From the Hill Country in Texas, this is OneRadioNetwork.com.
Hello, welcome to our two of our little show here.
Dr. Ray Peat has a PhD in biology from University of Oregon.
He specialized in physiology.
He's taught at schools like University of Oregon, Urbana College, Montana State University,
Natural College of Naturopathic Medicine, University of Dadaad in Bataclues,
and some other places in Mexico that I can't pronounce.
He started his work with progesterone and related hormones at 68.
He did papers on those and all kinds of pretty geeky things when it comes to the body.
And he's been studying these things since that for a long time.
Has quite a following around the world.
His website is raypeat.com and we're honored to have him back because we have lots of good questions for him.
Well, good morning, Dr. Peat.
Good morning.
How are things out there on the left coast?
It's been sunny the last couple of days.
Really? We just talked to Dave Stetzer that had a couple feet of global warming on the ground there in Wisconsin.
Dr. Peat, how do you spend your days generally up there with you?
Usually reading.
Reading. How do you know when you read all this stuff?
How do you know what's kind of like right or medium or fake news?
I mean, how do you know?
When I first went to college, I was a literature English major for several years.
I specialized in English literature mostly.
And doing that, you learn how to really interpret who a person is just from fairly short passages of their writing.
You can tell pretty much what their philosophy is, what their mind is like just from the way they make a few sentences.
And starting almost 100 years ago, science and medical journals started imposing a way of writing that creates the impression that there's no person present.
And despite that stylized, impersonal, so-called objective way of writing, at some level you can detect the mind of the person behind those pseudo-objective sentences.
And I think of science and medical writing as political propaganda writing.
It's the same as reading the newspaper.
You know it's going to be 90% lies, but you figure out the motives, why they chose that subject to write on.
And the motives will explain the way they use their terms, the assumptions they make, and the conclusions, the way they draw conclusions from the evidence.
Very interesting. Similar to, I guess, that people have begun to discern just fake news in general when it comes to politics or science or whatever.
Much better than 20 or 30 years ago.
But still, most people are gullible.
Like what they're saying about Venezuela.
Yeah, right.
It has the biggest oil and gold deposit in the world.
And it's democracy we're interested in.
I know, just isn't it interesting to watch that.
And all these countries that have gathered up and said, "Oh yeah, this new guy, he's our guy, you know, he's our guy."
It's very curious, isn't it, when it comes to money.
Oh boy, yes indeed.
You can just spot it. I mean, I smell it, you know, a lot.
But I've studied the money thing for quite a few years.
So I guess after you study things for a long time, like I've done with the financial world for 25 years,
you just kind of, like you said, you kind of smell it, right?
You just kind of intuit that the people have a particular position one way or another.
Yeah, yeah. Dietitians and doctors writing about statins or other drugs.
Sure, yeah.
What are some of the subjects that you get, like, you know, just top of the line interest in these days, Dr. Peat?
Parts of organs or parts of the body or particular illnesses.
Do you see some things keep showing up in number one, two, three, like over the last year or so that kind of spark for you?
Always hair loss and obesity are the most common.
But there's an awful lot of cancer recently.
Cancer is displacing heart disease in the people I've been talking to.
And two or three days ago, I heard from a veteran who had had 20 vaccinations and then had immune suppression therapy and then developed cancer.
I think the things we're being exposed to are creating cancer in young people.
It isn't being publicized because people generally think about an age-related cancer.
But just in the last 10 years, there's been a big surge in cancer in the 20s and 30s and 40s.
Air, food and water, the basics are getting toxic.
The combination of lots of PUFA in the diet, lots of radiation, tongue cancer is practically an epidemic compared to what it used to be.
Tongue cancer, tonsil cancer, eye cancer, thyroid and brain cancer from combination of cell phones around the head and dental x-rays.
Wow. Tongue cancer, is that a source of that? Do we know?
I think oral x-rays are probably the best explanation for that.
Oh, they over x-ray when you go in and...
Yeah, they talk about the new sensitive instruments that don't make as much radiation per exposure, but then they give you panoramic scenery x-rays that make dozens of exposures even though each one is low exposure, but some of them is much more than people used to get.
Yeah, a cinemascope and whatever, they really go for it now.
Oh, me darn.
If you have a question for Ray P, we have lots of emails already, patrick@oneradionetwork.com.
Several emails after your last show and folks were wondering why you were suggesting possibly the synthetic hormone replacement rather than the pig nature authority.
Nature authority, is that how you say it?
Oh, I don't know about that particular brand, but there are now lots of desiccated thyroid planned products available, but 100 years ago and up until the 90s, the Armour Company was the main producer of desiccated thyroid and there were a couple other companies that made extremely good products,
but they were testing every batch.
They took it from beef and pork both and you could get the type you wanted or a mixture, but every batch was standardized in potency by testing it on mice.
In the 90s, that stopped and then one of the major producers started extracting and selling thyrocalcitonin from the powder.
So you can't tell whether the powder is the entire gland the way it used to be 100 years ago when all of the great research was being done.
Now, you're likely to get a fractionated extract from the thyroid gland and since they don't standardize it on mice.
In Mexico, I got some thyroid glands from the slaughterhouse and found that they had almost no thyroid activity.
Something had been in the animal feed apparently that ruined their thyroid.
So if you aren't standardizing the product, the only way you can tell what you're getting is to get a good batch of a particular product and then test it on yourself.
With a natural product, it takes about two months of adjusting the dose to really know how much you should be taking.
With two or three good synthetic products, they are adjusted to a standard.
For example, I've been using CINO+ which was based on armor thyroid composition.
I've been using this one product for about 30 years and the potency hasn't noticeably changed.
And so there's no issues with the fact that it's a synthetic as far as you can tell?
Yeah, it was designed by the armor thyroid company itself to imitate their own armor thyroid USP.
And now the synthetic is continuing that same composition.
And new companies that try to make T3 or T4 or the combination, if they don't test it on some animal, those materials are very hard to keep functional in a pill.
And so with those, if you don't use the well-known products such as Thyrolar or Cynoplus, then it's a matter of testing those over a period of a few weeks.
I see. Very interesting.
So you're willing as a researcher and when you talk to people, if there's any downside at all and are you pretty sure there's not with the downside of the synthetic to do that because you're more sure you're getting exactly what you need or want?
Yeah, I hear almost every day one or two stories of bad results with a so-called glandular.
There are lots of things that can go wrong with the glandular.
For example, they'll put additives in it or desiccated liver along with the desiccated gland and chemicals either in the liver or the other additives can alter the effect of the thyroid.
Yeah, I guess if you really thought about it deeply without getting too dark, if the animals are being fed antibiotics or growth hormones or even GMO grain or something, that could affect the thyroid as well, I guess.
Oh, yeah. If they give them fattening diets with lots of PUFA, that blocks the thyroid.
Maybe they need to make an organic desiccated thyroid or something. I don't know. Wow, very interesting.
We had a question. I have an email here that the lady wanted to understand more about the desiccated thyroid.
She has a 60 grain and it gives you so much T4 and so much T3. I had the numbers here that she wrote.
Yeah, they usually say 9 and 38.
Right.
But as far as I can tell, those numbers are something that the FDA told them to put on the label.
Oh, good. Yeah. It's not necessarily what it is.
That's my impression because unless you standardize it on an animal, if you just do the tests on the actual pill, the desiccated thyroid, a chemist several years ago took a product from Thailand and saw on the label,
it said 18 and 76 micrograms of the substances.
He tested for those and found zero in the product.
Zero?
Zero, yeah. And I explained that that's normal. The gland should contain zero T3 and zero T4.
But when we eat it, we digest it and produce the digestive process creates those hormones when you eat the gland.
So he hydrolyzed the pills with acid, then tested it and they did have exactly what they claimed, but it's simply false. An FDA fiction to put on a glandular product that it contains T3 and T4.
