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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to It's Rainmaking Time. This is Kim Greenhouse and it's an extraordinary honor to welcome Dr. Ray Peat, who is an expert in the area of naturopathic medicine in nutrition and physiology. He has a PhD in biology from the University of Oregon and he specializes in physiology. He's taught at the University of Oregon, Urbana College, Montana State University, National College of Naturopathic Medicine, Universidad Veracruzana, oh my God, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, and the Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Mexico and Blake College.
He has written about anti-aging, he's written about the effects of hormones from estrogen, progesterone, DHEA, he's written about radiation, stress, lack of oxygen. Recently I just found out he had written about water, some of the misunderstandings about water. He has articles and papers on cancer, on hot flashes, multiple sclerosis, on meat, fats, functions and malfunctions. It goes on and on. He feels there needs to be a new perspective on living matter. If we actually had a different kind of perspective, we would understand that energy and structure are interdependent at every level. That's what he says.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome the Honorable and incredible Dr. Ray Peat back to its rainmaking time. Good afternoon. Thank you. If people want to get a perspective on what that means, a new attitude towards what life is, the works of Albert Saint-Georges and Gilbert Ling are the best places to start, I think. Let's do a little bit of a context for the listeners about a new perspective on living matter. Flesh that out for us. Talk a little bit about it. It probably got its best start with a biochemist named Bungenberg de Jong.
He demonstrated that compositions of fat and protein and carbohydrate made things much more complex than colloids. He called them complex coacervates. They had many of the functions of living cells. And then Sidney Fox, a generation later, demonstrated that he could create things like cells so simply that his students could create replicating cells that had many of the functions of bacteria in just an hour or two-hour afternoon lab. He would throw amino acids on hot lava, imitating a prehistoric situation, and then splash a
little water on them so that he was creating from a dry environment in which water was under the control of protein or of amino acids rather than in a wet ocean-like environment. And he showed that in this relatively dry condition, the water and the amino acids catalyzed themselves to form protein-like molecules which spontaneously formed little spheres about a micron in diameter, very uniform, and that these things would assimilate other proteins from the environment and grow and bud like yeast replicating. The buds would grow and assimilate more proteins and so on.
They simply lacked nucleic acid to resemble living bacteria. And then he showed that adding the precursors to DNA, these things would catalyze polymers of DNA-like material. So spontaneously, he showed that simply by not overwhelming the molecules with too much water, that the water was an essential part of organizing proteins and DNA-like material, and that the very stable, spontaneously forming structure resembled bacteria. But what does that mean to us in the context of a new perspective on living matter? What does that mean, what you just said?
Well, when you look at the substance of a cell, rather than having to be assembled through a billion years of evolution, it means that the principles governing the way we function also govern the way the organism holds itself together or forms itself, makes new cells. And rather than a cell being isolated from the environment by a lipid membrane, the famous bilayer lipid membrane, the functional principle is what Bungenberg de Jong demonstrated was that these complex mixtures of protein, fats, and carbohydrates primarily spontaneously separate things from the environment and cause their chemical change and integration.
So that, for example, if you take a piece of hair made up of completely dead cells and wash it completely free of all of the sodium and potassium and calcium ions and so on, and then you dip it in the serum, it will pull out the potassium and bind potassium to itself against a gradient excluding sodium. It will bind magnesium, excluding calcium and so on. So this demonstrates that you don't need membrane pumps. It's simply an ion exchange phenomenon that dead cells can do.
And this is behind the way of looking at matter that Gilbert Ling, Bungenberg de Jong, these non-mainline researchers, I think of it as the real mainline of science and that the membrane school is the peripheral irrelevant part, except they're more numerous. So that's the big paradigm change in the way we understand the cell. You're saying there's so much even about hydration that's said that you have to get through the membrane of the cell to hydrate the cell. Do you agree with that? I agree that that's the paradigm, but that's been totally disproven so many times.
The idea of the membrane is that the arrangement of chemistry inside is unstable relative to the outside. And this whole idea that we're negentropic and that entropy tends to kill us, tends to make everything die. This view is that we are a stable form of matter as long as energy runs through us and that it's a chemically favored arrangement of matter that doesn't need pumps in the membrane to maintain it. It's simply the composition which maintains itself. Is what you're saying the cells are self-maintaining organism? Yes. Okay. Versus needing things from the outside. Yeah.
So the whole idea of the membrane and the pumps is based on this idea that it's an improbable accidentally arranged thing that came about only by extremely improbable events over a billion years. The fact that Sidney Fox could make cell-like things in a couple of hours shows what a different perspective it is on the nature of substance. Here's my question. You know how there's a lot in science now about cell hydration. What is your view on cell hydration? Gilbert Ling just sort of incidentally to his main work has demonstrated that hydration is regulated by energy.
The amount of energy the cell is producing and holding prevents the cell from taking up too much water, but it binds water and prevents its loss below a certain level. And so if you lose the adequate amount of energy, the cell will control the water. The water starts to take over and control the cell. This explains many medical problems involving edema and swelling that the membrane theory is totally confused about. Doctors will tell you, "Stop eating so much salt to reduce your edema." But in many situations, restricting sodium is exactly the wrong thing.
It will make the edema worse, especially in premenstrual women and very old people. I've seen people solve their swelling problems, their high blood pressure problems, appetite control and so on just by salting their food according to what tastes good rather than what the doctor advises. Dr. Peat, I have dear friends of mine that have high blood pressure and I tell them to take real salt, obviously not just the regular salt on the table, but they say their doctor tells them, "Do not have salt at all."
Yeah, and a lot of doctors still tell people to drink two quarts of water, even disregarding whether they might be drinking milk, coffee, orange juice and so on. And there are experiments that show that if you put a little too much water in the intestine, it will promote inflammation a little beyond that and it can start causing a shock reaction. Loss of sodium tends to be associated with imbalance of several other salts, but sodium itself stimulates energy production of the cell and respiration.
And if something interrupts that balance of salt, magnesium and calcium and the cell loses energy, the cell takes up too much water and the excess of water stimulates cell growth but not energy production. That tends to create an anabolic condition with all sorts of possibilities including diabetes, obesity and cancer, inflammatory things in general. You know how there was a guy who got the Nobel Prize for identifying the aquaporin channel in the cell? Yeah, Gilbert Ling has written quite a bit about the whole channel idea. What do you think about it?
Because I haven't read Gilbert Ling yet. Since Ling explains the balance between proteins and water adequately to take care of everything and the channel idea goes with the idea of a membrane which is a barrier to salt and water and so it needs channels, but Ling demonstrated that there is no such barrier. There might be something that you can stain that looks like a membrane with different preparations. You get different membrane appearances, but there is no barrier to sodium entering the cell.
As soon as isotopes became available in the 1940s, it was discovered that sodium freely leaves and enters the cell, but there's no semi-permeable membrane keeping sodium out. What about keeping water out? It's the same thing. If you have a fat layer which can keep sodium out and potassium in, that would obviously be keeping water out. One of the early persons criticizing the idea of a lipid membrane, it was being described as basically a lecithin membrane made out of phospholipids with their fatty acids stuck together in the layer.
He commented that lecithin has a great affinity for water and it will swell in the presence of water. So it's a very bad choice for postulating as limiting membrane barrier on the cell. You talk about the distinction between water and ions, that we need to really understand more about the play of water and ions. The thinking is partly sustained just because some of the methods becoming so complicated that doctors and researchers use approximations and don't really calculate what's going on with ions and pH and so on.
