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This free program is paid for by the listeners of Redwood Community Radio. If you're not already a member, please think of joining us. Thank you. [Music] Well, thank you for that introduction and happy solstice to everyone who's listening. As always, the show will run from 7.30 to 8 o'clock with callers, and we want to try and make a habit of asking people where they come from, so just to get an idea of the demographics of the show. Okay, so my name's Andrew Murray. For those of you who perhaps have never listened to our shows,
which run every third Friday of the month from 7 to 8 o'clock, we're both licensed medical herbalists who trained in England and graduated there with a degree in herbal medicine. We run a clinic in Garboville where we consult with clients about a wide range of conditions, and we manufacture all our own certified organic herb extracts, which are either grown on our CCUF certified herb farm, or which are sourced from other USA certified organic suppliers. I carry on with the age-old intro of "we". My lovely wife is looking after our two-month-old baby,
and I guess for maybe another month or two, she'll be sitting at home taking care of our little girl. Okay, so you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMED Garboville 91.1 FM, and from 7.30 until 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 heart. And also there's another article Dr. Peat's just recently written, the cancer matrix. So the number here, if you live in the area, is 923 3911,
or if you live outside the area, the toll-free number is 1800 KMUD RAD. That's 1800 568 3723. We can also be reached toll-free on 1-888-WBMHERB for further questions during normal business hours Monday through Friday. Well, before we get going with introducing Dr. Peat to the show, we're once again very fortunate to have him on to share his expert knowledge. I got pretty excited, not that I don't believe, but pretty excited that suddenly in the last month, I think I probably received four newsletters, part of Medscape's email newsletter program.
So the thing that struck me the most about it was that I don't know how many people are listening now who have been long-time listeners or maybe have been just recently switched into what Dr. Peat's been professing probably for the last 35-40 years, that the saturated fats and the animal fats and the butter, etc. are the good fats and that the polyunsaturated fats, things like safflower, linoleic acid, any of the seed oils, cottonseed, hemp seed, canola, etc., all the bad oils and fish oil, obviously, are one of those oils,
because the main thrust of industry is to propose these as heart-healthy and cholesterol-lowering, etc. Well, what do you know, folks? Dr. Peat's always said that whilst truth races around the world, sorry, while a lie races around the world, beg your pardon, truth is just getting her shoelaces tied. And here we go, 40 years later, I got several articles from Medscape, and I just wanted to share them with you. So the first article from the British Medical Journal was the use of dietary linoleic acids for secondary prevention of coronary heart disease and death.
And I don't want to go on too long with these articles before we bring Dr. Peat in, so in the next five minutes or so, I'll just quickly run through some of these. The advice to substitute the polyunsaturated fats for saturated fats is a key component of worldwide dietary guidelines for coronary heart disease risk reduction. However, clinical benefits of the most abundant polyunsaturated fatty acids, the omega-6 linoleic acid, have not been established. So in the cohort that was studied, they substituted dietary linoleic acid in place of saturated fats,
and they found that it increased the rates of death from all causes, coronary heart disease and cardiovascular disease. And this was an updated meta-analysis of 430 patients in the-- where have we got here? Use of dietary linoleic acid for secondary prevention of coronary heart disease and death. And this was an evaluation of recovered data from the Sydney Diet Heart Study, an updated meta-analysis. So the advice to substitute vegetable oils that are rich in polyunsaturated fatty acids, or PUFAs as they're known, for animal fats rich in saturated fatty acids,
has been a cornerstone of worldwide dietary guidelines for the past half century. Now, when this advice originated in the 1960s, PUFAs were regarded as a uniform molecular category with one relevant biological mechanism, and that was the reduction in blood cholesterol, or so they said. So this most recent turn up is just showing, finally, you know, coming to pass, saturated fats are actually better for you than the polyunsaturates, and they've shown this quite clearly in clinical trials. Well, another review was done by Steve Stiles,
and this was also another Medscape article that I got a few weeks back. And it was entitled, "Dietary Saturated Fat Has Undeserved Bad Reputation." Well, it's a fairly lengthy article, so I won't go into a lot of it, but some of the bullet points were the evidence that potentially carcinogenic preservatives in processed meats as well as high heat cooking methods have influenced perceptions that red meat per se has adverse health effects. How the preparation and cooking methods used for foods that are traditionally classified as saturated fat foods
may be producing substances from PUFAs and carbohydrates in those foods that are promoting disease. I also stated that studies suggesting the positive health effects from dairy fat and tropical oils, both high in saturated fatty acids and therefore were discredited as unhealthy, and the hazards of diets with increased carbohydrates as a result of being lower in fat, in low-fat diets, followed to improve health, especially cardiovascular health. So again, another good article there. It's a fairly long article, so if people want to check this out on the web, just type in "Medscape Good Fat vs. Bad Fat,"
I think one of the titles of the articles is. There was another article in the European Heart Journal that the dietary intake of saturated fatty acids, or it was about the dietary intake of saturated fatty acids and the incident of stroke and coronary heart disease in Japanese communities, which are famous for consuming fairly large amounts of the polyunsaturated, especially in fish oils. Saying that saturated fatty acid intake was inversely associated with age, sex, and energy-adjusted incidents of risk for total stroke, total and deep intraparenchymal hemorrhage, and ischemic stroke.
