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"Here it is." Broadcasting from the beautiful Hill Country in Texas, this is one RadioNetwork.com. Well, we're happy to tell you that for the time being, until he doesn't want to do it anymore because he has free will, Dr. Peat says, "Yeah, I can come on once a month." And we're going to do the first or the third Tuesday, and that's today. So we're excited about that. Thank you, Dr. Peat. Dr. Ray Peat, PhD, University of Oregon. He's specialization in physiology. Started his work with hormones back in 1968.
Man, that's when I started in radio in the Navy. '68. I'll be darned. He wrote his dissertation in '72, which he outlined his ideas on progesterone. Progesterone. And the hormones closely related to this. Something else clicked. I want to make sure you're on. You're on, sir? Yes. Hi. Hi. Good morning. Good morning. Have we had our coffee today? Yep. Had two cups already. Wow. Wow. What time do you generally get up? Oh, generally 8.30. And you live on the West Coast, huh? Yeah. Yeah. You lived down in Mexico for a while? Oh, yeah.
Years down there. The first time I went down was 1955 for summer school studying painting. Many times since then. And had a school down there for a few years, like college. Were you taught? Yeah. It was an experimental college from 1961 to '65. And what kind of things were you teaching down there? It was intended to be in sort of open curriculum in which teachers could teach anything they wanted and students could study anything they wanted. And the student would propose an idea and try to get teachers interested or the teacher
would give a lecture and see what the students thought. College level? University level? Yeah. Uh-huh. What kind of things were the students most interested in? What is that, 40 years ago? Wow. 50 years ago. Literature, philosophy, and painting. Really? It was sort of a matter of who the teachers were, I think. Yeah. Do you still spend time painting now? Oh, yeah. Almost every day. Really? Yeah. What kind of things do you paint? Oh, a few landscapes, lots of faces and figures. Sort of integrating figures in the landscapes. Oh.
That must be a nice meditative thing to do for you. It is. It constantly gets me out of the words from reading too much. Yeah. That'll do it. I don't know how your head explodes now. Not explodes, but... Talk a little bit about your research now, your ongoing research, finding research that you think is valuable, to even retain that information. How do you do that? I have a general thought in mind, understanding how everything works. And things that don't fit the established theories or paradigm just stick with me.
Some of them, for 50 or 60 or 70 years, have been in the back of my mind. And that was what finally shifted my main activity from painting and literature to biology, was these unanswered questions that no one was working on. And currently, the idea is around the idea of stress and energy and structural development. There's a young professor at MIT, Jeremy England, who a few years ago proposed a new way of looking at the origin of life, rather than being governed by chance.
The really kind of silly idea that is behind neo-Darwinism, that everything is random, that life developed by chance. Jeremy England is saying that the flow of energy, very quickly, on a time scale relative to the conventional beliefs, very quickly will create order, and that the order will begin self-organizing. His idea really is just a new mathematical version of the Russian Vernadsky, who started that same idea at the end of the 19th century and tried to convince, he applied for research support at two or three American universities, who told him to go away.
But he was integrating the development of soil with the development of organisms in the context of the continuing flow of energy from the sun. And he showed very clearly why organisms develop big brains, simply responding to the flow of energy from the sun. Oh, and that's how the evolutionary, that's how we evolved, is what he argues. That's how we as a species... Yeah, but my interest is in how it governs development from the ovum up through the adult form. It's really the same sort of principle, that it's the flow of energy ultimately derived
from the sun in the form of the sugar made by plants, and then the sugar which the mother consumes is provided to the fertilized ovum, and in proportion to the oxygen and sugar, basically the source of energy and the recipient of the energy on oxygen. It's that flow from glucose to oxygen that shapes the human organism or any animal organism. And it follows that same principle that the flow of energy through the system creates order. And those observations that have been sitting around for a hundred years are just now starting
to show up again in the science culture with people like Jeremy England. So would that argue then that the energy, whatever this energy is that drives everything called spirit or whatever, has an order to it? It is an orderly energy. Yeah, and that's what really went wrong with Neo-Darwinism. They were horrified by the idea of spirit guiding things. So they said, "No, it's all blind and random. Matter is utterly stupid and mindless." And the alternative is that matter isn't alien to spirit. That matter isn't alien to spirit.
So it would pretend then that we can utilize spirit, this energy, to our greater good and to everyone's greater good, becoming more conscious of what he's arguing, right? What Mr. England's arguing. It implies that there's a basic goodness in existence. Yes. I like that. It feels right. I mean, that spirit, we take all the beautiful attributes of goodness and love and abundance and beauty, right? Balance. All those words, it feels like that's what spirit's really made out of, if you had to describe it on a game show or something. Yes.
And philosophers, since before Plato's time, have been under that. It's fairly continuous through philosophy and all the cultures. And it's only this fairly recent Neo-Darwinist worldview that has put things off the track. So I don't really understand Neo-Darwism. What is it exactly? What are they arguing, the Neo-Darwinists? The basic horrible assumption is that the universe is random. How random? And that variation happens only by chance. And so they see evolution as something involving roughly a billion years. But Sidney Fox, a biologist about 40, 50 years ago, doubted that time scale had any reality.
And he put, instead of thinking of random changes in a primordial soup of an ocean, he said, "What if it was just volcanic energy, like these volcanic vents under the ocean?" Yeah, just coming up. "What if it was very high temperature?" He took some hot lava and dropped some amino acids on it, and then splashed water on the hot rock and amino acids, and looked under the microscope, and he had what looked like bacteria, and in an afternoon he developed a process so that high school students could
create self-replicating, energy-consuming cell-like structures in an afternoon lab class. So basically he demonstrated that chance is not at all involved in making proteins and DNA. He added the bases that are used in making up DNA and RNA, and these protein microspheres, self-organizing, integrated and made chains, made DNA-like chains out of the base precursors. So it's sort of a self-guiding, or cosmically guided process rather than random chance over time. Yeah, somewhat more like maybe free will and God's will, or maybe the same thing in a way. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow, that's pretty cool stuff.
So on the bacterial level, we always hear about how much bacteria. We've been talking a bit about parasites, Dr. Peat, in the last couple of weeks. As a biologist, are we just a lot, is there just a lot of bacteria everywhere in our body that our body is really made up of a lot of bacteria? How does that work? No, but they can coexist with us harmlessly. One of the people I got interested in in the 1940s, one of these anomalies that has been excluded from biology and medicine was Frederick Koch.
He developed a cancer treatment about 1915 to 1920. He was a professor at the University of Michigan, and the AMA didn't like his attitude. So after one or two papers were published describing his work treating cancer successfully, no one would publish any more of his papers. He lived decades after that doing his own work, but he was written out of science and medicine. And he showed that the treatment that he used for cancer patients worked for infections, and it worked simply by activating the oxidative energy system, restoring mitochondrial energy
production, which activated the immune system and prevented inflammation. And in the process, it made any bacteria which were present, made them harmless by providing them what they needed, preventing stress to the bacteria at the same time that it prevented stress to the host organism. Some of his followers in Canada tested his materials on cows with infected udders, mastitis, and showed that they could demonstrate the infecting organisms coming out in the milk. And when the cow was treated, their oxidative metabolism improved, and the infection disappeared.