A lot of that derives from the definition of what an acid and a base is. Gilbert Lewis defined acids in a very different way in which protons aren't involved. The whole medical idea of acid and base involves the concentration of protons. That's what pH stands for. Gilbert Lewis demonstrated that you don't need protons at all to have acids or bases. It's all a matter of how the electrons are handled and since electrons are what are involved in metabolism and energy production, it's much better to use his concept of acid base
rather than the proton pH idea. Peter Stewart redesigned the handling mathematics for acids and base and he showed that almost always the crucial factor is carbon dioxide gas pressure, not the bicarbonate ions that hospitals are measuring and calculating. It happens to be that Peter Stewart and the Gilbert acid theory are simply physically correct and Gilbert Ling doesn't talk about these particular aspects of the theory, but his way of calculating ion distribution is so physically simple and correct that some of the first people to accept his calculations were the engineers designing water softeners
and ion exchange resins because his calculations work perfectly for any physical system, not just cells. Would you talk a little bit about CO2 because since 2009 and since the EPA declared war on CO2, carbon dioxide, and since the whole global warming thing and anything connected to climate changing, people are scared to death of CO2. And I just realized in doing an interview with Dr. Mark Circus that oxygen isn't everything. In fact, if you don't have enough carbon dioxide, you're not going to be well. There's a lot of confusion about this.
Explain what carbon dioxide is and what does carbon dioxide have to do with aging and health? About 60 years ago, some people working with microorganisms did a survey and found that although some bacteria, protozoa and so on can survive without oxygen, like in deep sea vent, there are organisms that totally live without oxygen and use sulfuric acid as their oxygen for example. These experimenters tested many different types of organism and even those which can live without oxygen can't live without carbon dioxide. So it really should be considered the basic material of life, not oxygen.
The purpose of oxygen from that point of view is to make carbon dioxide. And if you consider it in the context of Gilbert Ling's cell structure, with the protein itself is a weak acid and the weak acid is electrically charged with a negative charge which attracts positive ions so that it spontaneously binds things like potassium, sodium, magnesium, and calcium. But if you adjust the composition as a whole, the whole colloid or coacervate of the cell, the water softener prefers to bind calcium over sodium.
But if you put a very high concentration of salt through your water softener, you can wash out the calcium and then it will extract calcium from your hard water because of its chemical nature that an acidic group of the right size will prefer one ion over the other. And carbon dioxide is one of the factors that cause our proteins to prefer potassium over sodium. At the same time that the cell is regulating its salt and ion balance by having the right amount of carbon dioxide, it's producing a steady stream of carbon dioxide flowing out
of the cell into the blood and as it leaves the mitochondrion, it reacts with water forming carbonic acid. And the carbonic acid has a negative charge so as it flows out of the cell, it drags along positive ions with it. In this case, calcium and sodium are constantly flowing out of the cell just because of the flow of carbon dioxide. And as we exhale, that carbonic acid in the blood is constantly changing back into carbon dioxide which leaves in the lungs and that leaves these calcium and sodium ions stranded
in the blood as the carbon dioxide leaves them. That accounts for the blood having a more alkaline test pH equivalent than the inside of the cell. Then the kidneys finish keeping the balance again by adjusting the change between carbon dioxide and carbonic acid allowing the kidneys to select in one direction or the other these ions. One of the functions of carbon dioxide is to regulate the acidity of tissues and prevent the uptake of too much water and to keep the energy intake going.
Shock is a typical extreme situation in which cells become unable to make energy and take up too much water. So that, for example, your capillaries take up water and swell shut. Cells become so fat they close the aperture. Arterials get swollen so that blood hardly passes through them. The mechanisms obviously relate to the known mechanisms of shock except that the shock industry is committed to the idea that something fails in the circulatory system as the primary event but not necessarily the closure. Simply the heart stops pumping enough maybe because the blood vessels have relaxed too
much and can't return the blood but they neglect the fine structure of what's really happening. In the early part of the century, Yandel Henderson, a Yale professor, became interested in carbon dioxide physiology as a regulator of oxygen metabolism. Shock at that time was being seen in relation to the nervous system as something that can turn off or turn on energy production of cells all through the body. But he was simply looking at what happens with more or less carbon dioxide.
And in one of his studies published in 1910, another one in 1911 on what happens to the circulation in the absence of carbon dioxide, he was one of the first people to see that carbon dioxide relaxes the arterioles and allows blood to flow freely through the body. But if you turn off the energy production and stop producing carbon dioxide, then you have less relaxed blood vessels. The heart has a harder job pumping. So he was looking at the feature of shock that fails to return blood to the heart and fails to pump it.
The First World War, all of that research relating to the chemistry of metabolism and how it relates to the function of arteries, capillaries, and veins and the heart, all of that was displaced by a simple mechanical failure of the blood to pump without explanation for the mechanism behind it. And that elimination of carbon dioxide metabolism became institutionalized as hospitals simplified things by supplying oxygen in an emergency where Yandel Henderson showed that you could cause quicker recovery of oxygenation by adding 8 or 10% of carbon dioxide to your oxygen.
The whole idea of physiology changed largely as a result of the war research. At the time of the Second World War, a Russian researcher who was looking at the appearance of high metabolizing animals in the world, how the expensive energy producing brain of humans could evolve, what the factors in the environment are that are needed to maintain and develop the brain, he saw that the environmental carbon dioxide is an essential factor for good brain function. And he predicted that the natural development of the planet's ecosystems would be to increase
the metabolic rate, increase the brain size of populations, and do it by the interaction of increasing carbon dioxide, stimulating oxygen metabolism, and stabilizing the big brain. And in the history of the deposition, the Carboniferous Age of fossils, for example, at that time when evolution advanced so rapidly, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was many times higher than at present. So he predicted that the earth would go through other phases of greatly increased atmospheric CO2 that would increase the whole vitality of life on the planet.
Vernadsky died around the end of the war in 1945 or '46. But around 1970, a Russian researcher looking at the length, birth weight, and head size of babies born over a period of decades saw that around the world, the head size had been increasing in correspondence to the increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, seeming to validate the prediction of Vernadsky made 25 years earlier. What does that mean? We don't have to worry about increasing the atmosphere because it's stimulating life at all levels. Can you tell that to the EPA?
Because the EPA is acting as a police agency, an entire industry is created to decrease CO2. Yeah, but if you think of CO2 as a life-supporting, brain-supporting thing... Well, I do, actually. I had Dr. Sherwood Itso on to do a whole show on CO2 with regard to plants and life itself, but you're a whole other side of it with health. Going to a high altitude is one thing an individual can do. Changing the diet to include lots of fruit, anything that supports thyroid function, avoiding polyunsaturated fats, avoiding electromagnetic fields, and so on.
We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. We are living in one of the most exciting and dangerous times in history. Many of us are being challenged to turn away from parasitic systems of enslavement and misery and move into different life-giving activities, commercial opportunities, and communities. Transition is upon us right now. The seizure of the world's natural resources, the poisoning of our food, water, and air, and the total electronic surveillance of our lives is forcing many of us to develop new rules of engagement for being in the world.
