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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. 40... 48 degrees outside our Redway studios. We are at KMUD 91.1 FM, KMUE 88.1 FM, NKLAI, Leightonville 90.3 FM. Our Eureka and Garberville signals are also on HD. And we have FM translator K258BQ in Shelter Cove at 99.5. The views and opinions expressed throughout the broadcast day are those of the speakers and not necessarily those of the station, its staff, or underwriters.
Time will be made available for other viewpoints. Thank you for joining us. And KMUD thanks 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 in Arcata, Jade Dragon Acupuncture can be reached at 822-4300 and online at jadedragonacupuncture.com. Get ready for Ask Your Herb Doctor. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Welcome to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name is Andrew Murray.
For those of you who perhaps have never listened to the shows which run every third Friday of the month from 7 to 8pm, my wife and I are both licensed medical herbalists who trained in England and graduated there with a degree in herbal medicine. We run a clinic in Garboville where we consult with clients about a wide range of conditions and recommend herbal medicine and dietary advice. So you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMUD Garboville 91.1 FM and from 7.30.
In fact, what we'll do is I think this time round we'll just open up the lines straight off the bat. We normally open them up from 7.30 to 8 but people are welcome to call in any time. So how about that? Let's see what that does to the show's train of thought. Anyway, okay, so the end of the show is at 8 o'clock. You're all invited to call in with questions either related or unrelated to this month's subject of aging and energy reversal.
The number here if you live in the area is 923 3911 or if you live outside the area the toll free number is 1800 KMUD RAD. Well, this month we had a small amount to finish up from last month's show on misdiagnosis of thyroid conditions but something that came into the limelight if you like and I know it's been looked at for quite a while now and I know Dr. Peat who will be joining us in a moment here has spent a long time researching in his own academic career and that's the aging process.
Well, as it is I generally take a look at the news most every day and I look at the BBC news out of kind of a preference I suppose and I saw an article in the health section of the BBC news and the title was US scientists have performed a dramatic reversal of the aging process in animal studies and this is what I want to bring out with Dr. Peat's history using things like progesterone and thyroid which are definitely anti-aging in their own right and energy creative and energy reserving products.
So anyway, I just want to quickly read the article out and then introduce Dr. Peat onto the show for those people who perhaps have never heard of him before. So the article said that they used a chemical to rejuvenate the muscles in mice and said it was the equivalent of transforming a 60 year old's muscle to that of a 20 year old but they did put in parentheses here but muscle strength did not improve. So just the general quality of the muscle or the health, I think it's more appropriate,
or the energy readiness of the muscle became that of a 20 year old's. So their study in the journal Cell identified an entirely new mechanism of aging and then reversed it. Other researchers said it was an exciting finding and aging is considered a one-way street but now researchers at Harvard Medical School have shown that some aspects can be reversed. Their research focused on a chemical called NAD, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide and its levels naturally drop off in the cell of the body with age.
The team showed that this disrupted the function of the cells in built power stations and mitochondria leading to lower energy production and aging as a result. Experiments showed that boosting NAD levels by giving mice a chemical which they naturally convert into NAD could reverse the sands of time. One week of youth medication in two year old mice meant their muscles became akin to those of a six month old in terms of mitochondrial function, muscle wastage, inflammation and insulin resistance, so greatly improved. And Dr. Anna Gomes from the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School said,
"We believe this is quite an important finding." She argues that muscle strength may return with a longer course of treatment, so is this a cure? Well, thanks so much for joining us this month again, Dr. Peat. For those people who have just tuned into the show or maybe have never heard you before and they have quite a following and I think those people kind of generally tune into the show, but would you just give people that may be new listeners an outline of your academic and professional background?
In the 60s, I had been working in linguistics, but on my own studying, I was very interested in general questions of aging and the brain in particular and how the brain makes consciousness and language possible and how that changes during maturation and aging. So I enrolled at the University of Oregon thinking I would study brain biology in 1968 and found that the brain biology people were extremely dogmatic, thinking in terms only of genetic control, membrane functions and nothing much in between.
