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You're listening to Holistic Living, brought to you by EastWest Healing and Performance. And now, here are your hosts, Josh and Jeanne Rubin. [Music] What up everyone? This is Josh Rubin from EastWest Healing and Performance. Today to host our great radio show with Dr. Ray Peat. Jeanne will not be joining us today, so it's just me and Dr. Ray Peat on the show. And once again, you know, I always say this, and not a lot of people call in, but you know, we do this show,
of course, for ourselves, but we do it more for the listeners, because I know a lot of people are really into Ray's philosophy and information. So, you know, at the right time, don't call in in two seconds, but at the right time, feel free to call in, ask a question. The show's on cholesterol and saturated fats, so obviously try to revolve your questions around that. The call-in number is 347-426-3546. And of course, if you can't listen to the show live, you can always download it later
from our actual blog talk radio show page. You can find that on our website, eastwesthealing.com, on the right-hand side. Or as well, check our Facebook, Twitter, all those fun little social media OCD-creating pages in order to listen to the show later on. Take notes, because it's going to be a great show. Of course, I want to just introduce ourselves. If you're new, we own a, you know, a wellness center, just probably a wellness center back in the College Bed area, San Diego. We work with nutritional lifestyle clients all over the world using phone and Skype
to help them with a lot of their metabolic issues, autoimmune diseases, GI problems, and so forth. So feel free to call us if you have any questions regarding our services. You can check out our website at eastwesthealing.com. And if you're local, definitely stop in, check it out. One more order of business. I have to check my schedule, but I'm pretty sure it's October 27th, which is a Thursday at 2 p.m. I'm going to double-check, but I'm pretty sure that's it. We're going to do a show with Dr. Cutler. Dr. Cutler is a biochemist,
and he wrote a book called "Amalgam Illness, Diagnose and Treatment, What You Can Do Better, and How Your Doctor Can Help." It's a great book. You can look it up. Andrew Hall Cutler, Ph.D. It's called "Amalgam Illness." Highly recommend it. And our show is going to be on amalgam illness, so definitely stay tuned for that. So, today's show, cholesterol and fats. Huge topic. Of course, we're going to get Ray Peat's philosophy on this. We'll cover lots of things from why cholesterol is so important,
why a doctor is trying to lower it, why our body needs it, our physiology needs it, and what can happen and what it means if it's high or low, and what we can do to actually lower it. And it involves why saturated fats, yes, the right types of saturated fats are so important in our diet. So, enough of me. I want to get Dr. Ray Peat on the show. Maybe let him do an intro of himself this time, because I feel like I never do enough on her.
Just one more key piece before I click him in. I always say this. We do the show. He volunteers his time, and I know a lot of people are emailing him left and right. So, please, please, please, I don't care if you send him a check for a dollar, $10, $5, $50, $100, whatever you want to send him to say thanks. If you're emailing him, sending him a check. You know, I know people that send him checks every month. We send him checks all the time.
I just think it's important because he's donating, you know, one to two hours of his time plus emails every month. So, don't want to say any more of that, but hopefully you can take that and say thank you to Dr. Ray Peat. So, let me get him on. Ray, are you there? Yes, hi. How's it going? Okay. So, I want to know if you wanted to just kind of introduce yourself to a lot of the listeners. I always do an intro, and I just feel like it never does you the justice.
So, I don't know if you want to take a couple minutes just to kind of give a brief history of who you are and kind of where you come from. Before I studied biology, I was mostly studying language and literature and painting. And I had been interested in biology for a very long time, but I had a bad impression of academic biology from my high school experience mostly, but then seeing that in the 1940s there was a very big change in the nature of American biology
that was powered by industry and government promotion of the gene theory as opposed to the field theory in development and health and so on. So, I waited a long time until 1968 to actually enter a graduate program in biology. And I had learned enough about universities and biology to manage to get through the program without having too many conflicts with the professors. Most of the professors were very committed to the genetic determinist idea of what an organism is. And I was interested in the field concept and the environmental influences on the organism.
And nutrition is one of the most important environmental influences on the nature of the organism. So, I see our nature as being a matter of potential being realized according to the conditions of the environment rather than the expression of a predetermined genetic program. So, you're also a writer, guys. If you want to check out Ray's philosophy and what he does, definitely check out his website at raypeat.com. He has umpteen number of articles on his website that are free.
And check them out, download them, buy his books. You can buy his books from his website as well. There are a wealth of information. I mean, I think I've read each book six times over easily. So, definitely do that. Check them out. But that's a synopsis of who Ray is. And today we're going to talk about cholesterol and fats. And Ray's done a lot of work on this. He's written a lot on this. And I think it's a huge controversial topic out there.
A lot of people don't understand it. A lot of people are afraid of cholesterol. The medical community is making people afraid of cholesterol. People don't understand saturated fats. So, hopefully today we can clarify a lot of these things or Dr. Peat can clarify a lot of these things to educate yourselves to understand what you're actually saying, the meaning behind what you're saying. So, we have a lot of questions here from listeners. I got a lot of questions kind of written up. But I guess we should start with, you know, kind of some basic questions.
I mean, kind of on the political side of it or the Western medicine side of it, Ray, why do you think America is so afraid of cholesterol and saturated fats? I think it's driven primarily by the food industry wanting to sell their products, the seed oils. The seed oils were already seen to be toxic, cause sterility, degeneration of the brain and the gonads and so on, probably from 1925, but especially in the 1930s and '40s, the very oxidizable seed oils were known to be toxic.
That was one of the factors in researching vitamin E as something to counteract the toxicity of the seed oils, unsaturated fats, as well as the toxicity of estrogen, which happens to interact, synergize with unsaturated fats. And the pig industry had been looking for ways to make their animals gain weight and eat less food. And George Burr, who's identified as the inventor of the essential fatty acid concept himself, discovered that the essential fatty acids slow the metabolic rate tremendously. Deficient animals eating sugar instead of unsaturated fats had about a 50 percent higher metabolic rate,
but various people noticed that effect. And they found that feeding soy and corn to the pigs because of the unsaturated fats suppressing their metabolic rate increased the profit, less food in, more pig out. At the same time, they noticed that it was lowering cholesterol, just as one of its biological effects, a toxic effect basically. And the paint chemists, oil chemists discovered that instead of using the expensive seed oils that were now being sold largely as pig food, the chemists discovered how to make paints and plastics from petroleum around 1950.