So saying that all of these things, these cardiovascular disease etiologies, were all definitely higher in people that consumed less saturated fat. So again, another article proving that the saturated fat that Dr. Peat's been a proponent of for 35 years or so, is true. And actually the liquid oils, and especially the fish oils, are very bad for you. There was another article, and this again, this is something else that Dr. Peat's pretty keen to bring out as a good dietary substance. So coffee. I know Dr. Peat likes coffee for its magnesium content,
but there's another article here presented by the European Society of Hypertension in 2013, during their scientific sessions, it was actually published June 18th, 2013. Green tea and coffee may guard against stroke. Chocolate nudges down blood pressure in new meta-analysis. And coffee versus heart failure. A few cups per day protects. So I know Dr. Peat's always pushed coffee as being a good source of magnesium, and another good antioxidant type food. And then very lastly, before we introduce Dr. Peat here, the food supplement that was linked to lower prostate-specific antigen in prostate cancer patients was a mixture.
They called it Pommy Tea, and the main components of it were broccoli, green tea extract, pomegranate, and the other product was... Well, those were three of them. There was four in it, but they were turmeric. That was it, turmeric. Okay. So they found that this mixture significantly lowered prostate-specific antigen compared with placebo in a study of 400, again, 420 patients with prostate cancer in a double-blind placebo-controlled randomized trial. So again, Dr. Peat's always mentioned things like the antioxidants and the flavonoids
as being very beneficial components in foods, and that's why he's so behind food as a medicine rather than supplements and drugs, et cetera. He's very much behind getting your dietary medicine from food. Okay. So enough of me. Let's introduce Dr. Peat. Dr. Peat, are you on? Yes. Hi. Thanks for joining us. So what do you think, then, for 30 years of telling everyone that saturated fats are good for you and probably getting a lot of people laughing and doubting and just casting aspersions on what you bring into light,
how do you feel about some of these things that are now coming out? I'm not sure what the motivation is exactly because the information has been sitting around for 50 or 60 years. I guess someone has slipped on their public relations for the fish oil and PUFA, letting this stuff leak through into the media. It's certainly a big industry, isn't it? I've seen some of the numbers that are touted as generating income for fish oil sales, and they're pretty staggering.
So, Dr. Peat, I don't want to let you carry on without just introducing yourself and your professional background so people that perhaps have never heard your name can hear a little bit about your education, and then we'll get going on the show. Okay. In the '50s and '60s, I had taught various places in humanities mostly, but 1968 to '72, I returned to graduate school intending to study brain biology, but I found quickly that the nerve and brain department in the university was among the most dogmatic. Molecular biology, genetics, and brain studies were highly dogmatic,
so I shifted over to the physiological chemistry of aging and the reproductive system for my thesis. Okay. All right. Very good. So I remember last month the topic was the heart, and again, linked with heart health, the common medical misconception that the saturated fats are the cause of blocked arteries, for want of a better word, and other cardiac illnesses, certainly is not founded in terms of research that's done, but yet seems to be the common theme on the lips of most people from what they hear on the radio or television adverts, etc.
