I'm really glad and thrilled to have you with us. It's an honor to talk to you. You've been
quite an inspirational force in the world of nutrition of which both of us have been
aware of your work. Tucker Goodrich has known about your work longer than myself, but I've
been fascinated by the insights, the little bit that I've learned so far. Tucker, would
you provide a little background for yourself?
Tucker Goodrich Me? I studied mostly humanities and arts for the first 10 years or so after
I graduated from college. Just because of seeing how many things were being mismanaged
in science and health, I decided to go back to graduate school and get a PhD in biology,
physiology. And so I went right from literature and painting into physiology and got a PhD
at University of Oregon in 1972. And since then I've been working on related themes between
brain function. That was my actual first interest in graduate school, but I discovered that
the nerve biology and brain biology people were extremely dogmatic. And so I looked around
the biology department and I found that the physiologists and especially the reproductive
physiologists were actually scientific rather than dogmatic. And so I concentrated on age-related
changes in fertility in females in particular. And that turned out to be very valuable for
understanding the brain, which had been my first orientation. The female hormones, actually
progesterone is a basic stabilizing factor. It's historically considered a pregnancy hormone,
but it's essential for brain function in both men and women. And the concentration in the
brain of progesterone is about 10 times higher than in the blood. So that has been one of
my main orientations at the last almost 50 years is looking at the implications of progesterone
deficiency. And along with that, stress induces estrogen, which again isn't the female hormone
as it's been advertised now for about 70 years. It's actually a stress hormone. If a man is
injured or has a heart attack or is very sick and old, his estrogen is going to be as high
as a woman's or higher. So it's a stress and aging indicator or hormone, definitely not
a fertility hormone. In the 1930s, estrogen was already identified as a promoter of miscarriage
or abortion and inflammation and cancer. Despite that, the estrogen industry by the early 1940s
discovered that almost anything toxic turns out to have an estrogenic effect. And soot,
for example, you can extract about a thousand different estrogenic substances from soot.
And so the industry found a very cheap, almost so cheap you could hardly identify a cost
substance, which is estrogenic and began selling it as the female fertility pregnancy protecting
hormone, estrogen. Convinced the FDA and other regulatory agencies that it was an appropriate
treatment for pregnant women, aging women to prevent aging and so on. The first 200
inhalants or more that estrogen was sold to treat all turned out to be fraudulent, but
they made many billions of dollars in the process. So they changed medical schools,
medical journals, the whole national consciousness to sell their fraudulent scheme or project.
Well, it's good. It's good to hear that not much has changed in the last many decades.
Dr. Peat, how did you take this interest into the nutrition sphere?
Oh, well, I was still working in the humanities. I started the school in Mexico called Blake
College in the early 1960s. And I started seeing, for example, students who would come
after work just couldn't learn anything. And so I started giving them a wheat germ and
egg biscuit and coffee with a little vitamin B1 added and they became good students. Just
a few good meals and their brains were functioning better. And then a friend mentioned that his
niece was dying in the hospital of intractable diarrhea. And I told him what I read in Adele
Davis's book written in the late 1950s about vitamin B6 sometimes curing diarrhea. And
after two or three days, he finally consented. He said they had given up and that she was
probably going to die within a day or so. So he went over to the doctor's head and gave
the kid 10 milligrams of vitamin B6. And within hours, her diarrhea had stopped and she was
out of the hospital within a few days. That was one of the deciding things that made me
realize how powerful nutritional therapies could be.
Indeed, that sounds somewhat similar to my own experience where I was able to put an
inflammatory bowel disease that I'd suffered from for 16 years in remission in a couple
of days by cutting back on my polyunsaturated fat intake. I was rather surprised at how
effective it was and that spurred my own interest in nutrition and your research among other
things. So thank you, by the way, for all the papers that you've published or the blog
posts that you've done over the years. I've started reading them probably more than 10
years ago, and I find that every time, as I continue to learn, I go back and I reread
them and appreciate how much you had said that I wasn't able to understand the first
times because I didn't have the background to comprehend the points that you were making.