Living business today is way more complex and nuanced. The electronic age is a mixed bag. If you want to live in a more humane world, don't confuse electronic communication with real relationships or knowing who your neighbors are or how they're doing or the importance of sitting down with your family and having meals together. This is real life. Practically everything we've been indoctrinated to believe about life and work is out of touch with what's available to us today. New discoveries about nonlocality and consciousness are not only mind-boggling, they are game
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I'm the Chief Executive Officer of The Rainmaking Company, a manifestation agency, a leadership agency, and a development agency. Feel free to call for our rainmaking services, both on an advisory and development level, 626-398-8652. And back to the show. Do you agree that if we got more carbon dioxide in our systems that we would be healthier? Up to a certain point, the insurance industry more than 100 years ago recognized that all of the degenerative diseases caused less death at very high altitudes.
They had figures from all over the world at the beginning of the 20th century showing that cancer, brain diseases, heart disease, all the circulatory diseases caused many fewer deaths at altitudes of 8,000 to 10,000 feet. Why do you think that is? Well, Yandel Henderson, a professor at Yale in the early part of the century, did most of the basic human physiology relating to carbon dioxide. He showed that oxidation of the tissues depends on carbon dioxide. And if you have too much oxygen in your environment, which at sea level we do have, that reverses
all of these ion balancing processes and energy giving processes and pushes too much carbon dioxide out of our blood when it reaches the lungs. That shifts the whole balance so that as the blood reaches the cells carrying its load of oxygen, it requires the carbon dioxide being produced in the cell to release the oxygen to the cell. And if your whole system has been depleted beyond a certain level of the necessary carbon dioxide, your red blood cells don't give up enough oxygen to the tissues. And so you will starve your peripheral tissues.
If you hyperventilate for a couple of minutes, breathing deep and fast, you will notice that maybe your fingers and toes go into a cramp. That same process happens under any circumstance that is depriving you of carbon dioxide. Giving pure oxygen, 100% oxygen, will create the same situation. And in the brain, too much oxygen and the deprivation of carbon dioxide shrinks the blood vessels so that just a couple of years ago, using MRI and other imaging, they have shown that too much oxygen breathing lowers the availability of oxygen in the brain by constricting the blood vessels.
Fascinating. So, what would you suggest for the listeners to get their carbon dioxide levels up? I noticed you brought up the breathing method of Butyko, B-U-T-E-Y-K-O, the Butyko method? Oh, Butyko, yeah. Butyko, talk about that for a minute. Isn't that a Russian breathing method? Yeah, he was a Russian doctor who, starting in the 1950s, noticed that sick and dying people tended to hyperventilate and he found that if he could calm them down and get them to breathe more slowly, they often recovered.
I don't think he was aware of the research that Ian Dell Henderson did, but Henderson got the emergency firefighters and such from the 1930s into the 1940s. It was standard to use 8% or even 10% carbon dioxide in their respiratory tanks with oxygen to treat suffocation victims, carbon monoxide poisoning and such because the carbon dioxide is so essential to restoring respiration and it even activates the Krebs cycle. I personally think it's involved in the actual formation of ATP from ADP by facilitating the dehydration withdrawal of water from the phosphate precursors to form the ATP itself.
So what do you suggest for people so that they get more CO2 in their system? The diet is very important. Some foods interfere with metabolism, cause you to tend to produce lactic acid, which displaces carbon dioxide. Let's talk about that. Polyunsaturated fats block respiration and thyroid function. Alkaline acid balance is another thing that tends to make you blow out too much carbon dioxide and not form enough. Don't you find, Dr. Peat, that that's very confusing for people? This man that I interviewed years ago who's passed on now, David Webster, who did a huge
amount of research for like 35 years on the colon. One of the things he said to me is that people talk about pH, but there's blood pH, the colon has a totally different pH. There's different pHs in the body. So how do we not get it all confused? If you think of the flow of carbon dioxide, for example, the healthy cell producing a lot of carbon dioxide, which is a Lewis acid, it contains no protons, but it has an acidic reaction all by itself.
It being formed and the oxygen which forms it, oxygen is named as the acid former. The acid that it forms is in the cell carbon dioxide. So the function of oxygen is to make the carbonic acid, which gives the cell in its healthy condition an acidic reaction below 7 pH. When it gets sick and can't make carbon dioxide, as in cancer, the pH of the cell becomes alkaline. But in the healthy condition, you have inside the cell a mild acidic condition.
As the CO2 drags minerals out of the cell and drops them in the blood, the blood becomes alkaline. As the urine retains the alkaline minerals that it needs, the right balance of calcium, magnesium, phosphate, sodium, and potassium, the kidney ideally should be producing an acidic urine to maintain that alkaline bloodstream. So when people are measuring their alkaline acidity balance with an alkaline piece of paper and they're testing their urine, it's not giving the right reading, is it? No, you want your blood to be alkaline and to do that, your urine ideally, usually is
on the acidic side. And people with alkaline urine tend to deposit minerals just because of the physics of the situation. I hope the audience understands this because it can be a little bit confusing. Say it again, would you, Dr. Peat? Okay, the kidneys are very important along with the lungs in maintaining the alkaline normal condition of the bloodstream. And to do that, your lungs blow out the acidic carbon dioxide and your kidneys, according to the need, they can adjust the pH.
But the most stable situation is for the kidneys, like the lungs, to excrete a slightly acidic material. What do you think about hyperbaric oxygen chambers that cancer patients have gone into to try to get rid of the damage from radiation and chemo? If the circulation is completely destroyed to an area, as in gangrene, high pressure oxygen can get the tissue, keep it alive simply by diffusing into the tissue. So for like a wound, a puncture wound with damaged blood vessels, high pressure oxygen can help it recover.
But the situation in the brain in which too much oxygen shuts down the blood vessels, the oxygen is actually preventing proper delivery of oxygen to the brain. I knew someone who was treating cancer patients with high pressure oxygen, I think 200% of normal pressure. He tried adding some carbon dioxide to the atmosphere inside the chamber and he got a little too much in and the patient lost consciousness. He hadn't been able to speak at all because of cancer in his throat, but he was unconscious
in the machine for a while as the person tried to remedy the excess carbon dioxide. And during that time, the windows steamed up so that the doctor couldn't see what was happening in the chamber. It doesn't sound like a very stable scenario. It was a very scary situation when he finally got the pressure down and the chamber opened. The person was recovered as the CO2 went down. He woke up and he could talk. But what does this mean? The bedding he had been lying on was soaked.
He was almost floating in water from perspiration and his breath had produced so much vapor that it fogged up the windows. The carbon dioxide basically improved the acidity of his cell proteins so that they could excrete the water. In the cancer situation, cells lose their carbon dioxide production and with the low energy become waterlogged, soak up too much water and can't do anything but grow. So apparently the carbon dioxide helped his cells to excrete water very fast.
So it was just pouring out of all of his pores and through his lungs and kidneys and he could talk normally and felt very good when he woke up. So what should we do to enhance our carbon dioxide experience and get more of that into our cells and our blood? Living at an altitude of 11,000 to 12,000 feet probably is the simplest thing if you can do it. But otherwise, it's a complex matter of improving everything that's relevant. Buteyko found that just by behavioral assistance, coaching them to breathe more calmly and shallow,
slow breathing, he could do it. But the stressful environment makes people hyperventilate. Chemicals in the environment, estrogenic materials, stimulate hyperventilation. Pills of all sorts increase hyperventilation and imbalance the blood, minerals and so on. Would you talk a little bit about the distinction between progesterone, pregnenolone and estrogen just in terms of giving a frame of reference to the public? Estrogen is essentially anti-oxidative and anti-thyroid. Thyroid is our basic oxygen-using hormone. So if you can have good thyroid function, you're going to be producing enough carbon dioxide.