And that decreased one of the big markets for soybeans in particular. Henry Ford had imported soybeans to use in the car industry. He made a car body entirely out of soybean plastic and hoped to replace iron with that. There's a picture of him using a sledgehammer to pound on one of his cars showing that they were very strong. But by the late 1930s, only doorknobs and steering wheels were still made of the soybean plastic. But when the petroleum chemists learned how to use petroleum, that freed up the soybean market for pigs
and their production was great enough. They wanted to find new markets to replace the paint and plastics market. And so they started promoting the health idea of their soy oil, cotton seed oil, safflower seed oil and so on. And the only biological effect other than sterility and dementia that were established for these seed oils was that they lowered blood cholesterol. For several decades, people had been noticing that cholesterol accumulated in the walls of blood vessels, atherosclerosis. And although the first person who discovered that in rabbits had dissolved the cholesterol in unsaturated vegetable oil,
he realized that cholesterol by itself wasn't causing the disease. But there had been these experiments that gave a basis for the seed oil people to say cholesterol is found in the hardened arteries and in the blood and their oil lowers the level in the blood. So they argued by association that if it's in the blood vessel and the blood, then you can lower it in the blood and prevent the disease. But the very people who had made those discoveries had realized that it wasn't so.
And in fact, in the 1930s, people had found that thyroid was enough to prevent the atherosclerosis and at the same time it lowered cholesterol. Over the last 10 or 15 years, a Swedish doctor named Uffe Ravenskov has gone through the literature and shown just beautifully that there is no connection between atherosclerosis, heart disease, and the triglycerides and cholesterol in the blood. They are associated, but it isn't causal. The experiments that had been done in the '30s showed that hypothyroidism and the associated changes caused by the lack of thyroid and metabolism were what caused the atherosclerosis.
The cholesterol seems to be there as a defensive reaction to protect the injured blood vessels. So just for the listeners, you brought up unsaturated fats. Can you just elaborate maybe the difference between the saturated and unsaturated fats for the listeners? Because a lot of people don't really know the difference between those. It refers to the chain of carbon atoms in the fatty acid. In one case, they have all of the hydrogen atoms attached to them that's possible. So they're saturated with hydrogen.
And if some of the carbon atoms lack the hydrogen, they just have their electron bonds more exposed to the environment. The absence of the hydrogen makes them more flexible. Instead of being sort of like a bottle brush bristling with the hydrogen surrounding the chain of carbons, it's more like a necklace of beads, flexible where the hydrogens aren't missing. And the bonds can rotate more freely. You get two or three or four or five of those double bonds, and the chain is bent at each place there's a double bond.
And at the single bonds, the molecules rotate freely so you can get very flexible shapes when you have the purely or highly unsaturated molecules. And that flexibility you can see when you put a bottle of oil in the refrigerator. Coconut oil is hard when it's just a little cool, just below room temperature or even at room temperature. But olive oil has to be much cooler before it starts solidifying. That's because it's relatively saturated and canola and corn oil have to be extremely cold before they'll solidify. And that's biologically important.
One of its meanings is that if the organism lives at 40 degrees Fahrenheit, for example, and it contained butterfat or olive oil, its fats would be solid and wouldn't be manageable. For example, if an animal contained 30% fat and it all hardened, its subcutaneous fat would become stiff. Just the way a steak, when it's in the refrigerator, the fat is stiff. When it's in very warm conditions, it becomes soft and flexible. So in the tropics, even fish in the Amazon River, for example, have fat as saturated as butterfat.
And if you grow soybeans or corn in a very warm climate, their fat is saturated according to the temperature. And chocolate and coconuts grow in a place where the temperature is probably averaging close to 90 degrees. And so they need to have very saturated fat just for the biochemical manipulation of the molecules to happen. And if you had unsaturated fats, like is necessary for the cold water polar fish, for them to be flexible, they have to have triply or quadruply unsaturated fats.
But if you had those in a fish in the Amazon River, the fish would oxidize its fats in just a couple of days, even with a medium unsaturated oil such as soy oil or corn oil. If you put a rubber hose into a cork in the top of the bottle and put the other end of the hose in a cup of water and leave the bottle at room temperature, the water will rise up the tube as the oil is consuming oxygen. It's just a constant process even at room temperature.
If you raise it to body temperature, 95 or 100 degrees, then the process is much faster and you have sticky, rancid oil very quickly. So it's a biological adaptation. You can make a pig have subcutaneous unsaturated fat depending on the temperature of the weather that it's exposed to. If you put a sweater on the pig, it will get more saturated. It's quite interesting. So guys, what he just said the past couple of minutes, write that down. That's some really good stuff to educate yourself on the differences and why saturated fat is so important,
the right type for humans and why unsaturated fats can be actually quite detrimental. Now you're talking about atherosclerosis. It's not the easiest word to say. Most Western literature, Western medicine literature doctors, they always talk about cholesterol and heart disease. And if you even read the side of like Lipitor and stuff, it even says this medication has not been approved to prevent heart disease, but they still promote it for that. What do you feel, I know your thoughts on intracellular calcium and fibrosis and all that.
Can you elaborate on what your thoughts are around atherosclerosis and heart disease and stuff like that? Yeah, the polyunsaturated fats that we unavoidably get in our diet, they're constantly breaking down, producing free radicals and tending to cause inflammation and tissue injury. And if anything is disturbing the metabolism of a cell, that's more likely to happen. For example, the normal healthy oxidation through the mitochondrion keeps the electrons tightly controlled while they're being transferred from, say, a glucose molecule to an oxygen molecule.
But if you take away some of the oxygen, the electrons in the mitochondrion will have no place proper to go and they will escape as free radical potentiators. And so the cell becomes more oxidized in the absence of sufficient oxygen. So any stress of a cell puts out these electrons that can attack the exposed electron bonds in unsaturated fats, but the saturated fats aren't open for stray electrons. So every time you're limited in your delivery of oxygen to a cell, you're putting the unsaturated fats in the way of these stray electrons.
And those will then start chain reactions that at the extreme, they form lumps of material called age pigment or lipofuscin. And the free radical oxidized fat fragments attach to proteins and they collect bits of iron and other breakdown products from the free radical attacks on whatever is around in the cell. And these lumps of age pigment, because of their iron and fat fragments, are able to catalyze the consumption of energy and deliver energy from the enzymes to oxygen. So they can create a false mitochondrial effect, consuming energy and wasting oxygen,
and then that accelerates the process because the real mitochondrion is further deprived of oxygen by these age pigment lumps. But before that happens, that tends to be at the end of the life, and you get degrees of that happening in which oxygen deprivation and stress cause lower degrees of damage and inefficiency. Signals go out changing the conditions of the organism. For example, sending signals that more energy is needed, activating hormones such as cortisol, estrogen, and growth hormones. And these three hormones are very closely connected to the rising triglycerides
and the damage to the blood vessel wall. And they tend to interact. Cortisol increases estrogen, estrogen increases cortisol, and they both increase growth hormone. And all of these tend to break down triglycerides into free fatty acids, which are more reactive, tend to become oxidized more quickly, cause more cellular injury. So the circulating fats in the bloodstream are, in the first place, activated by stress and unsaturated fats, and then these three main hormones increase the damage they can do,
even though they normally would be part of a defensive repair process in the presence of the unsaturated fats. They magnify the damage. So in regards to cholesterol, when an organism is stressed, you mentioned how cholesterol will actually elevate, and I think a lot of people don't understand that. Why is cholesterol so important for our physiology, and why does it go up when one is stressed? The whole stress hormone system, the things that Hans Selye popularized and studied for many years, he was concentrating on the steroid system, and that's the most powerful stress-induced system.
