Paused at 0:00.
Nothing is more expensive than bad information. Know the source. One Radio Network dot com. Well, a very pleasant good morning to you and we're back here, if you were with us, with Dr. Massey with a very popular guest. His name is Ray Peat. Raypeat.com. Dr. Peat is a PhD in biology, University of Oregon. He specializes in physiology and he taught at the University of Oregon, Irvine College, Montana State University, National College of Naturopathic Medicine. Talked down in Mexico, worked in Mexico, had some nixtamalized corn.
He talked, told us about nixtamalization of the corn tortillas in Mexico and he's a good one. He has a newsletter we'll tell you about and he visits on the third Monday of every month. Dr. Ray Peat, good morning, sir. Dr. Peat Good morning. Dr. David J. Massey How is your life up there in the Northwest? Dr. Peat Oh, it tends to get a little boring, but that's better than other possibilities. Dr. David J. Massey Are you still painting? You're still painting? Dr. Peat Oh, yeah. Dr. David J. Massey Uh-huh. That keeps you busy, huh?
Dr. Peat Yeah. When I get tired of reading and writing, I've got something to paint on. Dr. David J. Massey Yeah. Have you been working on anything special these days? Any ideas special? Dr. Peat Yeah. I've just started working on this month's newsletter, which will be something related to unsuspected, generally unrealized effects of estrogen on metabolism and things that it does to promote aging and that I haven't talked very much about in the past. Dr. David J. Massey So when we get too much estrogen, the body doesn't like it and we age? Dr. Peat Yeah.
One of my early observations was that the doctrine of age-related decline in estrogen was a simple mistake based on measuring only the estrogen that's found in the blood itself. Because with progesterone, the way they measure progesterone is to separate the liquid part of the blood from the fat and the red cells. It turns out that most of the progesterone is in the fat part of the blood and the red cells twice as much inside the red cells as in the serum. So what they're doing is throwing away most of the progesterone and then measuring what's
in the fluid part of the blood. And it's even worse with measuring estrogen because when you're low in progesterone, a whole group of enzymes shift their activity. Progesterone pushes them in a direction that neutralizes and eliminates estrogen. So if you're deficient in progesterone, this whole group of enzymes increase the activity of estrogen, but inside cells, the function of progesterone is to get estrogen out of the body and so it will appear in the blood as it heads for the kidneys to be excreted. But without progesterone, estrogen accumulates and is synthesized de novo inside cells, muscle
cells, fat, brain, liver, breast, uterus, every tissue you can identify concentrates estrogen more and more with aging. So by looking at the blood, if it is staying inside cells at a higher rate and not appearing in the blood, you get exactly the opposite impression of what estrogen is doing during stress and aging. So the basic way sometimes now it's being measured with bioidentical hormones and the things that ladies are doing could be not correct, not accurate. Yeah, already in 1970, I was grinding up uterine tissue that was under the influence of estrogen
and extracting it in a solvent and then measuring that. And a person working in the same lab, Terry Parkinning, went on to work in the University of Texas where he had much better equipment and confirmed the same thing that estrogen increases wherever he measured it. It was increasing with age, same thing I found. But you have to go about measuring it in the right way. And what's the right way? To extract what's in the tissues. Does anybody do that? Only three or four people in the world as far as I know.
So that's why over the years I've had so many emails with ladies that work with these bioidentical hormones and some have okay and some just don't have a good experience with it at all. They're just constantly adjusting it, constantly back and forth. I've never seen anyone who was actually demonstrably deficient in estrogen. Old men, for example, or a man who has been in an accident or had a heart attack, even their blood level will then show a very high level of estrogen.
But to really know what a person is subject to, you have to take a bit of cellular material and actually test it. So how do those ladies, especially the ladies but even guys sitting here in the cheap seats in the bleachers, how do we utilize this information with progesterone and estrogen to help us to feel better and live longer? If you supplement progesterone, it will then release estrogen from the tissues so it can be measured in the blood. Otherwise you just have to be very cautious and realize that the effects you get when
you supplement very large amounts of estrogen, starting often before menopause but very often after menopause, they'll give women super doses of estrogen. It acts on the brain very much in the way cocaine does. It turns on excitatory pathways. Going back to the '30s, it was recognized that in the phase of the menstrual cycle when estrogen is highest, at ovulation and around menstruation, the ratio between estrogen and progesterone is highest. Those are the times when women have epileptic seizures and that's been known now for at
least 80 years and it's because of the excitatory effect of estrogen on the nerves. So that's why you've been often just recommending men and women take a little bit of progesterone every day even if we're not too sure. It can't hurt, right? And both men and women always are making progesterone. In the brain, the concentration is usually 10 times higher than in the bloodstream. So you might not seem particularly deficient if you measure only the liquid part of the blood but a little dose can go right to the brain and have tremendous beneficial effects.
And how many milligrams are we talking about a little dose? Oh, sometimes five milligrams is enough to produce. Just five? Yeah. There are people out there thinking you've got to have 50 for something to happen but seems like a lot. Yeah, 50 is in the range of a therapeutic dose for someone with arthritis or seizures or migraines, something like that. And for cancer, people have used hundreds of milligrams and in the usual way of administering progesterone because it's very insoluble in water. The industry has since the 1940s claimed that you can't take progesterone orally because
they said that stomach acids destroy it. That was just to sell their injection products. So is there a downside to doing too much progesterone if you don't need it? Yeah, it can make you drunk or unconscious if you take hundreds of milligrams. How does progesterone-estrogen balance men and women play into, say first breast cancer for gals and then overall sleep issues for men and women? I was just looking at a recent article by well-known researchers that reviewed the history of estrogen therapies.
It was that there's sort of a dogma in medicine that they have the true history of what the understanding has been of estrogen, but really all along since 1940, the pharmaceutical industry has been training the government regulatory agencies and the universities and the journals to sell their products, not to pay attention to the actual science. But starting in the 1930s, the carcinogenic effects and the pain-inducing effects and the pro-inflammatory effects of estrogens have been identified very clearly. The abortifacient effects, everything that was known about estrogen scientifically before 1940, showed its extreme biological riskiness.