And estrogen in many ways, it actually blocks the secretion of thyroid hormone. But on the cellular level, it changes the way oxygen is used, diverting it from making carbon dioxide to consuming energy, shifting away from glucose metabolism, which produces carbon dioxide, to fat metabolism, which makes less CO2, and stimulating the uptake of water as a result of this shift in energy production. So estrogen causes the breasts and the uterus and pituitary to swell up by taking water into the cell and the extra water stimulates cell division, so it causes the uterine growth
and the breast growth and so on. So I take it from listening to you and from reading your work that you are not into anti-aging, even bio-identical anti-aging hormones via estrogen. Definitely not, because the older and more stressed a cell or a tissue is, the more estrogen it tends to produce. A young healthy person produces estrogen primarily in the ovaries, with some in the adrenal glands, cortex. With stress, aging, falling thyroid function, ability to synthesize progesterone, every cell in the body develops the ability to make estrogen and loses the ability to excrete
it into the bloodstream. So simply by becoming deficient in progesterone, your blood test won't show that you are deficient in estrogen because progesterone is needed to get the estrogen from the cell into the bloodstream, but inside the cell is where estrogen works. And so your fat cells and brain cells, skin, every tissue in the body has the capacity to make estrogen when it's under stress. People with diabetes, their tissues all through the body are producing excess estrogen. What do you think of the fat cell relationship to estrogen?
Yeah, that's the major bulk of it and some of that is actually getting into the bloodstream. But the breast tissue itself starts producing estrogen, even though it's thought of as the target of the estrogen, it becomes the source of estrogen too, and the uterus. I'm going to ask you a really controversial question, Dr. Peat. How current would you say what you just said is? Oh, well, a man named PKC Terry was the first one to demonstrate clearly that fat after menopause, especially fat, becomes a major source of estrogen production.
But since then, hundreds of people have demonstrated that with stress, diabetes, and inflammation, the aromatase enzyme has increased. An Italian named Cutolo has been very good on this subject for the last 10 years. You know, the anti-aging community, that is the complementary supposed physicians and the anti-aging community, the doctors that assert that they are the hormone doctors are giving women who have been through menopause bio-identical estrogen called BIAST in a cream form vaginally, progesterone in a cream form vaginally, and testosterone in a cream form vaginally. What do you think about all that?
The early studies of the vaginal estrogen by itself, doctors were telling women that it's only local, it isn't going to increase your risk of breast cancer or lung cancer. But as soon as someone measured the blood after people were applying it to the vagina, they saw that it produced very immediate high levels all through the body because the membranes absorb it so easily. So local use is going to change the local tissues but also increase the exposure of all of the cancer-sensitive organs.
It's been known since the 1940s that all tissues will develop cancer or a risk of cancer with continuous exposure to estrogen. But if you interrupt it regularly with progesterone and stop the estrogen and have a good two weeks of progesterone exposure regularly, that tremendously reduces the carcinogenic effect of estrogen. What do you say to people who say, "Look, we don't have any libido anymore. We've got to take something"? Sometimes thyroid to lower the stress hormones including estrogen, that very typically will normalize this libido. So it's a whole system.
If I'm hearing you correctly, you can't really just deal with the hormones, the male and female hormones. You've got to include the thyroid. What else? Well, nutrition. If the liver isn't supplied with at least adequate amount of protein and B vitamins, your estrogen level will chronically stay elevated. If you don't eat enough fiber, your liver, even if it's supplied with good nutrition, it's detoxifying all the estrogen that reaches it if it's well-nourished and secreting some of it into the bile, some to go to the kidneys.
But if you don't eat enough fiber or don't have a good active intestine, that estrogen excreted into the intestine is reabsorbed. So just eating a carrot every day, after just a few days, it will normalize the hormones in a lot of people, lowering the estrogen, increasing progesterone and lowering the stress hormones, cortisol for example. Let's talk about coffee. Let's get really controversial. Weren't you one of the first people in the US to tell people that coffee is good for you? Well, in the 1970s. Right.
They did a monograph showing many of the biological effects, including the cancer protective effects of caffeine. And that was what really got me interested. They had been experimenting with tobacco smoke in the lab and showing that 96 to 100% of their mice developed cancers where the concentrated tobacco smoke was applied. But they looked at their records for one week and saw that about 5% of their mice that week were developing cancer. And they saw that in the lab records, someone had used this distillation apparatus for something involving caffeine.
So their smoke had been contaminated with caffeine during that week. And they repeated the experiment, adding caffeine to the carcinogenic smoke. And again, it would only produce cancer in 5% rather than 95% of the animals. Wow. Then they tested it on all the classical carcinogenic compounds, polycyclic aromatic compounds, radiation, ultraviolet and x-rays, viruses. Every known cause of cancer was prevented by adding caffeine to the situation. Very interesting. And then there are some people, Dave Aspey from the Bulletproof Executive, he's popularized butter and coffee. What do you think of that?
Each one is good, but I think cream is better in coffee. You mean tasting? Yeah, it tastes better. He's talking about not margarine, but butter to get your saturated fats in, get the CLA in the brain first thing in the morning. The butter just floats on the coffee and it's sort of messy, but... Not when you mix it in a blender. You don't need to do that if you use good cream. I use both. Let's get to coconut oil. I was sitting at a Thai place about a year ago.
This guy walks in and he sat down near me. I ordered a coconut, one of those pure coconuts, and I go, "Oh, I just love coconuts." And he goes, "You Americans are crazy with the coconuts already and the coconut oil. What is it with you?" I said, "It's really good for you." And we started to talk, but they laugh at us, but yet they live on coconuts and coconut oil. Talk to the public about coconut oil. I've done shows on it, but I'd like you to share from your expertise about coconut oil.
Again, in the 1970s, I was attracted to it by reading an article in which they had fed several groups, I think it was 15 groups of rats on different diets, including either a high-fat, saturated fat, a low-saturated fat diet, a very high polyunsaturated fat diet, and a very low-fat diet with only polyunsaturated, and so on, so that they had 15 different compositions, very high-fat, very low-fat, pure saturated, pure unsaturated. And at the end of their life, the leanest rats were the ones that ate the saturated
coconut oil diet, regardless of whether it was high-fat or low-fat. And the fat animals were the ones that had the pure polyunsaturated fat. Again, even a low-fat diet, if it was purely polyunsaturated, made them the fattest animals. So it wasn't the quantity, it was the unsaturation. In the last several years, people have started talking about the saturation index, meaning the proportion of saturated fats to polyunsaturated in your tissues, and cancer patients are very low on the saturation index. So it's not only obesity-producing, it's associated with high incidence of cancer to have highly polyunsaturated fat diet.
I have a question about thyroid, and the kind of thyroid that you recommend people to take. I realize that you're not to prescribe anything on the show, but do you agree that people are still taking Armour thyroid, or do you have a particular thyroid that you think is more effective for what's going on today? The original Armour product was pretty stable for, I think it was 90 years, and they tested all of their batches on mice and would adjust the composition because it varied from animal
to animal, and they would test it to make sure that it had exactly the same potency. When the finished product was tested and compared to others, it was much more consistent than, for example, the synthetic Synthroid product, which varied a lot from batch to batch. But Armour was an extremely well-controlled product. But then Revlon bought it, and the price went up from, when I was getting it as late as 1990, it was $8 for 1,000 tablets. And after Revlon bought it, the price doubled or tripled. They don't own Armour thyroid, do they now?