The pituitary senses something wrong in the organism, increases its ACTH, which drives the adrenal glands in particular to take up cholesterol and to synthesize cholesterol from raw materials, and to direct the cholesterol into the mitochondrion to turn it into pregnenolone, progesterone, DHEA, and finally cortisol. Cortisol is the thing which has a short-term defensive reaction against stress. One of its main effects is to turn protein into sugar so that the sugar can be used for energy to increase adaptive ability to handle the stress.
But if you keep your cortisol up too long, you'll destroy too much of your protein tissues. So before the cortisol stage of stress, the continuously activated adrenal tissue will be first producing pregnenolone, progesterone, and DHEA, and it's only when those aren't enough to handle the stress that the progesterone will be further converted into the cortisol. So the production of the cholesterol is the first stage of handling a stress reaction, and then the cholesterol has to be converted into pregnenolone to further the defensive reactions.
But the increased production of cholesterol itself is a primitive defensive anti-stress system, and the later stages, pregnenolone, progesterone, and DHEA, back up that basic function of cholesterol, giving it more dimensions of protection. But starting probably around 1920, people were trying to purify cholesterol to see what its biological effects would be. They found that I think they used about ten different toxins, everything from pus from an infection to snake venom, heavy metals, chlorinated solvents, everything that occurred to them. They would give a lethal dose of the poison to an animal,
and if they gave it a good dose of cholesterol, it would survive an otherwise lethal dose. And that has been done repeatedly. There have been some more specific things. For example, the testes are stimulated to more efficiently produce sperms in the presence of cholesterol, and the cholesterol has a direct activating effect on producing more of the defensive steroids and helping the cell do what it should do, as well as interfering with the toxic effects of chemical stresses and physical stresses. For example, hyperthermia that will cause your red cells to break down
if you add enough cholesterol. The cells won't be hurt by an otherwise deadly temperature. So it's just an incredibly broad spectrum of protective substance. So the list is cholesterol rising under stress as a response, and people should understand that. It's your body's natural response to stress to help fight stress. Now, the issue is with most people, it goes up, keeps going up, keeps going up, and it's never coming down. What are your thoughts on that? Is it a conversion issue? What do you need to make that conversion from cholesterol to pregnenolone?
I guess it was about 40 years ago that someone was looking at the effects of varying the amount of cholesterol going into either an ovary or an adrenal gland, and they found that if the thyroid hormone and the vitamin A nutrition were adequate, the amount of progesterone coming out exactly corresponded to the amount of cholesterol going in. So a very big portion of the cholesterol is being turned into the also protective hormones, pregnenolone, progesterone, and DHEA. And that is a massive turnover of the cholesterol that's being produced,
but it depends on thyroid and vitamin A very largely. So the higher your thyroid function, the more cholesterol you're consuming. And in the 1930s, someone noticed that when the thyroid gland had been removed, people's cholesterol immediately went up. So they would measure the cholesterol and give them a thyroid supplement, and immediately as the metabolic rate increased, the cholesterol would decrease. So blood cholesterol was a mirror image of their thyroid function. But the thyroid also supports the ability to make the cholesterol in the first place,
but the level that a healthy person maintains depends on everything else that's happening. If you have, say, a 500 milligram cholesterol blood level, that's considered very high, and you can bring it down in a week to 200 or 180 just by giving frequent small doses of a quick-acting thyroid. And that is protective because it's what's needed for them to produce progesterone and pregnenolone so they don't have to rely on the pure effects of the cholesterol for their antistress activity. If you lack something needed to turn energy into cholesterol, for example, sugar is needed.
If something is causing you to be overloaded with unsaturated fats, and too much starch and unsaturated fats probably are the main reason for not being able to produce enough cholesterol. The thyroid will also help you overcome some of the blocks to producing cholesterol, but a supplement of sugar sometimes is needed to bring up your production of cholesterol so that you don't want your cholesterol to get below something like 160 is the very minimum. In some studies, after they were seeing that some diseases such as cancer were associated with very low cholesterol levels,
and instead of being that the cholesterol was being consumed by the cancer, it turns out that low cholesterol makes you susceptible to developing cancer. There was a Hungarian study about 45 years ago that found that when they chemically lowered the cholesterol, the mortality increased from all causes, accidents, homicides, suicide, and cancer. A huge increase in cancer mortality as they chemically lowered the blood cholesterol. The hormones that aren't being produced from the cholesterol are probably the reason for those increases in mortality.
When it comes to making that conversion, I know a lot of people follow your philosophy, and one thing certain people say is when they start following your philosophy to lower their cholesterol, their cholesterol actually goes up. Now is that because of utilizing the tropical fruits that they haven't been used to and they're producing more T3 so they're utilizing more and it will eventually come back down, or are they missing something? Yes, and no one is really sure what the optimal level of cholesterol is.
For example, looking at old people in rest homes, they followed their cholesterol levels and saw that the ones that lived the longest had pretty high cholesterol. I think the 270 was the number that corresponded to the longest survival. In the Framingham study, they saw that people over the age of 50 who didn't have at least a 200 cholesterol level were more likely to develop dementia. In a big study of violence, they divided populations into those with at least 180 cholesterol
and those below 180, and the violent offenders were clearly connected with the below 180 cholesterol levels. So going back to the dementia, and I think you mentioned in one of your books, you talk about people with low cholesterol, whatever that number is, there's a higher incidence of depression. You talk about cholesterol is precursor to pregnenolone. Can you elaborate on pregnenolone's effects on our brain chemistry? I know you talk about ACTH on it. Can you elaborate on that for the listeners? Yes, several signals can tell your brain that you're suffering stress.
For example, low blood sugar is one of the basic things. The various things that amount to stress act on the stability regulators of brain cells. GABA is a sleep-inducing peptide fragment of the glutamic acid, amino acid. Glutamic acid excites the brain. If you take off the acid, it becomes gamma-amino butyric acid, which sedates the brain. And the stressed brain will activate enzymes to produce GABA and turn off the excitation. There are specific peptide signals that act parallel with glutamic acid to excite the brain and to interfere with GABA, the stabilizer.
