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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. Supporting your community radio station. This Saturday, May 19th, is Household Hazardous Waste Collection Day. It's from 9 a.m. until 2 p.m. Households can bring up to 15 gallons or 125 pounds to the Caltrans Maintenance Yard in Garberville. Materials accepted include wet paint, auto and garden products, cleaners, aerosols, medical sharps, and a red biohazard box, and up to 10 fluorescents and 3 HIDS. No electronics or appliances, please.
More info is available at 441-2005. And it's time for Ask Your Herb Doctor. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Welcome to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name's Andrew Murray. My name's Sarah Johannison Murray. For those of you who perhaps have never listened to our shows, which run every third Friday of the month from 7 to 8 p.m., we're both licensed medical herbalists who trained in England and graduated there with a degree in herbal medicine.
We run a clinic in Garberville where we consult with clients about a wide range of conditions and recommend herbal medicines and dietary advice. If you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMUD Garberville, 91.1 FM, and from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o'clock, you're invited to call in with any questions, either related or unrelated, to this month's subject of genetics versus environmental predisposition to disease. So the number here, if you live in the area, is 923 3911, or if you live outside the area, the toll-free number is 1-800-KMUD-RAD. That's 1-800-568-3723.
Once again, we're very pleased to have Dr. Ray Peat on the show tonight, and from 7.30 on, people are invited to call in with any questions related to this show. So, Dr. Peat, are you with us? Yes, I am. Okay, thanks so much for joining the show again. I know we get requests fairly frequently from people who've listened to the show and very much enjoy what your opinion is, and your scientific research is on some fairly static ideas in science.
And several months ago, we were on air last month, but I think it was in March, the beginning of March, a listener sent us an email, very much appreciated your take on things, and also had a few suggestions, without being bold, he just gave a few suggestions for things that he'd really like to hear your opinions on. And they pretty much conform with tonight's subject. So, first of all, for those people who perhaps have never heard you, Dr. Peat, would you just briefly outline your academic career?
I got a PhD in biology at the University of Oregon in 1972, but I had been reading in biology since the late 1940s, and avoided academic study because I saw that strange things were happening that didn't seem at all scientific to me, even as a kid, it was very clear that political doctrines were influencing biological theories. Okay, I've just very briefly been told by the studio director, we'll call him, that all views and opinions expressed on this show are those of the speaker, not necessarily those of the radio station.
I think that's how it goes, isn't it? Good. Okay. So, thanks so much, Dr. Peat, for letting people know what your academic background is. Later on, we'll let people know how they can contact you through your website and/or ask advice further later on the program. So, on to the question of the fairly dogmatic, entrenched view that genes, our genes, control everything. They control us and we are at the mercy of our genes, and to one degree or another, if we are genetically predisposed to a disease, that's it.
Our future siblings, etc., etc., will be doomed, for want of a better word. I know the article that I wanted to discuss with you, and I want your opinion on the current model versus very alternative, very scientifically founded alternative ways of looking at biology and cells in particular. How you see the role of genes versus the environment. The federal government is really involved in the issue. I was sort of horrified when I discovered that the National Library of Medicine maintains an online version of a book called Mendelian Inheritance in Man.
I bought a copy for 50 cents at a used book store just for the humor of it, because it's just totally absurd stuff, basing genetic determinism of a disease on two cases, for example. A single family is enough to prove to the author of that book that there was genetic determinism involved, neglecting the possibility that both people in the family were exposed to the same chemical toxin, for example, or the same diet or whatever.
Just about the time I was starting to read biology was when the government was starting to get involved in helping the dogmatists control biological teaching. Someone that I got acquainted with when he was very old, Carl Lindegren, wrote a book called Cold War in Biology that explained how the change took place in the 1940s. People who didn't conform to the dogma weren't allowed to teach, even in high schools. It was a very totalitarian institution with the government's involvement as a funding agency.
The science journals being influenced by the pharmaceutical industry, for example, were big factors in outlawing the teaching of alternative views of inheritance. In the first half of the 20th century, the embryological view of development and inheritance was developing the definition of how the single cell becomes an adult. It does this by proceeding through many stages of different organizations. The guiding principle for the first 50 years of the century was that a field was involved, a gradient field of chemicals or electrical forces or even other physical forces were assumed to be involved.