Well, it went through three or four changes of ownership each time with the price doubling. So from 8/10 of a cent per tablet, it now is over 50 cents per tablet. Right, but that's a pharmaceutical industry phenomenon, right? But at the same time, they were changing the additives in it, and there have been periods when the tablets wouldn't dissolve or they had different behavior. So I stopped using it in the early '90s because some people found the pills were going through undigested. So I started using synthetic products.
Thyrolar was the Armour company's synthetic equivalent since they tested every batch on mice, different synthetic compositions, and got one that acted just like the original Armour product. So the sale of the company involved the sale of that product. For several years, I recommended that one, but then it became hard to get. Luckily, two or three other companies had copied their formula. Proloid had been a colloid purified from the gland, and they changed to Proloid S, meaning synthetic, but the product is basically the similar composition, in effect, to Thyrolar and a couple of other products.
Cynoplus is one that I've used for a long time, and it's very steady and reliable. Is that also a synthetic? Yeah. Some people listening are going to say, "Why, Dr. Peat, are you recommending a synthetic over something more bio-identical or bio..." Well, the Armour company invested a tremendous amount of work and research in their product. Smaller companies haven't had access to that research, and when they change their additives, for example, sometimes it changes the way the product works. I didn't know there were additives to thyroid.
Most of the products have had some changes over the years. Armour used only sugar and magnesium stearate, I think, for the binders. They would adjust the amount of sugar slightly according to the animals they used so that it always had the same functional potency, but now the companies don't have the resources to test every batch on animals, and there just can't be the quality that Armour had achieved. What happened to Cytomel? Remember Cytomel? In its foreign forms, it's called Cynomel or Cynomel, but it's made by the same recipe,
and so it has been very valuable and consistent. You know, the whole testing of both the thyroid and the hormone matrix in men and women has really changed over the years. I remember that to test the thyroid, they would take your blood, and some people now say to test the thyroid, take your urine. They used to do that with male and female hormones. Instead of the blood, they say the active hormones are showing up more effectively in a 24-hour urine sample. Do you agree with that? No, I think it's a better business.
The blood isn't such a great test for thyroid anyway because if you have more estrogen, more cortisol, more free fatty acids, different amounts of protein, a given amount of T3 or T4 in your blood isn't going to have the same effect on the cells. And even the reverse T3, which goes up under stress, interferes with the action of T3. Unless you have a computer program to understand the whole physiology, there's not much point in looking at the T3 and T4. You mean in the blood? Yeah. What about free T3?
Because the anti-aging community says the real action and heart of the thyroid activity, what's happening is in the free T3. You agree with that? Ask them what they mean by free exactly. The idea of a free hormone is very vague and contradictory. The way they measure it, I think currently they're still using a dialysis method that what passes through a dialysis membrane is called free. But in the blood, hormones actually travel with proteins and fats and in and on the blood cells.
Some people talk about it traveling on the red blood cells, but actually all of the hormones go in and out of red blood cells. So you have to break down the red blood cells really to know what is actually in the blood and available to the cells. The thyroid hormones can bind to albumin, for example. Albumin has free access in and out of cells, even into the nucleus. So anything bound to the albumin is going in and out of cells. So how do we test for thyroid?
What's the most effective way to test for the condition of our thyroid? Broder Barnes, who was educated in the 1930s, reflected a lot of the understanding that was based on the good research of the Armour Company. He advocated temperature, morning temperature especially, as a very important indicator in the functioning of the thyroid. But other doctors in the 1930s used a combination of indicators. For example, some people showed that there was a mirror image relationship between blood cholesterol and thyroid. When you remove someone's thyroid gland, immediately the cholesterol increased in the bloodstream
as the oxygen consumption decreased. And if you then gave them a thyroid supplement, it was a mirror image again. The increasing thyroid and oxygen metabolism caused the cholesterol level to come down to normal. I've seen people lower their cholesterol. They were in a hurry to pass an insurance health test, lower their cholesterol 200 to 300 points in a week by using hourly doses, not take a huge dose at once, but just adjust and keep their thyroid where it should be. Keratin was another indicator.
Low thyroid people had high keratin and keratin is antagonistic to the female hormones in particular but also it tends to block the thyroid. Reaction tests, the speed at which your muscles react or relax corresponds to your thyroid function and oxidative metabolism. Achilles tendon reflex relaxation rate is what was used in the 1930s but a lot of doctors look at how far you jump when they hit a reflex trigger but it's the rate at which the muscle relaxes that corresponds to good thyroid function.
And your brain undergoes those same reactions so that on an electrical measurement of your brain waves or an electrocardiogram showing the speed and quality of the T wave which is the relaxation rate wave, those all improve under the influence of thyroid. So any indicator of quick relaxation, quick energy restoration, normalizing of cholesterol and various blood components, all of those help with the diagnosis. How many tablespoons of coconut oil a day do you have? Oh, I haven't eaten it regularly for a long time. Incidentally, I've always used the cheap refined stuff.
Now I use it just for occasionally frying things. When I had a tablespoon or two every day over a period of I guess it was six or eight weeks, I lost weight that I had had for about 20 years. Went back to my 1970 body weight. And you think it was just from that alone? You don't think it was from pregnenolone? No, I had used pregnenolone before without any change. When I experimented in around 1980 with DHEA, I noticed that I was looking slimmer, had a smaller waist.
But when I weighed myself, I weighed exactly the same. It turned out I had grown a little at the age of something like 44 and built more muscles so that even though I looked slimmer, I was actually the same weight. But then about 12 years after that was when I started using a little coconut oil and went down about 14 pounds. You made a point of saying that you used the refined coconut oil and not the unrefined, which everybody recommends the unrefined. You made a point of saying that, why?
Because a lot of people are allergic to the extraneous material other than the fat in the oil. So you use the refined? Yeah, the deodorized. Okay. The basically tasteless kind. If you're not allergic to it, the very aromatic unrefined kind is nice for making ice cream, for example, coconut flavored. But for frying eggs, it tastes terrible. Smells terrible. Yeah, it tastes terrible. Some people love it, but I don't know how they love it. They must do something with it. I want to ask you a little bit about serotonin.
So many people as they get older start to lose their serotonin production or it goes down. Do you agree? I don't know the way it's measured. I think the only simple way to measure it is by the breakdown product called 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid, 5-HIAA. That indicates how much you're destroying or excreting. To do a blood test, you want to see how much is in the platelets and how much is in the free liquid of the plasma because the total amount in the platelet, as long as it's inside the cell, it isn't hurting you.
But if it's free in the liquids of your body and is deficient in the platelet, that means something is causing it to be not retained properly as if they're excited. The normal function of the platelet is 95% of your body's serotonin is made in the intestine. Anything that inflames your intestine, even mechanical irritation, stretching it with a gas blow-up or irritating allergenic foods, all of these increase the intestine's production of serotonin. And serotonin moving from the intestine into the blood is picked up by the platelets.
And if they bind it firmly, they carry it to the lungs where the situation of the carbon dioxide oxygen exchange causes them to release it where enzymes in the lungs destroy the serotonin. Negative ions in the air seem to help the lungs to destroy the serotonin in an oxidative process. If your lungs and platelets aren't getting rid of the excess serotonin made in an irritated intestine, then it gets to the brain and can cause things such as anxiety, aggression and even depression turning on the inflammatory system.