And the valium-type sedative or tranquilizer acts on the GABA-stabilizing system of the brain. If something is preventing the glutamic acid from being turned into sufficient amounts of GABA, valium will fill in and activate the GABA system. Activating the GABA system turns off the stress signals and stops the pituitary from producing ACTH to activate the adrenal cortex. Progesterone and pregnenolone and many other things act on the GABA receptor system. And pregnenolone happens to be one that doesn't have many other hormone-like effects. It's basically a stabilizer at all levels of cells in the brain.
Its effect is on the GABA system to imitate valium to tell your pituitary that the stress is under control and to stop producing so much cortisol. So in early experiments testing the toxicity of pregnenolone, someone gave a group of mice or rats 10 grams of powdered pregnenolone made into a slurry injected into their stomachs. They didn't have any appetite for a few hours because being so full of powdered pregnenolone. But the only hormonal effect that they saw was that some of the animals that had been stressed
and had excessive cortisol or corticosterone before the dose of pregnenolone, when they were getting the huge dose, they were normalized. So the animals were more normal after that big dose than they were before the dose. For a person that would be like eating a pound of progesterone all at once, or pregnenolone rather. So pregnenolone alone, could nutrition philosophies do enough if you're making the conversion to raise pregnenolone to help with brain chemistry, skin tone, and overall stress reduction? Or do you recommend possibly using a powder of pregnenolone to actually help balance that and lower cholesterol?
Yeah, it depends on how far the system has deteriorated. Many years ago, some Russians found just with isolated mitochondria that giving them pregnenolone would structurally restore damaged mitochondria and allow them to begin producing more pregnenolone. And that's similar to what people saw with isolated progesterone on slices of adrenal gland. When they would give the adrenal slice progesterone, it would increase its production of progesterone. So in both cases, there's a positive feedback rather than the typical negative feedback.
You give it some and it makes more, which means that the organism is designed as if it wants as much as it can get. And ordinarily, you can make enough from converting sugar to cholesterol and with thyroid and vitamin A converting cholesterol to the other hormones. But when you have been poisoned with not enough of the needed foods or too much of the unsaturated oils, heavy metals causing free radical reactions and so on, then it helps to use all of the supports possible, thyroid supplements, pregnenolone supplements, possibly DHEA and progesterone, saturated fats, sugar,
everything that works in the same direction. Right, right. That makes sense. Now I'm just going to email from a listener just to rewind it a little bit. He wanted to know if you could elaborate a little bit on why growth hormone, when you were talking about it being inflammatory, why is it inflammatory? Is it just in itself inflammatory or is it the excess of it actually being inflammatory to the system? Most of the research is designed to praise its beneficial effects,
but there are some very basic observations that people who have been chronically deficient in it have a remarkable absence of atherosclerosis. The mice that genetically are deficient in the pituitary hormones have no growth hormone. They aren't very big, but they live two or three times as long as normal mice. And one researcher removed the pituitaries from several species of animals and found that they lived much, much longer than animals with their pituitaries if they were given basically a thyroid supplement to keep their metabolism going. So when you have hypoglycemia, you increase your growth hormone
and it tends to come with the other pituitary stress responsive hormones. And all of these tend to have their side effects. So they're all beneficial in the right amount at the right time, but they're all harmful when they go on too long or too high a level. People with the giantism acromegaly, for example, a tumor or overactivity of the pituitary gland, they have an extremely high incidence of atherosclerosis. So we're talking cholesterol. Can you explain just the--you can get as deep as you want, I know,
but the basics for people and the differences between HDL and LDL? Both of them are able to participate in detoxification. The protein that helps to carry the cholesterol in the bloodstream itself has some very specific antistress, even antiviral activity. So they're part of our ability to respond to stress, the protein as well as the cholesterol associated with the protein. And they're both defensive and both important, but the LDL is mostly the one that carries cholesterol into the places where it's needed, the brain, the ovaries, testicles, and adrenal glands, but anywhere you're making steroids,
and that includes the skin. Skin is probably our biggest endocrine gland. Skin is the next, and then the ovaries, testicles, and adrenals. And the HDL has probably some more specific antitoxic effects where the LDL is more a delivery system of cholesterol itself. And toxins will tend to increase the HDL relative to the LDL. Toxins of most types will increase, both of them defensively, but the chlorinated hydrocarbons, radiation, estrogen, and alcohol, for example, will increase the HDL relative to the LDL because it has some more specific antitoxic effects.
Now, I know you've talked about before how DHEA can actually lower LDL cholesterol. I think I read that in one of your articles. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? Can lower which, the LDL? Yes, I think it was the LDL. Well, anything that is activating the turnover, increasing your metabolism, progesterone redirects your metabolism, DHEA intensifies some of the cellular turnover processes, thyroid is the basic thing increasing the turnover, and the turnover of cholesterol, besides making more of the pregnenolone, progesterone, it's also important to keep it turning over
so it doesn't sit around and get oxidized in the presence of the unsaturated fat breakdown product, which everyone has exposure to. So everything that increases your metabolic rate, such as thyroid, DHEA, coconut oil, and sugar and salt, all of these things can potentially lower your cholesterol just by increasing its use, but it depends on where you're starting. They can potentially increase it if synthesis is the limiting factor. So it's really just going back from cholesterol, the conversion, having those things, sugars, T3, vitamin A, to pregnenolone, to reduced DHEA, and so forth. Yes. Okay.
Now, I know you've talked about light therapy a lot, and how lack, or just even light. Can you talk about how you mentioned how lack of light can actually cause an increase in cholesterol? Someone took blood samples every 15 minutes during the night and recorded whether the person was awake or not, and as soon as the lights went off, the cortisol began rising, and it continued pretty steadily through the night, and sleeping decreased the rate of increase of cortisol, but it shows that the stress system recognizes very immediately in less than 15 minutes
that darkness is stress in some way, and that seems to be that the intrinsic oxidation free radical production gets out of control in proportion to the exposure to darkness. When you measure the cytochrome oxidase, which is what delivers food electrons to oxygen, it's the last step in the mitochondrial energy production. If you measure that during darkness, it degrades, and after several hours, like in the far north, where you have 15-hour nights, after about 12-15 hours, the mitochondria swell up, some of them explode and leak their contents.