And I looked around the department and found that the reproductive biologists seemed to be more scientific and actually looking for an explanation rather than trying to explain things in terms of what they believed they knew. So I worked on reproductive aging and our lab specialized in the female aging. And I concentrated on the energy, oxidative metabolism and the changes occurring in the uterus with aging. And I found that all kinds of stress converge with the changes that you see during aging, especially in the reproductive system.
It was like the lining of the uterus was a very good model for things that happen in the brain and the whole organism. And all types of stress from radiation to a bad diet, vitamin E deficiency, deficiency of oxygen, all of these things mimic the changes that you see in aging. And basically that's the area that I've been thinking about a lot ever since. Okay, good. I think some of the language sometimes is a little difficult for general listeners to get their heads around if they're not medically or physiology minded or trained.
And so I think just to open up the subject this evening of aging in light of the research that was broadcast in an article produced by Harvard. If we want to talk about the two types of interactions that happen in the aging process that this was looking at in terms of the interaction with DNA, with methylation as a additive process which degrades the DNA, and the acetylation, which apparently is more protective, they talk about an epigenetic modification.
And perhaps if you -- we mentioned in the past that, you know, unlike most modern thinking that would tell us that we are a result of our genetics and there's nothing much we can do about it, I know that you found many different research articles that have proved beyond doubt that there very much is something that can be done. And the environment in its own right has its own effects on the genes, even at a very local and a very time-dependent manner.
So it's not a case of the genes being fixed in time and space and immutable, but that definitely changes can be done in a relatively short space of time. So when the articles talk about epigenetic modification involved in gene expression, for example, to perhaps stave off cancer or even allow the cancer to exist, would you explain what that is, that epigenetic modification? Well, Luther Burbank was a person who explored the influence of the environment. Many biologists from the time of Lamarck down through Barbara McClintock, who was ignored until just about 20 years ago,
they sort of pulled her out of obscurity before she died. And these people had demonstrated that the need for a function could elicit the function in an organism so that a stressful environment would cause changes in the chromosomes. Barbara McClintock referred to jumping genes, but these things were actual movement of DNA elicited by stress in the environment. And all of these people for almost 200 years were excluded from science by a very dogmatic view of genetics. All of the dogmatic view of the geneticists of the 20th century are now defunct completely,
but they live on in practice and medicine. In the last year, several dozen people have asked me what to do because they've discovered that they're a mutant by having a DNA test. There are a couple of popular genes that almost everyone has a mutated form of, but actually these make almost no difference in health or function, a very slight nutritional requirement difference. And if you look at identical twins, despite the fact that all of their DNA is identical
and they experience the same environment in the uterus and most of them experience a very similar environment because of their social economic level, despite all of those genetic and environmental overlaps, when you look at a serious disease, there's very little overlap. For example, if one twin has rheumatoid arthritis, there's only a 12% incidence of it in the other twin. And that's now well recognized, but still the gene testing industry is trying to sell the idea that you get sick if you have certain mutated genes.
So you're saying it's more a product of the environment, perhaps in that arthritic type situation, perhaps? Yeah, and constantly, like they put 40 mice, I think it was, in a stimulating environment and found that just by the choices they made in their daily life, they became very different in personality and behavior. Just by where they happen to go in the environment, influencing what they learned, and over their lifetime, they became very recognizable individuals.
And that would really upset medicine if they had to consider everyone as a unique individual all the way down to the way their genes work. Because there would be no exact definition of a disease, it would be your disease this month. Yeah, yeah. Interesting. I wonder what it is in the animals, in that mice study, perhaps, that made the individual mice do things differently that gave them a better outcome. Possibly just which one was the first one to be weaned and wander off and have an experience.
And that stimulated them in a way that the others didn't experience. Thank you. Go on. The genes are being used constantly. Everything you do is using your genes in a certain way that varies according to whether you're awake or asleep, for example. But if you're starving day after day, this is going to pull up an accumulation of changes, not just a quick on and off effect of day and night or incidental experiences, but it will accumulate sort of an inertia and layer after layer will be laid down in the stuff around your genes,
attaching carbon atoms to the DNA itself and attaching a great variety of molecules to the proteins that handle the genes, the histones that surround the chromosomes and move the genes to make them accessible for copying and functioning. These are relatively easy to change. The methylation is a little more sluggish. And when you're in an extremely stressful situation, a lot of your genes get turned off, methylated especially. And those can be identified in the chromosomes that you inherit from your father or mother specifically.
