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This free program is paid for by the listeners of Redwood Community Radio. If you're not already a member, please think of joining us. Thank you. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Welcome to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name's Andrew Murray. And for those of you who perhaps have never listened to the shows which run every third Friday of the month from 7 to 8pm, I'm a licensed medical herbalist who trained in England and graduated there with a degree in herbal medicine.
I run a clinic in Garboville where we consult with clients about a wide range of conditions and recommend herbal medicine and dietary advice. So you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor KMUD Garboville 91.1 FM. And from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o'clock, you're invited to call in with any questions either related or unrelated to this month's subject of oh, very many varied questions, cholesterol, further questions from people asking about various different conditions. It's going to be a kind of open-ended show asking, like I said, many different questions
that I'm getting on a fairly consistent basis because it goes contrary to popular belief. So the number if you live in the area is 923 3911. If you live outside the area, this whole free number is 1-800-KMUD-RAD. It can also be reached at the end of the show on 1-888-WBM and generally Monday through Friday business hours. Okay, so once again, for those people who perhaps have never tuned into the show, Dr. Raymond Peat has become a fairly firm fixture to our monthly shows.
And we're very pleased and very happy to have his wisdom on the show. So it's very nice of you to join us again, Dr. Peat. Hi. Thank you for joining. Like I said, every month pretty much there might have been people who have not heard of you. And it would be a very good idea for you to just give us a resume of your professional and academic background before we get started. Okay. I taught in several areas. My first teaching job happened to be biology oriented towards physics majors. But I also taught literature and painting.
And then I decided to concentrate on biology, physiology, intending to concentrate on the brain because of my interest in language. But because of the doctrinaire nature of the nerve biology people, I went into the reproductive physiology and aging. I happened to be a specialty of the sodar wall in particular, but several of the physiology people were interested in age-related changes. So that's what I did my dissertation on 1972. Very good. Okay.
Now, I understand that you have been advising a wide range of people about a wide range of conditions with your personalized research-based approach to sickness, disease, ill health, and you have some pretty, yeah, pretty groundbreaking ideas that are not at all common. I wanted to kind of open up the show, the beginning of the show, and just remind people that they're welcome to call in. We generally have people calling in from 730 to the end of the show at 8 o'clock.
But if people want to call in at any time, I think they should leave that open to people because it's always always get the phones ringing, perhaps, and people end up having to hang up before they get their turn to get their question in. So let's just open up the lines from now until the end of the show at 8 o'clock. But Dr. Peat, I have several questions that I wanted to pose you before we get on with the kind of broader subject of tonight.
And I get quite a few people have been asking this question. And so I just wanted to put it to you and for you to answer yourself. One person in particular has a young friend who's in hospital with preeclampsia, and the doctors actually want her to abort the baby. And this lady in particular won't won't abort. She's trying to keep her blood pressure under control. But don't actually the doctors don't have it under control and it spikes up and down. She's very health conscious and they're letting her eat her own food while in the hospital.
And she's at 24 weeks. And they say that she has to remain in the hospital until the birth. What's what's your general impression of preeclampsia and the best approach to its treatment? Because I know there's lots of differing solutions for it. And the doctors certainly have their own approach to it. But physiologically, how do you view preeclampsia and its treatment? When I first was interested in biology, I saw that preeclampsia was one of the most dogmatic areas of medicine.
And until fairly recently, about 30 years ago, almost all doctors were taught that it is a genetic related disease sort of intended to kill off poor people because poor people had a very high incidence of preeclampsia and other pregnancy related problems. And the idea was that the mother's nutrition had nothing to do with the development of the baby. Bad genes in the baby were possibly poisoning the mother was a theory. But Tom Brewer, a medical doctor who happened to actually study nutrition, was instrumental in gradually over a period of 30 years changing that medical dogma.
It still isn't very clearly understood. Two people influenced by him were Douglas Shanklin and Jay Hoden, who wrote a book about, I guess, 40 years ago now called Maternal Nutrition and Child Health. And Tom Brewer had found that just having the women salt their food to taste and drink at least a quart, maybe two quarts of milk a day, but to definitely get 80 grams or more of protein per day. And he said that what was currently popular at that time for controlling the blood pressure of preeclampsia
related to the idea that blood pressure in anyone with hypertension could be controlled by restricting salt. And that idea was promoted by the drug industry when they came out with diuretics that were supposed to lower pure blood pressure by causing you to lose salt in the urine. So that was applied unscientifically to the high blood pressure of preeclampsia. And it was killing and causing defects in the babies by starving their brains, by reducing the blood volume.