You see a lot of stuff in the medical literature that is spreading the propaganda line, and superficially it presents itself as science or research on the effects of the fats on the animals and so on, but when you read it closely, it's just like a professional trick in which they compare things that they know or should know to be extremely toxic against the thing they want to sell and say, "See, it's less toxic than this other thing," but since it's common knowledge that the other thing is just powerfully toxic,
anything compared against it practically will look beneficial. That's just almost a trick of the trade. Just to keep selling a pretty profitable product, especially the fish oils, I can't imagine, well, I do imagine why the industries do what they do, because ultimately things that are waste products, when they're turned into a profit, a profitable product... Some of the bad research is just carelessness. For example, for about 30 or 40 years, people referred to lard as the saturated fat, and then they would use some middle of the range of a vegetable oil, canola or something,
and show an advantage to the vegetable oil over lard and say, "Lard, the saturated fat, has these disadvantages," but during this period, they were feeding the pigs corn and soybeans to fatten them because specifically of the high unsaturation of the food, and so lard was an extremely highly unsaturated fat. There were hundreds and hundreds of research papers compared to it, using it as the so-called saturated fat. Okay, we're talking about fats and cholesterol again. What do you see of the harmful effect of lowering cholesterol relevant to heart failure?
Cholesterol, as far back as the 1920s, probably earlier, was identified as a major protective, defensive molecule. For example, around 1920, someone injected half a dozen different toxins, heavy metals, snake venom, infectious bacteria, just about anything that was considered extremely toxic, and then they gave the animal a cholesterol injection and found that it antidoted all of those harmful things, and that has been repeated about every 20 years or so. Someone repeats a similar experiment showing that in any system you look at, increasing the cholesterol improves functioning.
For example, injecting it in the animals that are being trained, it improves their memory and learning ability. It turns out to be a component of every part of a cell's anatomy, the nuclear framework, the cell division apparatus, the respiratory system, everything. They talk about it as a membrane component, but it's really everywhere in the cell. Okay, yes, so it's extremely important, and I know that you consistently mention that a higher cholesterol is a lot better
and a lot safer for you than a low cholesterol, and that there's much more damaging effects of low cholesterol than there is high. Yes, I've known several doctors and such who deliberately kept their cholesterol down and bragged about having 100 or 120 milligram percent cholesterol, and I don't think any of them lived much beyond 40 years. Whoops, whoops. Okay, so just for the listeners, I know the cutoff point on most lab core, for example, blood tests, give 200 milligram as the cutoff point at which they start prescribing statins, which have also --
and it reminds me there's also another article that appeared in Medscape in the last month about how damaging the statins were, and they're the artificial cholesterol-lowering drugs that are used to counteract so-called high cholesterol. So the -- One of the Framingham studies found that over the age of 50, people who didn't have higher than 200 on the cholesterol were more likely to have dementia, showing a protective effect on the brain. Right. That's what you've said many times now. So people over 50, they want the cholesterol around 200, and actually to lower it artificially with statins,
which is what happens when a doctor sees that on someone's blood work, is actually far more damaging to them than to have it at 220. Okay. So what about -- because I know you're also a very big proponent of thyroid as an energy molecule, if you like, as part of an undergirding framework of metabolism in the body, because everything that happens in the body costs money, I guess, in a way to put it simply. And that thyroid hormone is the currency with which a lot of these transactions are met with.
So in terms of low thyroid and muscle weakness, do you generally see muscle weakness as a part of a kind of low thyroid picture? Yeah. There's a very close connection between polyunsaturated fats, and it's inversely related to thyroid function at every level. If you take one particular function of thyroid, the formation of the hormone or the secretion from the gland or its transport through the blood or its action on the respiratory or genetic system in the cell, each of these functions decreases as the unsaturation of the fat molecule increases.
And so the low thyroid, which allows muscles to fatigue more easily simply because energy isn't being produced by respiration at the necessary level, as the muscle is fatigued, it activates processes that try to provide more energy. But in doing that, they liberate fats from storage, so they become free fatty acids. This not only further suppresses the thyroid and the energy production, but it starts an inflammatory process so that the muscle, instead of just becoming fatigued and working less, shifts over to becoming inflamed and breaking down. Sometimes the muscle breakdown can kill a person.
That's one of the side effects of the cholesterol-lowering drugs. Okay, folks, so staph is a bad for you. Higher cholesterol is good for you. So don't forget saturated fats are also the good guys, not the bad guys. Okay, so you're listening to Ask Your Arb Doctor on KMED Gallival 91.1 FM. And from 7.30 till the end of the show at 8 o'clock, you're invited to call in with any questions related to the heart, cholesterol, saturated fats, and later on, we might get into some of the latest article on the cancer matrix that Dr. Peat's written.