The FDA really is that ignorant. They don't know what they're doing.
Yeah. Well, surprise, surprise, Dr. Peat.
You know what? I want to do a quick break and I'm going to call you back on a different line. I'm getting some clicks and clunks.
I'm not sure. Have you heard them?
You're sounding fuzzy.
Yeah. I think it's this line. I'm hopefully that on a new line, it's going to be clear.
So if you would hang up, I'm going to call you back directly.
You'll hear a commercial plane when you pick up.
And I think there's a problem with the line I'm on. Okay?
All right. Let's do that.
One of the fun and easy things we do with this Pearlcium product is brush our teeth with it.
But as we look deeper into this product, taking it internally is really kind of magical.
Calcium metabolism basically affects the whole metabolism and also your whole energetic systems.
Literally, the calcium is the powerhouse for energy and it also carries energy everywhere.
So whatever we do, either thinking or doing any work, calcium is a carrier to get the energy over there.
And recently we had a Professor Paul on our show on the electromagnetic fields.
And he explained very clearly how these things were interfering with the proper calcium getting into the cells.
That's fascinating. I completely agree with his research because everything is actually a field, you know, a vibrational field.
Even our body is a field.
And also Pearl can really alter the whole vibrational field because it has this crystalline structure.
And this crystalline structure carries the most positive energy and also information and matter.
And so when it gets into the body, it can change the completely vibrational field.
So it can heal us at a very deep level.
Well, Dr. Rulan Xu, we love the sound of that. Heal us at a deep level.
Want to give it a try? Click on the front page of OneRadioNetwork.com.
You'll see the ad. Green container. Pearlcium. OneRadioNetwork.com.
Previously with cardiologist Dr. Joel Kahn, 35 years experience in cardiology.
On your commercial break, you hit a hot button because I'm a giant fan of infrared sauna and the cardiac benefits.
Tell us about why you like these saunas for the heart. What does it do?
In Japan, it's a traditional therapy of heart disease to even sick heart patients to sit for 15 or 20 minutes in an infrared sauna,
then lie down and rest and hydrate for about half an hour. They call it "Wa-On." W-A-O-N.
It means soothing heat. And they've done research studies, like 30 of them, in humans.
It anti-ages your arteries and improves the strength of your heart.
And it may actually prolong survival in sick heart patients.
Anybody can just, again, go to the Internet, read about infrared sauna heart disease,
or put my name there because I've written many articles about it.
Now there's data coming out of Sweden and Finland because they've published some amazing data
that the number of times a week you're in a sauna, the number of minutes each time,
you can just track out how long you're going to live.
So, very powerful therapy by being in, my favorite is, an infrared sauna.
Well, I don't know about you, but if the heart muscles and the arteries are happy, things are good.
Very important. We promote the Relax Far Infrared Sauna.
Special price, not in print, $9.95. Delivered continental U.S.
Get your heart and keep your heart and arteries in fine shape by using the Relax Far Infrared Sauna.
Email me for the special price, patrick@oneradionetwork.com.
Okay, it is the 19th of February. Dr. Peat, are you there?
Yes, that ad was very interesting in relation to thyroid because raising your body temperature
is one of the basic essential things that the thyroid hormone does.
Broda Barnes, who was a pioneer in the prevention of heart disease,
judged his thyroid dose for his patients on the basis of their temperature.
If they woke up very far from 98 degrees and didn't rise to 98.6 by the afternoon,
he would adjust their thyroid dose until that's the way their temperature varied during the day.
And in his long practice of 30 years or so, he didn't have any one of his patients die from heart disease.
"Solve the Riddle of Heart Attacks" was the name of his book.
And even if you just warm up your body with a hot bath regularly,
that does many of the things that the thyroid hormone does.
And the way that thyroid function is currently being estimated by the medical profession
all around the world the last 20 years or so on the basis of the thyroid stimulating hormone,
a pituitary hormone in the blood, that rises when we're deficient in the actual thyroid function.
And when you're correcting the body temperature and keeping your oxygen consumption up,
your TSH goes very low. A healthy population was found to have no thyroid cancer
if their TSH was 0.4 or below, in effect below the so-called normal range.
And the TSH itself, the thyroid stimulating hormone, rises when your thyroid is malfunctioning.
And the TSH promotes inflammation, promotes hypertension,
the degenerative processes associated with low thyroid function.
Many of them are directly caused by the TSH,
yet doctors won't prescribe thyroid until you get extremely high TSH.
And maybe that's a connection, as you said, on the infrared sauna and the heart and the thyroid
and the temperature and all that. That's very interesting. Yeah.
So I'm wondering, so if folks have a high TSH, and you're way down there,
how do we know if we want to give the body a T4 or T3?
Really, most people, most men will get along with either of them.
In the 1940s, when synthetic thyroid came out,
the product was tested on male medical students, men in their early 20s,
and they found that T4 thyroxin worked just like natural armor thyroid.
And that was the basis for prescribing it.
But starting in the late '40s, people created the idea that only 5% of the American population
needed a thyroid supplement because they were testing the blood, not the temperature.
And they found that the iodine in the blood was deficient only in 5%.
For 20 years, that went on until they discovered that iodine in the blood
has no correlation with thyroid function.
It isn't the thyroid hormone they were measuring.
That's amazing.
So they created this horrible myth.
And then as the good tests, such as radio-immunoassay for TSH, as that came out,
they stretched the normal range to fit the myth that only 5% needed a thyroid supplement.
Interesting.
So in general, if folks wanted to get their body temperature up,
they could either do the T4/T3 combo or just a little bit of the T3
and experiment with it and get their body temperature up?
Yeah.
Women--that myth was created on the basis of young men.
But women of all ages, especially when their estrogen is high,
are sometimes extremely insensitive to a T4 supplement.
Oh, be darned.
And it can actually lower their thyroid function by suppressing the TSH
and turning off the conversion of T4 to T3.
The first thing that got me interested 40 years ago was knowing of a patient
at the University of Oregon Medical School who was brought in comatose
because her doctors had started her on 100 micrograms of thyroxine,
and she got worse.
They raised it in steps up to 400 micrograms of thyroxine, and she went into a coma.
And in the hospital, someone knew about the function of the liver and T3,
gave her T3, immediately she came out of the coma and was normal.
But that shows that the female liver has to convert T4 to T3 like the male liver,
but estrogen blocks that process.
So that's why women have about from 5 to 10 times the incidence of thyroid deficiency as men.
Oh, because of the estrogen in the body.
Yeah.
We had a gentleman on the show, a Dr. MD type,
and he was suggesting that if you did a fraction of free T3
and the bottom number would be the reverse T3, that number wants to be about 20 to 1.
Does that sound reasonable to you?
I think it's probably ideal, but people get along with a much lower ratio.
A lower ratio.
And the actual ratio varies from tissue to tissue,
but if you only have the blood to look at, it's good to have a fairly high ratio of T3 to reverse T3.
I was reading on your forum, and you gave us the website,
and we put that up there, the Mexican place,
and it seems like a reputable organization where people can just get the T3.
I think it's like $13 or something.
But I've seen on your forum that folks are actually putting it into a powder
and just doing a little bit every few hours, which is kind of clunky,
but why doesn't it work if you just take--
the T3 is what, 25 micrograms, which is very small,
but that's too much to take at one time?
Yeah, the liver is the main source, naturally.
Okay.
And so if we produce, say, 400 micrograms of T4 at maximum--
T3 or T4?
Of T4, our liver will convert maybe a fourth of that to T3,
so at the very maximum, we're getting 100 micrograms per day
or a maximum of 4 micrograms per hour,
but on average, we're about half that for normal functioning.
And so the normal hourly production should be around 2 micrograms,
and if you take 25 at once, the liver experiences that tenfold excess--
Not good.