Just from the 15 hours of darkness is fatal to a large proportion of the mitochondria, and first they produce more and more cortisol, but finally they're overstressed and simply die. So that's part of the aging process, being exposed to the prolonged stress of darkness. When they shined red light on the heads of experimental rats, the red light penetrates very easily, but it happens that the cytochrome oxidase enzyme contains copper in the blue state of copper oxidation, and the blue copper absorbs red light, and there isn't very much of it,
so the red light passes very freely through the tissue without being absorbed randomly, and so it's delivered to the copper in the oxidative enzyme, and it restores the copper to its proper functional role. And that's currently what's lost during exposure to darkness. The use of the cytochrome oxidase enzyme, in effect, wears it out in the dark and it needs to be recharged by light. And you can see similar effects if you expose a bit of tissue to sunlight. The blue light and ultraviolet light will excite electrons
the same way X-rays excite electrons in hard tissue especially. The excited electrons can last for years or decades in the hard tissue, such as the tooth or bone, but in the soft tissue, these excited electrons can be detected in an electron spin resonance machine for hours after being exposed to sunlight. So you can tell the history of a seed or a bit of tissue by measuring the state of its electrons, whether it was exposed to blue or ultraviolet light. But while you're measuring it in the machine
and expecting it to be able to show excited electrons for hours, if you shine just a burst of red light at the tissue while it's in the machine, it quenches those excited electrons and they go back to their resting state. That's apparently what's happening in the rat experiment, restoring the copper by absorbing red light puts the electrons back in the proper arrangement. So you might have said this, I just want to kind of repeat and make sure I hear this correctly, that it's almost in a simplistic sense that light stimulates cellular respiration,
progesterone, which is stimulatory to the thyroid, which helps with the conversion where darkness is more stimulatory towards estrogen, serotonin, those things, which are antagonistic to the conversion. Yeah. Okay, cool. Guys, don't forget we're taking calls 347-426-3546. If you call in, hang tight. I'm not going to interrupt Ray when he's talking. So if you call in, just be ready to be on hold for a couple of minutes and I'll definitely chime you in. So don't forget to call 347-426-3546. Can you talk a little bit about circulating cholesterol in correlation with vitamin D and calcium absorption?
Is there a correlation? Oh, well, no, not anything I can think of. A toxic level of vitamin D is one of the things that can injure the blood vessel wall, but at physiological levels possibly interacting through parasyroid hormone would be an indirect way that they would relate to that. I have a question from -- not a caller, someone emailed me the other day. I'm going to read you the question. I'm pretty sure it's from an audio/radio show that you were on. I don't have a date, but it says his statement,
which I'm assuming it might be you, so you can correct me if I'm wrong. And it states that it is possible to live entirely without eating fats because your body can make all the saturated fat it needs. In the early part of the last century, animals that lived on a fat-free diet were completely free of spontaneous cancers and lived longer than normal. So the question is, the body can make all the saturated fat it needs, what's the importance, if any, of consuming saturated fats?
One thing is that it makes the food a lot pleasanter to eat. It makes it digest more efficiently and steadily. Experiments with a loop of intestine, they would put just proteins or just carbohydrates or just fats in at a time, and they found that the digestion was very poor until you had all three types of food present at the same time. And then it was as if the intestine needed a complex stimulus before it would really effectively start absorbing and digesting the food. So it's partly a stimulus to your intestine
to handle the protein and carbohydrate effectively. And it's a signal of satisfaction that helps to lower stress, to have fat and sugar in your food. So I guess what we should ask, in a homeostatic state, which is, I guess, hard to get to for a lot of people, can a person, or should they, live on a "fat-free diet" because the body is going to be working efficiently? Or no, I mean, you highly recommend, especially in this day and age, people definitely increasing their saturated fat content.
Yeah, largely because of the effect on the taste system and the intestine reflexes. It helps to handle the other foods efficiently and to make the whole body recognize that it's being fed properly. So it's part of the reflex nervous system that guides eating and helps to satisfy the appetite. And so people feel more satisfied when they've had fats, especially saturated fats. And the experiments with the rats, they used a purified diet. And when saturated fats were added, they had similar cancer-free results. It's a very small amount of unsaturated fat
that is responsible for the stress and cancer production, the equivalent of just about a teaspoonful of unsaturated fat per day is enough to show a threshold increase in the incidence of cancer. And when we eat natural foods, we're always getting some of the unsaturated fats. And it's hard even eating coconut oil and butter fat and beef fat and so on that they only have about 2% unsaturated fats. But on a normal diet, it's hard to get down to that threshold of about 4 grams of fat per day.
And so that's-- besides eating the most saturated type of fat, that's one of the arguments for using carbohydrates as a major part of your energy supply because if we have some extra carbohydrates, more than we need to burn at the moment, they will turn into saturated fats and extend the proportion so that, in effect, you can lower the unsaturated proportion below the threshold of carcinogenic fats. Right. That makes sense. I get some questions on coconut oil and stuff. We had a caller. Do you mind taking the caller? Okay.
Caller from the 450. You are on the air. Yes, hi, Jeff. This is JP. Hey, JP. What's up, buddy? No, much you. Hi, Dr. Peat. Hi. This is Jean-Philippe Roux from Montreal. Uh-huh. Hi. Hi. I have a big question for you. You know what? I have a best friend of mine. Now, I don't know if you can answer me, but it's contracting HEV now, and I recommend him some of your recommendations about saturated fats and aspirin, but his last blood test showed that the CD4 and CD8 dropped down. Do you have something to help him?
What about niacinamide? People with HIV often have a very high polyunsaturated fat circulating, and niacinamide is something that will help lower the free fatty acids. If you lower the free fatty acid, the CD4 and CD8 increase again? I think so. You think so? Because you know what? His doctor advised him to begin the tri-therapy, like ACT, I think, and I don't know if you advise that or you have other recommendations. I think aspirin-- Because I read a lot of it about coconut oil.
I tried to explain that coconut oil are very useful when you contract HEV, and I gave him maybe five tablespoons per day, but if the CD4 decreases, I don't know what I explained to him. Sugar, niacinamide, and aspirin are all things that help to lower the stress and keep the immune system up. Okay, but when you said aspirin, it could be 15 aspirin today? Around that. Around that. Okay, that's very good. If something is going wrong with him, I'll let you an email. Thank you very much, Dr. Peat. Thanks. Thanks, JP. Bye, Justin. Yes, bye.
Bye. Great stuff. Great stuff. Thanks, JP. Let's talk about coconut oil because people out there, I mean, even our clients, everyone is just so--you say saturated fat, and it's just like, bam, people are so against it and they don't know why, but we know when we talk about saturated fat, of course, as others, you're a huge proponent of coconut oil. Can you elaborate on why in regards to metabolism, hypothyroidism, the liver, just as much as you can put out there for people? Any of the saturated fats have an anti-inflammatory protective effect.
A group studying liver disease has found that the fish oils and the shorter seed oil unsaturated forms increase liver inflammation and a tendency to become fibrotic and cirrhosis, and that can be blocked by the saturated fats. I think it was an Indian that noticed that alcoholics in India who lived in areas where they had ghee or butter as their main fat didn't develop liver cirrhosis despite being alcoholic, and they began testing that and saw that alcohol activates the unsaturated fats to react with iron to break down and produce the liver damage.