They could demonstrate that there was a field effect in the sense that if you removed a part, the surrounding conditions constituted a force that would create a replacement part, regeneration, according to the place in the field rather than to what it had done up to that moment. The idea of genes reading out as if from a blueprint mechanically was clearly disproved by the embryologists. The morphogenetic developmental field disappeared about 1960. The last advocates retired between 1950 and 1960.
You think that a lot of the change or stagnation was brought around by vested interests in medicine and guiding the dogma of genetics to produce a controllable scenario where drugs can be introduced, targeted at specific proteins. The idea that genes create a disease, if you can't find a drug that will neutralize that gene's product, then you have something to blame it on and explain why the doctors are powerless. It's incurable if it's genetic unless the drug companies can come up with something to alleviate the symptoms.
The actual evidence of how genes relate to health is really just a complete fantasy. The idea of a gene in the 1930s to 1960s was recognized as a metaphysical construct, even less based on evidence than the idea of a field, even though they didn't know exactly what the elements of the field were. The idea of a gene was simply an abstraction until they applied the abstraction to the idea that there were certain stretches of DNA that they began calling a gene.
The definition of a gene has been changing even since the recognition of DNA as a component of inheritance. Did they want to tell us that if they can't help us because there's no drug to help that disease, then it's just a genetic disease? It takes the power out of the person to help themselves. If they have a genetic disease, people think there's nothing they can do about it. That's the common way of thinking about it. Was that part of the motivation or do you think that was a subconscious byproduct?
A very conscious ideology. Conrad Lorenz, who won the Nobel Prize, was a hero of practically all of the professors that I knew, even in the 70s. He was a Nazi who designed his idea that genes control behavior, specifically for Hitler's Institute of Racial Hygiene as an excuse for killing people who didn't have the behavioral traits that they thought were appropriate. It justified political and religious killings where the American view of eugenics had been mostly to sterilize. Sometimes they would euthanize babies, but mostly it was used to sterilize people they considered defective.
That political idea of genetics derives right from the end of the 19th century. Mendel and August Weissmann were consciously trying to destroy the Darwinian or Lamarckian ideas that the environment might be able to improve the intelligence of poor people. They wanted to have an absolute determinism that people of lower intelligence were simply permanently, their children would inherit their traits and so on. At the worst, they could be killed or sterilized, but it was used to justify everything in society, not just particular sickness.
For example, it was applied to the idea of toxemia of pregnancy. The fetus was said to have a genetic defect which was poisoning the mother, but of course the fetus had inherited it from the parents. It was denying that a better diet could control or prevent pregnancy complications because all of that was genetically determined. The Scopes trial in which William Jennings Bryant argued against evolution, he was basically against eugenics which was justified by the theory of mechanical evolution.
You are listening to Ask Your Web Doctor on KMED Galbraith 91.1 FM and from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o'clock you are invited to call in with any questions either related or unrelated to this month's subject of genetics versus the environment, the predisposition to disease. We are very pleased to have Dr. Raymond Peat to share his expertise on this subject. Dr. Peat, I was going to ask you next, how much do genetics affect the organism?
If we are told by medical people and scientists per se that genetics are all pervasive as a cause, what is your take on how much genetics affect the organism? There are several diseases or conditions that are distinctly controlled by particular genes. The type of dwarfism in which the bones don't develop, there is a definite gene mutation involved but that doesn't say that the environment hasn't created that mutation in a particular controllable way. One way of looking at genetic uniqueness is that every organism requires a certain environment.
A frog can't live in the same place an eagle can live. Every organism needs exactly the right kind of environment. Certain genes make you need more things from the environment. Even the genes that limit you, they can create a stress reaction and the stress reaction can lead to changes in the genes. The evidence has been accumulating now in American universities, Australian, among very well-known researchers, they've demonstrated that stress can produce directional changes in microorganisms
using mechanisms similar to what Barbara McClintock recognized in corn, mobile genetic elements that move around under stress and accelerate the ability to adapt. So our environment is constantly having an effect upon our DNA and our DNA and our cells are constantly sensing a change in environment? Yeah, James Shapiro, who was one of the people that discovered that bacteria can adapt to resist penicillin or antibiotics and that they can pass on that acquired resistance to their descendants or to other bacteria that they interact with so it can be transmitted.