So if your father had a very hard life, you can identify the highly methylated genes in your chromosomes that came from that hard life. So that's inheritable then? Yeah. And in animal experiments, it takes several generations for a very bad generation's experience to be removed when they're put into a normal environment. But if you put them into a super environment like the... Enriched environment. Enriched, yeah. It's very stimulating. You can repair the previous generation's damage very quickly. And some nutrients and drugs can do that, remove methyl groups from the DNA
and attach more of the opening groups to the histones. Okay. Let's just let people know here. You're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMED Gallup 91.1 FM. And 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, perhaps to this month's subject of aging and energy reversal. Dr. Raymond Peat is a specialist in hormone physiology and the aging process. He's having studied it for the last 35 years or so. So, yeah, let's just tell people the number again. I guess it's 923-3911.
If you live outside the area, then 800 numbers, 1-800-KMUD-RAD. That's 1-800-568-3723. Okay. So let's perhaps go on then to the... what you've mentioned about methylation and demethylation and how that occurs, how that affects the gene, how it silences it, how it allows tumors to grow and how they have just found now in this piece of research that the very presence of this is a very diagnostic indicator for how well the tumor will continue to grow and how switching this off is actually a fairly new approach to cancer therapy.
So, in terms of the process of methylation and how this happens and how this is also related to that train of thought, a fairly aberrant train of thought perhaps, but that fasting is good for you and going without is actually fairly healthful and if you starve yourself fairly regularly and live on a very meager caloric intake, you'll actually have a greater chance of longevity and it's not actually true, is it? No, it was definite about 70 years ago, a researcher named Clive McKay, I think it was,
showed that restricting the food supply made animals live longer, but later people restricted the type of food, kept down the heavy metals in their diet alone and let them eat all the fat, protein and carbohydrate they wanted and they lived longer. Actually, Dr. Peat, would you hold it there a minute for us if you could? We've actually got a couple of callers on the air, so let's get these couple of callers in. First caller, you're on the air and where are you from, caller? Hi, this is Gina from Kansas. Canada. Kansas. Kansas? Kansas City.
Okay, I'm sorry. Sorry, it's my accent, I'm foreign as well. Oh, no problem, we're all foreign. Go ahead, what's your question? My question is not about tonight's subject, but it's about estrogen and the reduction of estrogen or if there are any herbs that can function as an aromative inhibitor. My situation is that I'm in a high estrogen state. I'm in my 40s, but I am already post-menopausal. I enter menopause very early at about the age of 40. I also have or I have been diagnosed this year with Hashimoto
and I have gained a lot of weight, like 40 pounds in just three years. Since the menopause, I was told that I probably also had Hashimoto for three years or so. But I have gone from 99 pounds to 139 in just three years. My progesterone is very low, even though I am supplementing with Progest-E. Okay. And very high FSH and LH. Right. I'm under a lot of stress, so even though the blood test shows the estrogen is low as well, I believe it's only because it's trapped in the cells.
I don't believe I have high estrogen. I don't see how I could, considering I'm fat, I'm under stress, I have digestive problems and a lot of other issues. So since I can't raise the progesterone, even with supplementation and diet, such as raw carrots, low fiber, I still cannot pull it up. Would you suggest perhaps that I should take something as an aromatase inhibitor? Well, the main aromatase inhibitor that I'm familiar with is from nettle root, and that's really used as a kind of prostatic agent in men to treat benign prostatic hypertrophy by blocking that enzyme.
In terms of your condition and what you said about the weight gain and your age, it's not uncommon at all for what you're saying to occur. I think it happens fairly commonly. Dr. Peat, in terms of this lady's supposed low progesterone levels and the estrogen that she's been exposed to having gone into early menopause at 40, I know that you'd probably be looking at her thyroid function as a main route with which to treat her situation in terms of her possible now Hashimoto's diagnosis.