Their udder became uninflamed and normal, but the number of bacteria present increased. The bacteria had become harmless and thrived without hurting the organism at all. So what does that mean for us when we think about oxidative stress? It's exactly the wrong idea. People in the 1960s had already demonstrated that it was a wrong approach, but for 50 years, the mainstream has gone crazy on the idea of preventing oxidative stress with antioxidants. Vitamin C was sort of a cultural icon, the basic antioxidant, but in cells, it is present in an oxidized form.
I experienced this myself in the 1960s. I decided to stop eating all vitamin C-rich foods or supplements and analyzed the amount of vitamin C in my urine. It dropped slightly, but I was still putting out 2,000 milligrams a day in my urine weeks after I had stopped eating any, and that got me interested in what's going on energetically and oxidatively with the vitamin C. Where was it coming from? Meat and milk turn out to have a lot of vitamin C in them, but it isn't present in the form that the ordinary tests can detect.
In meat, it's almost all, ten times more vitamin C is present in the form of dehydroascorbate, a fully oxidized form of the molecule rather than ascorbic acid. So the tests simply are blind to the amount of vitamin C in our diet because they think it should be in the reducing antioxidant form, but it functions in the cell as an oxidant protecting against oxidative damage by maintaining normal oxidation, which is the flow of electrons all the way down to oxygen. As long as the oxygen is sucking up the excess electrons, they won't go wrong and produce
damage. So you want to intensify normal oxidation. If you cut off the oxygen supply, that's where you get the so-called oxidative damage because the reductive pressure, the excess of electrons, shifts senders like ion atoms. It reduces them, gives them an extra electron, which they will donate to just about anything, including water, making the water toxic. So when you cut off the oxygen as the oxidizing source, then water becomes a random oxidizer and you get what they call oxidative damage, but it's really the result of just exactly the opposite, too much reduction for our oxidative capacity.
So what's that sounds, that's pretty geeky. I wasn't able to follow all of it. So what's the takeaway for us, our listeners, and with vitamin C, say, example. So you say our body, we're making all that we need? No, but we're getting it from unsuspected sources. Unsuspected sources like the meat and milk? Yeah, meat and milk and eggs, all the organism is making it themselves and having it right inside their cells, but in an oxidized form, which is stabilizing their oxidative system. So it's stabilizing their oxidative system and it goes in as an oxidative form.
So that is no way detrimental to us, right? No, that's the form we use. That's the form we use. But that's not the form that the scientists say, you got to have so much vitamin C and blah, blah, blah and oranges and whatever. Yeah, they're saying it acts as an antioxidant, but its real function is as an oxidant. The system where proteins are put together in the cell, they call it the endoplasmic reticulum, but it's just a location or system that forms proteins.
One of vitamin C's main functions is to keep the oxidized state there for folding the proteins properly, keeping the sulfur atoms in the proteins in a ready to be oxidized state to lock the protein into a stable condition. Without the vitamin C, the protein folding goes wrong and too many electrons, too little oxygen will overwhelm that oxidizing function of the vitamin C. So what happens when folks take ascorbic acid or other forms of vitamin C supplementation? What goes on in the body?
If it's the right amount in a well-nourished person, it goes into the cell and is used as a dehydroascorbate and some of it circulating as the reduced form will protect as an antioxidant. It will, for example, put mercury into a reduced form which isn't dangerous, but it also can put iron and copper into a reduced form which is dangerous in those molecules. In the Journal of Free Radical Chemistry, I think it was about 20 or 30 years ago, someone noticed that there were trace impurities even of iron in commercial pure reagent grade or
USP grade vitamin C. He put, I think it was a gram of it in a liter of multiply distilled very pure water and then put that in a machine that detects free radicals, electron spin resonance and showed that if an x-ray machine had been producing that amount of free radicals, it would have been enough to kill an organism in a few seconds. But he said that shows something about our organism that we can eat a gram of vitamin C without dying of free radical poisoning as if x-rayed to death.
But it was the trace elements of heavy metals apparently causing the production of free radicals with that concentrated vitamin C in the body that's quickly disposed of and the vitamin C is eliminated as a reductant and turned into a protective oxidant. So the takeaway for you, do you take any extra vitamin C supplementation? No, I stopped in 1967 or '68. I used to stop, nothing at all. And I stopped having a habitual cough right after I stopped taking the vitamin C and so
after that one I would see someone with a habitually runny nose or cough, I would suggest they stop the vitamin C and it generally worked almost always. Is that right? Man, from the motion picture nothing is as it seems. Just curious. So much talk about different things on the planet these days, isn't there? It's pretty fun. We've been discussing the vitamin D thing and we talked to Professor Michael Hollick at MIT, he's a pretty cool guy. He was on the show and Stephanie Sinef was on and she had an idea.
You know, Hollick, I think his takeaway thing was you should take about, I don't know, what 6 to 10,000 units would be a reasonable thing. And Dr. Sinef, she was just wondering and she wasn't basing this on any science but she was really curious that does the supplemental vitamin D actually do something totally different than what the sun does as far as helping us. So I'd like to get your thoughts on vitamin D in general. I think she's very wrong and he's very right. Oh really? Okay.
He has pretty much turned the culture around on the issue of vitamin D. I think its main function, not the calcium bone building function that they talk about, I think its even more basic function is that it reduces the parathyroid hormone and the parathyroid hormone is an activator of the kidney production of what they call activated vitamin D, 1,25-hydroxy. The one they measure, the one they measure on the blood test. Well sometimes they measure that but the usual one they measure is 25-hydroxy.
And they call the one made in the kidney the activated vitamin D and people who study that go off on a separate line of thinking. But several years ago a mutant mouse was found that aged very fast in all of the standard ways, osteoporosis, dementia, wrinkles, gray hair and so on. And the mutant gene was called Clotho or Clotho after a Greek goddess or some mythological figure. And the Clotho gene now is recognized as a regulator of calcium metabolism and it has an anti-parathyroid hormone effect in many parts of the system.
And the vitamin D that we take or that we get from the sunlight works to reinforce Clotho, the anti-aging gene or protein and at the same time it's lowering the parathyroid hormone. And in the process it lowers the so-called active vitamin D. And I think the failure to look at the relation of the so-called active vitamin D to the circulating 25-hydroxy form and see how that compares to all of these indicators of health that have been neglected, not just the bones, but the rate of aging.
And that will help people to unravel things and see why the strange range of health issues that Holick talks about, how they really fit together. And it all has to do with this reductive oxidative balance, the flow of energy. And the parathyroid hormone rises when we're deficient, when our diet is deficient in calcium and magnesium and vitamin D or we aren't getting enough sunlight. And it's part of an emergency system that creates tissue repair and regeneration on an emergency scale that diverts energy from the long-range purpose of the organism.
The overriding large purpose is to be conscious. The emergency purpose is to repair tissue damage. And these hormones, such as parathyroid hormone, are working on the emergency scale and diverting energy from our big biological function, consciousness. And an example, many people have noticed that after doing surgery, for example, someone with a kidney disease, if they remove their parathyroid glands, they will have a remarkable improvement in their health without these supposedly essential glands. Because on, I think it was mice, maybe rats, anyway, a rodent, about a fourth of the way
through their pregnancy, about five days pregnant, they removed the mother's parathyroid glands, so the baby's developed pretty much in the absence of that hormone. And then several generations later, as much as eight or ten generations later, these offspring of that one exposure to a great deficiency of parathyroid hormone, these animals were fertile in old age, at the age that normal rats have become sterile and ready to die. The old rats, descendant of the parathyroid deficient mother, were still working and reproducing. So what are we learning from this then?