--and shuts down.
I experimented myself taking 25 micrograms only in the morning,
and after two weeks, I noticed in the mirror that my thyroid gland--
there was a depression on each side of my Adam's apple where the gland should be,
and it wasn't there.
But the real problem was that at sunset, my heart began stopping.
Oh, good.
Ten times per minute, it would stop for a few seconds,
and there would be a few regular beats and then a pause of two or three beats,
and I found that when my heart was having those episodes,
if I took 10 micrograms of T3 and chewed it up,
within about 15 seconds, the perfect rhythm would be back.
And I realized that I had activated my liver enzymes to the point
that they were throwing off the T3 and creating a profound deficiency
in just 12 hours from the single pill.
But if one was going to use the T3, would they have to do this every couple hours,
like for a long time? That's pretty time-consuming, isn't it?
Yeah. A friend of mine and his wife were on the train going to Chicago,
and he had a heart attack and was rushed to the hospital,
and they started taking his blood enzymes and showing that part of his heart
was dying and releasing enzymes, and they were graphing it,
showing the steady rise, and they said that would keep up for four days
if he survived and would gradually correct itself.
But on the first day, his wife happened to have some T3
and started giving him one microgram per hour with a glass of orange juice.
And that afternoon, his enzymes started normalizing downhill.
The doctors said that never happened and that he had to stay in the hospital
for four days, but he went home and was fine.
Interesting. So I guess could you powder the T3 and then maybe mix it with liquid
and dose it out that way?
Oh, yeah, getting it finely divided.
Yeah, how would you do that?
Some people just nibble, take a little crumb off the side of a tablet.
Yeah, yeah.
If you have sharp teeth.
Or you could powder it and just take a little dose of the powder
and maybe get 25 micrograms over the course of the day.
Yeah, it doesn't have to be exact, just so you don't have those gigantic surges
of 10 or 20 micrograms.
Is there any chance that by doing that that you could help the thyroid along
to get better on its own?
I've seen several people who were doing silly things that suppressed their thyroid.
One doctor, endocrinologist, told her that her thyroid must be dead
because she had no thyroid function.
And she started taking thyroid and within a week her whole pituitary had recovered.
And there are published cases where people do recover their thyroid function
just by taking a thyroid supplement.
But it's fairly rare because it's usually not just a short-term stress
that has suppressed the gland, but a chronic stress.
Chronic stress, so it could take a while.
So again, before we leave the thyroid, I don't want to get bogged down.
We have so many different places I'd like to go this morning.
The difference in taking T3, which you can get, or the T4, T3,
the common combination for the body is what, the difference?
The T4 is only active by conversion to T3, which activates the oxidative heat-producing process.
But the T4, even though it isn't metabolically active, it does act in the pituitary,
which can do the conversion locally.
And so it can be therapeutic just by suppressing your TSH.
But you have to take into account the heat production and calorie burning of the T3.
And the T4 takes a long time to equilibrate in the body from any dose that you're taking.
It has a half-life in the body of about two weeks, where the T3 has a 12-hour or one-day half-life.
So you can get up to normal quickly with T3,
but it takes several weeks to find what your stable response to T4 is going to be.
And one thing I should mention, I got an email yesterday reminding me
that deep venous thrombosis and other clotting problems are very easily usually resolved by a thyroid supplement.
When your thyroid is low, your clotting is up.
Hyperthyroid people have difficulty forming clots,
but low thyroid people will have transient ischemic attacks and strokes and thrombosis of legs and lungs and whatnot.
So another reason to have that thyroid happy.
Yeah.
So other than the—I keep saying I'm going to leave, but there's so many people with the thyroid thing, it's like epidemic.
Other than the supplementation, before we leave thyroid,
things we can do food-wise or lifestyle to boost the thyroid to get more back in balance.
Any ideas there?
The PUFA are the main—polyunsaturated fats are the main things that interfere with thyroid production, transport, and response.
Okay.
But excess protein because of two or three amino acids, tryptophan, cysteine, and methionine are all the thyroid-suppressing amino acids.
So if you eat too much protein in relation to carbohydrate, that in itself is going to interfere with thyroid function.
Very interesting.
I've actually heard thyroid people that want to have you eat some animal protein in the morning to boost your thyroid.
Yeah, you need orange juice first to get your thyroid going.
Orange juice is better for your thyroid than animal protein?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, good.
And you don't have to kill a cow.
That's great.
Okay.
Let's move on here.
Here's a lady that really enjoyed the first show.
I hope Dr. Peat comes back.
I'm doing some liver, some eggs, some bone broth, zero PUFAs, sourdough bread, ripe fruits, and she's giving her whole kind of diet.
I feel much better, and my temperatures are higher.
I sleep better.
My question is this.
I've never had allergies or food intolerances, and none of these foods are new to me.
However, I get horrible, painful acne behind my ears and chin and below my ears even if I back off the liver.
Any idea I could find out what's causing this?
When I first supplemented DHEA, I got acne.
And the thyroid, one of its most important functions is to increase your conversion of cholesterol to progesterone and DHEA.
And the surge of new youth-related hormones can give a 50-year-old person teenage acne if your nutrients aren't all in balance.
Some shellfish, some liver, fibrous foods, it takes a good balance of nutrients.
And too much protein relative to carbohydrate can dip your blood sugar and cause a stress reaction that activates the production of cortisol.
And if your thyroid is good, the adrenals will make a surge of DHEA, and that could make the skin oily and susceptible to acne.
So maybe she's just kind of getting a little younger.
Yeah, acne is a sign that the skin is rejuvenating its oil and moisture.
So she's doing good, right? She's just getting younger.
Yeah, it increases your nutrient requirement.
The thyroid stimulating the conversion of cholesterol to progesterone, for example, greatly increases the consumption of vitamin A.
And the vitamin A deficiency makes your immune system fail, can make bacteria able to grow in your skin.
And that's why the vitamin A is one of the whole reasons why the pro-cod liver fish oil people take this, right?
Because they say you need the vitamin A for your eyes and everything.
Yeah, and it comes with vitamin D in fish oil.
Yeah, which you're not a fan of. That's like one of the worst poofers, right? The fish oil.
Yeah.
Have you ever seen people do well with cod liver or fish oil over a long period of time?
Oh, sure. Yeah, young people do very well.
When the thyroid is up, it can consume, destroy, excrete the fish oil fats.
But when you're under stress, the fish oil then tends to accumulate, break down, and produce inflammation and immune suppressive products.
It oxidizes almost instantly into immune suppressors if your liver is a little slow.
So in a perfect world, if one wanted to do cod liver oil, you wouldn't get all yellow-fatted up or lipofuscin?
No, for a young person.
For a young person, yeah.
Here's John. He's in Australia.
Could you ask Dr. Peat, if it's not too late, about the cell membrane and if it is not made of calcium and phospholipids to share what he believes?
Does he believe the cell membrane is a polarized water?
Wow, that's quite a question.
Actually, I think it should be referred to as the cell surface, an interface between two phases.
And every interface between ionically different substances will have an electric double layer.
No matter what the substances are, if you examine it on the electron microscope level, you'll see a polarization of whatever is there by this electric double layer.
Each substance has its own affinity for electrons. And when you put different substances together, they compete for the electrons and you get that microscopic reversal double layer electronic.
And that will polarize proteins or fats or ions, whatever is there, and create the microscopic appearance of a double layer bilayer, which if there's a lot of fat around, it'll be a lipid bilayer.
But that's a side effect, not an organ.
In the 1960s, disregarding the physics of the situation, there was a great movement to explain everything in terms of genes.
The genetic theory of cancer was imposed by the government in the 1960s and that came along with the membrane mania.
Biologists just went crazy in the 1960s creating new journals specializing in membranes.
By the early 1970s, that craze had died away.