Both genetically and horizontally as an acquired trait. Shapiro calls this natural genetic engineering in which the organism is adjusting its own inheritance to improve its survival. Okay, so I guess let's go on to some diseases perhaps that are considered genetic by today's scientific thinking which are probably more environmental. I know that things like the prion diseases and Huntington's chorea... Yeah, those are considered degenerative diseases as well as genetic and the fact that, for example, Huntington's disease typically becomes apparent as a problem when the person is maybe 40 years old.
They were perfectly healthy or even some people have said that they were healthier than average up until the disease set in at the age of 35 or 40 or 45. When you look at the specific gene that they're talking about, in the case of Huntington's chorea, it's a protein that gets an extra inserted stretch of glutamine residues. This can change generation after generation so that the victim's offspring can develop it years earlier than the parent and it can change quickly from generation to generation indicating that something is actively contributing to the mutation.
But the folding doesn't become a problem. You can have the gene for 40 years with no health problem at all and what's known to activate the folding problem that creates the symptoms, these are environmental things that have been accumulating over the decades of ordinary living. These features are now coming to be identified. For example, the unsaturated fatty acids cause misfolding of the prions in CJD and mad cow disease.
Radiation and the polyunsaturated fatty acids are known to accelerate the misfolding of the protein making it act like an infectious thing that spreads from one cell to the next. Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's, similar folding of proteins cause the symptoms and the factors that cause that misfolding are now being identified as environmental dietary factors. And weren't you saying that even in a test tube when they add omega 6 oils to these proteins it encourages or stimulates the misfolding and the misshapen to occur?
That's been done with prions and all the prion related diseases and in Parkinson's disease the protein is called alpha synuclein and the DHA long chain highly unsaturated fatty acid is known to induce the misfolding and saturated fatty acids can block the misfolding. So the evidence is now looking like it's related to an aging process since with aging the brain accumulates more and more DHA especially under the influence of estrogen.
Women accumulate more DHA, circulate more of it in the blood and very typically with the degenerative inflammatory diseases women are more susceptible than men to several of the diseases. And DHA is one of the omega oils that they tout as being so anti-inflammatory and so good for women, DHA and EPA, but what you're saying is that it actually works in conjunction with estrogen to be very destructive?
Yeah, it does several things. It breaks down and forms for example acrolein which is a very reactive fragment that attaches to for example the tau protein that is involved in the filament formation in Alzheimer's disease. And DHA activates the excitotoxic process, it increases the glutamate excitatory system, increasing the free glutamic acid in the brain fluid and in all of these brain degenerative diseases you can see increased breakdown products of basically the fish oil type of polyunsaturated fats in the cerebrospinal fluid and in many cases in the other body fluids, serum and such.
So everything from the short acrolein up to the larger prostaglandin like breakdown products of the polyunsaturated that are called isoprostanes and neuroprostanes. These show up increasingly with age and with dementia. So as a newborn infant their brains have very little DHA and EPA? Yeah, because their fats have been synthesized by their own bodies made mostly from glucose absorbed from the mother and the animal body can produce saturated fats and monounsaturated like oleic acid and our own series that are called the omega-9 series of unsaturated fats.
And at birth these are the dominant fats in the baby's brain. And animal studies going back 30 or 40 years showed that if you feed pregnant animals a large amount of polyunsaturated fats their babies are born with smaller brains and don't learn as well. And a group in France two or three years ago basing their thinking on the addition of these fish oil type fats to baby formulas, they were looking at that argument that the brain is made of these and so they should help brain development.
So they fed some pregnant women a high polyunsaturated fat diet hoping that they could demonstrate increased learning of the fetus by presenting sounds to the developing fetus and watching the learning reaction. And they found that their learning was retarded in the presence of the omega-3 fatty diet to the mother just in line with what the animal studies had shown. So did they think that these oils were useful for the baby's brain because they did autopsies on adults and found that the brains had a lot of these oils in them?
They said your brain is full of fish oil so it must be good for the brain but looking at a baby's brain it's very low in babies. Well maybe they were looking at Alzheimer's brains. Yeah exactly, the more demanded not only Alzheimer's but the other brain degenerative diseases and old brains in general have more than young brains. OK you're listening to Ask Your Ab Doctor on KNED Galbraithville 91.1 FM from 7.30 which is right around now until the close of the show at 8 o'clock.