Let's break this down a little bit to better understand the vitamin D thing. So are you on board then, agreeing with Hollick, where you're saying at the end of the day, maybe six to ten thousand vitamin D supplement would be a reasonable thing. He also said that if you look at the 25-hydroxy on the blood test, that the upper scale would be preferable to him as far as the lower scale. I think the range, Dr. Peter, is somewhere between 30 and 100 on the blood test?
Yeah, I think the upper end of the scale is right, 80 maybe. So you kind of go along with him, where you think an 80 thing might be better served for humans to be around in that level. Yeah, 50 to 80, I think there's pretty consistent evidence that that's good. How is it, I wonder, a fellow like me, I get out in the sun every day, every day, every day. I just do. I just love sitting out there, especially midday, with no clothes and stuff.
My level was like 38 when I took it about a month ago, which is kind of on the lower end. How can I explain that to myself? The older you get, the less cholesterol there is in your skin. Oh, your cholesterol. Yeah, basically a cholesterol deficiency in the skin that makes older people need much, much more sunlight. Oh, so you can take more and you're not absorbing as much. Yeah, there just isn't as much cholesterol in the skin to be turned into vitamin D. Right, okay. So that's the whole mechanism of the cholesterol.
But my cholesterol level is way up high in good ones, but it's just maybe has left my skin a little bit. Yeah, the skin aging. So I wonder then if I would take supplemental D, would that number go up and would that be a good thing for someone like me and other people? Cholesterol can be rubbed into the skin and helps restore the youthful function. Oh, you mean to do it more normally than taking the supplements? I don't know of any good sources of pure cholesterol, but rubbing it into the skin, slight impurities
aren't likely to be as much risk as taking it orally. Oh, I wonder what you would use pure cholesterol, I don't even know if it's possible. Just eat meat and eggs, right? Yeah, eggs are a very good source of cholesterol. So what is it doing when the levels are good on the 25-hydroxy test at the levels 50 to 60, like you and Alejandro are proponents of, what's that doing for the bodies of the people that have those levels? It's on one side of the research, it's helping the clotho protein to work, but the side that
I've been paying more attention to is lowering the parathyroid hormone, which is the other side of the rising function of the clotho. All kinds of stress increase to a toxic effect the parathyroid hormone. A deficiency of salt or sodium in your diet or the inability to retain sodium properly causes the parathyroid hormone to rise the same way a calcium deficiency does. And so the adrenals under stress or especially in a sodium salt deficiency, the adrenals produce aldosterone at a higher level and aldosterone directly blocks your mitochondrial
energy production and increases the parathyroid hormone activity, which itself functions by blocking your mitochondrial oxidation and making up for it with glycolytic energy production, which shifts you over into the reductive stress, the failure of oxidation. How does the parathyroid hormone lowering and raising tied in with the TSH levels that people get on the thyroid test? TSH is increased by stress hormones. So a person with low thyroid doesn't make their oxygen turn into carbon dioxide. They don't have the carbon dioxide needed to retain sodium, and so they lose sodium.
That activates the adrenals to produce aldosterone, and the aldosterone interferes with the mitochondria and increases parathyroid hormone. The TSH being activated by stress is a signal of stress as well as being a product of stress. The TSH goes around irritating or creating inflammation, for example, in the blood vessels, tending to work with parathyroid hormone. Parathyroid hormone shifts calcium out of the bones into the blood vessels, and TSH in excess works in that same direction, calcifying the blood vessels, increasing blood pressure. So the traditional recognition that hypothyroid people with the diagnostic high TSH, hypothyroidism
goes with a great risk of hypertension and related diseases, but it turns out that it's the TSH directly creating much of that damage to the circulatory system, and it has inflammation promoting effects in the bone marrow. Everywhere it has been studied, it has a tissue irritating effect. So the stress condition creating more adrenaline and cortisol, for example, these can compensate. The hormones will suppress the TSH and reduce inflammation, so that the stress which is creating the hypothyroid need for more thyroid production, tending to increase TSH, it will
also produce more cortisol and adrenaline to lower the TSH defensively. So in the defensive condition, you will look like your thyroid is normal because the cortisol is holding the TSH down, protecting against inflammation, but it makes TSH useless as an indicator of your thyroid status because it's just as much an indicator of your stress status. Wow, boy, really tricky business. So when folks are taking, say, a little bit of Nathriathroid or one of those guys, and they're getting their TSH level to lower, they're on the right path, they're doing good things, right?
Yeah, I think it's good to have close to zero on TSH as long as everything else is going smoothly. And how do you know if everything else is going smoothly? Stable blood sugar, feeling good, all the good functions, good sound sleep, for example, takes energy to the brain to make the brain relax and go to sleep. The traditional diets used to contain the equivalent of these natural desiccated thyroids, maybe something like an average of half a grain in the daily food.
The Europeans used to make sausages, for example, out of all of the glands of an animal. They would make stew or something out of muscle meats, but for the flavor, they would put liver and thyroid glands and other tissues in some type of sausage, usually. Sometimes the whole thing would just go in a big stew pot, and so they would get muscle and bone and skin and thyroid gland. And if you eat the whole animal that way, you're getting your little daily dose of desiccated thyroid equivalent.
Yeah, and you had said, and I wanted to kind of retrace before we do a little break here, is that when folks start off, you thought if they were doing it themselves, and you can get these thyroid things now overseas, the clean stuff, to do a little bit at a time, maybe do what, a fourth of a 60 tab or a grain or like 20, let's see, what did you say, like 15, would it be 15 milligrams or so, and start slow and kind of teach the thyroid to be happy
with that and work your way up? Yeah, traditional thyroid doctors like Breda Barnes usually started with 30 milligrams of a well-standardized product, like at that time it was Armour thyroid. But I have seen two people who reacted very surprisingly to 15 milligrams, a fourth of a grain, with heart pain, and I realized what's happening is that your cells, especially your big muscle cells, retain magnesium and calcium in a balance. Calcium is a relaxant, and thyroid is needed for the muscles to retain the proper amount
of magnesium, and your heart has that same magnesium-retaining, stabilizing effect when your thyroid is good. But if you're suddenly increasing the thyroid when you've been deficient, your muscles, your leg muscles will compete with your heart muscles for that trace of magnesium in your diet, and your heart arteries will constrict and you'll get a heart pain. So it's very important to make sure that your diet includes plenty of magnesium when you're starting to use thyroid. Just magnesium-rich foods? Yeah, for example, milk has a good amount of magnesium, and milk and meat will provide
the magnesium, but many people have a low intake of those. It's only two people that I've seen out of about 1,000 who had that reaction, but it's something to keep in mind. So have you seen people that actually have felt better and then thus lowered their TSH number down closer to zero just on 15 or even 30 milligrams of the thyroid meds, the natural stuff? The ones that said T3 and the T4, I guess, is the one we're talking about, right?
Yes, 30 milligrams will do it, but historically, it usually is around 100 milligrams or 120 of the desiccated stuff to reach a stable anti-inflammatory level. But you still like working your way up there? Yeah. Traditionally, they would take five or six months of increasing it 30 milligrams at a time before they would be... Oh, so over a long period, just a little bit, 15, 15, yeah, and just slowly. That makes a lot of sense to help the body to figure out what's going on. Stay right there, Dr. Peat. Boy, we have lots of emails.