So you've become, I don't want to say notorious, but rather famous in nutrition circles for
having a somewhat unconventional view of what a healthy human diet looks like. How would
you describe, for somebody who's new to your work, how would you describe succinctly your
views on what human nutrition should be optimally?
I started out in Mexico looking at the reason for malnutrition and poverty was a major thing.
And so I started thinking about the cost of foods and what was most easily available and
started looking around the health of populations around the world and what they were eating
and what was economically available to correct their problems. And I saw that refined grains,
for example, seemed to be a major problem when the traditional Mexican diet of tortillas
and vegetables and small amounts of crustaceans, when that diet was replaced by the Spanish
refined cereal-based diet and meats, for example, the nutritional deficiency diseases started
showing up. So I looked at what traditional diets were doing and the lime processing using
either calcium hydroxide or sodium hydroxide from ashes to soak the corn kernels in to
precook them in this strong alkalized solution. It changes the chemistry, for example, decreases
the tryptophan, turns it into niacin and makes the starch and toxic proteins digestible and
harmless. So simply their traditional process of the way they cooked their corn turned it
from a toxin to an actually beneficial food rich in calcium, niacin and other essential
nutrients rather than in the southern US where they imported corn from Mexico but didn't
widely use the alkali process. Homini is the safe form of corn cooked in lime, but when
they didn't make their corn into homini, they got pellagra.
So that makes sense. I
would hate to say it, but it seems that when you go to a vet, the first thing they ask
you about your pet is what is your pet eating. And when you go to a doctor, they don't generally
ask that question. It's a biological approach. If you have nutritional deficiencies, let's
figure out what's causing them. I used to suggest that people would do better going
to their vet rather than their doctor.
So you make a couple of statements that a lot of people find somewhat confusing or hard
to take. You're a fan of, to some extent, of consuming sugar as part of a healthy diet.
Do you want to describe the rationale behind that?
Yeah. Many years ago, I was hearing dieticians talk about the glycemic index of foods. And
right in their own tables, they showed that starches had a higher glycemic index than
sucrose. And that started me thinking about the difference between starch and sucrose.
Sucrose consists of 50% fructose and 50% glucose, where starch is, when you assimilate it, it's
pure glucose. And glucose stimulates insulin, turning on fat production and lowering your
blood glucose unless you have a steady intake of it. Where the fructose component either
doesn't stimulate insulin or even can have a restraining influence on insulin. And so
intrinsically, the reason sugar has a lower glycemic index than starch is that the fructose
component restricts insulin and restrains fat synthesis and so stabilizes blood sugar.
Right. And of course, for just that, it was advocated as a better sweetener for diabetics
for a while.
Yeah, but it has to be, unless you extract it from ripe Jerusalem artichokes, which take
a lot of care in storage and so on, it's generally manufactured chemically. And so it turns out
that quite a few people have an allergic type reaction to the manufactured form of fructose.
But if you eat fruits, for example, you not only get the fructose component of the sucrose,
but the high potassium content of the fruit has an insulin-like activity that also restrains
your body's production of insulin. So the fruit goes in with a slightly insulin-moderating
fructose content and also the simultaneously the potassium, which takes care of absorbing
the glucose without needing to secrete insulin. And so it has these surprising ways of bypassing
the insulin problem or what's related to diabetes. And I ran across two 19th century doctors,
one in Paris and one in following up in England, who the one in Paris was the first to observe
that a high sugar diet cured his terminal diabetic patients, originally diabetes, because
you couldn't assimilate glucose. You turned your protein of your tissues into glucose
to survive. And so the diabetic wasted away, lost their muscles and finally died in essentially
a starvation condition. The doctor in France gave his terminal diabetic patients who were
wasting away the amount of sugar they craved and found that they stopped wasting away and
very quickly started building muscle when they were eating a regular diet, milk, beef,
fruits and vegetables and so on, but along with a sugar supplement. So the doctor in
England did exactly the same thing and described the course of people who were dying, wasting
away, putting out tremendous amounts of sugar in their urine, even though they weren't eating
any. They were restricted because they called diabetes the sugar disease. So they were torturing
their patients by not letting them have any of the sugar that they craved. But he decided
not to torture his patients and let them add as much sugar as they wanted to their diet.
