Paused at 0:00.
Sounds like we got a glitch on the disc. I have to look at that for next month, otherwise we're going to hear that again. Okay, so welcome to this evening's Ask Your Ab Doctor. My name is Andrew Murray. My name is Sarah Johanneson Murray. For those of you who perhaps have listened to the show, which run every third Friday of the month from 7 to 8 p.m., we're both licensed naturopathic doctors who were educated in England and came to California,
where the land of the free, home of the brave, we practice herbal medicine and nutritional counseling, have a clinic in Garboville. Actually, you know what? We don't have a clinic in Garboville. That was closed last month, so it was taken over and I'm actually doing a lot more consulting from home, so it's actually working out a lot better for most people. Anyway, the number, if you live here, for the call-in from 7.30 until 8 o'clock is 923-3911. We get a lot of people calling from all over the States most shows, so there's an 800 number.
It's 800-568-3723. You can listen to us on the web, KMED.org, and there's a new temporary call-in number. So I'm not too sure if that 923-3911 is still active or not. It's not, is it? Well, maybe not. Okay. Well, folks, there's another temporary call-in number if you're in the 707 area code. That's 383-9007. So for people that are listening to the show, calls are welcome from 7.30 to 8 p.m. If people want to contact us outside of the show, Monday through Friday, either go call us on toll-free number 1-888-WBM-ERB,
or if you want to email either of us, Andrew or Sarah, either Andrew or Sarah, at westernbotanicalmedicine.com. If you want to shoot us questions and stuff like that, we've got the time and we'll certainly answer you. Okay. So this month, I wanted to continue from last month's topic because we barely had time to get into the meat of it. And last month's topic was a subject, the precautionary principle, and this is something that Dr. Peat was enlightening me to in terms of what I found out to be a directive in law
in Europe, whereas that directive is not in place in the States. And there's certainly political and economic reasons for it, but some of the topics that we'll bring out later on in the show will be pertinent to the fact that in this country, it's not enshrined in law, but in the European Union, it is. So reiterate the opening of last month's discussion. As I said, the precautionary principle as applied to medicines and foods can be seen in Europe, where it's codified into law, but purposely not here in the US.
And whilst this is not a political show, but rather a humanitarian and altruistic venture, the politics of nations with their attendant controlling vested interests and lobbyists, they most definitely are up for examination. A regular phrase which bears worthy cautionary advice is, "If you want to know more, follow the money," and we've all heard that. As I stated last month, the World Charter for Nature, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1982, was the first international endorsement of the precautionary principle, and the principle was implemented in an international treaty as early as the '87 Montreal Protocol,
and among other international treaties and declarations, is reflected in the '92 Rio Declaration on the Environment and Development. This was signed at the UN Conference on Environment and Development. Now, the United States has opposed the use of the term "principle" because this term has special connotations in legal language, due to the fact that a principle of law is a source of law. And this is the legal status of the precautionary principle in the European Union, though, and whilst I'm not a supporter of the Union due to its unelected bureaucracy,
there's nothing wrong with international dialogue and trade, with countries agreeing with one another on creative policies whilst retaining their own unique cultures, language, and borders, and ultimately learning from mistakes and moving forward with better models. Later in the show here, I wanted to explore the nature of both Chris Busby's article, and a recent article was shown from Dr. Ernest J. Sternglass, and the relation to the whistleblowing on the dangers of the nuclear industry and the government control of data and disinformation.
I know in the election cycle that we've just gone through, the mainstream media certainly had a lot to say about disinformation, and there was quite a war waged by both sides in terms of disinformation, or "information," so we're all familiar with that term. So as I mentioned last month, Chris Busby's article and the invocation in Europe of the Euratom Suicide Clause, which we'll talk about later, needs to be closely followed, as there are legal ramifications in Europe which can force the hand of willfully corrupt officials and institutions,
and this is in regard to accurate reporting on radiation leakage, etc., from these power stations. On a side note, I am pleased to hear that clean, coal-burning, zero-emission power stations are going to be supported once more, and that energy independence and lower energy costs can be a reality for us here in the US. We've previously discussed the disinformation surrounding the lie of global warming and the real reason it was being pushed globally as carbon taxation, designed to enslave us all with another "life tax," just like the lie that with Obamacare you can keep your doctor
and there's no penalty for not getting health insurance. Anyway, so Chris Busby's invocation of the Euratom Suicide Clause looks to pose a credible threat to the nuclear industry, and Dr. Sternglass's publications clearly show the reality that no radiation exposure is safe. So, Dr. Peat, are you with us? Yes. And thanks so much for giving your time, as you have been doing for some time now, every third Friday of the month. We really appreciate you being here.