And so all of these saturated fats are protective when you have an inflamed situation, and that goes all the way up to the waxes, such as extracted from beeswax and sugar cane and such, the super long chain saturated fats. And coconut oil is in the medium chain length. It includes some of the very short chain saturated fats, mostly it's 14 and 16 carbon chains. And the shortness of the chain means that it's very mobile in your system, and the shorter saturated fats can be handled in the mitochondria
without relying on the transport systems for handling 18 chain carbons, for example. The 10 carbon chains can be oxidized as easily as glucose, and so instead of interfering with glucose metabolism and switching the whole mitochondrial function, they can participate and even activate the glucose oxidation, and they interfere with the anti-metabolic effects of the unsaturated fats. By interfering with the anti-metabolites, they let the mitochondria run at full speed, and that works as if you're giving a thyroid supplement. The polyunsaturated fats interfere with all of the effects of thyroid
all the way from the gland secreting the hormone and the proteins transporting thyroid hormone and the cells responding to it. So at all of those points, the coconut oil is probably getting in the way of the suppressive effects of the polyunsaturated fats, but especially in the mitochondria where the coconut oil itself is being very quickly burned and used as energy. So the interesting thing for the listeners, I'm going to summarize that if I can, is that saturated fats help to protect the body and detox from unsaturated fats.
The help with glucose oxidation and kind of reteaching the liver to store glycogen and helping with blood sugar regulation. Saturated fats like coconut oil are pro-thyroid and anti-inflammatory. Yes. Okay. Yes, and speeding the metabolic rate, that's the most important thing the thyroid does, and sugar and coconut oil work right with it and maximize the good metabolic oxygen consumption. And it's interesting because at least with our clients, there's other things we've done, but to lower people's cholesterol, we've actually increased their saturated fat. And most people just get completely blindsided by that, but it definitely works.
Can you talk about, you've quoted, I think it was Hsieh, in a lot of your articles about coconut oil and its effect on the pancreas. Am I correct? Can you talk about that a little bit? Yes, he was experimenting at the time he was working. He was just discovering the multiple factors that regulate blood sugar, and he saw that the pituitary would activate the adrenals to increase cortisol and raise the blood sugar, while the pancreas was making insulin to lower the blood sugar.
And the coconut oil and sugar worked very similarly to keep the system working to allow insulin both to function and to be produced. And he didn't know at that time there were a lot of things about the interactions of pituitary, sugar, adrenal, and so on that hadn't been discovered yet, but working just with those few elements, he was on the right track. Good stuff on coconut oil. Let's talk about milk, and then I want to talk about eggs, because we're talking about saturated fats. And we know, or the people that are listening,
how much of a huge proponent you are of, of course, the right type of milk for that person, because of its complete macronutrient and saturated fat. Can you just give us some of your thoughts on why it's so important? Why should people be using it in their diet? Because most people out there, nutritionists, are actually not promoting it and saying it's actually quite inflammatory, and you actually promote it as something that's anti-inflammatory. I think the calcium content, besides it contains such a broad spectrum of all of the nutrients,
but the disproportion of calcium is, I think, what makes it anti-inflammatory. And there are lots of ways that the calcium is working. One is that it increases the oxygen-using ability of the mitochondria the same way thyroid does. It specifically activates some enzymes, the uncoupling proteins in the mitochondria, that turn on a higher metabolic rate. But systemically, it's suppressing the parathyroid hormone, and parathyroid hormone is another of the short-range protective adaptive hormones that when it continues too long becomes counterproductive and contributes to degenerative diseases. People on kidney dialysis tend to get very high parathyroid hormone
because of an imbalance of phosphorus and calcium, and the parathyroid hormone is what eventually tends to kill them, causing all kinds of stress reactions, aging reactions to be intensified. And having a chronically high calcium intake gives you a chronically low parathyroid level, so the parathyroid isn't taking calcium out of your bones and tending to put it into your arteries and kidneys and so on. Keeping the parathyroid hormone down protects your arteries and kidneys and bones and allows your insulin to do what it should to keep the pre-fatty acids under control.
The whole system tends to function in a smoother way when you keep these stress hormones minimal. So the calcium down-regulates parathyroid hormone, which down-regulates inflammation. So you talk about how the dairy in itself is actually prothyroid, which can help with the conversion of cholesterol. Is that because of the progesterone in it? That's just one minor factor. Human milk at least contains enough progesterone and thyroid to meet the baby's needs. So the babies that are born without a thyroid gland, if they're being breastfed, will not have any hypothyroid symptoms until they're weaned.
So human milk has a full supportive endocrine system in it for the baby. And cow's milk isn't as appropriate for human use, but it still has some of the metabolism-supporting hormones as well as the nutrients. Guys, don't forget we're taking callers. 347-426-3546. You're welcome to call in. Ray's taking callers today, so definitely feel free to call in. Let's talk about eggs and fat. Can you elaborate on why you feel eggs are an important staple of people's diets? I know Dr. Brewer talked about that as well.
Is it the fat content? Is it the protein? Is it the combination of both? Or is there something else in the egg? With the industrialization of the egg industry 40 years ago or so, the cholesterol content of eggs went down quite a bit and the polyunsaturated content went up. So if you can get non-industrial eggs from chickens that have pastures and can eat varied food, the eggs are going to be a lot better. But the cholesterol in the egg seems to be one of its important nutritional values,
something like 600 milligrams of cholesterol in your diet from some of the experiments. It increases the oxidative stability of your lipid particles in your bloodstream, makes them less atherogenic. We've got a caller on the take, if you don't mind. Just popped in. He's been waiting for a little bit, actually. Caller from the 949, you're on the air. Hi, this is Danny Roddy. Hi, Josh. Hi, Dr. Peat. Hi. What up, Danny? Yo, I just wanted to ask Dr. Peat, I know he's talked about this a lot in his articles,
but basically a lot of people in the paleosphere are under the impression that free fatty acids in blood is a good thing. So I was curious if Dr. Peat could elaborate on that and perhaps explain how that can be harming to the liver and the thyroid. What was the material in the blood? Free fatty acids. Free fatty acids? Yeah. Correct. Can you explain why somebody would not want that to happen, i.e., like a low-carb diet? Would not want which to happen? He's saying that a group of people that follow the paleo diet out there,
it's a high-protein, low-carb diet, and they're saying through their research that having higher levels of free fatty acids in the blood is actually beneficial, and you're saying it's not. So he was asking you to kind of elaborate on that. Yeah, that's my main argument against eating a high-meat diet. That's one of the important functions of sugar, I think, because my next newsletter in four months, I think, will be talking about free fatty acids. But basically they're one of the means by which stress causes its damage.