And Tom Brewer observed that a farmer who restricted the sodium for his pregnant pigs would soon go out of business. But it took a long time to stop that sort of barbaric pharmaceutical instigated practice. The book by Shanklin and Hoden cited some studies in which the only intervention was to supplement sodium several grams extra a day. And those studies showed that in some cases just increasing the amount of salt in the diet was enough to correct the blood pressure
by increasing the volume of fluid and blood so that there was enough blood in circulation to properly oxygenate the fetus. And with proper oxygenation, then the kidney could regulate things so that the production of aldosterone decreased. Salt intake is directly related to the suppression of aldosterone, which increases blood pressure. So when you restrict salt, you increase aldosterone, which increases blood pressure. So in Tom Brewer's approach, since he recommended milk, a couple of quarts of milk a day and fruit, vegetables, was also increasing on average their calcium and vitamin D intake.
And those happen to be very protective for blood pressure in general, and especially in preeclampsia. So the almost exact opposite of what the current recommendations are, normally salt restriction and the dietary advice is definitely not in keeping with what you just mentioned. OK, so the basic idea is to increase the protein content of the mother's diet and increase the salt intake. And the calcium. And calcium and vitamin D. So yeah, you mentioned those two things. Now what do you think is the best source of protein?
I know you're a big advocate of gelatin as a balanced kind of amino acid based protein. Milk, cheese, eggs, and among the vegetables, potatoes are the best protein. OK, very good. OK, good. So that's the first question I had. So that person hopefully will receive this either on the online archive or I can directly post it to them. OK, well, I had another question from another person very recently, and they wanted to know a little bit more about the subject of aortic valve stenosis.
They have a male friend who's about 30 years old and apparently has had this condition for some time already. And their doctor is thinking he'll have to have surgery pretty soon. So aortic valve stenosis where the valve is narrowing and causing a murmur and or other volumetric flow problems. The fibrous tissue replaces the normal elastic tissue with aging in general, but inflammation can accelerate it. Stress and inflammation in a particular area will stimulate the production of too much collagen, overgrowth of fibrous tissue. And that happens in the heart when it's being overworked or undernourished.
And the valve happens to just be an area which is constantly being stretched and stressed by the amount of work it does. And one of the mediators of inflammation that can be triggered just by stretching is serotonin. And people who have an intestinal disease that overproduces serotonin very often have that particular problem. Valve fibrosis and narrowing of the blood vessels. And so looking at the general diet, avoiding intestinal irritation will in many cases lower the exposure to serotonin in all of the tissues. And will especially protect the heart.
Some of the drugs that increase both serotonin and dopamine, both of those happen to intensify the production of fibrous tissue. So the SSRIs you're talking about here? Yeah, in particular. This is the worst. Currently very common medications. Things that cause inflammation generally. So aspirin is very protective against almost any kind of degenerative and fibrotic disease, even radiation exposure. Okay, so can I interrupt you for a second? You said that the valvular tissue that is subject to this fibrosis and causing eventual stenosis, as they call it, of the valve.
Is this serotonin actually produced within the cells of the valve or is this something that is more of a systemic circulating component? Nearly all the bodies' serotonin is produced in the intestine. It just happens to be rich in the type of cell that can produce it. And with a bad diet, those cells multiply and can even form tumors. But in the average person, about 95% of our serotonin comes from the intestine. And then it's carried in the platelets in the bloodstream. And the lung is where it's detoxified.
The platelets should not give up their serotonin until they reach the lungs. But with overwork or various things that produce inflammation, the whole lining of the circulatory system can be overexposed to serotonin. And the valve happens to get both the stretching and the chemical exposure. And hormonal situations that, for example, cause you to hyperventilate and not retain enough carbon dioxide will cause the platelets to dump out their serotonin and cause increased inflammation. So any systemic stress that causes a loss of carbon dioxide will increase that.