So in terms of this precautionary principle, just to briefly wrap from last month so we can continue with the other topics of Sternglass's publication, Busby's publication, and then get into some of the issues surrounding things like GMO and nanotech, as how safe are they and how they've gotten to where they've got. Could you briefly go through the process again of the precautionary principle, how it applies, and then that will help people understand perhaps how in Europe, where it doesn't apply, how things have maybe been managed differently,
and then we can look at the bureaucracy and the economic and political involvement or interests that stand to be gained from these people. The principle really is nothing but saying that common sense should be incorporated into public policy, that it's better to be safe than sorry. But it's really hard to appreciate why that is so controversial, that you should know something about the probable effects of any action you take. I was just reading about the first big hydrogen bomb test that the US made in the Pacific.
The very first atomic bomb explosion, some of the people, some of the physicists working on it, had said that they had calculated there was a certain probability that the bomb might start a chain reaction in the atmosphere and destroy the world. They went ahead with it because they said that was a small probability. That was pretty good to put it out there. When they were designing the first hydrogen bomb, to make a portable device, instead of having refrigerated hydrogen gas, they used lithium hydride or lithium deuteride as the source of the fusible deuterium.
They were calculating that they would get a five megaton explosion from the amount of deuterium present in the lithium compound. It didn't occur to them that the lithium itself might undergo fission and provide more fusible material. In fact, that's what happened. The lithium itself entered into the nuclear reaction and produced a 15 megaton explosion, three times bigger than they calculated. It killed a fisherman, irradiated, sickened people on the Japanese fishing boat, and burned a lot of the sailors and military people who were watching it.
Just because they were so confident that they were good engineers and good physicists, they didn't even think about the simple physical chemistry involved. That whole process of simple ignorance is something that you have to take into account when you're working with anything dangerous. But far beyond that is the ulterior motive. If they have some big goal that they're after, it isn't simply a matter of not investigating the dangers, but of actually falsifying the known effects, the known probable effects. That's where the precautionary principle opens up something much bigger.
The fact that the government has controlled scientific information so drastically over the last 60 or 70 years, that even if you do try to apply the precautionary principle without the information you need, it's impossible to take precautions that will save lives in the future. Okay, now are you saying because in the States here this precautionary principle does not apply, that it certainly gives a wider doorway through which this kind of procedure can get through, rather than being held accountable financially for reparation through the courts? Yeah, that is one possible solution to it.
If the information ever comes out that they really knew that they were killing people, then they could be held responsible. Because I guess we're skipping ahead a little bit when I think about vaccine damaged children as a pretty recent revelation. You know, and Dr. Andrew Wakefield being exonerated and it being brought to full public attention that vaccines really have damaged a lot of children. Well, that's direct. I mean, that's the government directly giving the indemnity. Yeah, no, I'm just saying where that kind of thing has existed in this country,
there isn't any real, there isn't the same simplistic recourse through law for reparation like there would be in Europe, for example, where they apply the precautionary principle in law. But documents have come out that the insiders in the Center for Disease Control knew the dangers and didn't want to make public. Right. Yeah. Okay, so that's very different. That's willful or culpable damage or involvement then. And what are you referring to that the CDC did? The insiders knew the research showing the risks of vaccinations as they knew the risks of radiation,
not just risk, the actual cause of cancer, premature birth, brain damage. When they are finally forced to admit that there is some damage, they traditionally have falsified the quantities of toxins or the intensity of the damage to be expected. In the story that Chris Busby is telling, the government falsified the Hiroshima, Nagasaki damage, over a hundredfold shrinkage of the actual damage produced over the years. So is this because the corporations are lobbying the government? Well, or owning the government. The lobbying reaches the point where they don't.