One researcher did thorough tests over a period of 10 years and showed that every tissue in the body, if you give a small, continuous dose of estrogen, it's carcinogenic in sequence according to sensitivity to all of the tissues of the body, starting with the uterus, then the breast, then the pituitary and lungs, then the kidney and liver and eyeballs, brain. Everything has its sensitivity to being cancerized by an uninterrupted dose of a small amount of estrogen. That was thoroughly established by 1950, but the current medical understanding is that
there was no fear of estrogen being carcinogenic until in the 1970s. It was unavoidable seeing that it was causing uterine cancer, and they thought or claimed they took care of that by giving synthetic progestin along with the estrogen to prevent uterine cancer. It turns out many years later with the Women's Health Initiative in 2001 and 2002 that the synthetic progestin, if anything, exacerbates the effects of estrogen, not only causing increased breast cancer as well as uterine cancer, but increasing heart attacks, strokes, dementia, Alzheimer's disease.
What do we do before we ask about sleep, Dr. Ray Peat? By the way, we're Dr. Ray Peat, and we are live here. It is July 19, 2021. If you care to be on the show, [email protected]. We're on the 800 number, so we can't use that. I should have called him on the other line. Just use the email, [email protected]. Dr. Ray Peat, what do we do day in and day out or just in our life of living on planet earth to exacerbate the problem of having too much estrogen regardless of our age?
Do we eat, diet, or lifestyle? Do we do things? Yes. The things that already in the 1930s and '40s, the polyunsaturated fats were known to intensify the effects of estrogen. The Schutt family, starting in the 1930s, Wilfred Schutt was one of the later, the son of the original Dr. Schutt, identifying first estrogen as a pro-clotting factor exacerbated by the breakdown of the polyunsaturated fatty acids and the role of vitamin E supplements as first an anti-estrogenic factor, a fertility factor against the sterility-inducing effects of estrogen.
Then vitamin E, under the influence of various industries, vitamin E was relegated to the status of an antioxidant only against the polyunsaturated fats. To interpret vitamin E correctly, you have to see that the anti-estrogen effect was equivalent to the anti-liquid peroxidation effect of the unsaturated fatty acids. Great mythology was created under the influence of the pharmaceutical industry promoting their new wonder drug, estrogen, to prevent aging. A couple of doctors at Harvard promoted the idea that being feminine is what makes you able to have babies, and if estrogen is the female hormone, then supplementing it makes
you more feminine in the sense of being more able, more fertile, less likely to have miscarriages. They promoted the whole horrible DES catastrophe. So then estrogen plays a role, if too much, for guys especially, then the testosterone levels go down. When a man is under stress, every sort of stress, but accumulating polyunsaturated fatty acids is a chronic, age-related source of pro-estrogenic stress. The more stress a man is under, the more his various tissues start activating aromatase that turns testosterone into estrogen, and what he has to do protectively besides getting
the polyunsaturated fats out of his tissue is to shift the balance away from stress to things that inhibit aromatase rather than activating it. Polyunsaturated fats through the prostaglandins activate aromatase, so aspirin blocking prostaglandins blocks aromatase and will raise testosterone when you're in a stress state. Progesterone is another direct action against the activation of aromatase. Aromatase-induced cortisol activates not only the prostaglandins, but direct action on increasing aromatase function. So then that would tie into maybe the sleep idea, if we have too much cortisol.
So, because we've had some emails this morning about insomnia, what can you tell us there regarding progesterone, estrogen, maybe aspirin as far as people having a hard time with too much cortisol at night going into sleep? If your liver is under-functioning, it can't store enough glycogen to provide glucose to keep your brain working during the night. When your glucose falls, adrenaline, histamine, and cortisol in sequence arise, each with an excitatory effect on your brain. This thyroid hormone is essential for using and storing glucose.
If you're low in thyroid, your liver isn't going to have enough stored glucose to get you through the night, so your histamine, adrenaline, cortisol, and serotonin, all of the stress inflammation factors will increase. Your body temperature falls protectively when your glucose is low, and progesterone and thyroid are able in many ways to keep your body temperature up, your liver storing glucose, and directly shifting the balance away from cortisol, histamine, serotonin, and adrenaline. That ties back to the thyroid again. Low thyroid people have been studied with brainwave sleep analysis and found that if
you divide the type of sleep into four phases, hypothyroid people never get below the superficial second phase of sleep. So they wake up unrested, achy, and fatigued. It takes thyroid and progesterone as very central factors for achieving deep, restful four phases of sleep. Fascinating. Back to the thyroid again. Here's an email, and let's jump on this one before we do a first break, because as long as we're talking about it, I think you'll be able to help this person.
Let's see, "I bought some progesterone cream, 5% 50 mg per pump to try before I eat my meals. My question is, my insulin levels are low already. I am at 2.2 right now. So if I start taking this progesterone to block some adrenaline because I have all the other symptoms, will it have an adverse effect on my already low insulin levels, or is it just that my insulin is already under control?" Yes, a healthy person is able to oxidize their glucose without producing a very large amount
of insulin, so you have to know what the conditions are when the insulin is measured. It could be very good to have low insulin if you're still able to oxidize your glucose. One thing with the creams is that a lot of them simply have micronized progesterone suspended in an emulsion of a cream. So what they're doing is spreading a very fine powder on their skin with only part of it being functionally dissolved in oil so that it can get into the bloodstream. Wow, so how do you know?
You'd have to really explore whatever cream you're using to make sure it's the good stuff, huh? Yeah. I found working in the lab that if I accidentally got my whole hand and arm covered with micronized progesterone, I could quickly taste it in my nose and mouth. There was a sensation, but that was using maybe a thousand milligrams of progesterone spread all over a part of my arm. But if you're only putting on 50 milligrams and most of it is still in the crystalline
micro-pulverized form, then you're only going to absorb maybe 2 or 3 percent of what you put on. So that's why you have developed a product called Progest-E, right? Yeah, when you eat oily foods and vitamin E, the vitamin E travels with the fats in your food and is quickly and efficiently entered into the chylomicrons, a particle of emulsion that is taken up through the wall of the intestine into your lymphatic system, flowing directly into your main blood supply and circulating through the body before it reaches the liver.