People like Gilbert Ling and Harold Hillman showed that basically they were looking at artifacts.
You can make a picture of a membrane, but there's no barrier membrane. That's what they believed in and imposed in school, that there's an electronic barrier membrane.
Gilbert Ling long ago showed that with labeled isotopes, you can show that sodium moves in and out freely. There's absolutely no barrier to sodium, which was the whole philosophical basis for believing in a barrier membrane.
So what do we take away from this as far as learning about our health? It was a little geeky what you said. It was interesting.
But what could this information do for us taking care of our body?
One of the selling points for fish oil was that PUFA are essential fatty acids and they're essential for making prostaglandins and for making membranes and our brains, they say, are 60% fish oil.
And so if you don't eat your essential PUFA, you won't have proper brains because the brains are so PUFA loaded.
But at birth, when you look at a newborn human or animal baby, their brains are defined as essential fatty acid deficient.
We have the mead acids in the newborn brain, which are the defining sign of a PUFA deficiency.
So if you want a newborn, fresh, energetic, able to learn brain, you don't want it loaded with fish oil.
That's something that accumulates all during adulthood and by the age of 50 is increasing the risk of nerve diseases.
The polyunsaturated fatty acids we call PUFAs, right?
Which accumulate in the brain.
On the idea of electrons, we've been told that toxic substances steals, maybe, does it steal an electron or it's a negative electron thing and that causes the cells to oxidize? Is that close?
That is one of the ideas. But behind that, if you cut off the oxygen supply, surprisingly, you get a surge of oxidative damage.
If you run an animal at high rate with thyroid or anything else that increases the mitochondrial oxygen consumption, their free radical production drops drastically.
There's a good paper called Uncoupled and Surviving in which they show that the faster the mitochondria run consuming oxygen, the less oxidative damage there is and the longer the animal lives.
The saturation index is another. The cancer-free animals and long-lived animals have a high saturation ratio to unsaturated fats.
So, how do we use that information to increase our lifespan and also that of our animals?
Avoiding the PUFA.
Avoiding the PUFAs again, wow.
Yeah, with farmed salmon, they found that they had better health, better endurance if they fed them some saturated fats rather than the fish oils.
So, even the cold water fish do better without their PUFA.
So, for the animals, we stick with the saturated fats just like for ourselves?
Yeah.
Yeah, just like ourselves. So, does vitamin C and other things like kind of put this electron back on?
Yeah, ascorbic acid existing inside cells where it is active and protective is an oxidant. It's called dehydroascorbate and the dehydroascorbate to ascorbic acid ratio is at least 8 to 1 inside the cell, highly oxidizing.
So, the so-called antioxidant, it does prevent oxidative damage, but it does it because it's pro-oxidative.
The things in fruits and vegetables that are considered antioxidants work because inside the cell, they are extremely pro-oxidative.
And if you imagine a cell which is suddenly suffocated and can't use its oxygen, electrons accumulate because they aren't being turned into water with the oxygen.
The electrons accumulate and any iron atom which had been in the inert F3 positive, it catches the electron and is turned into the F2 positive.
The reduced iron becomes a catalyst for destructive random oxidation. So, an excess of electrons is what creates destructive cell-killing oxidation by way of iron.
Does regular ascorbic acid get into the cells to put that?
Yeah, it's taken in and immediately oxidized to dehydroascorbate.
And that's a good thing.
Yeah, and cancer cells, if you look at the ascorbic acid content, it is high relative to the dehydroascorbate.
It has become reduced and is no longer working because the cancer has an excess of electrons.
So, do you and do you recommend other people take daily doses of extra vitamin C?
No, because milk and meat are very good sources.
I experimented stopping all the known sources such as fruits, vitamin C and ate mostly milk and meat and eggs.
And several weeks later, I kept testing my urine vitamin C output and it was still up in around 3000 milligrams per day even though I was just eating milk and meat.
Oh, so yeah, because you're a milk guy, right? Yeah, you're a milk guy.
Yeah.
Interesting.
Here's an, oh, yeah, do you have any knowledge or opinions of this very famous brand, this lipospheric vitamin C, if it works any better getting in the cells than the ascorbic acid?
Is that the palmitate?
Well, let's see.
I'm not sure if palmitate, it's lipospheric, live on labs.
I'm not sure what's in there.
Years ago, the sausage makers developed a palmitic extra vitamin C and that works for preserving fats.
So, it was good in industry and they started selling it as a supplement, but I don't think it's any better than real vitamin C.
You don't think it does much of anything, it's just a marketing thing, you think?
I think so.
Yeah, well, they do good at that, that marketing thing, boy.
Good at that.
Dr. Peat, this is from Glenn.
He is, let's see where Glenn is, in Colorado.
I know you're a big fan of cholesterol and keeping levels higher than is recommended by doctors.
My question is, is it safe to raise cholesterol levels by supplementing with dried cholesterol powder?
And he's got another question and we'll do this one first.
There has been research with that, for example, in autism.
And I don't know what the source of their cholesterol was, but it did improve the autistic kids.
But years ago, someone analyzed the supposedly chemically pure cholesterol that was being used in experiments feeding animals.
And they found that it was pretty highly oxidized, making it toxic.
So even at 1% oxidized cholesterol, I wouldn't risk taking a supplement unless you knew that it was very close to absolute unoxidized.
So the liver makes most of the cholesterol, is that correct?
Yeah, and when you eat more cholesterol, you shut off your own liver's production to a great extent.
So by eating a bunch of cholesterol, like eggs or, I don't know, meat, it doesn't really raise that number that we like to keep up there?
No, 40 years ago, someone tested patients and healthy people and found that very sick people, you could raise their cholesterol with eggs.
But healthy people, at 22 eggs a day, they still hadn't raised their serum cholesterol.
So we know with a lot of studies, a recent one of Sweden, that especially folks 60, 70, 80, up there,
they have a much better mortality rate with higher levels, you know, high levels up there, 225.
And avoiding dementia is very important.
And avoiding dementia. So how do people keep that number up there if the food doesn't do it? I'm kind of confused.
The thyroid and sugar are very important, keeping inflammation down in the intestine.
Eating raw vegetables feeds bacteria, and the bacteria create endotoxin, which poisons the intestine and liver,
so keeping it from making adequate cholesterol.
So a diet rich in non-irritating, easily absorbed foods, milk and orange juice,
are the simplest for keeping the energy of the liver up and the inflammation down.
So the raw foods, you're a fan of cooking your vegetables?
Yeah, overcooking, actually.
Overcooking, yeah.
Yeah, the reason raw vegetables lower your cholesterol way down to half of what it should be or less,
is that they're feeding bacteria, which are poisoning your liver, so it can't make the normal amount.
That's interesting. Feeding bacteria that's causing your liver not to make the cholesterol.
But I mean, all the raw food people, they talk about how the raw vegetables, they're feeding with good enzymes,
and this is what we need as living human beings.
Yeah, but the liver left alone and giving nourishment knows how much cholesterol to make
and how much to turn into bile salts and hormones and so on.
So supporting the liver, it'll do the right thing, which is to keep your cholesterol in the range of 160 to 200.
At least. And how do we support our liver just in general?
Yeah, avoiding raw vegetables is very important.
Very important.
Getting adequate calcium, sugar, sodium, all of the essential nutrients.
All of the nutrients. Sugar in the form of fruits, right? Apples and oranges.
Yeah, one of the anti-sugar guys, Yudkin, I think, wrote a book explaining that it wasn't saturated fat.
It was sugar that raised your cholesterol, and that created the anti-sugar craze that it would cause heart disease.
But raising your cholesterol, your liver's ability to make it, is just what we need.
And what causes the cholesterol to rise up to 300 milligrams per cent, for example,
is blocking the thyroid function because the thyroid function is using that protective cholesterol
to make progesterone, DHEA, testosterone, and so on.