And diabetes happens to be a failure to oxidize sugar properly and instead turns sugar to lactic acid. And the lactic acid displaces the carbon dioxide and the loss of carbon dioxide causes serotonin exposure. Do you think that you could measure the serotonin on the breath as a marker of how stressed somebody is? I wonder if there's any easy... Do you know of any... Yeah, you can measure almost anything in the breath with the right apparatus. But since serotonin acts partly through the stimulation of nitric oxide in any cell that it's irritating,
the process of forming inflammation and fibrosis under the influence of serotonin involves the local increase of nitric oxide. And being a gas, nitric oxide is easy to see in the breath. And so they're analyzing a person's health just by measuring the amount of nitric oxide in the breath. Yeah, sounds like a pretty good way to get a measurement on it. Well, okay, they're very interesting. I think it's always good to refresh people's understanding, or at least their concepts to get changed by some new news about things.
And I know in the news they're always coming up with various studies and articles. It just takes a long time for it to get to the mainstream medical community. So again, go ahead. I've been seeing lots of advertisements for arginine supplements and related amino acids with the deliberate intention of increasing nitric oxide. That has derived from the pharmaceutical promotion of the idea that increased nitric oxide lowers blood pressure, restores youth and virility and so on. Viagra, for example, is supposed to increase your nitric oxide. But since nitric oxide is the mediator of inflammation and degeneration,
it's very good to avoid any of those supplements intended to increase it. Now, am I right in thinking I'm just misguided when I think about nitric oxide as a vasodilator and that's maybe why they are looking at it as a blood pressure? Yeah. But they're missing the point that the whole inflammatory cascade caused by nitric oxide is far worse than any perceived benefit of vasodilation. Yeah. There are other ways to dilate the blood vessels safely. Keeping your carbon dioxide up, for example, suppresses free radical damage and relaxes the blood vessels in a safe way
in proportion to the amount of circulation needed. So when your tissue is burning a lot of oxygen and sugar, it produces a lot of carbon dioxide, relaxes the blood vessels and opens them up. But nitric oxide is produced under irritation and things that produce inflammation. So when you get that kind of vasodilation, for example, scratching your skin, some people are very sensitive to getting a flare that turns red when you scratch the skin. That's largely nitric oxide release.
Okay. So they call that dermography, I don't know, where you can write on the skin as it were with your finger. So that's nitric oxide release from the mast cells or from dermal cells? Oh, I think it's largely the mast cells which also produce serotonin and histamine, which in turn activates nitric oxide. But the same thing happens invisibly when your intestine is irritated or when your heart valves are overstretched. Yeah, that's interesting. You talk about that whole stretching as being an irritation, inflammation, stroke, serotonin releasing or inducing type situation.
And the intestines, their prime function is to squeeze and move the food contents along from start to finish and so that area, you would imagine, comes under a lot of stretching activity. So that again, I wonder whether or not that is in part responsible for the serotonin production that you said happens principally in the gut. Yeah. When an experimenter is just looking at a piece of exposed intestine, they find that just gentle rubbing a finger across it causes serotonin release. Okay. Well, let's just remind people what's going on.
You're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMED Gallivoo 91.1 FM. And from 7.30 or indeed from now until the end of the show at 8 o'clock, you're invited to call in with any questions either related or unrelated to this month's wide-ranging subject of questions which we'll be working our way into some of the cholesterol myth and answering questions again from various interested people. So the number if you live in the area is, gosh, 93 3911. Or if you live outside the area, the 800 number is K1800, K-M-U-D-R-A-D.
Okay. So people are very welcome to call in any time now. So, Dr. Peat, cholesterol again. I don't mean to bore you. I know we've done several shows on cholesterol, but keep getting questions about cholesterol because there's such an entrenched dogma surrounding it. And my main question is I wonder why the doctors don't know any more about it because they all seem to be totally convinced that LDL versus HDL is the main problem and that actually atheroma and coronary artery in particular narrowing that whole coronary artery disease is caused by cholesterol.