It's not just lobbying. They actually own it. Yeah. And so then they get to make up the rules. Yeah. The people working for the government are assured that if they do favors for the industry, they can quit their job in a few years and go to work for the corporations for 10 times as much money. So it's slightly delayed bribery. Right. Internal gratification. All right. So in terms of exploring this precautionary principle, how do you think we can develop a safe innovations and without stifling progress
or bring to market new ideas in a timely fashion without overregulation or bureaucracy, which is another factor that I believe this incoming administration has made a campaign point of stating. He wants to reduce regulations, wants to reduce paperwork, wants to make it easier to bring products to market. So what's the best way forward with this? Just imagining that he does not want to do anything that is dangerous and that he's not in it for money. With his kind of ethos, how does this play out safely? Information has to be available to the public.
And that involves alternative scientific opinion being publishable. But when the journals are controlled by the industry, the what's available, for example, the interference by Monsanto with articles that have been critical, either stopping their publication or pressuring for the elimination, the retraction of already published articles. And in the case of health physics and radiation, the main journal, Journal of Health Physics, is really a house organ of the nuclear industry. The articles that are published are just outrageously favorable radiation, claiming that it's actually good for people to be irradiated.
So there's a lot of collusion basically between the industry and government. And science. And science, yeah. It's all a ruse. Because a lot of the, and we've mentioned this many times about clinical trials being skewed, data being hidden, and then they brought out last month, didn't they, that Glaxo's kind of record settlement of three billion in compensation as a relatively small part of their income. And so it's really not in the interests of these companies to be so prudent because either the reparation is not high in contrast to the gross income of the business
compared to what it would be if they had to make it safe and/or not produce it. And then there's all the lobbying that goes on between government and big corporations that, like you said, is very much an inside job. And if there isn't any truth in publication or a movement to provide the truth, and again, we have said this many times, that the Internet, I believe, is really making a difference to the world population's perception of what is true because there is plenty of information you can find in any argument.
And ultimately, you know what, you begin to see what is the truthful side of what you might read. Well, that's getting changed too. I mean you try to find something on YouTube and you can hardly find it because there are advertising sites that try to tell you what they want to tell you or show you the part of the show they want you to see, not the whole thing. It's very much like what you said, and you have said it quite a few times in different parts of the show,
when you used to read abstracts in the library of original research, it was all well and good because it was original research and there it was, but they started removing it from the libraries. And now you have a hard time finding it on a web search because those abstracts either haven't been reproduced or what you might find now, you're being directed to by certain algorithms that are now becoming fairly commonplace within Google's search terms or as we've heard about Facebook censoring now and they're using fairly complicated algorithms to produce the results they want.
Everyone seems to trust PubMed, but years ago the librarian posted a notice for students to be aware that PubMed is not a science database. Meaning it's controlled by industry? Yes, it's an industry database. It's a government, military. I compared some articles that were listed in biological abstracts or chemical abstracts and then looked them up in the index Medicus or PubMed and the good articles were simply deleted. I would find a conventional mainstream idea article right next to it, a very good article. The bad article would be listed in PubMed, the good article wouldn't be.
Now you said biological abstracts and the other one that you mentioned? Chemical abstracts. Chemical abstracts. So these are both searchable databases that anyone can look at now if they want to. They're very expensive to use. Are they a pay per publication type subscription? You can't subscribe and then have access to the library? If you get your library to subscribe and then are a member of the library, a staff or student, that's the only practical way to get in. And the library is unfortunately becoming a thing of the past, aren't they? Shame.
Okay, well you're listening to Ask Herb Doctor on KMED Galbraithville 91.1 FM from 7.30 to the end of the show at 8 o'clock. You're invited to call in with any questions either related or unrelated to this month's continuing subject of the precautionary principle in food and medicine. The number if you live in the area, there's a temporary call-in number, 707-383-9007. Or if you're outside the 707 number, there's an 800 number which is 1-800-568-3723. So Dr. Peat, in terms of the-- I'm trying to think what is the best way of making this crooked road straight again
in terms of-- it's always a case of just follow the money. If you want to know where something is going, follow the money because that's the only thing that people are ever really pursuing in business is the financial gain unless obviously they are PhD students who are doing theses and doing research that's hopefully not being tampered with or they're not being steered in a certain direction. Well, abstract should have-- I mean, fully referenced scientific publications should have the funding listed at the bottom and that gives you a cue to follow the money.