But if it's in the powdered micronized form, it isn't delivered into the chylomicron system, but slowly some of it sticks to the lining of the intestine and superficially releases molecules into the portal circulation carried to the liver, where the liver attaches either sulfuric acid or sugar to the progesterone, making it water-soluble. So taken in the powdered form, most of the progesterone circulating in the body will be in a water-soluble form, ready for excretion, and very different in function from the oil-soluble
form, which is how your various ovaries, for example, are preparing it so that it circulates with the fats and blood cells. In a way, the chylomicrons, just as much as the red blood cells, are able to pass repeatedly through the liver without the progesterone being exposed to the inactivating enzymes. So chylomicron-carried progesterone imitates the body's way of distributing it through the body. And the creams then, how do they relate? Some of it gets exposed to the bloodstream, where it meets the red blood cells and lipids,
which are the red blood cells that are the most likely to be exposed to the red blood cells. And that means that if you put a little bit of olive oil on your skin or vitamin E on your skin with the cream, you're going to dissolve more of it and let more of it get through into your bloodstream. Interesting. So, is it a good idea in general for the oral listeners to take a little vitamin E every day, do you think? It doesn't hurt to take 10 to 50 milligrams a day.
And it would be the mixed tocopherol things? Yeah, those are the safest and least likely to have a lot of extraneous additives like polyunsaturated fatty acids. And so, but the product that you helped create, this progestease, it's got the vitamin E and the oil in there, right? Yeah, vitamin E and coconut oil. Coconut oil. And what's the dosage on that? Because I've got some, but how do you know how much to take of that? You can tell just putting some on your finger and rubbing it on your tongue or gums and lips.
You can usually feel a sense of well-being within five or ten minutes of taking it. And how many, like if you're taking like a quarter of a, would you take as much as a quarter of a teaspoon of the progestease or how many milligrams are you getting? Some people feel like they're semi-anesthetized with as little as a fourth of a teaspoon, which is 100 milligrams of progesterone. So in the progestease, let me write that down, a quarter tea is 100 milligrams. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, tricky biz, huh?
Yeah, that's very often a therapeutic dose for a migraine or a mild seizure or for arthritis. Curious, how is it affecting arthritis? What's going on there, the progesterone? I don't really know all of the things involved, but studies of knee joints, for example, with rheumatoid arthritis, an Italian named Cutolo, that's his last name, has done detailed studies and found that estrogen is being produced in the arthritic joint and there's very high concentration there. And I think what's happening is most likely that the progesterone is inactivating the
aromatase intrinsic to the inflamed joint when you anoint the joint with progesterone, vitamin E and olive oil or the whole leg around the joint. Sometimes the inflammation and redness and pain will be gone within an hour or two after anointing the whole leg with the progesterone solution. And I think the only way it can explain such a rapid and complete effect is that it's knocking out the aromatase, which is the center of the problem. A friend of mine used, I think it was 500 milligrams applied to his whole leg.
He had a huge red inflamed joint that disabled him every afternoon for several weeks at that time. That afternoon, the joint cleared up before bedtime. Next day, he didn't have any soreness in his knee. And I knew him 40 years after that, he had never had a return of arthritis. Ha, could the progesterone be used for sleep if the thyroid is not happy or would you just be wasting your time there? Yeah, pretty much it's a waste. You get a temporary relief. It increases your temperature and deepens your sleep.
But the basic thing is to correct the thyroid which is required for keeping your glucose up, producing carbon dioxide, reducing lactic acid and histamine and the whole cause. The whole cascade thing. And again, so to recap on your thyroid, you're still a big, you focus just on the THS. What is it? THS. T3 of the thyroid? No I mean the main number. I don't even know what that number is. In the thyroid test, what is it? Oh, the TSH. TSH, sorry. I just escaped my consciousness there.
So you really like to focus on that, the TSH, right? Yeah, that should be, for example, when they have studied a population of generally healthy people, no symptoms, no thyroid cancer or other thyroid disease, they found that they had below 0.4 on the TSH test. Below 0.4? Yeah. Wow. That's pretty low. Many doctors won't prescribe thyroid even if you have a 3.0 on the TSH. But I've never seen anyone that I would consider healthier that was free of symptoms if their TSH was even 2.0. They always have some problem.
So is there any way, if you had like a TSH of 2 or 3 or something, to work with that other than taking, just go ahead and take the thyroid meds, just take it, take thyroid? Yeah, I think it's good to read Brodebarn's books on the thyroid using the traditional glandular thyroid. He was very cautious, starting with generally a half a grain, 30 milligrams of the standardized powdered thyroid gland, gradually over a period of two or three months, working up to whatever the patient needs to function perfectly.
On average, that was two grains, 120 milligrams of desiccated thyroid. And why work up to it? Why not just go for it? It just doesn't work well like that? Yeah. I've only seen it happen two or three times, but even a half a grain over a few days accumulates and the powder that you take is about a three or four to one ratio of thyroxine to the active hormone and sometimes the inactive hormone can start interfering with the active T3 hormone.
That's somewhat rare, but in middle-aged women, you can more often see the effect of T4 rising along with symptoms of hypothyroidism. You have to give the liver time to be able to activate, convert the thyroxine into the active hormone. Another thing that happens is that if you're hypothyroid, your cells aren't able to retain magnesium efficiently. Magnesium is held inside cells bound mostly to ATP, so if you're not producing ATP very fast, your cells don't retain magnesium very efficiently. And in the absence of adequate magnesium, your ATP is destabilized and so it becomes a vicious circle.
You have to give your body time to assimilate from your regular diet. As you increase your availability of thyroid hormone, your cells are able to retain more of the magnesium that you're feeding them. So they become more efficient and stable, then you can handle more and more thyroid activity. Interesting. Have you ever made any connection, Dr. Ray Peat, from the spiritual, mental, emotional side of our being and thyroid and why there are so many people mostly low thyroid? The low mental energy makes you more susceptible to any kind of stress, emotional or physical stress.
And a lot of people compensate with increased adrenaline, up to 30 or 40 times the daily adrenaline production to compensate for the inefficiency that the thyroid magnesium problem creates. They can be very speedy and alert by keeping up this gigantic adrenaline production as if they're living on speed. Other people compensate with high cortisol and that has its effects on your mentality and way of thinking. Other people don't compensate and they just become sluggish and depressed. So the low thyroid person is susceptible to various kinds of stress-related problems.