And I know you have very different opinions about that and scientifically based opinions that I'm no validated. But what do you what do you what do you see with atherosclerosis, for example, and why is lowering cholesterol artificially a bad idea? In the 1950s, the seed oil industry knew that there was an inverse relation between eating a lot of unsaturated oil and cholesterol level and they on the basis of that to sell their oil, even though they were arguing that it was a natural food because of the idea that it contains essential fatty acids,
which at that time the essential fatty acid was linoleic acid and its animal extension arachidonic acid. But even though no one claimed that even if they were essential, that anyone would need more than a few hundred milligrams per day, they started selling the idea that since it lowers cholesterol, that it must be good for you if you eat an ounce or so a day and that much does lower cholesterol. But it is probably something like a toxic effect on the liver.
The liver, when it when the body senses a need for defense, a sense of stress, the liver and the intestine will increase their production of cholesterol because cholesterol as the precursor for the protective hormones, DHEA, pregnenolone and progesterone, as you increase the circulating cholesterol, you increase the production of these defensive hormones. So if you are poisoned, your body produces more cholesterol and thus more pregnenolone, progesterone and DHEA. And if for 70 or 80 years now, it's been demonstrated over and over that any poison you can think of,
if you inject intravenously cholesterol, it's an antidote for everything from arsenic to cobra venom. It protects red cells against breaking down and so on, but it protects every cell in the body and practically at every imaginable level from the stability of chromosomes and DNA to the stability of the mitotic cell division apparatus to the so-called membrane or cytarchitecture that holds the cell together. It's a stabilizing factor at every imaginable level of the cell. Okay, I don't mean to cut you short and I will pick up this after these next callers posted their questions to you,
but we have a caller on the line. So let's just start by taking this first caller. Caller, you're on the air and where are you calling from? Hi, I'm calling from New Jersey. Okay, hi, welcome to the show. Hi. I'm really floored by what you just said. My question was totally off topic and a very different one, but I guess I'd also like to know just responding to what Dr. Peat just said, where would one get injectable cholesterol? I mean, and I'm not being flippant.
That's just for experiments, but you can increase your cholesterol by optimizing your nutrition. Orange juice is a very practical way to increase your cholesterol, which many people are surprised at. There were experiments in which people, medical students, ate as many as 20 eggs a day or egg yolks and couldn't raise their cholesterol. But if you have low cholesterol, some sugars such as orange juice will usually bring it up to normal. Wow. So what was your initial question? That was a very direct answer to my question. Now, the question I called about was very, very different.
Can magnets be used for bioregeneration? And if your answer is yes, how could we use them effectively? And I'm going to say thank you and I'm going to sign off and listen to you all. Thank you. Thanks for your question. To use what? Magnets for bioremediation. I think she said regeneration. Regeneration, beg your pardon. Bioregeneration. So do you know anything about magnets and their application for bioregeneration? Yeah, in the 1960s, I was reading on the subject and I was so interested in a Russian researcher's work.
Yuri Holodov had demonstrated that the gonads and the brain are extremely sensitive to magnetic fields. And since those were the tissues that I was most interested in investigating, I went to Russia to talk to him. Wow. He said the politicians were very encouraging for giving foreigners their latest information. But he gave me just an amazingly complete bibliography, which when I got back to the U.S., I found a lot of those sources.
And so I learned that there was a really good foundation for being able to sense magnetic fields and for them to have effects on the brain and the gonads in particular. And a scientific reason. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Madeline Barnacy and her husband, that was one of the books he referred me to. What was the name of the authors? Sorry. Barnacy, B-A-R-N-O-T-H-Y. My American professors had never heard of the field at all. And Salko Tromp, a Dutchman, T-R-O-M-P, who invented the whole field of medical biometeorology practically in the 1930s and '40s.
He was aware of the biological sensitivity of organisms to magnetic fields and his work on the nervous system probably gave the computer people the idea of how to use liquid crystals in display systems and such. So he was like 30, 40 years ahead of most technologists. Wow. I don't know how you come up with this stuff, Dr. Peake. This is completely unrehearsed, folks. I promise you I never had this question prepared. And you've blown me away with what you mentioned about going to Russia. That's far out.