Eventually they stopped putting glucose into urine and stopped losing muscle and recovered
very quickly.
>> Eric Lander So it sounds like this was because the sugar
intake was sparing the liver the necessity of using glucose to produce the glucose that
their bodies needed.
>> Dr. Gregory S. Fowler Yeah, it turns off the cortisol which breaks
down your tissue protein to make sugar out of it or the sugar equivalent. Same thing
happens in cancer. The myth has developed that sugar feeds cancer. It's true in a sense,
that the cancer sends out signals such as ammonia to the body that it needs sugar if
you don't have sugar in your diet. And the body turns on extreme amounts of cortisol
providing sugar by breaking down your immune system, muscles and skin, all of your tissues.
The brain and lungs and heart are preserved. But the cancer causes catechia or the wasting
disease as a main killer. And if you simply give the body a large amount of glucose or
sugar of any sort, that will reduce the production of cortisol and stop the destruction of the
body tissue or at least slow it. So diabetes and cancer have that in common, that they
involve the stress, high cortisol-induced loss of active body tissue to provide the
glucose which is essential for the brain to survive.
Are both diabetes and cancer driven a lot by the overconsumption of the PUFAs?
Exactly. The PUFA, the number of unsaturated groups in the molecule, the more highly polyunsaturated
the fat is, the more double bonds there are in the molecule. And exactly in proportion
to the number of double bonds, the interference with thyroid function increases. So the enzymes
that release thyroid from the gland are inhibited by the highly unsaturated fatty acids. The
proteins that carry thyroid hormone in the blood, the thyroid is displaced competitively
by the highly unsaturated fatty acids exactly in proportion to the number of double bonds.
And the cells, tissue cells' ability to respond to the thyroid hormone that they do receive
is blocked in proportion to the number of double bonds. So it's every known step of
thyroid activity which is needed to produce oxidative energy and it's that exactly which
fails in diabetes and cancer. So you lose oxidative energy production from glucose and
the fatty acids. In the 1960s, research showed that as your free fatty acids in the blood
go up from stress, from the need for more sugar in your diet, the increase of free fatty
acids blocks exactly the ability to use and oxidize glucose.
Apparently the basic survival function of that which is called the Randle cycle, the
biological function is probably to stop the use of glucose in your massive skeletal muscles
and dispensable tissues, skin and muscles in particular, saving whatever glucose is
available for use by the brain, heart and lungs. But as the free fatty acids in the
blood rise, then even the ability of the heart and lungs and brain to use glucose for energy
decreases. And that's especially true if the free fatty acids are highly unsaturated
because they are increasingly toxic to the mitochondria in proportion to their instability
and high unsaturation.
Okay. Now this, wow, this reminds me of one of your blog posts, Dr. Peat, that's a nation
of information and there's a lot of unpacking that can be done to understand some of the
things. To go back to your comments on sugar, there are primitive tribes that subsist on
high amounts of honey, which is effectively the same thing as sugar, up to 80% seasonally
in some groups and to suffer no ill effects, which speaks to your view that sugar isn't
except perhaps for its dental effects, a harmful nutrient. There's a fructose going on nowadays.
There's a physician out of San Francisco, Dr. Lustig, I don't know if you're aware of
him.
Oh yeah, I saw his famous video.
Right, okay. Do you have any thoughts on what the difference between your view and his view
on fructose and metabolism?
Yeah, during his talk in that video, he quickly shows many references in the background and
I looked up all of the references that I could read and found that they supported my argument
as much as they did his. For example, he described fructose as a poison similar to ethyl alcohol.