Yeah, almost everyone around the age of 40, that's when the highest ratio of estrogen to progesterone exists, but the trouble is the estrogen seems to drop when you measure it in the serum, even though it was at its very highest lifetime level around the age of 40. When progesterone falls, the estrogen can't be released from the cell, and so it doesn't appear in the serum until progesterone affects the cells to release it so that it can be measured. But that means that even without taking something to increase your progesterone,
the aromatase inhibitors are very practical and logical. Two fruits that contain effective aromatase inhibitors are oranges and guavas, apigenin. So this is naringenin? Yeah, in oranges and then in guavas, I think there's one called apigenin. Apigenin, okay. Apigenin. Okay. And aspirin, by blocking the production of inflammatory prostaglandins, aspirin helps. And the supplement pregnenolone is indirectly able to increase your progesterone and lower the estrogen production. The pregnenolone is a precursor to the DHEA, correct? It's a what? Precursor, yeah. Oh, precursor. Yeah. Right. My DHEA levels are quite high. So would taking pregnenolone make it even higher?
No. When your estrogen is not being controlled, it likely over-activates your adrenals. DHEA tends to go up with cortisol, and cortisol is a major activator of aromatase. And the function of pregnenolone is to lower the excess cortisol and prevent the overstimulation of aromatase. Okay. So if the pregnenolone being a precursor to DHEA, you explained how that works, but the DHEA is also a precursor to estrogen. So how would I keep it from producing even more estrogen? Sometimes the pregnenolone in itself can do that by lowering the stress hormones, which drive the adrenal glands too hard.
And the diet to correct your low thyroid function is probably the basic thing. Estrogen causes basically inflammation of the thyroid gland. It inhibits the ability to secrete thyroid hormone while allowing it to synthesize it and respond to thyroid-stimulating hormone. And progesterone is needed for the gland to secrete. So you want to do things that lower the stress on your thyroid. And polyunsaturated fats are probably the most important factor in blocking the thyroid other than estrogen. Right. I have eliminated those now. Okay. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate your help.
Calcium in the diet is a very important thing for keeping your metabolic rate up and helping to lose weight. How much calcium should I have a day? Two quarts of low-fat milk will provide a pretty ideal amount of calcium. Okay. Low-fat milk. Okay. Would that amount to be influenced by the fact that I have low stomach acid and I don't have a gallbladder so I don't absorb nutrients as well? Yeah, with one percent milk, there's enough to slow the absorption of the sugar and protein slightly but not enough fat to upset your gallbladder. Okay.
Okay, thank you very much. I appreciate that. You're very welcome. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Okay, there is another caller on the air so let's take this next caller before we carry on. Hi, caller. You're on the air and where are you from? Yes, this is David from Missouri. Oh, hi, David. Hello. So, you know, I just thought of something that might be helpful to all of us and Dr. Peat has really helped me a lot on this and he's discussed this quite a bit but, you know, we're at the lowest point in getting sunlight.
We're getting close to the winter equinox and I've really been experimenting a lot with the red light, you know, using the heat lamps that is basically like a chicken light that you would go buy at a hardware store and having a reflector on it and really trying to get more of that light each day. So anybody that's having any kind of problems, a lot of the problems could be coming from the low light situation so that might be a good place to start. So anyway, I just wanted to start with that.
The other thing, I just have a few questions about food in general and also about aspirin since you brought up aspirin. One of the problems with buying, like, you know, different brands like Bear and different things, it seems like they have a lot of additives in them and so I've explored different ways of getting aspirin that is pure aspirin. The only place you can actually buy that is through pet supply places which always feels a little weird, you know, buying it that way.
But then the other thing, and Andrew, you probably know quite a bit about this as well, willow bark, which I guess is really the source of where Bear Aspirin originally got their, you know, their molecule structure to create the phyllic acid. I think it was also another very good rich source of acetylsalicylic acid, but I think it was probably the willow bark where it was first synthesized. Yeah, so I'm just curious, Dr. Peat, what do you think about using the willow bark rather than trying to use some of these aspirin that have all the fillers
and different phyllic materials in them? The fillers definitely aren't good. I mean, if you have access to nothing but the pills, I think you should dissolve them in hot water to let the junk settle out and then just drink the sour water. Okay, I never thought of that. Okay. There is quite a few chemical supply companies actually that will sell it. I don't think it's a controlled substance. Dr. Peat, aspirin is not a controlled substance at this point in time, is it? No. Okay, yeah. Okay, well, that's good.