Anyway, I hope that I'm not quite sure if you fully answered your caller's question there or if you had anything else to add. If you didn't, it doesn't matter. OK, so, yeah, totally, totally can be used. Interesting field of science that you've looked into yourself. I'm really grateful for that. I think, do we have any other callers on the air? Let me just get the attention. Yeah, we do. One more caller. So let's take this caller. And you're on the air. Where are you from? Hello. Am I on the air?
Yeah, you're on the air. Where are you from? I'm from Arcata. OK. Very good. Hi. Hi, Dr. Peake. I've been listening to you for a few years. Randomly, I hear the show and I'm usually only listening halfway. I apologize. And it seems like I need to listen fully to comprehend what you're talking about. I just, I don't think you can fully explain all of it to me right now because it seems a lot of it is contradictory to the mainstream health propaganda or whatever it is.
But could you just explain the part about the serotonin not being a beneficial thing? Because it seems like we get a lot of how beneficial serotonin is for just, you know, thinking happy thoughts and stuff. And now I'm hearing from you that it's not really good to have serotonin. So I'm a little confused about that. If you could just simplify something for me in that way. My website has two or three articles that touch on points of the history of serotonin.
And I think a lot of it came when they, in the 1960s, realized that it was an antagonist to LSD in many ways. And the government demonized LSD, took it out of use as a drug or medication and turned it into a danger that was driving people crazy. And so the drug industry, knowing that serotonin antagonized LSD, I think they took advantage of that and said that if LSD makes you crazy, then serotonin is the good guy.
And before that, people who studied the intestinal tumor that overproduces serotonin, psychosis and aggression and anxiety were outstanding features of their psychotic state from being flooded with huge amounts of serotonin. So I think it had to be the reverse psychology of being an LSD antagonist that led to the idea that it's a happy drug. So why do so many people that take Prozac, for example, think that they're not depressed anymore when they... Those drugs, besides in many cases increasing the exposure to serotonin, their beneficial effects seem to be from many other things that they do.
For example, typically they will increase several of the so-called transmitter substances, but their beneficial effect corresponds to the increasing brain progesterone and other steroids. So the irritation in the brain increases the production of these steroids and the mood lift comes when your brain progesterone and pregnenolone are increasing. Okay, well, thanks. I'll look on your website. Okay, thank you for your call. So yeah, Dr. Peat, you've mentioned many times that serotonin itself is an inflammatory mediator, an anti-life, an antioxidant type molecule in terms of its inflammation.
Yeah, each of these things has its local effect. We seem to have inherited them from very simple life stages. Everyone, even plants and single-celled organisms, use or respond to most of these things. But for example, in the intestine, if you eat something really dangerous, the inflammation causes a surge of serotonin, which causes spasms and secretion and creates diarrhea. And vomiting. Get rid of it. So it's very functional in the acute sense. Over a matter of hours, it will save you from absorbing too much of a poisonous food.
But if it becomes chronic, things like irritable bowel syndrome involve a chronic overproduction of serotonin. Interesting. It stimulates cell division. So when the blood vessels are constantly being -- if you spill it out of your platelets and expose the blood vessels to it, it stimulates growth. So it thickens the walls of the blood vessels as well as makes them leaky so that anything like circulating proteins in the blood can leak into the tissues. The barrier between the blood and the brain, for example, is broken down by serotonin and nitric oxide.
Okay. Well, let's just refresh listeners' minds about the calling number if they'd like to do so. You're listening to Ask Your Ob-Doctor on KMUD Gallivood Road, 91.1 FM. If you live in the area, the number is 707-923-3911. Or if you're outside the area, there's a toll-free number, which is 1-800-KMUD-RAD. We're very pleased to be joined by Dr. Raymond Peat this evening. So, Dr. Peat, I've got some more questions from other people that want to pose this question. But I'll tell you what, the engineers just said that the phones are ringing.
So let's take this next caller on the air. You're on the air. Where are you from? Locally here from Garville area. Been here 42 years. I listen to the show as often as I can, and I just want to thank you, gentlemen, for putting out the straight skinny on what's going down medically in this country. And, Dr. Peat, you're just a goldmine of information, sir. Isn't he?
And the question I have is, I've called in before on my Crohn's disease, and I've had five major military surgeries and moving all but about six, seven feet of my intestines. I have a double ostomy where small intestine and large intestine come to the outside of my body. And slowing my bowel down enough to be able to assimilate food and liquid has been a major problem of mine. And presently, I've tried a lot of different things. I even tried an antihistamine that you recommended once.