Callers are invited to pose questions either related or unrelated to this month's subject of genetics versus environmental predisposition to disease. Our guest speaker is Dr. Raymond Peat and the lines will be open until 8 o'clock. Sarah did you, oh I think there's a caller actually so let's take this next caller. Hello. Hi you're on the air. Hello this is, first of all I just want to thank Andrew, Sarah and the people you showed. I try to tune in every month because I learn a lot and I appreciate it.
I'm actually the person who suggested this show and I really appreciate you doing this topic. It's something that's always interested me because I mean I've seen several doctors and I've never had a doctor ask me like what do I eat, what my diet is. Yet I've always had a doctor give me like weird looks when I told them that both my grandfathers died from type 2 diabetes and somehow it seems like now I'm destined to that. There's no way that I can go about it you know it's just a matter of time.
It's kind of weird to kind of think of it in that way and I guess. Hello, are you there? Yeah, yeah sorry. I guess my question to Dr. Peat would be that I had an argument with one of my professors in the university a couple semesters back and he basically said that there was a lot of evidence for the genetics.
And one of the things he said was there was a lot of studies I guess from twins that were separated at birth and I guess they reconciled 40, 50 years later and they did different measurements and stuff. And I was wondering how much of that would actually be genetic and how much of that could it be the shared intrauterine environment during the nine months of gestation? That's basically an argument I've been making for a long time.
There was a genetically oriented argument for the idea that working class people would never rise to the middle class because of genetic influence on their intelligence. I pointed out the evidence of the intrauterine environment and nutrition and the article that I was criticizing I think was 11 pages and the conclusions didn't even relate to the evidence they had presented. But the editors instead of just rejecting my two sentence rebuzzle sent it to reviewers to get their support for rejecting it and the only evidence they cited happened to come from Hitler's Institute for Racial Hygiene.
The evidence from animal studies is really clear that the twins have a very similar environment. They get basically the same nutrition and so if the mother's health changes from pregnancy to pregnancy the intelligence of the baby is going to be influenced according to what she was eating at the time. Animal studies show that this effect can be passed on for four generations at least.
Studies of people who were starved during pregnancy in Holland and Russia, not only were their babies impaired mentally but even their grandchildren showed impairment as a result of the conditions affecting the brain, the hormones, the whole physiology. So it's inherited but it's purely a physiological environmental thing. If they had a super supportive environment that could have been corrected and wouldn't be passed on from generation to generation.
I was just wondering, so the mother's nutrition during gestation, would that also explain that huge variance that you see among people in the way that they can tolerate a poor nutritional diet? What part does genes play into that? Thirty or forty years ago doctors were talking about the thrifty gene that caused some families to get fat on very little food. But that's undoubtedly another example of the same kind of inheritance by gestational influence. If you're starving, the fetus adjusts to a very poor diet and becomes thrifty.
They've never identified a thrifty gene or a gene for diabetes but people go on talking about a gene for obesity and for diabetes. When the country of Israel was formed, lots of immigrants came in from other parts of Africa as well as from Europe. The Europeans had a very high typically European rate of diabetes but the immigrants from poor countries had almost no diabetes when they immigrated. After the first generation, only the Europeans were diabetic.
But after a second generation of living on a relatively abundant European style of eating, the immigrants' children were developing diabetes at the same rate as the European immigrants, totally destroying the idea of genetic diabetes. The natural dogma is that it's because of the mixing and interaction of the genes among the people. No, they were interbreeding. The immigrants didn't mix with the Europeans. Oh, okay. Interesting. Okay, we have another call. If you have any more questions, go ahead.
Thank you very much for everything you guys do. It's great that this is being shared because the dogma that's going on, it lets people think that it doesn't matter what they eat or what they do. I appreciate it and I know a lot of people do so thank you very much. Well, we appreciate your suggestion for a topic and thank you for your call. Thank you. Okay, there's another caller on the air.
Thank you so much. I wanted to ask Dr. Peat, I've been told I have cystic fibrosis and have tested positive, I guess, on the chloride sweat test a couple of different occasions. I've also been told that this is some sort of malfunction in the sodium transport mechanism and I'm wondering whether he can enlighten myself as to the veracity of any of this or anything that he might be able to shed light on in this situation.