Serotonin is a major stimulant of the corticotropic release hormone which activates your pituitary to turn on your adrenal stress reaction. So serotonin reaching the brain is a powerful stressor. If people have a hard time relaxing, they have a hard time sleeping at night. Most often it's either poor nutrition or hypothyroidism. Some of the old people I mentioned who solved their problems by adding salt to their food noticed that when they followed the doctor's orders to not eat so much salt, they developed insomnia.
In the study where they were told it was okay to add salt, their insomnia was cured. That led me to realize that salt is a major factor in lowering the stress hormones, especially adrenaline. One of its functions is to counteract the effect of too much serotonin. How is it that it is said, and this is a popular myth then, that serotonin in people over 50 is dropping and that's why they should take tryptophan at night because tryptophan produces more melatonin, but doesn't it also produce serotonin?
Experiments show that especially the hydroxy tryptophan very directly corresponds to increased serotonin. And isn't serotonin the happy hormone? No, the name means the pressure increaser, the serum toner. It was identified in the 1950s as the cause of emotional disturbances, blood pressure disturbances, many circulatory problems. In the 70s, this myth about it being a happy hormone, on my website I explain some of the circumstances accounting for that very odd myth. Is that in the article "Serotonin, Depression, and Aggression, the Problem of Brain Energy?" Yeah, that's one of them. Okay. There are several of them.
You have so many, it's hard to keep track of you. Let's talk a little bit about radiation. We're covering a lot of subjects. I know we're going quickly on these, but there's a lot to say on this. For women over a certain age, we're all told that we need to have an annual, not only breast exams, but we need to have a mammogram, which I refuse to do. I do a thermogram. We're told that we need to have annual x-rays at our dentist.
I know people who have had MRI after MRI after MRI, and they're being radiated. Let's talk about it. What's your take on the whole thing? In the 1950s, I got interested in the issue, and I've been following it ever since. In the 1950s, the government would basically destroy the career and reputation of anyone who said radiation was harmful. They were in the business of selling their atomic bombs and atmospheric testing, so they had to say it wasn't killing Americans to drop radioactive fallout on them, but later
calculations showed that, in fact, at a minimum, it killed 15,000 Americans, not to mention the rest of the world. That was a minimal calculation, but in the 1950s, one of their big mouthpieces was John Goffman, who happened also to be a promoter of the cholesterol theory of heart disease. I considered him sort of a demon because every time someone would point out the dangers of fallout, he was there to say, "It hasn't been proven that it causes cancer or sterility or mutated children or mutated great-grandchildren and so on. Always don't worry. It's probably harmless."
But in the 1960s, he later reported that he came to consciousness in the middle of one of those lectures and realized that he was saying insane things, but he had been a very influential government spokesman ever since the late '40s through the '60s, and his whole life after that was trying to bring some sanity back to the radiation business. One of his last works, it might have been his last major book, was on the radiation influence on health. Medical radiation, he showed, was currently the biggest cause of breast cancer and heart
disease because of flowing radiation through the chest of millions of people at frequent intervals. The heart and the breasts were getting exposed by chest X-rays and mammograms. He showed, for example, that the incidence of these diseases corresponds to the availability and use of medical services so that the rich areas around San Francisco, for example, had the country's highest rate of breast cancer and very high heart disease. West Virginia, with the lowest access to medical care on average, had the country's lowest incidence of breast cancer, lowest mortality. That corresponds with all of the honest animal research.
It overlaps very interestingly with estrogen cancer research. People who did studies including both radiation and estrogen exposure showed that they synergized. You get a certain amount of cancerization from either radiation or estrogen, but when you have both of them, it's even more than additive. It's compounding. What do you think about Homeland Security doing low-level ionizing radiation equipment on people that are trying to travel? I don't know the current motivation, but one of their apparatuses that was irradiating people for a time, the business was owned by the head of the agency. By Michael Turdoff, correct? Yeah.
I think it's primarily money-making business as well as keeping the population fearful. Having to do with health, what do you think of people going through those machines? Well, all of those types of radiation are known to be harmful. Do you know what they told me at the airport last year? Somebody said when I refused to go through the machine, then I said, "It's okay. You can do a pat-down." Then I won't even tell you what happened on that. The woman said to me, "When you fly in the air, you're getting just as much radiation."
Yeah, that's a story that was invented by both the people doing the atmospheric bomb testing and by the nuclear power industry, which was closely involved with the bomb industry. The whole thing was a single culture, people going in and out of military bomb manufacturing, private electrical power generation. Their story was that these ions, the radioactive isotopes of various metals and other compounds that are released from bombs and from the nuclear reactors, including Chernobyl, Fukushima, and any operating reactor. For example, the area around the Rancho Seco reactor in California, the water supply contains
isotopes from that reactor that are probably still causing cancer many years later. These deadly particles that release radiation in your body after they've been ingested or breathed in have almost an absolute carcinogenic effect. Each one destroys a series of cells, mutates them, and the radiation from an x-ray, which is powerfully carcinogenic, is many times less carcinogenic than breathing in these particles. But the low-voltage x-ray that produces the best image of a breast, for example, and is still being the devices that produce the low-voltage sharp imaging mammogram devices, these are
still being promoted, even though it's known that low-voltage, low-energy x-rays are much more carcinogenic than the high-voltage. The principle is that low-energy radiation is more easily absorbed by tissues. Gamma rays will penetrate through a meter or more of concrete, which means that passing through your body, relatively little of their energy is absorbed by the tissues. So the extremely low energy of ultraviolet, for example, 100% of it stops in the first few millimeters of your skin, so you get a very intense sunburn.
The higher the energy is, the less tissue damage there is for a given amount of radiation, because it passes through without doing anything. The radiation you get in an airplane, it's similar to living at a high altitude. This is high-energy cosmic radiation, primarily. Isn't that a gamma ray? It releases gamma rays, which are much less harmful than low-energy x-rays. Much less of it is absorbed. With cosmic rays, it almost all passes through your bodies harmlessly. It's going at such a high velocity that it leaves a stream of minor ionization, but it seldom produces carcinogenesis.
Studies looking at the cancer incidence in the United States or even within a state like Texas where there's a variation of stable population at different altitudes, they see that there's a negative correlation between cancer and altitude. That corresponds to the fact that at high altitude, you get a lot of cosmic rays, but they're high-energy and pass through you. At low altitude, those same rays have passed through a thicker layer of atmosphere, running into more oxygen and nitrogen atoms, causing collisions that release radioactive particles.
So you're actually getting more radiation from cosmic rays at sea level than at high altitude. But the industry, which has known that, and that the actual incidence of cancer increases at the lower altitude. The industry has been lying about that for 50 years. You know, I just found out I'm taking this trip to Spain this May, and I found out that Spain is the second highest country elevation in Europe. First is Switzerland, and the second is Spain. Have you ever been? No, I've never went to Spain.
So I'll be at a very high altitude having a good laugh. Do you live in the mountains? No. You live at low altitude? I'm surprised. I have a house in Mexico that I hope to get to soon at 6,600 feet, but it's close to the volcanoes where you can get up to 17,000. Oh, wow. The only times I've been up that high, the higher I went, the better I felt. It's something you can feel immediately as a lack of stress.