And presently, the only thing that seems to work quite well is opiates. And, of course, being on maximum opiates with the military for years, I mean, six, 700 milligrams of morphine a day in time release, which, you know, half the pills go through your body without even being dissolved. I've gone to much lower levels, 4 milligram tablets of the lot of them, about 200 a month. I was wondering, as long as this seems to be working, do you think I should stick with this?
I might mention, too, that I have no other symptoms of Crohn's anymore. And you aren't having any side effects from the opiates? No, I don't seem to have any side effects at all. I don't even get high from them. I don't get warm and fuzzy or anything like that. It just seems to slow the bowel down enough. Instead of my short, small intestine cycling at maybe 45 minutes, it'll slow it down to maybe 3 1/2, 4 hours. You know, the whole process of my food going through.
Hmm, interesting. What do you think of that, Dr. Peat? It sounds like he's adapted very well to the opiates. But have you had thorough hormone tests, blood tests, for things that might be related? I've had numerous blood tests done. In fact, for years now, because of missed medical management with the VA, which I left, and I'm now with local Red River Rural Health Center, they were always taking 6-8 bottles of blood out of me every 2 months or so.
And I went through cycles of having to go in for saline solution to bring up my hydration level 4-5 times during the summer. Now, for the last year and a half since this FPN, physician-assisted, has been listening to me, because I've had Crohn's disease for almost 30 years now. And consequently, I know more about Crohn's and the side effects of this disease and what drugs do to my body than most medical people do, even gastrointestinologists that I've talked with.
And so this FPN has been to me, as far as absorbing information from me, feedback from a patient. And we've tried this, and so far this seems to be working quite well. So I've been wanting to stick with it. When I see a regular MD, he maybe wants to take me off it and put me on some cyclamine. And of course, that does nothing for my osteoporosis or arthritis pain, and it does nothing for a night cough that I have from emphysema from laying down.
So I'm actually attacking 3 different symptoms of old body disease with just one drug, so to speak. And all of my blood levels seem to be fairly in balance. I try to take any amendments I can, as much in liquid forms. I take a liquid B-complex, and then I take a couple thousand units of D a day, and I take some E. And I use blackstrap molasses as a source of minerals. About two tablespoons of that a day seems to really mineralize my body fairly well. And how much calcium and magnesium are you getting?
I eat at least two pints, half pints rather, of yogurt every day. So I do take a little bit of milk and coffee, but that's not really a good source of calcium. But I think the yogurt helps with my gut and plurin fauna, and it gives me a source of calcium too. I can't seem to find liquid calcium, so I don't take hard pills if I can help it, because they just pretty much don't do that much good. What about cheese? About what, sir? Cheese as a source of calcium. I'm a coffee drinker pretty much.
I use that for a diuretic to keep my kidneys functioning. I find that by drinking coffee, it has a tendency to pull water out of my gut into my bloodstream. And of course, I have only half of a bladder now because of intestinal alterations to the bladder in former years, and of course I had to remove part of that. But Dr. Peat is suggesting cheese as for calcium. Yeah, I didn't know that cheese really contained that much calcium, and I'm pretty astute that way.
I'm sure you can give it a try. I'm going to look into it. I know that. I think vitamin K and vitamin D would help you retain calcium, but you probably aren't getting enough calcium. Coffee is a good source of magnesium. Right. Yeah, well, I'm going to definitely take your advice, Dr. Peat, because you sure you didn't blow off the turnip truck yesterday. And I want to thank you so much for that suggestion. Okay, thank you for your call, Guy. And we do have another one on the air, so let's give this person their go.
Caller, you're on the air, and where are you from? I'm from here, Southern Humboldt. Okay. And I wanted to see what kind of tea for calcium was recommended, and also if there was anything for blood pressure that goes up and down. It goes high, and then it goes low, and is there something to regulate that? Yeah, just to clarify the last caller, it was cheese. So this is as in the fermented dairy cheese for calcium, because it's rich in milk. So anyway, your next question about -- Okay, cheese, not tea. Yeah, cheese. Okay.