When your thyroid is normal, if you experience either grief or any physical trauma, it can be enough to turn on the stress mechanism and suppress your metabolism as if your body can't confront the magnitude of the injury you're experiencing and tries to retreat and go into a sort of hibernation state involving blocking your thyroid function. In those cases, I've seen a few people taking a small amount of thyroid as well as eating well for just a few days who could pop right out of the stress and bring their own thyroid up to full functioning.
Wow, interesting, amazing. Stay right there, Doc. Okay, can we take a break here? Dr. Ray Peat, Patrick Timpone, OneRadioNetwork.com. As you know, I've been hanging around doing talk shows about health. We began in the late 70s and I've come across a lot of different technologies. You can imagine all the powders and potions and pills and gadgets that people have wanted me to promote. I have over the years some of them. Most of the things are kind of silly and they never did much, especially the gadgets.
But this technology that we've been working with for a couple of years has been probably one of the most beneficial, powerful technologies that I've come across. I've been breathing the hydrogen browns gas for two years now and you drink the water. George Wiseman created this Aquakir machine and it's really something and it works and it's powerful and you can go to many places. But I think Tyler LeBaron and Molecular Hydrogen Institute, he's got more peer-reviewed studies on the benefits of breathing browns gas, hydrogen.
Browns gas is what our machine does, which is a little bit, a little leveraged hydrogen a bit, but most of the research has been just on the pure hydrogen. So our machine delivers a little bit more. It's got more of the idea of the water and the fourth phase of water, the Gerald Pollack work. But you can breathe it and drink the water and there's a lifetime warranty on this baby. But here's George talking a bit about it. Did you know the Aquakir browns gas machine reduces oxidative stress?
Hydrogen is the world's best antioxidant by a long shot. First of all, it's 700 times smaller than something like CoQ10, 400 times smaller than vitamin C, things like that. So it can literally go, the hydrogen molecule can literally go through everything in your body and go right into the very DNA and repair it. First of all, you're repairing oxidative damage, but you're also reducing or eliminating free radicals. And there are only the bad free radicals, which is another reason why hydrogen is good
because you actually have free radicals in your body that you want to keep. Example nitrous oxide. The oxidative stress, is that the main thing that damages the DNA and causes the regeneration to stop, you know, euthane or getting older, immune organs? Is that at the base, George Weissman, of most of the issues? It's one of the pieces. Just one of them. And this comes back to that regeneration thing that I was talking about. The cells won't regenerate. You won't have stem cells and that sort of thing if you haven't got enough hydrogen.
And if our body is not generating enough hydrogen, we get dehydrated. Dehydrated. Lack of hydrogen. The AquaCure machine, 10% off, promo code 1RADIO. Use the promo code 1RADIO, 10% off in our store, 1radionetwork.com. Indeed. And believe it or not, I mean, in a month or so, we're going to be thinking about fall. Can you imagine? Phew, man. And when the weather starts to cool off, that's when we really start selling more and more saunas because it's just kind of a, you're just more motivated to do a sauna when it's cold outside, obviously.
But we don't like to talk about motivation here because here on 1Radio Network, we encourage you and teach and teach ourselves and learn ourselves not to worry about being motivated about doing something. Just do it. Because if we waited until we were motivated to write the great novel or paint or write my screenplay, if I was waiting to be totally motivated, it would never get done. So you just got to sit there and do it. You know, just do it. And before you know it, you're motivated. That's the way we deal with it.
But I don't know how I got off on that. But it is a time when you'll be more inclined to think about doing saunas. So get one now. Beat the rush. These are great units. I'm in mine all the time for what that's worth. And I think it's very valuable to sweat with the far infrared rays. We have a unit called the Relax Sit Up Far Infrared Sauna. And it's a great price that we're allowed to give only orally. Don't even put it in print. And that's $1,195.
And that's delivered to you in the lower 48. And anywhere else, you just let me know where you live. Alaska, Hawaii. And we ship them all over the world. And we can ship them to you no matter where you live. And it's not as expensive as you think. We did one I think to the Netherlands. I think it was a total of $200 and more. So $1,195 to I think $1,395 total to the Netherlands. And of course comes with the proper plug for the Netherlands. So these are great units. I think you'll like it.
You'll enjoy sitting in them. They have different controls. So you control how hot it gets. You can put on one or two of the different burners. And you could probably sweat every day for the rest of your life and be better off for it. Just my theory. I have no science behind that. But you know, it's a wonderful way to detoxify ongoing. As long as you're drinking plenty of water and get your little electrolytes there, you'll be fine. The RelaxFar Infrared Sauna. Just let me know.
The only way to get it is to email me, [email protected]. The RelaxFar Infrared Sauna and we'll hook you up with just the right price, the best price ever. And then have some fun. From the Hill Country in Texas, this is oneradionetwork.com. We're talking with Dr. Ray Peat who's here on the third Monday of the month. And Dr. Peat, we thank you so much for taking the time to visit with us every month. We really appreciate it. You're welcome. We really do. Here's a question from David in Australia.
And he says, you know, there's a lot of people out there that's kind of demonizing the being metabolically acidic, meaning the more acidic, then the more cancer, poor functioning of kidneys. What does Dr. Ray Peat think about this idea of being more alkaline for health? In the limited sense of having a pH of 7.4, our blood should be mildly alkaline. But that doesn't mean that the cells should be mildly alkaline. In fact, the healthy functioning cell is kept in a mildly acidic state, usually 6.8 or 6.9 pH.
And the reason the blood is not neutral, is slightly on the alkaline side, is that the metabolizing cell is excreting sodium into the blood and the excess is eliminated by the kidneys so that the blood doesn't become too alkaline. But 7.4 is a steady state, a safe level of alkalinity that corresponds to the acidity inside cells, which is preserved by exactly the excretion of the base into the bloodstream for potential elimination. If you take a dose of baking soda, sodium bicarbonate, we have enzymes that if the cell
is deficient in carbon dioxide, for example, because it's hypothyroid, the bicarbonate is turned into acidic CO2 by these enzymes and the acidic form of CO2 is oil soluble, so it's retained inside the cells. And momentarily, taking the baking soda will make your blood more alkaline. But since the CO2 can be retained inside cells as far as needed, then the sodium becomes excess, raises your pH, sometimes a little above 7.4, at which point the kidneys excrete it, leaving a net of CO2 retained by the cells.