It seems like the only-- I've done a lot of different searches and called a lot of places, and it seems like the only place you can find it is like Pet Supply, which it seems like in America sometimes they treat pets better than they do people. They don't give them as many additives, that's for sure, probably. No, you definitely can get too much of that. The other thing I wanted to ask about was on pressure cooking and canning.
And the reason I'm thinking along those lines is, you know, we just kind of live in crazy times, so I've been thinking about, you know, trying to come up with some foods that could be canned, like in Mason jars, and I bought a pressure cooker. And so I just want to throw this one recipe that I'm thinking about doing out, and it would be potatoes and kale, garlic, onion, and I'm thinking also about using like ground lamb. Either cooking that in the pressure cooker in the jar or cooking it before,
and I'm just curious if you have any thoughts about that. I would think the main thoughts Dr. Peat would have about that is the onion and garlic side of it. Oh, okay, so we would rather not put the onion and garlic in there? Well, I think that's because some people are fairly sensitive to it, and they may not even notice the onions and the garlic that are doing it. It's like people eating a lot of vegetables and then having a lot of flatulence and it's quite normal. It's actually not good for you,
so you're probably better off without it. I think that's the logic. Do you think, Dr. Peat, that the nutrition aspects of the canning would harm the foods? Oh, no. There were experiments in the 1940s in which rats were fed stuff out of cans, the usual vegetables, beans, corn, all the standard vegetables, and others were fed the same vegetables, fresh and raw. The animals eating canned vegetables thrived. The others didn't. Interesting. So I'm thinking that the potatoes, because you've talked about potatoes actually being a fairly decent protein,
even though I know the starch is a little bit of a problem, but if it's cooked really well, and I'm thinking the kale is a really good source of minerals and vitamin K, and then the lamb fat and the protein in the lamb I would think would all be really good. Yeah, the well-cooked green leaves are extremely good nutritionally, especially to balance meat because the greens contain very little phosphate and the meat contains too much phosphate and too little calcium, so you've got to balance when you have greens with meat. Okay, well, good.
Well, I'll do some experiments on that and let everybody know how that turned out, but it seems like a fairly nutritious product to can, so. And then just one other thing, I was curious about calcium chloride, and I don't buy very many foods that have additives in them, but there's one thing that I do buy, and it's actually a really good brand of pickles. There's very little ingredients in them that I could see any problem with other than calcium chloride. I'm just curious, what do you think of calcium chloride?
It's been used for making pickles and such, and it has a nice taste when it's added to food, but a lot of people are sensitive either to magnesium chloride or calcium chloride, and so it's good to be cautious with it. It can cause headaches and bowel symptoms of various types. So if I'm not having any problems that I can sense, then I guess it's probably fine. Yeah, if it's chemically pure, it's good as a food additive. Okay. Okay, well, hey, thank you. Okay, thanks for your call. Okay.
Okay, so the number here if you live in the area is 923-3911, or the 800 number is 1-800-568-3723 or 1-800-KMUD-RAD. Okay, so the lines will be open until 8 o'clock. Dr. Peat, you were starting to talk about the -- well, I think between methylation and the compounds that would be useful that were brought out in the article, I know they talked about things like curcumin from turmeric. They mentioned resveratrol, which I know that you've looked at in fairly good detail.
You mentioned genistein and diazine, which are other compounds that were useful in switching off that methylation. Do you have any other -- yeah, any other thoughts on that? The caller mentioned the importance of light, and even light can help to reverse the toxic methylation that happens from stress. Okay, to switch off that excitotoxicity. Yes. Because I know we've talked about that in the past, haven't we, about neurons becoming too excited, and that's just as bad as being inactive. So in terms of methylation, then, it's a bad process that happens to the genes,
and it can happen through various mechanisms, not least of which can be nutritional. But you've mentioned things like red light. I know we've talked in the past in great detail about thyroid hormone, but is there any other things that would be counterproductive that you could use to counter the methylation in the genetics? Some of the people who have been told that they have mutated genes are being told by their doctors that they need to eat lots of methyl groups, choline and methionine in particular, to make up for the weak gene enzyme.