Back to the power and the critical nature of this organ, the thyroid.
Don't you find it curious that there's literally an epidemic of thyroid dysfunction in our culture?
Just in Broderbarn's time, before Synthroid came on the market,
he was showing that about a third of the population benefited greatly
and would avoid premature heart disease and cancer in his career.
None of his patients died of heart attacks.
By doing what?
By supplementing thyroid.
Did he use a desiccated at that time?
Yeah, Armour was the only thing he ever used.
Which has a T4/T3, correct?
Yeah, it was the standardized pork and beef thyroid,
standardized to have approximately a 3.5 to 1 ratio of T4 to T3.
A listener wants to know the names of the brands that I might get
if I wanted to move to a synthetic thyroid, as Dr. Peat recommends.
What are those names?
Thyrolar was the standard for about 50 years.
I don't know if they're even making it now.
CINO+ from Mexico is the one that I've been using for 30 years.
CINO+, oh, that's from that Mexican pharmacy.
You can get CINO+.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, uh-huh.
And you've been using that for 30 years?
Mm-hmm.
When the thyroid production went from the Armour company
to Revlon, the cosmetics company, I stopped using it.
And when was that?
Around 1991 or '92, I think.
My goodness, my goodness.
Dr. Peat, stay right there, okay?
I'm really having fun.
Boy, we have lots of action going on, lots of emails, telephone calls.
We're going to do what we can here to take care of you.
It's really fun having Dr. Ray Peat on,
patricktimpone@oneradionetwork.com.
Dr. Peat's website is rayPeat.com.
You can also sign up.
He's got a very interesting newsletter, and it's very affordable.
He can tell you how much.
It's practically nothing.
And get that newsletter and stay up to date.
Incredible amount of articles on his website.
And as you can tell, he's well-researched
and sounds pretty credible to me, rayPeat.com.
Dr. Peat's a fan of milk, and we're kind of a fan of colostrum.
I know that Dr. Thomas Cowan, a heart is not a pump guy,
he's a big colostrum fan, and he says that it can help to heal
and seal up the gut lining.
And other people have said that, including Daniel Baitalos.
Sir Thrivell makes a great colostrum.
If you'd like to try some colostrum, it's the real deal.
You open that little puppy up, and it smells--
I can remember the first time I opened it up,
and being an Italian Catholic, we had a lot of kids in my family,
six brothers and sisters, seven total.
Yeah, I did the math, six and one, it was seven.
And I remember the first time I opened the colostrum up years ago,
it actually had that smell, that little flame, that smell of breast milk.
And believe me, I smelled a lot of breast milk around my house
because I was the only one who changed diapers
and held the baby and stuff, more than all my brothers and sisters.
I don't know what that was about.
But anyway, it's a nice product.
Click on it, front page, One Radio Network,
and get yourself some colostrum if you'd like,
from Daniel Vitalis, Sir Thrivell.
Previously, with Wayne Blakely, we were talking about
the Living Streams probiotics.
That's why when we do your bifido in the mouth,
we do it for the yttrium because the actual bifido doesn't--
Right, that's a bifido 2 product I have.
You put it in your ear, it bypasses the gastrointestinal tract,
and it goes through the lymph system, the drain system,
goes right into the small intestinal tract.
It bypasses the gastrointestinal tract.
That's the reason I developed it.
Now, for 50 years, they've been developing a probiotic capsule
that you could take that'll open up in that area
so the bacteria start growing.
There's two problems with that.
Number one, it doesn't work.
And number two, they put a pathetic bifidos in there.
They're weak, and they're dying anyway.
What do you mean it doesn't work, number one?
That's a bad way to say it.
It doesn't work.
It doesn't work. That capsule doesn't work.
So that's the reason I developed a liquid product to bypass the gut.
Well, why doesn't the low pH just kill the liquid guys, too?
Because we put it in the ear, bypasses the gastrointestinal tract.
Oh, okay, that's the bifido, too.
That's the bifido, too.
You can use any of my products, do the same thing.
They'll go right through, bypass the upper tract,
and go right into the lower tract.
That's where your immune system kicks in down there.
So we could use any of the living streams in our ear?
Any of them.
It's all safe.
How are we doing?
Totally safe.
Cool.
That is pretty cool.
That's where a good portion of the immune system is,
in the small intestines.
Check them out in our store, Living Streams Products,
all of them on OneRadioNetwork.com.
Previously with Andrew Goss, I asked him
why would someone want to buy coins from his company.
So if you don't know coins, you better know your coin dealer.
And you know, you shouldn't buy coins from someone
who isn't a well-known registered dealer.
So if they're an NGC dealer, they're registered with NGC.
If they're a PCGS dealer, they're registered with PCGS.
Ask questions.
Don't just, "Oh yeah, here's 10 grand or 50 grand or 150 grand.
I just want to buy coins.
Let me know what I'm getting."
No, that's not how an intelligent investor does it.
And we do not let you do that.
So if you're not willing to learn about the coins that you're buying,
maybe you should find another coin firm.
Don't call this one.
Because we're going to insist that you know why and how a coin is rare.
And once you know that, then I think you can take that knowledge
into the marketplace and make intelligent investment decisions.
Aha, what a concept.
Intelligent investment decisions.
I've known Andrew for 25 years.
He's the real deal.
His company, SDL 800-468-2646.
Give him a call if you're interested.
800-468-2646.
Well, I don't know what's going on.
We're going to do a special remix archive show of Andrew Goss tomorrow,
which is what we've been doing since Andrew passed on.
He went on his cosmic vacation, I guess, about a month ago.
God love him.
We really miss him.
So we're going to have a special show for you tomorrow.
So come by.
We're going to go over some of the things that are moving in the markets as well
from all the places that we've done research.
I don't know what's going on, but I'll try to figure it out.
Gold is up $10 this morning.
Silver is up $0.15.
The dollar is down.
The stock market is up a little bit.
So we'll visit with Andrew Goss and have a special remix archive show.
People are enjoying them because I put together two or three shows,
so it's really jammed with--it's always fun.
I've been listening to some of these old shows.
What a wealth of information he is.
By the way, with Andrew Goss, we have 11 years of shows in our archives,
so you can get yourself a real PhD in economics by listening to this
because he really fills you in.
That will be tomorrow, the Real World of Money Special Archives with Andrew Goss.
Speaking of PhD, Dr. Ray Peat has been around a while doing that.
Dr. Peat, you do a newsletter?
Tell folks about that, how they can get that.
It's sent out every other month.
So 12 issues or two years, the email subscription is $28.
Oh, $28.
Even I can afford that.
I'm a talk show host.
Good for you.
That's a great--so every other month for $28 for two years at rayPeat.com.
I see.
Okay.
Boy, we can't get away from thyroid, but these are the questions.
Is it possible to become thyroid toxic from T4, T3 supplementation,
i.e., can the body store too much T4 and cause problems?
If it stores too much T4, generally that interferes with the conversion to T3.
So the real problem with taking too much T4 is the risk of turning off your brain metabolism.
If you take the combination, taking it too big a dose too fast can make you short of breath,
can give you a fast heartbeat.
I think it was 1933, the JAMA magazine published a story about a doctor who had heard about
Berta Barnes and preventing heart attacks with thyroid supplements.
He had a patient who had just recently had a heart attack, and this doctor hadn't read
really what Berta Barnes was doing, so he gave him a full-size dose of thyroid, increasing
his metabolic rate with his heart in a failing injured state, and the guy died almost immediately.
So that went out as a warning not to use thyroid.
It would kill you with a heart attack.
I see.
In fact, when it's used properly, it's the best single way to prevent heart attacks.
But for example, a 40-year-old woman who had a fairly large fibroid blocking her fallopian
tubes, and she wanted to get pregnant.