If you live in the area, numbers 933911, or if you live outside the area, there's a toll-free number, which is 1-800-KMUD-RAD. Okay, so again, the misconceptions surrounding the endurance training style of aerobic exercise, it's just not unhealthy, but it's pretty damaging, isn't it? Yeah, one experiment with just walking fast on the treadmill to keep the heart rate up to about 120 or less, they found that the liver's production of the active thyroid hormone decreased radically in less than an hour of that kind of exercise.
And if the person is very healthy, the thyroid will bounce right back from that kind of stress. But if their tissues are loaded with the thyroid suppressive fats, that much exercise liberates the fats and keeps the thyroid from recovering quickly. Okay, good. Could you just remind me, you are in favor of someone's resting heart rate to be around 80. I know that you don't agree with aerobic exercise because you say that that's, and for that reason that you just brought out, it's damaging.
But yet you prefer a person's heart rate to be between 80 and 100. Yeah, one experiment that got my interest about 30 years ago or more was looking at the school performance of, I think it was high school kids and their heart rate. And they found that the ones that had the highest grades averaged an 85 beats per minute at rest. And the average around 70 were the lower performance students.
So how about these people who maintain that low heart rate is a sign of health and the people that go jogging or they do marathon running and they have a pulse of maybe 50 or even lower sometimes and just say that they're incredibly fit. What do you have to say about the people that have that kind of heart rate with that kind of exercise? In general, that very slow heart rate correlates with very slow everything. Sperm production, for example, is usually very low in those endurance runners.
Okay, so not very healthy to have a low heart rate. Much better to have a metabolic energy production that's more up in the 80s or even a little higher. Some of the drug companies are doing some trick research to make it look like it's better to have a lower heart rate. But what they're doing is including people with heart failure. And when your heart is in the process of failing, it beats more weakly and so it has to beat more often.
And so when you include people with heart failure, then you see that those with a fast heart rate are about to die. Okay. Now again, this caught my attention because I was always taught that heart muscle cells, they're called myocardiac sites. But the heart muscle cells, I was always taught that they were finite and that any heart exercise purely involved a localized swelling, if you like, a hypertrophy without an increase in cell numbers. But new research is showing that stem cells are able to create new heart cells and have been recognized.
How does the effect of thyroid hormone promote this? Well, partly it keeps the cells alive. But as long as the heart cells are able to respire using sugar, using glucose and producing carbon dioxide, any muscle cell in the heart that is damaged will be replaced by a recruited stem cell maybe coming in from the blood or another part of the heart, which in the presence of the thyroid and the good environment of plentiful glucose and carbon dioxide will mature into a muscle cell.
But if the cell is blocked by these free fatty acids, which interfere with the use of glucose, then the cells of the heart produce lactic acid and lactic acid is a signal to produce collagen. And the stem cells arriving get that kind of signal from the environment of the sick heart and turn into fibroblasts and produce connective tissue. So the heart becomes progressively fibrotic and less contractile cells. And in experiments, they've produced two kinds of heart enlargement.
One in which the heart simply works harder, like when you take more thyroid, it pumps harder and pumps more blood. Or if you block the output of the heart by having what produces high blood pressure, you create more resistance. That causes the heart to enlarge. But the stressed, plugged up heart enlarges by producing more collagen and becomes fibrotic. But the enlarged heart that has developed with increased function and thyroid provision is a good muscular functioning heart. And when animals have been caused to develop an enlarged fibrotic heart with the other type of heart interference,
then giving them T3 over a period of time causes the fibrosis to regress and be replaced by good functioning heart. And that kind of animal research has been somewhat indirectly applied to people preparing cadaver hearts for donation for transplants. And they found that if they gave the donor heart before they removed it, if they provided T3 to have it ready for removal and transplant, the transplant was much more successful. Wow. Wow. All right. That's interesting. You're saying that T3, just to recap, you mentioned that T3 was anti-fibrotic.
Yeah. In the liver part, every place it's been studied, it helps to reverse the fibrosis. Wow. And how do you understand that mechanism being good? I think developing good new tissue, stem cells, and keeping the environment low in lactic acid and high in carbon dioxide allows the differentiation to go in the right direction. And organs and tissues are always trying to break down and renew the extracellular matrix, which is where the collagen fibrosis exists. That's always being broken down and replaced. In the thyroid deficient stressed person, the replacement becomes worse than it was.