But the American Medical Genetics -- College of Medical Genetics recently said that mutation doesn't call for basically any treatment. It's not significant clinically. But they didn't mention that people with that so-called mutation have a lower incidence of cancer, and this probably relates to what we're talking about, the epigenetic methylation of the genes. The people who have a slightly weaker methylation system are better off for cancer risk. Okay, because I wanted to bring out two compounds that are actually anesthetics, lidocaine and procaine, kind of related to the cocaine-type structure.
So both lidocaine and procaine have a demethylation activity. Is that right for the DNA? Yeah, these are being studied in several types of cancer. Prostate, breast, pancreas, lung, and melanoma are the ones I've seen, and its effects are just dramatic for reversing those changes that are characteristic of the cancer. So it's being considered as an important new approach to cancer treatment, but it's so cheap that no one is very enthusiastic about applying to the FDA. It definitely hasn't got a patent on it still, correct? No, and it costs maybe a quarter a day or something.
Yeah, oh dear. Okay, well, the other thing, in that BBC article they mentioned NAD being the molecule that was responsible here, and if I'm right in thinking that this compound can be synthesized from tryptophan-- I don't want to get confused here now. Have I not heard you mention that excess tryptophan is not good for you? Yeah, women in particular are very susceptible to too much tryptophan. They used to be the victims of pellagra much more often than men. That's because estrogen redirects the metabolism of tryptophan into serotonin rather than niacin or niacinamide.
And when corn is treated with alkali to make hominy or tortillas, the chemistry shifts it over in that pathway, makes niacin out of it, and doesn't let so much serotonin be formed. Okay, because there was another chemical, aspartic acid. I also saw that was a good source from which NAD can be synthesized, and that was from asparagus and asparagus juice in particular. Well, you don't want to take plain aspartic acid or even with minerals because it's an excitotoxin in itself. How about asparagus juice as a source of it? Oh, it's fine.
And another amino acid that's being promoted a lot in the internet world is either arginine or citrulline to increase your nitric oxide. That's going exactly in the wrong direction genetically. And the vitamin B6 is needed to prevent tryptophan being turned into too much serotonin and to help turn it into niacinamide. And simply supplementing niacinamide is a very direct way to help reverse these epigenetic problems. Five years ago when the Harvard people were starting a drug company, I think it was called Certis, S-I-R-T-I-S,
which was bought by a big drug company, Glaxo, and they dumped it this year and went on to something else. You said that some of the chemicals that were uncovered might be useful in the future. Yeah, at the time the people promoting resveratrol through that company as an anti-aging chemical were warning that niacinamide antagonized resveratrol and lowered the sirtuins. And therefore niacinamide would accelerate aging. But I think now they've changed their story. And the facts over even at that time, five years ago, it was very clear that niacinamide greatly extended cell life.
Just a tremendous increase in human cell longevity in vitro. And it's very safe, so it can be used in all of these epigenetic problems, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, various types of cancer and so on. And it's interesting that all of these substances that have been known, some of them for thousands of years, as anti-inflammatory drugs, they all turn out to work in the same direction, protecting us from over-methylation and over-removal of the acetyl groups from the histones. Okay, hold it there, Dr. Peat. We've got a couple more callers, so let's take the next caller.