Holy cow. So we're going to get to them all. And Dr. Ray Peat is with us, and he said, "Yeah, for the time being, as long as the creaks don't rise, I can come on once a month, and that would be the third Tuesday of the month, and that's today." So we appreciate him doing that. And we're going to get your emails, all of them, and we're going to do it. Hold on. Daniel Vitalis talks about his two premier medicinal mushroom products, Chaga and Reishi.
Because Reishi and Chaga are considered not just adaptogens, but they're also considered immunomodulators, they're safe for daily consumption for a lifetime. There's a lot of herbs, as you know, Patrick, a lot of herbs are not that way. So many medicinal herbs are meant to be used for short periods of time, but there are those few that can be used daily forever, and medicinal mushrooms are that way. So these would be called the tonic herbs? Yep, they're essentially tonic, but if we wanted to get even more specific, they're adaptogenic.
I feel like we've set a new standard, and it's going to... We raised the bar, but check it out, see where the bar's been risen to. You can learn more about these great medicinal mushroom products on Daniel's site. Tonic herbs, adaptogens, dual extraction, fruit bodies, and they're tonics and can be used every day. Modulates the immune system. Chaga and Reishi, special Myron Glass, from Sir Thrivill on OneRadioNetwork.com. These are very nice, and a lot more, you know, more and more people are kind of jumping in
on the medicinal mushroom idea that's been used for a long time in Chinese, or you've had a medicine, and it might be something you want to pick up on and play around with, and Daniel Vitalis has got a good one. The Flora PM, all the different probiotics from Living Streams, these are really powerful. I've never experienced probiotics like this ever, and I've messed around with a lot of them, as you can imagine. Even the fancy expensive ones in a refrigeration case and all that, and these don't require refrigeration.
You don't want to let them get real, real hot if you don't have air conditioning in the summer. I put mine in the fridge because I don't do AC here, but you can play around with them and put some in your ears and put some in your eyes, the Bifido II in your eyes, a few drops and also the Flora PM in your eyes, and you'll see little gunky stuff in your eyes kind of brighten up and clear up.
I don't know what's in there, what's coming out of there, but you can then do the Bifido II in your ears, and it'll go all the way down to the small intestine through the lymph system. You can put them in your belly button. We like to use the Multi-Blend in our water after we've put some hydrogen in there and structured it up in the Multi-Blend and the minerals. It's a wonderful way to get minerals. I think Brian Wayne says there's about 87 minerals or so that showed up.
When they have these guys tested, it's a nice way, probiotics, to help to absorb the minerals. We think you're going to like this product. If you don't think they'll work, just take a little bit more. Take a little bit more than what they recommend, and you'll see the difference. Things kind of move in your body like, "Whoa, what's going on here?" They're powerful. You start small, but then you can take more and more and really build up some good things going on in your stomach. I'm really enjoying taking them.
These work like probiotics are really supposed to work. They just work like probiotics are supposed to work. Living Streams probiotics in our store at OneRadioNetwork.com. Lots to choose from. Previously with Mr. Oxygen, Ed McCabe, we asked him this. Does sulfur, does it bring oxygen to the cells as well? Yes, that's what oxygen, sulfur, are just kissing cousins. They love each other. The sulfur takes the oxygen. Now, in the beginning, we would have people stuff themselves with oxygen, either ozone or transport for oxygen in the air.
Not the burnt out, dead MSM that sells millions and billions of dollars worth at the health food stores and other places all over the world. It's worthless. You have to get the real organic, so don't ever shop price at MSM because you're just going to get garbage. You need the organic super sulfur. Real pure living sulfur, organic sulfur. That's what we sell right here. Three prices depending on where you live. If you'd like more than four pounds, email me, Patrick, at OneRadioNetwork.com. We'll give you a discount. Order anytime. Front page. Patrick, OneRadioNetwork.com.
One of the ways you can really tell is you leave some of the bottom of the glass, just a little fine film of water and sulfur, and you'll see they'll grow crystals in the next day or two. Pretty trippy. It's alive in there doing something. We really like it. We've been working with this product for, gosh, a long time. It's on our store and on the front page, too. Check it out. We talk about your health, wealth, and well-being on OneRadioNetwork.com. We're talking to Dr. Ray Peat, a nutritional counselor.
Been around for a long time working with this back in the '60s. Pleasure to have him here. From now, we're going to get him on once a month, so that's cool. Dr. Peat, you want to take some emails here? Sure. Sure. Why not? Let's have some fun. This is from Masha. What is the purpose of the endogenous unsaturated fats, and why are they, like meat acid, not harmful contrary to ingested proofers such as omega-3s or omega-6s? The omega-9 series that we manufacture out of saturated fat or sugar or starch, the omega-9
means that there are nine saturated carbons lacking double bonds at the tail end of the molecule. The acid end is the chemically manipulable end that the body handles with enzymes and adds to the length of the chain at that end. The omega-9 series, the unstable, relatively water-loving unsaturated carbon bonds are closer to the active end of the molecule where the acid end is creating a slight shift away from electron activity. The oxygen groups cause a retraction of electrons wherever this acid touches. Carbon dioxide is the basic acidic group that stabilizes the electronic system of proteins
and other molecules, and the acidic end of the fat molecule is like a carbon dioxide group which is protecting against free toxic electrons. These unstable double bonds are close to the protective acidic end of the fat molecule, giving the stable oily, oil-loving part of the molecule to have a surface-creating effect on the water that is exposed to it. When water is at a surface, whether it's air or oil, the film that you see on a cup of water that you can balance a float pin on is so tough that it can support a considerable
object like a water skater bug. The oily end of the molecule puts water into that tough, stable condition, and the acidic end protects the water, relatively hydrophilic unsaturated ends. So the overall picture is that the unsaturated fats that we make have some affinity for water, but it's held under control and protected against oxidation by the carbon dioxide integrated close to that unsaturated part of the molecule, allowing a nine-carbon tail to have a strong influence in toughening up the water surrounding this protein-fat system.
The omega-3 system is the least stable because it has only a short three-carbon hydrophobic tail, so it has less contribution to the film property of water. The water is less tough and protected when you have these fats, and at the same time, the risky, easily oxidized double bonds are farther away from the protective acid group at the other end of the fat. We humans, then, I guess olive oil is one of the safest oils? Yeah, because it has only 8 or 10 or 12 percent of the omega-6, which they are more stable
than the fish oils, but not as stable as the ones we make. We can turn the bulk oil is an omega-9 monounsaturated fat, and so olive oil is providing pretty much the same fat composition that sugar would provide. Sugar would be turned, any fat we make from sugar is all omega-9. Olive oil, something like 60 to 80 percent is this safe monounsaturated. And that's the one that theoretically raises the HDL levels, which we like, is that correct? No, not necessarily. Stress raises HDL. I thought HDL was good to have that number high.
It often turns out that way, but there are many situations in which it's a precursor to cancer. Oh, I see. So it's not that simple. I guess we went through a lot of years saying, "Take olive oil because it raises your HDL, and the higher your HDL, the healthier you are." Remember, we went through that phase. The HDL is a protective reaction to stress, but if it's too high for too long, that is associated with some degenerative problem. Do you think we're ever going to know, I mean, in our lifetimes, the really nitty-gritty,
Dr. Peat, of what goes on when we react to a stressful situation on planet Earth? It's probably pretty difficult to tell exactly all the negative things that go on. Well, I think that's the thing that Jeremy England and others working in the tradition started by Vernadsky. I think that's basically what they're working on. Linda writes in, "Babies are generally given vitamin K, a synthetic form right after birth. Newborns are generally deficient in K. Is there an oral form that can be administered instead of the injection, which is aluminum in it, among the other things?"