In fact, if you're poisoned by an overdose of ethanol, if you're very, very drunk, the
antitoxin or the antidote to alcohol poisoning is fructose. It exactly reverses the changes
inside the cells caused by alcohol. So he was right about alcohol being a metabolic
poison. He was exactly wrong by saying it's like fructose. Fructose is the antidote to
the alcohol effect.
That's fascinating and that is very interesting.
Tucker, I wanted to ask what he mentioned about the role of PUFAs in causing cancer.
Is that related to what you've proposed about cardiolipin and its role? Could you explain
that or maybe ...
Well, yeah. PUFA seems to be a metabolic, a mitochondrial toxin to the effect that ... I
mean, there's some argument that your mitochondria actually prefer to burn it to get rid of it.
It seems to be toxic to the extent that it alters the mitochondrial composition, which
makes it more susceptible to oxidative damage and this breaks down the electron transport
chain impairing mitochondrial function, especially the ability to process glucose.
So that's basically the mechanism that I've seen that describes what Dr. Peat is talking
about.
It used to be 40 or 50 years ago, there was the absolute doctrine, dogma, that diabetes
was a genetic disease, almost 100% caused by genes. The new immigrants after the formation
of Israel, Israel had an extremely high incidence of diabetes, somewhat higher than the European
countries the immigrants had come from. The dogma persisted that they simply had the genes
for being diabetic, but then immigrants to Israel from the African countries, these people
were very genetically different and had no diabetes at all when they moved into the new
country, but they soon took up the European diet that the diabetics were eating and their
children all had the European high incidence of diabetes, totally disproving the genetic
causation and the polyunsaturated fats were high in the European diet and had been very
low in the African immigrants until they moved.
So do you see any promising treatments people are proposing for diabetes and cancer or is
that complicated?
Yeah, the same as the two 19th century doctors, it's all a matter of revising your thinking
or realizing that the unsaturated fats are the cause and getting rid of them in the diet
as far as possible and then returning to a more traditional diet of carbohydrates and
moderate amounts of protein from a variety of sources.
I was just saying let food be thy medicine is your approach for these diseases, right?
Yeah, and the minerals are extremely important in a less refined diet. There was a lot of
magnesium and calcium, vegetable greens if they're cooked provide both lots of magnesium
and calcium and the cows and goats that live primarily on leafy greens process their rumen
and ferment and predigests the greens which are high in PUFA but the bacteria in their
rumen destroys about 97% of the PUFA so you get the very rich calcium and magnesium content
in their milk to some extent in the meat but not nearly as much as in the milk along with
a radical decrease of the PUFA content and simply getting a very generous amount of these
minerals, calcium and magnesium is therapeutic not only to diabetes but to a lot of other
conditions. There's a somewhat mysterious brain disease that was first seen in Guam
but in several other regions that resembles Lou Gehrig's disease or amyotrophic lateral
sclerosis and Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. It includes a combination of all
of those symptoms and they have considered various theories about poisons from bacteria
and so on and from eating a flying fox that had lived on foods containing those bacteria.
It turns out that what those regions have in common, not the toxins but they are all
regions very low in calcium and/or magnesium and in the absence of a large amount of calcium
or magnesium in your diet, the brain cells take up any positively charged metal in place
of the calcium and magnesium. What happens when you're deficient in calcium is your
parathyroid gland becomes hyperactive, turns off almost directly or indirectly. Your mitochondrial
function decreases, your ability to produce energy and lacking energy, cells tend to calcify
and the calcium is in early years protective of these de-energized, de-vitalized tissues
but if it continues for a long time, the diet deficiency of calcium leading to hyperparathyroidism
and reduced mitochondrial energy leads to eventually destructive levels of calcium in
the tissues such as hardening of the arteries, calcification of the brain, heart valves,
kidneys and so on. But in these island regions, they called it Guamanian dementia because
it was discovered on the island of Guam. In the absence of the calcium to such an extent
that your parathyroid hormone becomes very high, de-energizing your cells, if your environment
has a normal amount of iron, lead and any of the heavy metals, they will load up to
a toxic extent with the heavy metals and then the heavy metals interact to catalyze the
oxidative breakdown of the PUFA which are concentrated in the brain. So a calcium deficiency,
if you're extremely deficient, you won't even deposit the usual amount of calcium.