Let's go back to how we get more protective CO2, because I don't think we finish that. Do you? No. In an acute situation, you can apply it for high blood pressure, for example, or anxiety or other acute symptoms. You can breathe, re-breathe into a paper bag for a minute or two at a time until you've got the feeling that you're suffocating, and then breathe some fresh air. And doing that two or three times a day is usually enough to, over a period of a few
days to lower your blood pressure, and it'll stop the anxiety quickly. But for something like arthritic knee or foot or a broken bone or sprained ankle or such that you can put in a plastic bag filled with carbon dioxide, this has been done mostly in Europe. That's the only place I know of hospitals that have done it, but I've seen people do it and radically increase the healing of injured tissue. Once I was coming home with a huge tank, must have been a 35-pound tank or so, holding it
with the valve at the top, and I stumbled on the steps to a brick walk, and I didn't want to drop the tank and risk breaking the valve off, which would create a rocket effect. So I hugged the tank to my body and went down, fell on my wrist against the bricks with my body and the tank on top of it. I think I'm going to faint just with the imagery of this, but go ahead. I saw it immediately start to turn blue, and I rushed in the house, got a plastic bag and
filled it with carbon dioxide and held my hand in it for an hour and brought my hand out. There was no injury. How did you get the CO2? I had the tank right there in my hand. Okay, it was the tank. How did you get the CO2 in the tank? I bought it from a welding shop. Very cool. You're very creative. Are you still doing your art? Oh, yeah. You're still painting? Yeah. I think of myself primarily as a painter who doesn't have any customers. Do you want customers?
I tried to be a portrait painter for a while, but I decided that I didn't want to paint the way they wanted. They, for example, would have fairly silly looking kids that they wanted to look like classical storybook illustrations or something, but I like doing realistic things that actually show the personality, but my customers didn't like that. That would be scary if that happened with its rain making time. Sometimes the customers may not like what we talk about, but we got to talk about it. Want to talk to you about modern lighting for a moment.
Are you aware that the modern lighting of society, that these tablets and the cell phones and the computers are all interfering with our melatonin day and night cycles and the pineal gland functioning? Yeah. That's another reason why some people can't sleep at night, even if they're not going through menopause or they're not in any major hormonal change. Yeah. If you get your hormones and carbon dioxide up where they should be, you're pretty resistant to those minor field disturbances, but they are constant drains on our system.
One of the reasons I picked out the town in Mexico for my house was that it was known as a radiation quiet zone. The National University built a radio telescope just outside of town because it was so free of telephone pollution and such. You couldn't get radio or telephone or television signals there. You know, we have so much wifi and cell tower infiltration of society. I'm not sure we're going to be able to understand why people are so sick in so many different areas. Exactly.
It's not even on the radar, no pun intended, of the health field. If you work with an electrical machine, for example, you're constantly eight hours a day exposed to fields that probably are not as intense as some people get when they live near a phone tower. But those electrical machine operators are known to have had a very high rate of Alzheimer's disease and other degenerative diseases. So I think the zones around high electromagnetic emissions are going to turn out very sick. Oh, for sure. We've done a lot of shows on this.
Is there a test to measure the CO2 in your body so you can see if you're improving your CO2 levels? Yeah. I don't know how expensive the gadgets are, but I got one, I guess, 15 years ago that cost $1,300 that you blow into it at the end of your exhalation and can see how much CO2 you're producing. Do you know the name of the machine? Oh, it's a capnometer or a capnograph. You can find them on the internet. They should be available for about $35, but I don't know whether anything is commercially
available right now. Well, we're in the age of miniaturization, right? Yeah. Things are getting smaller and smaller and being produced faster and faster and cheaper and cheaper. So maybe it's at a level of affordability for most people who might be interested. When I first wanted a meter to measure carbon monoxide in the breath, the cheapest I could find was $10,000, but now they're $30. You mean monoxide or carbon dioxide? Well, that was monoxide, and if they can do it with carbon monoxide, they should be able to do it with carbon dioxide. Most certainly. Most certainly.
Let's hit the big one and talk about pregnenolone. You're a big pregnenolone advocate. Tell us what it is and why you suggest we use it. When we metabolize cholesterol, what happens is under the influence of thyroid hormone, which stimulates oxidation, and vitamin A, which activates the enzymes to clip a chain off cholesterol, thyroid and vitamin A are the factors we need mostly for producing pregnenolone from cholesterol. So if you're low in cholesterol or thyroid or vitamin A, you're necessarily going to be deficient in pregnenolone, and pregnenolone is the immediate precursor to progesterone and DHEA.
Progesterone is the precursor to cortisol. DHEA is the precursor to testosterone and other androgens and estrogen. If you are deficient in the precursors, the body will still have the ability to make a normal or even increased amount of the end hormones, which in the extreme situation tend to be cortisol and estrogen. The deficiency of thyroid and/or vitamin A and/or cholesterol will, because of not making enough precursor, will tend to expose your body chronically to high estrogen and high cortisol. And when you get the precursors, it happens that pregnenolone inhibits the stress process
and turns down your ACTH and adrenal hormone activity so that in itself, it blocks the effects of those hormones, but at the same time, it's blocking the production of those hormones. So it's doing many things, protecting against the harmful stress mediators and in itself, it works somewhat like carbon dioxide that's stabilizing cells. So I've seen people, for example, with emphysema who were purple because they couldn't get enough oxygen. In just a few days, they were back to normal color, breathing, walking upstairs, no problem, and so on.
Progesterone has that same effect on the lungs, getting rid of excess water so that oxygen can get through to the bloodstream. And in the inflamed joints, it has that same effect, releasing water that shouldn't be there. For example, bulgy eyes in Graves, so-called Graves disease, where the eyes are protruding. I've seen people's eyes recede back into a more normal position where they could close their eyelids in just an hour or so. It has its intrinsic protective effects as well as its indirect effects of blocking and reducing the production of stress hormones.
And then it also is the precursor for the other protective steroids, DHEA and progesterone. Around 1990, the whole idea that instead of being all produced in the gonads and the adrenals, it was realized that steroids are being produced in many tissues. And the brain and skin are major steroid-producing factories. And the major brain steroids happen to be pregnenolone, progesterone, and some DHEA, and the minor products from those. But the basic protective steroids in the brain especially, but throughout the body, are these three. Do you take DHEA? Yeah, I'm currently taking a couple milligrams per day.
You notice a difference? Yeah, it gives me nicer dreams. Nicer dreams? Yeah, a general feeling of euphoria. Now how much pregnenolone do you take? 100 milligrams? What are you taking? Oh, I stopped taking that about 10 years ago when I couldn't get a reliable source. So I found out that by adjusting other things, thyroid and diet, I apparently am making enough that I don't feel an effect when I take some. So you're taking thyroid and you're taking very little, if any, coconut oil, right? Yeah, very little, just for frying things occasionally.
I count on food for my nutrients. I'm keeping the hormones in balance mainly by adjusting my thyroid. Right. So you're not taking pregnenolone? No, I haven't for quite a while. And you wouldn't recommend it to anybody? Oh sure, I'd recommend it freely if you're not allergic to it. Most of the products now contain strange binders. Everyone seems to think it's necessary to put silicon dioxide. Even some of the companies that supposedly have all these great products are putting all kinds of weird binders, you're right.
I think they are just convinced by the salespeople, whatever the chemical companies have to sell, they convince the supplement manufacturers that they need it to make their pills prettier. So how do you get enough pregnenolone in your system? Eating foods that keep my cholesterol production high. Orange juice is my main one. I've seen people go from about 130 cholesterol to 160 or 170 in just a couple of weeks just by eating an extra, oh maybe a quarter day of orange juice. And are you talking about orange juice or are you talking about concentrate?