I didn't know they did that to babies. For a long time, they were using the very toxic, I think it's K3 synthetic vitamin K, but at least now they're using a non-toxic form, adding toxins to it. It works. Even transdermally, you need a bigger dose, but it is absorbed through the skin. If a mother was eating vitamin K while she was pregnant, the baby wouldn't need the supplement, but it can be supplemented on the lips orally or on the skin. What about K2? Do we need K2?
Is it good to have that with the vitamin D? Yeah. It's involved in energy production, not just clotting. In the clotting system, it's actually needed to make anti-clotting proteins, protein C and protein S are intrinsic protection against abnormal clotting. So a vitamin K deficiency can cause excess bleeding, but also leads to abnormal clotting and strokes. It's involved in calcium metabolism, protecting the blood vessels against calcification, the same way that vitamin D and calcium in the diet do. And it's involved in synthesizing brain chemicals, but actually in the mitochondrion, it's working
with coenzyme Q10 to produce energy, stabilizing that system. When we use the term strokes in our culture, just generally people, is it the idea that at some point something happens in the blood clots and it'll just cause big problems in the brain and strokes and heart? Is that what we generally say strokes are? Yeah, officially. Officially? There are several times as frequent clotting type strokes as bleeding type strokes. But if you actually look at the data, any extremely old person is likely to be having
small bleeding strokes, microscopic capillary level bleeding in their brain and other tissues. And I think vitamin K and progesterone and thyroid and vitamin D and all these things protect against that multiplicity of small bleeding strokes. And the so-called transient ischemic attack is a constriction of small arteries caused by reduced energy production. Carbon dioxide is the normal vasodilator in the brain. And if your brain is just not getting enough sugar or oxygen, it stops making enough carbon dioxide. And so the arteries constrict and shut off completely.
And taking extra carbon dioxide or extra sugar can sometimes break the transient ischemic attack. The stress hormones providing increased blood sugar will usually stop that transient constrictive effect. The stress hormone, one of the basic triggers of the stress system is serotonin. And under stress, the brain concentration of serotonin increasing is what turns on the ACTH cortisol stress hormone system. But in the process, the increased serotonin in the brain reduces circulation of the brain. And I think it's one of the constrictive factors that reduces the production of carbon dioxide
and tends to tighten up blood vessels and reduce oxidation and the use of glucose in the brain. And how do we increase this carbon dioxide? In an emergency, re-breathing in a paper bag, I've seen people lower crisis level blood pressure in just a few hours by every 30 minutes or so, breathing as long as they can in a paper bag, breathing for one or two minutes in an average size paper bag. You run out of oxygen and have to stop, but then resting a while, you can do it again.
And the increase in carbon dioxide by recycling it will relax blood vessels, especially in the brain, but throughout the system. And so the resistance to circulation of the blood drops as the carbon dioxide opens up the blood vessels and that can restore functions of the brain, breaking a transient stroke effect. But it also, by reducing the resistance to circulation, makes your heart able to produce a bigger stroke with less effort. So it can reduce the strain on the heart while the heart is pumping much more efficiently. Dr. A. Peat is with us. Interesting.
Dr. Peat said that a processed liver supplement was not a good thing. Could you ask him if a processed thyroid supplement is good, bad? I did not get results from the desiccated thyroid prescription, so I went to a grass-fed thyroid supplement out of New Zealand. He suggested a desiccated thyroid product of Mexico maybe. Hope to find that info on your site. No. About 30 years ago, the standard for almost 100 years was Armour thyroid, but the Armour company sold their trade name and business and immediately the formula started changing.
It went through about 10 years of periodic changes of the recipe, so I lost confidence in that one. Before that happened, there had been several thyroid products sold through pharmacies for about 30 or 40 years. Someone sent 10 of these products to an analytical lab that could detect tissue, an immunological test, and they found that eight of the 10 samples bought in a drugstore as prescription thyroid USP, eight of the 10 contained no thyroid tissue at all. That was probably deliberate fraud, but it's somewhat of a refined technology of making good thyroid product.
You have to know that you're getting the actual thyroid gland. I've seen people mistake lymph nodes for thyroid gland, so you have to know that the person producing the thyroid gland crude product knows what they're doing. Then you have to know that it's being processed carefully. You have to know that you're removing the fat with a solvent so that it's stable and doesn't deteriorate with oxygen exposure, and then that they don't extract part of the chemistry before they sell it as a thyroid product.
Some of the companies are taking out thyrocalcitonin, which is one of the natural hormones that should be in the thyroid product, and almost all of the thyroid products made in the US now claim that they contain a certain amount per grain, a certain amount of T4 and a certain amount of T3, but there should be none of those. They shouldn't be in there? No, it should be thyroglobulin with only the slightest trace amounts, if any, of the actual hormones. That's the characteristic of a thyroid product is that it's almost pure protein, defatted,
and we digest it, and in the process of digesting the thyroglobulin, our enzymes release the T4 and T3 and some T2 hormone. It shouldn't be in the product, but I think the FDA encouraged this misleading, really false labeling. Wow. So where can we get this good old just thyroglobulin? Is that even available? That's in all of the true desiccated thyroid products, but it shouldn't be labeled that it contains the hormones. It should be labeled according to the actual protein content. Are you familiar with this one that's made in Thailand?
A chemist contacted me, said he had done tests on it and it was labeled as containing so much T4 and T3. He said he couldn't find a trace of these hormones in it. Was it a fraudulent product? I said, "No, it shouldn't contain those hormones." It shouldn't, right. And so he hydrolyzed the product with hydrochloric acid and wrote back a few days later and said, "Now it contains full amount of the hormones." He hydrolyzed it the same way our stomach acid would. Wow. So maybe that's a pretty good product.
There was a fellow, I guess he went over to Thailand because he was tired of this nonsense going on with thyroid and he's making this and you can actually buy it. I think it's like he goes by something like postage stamps or something. You know the product I'm talking about? No. No, you don't? Oh well. Oh well. So if I'm going to go out and get a hold of the good stuff now, where would they go, the good stuff?
I'm not sure which to recommend, but people have told me in the last few months that they were having good results from I think the Nature Throid and WP. I think they said they were getting consistent results. But for about 30 years I've been using the synthetic equivalents that were based on the old armor composition. Thyral R was their company's formula for a synthetic equivalent and then Sino Plus exactly copied the Thyral R proportions. And so I've been using Sino Plus now for about 35 years and it's very reliable and consistent.
The Sino Plus, that's T3, right? More T3? No, it's a mixture of a 4 to 1 ratio of T4 to T3. And the same company makes a pure T3 called Sino-Mal. So the Sino Plus, you get that out of Mexico, right? Yeah. They're constantly being interfered with by American drug company competition. Yeah, I bet they are. I lost my place here, sorry. Bear with me a second. Okay. Dr. Peat has talked about, before on your show, about how tyrosine is a protective protein and it's found in gelatin.