I explained how estrogen excess drives the growth of those tumors, and thyroid excess
will give you an estrogen deficiency.
So she took Armour thyroid several grains a day, gradually worked up so that her resting
heart rate was 110.
Her doctor said she was going to die from having a chronic 110 heart rate.
And then each month, the tumor shrank, and after four or five months, it had become small
enough that she became pregnant at a perfect pregnancy.
But that was a deliberate overdose.
Women who are having menorrhagia, hemorrhaging from prolonged excessive menstrual bleeding,
that generally is hypothyroid, and they can temporarily increase their thyroid, not only
to the point of normalizing menstruation, they can, within a few days of using an excess
of T3, they can create an estrogen deficiency and turn off menstruation altogether.
So it can be dangerous if you take too much too fast, but it's a matter of watching for
signs, increasing it in very small intervals.
Little by little.
That's Gina's question.
She's in San Diego.
I purchased some of the T3 from the website I got off your website, Patrick, in Mexico.
How long would Dr. Peat expect that I would have to take the T3 at these small doses throughout
the day to raise my body temperature?
It's currently about 97, almost all the time.
It varies with body weight and age and what you ate previously.
But if you have a sign such as elevated liver enzymes showing a sluggish liver, the small
doses, one microgram at a time, within a few days, you can usually see normalization of
the liver function.
But if you carefully watch your waking temperature and pulse rate, since the T3 acts within seconds
when it's absorbed, it's instant acting and acts as a catalyst to increase oxygen consumption.
That's the main virtue of T3, that with these very tiny doses, you can see exactly what
you're doing, so you can avoid overdosing.
If they start with T4 and hope to get their temperature up, they see no results in the
first three or four days, but meanwhile, it's accumulating in the body, taking a certain
dose every day.
It builds up in your body for at least two weeks.
So if you load up because you see no results in three or four days, then it turns out when
you do get up to the normal temperature, you're going to overshoot it and you'll be, not happily,
stressingly hyperthyroid for a couple of weeks.
It levels out.
So are folks generally starting really low, maybe 30 milligrams on the T4, the desiccated,
and working up?
That was Broda Barnes, a typical starting dose.
I've seen two people over the last 40 years for whom that was too much, their heart raced
and they had to go back to even 15 micrograms for these oversensitive people can make their
heart hurt or go too fast.
They have to supplement both sugar and magnesium.
The thyroid lets your cells retain magnesium and potassium, and so eating well and maybe
supplementing magnesium helps you adjust to the thyroid because your muscles will take
away the necessary magnesium and cause your heart vessels to constrict and cause heart
pain.
I hope you don't.
So folks taking the T3 little by little, even one or two micrograms an hour, should they
see their pulse rate move up a little bit?
Yeah.
Or not?
Yeah.
Very, very slightly.
One or two beats per day is fine.
One or two beats per day, did you say?
Yeah.
Or per minute per day?
Per minute per day.
Would they use that as a gauge if they're taking too much and not enough or just the
temperature or both?
If you get up to the ideal pulse rate and temperature in four or five hours, then even
with T3, you're going to overshoot because it has a 12 to 24 hour accumulating half-life.
So you don't want to get there the first day.
Even with T3, it's best to work up gradually.
Go real slow.
So what happens if you would be on T3 and things are going good, your temperature's
up, your pulse is up a little bit, and then you would just stop?
Then what would happen?
You got the hypothyroid like I did when I was taking it.
It would just go back?
Yeah.
When I suppressed my thyroid so that I had these depressions in my throat, I stopped
it entirely, and the next morning my throat was smooth again.
Several people who have overdosed on thyroid to the point of having a collapsed appearance
of their throat, just in one day, it pops right back.
So is there any danger of being on T3 for a couple months and then quitting and seeing
if it's going to help you just work without it?
Yeah, usually two or three weeks you'll see whether it's correcting your own thyroid.
Oh, so you could get off it and see if it's going to hold?
Yeah.
Oh, that's interesting.
Here's an email from, I'm not sure, Amy.
Does Dr. Peat have any opinion about using pure pine gum spirits of turpentine?
Oh, yeah.
I always use turpentine as my painting medium.
Some people are allergic to it, but I always felt that it was safe and beneficial to have
some of the fumes around.
It was very common to use it for a poultice in an inflammatory condition, even to take
a drop of it on a sugar cube, for example.
I think that traditionally it seemed to have some benefits.
I think that the risk of allergy is present, but usually exaggerated.
Here's a lady that says, "I've never really had a menstrual cycle and began in ninth grade.
I've also despised, upset me."
Well, Barry, I simply decided in my mind not to ever have one.
Not sure if this was part of it, but maybe a dozen times I've even had, and I'm 56,
I have bloated belly and probably some hormone problems.
What do you think about this?
So she just decided she didn't want to have a period, and she stopped having them, I guess.
Yeah, the cycles are governed by the brain, which governs the pituitary, which stimulates
the ovaries.
And so, attitude, stress is the main thing that turns off the cycles.
It isn't good for an overstressed or undernourished person to get pregnant, and so the body regulates
to avoid pregnancy when your brain doesn't want it.
Do you think when women go through menopause and they stop menstruating, that's one of
the reasons why they generally live longer than us guys?
Yeah, the iron absorption really begins at menopause because what fails and stops the
period is the production of progesterone primarily.
And the myth that menopause is a deficiency of estrogen is purely a medical birth control
industry fabrication.
What happens is a failure of progesterone around the age of 45 or 50 or 55, and all
of the tissues of the body make estrogen, and in the absence of progesterone, they make
more estrogen.
And the progesterone is needed to cause the cells to release estrogen and excrete it.
So when you don't have progesterone, you necessarily are going to have intracellular estrogen excess.
Any stress will increase your estrogen production, but it won't necessarily show up in the bloodstream
unless you have the progesterone, which knocks out the enzymes that retain it in cells.
And intracellular estrogen is active.
For example, in a breast cancer, there is a huge amount of estrogen being produced in
the tumor.
In uterine cancer, the same thing.
The uterus becomes the source of the estrogen.
In the 40s and 50s, they were taking out women's ovaries and pituitaries to treat breast cancer,
not knowing that the estrogen isn't coming primarily from the ovaries.
In experiments with monkeys, someone actually measured the amount of estrogen coming out
minute by minute from the ovaries, and to control, they measured the estrogen coming
out of the arm vein, and they found that the arm was producing just as much estrogen as
the ovaries.
So a hysterectomy takes away your progesterone, but it leaves your arms and legs and all of
your organs making estrogen, and so you're estrogen exposed beginning at menopause.
And estrogen causes iron retention, and so in old age, women tend to catch up with men
in the iron overload symptoms such as heart disease.
Very interesting.
Ray Peat, Patrick Timpone, raypeat.com.
Stanley wants to know if bone broth is as healthy as it claims to be.
Not if it's made with marrow bones because of the fat and iron in the marrow, very high
concentration of iron which interacts with the fat.
So the healthy broth is made from the joints.
The joint bones, yeah.
Lots of cartilage and tendons, ligaments, and all of the connective tissues that are
rich in gelatin.
But not the marrow bones.
That's interesting.
I give my dog some marrow bones, grass-fed, and boy, she'll work and work and work to
get all that marrow out of there.
She's usually generally pretty smart about what she eats.
Do you think she knows that she needs that or?
It's very tasty and nourishing in the short run.
But if you do it over the years, you accumulate too much iron and broken down fat.
Okay.
Here's a telephone call.
On the phone, who's this, please?
Hi, I'm Patrick.
This is Mike in Chattanooga.
Mike, you're on the air with Ray Peat.
Go ahead.
Yeah, Dr. Peat.
My digestive tract is a real train wreck and it has a lot of inflammation.
I've seen a chiropractor and he took an x-ray of my gut and he said he'd never seen that
much inflammation in a man's gut.