So what would be the best way in terms of getting a system in place where we could free up the bureaucracy and the paperwork which is so apparent in Europe and the European Union? It's a complete mess and very difficult to do anything because of the bureaucratic nightmare of legislation. How do we get by the safety aspects of anything that is either food or medicine or devices that people use so that there can be a freely true open market and bringing product to market in a good time
and having a mechanism in place where there is a disincentive to be dishonest and/or dangerous? Even though it would be nice to be able to use the courts and to have Congress enforce open information laws, in what they release under the Freedom of Information Act, if anyone has had an experience with trying to get information out of the FDA, for example, they first stall and then they censor what they send you, blocking out the essential parts or just saying that the information is no longer available.
It would be nice if Congress could actually create a freedom of information that worked, but since that's fairly well proven not to work, I think it has to be something parallel. Using the internet for communication, for example, I think people have to create alternative institutions to sort of like WikiLeaks of science and consumer information, in which information that is more likely to be factual is made available to the general public. It makes me think about the First Amendment and the Freedom of Speech Association
and how glaringly obviously important that is in terms of having a society that is not afraid to speak out. That obviously is something that is so suppressed in China, probably still in parts of Russia, and other stroke communist, stroke socialist dictatorships or tyrannies. When people feel that there is nothing to be lost by being truthful, then amongst the people the decision can be arrived that we don't want this anymore, this is not good, we don't agree with it, and that should bear out in a government response
as a government is for the people, by the people, right, not to be telling the people what to do, but actually working for the people. So I think the whole dishonesty side of most of what goes on or can go on, I don't want to paint everybody with the same brush, but just to say that money totally is, truly the root or the love of money is totally the root of all evil. If there was more honesty and transparency that would itself cause more trustworthy business
and more products that were for our good, that didn't have the same propensity to be dangerous. So getting on to both these two articles, one is Chris Busby's Euratom Clause. I just wanted to mention this is an excellent full report outlining the cover-up and the misinformation tactics used by government to hide the fact that the death of survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is still ongoing and killing tens of thousands every year through cancers and genetic defects directly caused by radiation exposure and how this massive cover-up was done by the US government of all things
in order to keep and maintain the illusion that nuclear weapons were a good thing and that we could use them tactically, wasn't a problem, but it was a very quick way to really bring a rapid close to a conflict because of its devastating effects when actually the truth behind that is so completely polar opposite. And then another publication by Dr. Ernest Sternglass, his work on no exposure as the only safe approach to radiation. For our listeners, his work can be seen by typing the search term "Nuclear Witness Dr. Ernest J. Sternglass"
and you'll get a full list of publications at http://radiation.org/reading/ajsternglasspubs.html So I wanted just to bring out a couple of things that are just obviously out there as part and parcel of factual reporting. The UPI has stated now there's skyrocketing cancer cases in Fukushima. Associated Press have come out with an article alarming cancer rates after nuclear disaster. The Times has published child cancers up 5000% in Fukushima and then radiation doses may be considerably higher than estimated. Another thing closer to home here, before we get into some more of the things
that you might want to bring out about Sternglass, I know there was an interesting part of his history there where there was an interesting discussion here with Albert Einstein as part of the article. But the spike in animal deformities on the West Coast soon after Fukushima and then hundreds of baby cows with distorted legs and other malformations. And just in February 2017 here, dead whales with a record high number of deaths in Hawaii and carcasses scattered throughout the islands in the Pacific with sick and starving animals a mystery to experts.
Possible health effects in parentheses from Fukushima radiation off the coast blamed. And then also Fukushima's environmental catastrophe has only just begun with a massive increase in radiation being continually leaked into the Pacific being disclosed by TEPCO surprisingly in the last month. So in terms of the nuclear industry and the precautionary principle, I think Busby's got it right if he can get this to court safely and/or the European Union doesn't just dissolve like it sure looks like it's going to dissolve sometime soon here. How on earth can we really continue to defend nuclear energy
in the presence of technologies like clean coal that were being rapidly shut down and made far too expensive to operate by the Obama administration in the light of it being a global warming issue when actually global warming is a huge misinformation campaign all based on carbon taxation as a form of lifelong taxation? Do you remember when the Three Mile Island reactor melted down? The public really started turning against nuclear energy because of the fear of a huge meltdown. Sternglass got in great trouble. The industry defamed him beginning even before that around 1970.