But with adequate thyroid and nutrition, the fibrosis is replaced progressively by more functional tissue. Right. Go ahead. Doctors, I'd like to jump in here if I could and do some bottom of the hour business and open the phones up to callers because we had a number of callers. And I told them to call back after the bottom of the hour. So I just want to give you guys a second to catch your breaths. And we'll be right back with you, Dr. Peat and the herb doctor.
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So I want to remind you that the herb doctor is opening up the phone lines now. Our number locally is 707-923-3911. And if you're out of the area, 1-800-KMED-RAD. So the phone lines are open. I see they're starting to ring. I have one question for you, doctors from a caller. A lay person wanted to know if you could give a lay description of what saturated means in saturated fat. Oh, I'm sorry. There we go. All right, you guys are back and I'll get the phones.
Okay, Dr. Peat, did you hear that question that the engineer has just asked about describing saturated fats to a caller in a simple term? The fat is a chain of carbon atoms and they're covered with hydrogen atoms. And if you remove some of those hydrogen atoms on the typical middle of the chain carbon, there are two hydrogens. And if you remove those from some of the carbons, that's unsaturated. It just means if it's saturated, that means it has all the hydrogens attached that it can hold.
And polyunsaturated means that you've got more than one set of carbon atoms with a double bond of electrons between the carbons lacking the hydrogens where the hydrogen had been filling every possible space. Okay, and the other thing just to bring out that saturated fats are easily identified more or less by having a characteristic of being fairly solid at room temperature. And yeah, and that doesn't apply at all to the living state where we live at 98 or 99 degrees.
Those fats aren't at all more stiff or rigid in any way, but there's a whole literature that talks about them as if they stay stiff when they're at our body temperature. Promoting the ideology that they're bad for you, right? Yeah, and in fact, each carbon in a saturated fat is free to rotate against its neighbor. And the removal of the hydrogens creates a stiff bond between those carbons. So actually, the polyunsaturated is less free to rotate than a saturated fat.
Do you think just quickly before we have three quarters, but do you think quickly that makes the cell for want of a better word cell membrane less fluid? Yes, in fact, the fact that the highly unsaturated fat is easily attacked by oxygen means that the fats on the surface or wherever they are very quickly tend to attach chemically to adjoining proteins. And so when you look at it in the right situation, you see that the polyunsaturated membranes are often very rigid because of oxidation attaching them to the protein underlying the fat.
Thanks for that explanation for that listener. We have three quarters. Let's take this first call on the end. If you'd just say where you're from. You're on the air. Yes, I'm from Peercy from Minnesota County. I lived in the Humboldt County area for 41 years. I'm 66 years old. Andrew, thank you very much. You are God sent. And I think Dr. Peat is a prophet of the medical profession. He sure is. I've been I've been listening for quite a few months now on your program.
And the problem I have is not related to heart. But what I have is 66 years old. I've had four major military surgeries and had all but eight feet of my small intestine removed. I have a double ostomy, which means my small intestine and my colon comes to the outside of my body using a prosthetic bag for defecation purposes. Now, Donatel was a product I was taking to slow down my peristaltic action. What was the name of it? My peristaltic action so fast that I dehydrate all the time.
Donatel is not not not available anymore locally here, at least. It's a Belladonna, of course. And I had been trying atropine, which didn't help at all either. So what I'm doing right now is my physician has me on hydromorphone. And of course, you gentlemen know that opiate derivatives slow down the peristaltic action, causing constipation, which is what I need.
My peristaltic action slowed down. Is there anything herbal possibly that I could take or any other medicine that you know of that would slow my peristaltic action so that I do not dehydrate and have to go into for leaders of bringers lactate? Sure. OK, well, Dr. Peay, if you have anything to mention, I've got. Yeah. Have you tried antihistamines such as Cyproheptadine, which is both antiserotonin and antihistamine? No, sir, I haven't. I didn't. I didn't think of that. Neither is my doctor. An antihistamine to slow down peristaltic bowel action.
Yeah, they have a slight Belladonna atropine like side effect. I see. And what's that called again, sir? One which is both antiserotonin and antihistamine is called Cyproheptadine. Cipro, I think it's C-Y-P-O or is it C-I-P-R-O? C-Y. C-Y-P-R-O, hep, H-E-P, T-A-D-I-N-E, Cipro, heptadiene. Yes, I have it down, gentlemen. I want to thank you very much. And by the way, for some reason my mother knew that mono and polyunsaturated oils were the basis for lacquers, paints, and varnishes. That's right. Before they discovered that crude oil was a cheaper base for those things.