And so I'm real sensitive to foods and stuff.
And when I juice beets, it really helps lower my blood pressure.
As a result of this train wreck digestive tract, my blood pressure wants to jump up
a lot of times.
If I eat certain things, it will irritate it.
You know, like something that's really fibrous.
And so I have to really watch what I eat.
Do you know anything that can help reduce the inflammation in a gut when it's really
off the deep end like that, you know?
The main thing is to reduce the fermentable grains, nuts, vegetables, starches, and use
the foods that are easily, quickly digested and absorbed.
Milk, meat, eggs, and sweet fruits such as oranges are quickly digested and so they don't
support so much bacterial growth.
And there are some fibrous foods that are also antiseptic.
Cooked bamboo shoots, cooked, well-cooked mushrooms, and raw carrots are antiseptic,
antibiotic producers as well as being good fiber.
Right, and I juice a lot of carrots and beets together and that nitric oxide will lower
my blood pressure.
If I don't do that, then my blood pressure will be too high.
But the carrot juice is very rich in carotene and so if you do that chronically, it's going
to accumulate in your tissues, make your palms turn orange, and suppress your thyroid and
testosterone.
Oh, that's not good.
Right, and that was where I was going next is because if I eat broccoli and cauliflower,
you know, even if it's cooked, all of a sudden I'll break into this freezing, you know what
I mean?
I'm that cold.
I mean, it's just like I am freezing when I eat those vegetables because they shut down
the thyroid activity, don't they, temporarily.
That's true.
Okay, Mike.
I repeat saying this like maybe 10 years ago and I've been watching it.
I have to be real careful.
I try to eat broccoli and cauliflower occasionally, but I have to really not eat much of it because
it will make you just freezing cold.
I use that Edgar Cayce iodine, the good kind, Patrick, that you have, and that will help
warm me back up.
Yeah, but Ray P, you said that the iodine really doesn't affect the thyroid like we
have been told.
Is that correct?
Usually, people eating foods from various regions will have at least as much iodine
already, and if they use iodized salt, around the world there have been surveys that showed
that people who add iodized salt to an already good diet have an increased incidence of thyroid
inflammation, thyroid gland inflammation, and thyroid cancer because, for example, a
cow won't produce milk, a chicken won't produce eggs if they're seriously iodine
deficient.
So, eggs and milk are guaranteed good sources of iodine.
Okay, thanks for the call, Mike.
We appreciate it.
On a past show, this is Max's in Switzerland, Dr. Peat mentioned that Hashimoto's is
not really an autoimmune condition caused by the immune system attacking its own thyroid
tissue.
Could he elaborate on the mechanisms and reasons why the body starts producing these antibodies
against the thyroid?
There were experiments years ago in which a piece of cow's cartilage was implanted
and the immune system recognized it as normal cow material, but then they twisted it, just
mechanically gave it a sharp twist and implanted that, and the cow's antibodies recognized
it as foreign material and began phagocytizing it, breaking it down.
And the immune system recognizes damage to your own tissue and goes in to remove damaged
tissue as part of a normal cleanup process.
In the last 25 years, there have been two people showing the fallacy of the usual idea
of how the immune system works that derived from Paul Ehrlich, and they showed that Mechnikov,
he shared the Nobel Prize with Ehrlich.
Mechnikov was an embryologist who had a very different idea that the immune system helped
maintain healthy structure of the organism.
And these two recent theorists, Jamie Cunliffe and Polly Matsinger, have what they call the
danger or damage theory of the immune system, that the immune system, if you have an infection,
the damaged human tissue is what the immune system recognizes and goes in and as a byproduct
of correcting our own healthy structure, removing the damage, they take out the cause of the
damage just as a side effect.
But if you damage a joint just by twisting it, your immune system recognizes it and goes
in, invades it with white blood cells.
If you damage your thyroid gland by taking too much iodine or too much PUFA that blocks
its function, that is an intrinsic structural damage of our tissue that the immune system
recognizes as danger and damage and goes in to clean it up.
Same in the brain.
They've demonstrated that if you block the white blood cells and antibody production
that are involved in encephalitis, that the encephalitis kills the organism faster for
blocking the immune reaction.
So the immune system is doing what it's supposed to do in this classic autoimmune situation?
Somewhere it's limited and failing to finish cleaning up the job because usually it's an
excess of estrogen interfering with the stabilizing hormones, DHEA and progesterone and pregnenolone,
which stabilize the whole structure of the cell so that the body recognizes it as good
immune material rather than random damaged material.
So it's a matter of re-energizing the cell that will stop the autoimmune process.
Re-energizing.
Here's a question for you.
Medical medium Anthony Williams, I've heard of him, claims that Hashimoto's immune response
is really a body attacking a chronic Epstein-Barr virus hiding in the thyroid.
What does Dr. Peat think of this theory?
That is probably valid as one of the causes of the tissue damage, but the Epstein-Barr
goes wild in a hypothyroid person because of the low energy.
We activate things like herpes virus and Epstein-Barr when our cell energy is low.
So it may be accurate, but there's a whole lot of other things going on, what you're
saying?
The most general thing is failure of energy.
Failure of energy.
Thyroid up energy and PUFA energy down.
PUFA down.
I consume 325 milligrams of aspirin, writes Mark, right before bed, 625 milligrams upon
waking for joint pain.
It helps a lot.
How much vitamin K would you suggest I use?
Do I need it daily or weekly?
One milligram a day is adequate to keep your liver making the clotting agents.
And one of the things the aspirin is doing is activating the thyroid function, activating
mitochondrial oxidation.
It revs up your thyroid function.
So aspirin, like he's using it, is a sensible approach?
I think so.
So aspirin is relatively safe?
Yeah, you just, in the long run, you can suppress your immune, your clotting system.
And so the thyroid, I did that myself using a combination of penicillin and aspirin.
I was going along feeling very good, but I wasn't eating vegetables or liver and I became
vitamin K deficient.
And the tiniest little scratch, I would drip blood for several minutes.
And I realized that I had to eat liver or take vitamin K if I was going to use a combination
of penicillin and aspirin because penicillin stops the vitamin K production in the intestine.
Interesting.
George writes in, "People with kidney disease and ammonia overload are being told to avoid
potatoes because of excess potassium.
Is there anything to this or is it just mainstream medical mythology?"
The latter.
Medical mythology.
Sure.
A lot of that going on, right?
Gosh, it's tough to keep up with this.
Well, hold on a second.
A lot of thyroid questions here.
My wife, a woman 62, had a total hysterectomy, all female ovaries removed.
Can she live well without estrogen?
She takes bioestrogen, progesterone, and thyroid.
I know Ray is kind of anti-estrogen.
Partly depends on weight.
A skinny little person is fairly safe for not producing too much estrogen, but the plumper
you are, the more risk you have of accumulating dangerous amounts of estrogen.
I know an endocrinologist who was giving his wife monthly progesterone, and in her 60s,
she looked very young, and he said she was still menstruating because he kept giving
her the monthly progesterone, but her skin looked like a 30-year-old because of the protective
effect of progesterone.
What could cause hot flashes to start up again after 10 years of not having any?
Oh, hot flashes have been taking nature thyroid for several years.
Various things can increase your estrogen and nitric oxide production, a change of flora
in the intestine.
That's one of the benefits of a high-fiber diet, but the natural antibiotics, some of
the bacteriophage viruses that kill bacteria, and a few of the antiseptic bacteria, bacillus
subtilis, for example, can normalize or improve the intestinal flora so that we aren't producing
huge amounts of nitric oxide.
Estrogen, serotonin, and nitric oxide are involved in the vascular changes that produce
the hot flashes.
Here's an emailer that has hypertrophic cardiopathy, heart muscle thickened on the
left ventricle.
My symptoms are mild palpitations, a little bit of lightheadedness sometimes.