I've known people who were eating two or three pounds of meat a day and who were getting sicker and sicker as their free fatty acids and free amino acids increased. And that started me reading more about the free state of fatty acids in the blood. And just about everything that goes wrong involves free fatty acid increase. If they're totally saturated fatty acids, such as from coconut oil and butter, those are less harmful, but they still tend to shift the mitochondrial cellular metabolism away from using glucose and fructose and turning on various stress-related things
by lowering the carbon dioxide production, I think, is the main mechanism. Amazing. Thank you so much, Dr. Peat, and thank you, Josh. I love the show. Thank you. Cool, man. Thanks for calling in. Take care, guys. Bye. Bye. Do you mind taking another caller? No, fine. Okay. Uh, let's see. Caller from the 314, you're on the air. Oh, maybe not. Hold on. Maybe they hung up. Caller from the 314, you're on the air. Is it me? If you're 314, that would be you.
Okay. Well, I knew that there may be more than one caller from my particular area. I just called in because I had a spare minute and I was hoping to catch some information, so I wasn't really trying to--I didn't intentionally, like, put a question out there. I mean, I'm just-- Oh, you just want to listen? Yeah, yeah. I'm just now being introduced to most of the stuff, so pretty much anything that's discussed I'll be thoroughly interested in, in particular with regard to mitochondrial function
and how specific macronutrients and even different vitamins and minerals may play a role in how. So that-- All right. I'll ask him that. Okay. All right. Whoa. That was a little too loud for me, but I think his question was--I'll simplify it because I heard a dog, a baby, and a car. What does cholesterol have to do with mitochondrial respiration? Oh, first of all, it stabilizes it, protects it against the pre-fatty acids that are one of the disruptive influences. And besides stabilizing it, it actually stimulates respiration, oxygen consumption,
which might be just because of that stabilizing effect. But it functions as an antioxidant, partly by the way it interferes with the pre-fatty acids. And cholesterol associates with proteins and nucleic acids as well as other lipid materials. And I think the way it binds to proteins is responsible for its stabilizing effect in the mitochondrion. The proteins that make up the mitochondrion have a very liquid property so that you can use an oily solvent, remove all of the oil-soluble materials, and you still have a mitochondrion there.
But that shows that the apparent mitochondrial membrane is really a protein structure rather than a fat membrane system. And that protein structure is reinforced and stabilized by binding with cholesterol molecules. So in a sense, would you think it obviously just helps with the production of T3, but just the production of carbon dioxide as well? Yes, it stimulates the whole respiratory process, which includes conversion of some cholesterol to the hormones as well as producing carbon dioxide. Right. Awesome. There you go, Liam. That was for you.
We've got another caller, I think, from the 415. Let's see if they've got a question for us. It may take a second to get them on here. Hello? Caller from the 415, you're on the air. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay. Yes, I was just wondering, a lot of coconut oil, sometimes they make people either feel sick to their stomach at first or really achy. Is that because of the salicylates in it or something? Is it better then to get the refined coconut oil if you're having problems with some of the components in it?
Yes, I recommend the completely deodorized kind. The research was always done with the filtered kind that had no odor at all. It tastes really good to make ice cream or cookies or something out of the very aromatic kind for safety and general use because some people are allergic to the aromatic, tasty things in the coconut. Making it completely odorless, I think, is safest. Right, but that's not to process, though, the bleach, refine, deodorize, RBD, whatever they call it. You can find ones that are not. They just pass it through diatomaceous earth or full earth,
so it's just a filtering process, no chemical treatments. Okay, yes, because when we've had the regular virgin coconut oil, I always ended up feeling kind of sick or achy or something like inflammation, sort of like with fermented food, so I just didn't know what was going on there. It just takes a spoonful of the very odorous stuff to make me sick for about three days. Okay, and how much a day would be for just an average-weight person to just have however much they want, a few tablespoons?
A tablespoon with a meal was enough to make me breathe harder, get pinker, have a higher pulse rate and lose about, I guess it was a pound or two a week. Okay, all right, sounds good. Thanks. Thank you. I love it, Ray. Have a good one. Just know to launch along with your answers and just make it so simple. It's great. So could it be, too, because some people aren't used to eating saturated fat, and they might have an overburdened liver, biliary insufficiency, and so forth, so they increase saturated fat too fast.
Could it do with CCK, the release of CCK that causes the nausea, or do you think it's just the actual -- okay. Low thyroid people have very touchy gallbladders, and it just takes a little grease to trigger a gallbladder reaction, and you've got to get your gallbladder in good condition. Getting the estrogen down is the basic thing, but low thyroid people, a very high percentage of them have gallbladder disease. Yes, yes. I remember reading that in Dr. Jominy's work a long time ago. He found a huge correlation with gallbladder surgeries and estrogen dominance.
I got another e-mail from a listener, and he wanted to know -- he knows you advocate coconoyl and so forth for their antimicrobial properties, but in addition he'd like to ask about your views on butyric and propionic -- I can't even pronounce it. I can spell it for you. Propionic. There you go. Acid. Those are produced in the intestine by fermenting bacteria, and they have such a protective effect against cancer that people were actually selling butyric acid pills for cancer treatment about 20 years ago.
But the stuff smells so bad that some people preferred the cancer to the treatment. They sold tongs to pick up the pills before you swallowed them so you wouldn't have to touch such stinky material. But it is one of the components of milk, butter, coconut oil. The four carbon fatty acids metabolize into that when they're released from the glycerol in the triglyceride. So it's just a trace of it that gives you the buttery smell when you eat butter. Butter gave butyric acid its name. But since it's produced by bacteria
and since people with very good health have no bacteria in their small intestine, and the farther up in your intestine that you have bacteria, the likelier you are to have a lot of digestive and other health symptoms. And low thyroid people have slow digestion, and the bacteria tend to occupy most of their intestine. So from the fact that the healthiest people don't have bacteria and the butyric acid is produced by fermenting bacteria, it should be limited to the colon and preferably the materials that feed the bacteria
should have been digested and absorbed in the small intestine. So I think ideally we shouldn't be making any butyric acid in the intestine. And both butyric acid and propionic acid have some pro-inflammatory effect as well as their anti-cancer effect. So even though they are potential cancer therapies, ultimately I'm for minimizing the intestinal production of them. Okay. And aren't they found mostly in the large intestine? Well, no. When you have bacteria living up in your ileum, a lot of it's produced there. Okay. Good stuff. Now let's get to the question about--
we're talking about cholesterol, saturated fat. We've gone through the mechanism of the food, and I kind of want to do a summary at the end, but you have all these people taking statins, and most people don't even know the implications of taking a statin. They don't know what they're putting in their mouth, and they don't know what else to do. First off, what's the risk of not only taking a statin, but what's the risk of lowering your cholesterol? Well, the tendency to become violent or suicidally depressed or increasing the tendency towards dementia,
making your red blood cells less stable, everything becomes less stable. The cholesterol is an intrinsic part of the chromosome and DNA function and the cell division regulation. The first things people notice would be the emotional effects probably. And the statins, they have some beneficial anti-inflammatory effects, but at the same time, they do lower your cholesterol, and they interfere with that whole chain of syntheses, so they affect your coenzyme Q10 production and anything in that system. And so that probably is a factor in why they cause bones to rot and muscles to break down catastrophically.