So you can't think of taking CO2 as leaving a balance of alkalinity. It can leave a balance of CO2. And normally, your nerves and various regulatory systems cause your breathing to be regulated so that you retain enough CO2 to keep the cells acidified. And if something like anxiety makes you breathe too fast, and hypothyroid people aren't producing CO2 at a very high rate, so anxiety or stress is more likely to make a hypothyroid person hyperventilate, throwing off the CO2 they need. And that then makes your blood too alkaline. It's called respiratory alkalosis.
And that leads to things like panic attacks. Arrhythmia, I know, those kind of things. So if we just did those little pieces of paper, Doc, and did our urine, is that a test of anything that matters? Oh, yeah. It's good to keep your urine just slightly on the acidic side. Like six or seven, maybe? Six point seven is a good number. The more protein you eat, the more acidic your urine is likely to be because of the sulfate and phosphate in the meat and other proteins.
They make the blood sometimes all the way down to pH 5. Just being slightly on the acidic side of the urine is compatible with keeping your blood at about 7.4. What do you think? Do you know anything about the alkalinity of the water or the acidity of the water and how it would affect the body? Yeah. A lot of minerals in the water will generally make it slightly basic. If they're good minerals like magnesium and calcium, that's good. One of the effects of the mineralized water is that although it can deposit a stony material
inside your plumbing, at least it's not drawing out zinc and copper and iron and lead or whatever might be in the solder of your plumbing. It protects you from plumbing poisoning to have hard water. Very soft water can dissolve enough toxic heavy metals to be a problem just coming through your plumbing. So if your water is too soft, how can that be a problem because isn't that getting rid of? It retains enough carbon dioxide, carbonic acid, that the way water dripping into a cave will leave calcium stalactites by evaporating.
Having dissolved calcium from the stone, it will deposit them and if the water is naturally absorbing a little bit of CO2, it's able to dissolve minerals. In the case of a cave, it's usually mostly calcium but coming through your plumbing, it will be whatever the plumbing is made of. Interesting. Dr. Ray Peat, here's one, so I don't even know how to say this word, polycosanols. How do you say them? Polycosanols. Jason would like to ask you to discuss their benefits. They are like long chain saturated fatty acid.
They're usually longer than stearic acid by sometimes twice as long except they have an alcohol on the end, less oxidized than the fatty acids. So they're less water soluble than the highly saturated long chain fatty acids. They originally were found in association with vitamin E and when vitamin E was found to greatly increase endurance, it turned out that it was that the vitamin E was carrying into the body some of the polycosanols, highly saturated waxy material. Vitamin E is a good carrier for it and the original ways of making vitamin E by extraction
from leaves for example, you get lots of the waxy material from the leafy material. Here's a question for you, Robert in California. Why does a dozen fructose from juice or fruit cause fatty liver since it can only exclusively be metabolized in the liver? Jason Fung and others seem concerned about damage from fructose. If you look at some of the, well all of the high fructose liver damage studies I've seen contained 5% corn oil, an excessive amount of polyunsaturated fats and then a total caloric
excess meaning that you're going to store a high proportion of the excess of fatty acids in the diet. So the setup is biased to create fatty acid poisoning of your liver essentially from an excess of calories and where they're using it to, supposedly to incriminate the sugar is having a toxic effect on the liver. But even worse than that, some of these studies used a particular stock animal food diet that was deficient in magnesium for doing their studies with fructose.
I haven't seen the explanation how they explained it away but it was formulated with less magnesium than normal making it an especially liver toxic, proofer rich diet. So basically I think it's a setup to sell fatty acids and incriminate the use of sugar in causing heart disease and liver disease and so on. This is an email from Thornson, he's in San Juan Capistrano, beautiful place. He says, "Dear Dr. Peat, what can I do about severe and capitals depression?
It's pretty bad and I don't think it has any relation to this COVID but what can I do?" Take active thyroid T3 and a good supportive diet of vitamin D and adequate calcium. Those three work together to lower stress, get your stress hormones down and your brain energy up and sometimes just adding one of those like a large vitamin D supplement will sometimes bring a person out of a major depression. But the whole group, good diet, lots of calcium, adequate vitamin D and active thyroid together. It gets you going.
So you like calcium rather would be milk, right? Yeah, low fat milk in particular. Why low fat? It's more active, the sugar component works with the high calcium more quickly to activate your metabolism. Your body temperature tends to increase, oxygen consumption increases and if you used whole milk for example, the amount of fat would not only be fattening but it would slow your metabolism slightly. Actually slows it. Here's an email from Rose, she's having a hard time. Well her daughter is 38 and back in October 2020 decided to have a tubal ligation and
now she's experiencing great hormonal changes, PMS symptoms, anxiety, anger issues, night sweats. What can she do to counter these symptoms from having this ligation? I also did the same thing and I wanted her but not having any more children outweighs the risk in her mind anyway. Thank you very much for any service. In the 70s, I was studying the effects of the IUD on animals and how it works. In effect, it increased their uterine estrogen exposure causing miscarriage. But then around 1980, two different studies independently found that men who had had a
vasectomy, what pushed vasectomy impotence and other sexual symptoms, they found were associated scanning all of the relevant hormones. The only deficiency they saw was in progesterone and supplementing the progesterone corrected the impotency by getting the ratio proper between progesterone and the stress hormones. Almost simultaneously, I think it was 1980, a similar study in women found that having the tubal ligation, a lot of them went into depression right after it. In surveying their relevant hormones, they found that progesterone was the only deficient hormone and supplementing that, if their ovaries were okay, the supplement could get their
ovaries back to producing a normal amount of progesterone and correct the high ratio of estrogen to progesterone. Dr. Ray Peat, we're live here, July 9. Here's a good one for you. What is the highest dose of vitamin D3 in international units and one can supplement daily over long term, maybe all his life? And what would be the benefits to taking higher doses of D3 daily over the long term? I notice that I feel significantly better every time I increase the dose and in recent
podcasts you mentioned that higher doses of D3 can be a buffer for stress. Yeah, I think 5,000 units a day is the most I would want to take year round, year after year. 5,000 a day? Yeah. I've known people who for two weeks or so would take 10,000 a day to get out of, for example, rheumatoid arthritis and depression. And I wonder how much, I guess we get our share in the sun, right? But I guess you'd have to get pretty geeky to figure out exactly how many units you're getting.