Okay, so as far as your blood pressure question is concerned, Dr. Peat, for cyclic kind of variations and fluctuations of blood pressure, that's also in keeping with some of this -- tonight's topic with vasoconstriction and dilation and the regulation of that. What advice do you have for that? Well, all the minerals we've been talking about, fruit juice, very well-cooked green leaves, cheese and milk, orange juice is a good source of things besides the minerals. But vitamin D and vitamin K help to regulate all of the minerals, really, but especially calcium and magnesium.
And a big dose of vitamin K, it's now available in oily form without any harmful excipients so that you can get a milligram per drop. And big doses have been able to correct osteoporosis, not just slow its progress, but reverse it. And at the same time, it takes calcium out of the blood vessels and tends to correct hypertension. And by regulating your energy metabolism, it might even help to prevent episodes of low blood pressure. It works with coenzyme Q10 to maintain oxidative metabolism in mitochondria.
So it's not the simple clotting vitamin that it's medically known as. It's a brain repair, blood vessel repair, bone repair, and actually can prevent excess clotting. You know, that was one of my other questions, and I was going to ask you why doctors are so against vitamin K. I've had several people that we've worked with have been using it, and their doctors have been completely against it. They were taught in medical school that K stands for clot, and that if you take vitamin K, you will increase blood clotting.
That's what they all say. They all say it's going to increase your clotting, and they get very concerned, especially if they're patients using warfarin or other blood-thinning drugs. Yeah, but the blood clot system is incredibly complicated, and two of the essential factors are called protein C and protein S, and they happen to prevent abnormal coagulation, and you can't make them without vitamin K. They're involved not just in preventing clots but in many other cell functions. So you said that a big dose of vitamin K, what would that be for daily use?
Well, I know several people who used around 50 milligrams per day for one person who had a chronic steady blood pressure of 220 over 70, a tremendous gap between the top and bottom numbers, in two or three weeks was down to 140 over 70. One person who was taking a drug to prevent hypertension started on similar doses, and within a couple of weeks, his blood pressure was getting too low, so he had to stop his drug. Okay. Okay, thank you.
We do have -- thank you for your call, caller. Thank you for your question, Ralph the caller. We've got two other people on the line, so I just want to wait and see if we can get these people. Hi, you're on the air. Where are you from? Hello. Hi. I'm from Phil here in Southern Humboldt. Hi. I've got two questions, one about the vitamin -- hello? Yeah, you're on the air. Okay, one about the vitamin K. I'm taking Prodaxa right now as a blood thinner because I have a situation with atrial fibrillation,
and I was taking a calcium that had vitamin K in it and other things that helped you absorb the calcium, but the lady at the health food store said that vitamin K thins the blood, so if you're taking a blood thinner already, it might be too much. You know, it might be too much of a blood thinner to take the vitamin K. What do you think about that? No, I've never heard of that. So you think that it's okay to take the vitamin K as well as the blood thinner?
I think so. It's good to have your blood clotting system checked periodically, though, if you're taking a warfarin-type -- I'm taking Prodaxa. I didn't notice that there was a problem. Like, you know, a couple times I've cut myself, and, you know, my blood seemed to coagulate just fine, I think, even while I was taking the calcium with the vitamin K, but I ran out of it and I was going to get some new, and the lady was warning me about it. But you think it's all right? Because it does help you absorb calcium, doesn't it?
Well, it helps regulate calcium in all the systems. I'm not sure about the absorption in your intestine, but it puts it into your bones and keeps it from going into your arteries. Oh, well, that's good. Now, the other thing I wanted to ask is I heard on -- oh, it was probably Dr. Oz or something on TV about -- that we all know that inflammation is bad, causes a lot of problems, and he was saying that sugar causes inflammation, that it's best to not eat sugar or simple carbohydrates because that exacerbates inflammation.
What do you say to that? No, there are a couple articles on my website about sugar, and since sugar involves insulin to handle it, it's hard to tell which is responsible, but the combination of sugar and insulin is definitely anti-inflammatory. Anti-inflammatory? It's traditionally -- in Africa, for example, when antibiotics weren't available and in some war situations they found that packing just plain white sugar into an injury facilitates healing and not only prevents infection, but it prevents scar formation, and that's a very basic illustration that -- Well, that's topical, but what about in your body?