They started saying he was totally uninformed and so on because he had the actual inside information showing that the government was underestimating, under-declaring the amount of radiation being released by hundreds of millions of times. Actually, more than a million times more was being released than the government claimed or admitted. And the nuclear industry, professionally, they taught everyone who worked in the nuclear industry that people like Sternglass and Goffman and Alice Stewart were simply incompetent. Even Linus Pauling was in trouble. He couldn't do the normal professional things because he was ostracized
by other chemists and physicists because of his opposition to testing bombs in the atmosphere and so on. Part of the article of Sternglass is they mentioned the US Army's readiness to commit all of these underground explosions, and they were going to do hundreds of them, to create caverns in which they could store natural gas. And they started that. I think they did one. And the fallout from this was so great and the contamination was so great that it unfortunately couldn't be covered up. And I know they kind of had to stop that being pushed forward,
but they were fully ready to commit hundreds of nuclear explosions to this one project up on the East Coast. That whole idea of atoms for peace, such as digging canals and producing natural gas release and so on, all of that was knowingly fraudulent. It wasn't just a failure to observe the precautionary principle. They knew they had the information right from the 1940s that small amounts of radiation caused infant deformities, stopped brain growth in the utero, caused birth defects of a great variety, but especially brain damage.
They knew what it would do, but for their own purposes to be able to wage nuclear war, they promoted this idea that the bombs had a peaceful use, and that extended to the idea of producing cheap power without counting the cost of mining the uranium and processing it and killing the miners by breathing the radon and ingesting uranium and so on. The military created a myth of free energy and peaceful uses of the bombs. Because of the public turning against nuclear power in 1978 as a result of Three Mile Island,
a process started in the Pentagon in which they had to revise, come out with something more scary than nuclear power. Just at the beginning of 1980, just a few months after Three Mile Island, they reversed a trend of predicting a new ice age, which had been the data from the late 1940s until 1979. They were predicting planetary cooling. But the Pentagon and the CIA came up with this idea of planetary warming a few months after the Three Mile Island. The nuclear power industry told them to do that, right?
Yeah. Well, the military too, because they need the nuclear power as a source of fuel for the bombs. And so they invented planetary warming, totally reversing the preceding 30 years of climate study as a way to say there's something worse than nuclear power. If we don't use this clean, cheap energy, nuclear power will overheat the planet. And polar bears will die. And we won't take into consideration how many women, children and men die from radiation poisoning. Yeah. And then when Chernobyl exploded and the nuclear industry in this country,
ever since then, 1986 to the present, have insisted that only a few dozen people were killed as a result of the Chernobyl meltdown. And the Russians who were best informed on the whole process of Chernobyl and the cleanup calculated that when they did the study, it's been about 10 years now, I think, up until that point, 985,000 premature deaths from cancer had already occurred from Chernobyl alone. And cancer is only one of the causes of death from radiation. So if you have a million people versus 30 deaths from the U.S. industry's perspective,
that's again a hundred thousand fold difference. Well, again, I just want to say that it's very obvious to me, I mean, I'm only 51, so I haven't been around that long, but it's very obvious to me that there are cyclic events that happen. And I think it's analogous to the polyunsaturated fats that we first met you and talked to you with in 2007, that you were espousing polyunsaturated as really very bad, very damaging, very oxidizable, lipofuscin being a problem, thyroid suppression being a problem.
And you've been saying that for a long time, you know, probably two or three decades. And only just maybe in the last year or two years has that revelation become a little bit more mainstream. Actually, my interest in that grew out of my interest in the radiation industry issue in the 1950s, because those are the fats that most break down and become toxic under the influence of radiation. And excess of polyunsaturated fats produces the same kind of damage that radiation injury does. And my interest in estrogen relates to that, because estrogen and ionizing radiation synergize.