For a long time, I've been interested in the mechanism of sodium transport and I've suspected that hypothyroidism is sometimes misunderstood and a diagnosis of cystic fibrosis is made. When I worked in the woods the first summer, we had a cook who was a fanatic for believing that if you worked hard and sweated a lot, you needed a salt replacement. So he would put, I think it was something like a tablespoon of salt in everyone's breakfast and if you didn't eat your porridge that was horribly salty, you didn't get the rest of your breakfast.
Within a few days, I was tending to faint if I didn't take salt pills halfway through the day. My skin was so salty that I got crystals of salt on my forehead, eyebrows, glasses. It was actually just crystallizing pure sodium chloride. I for sure would have been considered to have cystic fibrosis from the chloride coming out of my skin. But it was simply an adaptation to my particular kind of thyroid metabolism and an extremely high salt intake.
Dr. Peat, do you have any suggestions that would be relevant to somebody with cystic fibrosis in terms of the main things at which environmentally could be changed? I think they should examine their thyroid function very thoroughly including measurements of their carbon dioxide, bicarbonate in the blood and exhaled carbon dioxide in the end of their exhalation. Because carbon dioxide is what actually regulates the movement of sodium and other minerals. So a comprehensive metabolic panel would show the carbon dioxide in the blood but are you saying there are other tests you could do?
Probably if you look with a suspicion of hypothyroidism and endocrine involvement, I think you will probably most likely find the answer in that. Thank you. Thank you so very much Dr. Peat. Thank you for your call. Thank you for your call. Okay, we've got a couple more callers on the line so let's take the next caller. Hey, are you talking to me? Yes, you're on the air. Okay. Can you turn the background music down? It's not background music. These are the loud people that are also in the house where I am right now. Sorry.
I can't turn them down. But I was also disconnected for a minute so I don't know what you guys were just talking about. But I heard you talking about carbon dioxide and I think in this context it's interesting to take note of the fact that shamans in this country and in South America use tobacco to connect with plants and plants want carbon dioxide. We want oxygen from them. So when you're blowing that tobacco smoke on the plant, it's actually like a chemical exchange that's happening there. It makes genetic sense too.
But beyond this, really what I was calling about is because really I just wanted to say that you made a mention of field theory before versus like the concept of a gene. And I think integrating field theory back into our understanding about these things would do a whole world of change. Like realizing that like your genetic code is really more like a field frequency that you can willfully affect. That's like integrating holistic medicine that works energetically with your diet and stuff. Like operating on both levels.
Like working your own kundalini flow, working that along with matching it up with your diet and proper herb intake. Knowing all of these things. But really like the field theory concept is what makes way more sense. You can have an effect. It's a shame that that was the theory for the first half of, you know, for the first 50 years of this century and it didn't seem to carry on. But the fact of the matter is that it's not just matter. Field theory is what makes more sense. Like science has got a little confused.
That's my opinion. It's reductionist thinking versus more of a holistic. Precisely. But really where I'm coming from is saying that like what needs to happen is an integration of the two. Realizing both are operative. So it can be both like your genetic frequency, like your inherent field resonance having its effect. Like on you regardless of what's going on around you. Or alternatively like the external environment, those fields affecting you. It can go both ways. But then the big factor here is that to realize that you can have a willful effect on it.
But those things are also debilitated by something like your chemistry. Like if you're not eating enough, then your ability to like emanate energy enough to not be taken over by the energies all around you. Like would be debilitated, like I said. Okay. Yeah, no, that's totally right on. So that's all my battling. No more noise for you all. I appreciate your call. Thank you. Okay. We've got three more callers on the line. The next caller. Hello? You're on the air. Hi.
My question for Dr. Peat was about, you've mentioned before on the show about hypothyroidism and the downward spiral I guess. That it can lead to high estrogen and then high stress hormones, low thyroid, low progesterone. And you mentioned supplemental desiccated thyroid to get out of that cycle. And I guess I'm just wondering, is that something that can work in the short term, like a few months, and you get yourself out of that cycle? Or is that something you would have to continue for the rest of your life? It would replace your natural thyroid.