Does it affect a lot of sugar? It doesn't cause inflammation, which would aggravate things like arthritis and other things? No, the combination of insulin and sugar suppresses some of the inflammatory things, such as nitric oxide. A diabetic is unable to oxidize sugar, and so diabetes and hypoglycemia have in common the promotion of inflammatory mediators, cytokines of various sorts, including nitric oxide. So you can either do something to lower your blood sugar too much or block its use, as in diabetes. Both of those situations turn on inflammation, and the normal use of sugar is definitely anti-inflammatory.
Well, how much would you say is a normal use? There's so much controversy around sugar. I happen to like to drink fruit juice without added sugar, but there's a lot of natural sugar in fruit juice, and people are always telling me I drink too much juice and it's got too much sugar in it and that that's not good. Well, in the form of juice, since the juices will always have minerals, especially potassium, there were experiments in which sugar disposition was followed,
and they looked at the factors that were causing cells to be able to use the glucose effectively, and it turned out that potassium was more involved in handling glucose than insulin was. And since fruit juice always has a lot of potassium, you don't need nearly as much insulin secretion to handle the sugar. So the story that it's going to disturb your blood sugar is very inaccurate. Eating a piece of bread is much more disturbing to your insulin and blood sugar system than drinking a similar number of calories as fruit juice.
So if I wanted to limit my calories, it would be better to limit carbohydrates and keep up with the juice and not eliminate the juice? Yeah, the juices are basically more nutritious than the starches. Even if they're cooked? You know, most juices aren't raw. Yeah, that's okay. Does that make a difference? Not much. Do you mean pasteurized? Yeah, yeah. I drink the good juices like Newtson and Santa Cruz Organic, which don't have any added sugar, but I think they are pasteurized.
Something like Ardwalla is fresh, frozen, so it has a little bit more, closer to a raw juice. I don't juice my own juices. I'm going to actually have to call both of you in. I'm afraid it's getting to be almost two minutes to the top of the hour. Oh, okay. Sorry about that. No, no, you're very welcome. Well, thank you for calling. Okay, bye. For the other person that's waiting on the line, I'm afraid we won't be able to take your call. But Dr. Raymond Peat, thank you so much for your time again.
I really appreciate all of your contribution to the show, and I know all the people that got a response from you have certainly got information. And for those people who never had a chance to answer a call, then next, the third Friday of every month. So, Dr. Peat, thanks so much for your time. I'll give out your information. Okay, thanks. Okay, so for those people who've listened to Dr. Raymond Peat for the first time, or those people who perhaps heard of him anyway, his website is a very good source of material, fully referenced scientific material,
which will give you the facts and not the, I don't know what you want to call it, but just hear us say it's factual scientific information. His website is www.raypeat.com, R-A-Y-P-E-A-T, full of articles, well worth listening and reading. He's been doing this for nearly 40 years. Okay, so for people that have called in tonight, thanks so much for participating in the show. It's completely unstaged. I don't know who's going to call, what they're going to ask questions about, but this evening's show was very interesting with Dr. Peat going to Russia. That was a corker.
Okay, so for those people who would like to get in touch with us Monday through Friday, we have a toll-free number, 1-888-WBM-ERB. Okay, so thanks so much for listening and being part of the show. We hope you got some good information from it and you've got something to think about. So until the third Friday of next month, good night. Thank you, Doc. [Music] Another highly informative episode of Ask Your Herb Doctor. [Music] My favorite talk show on the mud. I can't deny it.
I came to thank Jessica Baker of Jade Dragon Acupuncture for her support of Redwood Community Radio. Practicing traditional Chinese medicine, Jessica treats conditions ranging from psoriasis to post-traumatic stress. Located at 607 F Street, Arcata, Jade Dragon Acupuncture can be reached at 822-4300, online at jadedragonacupuncture.com. This is Redwood Community Radio, KMUD Garberville. Please remember that this program is supported by the listener members of Redwood Community Radio. If you like what you hear, please consider becoming a member of KMUD or renewing if you've already joined. A regular yearly membership is $50, but we accept any amount.
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