Are there any good food sources of tyrosine, plant-based sources? Oh, I think, did you say tyrosine? Tyrosine, right. Glycine and proline, I think, are the main reasons for using gelatin. Glycine is something like 35 or 40% of the amino acids. And glycine and proline have a cell-stabilizing anti-inflammatory effect. And gelatin is completely free of the amino acids that are pro-inflammatory. Antithyroid and even carcinogenic tryptophan is a carcinogenic amino acid promoting inflammation. Excess serotonin, for example, and cysteine can be pro-inflammatory. Methionine is another amino acid that is not in glycine.
Methionine is a longevity and shortening amino acid. So, gelatin being free of those three potentially toxic amino acids is a very protective protein for a mature person who isn't growing. So that's one of the reasons why you like the gelatin product, if you want to do a protein powder rather than something else, a whey or bean or rice or whatever. Yeah, and these amino acids that have the toxic effect are also very susceptible to oxidation. Tryptophan and cysteine can become more toxic than normal when they're dehydrated and exposed to oxygen.
So almost all proteins are degraded and made pro-inflammatory by dehydration, even with so-called freeze-drying. The drying process itself tends to create oxidation of those amino acids. So gelatin is unique, as far as I know, in being pretty stable to dehydration. Dear Dr. Peat, if powdered eggshells is pure calcium carbonate, why not just buy calcium carbonate tablets from the store and forget the process of boiling the eggshells and then grinding them to a powder to increase one's calcium intake? If the manufacturer of the powder or the tablets used oyster shells or eggshells, they would
get a pure, safe product, but you can't count on that. When people have analyzed various calcium carbonate products, the eggshell was always the purest, very close to oyster shells. If the oysters are taken from a polluted part of the ocean, they can have some contaminants. But eggshells are consistently the least chemically contaminated source of calcium carbonate. Second point of his question, he says, "My joint pain has greatly subsided simply by putting a quarter teaspoon of baking soda in my coffee each morning, as well as drinking
a half teaspoon in water before I go to bed in the evening. Do you see any issues with this routine of mine?" It's actually filling in for a potential calcium deficiency. The sodium is tending to lower your adrenal aldosterone production, and aldosterone is an age-promoting, inflammation-promoting, fibrosis-promoting hormone, so keeping that low by a little supplement of sodium is good. The bicarbonate is churned once it gets in the bloodstream. It's absorbed by cells. If they happen to be deficient in carbon dioxide, they can turn the bicarbonate into carbon
dioxide, acidifying cells, keeping them in the protected, oxidizing state. So a little baking soda is generally very protective. Athletes at the start of a marathon, a bicycle race, for example, have taken a tablespoon of baking soda and greatly increased their endurance. Lots of people take a teaspoon at a time, but even a smaller amount can be protective. Very interesting. "Is sulfated castor oil safe to use as soap? Is lanolin a safe moisturizer?" Two questions there. Turkey oil, turkey fat. For soap? Yeah. I don't know. Yeah.
I think it's probably okay if it doesn't smell like turkeys. Yeah. You don't want to smell like turkeys. Because lanolin, it's a very stiff oil, so it helps to thin it with a little coconut oil or MCT or something to make it spreadable. But besides being a protecting sealing agent so your skin doesn't dehydrate, it tends to hold moisture in the skin just by forming a seal. So at the same time, I think it's more than 50% of a precursor steroid to cholesterol.
So I think to the extent that it can be dissolved, like if it's maybe olive oil or MCT or something thinner, to the extent that it can dissolve into the skin, it's going to have an anti-aging effect by supporting the local production of cholesterol. I read that Mr. Peat is not a fan of whey protein powders. I was wondering if he could recommend other form of protein powders that could use. So would gelatin for you? Gelatin is the only protein I know of that is stable during dehydration. Can you take a lot of that?
I mean, if you want? People want to eat a lot of it? Is it okay? Yeah. It's about 30 grams. The book on the medical use of gelatin that was published, I think, about 1940 and distributed by I think the Great Lakes Gelatin has been distributing the book. It described treating diabetes and colitis, for example, with I think 30 grams a day was the most they recommended. But I've known people to use 60 grams a day with very good results.
I think I have to look at the can, but isn't it about 10 grams of protein per tablespoon? That'd be a lot if you wanted to get 60. It'd be six tablespoons, but you know, I don't know if it works. It seems weird though that, and they say it's grass-fed and organic. Well, grass-fed on the label, but they use the hide of the cows, right? That's where it comes from. Yeah. And pork and beef gelatin is, as far as I can tell, there's no difference, but some
people think they have digestive irritation from the pork gelatin. So you can specify if you want beef or pork. So now when you take beef or pork bones, you can different pigs feed and ham hocks and stuff and make your own bone broth, there's a lot of gelatin in there, right? Oh yeah, if you cool it and it becomes solid. Yeah, just solid. Yeah, that's what you want. I did that with chicken feed, some organic chicken feed, Dr. Peat.
And after I took, you know, I had a nice bowl of it with some carrots and onions and garlic, and then I put it in the fridge, it was so thick, you had to take literally a big spoon to get it out. That's how much gelatin was in there. Wow, man. Yeah, it should bounce. Yeah, it should bounce. So this would actually be maybe even a step up from doing a Great Lakes or similar in its efficacy? You get some of the chicken flavor when you use wings and feet, so it's tastier. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You want to hear a potato story? You're a fan of dextrinization, right? Dextrinized foods? No, not especially. Oh, I thought you were. Anyway, I dextrinized a potato in a crock pot for about 12 hours yesterday, we were talking on the show, and boy, it really came out good, just in a crock pot. Long cooking breaks down the starch, so it's easier to digest. Usually 40 minutes to an hour is safe enough. Plenty, yeah. Yeah, but you do it like 375 or something, or 400? I never thought of just boiling temperature was all I used.
Just to boil it, just to boil it. Mr. Peat has said in a young person, "Good food, sunlight, and high altitude can often overcome severe inflammatory conditions." And then when an older, in quotes, person whose tissues contain larger amounts of polys and they break down products, it takes more environmental support to get them out of chronic inflammatory pattern. Such as aspirin and coffee. Oh, such as aspirin and coffee. That's what he said, some specific remedies for folks that can do to break out the chronic inflammation pattern. Yeah, and vitamin D and thyroid.
That'll do it, huh? What's the difference, folks who want to live in a very low humidity, high altitude, like a Colorado compared to equator stuff, is there any of those living conditions that are more conducive to longevity and health, in your opinion? Yeah, studies in New Mexico and Switzerland have shown heart disease decreases in proportion to increasing altitude. Every thousand feet they saw, I think it was about a 2% decrease in mortality. Every thousand feet you end up. I wonder what that's about. I wonder what, did they say why that was?
Your body retains more carbon dioxide when you adapt slowly. If you rush up to 8,000 feet in a day, you might get altitude sickness. But the people who are low thyroid at sea level and think they're breathing okay are really hyperventilating chemically at sea level. And when those people go suddenly up to high altitude, their hyperventilation shows up and they get swelling of the lungs and brain and get sick. But if you adapt slowly, it will tend to correct hypothyroidism. Your T3 production goes up and your blood becomes more fluid, even though more concentrated,
carries oxygen more effectively. And inflammation goes down. That's the main thing. The Russians for about 50 years were doing high altitude therapy for allergies, arthritis, heart disease, and they even did studies in animals at least, in which sending the cancer treated animals that should 100% die of cancer to 17,000 feet altitude, about 50% of them threw off the cancer. Interesting. On the heart study thing you mentioned on the high altitude or the dryness, lower humidity, was that looking at myocardial infarctions and actually heart muscle or the atherosclerosis idea with heart disease?