Each one produces the same sort of damage to the organism. And both of those converge on the polyunsaturated fats in the tissues. So really, the government has participated in obscuring simple biological or chemical processes in the organism, because each one impinges on some ulterior motive that the government and industry has. Absolutely good. Well, we have a couple of callers, but I just wanted to finish up by saying that that is coming around full circle now, where we see saturated fats being portrayed as actually very useful now,
and polyunsaturated fats now being maligned the way it should have been. And we're talking about radiation now. We've done quite a few shows on radiation damage, and it's just up to people to be able to hear this, and get it into their minds, get it into their consciousness that we are the people, our voices do matter. All we have to do is just stand up and just say, "We don't want this." There are other alternatives that are much better and much safer, but it takes a free society to do that.
You're not going to get that in communist China or countries that are controlled by their governments, right? That's what a free and open society is all about, where our voices are what direct the government to put things into place. Anyway, we have a couple of callers, so let's take this first caller. And caller, where are you from and what's your question? Hi, Cora, are you there? Is this me? Yes. Hi, I'm from the San Francisco Bay Area, and I found that as my hypothyroidism and estrogen dominance improves, things are less and less overwhelming.
For example, I used to get anxious and overwhelmed with simple tasks like grocery shopping, and recently someone told me that I was using my health issues as an excuse for laziness. And so I was wondering, what are your thoughts on the concept of laziness? Interestingly, I'm the most productive when I feel very healthy, like when I eat well, sleep well, et cetera. Absolutely. Dr. Peat, would you like to answer that question? As an excuse for what? Laziness.
Yeah, people, blaming people, saying, oh, you're just using your health problems as an excuse to be lazy and not work. I don't think I've ever run into anyone that had exactly that excuse. Well, I think what the caller was trying to put through was -- the way I interpret it straightaway was that when you are metabolically deficient, it has a psychological effect, and I think it's a very real effect. And so in terms of improving your metabolic health, everything improves with it.
I think whether it's your thought processes, your recapitulation, or your accuracy and your performance, it's a bit like adaptogens, like the Russians did that research on the Lutheran and the ginsengs, as cognitive performance or cognitive enhancing products. No, when you're metabolically healthy, then you're definitely the most productive. The chronic fatigue syndrome for quite a few years was said to be a personality issue. Right, and fibromyalgia, I think they also put that down to -- But that's something that can actually be measured metabolically and hormonally and such. Absolutely.
Okay, you're listening to Ask Urb Doctor on KMED Galbraithville, 91.1 FM. From now until the end of the show, 8 o'clock, you're invited to call in with any questions related or unrelated to this month's subject of the precautionary principle. If you live in the area, there's a toll-free number -- sorry, if you live in the area, there's a regular number, 707-383-9007. Or if you're outside the area, there's a toll-free number, 1-800-568-3723. So, Dr. Peat, we do have another call on the air. Let's take this next caller. Caller, where are you from, and what's your question?
Hello? Engineer, do we have a caller? He might have gotten tired of waiting. I don't know. We hear him now. I think you're on the air now. Where are you from and what's your question? I did hear someone's voice, but they've gone again. Hi. I'm interested in two topics, if you have the time. The first question would be, is there an ideal body fat percentage to aim for? Right. And the second question would be related to sleep. What do we know? What does science tell us about how much sleep we really need?
Maybe the sleeping positions. Is it smart to sleep just once at night? Okay. Where are you from? The deep sleep, how much time we need in deep sleep and such things. Sure. Where are you from? From Finland. Finland. You're calling from Finland now, eh? That's correct. It is now 5 a.m. And very dark. 3 a.m. And very dark probably. Okay. Dr. Peat, what's the ideal body fat percentage? I guess that's probably the proportion of the height and everything else. And sleep.
I know you've got a lot to say about how much sleep a person should get, but would you start with what you think an ideal body fat percentage should be? I think it varies according to gender and age. For example, young women who are overweight have a better outcome of breast cancer, a lower incidence of breast cancer, than those who are underweight. And what age are you saying young women? Oh, in the 20s and 30s. And one of the greatest increases in cancer is occurring among women between the ages of 25 and the early 30s.