And she informed me at a very young age to only use butter, olive oil, or coconut oil. And I've been telling these organic hippies in these hills for years to quit eating organic poly and mono unsaturated oils. And they tell me, well, it's organic. And my argument is rattlesnake venom is organic too. Do you think that's any good for you? Good evening, gentlemen. Thank you very much for your help. You're very welcome. It's unfortunate, you know, we're just brainwashed. And you can't help but understand how people can be led astray.
It's not their fault, perhaps. It's just the medical industry and the industries around that industry that are so powerful financially, have such vested interest in doing what they're doing that they don't fail to continue the propaganda that, you know, their liquid oils are good and polyunsaturated fats are bad. OK, so on a very quick note for an herbal perspective, as an astringent, that would be classically the description of a product in the bowel that would help loose, watery stools, which is certainly what you sound like you're talking about.
So there'd be astringent, whether they're gentle astringent or something a little more tannin rich. Tannins are the things in teas that tend to dry or pucker your mouth up. Tannins are used for diarrhea and there's many different classifications of astringents that could be used internally, perhaps. OK, so there's two more callers on the line. So let's get this next caller and find out where they're from. Hello. I'm from Southern Humboldt. Southern Humboldt. OK, welcome to the show. So you were talking about cholesterol levels earlier.
And I wonder what you think of high cholesterol, you know, HDL versus LDL and how important that is and what people need to do if you think it's important to keep the balance appropriate. OK, Dr. Peat? Both of them are anti-inflammatory and that's part of the protective effect is the protein which carries the cholesterol itself has a very important biological effect, defending against things that would irritate and inflame. But some of the studies have shown that there's a close correlation between high HDL and some of the inflammatory diseases such as cancer,
because it rises defensively against exposure to those chemical irritants. So the level of HDL or the proportion of the total cholesterol partly is just reflecting how stressful your environment is. For example, drinking too much alcohol will raise your HDL. Being exposed to too much of the fish oil type of irritation or peroxidation will raise your HDL defensively. So you're saying, again, the opposite of what we hear from the medical establishment. You're saying the HDL is the bad cholesterol?
No, it's defensive. But having it high doesn't necessarily mean that you're on a good diet program because just drinking too much liquor can raise it. I see. And so if I got my blood tested and I had a certain ratio, what ratio would you say is kind of a good sign? I don't think it is as simple as that, but two or three to one is usually reasonable. Two or three LDL to one HDL. Yeah. Thank you for your information.
Okay, so there's another caller on the line, so let's take this next caller. You're on the air. Hello? Hi, you're on the air. Where are you from? Bloxburg. I have a speaker phone. Is it bothering it? No, I don't hear it. I have a couple of questions for you and the doctor. And number one is you're doing a great job. I'd like the doctor to describe the function of the lymphoid gland in the jaw area and what function it is. And is it dangerous to have a CAT scan in that area?
The function of the what? The function of the lymph gland or the lymph -- is it lymphoid or lymph gland? Lymphoid tissue, is it? Yeah, do you mean lymphoid tissue, the kind of -- the lymph that can come up under the angle of your jaw when you have tooth infection, say, or tonsillitis? Yeah, the glands in there, I guess they consider their glands. Yeah, maybe the parotids or the -- well, not that they're lymphoid, but -- Hello? Yeah, could you -- did you hear that, Dr. Peat?
The caller is wondering about the connection between swollen lymph and whether or not CAT scans are safe. Oh, well, definitely CAT scans are not safe. That amount of radiation is known to have a permanently inflammatory action. The more of them you have, the more certain it is that there will be some lingering damage from them. But the swollen lymph glands, sometimes it can just mean that you're being exposed to allergens or possibly foods that you're somewhat sensitive to.
It's very common in the spring to have a period of several of the lymph glands around the throat and neck to swell up because of air pollen and possibly changing foods from the season change. Yes, am I still on? Yeah, you're on. Did you hear that? I had this little knot for about four years now, and I went to the doctors and they said to just keep an eye on it. It's better just to monitor it and watch it and make sure nothing happens.
And then just recently, maybe within the last four or five months, it's like a little extra has developed on the side of it and starts swelling the side of my neck. I went and had a sonogram and it seemed to have some hard tissues there and stuff, and they want me to go in and have a CAT scan. So I felt I needed to talk to somebody, an herbalist or something. So is there some herbs or a diet that can reduce the swelling in this area?