They were just looking at the deaths from heart disease. Heart disease, death in general, right. Very great reduction. And insurance companies have seen for more than 100 years, they've seen a great reduction in cancer mortality in high altitudes. And there has been some publicity in the last several years. It just came on the news again yesterday or the day before about high altitude causing suicide by lowering serotonin. Several people have been researching this in Colorado, which does have a high suicide level and they noticed that serotonin goes down as altitude goes up.
And so they said if serotonin is the happy hormone and you have less, then maybe suicide occurs at high altitude because of loss of serotonin. But actually that is totally wrong. Totally wrong. Yes. Serotonin does go down as altitude goes up. And that's why the mortality from heart disease and cancer goes down. But if you look at suicide rates in relation to altitude and forget about Colorado, the very low countries, if you look at the three countries that have been number one for suicide,
extremely high suicide rates in the last 10 or 20 years, South Korea, I think it was Lithuania and Bangladesh, very low altitude countries, extremely high suicide rates. And then the lowest suicide rates in the world have generally been Mexico, Colombia and Bolivia. High altitude countries, yes. I think that's the actual effect of altitude. It improves health and reduces depression. Any challenges with living in low humidity, places like Colorado, for over many years? I mean, does that pose any health issues or challenges? Yes. It seems to make your skin drier. Drier.
You just got to put more gooey stuff on it or something. Yes. Yes, probably. Or eat more chicken, Peat. Would you ask Dr. Peat what he thinks regarding a carnivore or strictly animal foods diet? Yes, she's got two parts. Let's do that one first. Yes, that's kind of big now. It's another fad. Carnivore or just all animal foods diet? If that includes milk and cheese and eggs and oysters, that's a pretty good diet. But if you don't include the bones or the milk and cheese, then it can be a dangerously high phosphate-rich diet.
You should take in about equal amounts of calcium and phosphorus. If you eat only the muscle meats, then you have something like a 10 to 1 ratio of phosphate to calcium, which is very pro-inflammatory and pro-degenerative disease. That could be a challenge with the classic paleo diet, right, that they don't like dairy or stuff. Yes. Just in general, do you think... I don't know if we've probably talked about it, but I can't recall. Like just brown rice or organic brown rice or jasmine or even quinoa or these kind of
things, millet, these things that we need, are they just something extra to eat? Are they valuable to us? The reason the Chinese developed the white rice product thousands of years ago is that the fats in rice are very highly unsaturated and get rancid almost immediately in a warm temperature. In a cold climate, they fall off the plant when the weather is cool, and they live during the winter and then sprout when the weather is warmer. So the polyunsaturated fat is not harmful to the plant, but if you store it in the unprocessed
condition, then it's very likely to be rancid by the time you eat it. And then when you assimilate those fats, they proceed to become more oxidized in your body. So I think the traditional Chinese way of making white rice and then cooking it thoroughly, it's a good source of carbohydrate. Oh, I'm sorry, the last part, I missed the last part you say. The way you mean soaking and all of that? Yeah, but processing it, removing the bran and the germ.
And they also, thousands of years ago, developed the process of soaking it in lime or ashes, for example, which form lime when they're wet. It will digest the starch and convert the tryptophan to vitamin B, deniacin, and make much of the fat go off in the solution. So the ideal way to eat rice or corn is the lime processed. The Mexican form is called nixtamalized corn or nixtamal. Also what are your thoughts, writes an emailer, on high oxalate foods such as potatoes, nuts and seeds, darky leafy greens, causing oxalate toxicity?
I don't think it's a problem if you have good digestion and good thyroid function. It's a potential problem if your calcium metabolism is going haywire. You can form calcium oxalate stones, but calcium deficiency in your diet is one of the things that increases the stress hormones, parathyroid hormone makes you mishandle calcium. That increases the tendency to form stones. I see. Here's an email, "I've always pasteurized milk, especially like ultra-pasteurized." I've always heard pasteurized and ultra-pasteurized was not good because the high heat damaged
the fats and proteins, and this is what caused the allergic problems and everything else. Is this true? How can we heat and eat meat and fish? Is that a problem also? So cooking, let's start with the milk. You said that pasteurized milk, that's not a problem. Is that correct if I understand? The ultra-pasteurized tastes funny, and that goes with a slight loss of vitamin A, for example, and vitamin C. I think it's about a 20 or 30% loss, but mostly it's a taste problem when it's ultra-pasteurized.
But the good-tasting pasteurized milk, I think it has been held at the temperature only for a few seconds and then quickly cooled, and it can taste just as good as unpasteurized milk. But even unpasteurized or raw milk, if you want to heat it up to 160 and bring it back down? Yeah, the longer it stays at 160, the more flavor it loses. Right, right, right. So any issues on this email with when we cook meat and fish? Is that a problem for us? Similar. If it's overcooked, the cholesterol is progressively oxidized.
So quick cooking at high temperature, for example, they've compared different meats. Salmon was the most interesting because poached salmon had many times more toxic oxidized cholesterol than quickly broiled salmon. Same with steak. If you slow cook a steak, it tastes bad, and part of that is your fats and cholesterol have been seriously oxidized. So that's what the kind of overcooked flavor is when you overcook meat. It's an oxidation of the fat in there? Yeah, and if you can bring it up to temperature in just two or three minutes, that's best like pasteurization of milk.
It preserves the flavor and the nutrients. Ellen writes in, "Can Dr. Peat recommend a safe cholesterol product to rub into the skin?" No. I don't know anything about what's available now. Just do butter or something. My daughter has a condition called EPP where her liver doesn't flush out porphyrins as they build up in the body and causes sensitivities to the sun. EPP experts recommend a higher carb diet as they say there is an enzyme in the carbs that cleans out the excess porphyrins.
Is Dr. Peat aware of anything like this and what I could do to help her? Yeah. Sugar is the protective thing, and when your sugar is low, your free fatty acids go up and poison all of your tissues, not just the liver, but your brain. Everything is exposed to stress when the sugar is low, and those people with that slight shift in the balance of porphyrin metabolism, estrogen causes a drop in blood sugar and a surge of porphyrin, and just having consistent sugar intake, keeping your thyroid steady
so that your blood sugar doesn't drop easily, and having a frequent orange juice, for example, as a source of sugar is usually all it takes to prevent the attacks. And fruit, of course, and I guess anything that's going to turn to sugar, right? Potatoes or orange juice, or just anything. Honey, maple syrup, that kind of stuff? Sure. Boy, I like honey. Man. We just got an email, a fellow just wanted to thank you for your idea. He says when he does a couple teaspoons of honey when he wakes up in the middle of the
night, it goes right back to the bed. I think you mentioned that on a past show. He just wanted to thank you for that. People have told me that they have taken honey secretly to the hospital where someone was in serious condition, gave him a couple of tablespoons, person got up and left the hospital. Yeah. Well, it's pretty magical, some of it. Dr. Peat stated that the omega-3s is less stable. What that really means is that it is more sacrificial, it oxidizes instead of your tissue being oxidized? Do you know what he's saying here?