Well, I always recommended the frozen concentrate until several years ago. A lot of people started having bad reactions to it and I got asthma from most of the types and so I started using only sweet, freshly squeezed oranges. And why do you think, because see some people would say, "Oh my God, that's high in sugar." Why wouldn't that cause a problem with your glucose metabolism? No, you need sugar to make thyroid hormone and to make the various things related to cholesterol. Is that really true?
Yeah, sugar is the main precursor and regulator for both thyroid and cholesterol. Wow. This is news to me. It's news. I've got a couple articles on diabetes. Yes. Talk about the effects of sugar in general and its ramifications and especially when it comes in the form of fruit like orange juice. The minerals, potassium for example, takes on the function of insulin and so your body doesn't bother producing insulin because the orange juice is so easily metabolized without insulin so it's not fattening the way if you get the same amount of sugar from starch.
The starch is a powerful insulin stimulant and insulin tends to turn carbohydrate to fat. Do you think that it's possible for people with diabetes to get off of insulin shots? I've known a couple of people who did it in a week by radically changing their diet but I think it's good to measure things carefully and figure on doing it over a period of a few months. My father had a diagnosis of diabetes when he was about 30 and had wasted away to well
under 100 pounds when he found an old naturopathic book that described treating it with brewer's yeast. And when he started eating nothing but brewer's yeast for a few weeks, he stopped producing glucose in his urine and started gaining weight. He gradually added other foods but for a few weeks he ate cups full of brewer's yeast as his only food. After he got his weight back up, he lived 48 years after that with no sign of diabetes. How extraordinary. Now was that with your help? No, he and my mother found that themselves.
Are your parents still alive? No, they died 40 years ago. You miss them? Oh sure. Did they understand you and your work? Oh yeah, they were collaborators. Really? Yeah. Were they scientists or doctors or? No, just co-conspirators in finding things out. A lot of people dream of having parents like that. Yeah. That's extraordinary. Yeah, they helped me start the Blake College in Mexico in the 60s. That's great. And last subject and we'll still never scratch the surface with you is osteoporosis. There are so many opinions about how to prevent osteoporosis.
Some people say take vitamin D3 in high quantities. Some people say lift weights, do weight bearing exercises. But everybody wants to go in and get one of those bone scans. Yeah, x-rays happen to poison bone metabolism so the more bone scans you have, the more osteoporosis you're going to get. And the doctors have known for at least 15 years that looking at the bone with ultrasound is many times more valid than the x-ray scans. And ultrasound stimulates bone strengthening. So it's totally crazy not to use ultrasound to test your bones.
Do you think it's possible to order a test to have your bone density checked via ultrasound today? Yeah. There are good machines and minimal machines. The good ones can tell you how strong the bone is. The minimal ones will just tell you where it rates on the scale of density. But it's sort of hard to find them because the x-ray people discourage competition. For sure. You don't know of a single place in America that one could get their bone density tested via ultrasound.
I think someone found one in New York City but they're very hard to find around the country. I know the machines exist but they are probably mainly for research purposes. I see. And lots of doctors are steering women away from using thyroid. An article in JAMA around 1985 reported that women who took thyroid had more osteoporotic bones but they were taking thyroid according to what was current prescribing practices at that time. So when they had someone with serious thyroid deficiency, they were typically giving them only half as much as they needed.
And so what they were seeing was that hypothyroid women who were under-prescribed had more osteoporosis than healthy women. But the animal studies show the actual picture in which, for example, around 1940, rabbit studies showed that giving a toxic amount of armor thyroid in their diet, rabbits normally don't have very vigorous thyroid activity but they gave them I think 1% of the mass of their food was armor thyroid powder. It would be like us eating tablespoons of thyroid pills every day. And it stimulated their metabolic rate so much that they couldn't eat enough food to
maintain their body weight. So they waste away? They wasted away and died of skinniness. But when they looked at their bones, they had abnormally dense, strong bones. So the bones were the most protected tissue in the case of thyroid excess poisoning. You know, it's very interesting because you can change something at a molecular level and you've changed the whole thing. And very little do I hear of doctors or researchers talking about the alteration of the molecular level of food, water, and everything.
Studies on the skull bones of young mice, a very thin bone structure that's easy to study in the dish because it can absorb its nutrients directly from the culture dish. They found that T3, the active thyroid hormone, stimulates the metabolism of the bone cells causing the production of carbon dioxide which combines and crystallizes with calcium from the solution forming new bone directly in vitro can be demonstrated under the influence of active thyroid. Interesting. We really have to explore the details of things. I like that you get into so much detail. It's very important.
Very, very important. I remember four and a half years ago when I was doing an examination of what's happening with climate. And it wasn't until I was deeper into the investigation that I found out that the climate assertions and declarations have all been done by computer simulations and not by real data. But I just want to tell you, this is an example. So when we talk about health and wellness, I like that you go into so much detail because it's in the details.
Obviously, it's in the synergy and it's in the whole systems and it's in the whole organism. I like that you take this approach to looking at things and you look at evidence and details. But even in the anti-aging field, I've noticed that I myself have been imbued with inaccurate information. It's a constant process of trying to enlarge your context and field of reference because within one context, the medical school professor can sound very convincing. But when you look at a broader context and see what experiments people were doing 50
or 100 years ago or 150 years ago, things look very different. That whole context dropped out and they reconstructed the kind of context that fits basically what they want to sell. What do you think of this Affordable Care Act, do I dare ask? I think I'd rather pay the fine than be forced to buy insurance. First of all, I haven't been to a doctor since I was 10 years old, I think, except to have obligatory examinations, like to get my driver's license in Mexico.
I have to have an exam every six years, but otherwise I avoid doctors and I would avoid insurance except that the state requires car insurance and now they're requiring health insurance. But as far as possible, I'd rather pay the fine. Is there anything else you'd like to say to the audience today? Looking at the big context is the important thing. We're constantly being subjected to misinformation and it's necessary to look at concrete experiments and then see whether someone has done counter experiments that would invalidate those.
Don't you find that a lot of the testing that is done connected to the pharmaceutical industry is not real testing? In other words, they use the population as their test rats a lot of times? Yeah, the figures of the labs for the normal range, first of all, they're done on medical populations. No one sets aside a population that they define as healthy and finds out what the real numbers should be. One study looking at the TSH range, they sorted them out, people who had been tested at one
time and looked at the ones who later over the next 10 or 20 years developed thyroid cancer or other cancers. They found that the ones whose TSH was below 0.4 on the scale, it usually has that as considered too low. They were the ones who were freest of cancer. If you consider that the numbers represent a sick population, who wants to be standardized to a sick population? You know, some people will say, "Well, we can't test this stuff on healthy people. It's not ethical." What do you say to that?
It's even worse to test it on sick people. At least healthy people are better apt to make a decision whether to be tested or not. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my God. Ladies and gentlemen, we have been talking with, learning from, and listening to Dr. Ray Peat. You can find out more about him and his hundreds and hundreds of articles and experience and expertise by going to rayPeat.com. Dr. Peat, I hope you will come on again. I'm going to have a panel come on and I'd love to hear you share with the other panelists
your expertise as we talk about other subjects to come. Thank you so much for being with us. Okay. Thank you. Thanks for all your work in the world. Bye-bye. [End of Audio] 1 Page PAGE of NUMPAGES www.verbalink.com Page PAGE of NUMPAGES www.verbalink.com Page PAGE of NUMPAGES www.verbalink.com Page PAGE of NUMPAGES www.verbalink.com Page PAGE of NUMPAGES