If it's hardened, that suggests that it might be becoming cancerous. So I would think that doing a biopsy would be reasonable if it's actually hardened over what it has been previously. It's grown about twice the size, and they put me on antibiotics, and the swelling has gone down. And then I stopped antibiotics for about a week, and then it continued to swell back up again. What area is it in?
It's underneath the jaw, the corner of the jaw area, and they said it's a very sensitive area, and there are other glands, a saliva gland in that area, and they haven't been able to detect exactly what it is. If an antibiotic made it go down, I would just keep trying that line of approach and maybe have a raw carrot every day to clean out your intestine. Now, we went to some of the herbal places, and they gave us a couple of various things that I don't have a list from.
Now, to cleanse your blood and to cleanse the lymph glands, is that a good idea while you're taking antibiotics? Eating a fiber like a raw carrot every day has an antibiotic action, and you have to know which herbs you're working with because some of them could increase inflammation. Okay. There are definitely things like gallium apirini, which is cleavers. There are definitely fresh juices of that, which is very well indicated for lymphadenopathy, as is pokeroot. Pokeroot is extremely strong, and you definitely don't want to use too much of it
because it has a very narrow spectrum of activity beyond being toxic in its own right. And obviously things like Smilax, sarsaparilla, which is used as a lymphatic agent, and blue flag, the iris verticolor, is also a good lymphatic agent. So they may well be worth you trying them. Could I make a recommendation that the collar massage that area? Because you can sometimes push those lymph obstructions through if you work on it. It's your body, and you can manipulate it however you like and destroy that thing.
Get it through. Work it through your lymph system and make it pass on and get it out of there. It's not harmful to touch it or put mild pressure on it? No. Okay. Well, thank you very much, and you guys do a great job. This is really good for the community, and I am in the Bloxburg area and hear you very well. Thank you very much. Thank you. I would definitely go easy before you start putting too much pressure on it, for sure. Okay.
There's definitely some trains of thought that would also say that that in its own right might cause irritation locally. Take it easy, but what Dr. Peat is saying initially is good advice. Antibiotics, a lot of gut-related things can show themselves in lymphatic swelling. So the fact that it's in the mouth, it's part of the GI tract, may well be relevant to the fact that some food or allergen, either aerosol, allergen, or edible, may be causing it. Okay. Thank you for your call. Thank you very much.
We do have a couple more callers on the line, so let's give everyone a chance here. You're on the air? You're on the air. Hello? Yeah, you're on the air. Hi. Good evening, Andrew and Dr. Peat. Where are you from? Thank you for taking my call. My question was generally about the idea of stealth, that is, heart-to-death pathogens in the body, like Lyme, et cetera. I was wondering, Dr. Peat, what you think about those as maybe the root cause of such elements as chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia?
Specifically, chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia are so closely related to nutrition and the hormones. I think the mysterious infections are over-diagnosed. Some doctors specialize in them because they're good business if you have to treat them for months at a time. But if you think you might have been exposed to something like that, a good course of the right antibiotics should clear it up in maybe two or three weeks. In many of your recommendations, you talk about diet and several other things.
I was wondering if ever there are cases with stealth pathogens in which maybe like a catch-22 situation, that they are somehow preventing the thyroid from functioning optimally, and so the thyroid can't then eradicate them? Well, just ordinary bacteria, any of dozens of different kinds of bacteria living in the small intestine, which should be sterile, this great range of bacteria in the intestine will cause enough toxicity to interfere, mixed with everything else to interfere with your thyroid function. So keeping the intestine clean is the first step.
And that's increasing the transit time, or sorry, decreasing the transit time so you excrete waste more regularly. And then you've always mentioned raw grated carrots. So for people that are listening, the main reason Dr. Peat is promoting daily serving of raw grated carrot for people that have issues, especially GI, is that the carrots themselves, they're indigestible, number one, so you don't digest them. They pass through, but they have a very defined sweeping action on the bowel wall, basically either dislodging, removing waste, and/or absorbing excess and removing excess estrogen, which is one of the compounds.
Yes, there have been some experiments with either antibiotics in the intestine will lower estrogen and cortisol and increase the protective hormones. Carrots do the same thing. Apparently, both antibiotics and carrots are working by lowering the endotoxin absorption. The carrots actually carry away a lot of the estrogen, which otherwise would be recycled, reabsorbed, and passed through the liver again. Good. So just another reminder, folks, good old carrots. I remember what Dr. Peat said about carrots as well.