I'm sorry. Yeah, that's been the basis for a lot of the claims. One thing it does is lower your prostaglandin production. It competes with arachidonic acid for making the pro-inflammatory prostaglandins, so it can reduce inflammation. But when it's taken into the bloodstream, by the time it gets to the bloodstream, it's oxidizing. A large percent is oxidized before it gets into the tissue. Some of it does reach the brain, but much of it circulates as breakdown products, and these poison the immune system, interfere with white blood cells, and that can powerfully stop an inflammatory process.
But if it continues for more than a few days, that suppresses your resistance to bacterial or fungal infections too. So after a period of about six months, you start seeing serious damage to the immune system when people are eating too much fish. This fellow actually is a doc, and he says, "I know of a Dr. Trempe, T-R-E-M-P-E. He had benefits of seeing cause-effect in the eyes, and there's no doubt that omega-3 is protective to the retina." He sends a link here.
So I wrote a newsletter about that, and there is a lot of literature showing that babies in particular, it's the omega-3 fatty acids that are damaged by blue light or ultraviolet light, but bright light in general, causes retinal damage specifically by the changes in these highly unsaturated fats. So there's a lot of literature showing that they are damaging to the retina. The threes are? Mm-hmm. Wow. A couple more, then we'll let you go to work. Could breathing hydrogen gas help regulate the thyroid? Probably but I haven't seen any research on that.
It's very interesting stuff, but I don't know exactly what it would be doing to the thyroid. Gotcha. I understand. An American Indian friend keeps bear fat in his fridge for internal and external use. Is this a good fat to have if you can catch a bear? Let's get some bear fat. I think it would depend a lot on what the bear was eating. Some bears eat lots of berries, lots of fruit, and others load up on salmon when the salmon are running.
So if they were eating berries, I think it would be pretty much like beef fat. Dr. Peat, have you ever heard of a fellow by the name, I think it's Morris Croc? No. No. He wrote a lot of books about just eating fruit. You read these things and it's like if you just eat fruit, the whole world is going to open up and you're going to be in heaven. Have you ever experienced anybody that's really done the whole, just a lot of fruit, a lot of fruit? Do you see possible advantages?
I feel so good when I just eat a lot of fruit. I don't know. Talk a little bit about that with what you know about diet. Part of it is that lots of fruits stimulate the intestine and accelerate the movement through the intestine. So they can keep the bacteria happy and harmless. One of the problems with a pure fruit diet over the long run is that most fruits are very low in iron. There was a study in California of migrant fruit picker families.
The kids found that their average hemoglobin was at 10, way down in the anemic range because they were eating lots of oranges. But they were extremely free of disease and infection, healthier than their well-fed neighbors. So I think you can tolerate a fairly low iron intake if everything else is good. There isn't enough availability of a variety of fruits, I think, for people in the United States. You might end up eating a lot of bananas and dates and easy to store and ship fruits.
Those happen to be high in serotonin and can create problems of inflammation. Why are they high in serotonin? Just because they've hybridized them and stuff like that to make them ripe at a certain time? I suspect that is a part of it because when you stress a plant, it produces defensive, irritating chemicals intended to kill insects or predators. I think the way bananas are grown is very stressful to the plant. If you were to do a lot of fruit, how would you get more iron in there to help balance that out?
People that love fruit, where would you get that from? I'm not sure. In some of the studies of the Pacific Islanders who live on a potato diet, once a year they have pork feasts, one week a year, and that's enough iron apparently. My goodness, isn't that funny? One day a year? One week a year. One week a year, they just eat a lot of pork. But let's see, doesn't molasses have a lot of iron? Blackstrap? Yeah, but it also has some irritants that I don't think it's a safe, regular source of iron.
It's better than an iron deficiency, but I think eggs or oysters or something would be a much safer way to do it. You know, when you're in the business like this, I talk to all these people, all these different carnivores and paleo and keto and, I don't know, vegan and vegetarian. Do you think these are always going to be with us, you know, 10, 20, 30 years from now? I think the information is gradually getting organized to the point that we'll be able to understand which fruits, for example, complement each other.
You can get all the protein you need just from fruits. Potatoes are extremely good as a protein source, but with the right choice of fruits, you can get your protein just from fruits. But it involves choosing with information about which fruits should balance your whole nutritional pattern. There's places you could actually research and just research protein and fruits? Yeah, it's very scattered and hard to put together, but it's possible. Kind of fun, though. Fruits are fun, yeah, and they feel good. Well, Dr. Peat, thanks for being here this morning.
What are you going to do today for fun? Anything? I think I'll paint a little. Yeah, well, it's not like a good day to paint. You're up in the Northwest, right? What's the weather like? I'm cooling off a little. Yeah. Well, thanks for being here. We appreciate it. Tell folks now, we have it on our show page, they can get your newsletter, and if we click on it, I think it just takes you to, oh, good, it takes you right to the right spot if you
like to get Dr. Peat's newsletter, it'll take you right to a Gmail, [email protected]. So we have that up there for you. Oh, thanks. Yeah, sure, and that one, PayPal just joined up for two years. Is that right, two years? Yeah. Two years, and that's not very much, that's cool. And another one, final email, somebody wants to know where they can get your books. It's a good way to... Same place. Same place. Oh, same place. And they email you and they... and you have three books? I think those... there might be five available electronically now.
Oh, I see. So people can do it on their little fire readers and all that stuff. That's cool. All right, sir, thank you so much. We appreciate your being here, and we'll see you next month. Okay, thanks. Thank you. Dr. Ray Peat, and yeah, click on that. I've been meaning to join, and I'm going to join right after the show and get his newsletter because, I mean, come on, what's up with that? Yeah, this... it'll take you right to a Gmail and just Ray Peat's newsletter. All right, kids, we'll see you tomorrow.
We have a good show for you on Thursday. Dr. Rulon Shu is going to be here, and we got a Pearlseum back in stock, so we can start ordering that, the powder. I wonder if it's on the... if it says in stock, because they say it is. Man, we had a dry run there. So sorry, we're getting all kinds of emails. Where's the Pearlseum powder? It still says out of stock, but I need to check, because I talked to them yesterday, and they said it was in stock.
So maybe they just haven't taken that little thing off. Anyway, she's going to be here, and we're going to catch up with her. She's great gal. I'll figure it out and make sure it says the right thing on the website. And then also a fellow that I think we're going to have fun with, Dr. Ferdinando Pisani Massimoli. He's South American Resource Coordinator for the Foundation for Alternative and Integrative Medicine. Wow. And he's really got some... he's got some interesting stuff. He's worked with barefoot doctors in different places all around Europe with aromatherapy
and Amazonian traditional medicine. Cool stuff. So he's going to be fun. He'll be here on Thursday. Fred and the Real World of Money tomorrow. So we'll see you tomorrow. Thank you for your ongoing support. If you have questions about any of the products or services that we promote, get a lot of questions on the hydrogen machine, send them to me, and I'll get them to George, or you can go right to his website, which is EGLE, EGLE, whatever that is. You'll find it there. EGLE something.
But you'll see it there when you go on our website. And answer... George answers a lot of questions, and he sends me copies of the emails that he sends out, so I kind of keep up with all the questions. Good questions, so don't be shy about asking questions. So I'll see you all tomorrow. Thank you for being here. I love you all very much, and you're doing good. You're doing the best you can. I don't care what anybody says. You're doing the best you can. This is Patrick Timpani. May the blessings be.
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