You're on the air, and where are you from? Actually, someone called in. Quick question. I'll ask for them. What is the use of lidocaine, and how is it administered, and what sort of doses are there? And then there is another caller. Right. Not sure about the dose. Lidocaine for cancer was the question. Okay. Dr. Peat. These studies have been done in many different ways, but I've had several sort of random experiences with both protein and lidocaine that were really just amazing to me. For example, a girl with lifetime terrible eczema, red and scaly all over,
she put a handful of, I think it was rubbing alcohol mostly, with some novocaine in it, and she stroked it up her shin, and at the same speed that her hand moved up her shin, a wave of normal-looking skin appeared right behind it, and it stayed that way. I've seen people with terrible burns. If they could get it on in the first minute or so, the burn stopped and didn't develop. It has antihistamine, antiserotonin effects, stopping inflammation in the tracts, but what it's doing, all of these well-known anti-inflammatory things
are also undoing the limiting and harmful genetic changes that are caused by injury. It's almost as if the perception of pain itself accelerates the damage and the inflammation from that which caused the pain and inflammation in the first place. The nerves increase the release of the inflammatory materials. If you can block the signaling of pain, you can greatly reduce the symptoms of whatever the insult was in the first place. Interesting. OK, we do have another caller on the air, so let's take this next caller. Where are you from? They hung up.
Oh, they hung up. OK. All right, well, if people would like to call back, the number's 923 3911 or the toll-free number's 1-800-KMUD-RAD, so the lines will be open until about 5 to 8 here. OK, well, going back then to, we mentioned the NAD can be synthesized from tryptophan. Too much tryptophan is not good, especially in women with estrogen-related problems. And then the other thing was the asparagus juice, which also could be a source of a synthesis from that into NAD.
You also mentioned, I read a couple of articles about how aspirin enhances the deacetylation of the histones, and the histones were these coils within a chromosome that kind of bundled up the DNA. And then aspirin itself was shown to greatly potentiate the effect of the deacetylation. And I know you've mentioned, you talk about aspirin a lot as being a very useful, very good anti-inflammatory, very inexpensive, and not at all to be considered as a life-threatening drug that will thin your blood and cause hemorrhage.
But what do you think about the co-administration of aspirin along with that deacetylase inhibitor? I think it works by itself or with any of the other protective inhibitors. Caffeine has some of the same effects, and aspirin and caffeine have been used together in a lot of products. So a combination, all of these seem to work synergistically rather than interfering with each other. Okay. And there was, I think if we want to move on to the anthraquinones as a pretty interesting group of chemicals,
I know Pau de Arco is being one of these chemicals that has got a long history of anti-cancer use. But talk about imodine as a compound, this anthraquinone, the reddish, the chemical that gives the reddish color to those types of chemicals that have that laxative effect, so both cascara and imodine, and how they work. If you look at the molecule for Pau de Arco, is that the same as Lapatron? Yeah. If you put vitamin K and imodine and Lapatron in a row and tetracycline, the antibiotic, which is an anti-inflammatory,
they're essentially the same structure with a different number of rings. But it's like each one is an analog of the other, and each one has properties overlapping with those of the other anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer, anti-stress. Can I hold you there? I think there's three callers on the line now. Okay. Let's take the first caller. You're on the air, and where are you from? Hello, I'm from Arcata. Okay, hi. What's your question? You know, I have a problem. A couple of years ago, I scalded myself on my abdomen while I was cooking chicken. Okay.
And the oil from the pan got on my abdomen, and a blister formed. And this blister was bulbous, you know. And since that time, I've had intervals. I've had blisters form again and again in the same location. And they've even, you know, spread a little bit. But if I put--I also have the problem where if I put adhesive tape, like a band-aid, on my abdomen in that area, the skin comes off. Yeah, it's very loosely connected to the underlying membrane. Yes, and this has been, you know--the blisters aren't a great problem.
It's the--quite frequently, having to go through the process of healing from an open wound afterwards. How long after the initial accident have you found these episodes again? Oh, this--it started occurring like four months afterwards. The blister, the actual blister, and that went away. And then one day, I noticed--I'd taken a shower, and, you know, I noticed there was a blister forming. And it got very bulbous, about the size of a silver dollar or bigger. Okay. And, I mean, just--you know, and now, it's happened so frequently that there is, like, scar tissue there. Yeah, yeah.
But it's still blisters. Well, Dr. Peat, this sounds very much like a kind of genetic imprinting, a memory. Yeah, and I think the nervous system is probably involved in helping with the memory. And there is-- All the skin doctors can say is, "We can replace the skin there." Yeah. And I don't think that's inappropriate. There is a little-known branch of medicine, I think it was a German who originated--I think it was called neural therapy or something like that. But it involved finding key points and injecting procaine or other local anesthetic to change the nervous system.