Muscle pains, cramps and muscle pains, are very common in people who lower their cholesterol very much with the statins, and that can cause what they call a rhabdomyolysis, where the muscle is basically dying. I think it's a similar process that causes what they call fossey jaw. The interference with our cholesterol, it affects everything. Right. Of course, with most people you'd see fatigue, energy issues. And would you see a decrease in libido and hormonal function? Yeah, I think that's one of the early things. Okay. And it's interesting that some of the most common drugs are FSRIs
and libido-enhancing drugs as well as cholesterol-lowing drugs, so it's kind of like a little circle going on. So to summarize, what are some foods or what are some things that people can do to help regulate their cholesterol? Up or down? To lower it, because most people complain of high cholesterol. I should say to normalize it. A daily raw carrot will tend to lower your cortisol and estrogen, and that by stopping the stress will let your thyroid work better and increase progesterone, and that should accelerate the conversion of cholesterol into more progesterone and protective things.
And avoiding the polyunsaturated fats is essential for your thyroid to recover, and everything that increases your metabolic rate, such as calcium and sodium, are essential. Of course, to get the vitamin A, you could use dairy, liver, eggs. I think you mentioned before vitamin C. What does vitamin C have to do with lowering cholesterol? It's part of the adrenal and ovarian system. I don't think it has a direct synthetic relationship, but it's just part of the adrenal. Probably having an antioxidant function in the cell is exciting. It's like an adaptogen of some sort.
Yes, I think it's like a general adaptogen rather than a synthetic catalyst. Okay. Guys, we have about 15 minutes left or so, so definitely feel free to call in if you want to ask one last question. 347-426-3546. I don't know if there's anything in regards to cholesterol and saturated fats that we might have missed, Ray, that you want to talk about. It's a big topic. We're trying to cover as much as we can. Are there any key points that we might have missed that you feel is important for the listeners?
I think the important thing is to not think of the unsaturated fats as anything essential. That has never been proved. What Berg himself proved was that the unsaturated fats lower metabolism so that the so-called deficient animals had a 50% higher metabolic rate. That means that all of your nutritional requirements will increase when you shift to a prothyroid saturated fat diet. And the increased metabolic rate will increase your need for copper and selenium, the B vitamins. And I'm not sure what the effect on protein requirement is. The protein can contribute to that same intensifying metabolism effect.
So I don't know what the ratio should be between the saturated fats, proteins, and carbohydrates, but it probably varies with the individual's stress level. For example, when you're at rest, your muscles can burn pure fatty acids, but as your level of activity increases, the proportion of glucose oxidation increases, decreasing the use of fats. So your activity level governs the amount of saturated fat or carbohydrate and protein that you need. Right. And for everyone who's listening, we did a show on polyunsaturated fatty acids. You can go back to our Blog Talk Radio show page. It's blogtalkradio.com/eastwesthealing.
And you can download that show and listen to it. He's talking about a lot of above-ground vegetables, nuts, seeds, legumes, fatty fishes, cod liver, oil, fish oil, all those things are the unsaturated fats, which I know is opposite of what everyone's telling you, so definitely get educated. It's important to know what you're putting in your body and what could possibly be causing the issues that you're having. And you have to make a change. Go for it, Ray. You've probably been hearing about the woman doctor who treated her husband's Alzheimer's disease
with coconut oil and medium-chain triglycerides. That fits right in with the established evidence that it's the breakdown of the highly polyunsaturated fats that is contributing to the Alzheimer's disease. You can see the chemicals like isoprostanes, the spontaneous oxidation products of the polyunsaturated fats in the brains of Alzheimer's patients. So one of the direct effects of the saturated medium-chain triglycerides or coconut oil is to provide the saturated fats to the brain as well as the ketones and the energy supply. Great stuff, Ray. Great stuff. I riddled through all my questions, 50-plus questions, checking them off,
making sure we got stuff in there. Like I said, we've got about 12 minutes left. If anyone has any questions, one last question they want to ask, definitely feel free to call in, 347-426-3546. Other than that, Ray, anything else you want to add to the show? Nothing occurs to me. Are you selling books again? Yes. Okay. So people can just -- can you tell people how to do that? Because a lot of people email me and ask how to order your books, so I think now's a chance just to let people --
Yes, it's on the website, the address, post office box 5764 Eugene 97405. So they just send you a check, let you know what they want with their address, and you'll mail the books to them? Yes, and the postage listed there is $3 for one book, but for a group of more than one book, the postage per book is less. Right. It depends on the number of books and the particular combination. Right. And you're still taking more sign-ups to your newsletter? Oh, sure. Okay. And how much is that for the listeners again?
In the U.S., $28; Canada and Mexico, $38; and elsewhere, $48. Right. Well worth it, guys. Well worth it. Unbelievable stuff. Well, Ray, that was an awesome show. I know I speak for the listeners. Once again, not only appreciate you taking the time of your day to do this with us, but appreciate all the research you've done, the open-mindedness that you've had, and everything that you share with everyone all over the world. So really appreciate it. Okay. Have a good one, Ray. Yeah, you too. Thank you. Bye. Bye. So there you go, guys.
Another show with Dr. Ray Peat. The guy absolutely amazes me and puts a smile on my face. The stuff that he knows and just how simplistic -- well, to me, how simplistic it sounds. Just remember, everyone's an individual. You have to break that more of the same plus more of the same cycle to change. His information is one way to do that with a huge blast. And just realize that it's not just about eating carrots and taking niacinamide and drinking milk and you're going to be cured.
It's all about understanding who you are, what your physiology is, the state that you're in, how many meals you need to eat a day, what are your ratios of macronutrients, what foods are going to work for you, even though they're recommended. So there's so many factors that need to be worked on and fine-tuned and fine-tuned and fine-tuned. So hopefully you enjoyed the show. Like I said, we've got another show coming up October 27th with Dr. Andrew Cutler, biochemist, PhD, on amalgam illness, so definitely get your questions ready.
And we'll be scheduling another show with Dr. Ray Peat for maybe October, November, depending on when he's available. Not sure of the topic, but definitely tune in. Check out our Facebook page, Josh Rubin or Gene Rubin. You can go to our website and see our blog. You can find our YouTube page, Facebook, all that stuff. You can follow where the next shows are. Thanks for tuning in, guys. I'm out of here. Need one more reason why your Safeway store is just better? How about free Cuisinart Classic Cutlery or Elite Flatware? That's right.
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