Yeah, if you're exposed to good sunlight with a lot of skin exposure. On your skin, right. Yeah, you can make something like 10,000 units in a day. Here's one for you. Are caffeine pills a good alternative to coffee if they are used with plenty of sugar or milk? They're much cheaper, a way to reap the powerful benefits of caffeine. An alternative, did you say? I think this person is wanting to know if the caffeine pills would be an alternative to coffee. Do you want to pick up a little whatever caffeine does?
Except that there are lots of good things in coffee, anti-inflammatory things and nutrients that you wouldn't be getting with caffeine. So generally coffee's a pretty okay food for people? Very good. Many studies have found that the more coffee a person drinks, they usually say five cups or more, that lower the liver disease, that lower the dementia and so on. That's interesting. Progressive increase from zero to one or two cups with the best benefits from five or more. And to a great extent, it's supporting your thyroid function, lowering nitric oxide for
example which blocks your mitochondrial respiration. And so the combination of coffee and thyroid are protecting your mitochondria which protect your liver and brain. Here's a person who's had plenty of benefits they say from vitamin K2 supplement, maybe one milligram. But many have said that over long term, K2 supplementation can cause the jawbone to increase in size. I prefer not to have that. What is your opinion? I haven't heard that. The jawbone is, the facial bones in general do tend to have the capacity to increase with age but under stress, they atrophy with age.
And so especially the lower jawbone very often shrinks to the point that the teeth are lost. But with the right balance, the face can get thicker bones with aging. And vitamin K does protect the bones and since the facial bones are especially, the skull and face are susceptible to stress-induced changes. You might see strengthening of the jawbone in particular with regular supplementation of vitamin K. What it's doing is keeping calcium out of your soft tissues, especially your arteries and brain and keeping it in the bones where it should be.
Which is where we want to run. Ben writes in to Dr. Peat, "Prayer, your last show with Patrick. I've tried adding some orange juice to treat type 2 diabetes but it has raised my blood sugar. What is your OJ protocol to use that will begin lowering it?" It has to go with generally good nutrition. Knowing that your calcium, vitamin D, and thyroid and sodium intake are all good. The potassium alone component of orange juice works to some extent exactly like insulin to help cells take up glucose and oxidize it.
And the flavonoids, the colorful components of orange juice, give it a bitter taste when they're excessive. Those flavonoids have a pro-oxidative effect. So orange juice is one of the protective things along with caffeine and milk that help your cells to improve their oxidation. Excellent. The white pith of the citrus in moderation as in anything regarding health is it detoxes lymph plus scar tissue. I worked for a massage for 25 years so I learned these things as part of my work for the OJ
workers and I benefit them to ingest white pith from the organic as much as the orange juice. Actually the orange peel that you use in making marmalade has the highest concentration of the protective flavonoids. Yeah, marmalade. Yeah, marmalade is a therapeutic food. Has Dr. Peat learned anything since the last time you spoke about what's going on? Maybe even say it from these injections. What have you seen? Have you been doing any more than when we last talked about with the potential dangers of these injections for this COVID whatever this thing is?
I keep hearing people having the usual heart pains, stroke symptoms, inflammatory problems following their vaccination. Nothing provable in many of the cases but often they didn't even suspect there might be a connection but without any other reason for having sudden heart symptoms and blood clotting and vascular inflammatory problems, I think the vaccines are likely contributing factor. Yeah, we're going to have Dr. Andrew Kaufman on Wednesday and we'll be talking more about it. What about human shedding? Anything that you have seen that scientifically can prove that there could potentially be
some kind of transference of something in the people that have been vaxxed? The evidence goes back before the vaccine that we are always shedding proteins and nucleic acids and even into the breath. If you put a cold object under your nose and breathe on it, fluid condenses. It isn't just distilled water but it has hundreds and hundreds of different more or less volatile substances that got carried out of your lungs and condense onto a cold surface. The same is happening when you sweat.
It isn't just your lungs and urine but your sweat is constantly pumping out proteins, nucleic acids and hundreds of other substances. For years, the FBI has counted on the fact that your fingerprints, the little bit of sweat in the fingerprint has excreted your nucleic acids. Even if the shape of the fingerprint is blurred, they can analyze it and find your DNA when you've handled a document, for example. There's just no telling what we're sharing with each other. These exosomes that Zach Bush and others have talked about, we must be sharing a lot of
stuff with everybody all the time, aren't we? Breathing out, breathing in. Yeah, yeah. With other organisms, other people. And our food contains all of these things. And so our body can to some extent choose what it finds might be useful and integrate it into our genetic equipment. Integrated into our genetic equipment. I like that. Yeah, that's nice. A German lab has for years been studying food nucleic acids and showing that some of it is incorporated into the genome. You sent me a video with David Martin and then I sent you one back with Fulmer, this
German guy. And boy, it's really interesting, isn't it, what's going on? And Martin, he's got it down and he's looked at all the evidence that this corona thing, whatever they say it is, was not a novel virus at all. It was patented, what, 20 years ago by the CDC? Yeah, and by people working, the germ warfare lab was working on these things for many years. Ralph Beric's lab has been working at the University of North Carolina, but in close collaboration with the germ warfare people over the years.
And more than 10 years ago, he described how he was making viruses more toxic, more infectable, more dangerous in line with the germ warfare idea. This germ gain-of-function thing that they're talking about? Yeah. So taking parts from one virus, like the spike protein, and adding it to a virus that's easily infectable, making it more toxic by adding the spike protein to it. So the technology was there years and years before they started talking about using it in a vaccine publicly. Right. And therapeutically, they were talking about using it to kill foreigners, or to make, not
necessarily to kill them, but to incapacitate them, make them unfunctional for a few weeks, preferably not to kill them, so that they're more of a burden on the economy. Now, some are conjecturing, like Lanka, Cowan, Kaufman, and all the rest of them, that even if you make something in a lab and you release it, maybe in the air or something, that the chances of it still living and alive, this protein, and goes into you, and then I see you and then I share it with you through the air, is a stretch. Do you agree?