It's tripled in the last 30 or 40 years in that age group. But because of that relationship, it's better for a young woman to be on the plump side. With saturated fats, sir. Yeah, with a good diet. And then in older people, being somewhat leaner for women is reducing the risk of breast cancer. But in old people in general, mortality is lower with heavier body weight. They just have greater resistance to stresses. So you have to look at the individual and their age and gender.
Overall, mortality goes down in the old people who are slightly on the heavy side. So it's very much relative to age then and age and gender because obviously that percentage will change then. I thought you said that older people who are slightly more plump have a decreased mortality. Yeah, same with increased cholesterol and a slight increase of blood pressure in the old age is good. What do you think that body fat percentage would be though, 20%, 24%? I think a little higher. That's pretty low. Okay. That's too low, huh?
I remember when I was 19, I think I had it measured at 19%. Okay. I don't think you'd ever be able to get pregnant at 19%. So how about 30%? Yeah, I think 30% is a good average. Alright. And now how about your recommendations for sleep? I know you're a good advocate of getting enough rest. The timing also. And the quality of the sleep is the thing. Your blood sugar has to stay fairly steady, not drop too much during the night.
Otherwise, the deep sleep is diminished and the lighter phase of sleep in which you don't really repair your tissues becomes, for example, in a low thyroid person, they might spend 8 or 10 hours in bed semi-sleeping but wake up feeling fatigued and stiff and so on. And the level of blood sugar and metabolic rate are the main things that allow the deep and restful sleep. The turnover of the brain tissue is very great during the night. And that's one of the places where polyunsaturated fats in your, for example, your thighs and abdomen, during the night,
those are released into the bloodstream and whatever is in the bloodstream gets built into the brain structure. And you get this terrific turnover constantly during the night of the brain substance. So you want to keep your free fatty acids fairly low during the night by keeping your blood sugar up. And so having carbohydrates close to bedtime protects the quality of sleep. I've studied people with cirrhosis of the liver who did much better on all their tests if they had a fairly big dose of any carbohydrate, sugar or rice, for example, at bedtime.
And the breakdown that happens with aging primarily happens during the night, the calcium loss from the bones. It's essentially all in the morning urine or the night urine because that's when the stress hormones rise and cause the turnover. So if you can take advantage of that rapid turnover, if your stores of glycogen are high enough to keep the free fatty acids down. Okay, good. So I think you like to suggest that 10 hours is really not too much sleep. No, but you probably don't need that much if it's efficient sleep.
But 10 hours is fine if it's cyclic, if you're going through the deep sleep and then the slight arousal and then back into the deep sleep. But I think it should be more than six hours for almost everyone. I think Nicola was thinking about perhaps your comments on the "neanderthal sleep patterns" where we'd actually wake up, or maybe not even neanderthal, but maybe not quite so far back in history as that, where they say that humans used to go through two or three sleep cycles in a night and that actually was quite normal.
And actually now what we do, we go to bed at 10 or 11 and we don't wake up to 7, is actually being abnormal. Yeah, in the long winter or the night darkness would be stressful. But if they wake up and have a lunch in the middle of the night, that replenishes their glycogen stores and makes the night much less stressful. Right, okay. So it's all about how much sugar storage you have. And you know you're not storing your sugar if you wake up at 3 a.m. and can't go back to sleep.
There you go. That's a cue. Doctors used to be very negative about night eaters, like it was some kind of abnormality. But the studies in the last five years or so show that it's very protective. Excellent. And haven't you said too, Dr. Peat, that no one should get up before 8 o'clock? I think so. I like to quote that. If you're in the area, the 707 number, 707-383-9007. Or if you want a call toll free, 1-800-568-3723. We've got them to the top of the hour here.
And I haven't ever met a night worker who is healthy. But I could still meet one. I'm not saying it's not possible. How about that is the question. It's a little bit unrelated, but in terms of night shifts and the total imbalance of circadian rhythm and night and day and pineal gland involvement with serotonin and sleep and everything else. What do you think about people doing night shifts? It's very bad for the health, increases the cancer incidence, for example. I think it's very important to avoid it when it's possible. Yeah. Okay. All right.
I think we do have somebody calling in here. So let's just see if this call is actually a call. I was going to question a little bit if we didn't get any more calls about clinical trials and how -- because I know that you've certainly got experience with publishing material and the whole clinical trial basis and the mechanisms. But anyway, we have a caller here. So let's take this next caller. Call away from and what's your question? Hi. San Francisco Bay Area.