And I've seen a great variety of good results from applying any of the local anesthetics topically to-- It apparently helps to retrain the memory of the tissue so that it stops producing the recurrent problem, such as an ingrown toenail or recurring boils in a certain location. Yes. There are a lot of fairly strong local anesthetic ointments sold over the counter. Okay. And I think benzocaine in a small area is effective and safe, but you don't want to use a lot of benzocaine on a big area. Procaine and lidocaine are safer. There we go.
You could definitely try that because it does sound like there's some kind of imprinted memory in what happened for that to come back. I tried to look it up and there were several things I found on the Internet, but none of them suggest any type of treatment. And the big thing is that I would have an open sore there until that healed. And it healed rather rapidly, except at times it would form a false crust, a false scab, which would come off.
You could definitely try that anesthetic cream and try that as a next thing to do. Yeah. All right. Thank you very much. You're very welcome. Okay. I think we have two more callers, so let's get the next caller on the end. Where are you from? Is that me? Yes, you're on the air. Where are you from? I just have a really quick question. The doctor mentioned about the woman who was using alcohol and something else, a person, and the eczema just disappeared instantly. What was the other thing?
Was it lidocaine, Dr. Peat, or was it -- No, that particular one was just Novocaine, Procaine. Okay. All right. Well, thank you. That's what I wanted to know. Okay. It will dissolve in water, but a little alcohol makes it dissolve faster. Okay. Well, there is another caller, so if we can get the next caller done in two minutes, that would be good. So where are you from, caller? Hello, you're on the air. Maybe not, huh? Okay. Well, let's just leave that. It's probably getting too late anyway.
So, yeah, we were talking very briefly, then, Dr. Peat. We've got a couple of minutes before the end of the show. I know that Imodine and another laxative from Cascara were definitely used to suppress bladder cancer cell growth. I saw an article about that. Do you know much more about Imodine? It's about 10 or 15 years ago, the FDA was attacking the laxatives of that class, such as Aloe and Cascara, as potential causes of cancer.
But as soon as they took it off the market, the cancer industry started getting interested in it, and it relieves or cures many kinds of cancer. And it turns out not to have any of the harmful effects that the FDA was claiming. Its mechanism seems to involve not only the usual anti-inflammatory things, but a real basic reprogramming, demethylation, and inhibiting the histone deacetylase enzymes. Okay, good. Well, Dr. Peat, I don't want to keep you going. Thanks so much for joining us.
I just want people to find out a little bit more about you and how to get access to the articles that you've written. So thanks for joining us. Okay. Merry Christmas. Thanks so much for all your help during the year. Okay. Okay, so for those people that have listened to the show, Dr. Raymond Peat, his website can be found at www.raypeat.com. The website is full of articles that are fully referenced about a lot of interesting research that he has done himself, and research which he has collated from other independent researchers far and wide.
So there's a lot of very interesting information that is very scientifically referenced and backed up. None of it is just hearsay. So for those people that have listened to the show, thanks so much for joining us. And for those people that called in, thanks for your calls. It's going to be the solstice tomorrow, the shortest day of the year, and days are gradually going to get longer. So right now is the time you need to be thinking about your low thyroid activity
and what you can do to help your thyroid through this darkest time until the beginning of the light coming back again. And, yeah, for all those people that have listened, thanks so much for your input. And we can be reached toll-free after business hour, during business hour, sorry, for consultations or whatever else you'd like to contact me about. The number is 1-888-926-4372. And Merry Christmas to all of you and a Happy New Year. [Music] >> Came with thanks 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 or online at jadedragonacupuncture.com. This is Redwood Community Radio, KMUD, Garberville 91.1 FM, KMUE, Eureka 88.1 FM, KLAI 90.3 FM, and FM Translator K258BQ in Shelter Cove. At 99.5 we are also live and archived on the web at kmud.org. All of you out of the area Dr. Peat listeners, check out the archive. You will find incredible programming of all sorts. Thank you very much to Andrew.
And get ready, because Cousin Mark is in the house. It's time to get funked up. [Music] 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. Help us keep free speech alive.