Oh, no. Lab, to say Patrick to Ray Peat. Yeah, the Pfizer manual distributed in December of 2019, or no, of 2020, how to handle the vaccination, they warned against a vaccinated person being near or touching or breathing on a pregnant woman, because they recognize the shedding phenomenon. Yes, but that's being injected, but what about just some kind of germ thing they make in the lab, Dr. Peat, they put it out in the air and they want to kill people, and Patrick breathes it in and then sharing with you without injection. Is that model even work?
Well, we're breathing out those things, and so just breathing on someone or rubbing, touching their skin, you're putting whatever nucleic acids you're secreting into their environment and they can take it up. So they can spread it that way. Can I breathe something in that's in the air that was made in a lab and damage me? Oh, sure. The lab work starts with a real organism, so-called, or a real exosome, whichever way you look at it. I think all viruses originate as exosomes, particles secreted by healthy organisms or
sick organisms and circulating through other organisms where they can either be healthy or harmful. But the lab work mixes these in ways that can do certain things, can be used to carry an antigen to make a protein-based vaccine, which is a more traditional thing that probably is less risky. The use of the nucleic acid itself that was modified in the laboratory is where you get that unknown, unpredictable, and potentially catastrophic biological effects. Okay. Dr. Ray Peat, Patrick Timpone. Here's one from James. He's in Houston, Texas. Hi, James. My wife got the mRNA vaccine.
I'm not vaccinated, no plan on getting it, but back in May, and experienced a period of a month and a half of not getting her period. Wow. She finally got it and said it was extremely painful and said it is a genetic thing, not because she got the jab. She's also anemic and she should be focused on giving her progesterone and supplementing thyroid to help. All of the anti-inflammatory things help. The traditional vaccines, the antigen, the germ itself that you want to become immune
against, if they use that by itself, it wouldn't always produce the desired immune reaction. They create a deliberately systemic inflammatory condition combined with the specific antigen. You want a general, strong inflammatory reaction to rouse your immune system so that it does recognize whatever the protein is that they're wanting immunity to. Even an ordinary vaccine containing aluminum hydroxide, for example, as the adjuvant is intended to create systemic inflammation, and that systemic inflammation creates enough stress that it can disturb your menstrual cycle. It isn't necessarily the very novel threat from the RNA, but simply the antigen effect
that they add to the so-called vaccine to produce a reaction that can knock out your hormones and disturb your reproductive cycle. Dr. Sutart Bakhti and others are talking about the idea that many people can make it through one of these injections, but if you get the second one, is they're really trying to do something to promote that it's really very much more dangerous. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yes, since the spike protein is part of the problem, the adjuvant effect is a basic thing.
This material shares with the old vaccines, but the spike protein is something that a very healthy person can dispose of quickly so that between the ages of one and 50, a person can contract the COVID virus and hardly notice they have it. It's a sick person or an older person with weaker general health who is likely to suffer the effects of a COVID infection. Those are the same people likely to suffer the effects of combining an antigen with the spike protein. The spike protein simply makes the adjuvant have a deeper, longer-lasting kind of damaging effect.
So, what about all these variants, Dr. Ray Peat? Is this all made up stuff? One website has published thousands of sequences showing variations in the genetic makeup of coronaviruses. You could pick out any one of those and say you don't have enough Greek alphabet letters to name the possible variants. With any virus infection, it takes a lot of collected data to know whether a particular virus is causing a particular disease and to know whether a new variant is really causing the disease. It's something that's going to take a long time, maybe two or three years.
You'd have to really look at it. You'd have to do the whole Cox Postulate thing to prove it and all that, right? Yeah, really. Just recently I read that some government official was claiming that there really were a lot more COVID-related or caused deaths than the figures show. His point was that someone who had died with a diagnosis of pneumonia caused by influenza, the body was dug up and they gave it a PCR test and found a coronavirus. So they said, "See, there's someone who died from COVID," but there was no evidence at
all that either influenza or coronavirus was the cause of death. Yes, I understand. There are so many causes of pneumonia and you can be infected with a dozen or a hundred things that might actually contribute to the death, but to prove it, to actually diagnose that as the cause of death, no one is even trying that sort of thing. And I guess you've seen it where they're blaming this Delta variant eruption on all of us unvaccinated people. We're the problem. Yeah, you're unvaccinated people are a threat to society, they say. God love us all.
But the whole, traditionally people recognize that it's irrational to start vaccinating people in the middle of an epidemic. If anything, it's going to increase the variation and risk of creating new viruses. So the whole idea is... Just not right. Here's an email, interesting. Dr. Rainwater writes an email, "are slightly acidic from picking up CO2 on the way down?" Yeah, generally clean water absorbs CO2 from the air and becomes slightly acidic. Yeah, I think I've done my pH on my Rainwater, Dr. Peat, and I think it's like 5.7, something like that.
Yeah, it's very weak acid, but the pH can be very low. But that's just from the CO2, so that's not terrible, right? There's nothing that's okay? Yeah, CO2, the acid behavior of CO2 is what keeps us alive. Even primitive single-celled organisms have been found to need CO2, even though they might be an oxygen-independent organism, CO2 absorbed from the atmosphere is part of what's keeping them alive. So CO2 is really, along with water and proteins, it's the essence of keeping life going. This is interesting.
"Please ask Dr. Peat, I get intrusive thoughts and excited mind within an hour or two every time I eat any food that has a small amount of fiber, like raw carrots, sugar, apples, sapotes, mangoes, but I do very well on lactose-free milk, white rice. What can I do to be able to tolerate these foods?" Wow, can you explain why he's experiencing that? Yeah, very oversensitive intestine, just the action of peristalsis can bring on symptoms, increased serotonin, histamine reactions, just the pressure of increasing peristalsis can even cause a headache or such things as he mentioned.