I just called, but Sarah just mentioned that Dr. Peat said before that you shouldn't wake up after 8. Can you elaborate on that? I've never heard of that before. Dr. Peat. Or you should wake up after 8, I think. Right. Yeah, you shouldn't get up before 8 o'clock in the morning. And, Dr. Peat, is that because of cortisol levels that are very high at the early hours of the morning and if you try to do much, it's a real strain on your system? Yeah.
For example, people who would go for a jog first thing in the morning without eating, they looked at their blood cells and their chromosomes in their white blood cells were broken. And if they ate and then did their run, there was no chromosome damage and that same morning susceptibility to stress shows up in the mortality. There's a morning peak in death from strokes and heart attacks. The blood is thicker in the morning and the cortisol is at its daytime peak. So people are relatively fragile in the morning.
That's why you don't want to jump in a hot shower first thing in the morning before eating either. Right? Doesn't that lower blood sugar? Yeah. Okay. So let me ask you in the six minutes or so that we have until the top of the hour.
About the clinical trials and in terms of published work, I think because like you said, you know, the only real reliable source of information if you can afford it or if you can get a library to join to find real, well I say real, but unbiased publications is the biological abstracts or chemical abstracts. In terms of pharmaceutical companies falsifying data and I know when I've questioned you about various abstracts and you've told me, well, that means this or this means that and otherwise actually not, it's not actually the way to interpret that.
This is what they're trying to do. Is there any way, is there any way, any easy way for people to find, I don't know, glaring mistakes in clinical trials or information about clinical trials that will help find more accurate information about it or is it just completely sewn up by the companies doing the trials? If you think of propaganda analysis when you're reading a science paper, you have to think about everything that they can do wrong.
Sometimes I see a paper with fairly good conclusions in which they did everything wrong, but doing those wrong techniques, it makes it a pretty subjective thing. You can come up with almost any conclusion you want if you're using crazy techniques and when you, for example, dissociate brain cells and put them in culture and if you separate mitochondria and do techniques such as the patch clamp recording, a special way of recording electrical activity, there are things that have absolutely no physiological real meaning that are very customary in the research papers.
So you have to look for connections, how they can connect that to what's happening in the real organism and if you look at studies on animals, they can do things to animals, the intact animal that you can't do to a person and so you can get very good information. If you use an animal that's a good model of a person, but if you use, for example, a rodent with its night cycle and forget what time of day you're doing the experiment, they're stressed.
If they're a nocturnal animal and you do experiments during the daytime when they normally would be sleeping, you have to look at whether the animal is a good model of the person. But typically someone with an ulterior motive will use exactly those tricks of putting an animal in stress and claiming that it's a good model or choosing an animal that has an opposite reaction, for example, to cortisol and estrogen. Much of the estrogen industry is based on the claims about the estrogen and bone health based on rodents.
They have been doing studies in dogs and they found that estrogen damaged their bones. They gave up the dog studies and went to rodents because they could get opposite results. Let's hold you there, Dr. Peat. I do appreciate you bringing that out, but let me get people your information. Well, I just want to say one thing. Well, Dr. Peat, that's why we need you to help us sort out all this information because you have such a long history of looking at it and figuring it out.
We really need you to help keep helping us, Dr. Peat. So I hope you stay alive for another 30 years. I'm praying. I bet you are. All right. Well, thanks so much for your time, Dr. Peat. Thank you. Okay. For those people who've listened to the show, thanks for calling in. It's always good to get callers from other countries. Normally, the East Coast is pretty cool and then when we get some of them out of the country, that's great. If you want to know more, www.raypeat.com.
Let me just reiterate the two people that we were studying, Chris Busby, B-U-S-B-Y, URATOM, E-U-R-A-T-O-M, URATOM clause. And also do go and have a look at Dr. Ernest Sternglass's work. It's a very interesting section there on Einstein and his meeting with Einstein. Anyway, there's the glitch on the CD, folks. So we've got to get that sorted out for next month. My name's Andrew Murray. My name's Sarah Johanneson Murray. Thanks for listening and have a good night. Yeah. Bye-bye.