If you've got carrots in the bottom of your refrigerator, they can be there for months, and they're very hard to break down. But they're also very good at having an antibiotic action in the gut. We've got one or two more callers, so let's take the next caller. We've got two more, so let's see how we can get through. Hello? Hi, you're on the air. Hi. Yeah, I do have a cholesterol question, but first, that fellow who had the lump,
you were saying that if it was hardening that he should probably have a biopsy to make sure that it's not cancer, and that was kind of glossed over. Well, I mean, he can do all kinds of things, but if it's cancerous and he's not addressing that, I mean, cancer can be cured much better when you catch it quickly. So don't you think he should have a biopsy anyway, even though he's going to do other things?
Well, if it softens and seems normal after taking an antibiotic for a few days, that means pretty well that it wasn't cancer. I thought that he just said that it -- yeah, it wasn't -- it went down and then it went back up again, but the hardness, I don't know. I don't know that it softened. He just said it got smaller and then it got big again. Yeah, the hardness is a very accurate way to diagnose. They found that when doing breast cancer surgery, that just feeling the lymph nodes in the armpit,
they can diagnose accurately just by whether they're hard or not, whether there's cancer in them. So you're saying if he took the antibiotic and the swelling went down, it wouldn't do that if it was hardened cancer? Yeah, it would stay hard. Okay. Okay. Would it stay the same size? No, it could get smaller, but if the part of it is hardened and cancerous, it has like a mesh of compacted collagen surrounding the cells which are becoming defective, and that collagen takes days or weeks to soften up when it's being cured.
Okay, so you don't think he needs a biopsy. Okay. My question is, my daughter recently had a blood workup thing, and it says that her cholesterol is 264. Now, I know I'm very well aware that we're cholesterol phobic and that it's okay for it to be over -- you said around 220 is okay, but is 264 a little bit too high? How old is she? She's in her early 40s. Yeah, I think that's probably just expressing low thyroid function. The cholesterol is the precursor to several of the protective hormones, pregnenolone, progesterone, and DHEA.
Well, she's had thyroid problems, and she's going to get reevaluated to see if she's on the right level of medication because she seems to need to take thyroid. I think her thyroid doesn't produce enough on its own. When the thyroid function goes down, your cholesterol goes up in a defensive reaction, trying to keep the production of those protective hormones up. So when you take thyroid, you start turning cholesterol into the good stuff, and so the cholesterol goes down. So she just needs to address the thyroid and then take it from there, and it'll probably balance.
Yeah, and temperature and pulse rate and appetite and quality of sleep are good indicators of thyroid function. Okay, and you don't think that eating butter and beef fat is going to clog your arteries? Do you think that's not true? No, probably not. I have to jump in again. Thank you. Dr. Peat, Sarah has called in, and she's afraid you haven't made it completely clear of which are the polyunsaturated oils and which are the saturated oils. I thought you'd been pretty clear about it tonight.
Okay, Dr. Peat, let's hand it over to you to quickly define the polyunsaturates. And we've only got two minutes to go. Then I will make sure people get your information, and thank you very much. So just define the polys for us. Yeah, if you just name some of the popular ones, mayonnaise is almost always highly unsaturated, corn oil, safflower oil. Hemp seed oil. Yeah, linseed oil and fish oil. And olive oil contains about 10% of the potentially dangerous polyunsaturateds, and it has so much of the monounsaturated that it's relatively safe.
And all the seed oils are the same thing, right? Yeah, olive oil is a fruit oil, technically. Okay, let me hold you there. Thanks so much for joining us. It's been a great show. We've had to cut off at least four or five callers, so let me give you the details out, if you will. Okay. Okay, so Dr. Peat can be reached on his website, www.raypeat.com, and we can also be reached on 1-888-WBM-ERB, Monday through Friday for any help. Okay, so happy solstice to you all. Thanks for listening.
We'll have another show the third Friday of next month, and we'll have Dr. Peat back again. And thanks so much for joining us, Dr. Peat. We really appreciate you. Okay. Obviously, you've heard lots of people who are wanting to get their questions in. Good night. [Music] It is--wow, poppy in here. It's 8 o'clock and 71 degrees here in Redway, home of the greatest radio station on the planet, this one right here, Redwood Community Radio, KMUD Garboville, 91.1 FM, KMUE, Eureka Arcade, 88.1 FM, KLAI, Laytonville, 90.3 FM, and down in the Cove, 99.5.
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