Getting the sensitivity down, the three main things again, reducing abnormal sensitivity and inflammation are the right calcium to phosphate ratio, adequate vitamin D, and enough active thyroid. So the thyroid, calcium, so how do we play with that calcium-phosphate ratio if we don't know what we're doing? The main sources of high unbalanced phosphate are nuts, seeds, meat, fish. Oh, so too much fish can get the phosphate thing out of whack. Yeah, those meat has extremely low calcium content, very high phosphate, and so if you're
eating meat or fish and lots of nuts and grains and seeds, then you're likely very low in calcium. And greens, well-cooked greens, milk and cheese are the... Will balance you out there. Yeah, yeah, the high calcium foods. So if you like fish and you do good with fish and you just like it because it's fun or whatever, you just want to make sure you're getting plenty of greens or maybe some milk, low-fat milk and what else? Some cheese. Some cheese. Cheese or... and that'll help to balance out the...
So you think fish is generally pretty good? Oh, yeah, yeah. Kind of fun, really. I usually put melted cheddar cheese on my cod or scallops or... Just put it right over the top there, yeah. Yeah, melt it over. Trent wants to know what your opinion is on the drug metformin. Life Extension recommends metformin for diabetes as well as extending the lifespan. I'm very reluctant to recommend it because it works by interfering with the mitochondria and I think there are better, safer ways to get the same effect. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, here's a final one for you, then we'll let you go to work. Many people recommend that we really want to have two or three bowel movements a day according to Melody and what does Dr. Peat recommend for the safest way to help this happen without becoming dependent on something? Those anti-inflammatory things that I mentioned, good calcium to phosphate ratio is anti-inflammatory and makes your intestine happier. Very mild, well-cooked fibers like mushrooms and bamboo shoots, for example, help to clean out the toxins that your liver detoxifies and secretes into your bowel to get rid of.
If you don't have enough stuff moving through your intestine, especially the fibers, the fibers will bind and carry out of your body the toxins that your liver has tried to take care of. And so that keeps your intestine clean and happy and uninflamed. What about this fiber product, psyllium, is that cool, good? What was the name of it? Psyllium, the psyllium husk? Oh yeah, a person with a very inflamed bowel can have side effects, can dehydrate that so much that it can be concentrating, but for most people, psyllium is a good fiber.
There used to be a product called AIDS that disappeared with the AIDS epidemic, but it was basically a pure cellulose product that was sold for weight loss, but you can still get relatively pure cellulose products that help as a non-nutritive fiber that can clean out your intestine. Here's one that just slipped in here, let's go ahead and grab it if you don't mind. Two questions from this person, good questions, are spike proteins observable on camera? And Dr. Peat, has he seen anything on this idea of graphene oxide being in the vaccines and the PCR swabs?
What was the first, absorbed how? Are spike proteins observable on camera? On camera, spike proteins. Observable, I didn't get the last word. Observable on camera, in other words, can they take a picture of these electron microscopes and see them? Oh, sure. That's why they call it the coronavirus, because there's this fuzzy halo around the lump, which is how the virus attaches to cells, and that's the spike, this halo that forms a crown, or a corona. That's where the term came from, huh? Yeah, so it's based on the electron microscope picture. And what about graphene oxide?
There was this university, as you know, I think in South America that came out with the video and viral, like a million views. Do you think there's anything to that? And they said it was on the PCR swabs too, Doc. They say they have the evidence. I saw the video. What do you think? I think if they had the evidence, they would be publishing it. But they seem to be coy about presenting their evidence. So this could have been a black hole that people went down?
They have evidence that there's interest in using it as a vaccine, but they just haven't published what they claim to see as evidence. They have some undefined electron microscope pictures, but you need more than that to show that it's the graphene molecule or sheets. Yeah, well I guess when we go through these kind of things for what, a couple of years, we grasp at things just because we want some answers, right? What's really going on? Yeah, and they're right in putting nothing, no crime beyond the monopolies and powers that are controlling things.
You can't assume that they have basically goodwill and public health at heart. Yeah, you know that they don't have our best interest at heart. Well sir, it's an honor to have you here. Thanks for being here. We'll see you, I guess, in August. And it's raypeat.com. And he also has a great newsletter, which is, and all you have to do is go to Ray Peat's newsletter, and it's plural, [email protected] and you can sign up for that and that comes out for every couple of months, right? Yeah.
So if you want to learn more about progesterone and these kind of things, your next newsletter is going to be all about that, right? Yeah, and especially estrogen. Estrogen. Estrogen. All right sir, well you have a nice day up there in Oregon. You stay safe now. Okay, thank you. Thank you sir. It's an honor. Thank you so much. Thank you. Patrick Timpone, OneRadioNetwork.com with Dr. Ray Peat. Oh boy, what fun, huh? Well, here we are, planet Earth. We are doing everything we can, dear heart, to be very careful and selective in the people
that we talk to because there's just a lot of stuff out there that, even like the graphene thing that you just don't know, and the shedding thing, and you don't know who to believe, right? So we try to kind of close in on whatever truth is the best we can here, and so thanks for coming by. We'll see you tomorrow. You're going to have a good time with Tom Luongo, and I do appreciate your support for this website and our show, and there's ways you can do that. Look at our website.
We have all these great things like the sauna and the hydrogen, sulfur, shin blossoms, Thrival, Dr. Cowan's powders, and all the different things that we promote. This air filter thing is pretty cool, very cool. And so if you need something and you have a few bucks and you want to spend it with us, if you will, it's just oneradionetwork.com and we get a commission when you buy something. That's the only way we support ourselves. And if you don't need anything and you've got a few extra bucks and you'd like to support
us by sending us 20 bucks a month or 10 or 15 or 30 or whatever, you can do that. Just go on the donation page and you can do a one-time donation or you can also set it up for a month, every month, 10 or 20 bucks, whatever, and it's good. It really helps us because there has been some, you know, whatever, just thanks. I will see you tomorrow. I love you all very much. Thank you. Let me know if I can help with anything. My email, [email protected]. Let us know if we can help. [email protected].
Love you guys. May the blessings be. You take care. See you tomorrow. From the Hill Country in Texas, this is oneradionetwork.com. [MUSIC PLAYING]