It will be replaced by iron deposits or lead or whatever other metal is excessive. Copper,
molybdenum and manganese for example and aluminum. Aluminum is a major accumulated mineral because
it's generally abundant when calcium is deficient.
- Interesting. So now, you mentioned at one point in our discussion how high fatty acids
can impair insulin and there's been obviously, as I'm sure you're well aware, ketogenic diets
have become quite popular outside of the therapeutic indications in the last few years. Some people
have used your writings to say that a ketogenic diet can be harmful because the lack of glucose
increases cortisol to meet the body's glucose requirement and that this is a harmful side
effect of a ketogenic diet. Is that a fair representation of...
- Yeah, it's an essential to making the ketones. The ketones are great if you get them in fruits
and potatoes for example. They work fine as an energy source for heart and brain and so
on. But if you have to make them yourself, the way you make them is to break down proteins
which will come necessarily partly from your own tissues despite the fact that you're eating
a lot of protein. The cortisol doesn't care whether it's exogenous protein or your muscle
protein that it breaks down. And so when you're starving your tissues for glucose, your brain,
brains and heart are going to get glucose any way it can which means from protein. And
so you break down your own protein or your food protein and in the process you have to
dispose of the large amount of ammonia released by the protein. That means that you become
increasingly dependent on carbon dioxide to combine with the ammonia to make urea and
get rid of the potentially toxic ammonia. And if something interferes with your carbon
dioxide production, specifically not oxidizing enough glucose which produces about twice
as much CO2 per unit of energy as oxidizing fat, you're creating a situation in which
you have these multiple interacting stress factors that generally at an extreme can end
up poisoning your brain with too much ammonia but always to some extent poisoning your body
with too much cortisol breaking down proteins to make the glucose to sustain your brain
and lungs and blood system.
Dave Shiller>> Right, understood. And that would explain why people who go on a ketogenic
weight loss diet seem to experience a little more fat-free mass loss compared to people
who go on a high-carb, low-fat diet when they examine the two side by side.
Dr. R. D. Dixon>> Just looking at the pancreas gland itself, way back around 1920, people
were thinking of genetic reasons for the loss of the beta cells in the pancreas that can
make insulin. And it turns out that we have stem cells in the pancreas constantly replacing
if you kill for whatever reason your beta cells, they are stem cells ready to give birth
to new insulin-producing beta cells. And glucose is the sustaining factor for making new stem
cells for maintaining the ability to replace the missing insulin-producing cells. But free
fatty acids are constantly killing the beta cells. So a deficiency of glucose limits the
stem cell production and an excess of free fatty acids kills the beta cells faster. And
that means that you can very quickly activate these stem cells to make new beta cells and
at the same time by increasing the sugar availability, decrease the free fatty acids which are killing
the beta cells. And that can account for how these two 19th century doctors so quickly
cured terminal diabetics. The pancreas is perfectly willing to repair itself and become
non-diabetic if you just stop killing it with PUFA.
So, what about people who do the lower carb diet but they are eating 40 to 50 grams of
carbs a day, would that not be enough?
That would not be enough. Far from it I think. It's somewhat well more than 100 grams per
day. The healthy amount seems to be up above 200 grams of carbohydrate per day. The therapeutic
amount that the French and English doctors used was somewhat a little over half a pound
of sugar per day added to a standard diet.
So what about folks that say they seem to gain weight whenever they are eating that
kind of level of sugar, 200 grams of sugar a day. Is there, it's just about the right
sugars eating the fruits?
Well they probably weren't terminal diabetics. The patients of these 19th century doctors
stopped needing the sugar supplement in just two or three weeks. But if someone isn't
diabetic and they add that amount of sugar, it's all unnecessary excess calories. In
the case of the diabetics, they were powerfully deficient in calories and so when they added
half a pound of sugar, they were simply making them calorie neutral and it shifted them to
an anabolic metabolism that made the calories more efficient for rebuilding muscle. But
a person who isn't in that dying state from advanced diabetes always has to attend to
keeping their calorie intake within their metabolic consumption.