I've seen a few people who needed it just for a few days and it broke a stress cycle. And there have been published cases like that. But if your body is loaded with polyunsaturated fats, every time you get hungry, these come into your bloodstream and interfere with the thyroid function. So the average person who is hypothyroid, maybe at the age of 20 or 30, their body is so well saturated with the antithyroid agents that it takes a couple of years of fairly strict diet before they can get along without thyroid. Okay.
And would the same thing go for if the problem with that was low progesterone? Would the same thing happen there with some people needing only a few doses, I guess, and you could get them out of that cycle? That's much more frequent than the quick response to thyroid. I've seen, I suppose, two or three hundred women who just needed one or a few doses of progesterone to get out of the cycle and get going on their own without needing a supplement. So I've always resisted the idea of talking about hormone replacement.
But very often, for example, one woman who since puberty had been very white-skinned with purple lips. It was just apparently her nature. She put some progesterone on her hand, and I was explaining how it's absorbed through the skin. A little later, she telephoned and said as she was leaving the house, she felt something happening. And when she got home, she looked in the mirror, and her cheeks were pink, and her lips were red instead of purple. Weeks after that, when she visited her parents, the first thing they said was, "What happened to your color change?"
It had existed for about 18 years at that point, and in just minutes, progesterone apparently permanently changed her physiology just one dose. Thanks for that. Thank you for your call, Caller. Okay, I think there's two more callers on the line, so let's take the next caller. Hi, Dr. Peat. Hi. A couple of questions. The first one relates to the earlier part of your show. I saw a report, I think it was on KPIX out of San Francisco within the last six months. One of the major affiliates, and it was about eugenics in the U.S.
where there was a hospital in Sonoma, a so-called hospital, where they took people whose parents may have been considered misfits for being tardy to school or may have been involved in what was interpreted as prostitution, and they sterilized the kids. And in this report, they said that Hitler actually used that as a model, this hospital in Sonoma, for what he did that was even more evil, of course, than that. Bad enough what they did here in the state of California for these young people whose fault it was, none of theirs, what their parents had done.
Or if it was on their own, they were late for school and considered misfits for society and didn't want those traced in the run and sterilized them. But I wondered if you had heard anything in what you had discussed earlier that was related to that school and/or hospital in Sonoma. Not that particular hospital. I've seen it mentioned, but there were several hospitals doing that in the U.S. in the 1920s, and American geneticists were the model for Hitler's eugenics program. That's fairly well known.
The American Journal was called Annals of Eugenics, and it kept that name until 1954. Another journal was the Quarterly of Eugenics, and they kept that name until 1969. Public recognition of their role in Hitler's sterilization and murder campaigns finally caused them to change their name. It makes one wonder if tendrils of that don't exist to this day with what Congress, especially the Republican Party, seems to be doing. I'm not trying to blame either party here because I think they're all at fault,
but we see some of the stuff going on, whether taking that young college student who was a law student and then what Rash, Lame, Brain, or Crush, blah, blah, or whatever that Squawk Show host's name is, that really got what he deserved for saying that. My other question is completely unrelated to that. As you know, we're having an eclipse which enters and makes landfall in Humboldt County a little after 5 on Sunday, May 20th, and it peaks between 624 and about 632, 634.
My question relates to if somebody does injure their eyes, and of course they should use the number 14 welders, glass, or other approved observing techniques which you can obtain at telescope stores. But if somebody does injure their eyes, is it possible to regenerate any kind of seeing with things such as beta carotene, vitamin K, and the like? Immediately when the exposure has happened in the first hour, red light, like seeing light through your eyelids, can have a detoxifying effect on the heat damage. It stimulates circulation and lowers inflammation just to have mild red light exposure.
Anti-inflammatory things, aspirin and vitamin E, help to stop inflammation from such injury. I think even though people shouldn't do that, sometimes they do. It's good to know preventatively what they might want to have on hand in case somebody overdoes it. I hope everyone enjoys that eclipse. It's a really wonderful, unique opportunity. Since Humboldt County honors the matriarch so well, and this eclipse is going over the arc of Humboldt County, I'm referring to it as the She Clips. I think that's appropriate here. Okay, thank you for your call, caller. Thank you for the show. Bye-bye.