Cardiologist doesn't have much to do to help me.
Does Dr. Peat have any insights on this?
Yeah, I have a couple of newsletters a few years ago on the heart and progesterone and
estrogen's effect.
Animal studies, traditionally, they've blamed heart enlargement on the thyroid because if
you take gigantic doses of thyroid, keep your heart going 125 per minute, that will enlarge
your heart because it works harder.
But when they did this in rats and then gave them only a physiological supportive amount
of T3, the fibrosis of the heart was actually reversed.
The fibrosis is a product of not enough oxygen, too much nitric oxide and estrogen and stress.
And by reducing the stress, keeping the oxygen and carbon dioxide up, lactic acid down, if
you had your blood tested, you would probably see higher than average lactic acid as a result
of low thyroid function.
Lewis writes in, "My resting pulse rate is about 65 and if I get up to 70, I feel kind
of anxious and unsettled, much like Patrick has talked about.
I'm in the same way.
I'm 60 all the time, boom, boom, boom.
And if I get to about 65, I can kind of feel it."
So what do you suppose is going on for Lewis and I?
I mean, we should be just okay with 60, right?
I mean, do you think that there could be some improvement for us with low pulses?
Oh, yeah.
Temperature is very important.
Some people can get their temperature up and still have a slow pulse.
But the central thing to think about is having around a 98.6 temperature during most of the
day.
And that's the key and then whatever your pulse wants to be to get it there, then that's
fine, is what you're saying?
Yeah.
If you have a very big heart, it can do enough circulation with fewer beats.
Oh, I see.
Of course.
If you have a small heart, it has to beat faster.
But on average, I think people feel best with an 85 per minute resting pulse.
Really?
Wow.
That seems like supercharge to me on a bullet train.
I can't imagine that.
But who knows?
That's really interesting.
Does Dr. Peat recommend supplementation with B12 to either meat eaters and non-meat eaters?
And if yes, what type of cabalimine B12 does he recommend?
I generally don't recommend it because we can make it in our intestine.
And in the last few years, I've seen many people with twice the normal amount of B12.
And it turns out that they have overgrowth of bacteria in their intestine.
The B12 isn't hurting them, but when it's so high without a supplement, that means that
their bacteria are going wild.
Oh, that's the bacteria in the small intestine, the classic SIBO thing we hear about?
Yeah.
And that is caused by?
Slow digestion.
When your thyroid is good, you should make exuberant amounts of stomach acid and quickly
get the digestion going and then squirt out lots of enzymes from the pancreas.
The germs just can't survive in that environment.
The small intestine should be absolutely sterile all the way down to the colon.
Emily gets loose stool, she says, when she takes even just a little bit of the T3.
What is that telling me?
That usually the estrogen is very high, increasing the serotonin, which is what activates the
peristalsis too much, causing the diarrhea.
And so reducing inflammation, gradually nourishing the liver so that it can regulate those hormones.
Do you think it's reasonable to take milk thistle and things like that to keep the liver
happy and cleaner and stuff like that?
Several of those natural plant substances can be anti-inflammatory.
And for example, for mushroom poisoning, milk thistle is a lifesaver.
But I knew one woman who was having chronic liver enzyme elevation and taking milk thistle
for it.
And when she stopped the large doses of milk thistle, her liver immediately returned to
normal.
So an excess of milk thistle can be irritating to the liver.
Does Dr. Peat ever recommend doing blood tests?
And can we learn something from them?
Or are they just a snapshot in time?
They can be useful.
That's where lots of our information comes from.
But I don't generally advise people to do it because the doctors are going to misinterpret
them anyway.
Yeah, you really have to have a good interpreter to do that.
Yeah.
Is cancer, writes Leroy, is cancer caused by too few or too many electrons?
Yeah, the reductive stress where your vitamin C instead of being in the oxidized form becomes
reductive, the excess electrons activate iron to make it a toxic reductant.
Cancer characteristically has a great excess of reducing power.
And so it's an electron excess condition.
A couple more then we'll let you go to work.
What role does water play in regulating body temperature?
Can hydration keep my fingers warmer in the winter?
The hydration in the sense of blood volume does improve circulation, but that requires
a balance of sodium, calcium, magnesium, potassium, and that's regulated by hormones such as thyroid
and progesterone to optimize the blood volume.
And that will usually take care of how much water you take in and put out by adjusting
your thirst and kidney action.
But the healthy person with a good 2,500 calorie daily consumption should be evaporating at
least two liters of water just in their breath and from their skin.
Wow.
Yeah.
One of our listeners said that on our first show we did with you long ago, you had about
five, six, seven minutes that really explained the way to properly prepare grains.
And we won't go into it now.
So we're going to dig that out and maybe make a file and let people listen to that.
So there is a way, and I don't even remember it all, that we can work with grains to make
them much more user-friendly for the body.
Alkali cooking.
Yeah, it was mixed tamaleization, the tamale tortilla masa arena method.
And you explained that all on the original show.
So yeah, we'll get people to be able to hear that so they can do that.
Linda says, "Do coffee enemas deplete iron or is donating blood the only way to lower
excess iron?"
Drinking quite a bit of coffee is helpful because it reduces the absorption of iron
from your food.
Really?
And the enemas would have some of that effect, but I think just a regular having coffee with
every iron-rich food is very protective.
Here's a final one for you, then we'll let you go.
Can you explain the difference, writes Ben, between hydrogenated coconut oil, not oil,
and extra virgin coconut oil?
Yeah, extra virgin oil has all of the aroma and good flavor, but it also has 2 or 3% of
PUFA left in it.
And it has some proteins, which for some people are allergenic.
The hydrogenated has been not only thoroughly deodorized so there's no taste, but it has
been treated so there's no PUFA left.
So it's extremely, coconut oil itself is very stable against oxidation, but the hydrogenated
form is essentially resistant.
You just don't have the breakdown.
There's no PUFA there to break down.
You think it's a better choice, hydrogenated?
It's what I use.
I've never really seen it, but I guess you can find it.
Do they sell it in the health food stores?
Not yet, but there are a few places on the internet.
The first time I got it, it was a free sample from the company, but the shipping was $200.
But what about all this negative stuff that was said years ago about partially hydrogenated
this and that, and even Whole Foods took all that stuff out of their ingredients?
Yeah, if you partially hydrogenate soy oil or corn oil, a tremendous amount of the intermediates,
which are potentially toxic.
But if you start with only 2% or 3% of the PUFA, then the process goes to completion.
There are none of the intermediates left.
Oh, so it's not partially, it's just hydrogenated, which is a different quality of the product.
Yeah, for example, a Russian study, they knew that peanut oil in itself is toxic, but when
they hydrogenated it and gave it to animals, it restored aged mitochondria to their youthful
ability to oxidize.
Oh, P. Turner.
Those Russians, they've got some pretty interesting research over there, don't they?
They're really into longevity on a deep level, I guess.
Yeah.
That's why they drink a lot of vodka, that'll pickle you.
Yeah.
Well, Dr. Peat, what a joy having you here.
We covered a lot of territory, and I appreciate you being so generous with your time.
Thanks so much.
Okay, thank you.
Okay, hope you had as good a time as we did.
Bye-bye.
Dr. Ray Peat, raypeat.com.
So hope that's fun, and we'll put this on Facebook, and you can pass this on to everybody
that you care about.
We'll put it on YouTube as well, and we'll get some more Ray Peat fans out there.
I love you all very much.
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So please consider some of our products if you want to get something for yourself.
We've got some good stuff, and we know the source to all of them.
That's one of our trademarks.
So thanks for that.
We'll see you tomorrow.
We're going to have a special remix archive show with Andrew Goss and the real world of money.
I love you all very much, and may the blessings be.
From the Hill Country in Texas, this is oneradionetwork.com.
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