Thank you. We do have two more callers, so let's see if we can squeeze them in. Next caller, you're on the air. Oh, hello. Hi. I just had two questions. The first one is, could you explain how salt affects the thyroid? How what affects it? Salt. Oh, well, it stimulates cells to use oxygen, and it works with thyroid to rev up the oxidation of sugar, producing carbon dioxide. So it's like speeding the metabolism. Yeah. So salt is okay. And calcium. So then if you had an overactive thyroid, it would be best not to eat salt?
No, not necessarily, because your body should govern your salt appetite. You'll not have a salt appetite if you aren't losing salt fast enough. I see. And the other question is, when you're talking about polyunsaturated oils, are you saying it's not good to eat nuts like almonds and walnuts? Right. I think they're major problems. Okay, thank you. Okay, thank you for your call, caller. Do we have any more? Yeah. Okay, let's keep going with the next caller. Hello? You're on the air. Okay, thank you.
What I'm wondering is, when I tuned in to the show, you were talking about how bacteria inherit resistance to antibiotics, I believe, both horizontally and vertically, which suggests inheriting acquired characteristics. And so I'm wondering if you could comment on how that might refer or impact on, say, the work that Lamarck did in his studies of inheriting acquired characteristics. Well, Charles Darwin was actually not an antagonist of Lamarck, and Darwin's grandfather was a Lamarckian. And Darwin got his basic ideas from his grandfather, who was really a Lamarckian.
And in the introduction to one of the editions of "Descent of Man," he made several points that he was not saying that it's just a matter of the inheritance of randomly mutated genes. He pointed out several other mechanisms of inheritance, but the anti-Darwinians were actually anti-evolutionists, who didn't like the idea that organisms could have a purpose or could be intelligent and respond reasonably to the environment in a way that could be passed on to their offspring. So the anti-Lamarckism was really associated with anti-true Darwinism, and was a creation of late 19th century anti-evolutionists,
who became the basis for the neo-Darwinist movement, which is what suppressed this idea of a purposeful developmental field as being what is in charge of both expressing and organizing the genes. Okay, so all of this denunciation of Lamarck, I'm really thinking about this from having read Arthur Kessler's book "The Case of the Mid-White Coat," and so all this suppression of Lamarck's work and his ideas, you're saying, is really dogmatic rather than real. Dogmatic, and even to the point of being irrational and unscientific. It just makes no sense in things like Mendelian inheritance in man.
It's just like a cultish doctrine that doesn't have any basis anywhere. Okay, great. Well, that's really good to hear. That's what I've been thinking, that the scientific community is not there. So, thank you very much. Thank you, Paula. Okay, well, we better not take any more callers. We've just got a few more minutes here until we reach the top of the hour. I just wanted very briefly to quickly ask you, Dr. Peat, maybe in a minute or two, so we can let people know more about you.
I read a paragraph in your latest newsletter on inflammation that Zajacek had done experiments revealing a cell streaming in tissues, normally thought of as static, and you brought out the example where he'd shown evidence that a similar transformation of function occurs in the pancreas with the acina cells that normally produce the digestive enzyme or proforms. The pancreas, like other tissues, is constantly regenerating, and it's just our bad, dangerous fats in the diet that is constantly killing off the insulin-secreting cells. So, it's possible to regain insulin-secreting cells. That was the...
That's basically what Zajacek's research was showing, right, Dr. Peat? Yeah, the organism is in very vigorous replacement everywhere. All the parts are turning over and in a very organized, meaningful way, doing its best to renew everything, including the things that are associated with diseases such as lack of insulin. And just for our listeners, to wrap up here for these oils that Zajacek showed were harming the cells in the pancreas, basically polyunsaturated oils, if I can lump it all together, include every vegetable oil apart from olive oil, coconut oil,
and animal fats such as butter, beef, lamb fat, and any fat from a ruminant animal. Okay, for those people that have enjoyed tonight's show, and Dr. Peat as always bringing his intelligent, scientific approach to seeing it differently, seeing it how it really is, his website is www.raypeat.com, and there are lots of fully referenced articles on many uniquely different approaches to regaining your health. And he can be contacted there also. So thanks so much, Dr. Peat, for joining us again. It's invaluable information and we really appreciate it. Okay, thanks.
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