Animal experiments show that shifting to a fruit or sugar-based sucrose added diet in
various studies increases the metabolic rate by around 20% so they can keep their metabolism
in a calorie balanced condition even by adding a moderate amount of sugar. But gaining fat
weight means definitely that you're out of balance taking in too many calories.
So if a person who's normal in terms of not having any specific diseases but overweight,
you would recommend still including lots of fruits and I believe you're big on dairy,
ice cream even.
Yeah, the calcium and vitamin D are probably the most powerful weight loss nutrients there
are because both of them suppress the inflammatory system and the parathyroid hormone and the
parathyroid hormone suppresses mitochondrial oxidation and creates a vicious circle of
stress and the most powerful way to stop that exaggerated parathyroid hormone is to get
a lot of calcium, magnesium and vitamin D in your diet and that again drastically increases
your ability to burn calories, produce heat and not get fat. A low-fat milk diet with
adequate vitamin D is a very efficient weight loss diet as well as therapeutic in a variety
of other conditions. In fact, probably all of the really dangerous diseases are helped
by a diet high in vitamin D, calcium and magnesium.
Interesting.
Yeah, so you've talked about the vitamin D factor. Would that best source of that be
getting a lot of sunlight exposure?
Yeah, in a moderate latitude. In Florida, the sun is always within a reasonable intensity
high in the sky during the middle of the day. In the northern states except in the late
spring, summer and early fall, even the midday sun is so low in the sky, you're not going
to get enough sun. Only in the middle of the day in the summer, late spring and early fall
in the northern states, sunbathing is curative. It takes 30 minutes to an hour of good sun
exposure on the majority of your skin to keep your vitamin D level at least the middle of
the range that they call normal. It should be something like 50 or 60 nanograms per milliliter
to keep your parathyroid hormone under control.
Is that morning sun the best sun?
In Florida, it's probably the best. You can get very sunburned if you spend too much time
in the middle of the day. So you have good ultraviolet activity when you're in a low
latitude. And the higher altitude, the sun is more intense.
Dr. Peat, have you looked into the relationship between Omega-6 PUFA intake and sunburn and
skin cancer?
Oh yeah. There was a rabbit experiment. They shaved the rabbits and fed one group a PUFA
rich diet, the other one a PUFA deficient diet. And the ones on a PUFA deficient diet
didn't have sun damage. And they happened to be studying the wrinkling effect. The ones
eating a lot of PUFA had so much sun damage, their skin got fragile and wrinkled. And the
same thing that causes wrinkling, it's the same process that leads to chronic inflammation
and cancer.
Right. And additionally, I would expect the fibrosis that we see in a lot of these chronic
diseases.
Yeah. The tendency to swelling up, burn symptoms and eventually fibrosis and even calcium deposits
in extremely damaged skin. It's very common for precancerous and cancerous inflamed cells
to show crystals of calcium forming.
Interesting. Due to the body's inability to properly process calcium, I presume.
Yeah.
Interesting. Yeah. I discovered myself years back after going to a low omega-6 PUFA diet
that I, within a few weeks, had a much lower susceptibility to sunburn. I've also noticed
a lower susceptibility to just burn from hot things like kitchen accidents and the like.
It's been a rather dramatic alteration that a lot of other people have reported when they
go on a diet that's also low in omega-6 fats. Like a lot of the people who go on a carnivore
diet, if they're eating a lot of beef, they're going to get a lot less omega-6. And they've
pretty not entirely, but pretty unanimously noticed a decline in susceptibility to sunburn.
And D and calcium help that along. They are contradictory to the PUFA effect. I used to
sunburn just ridiculously easy. Just driving with tinted windows in a bright sunny area
in the desert, for example, I would get horribly sunburned right through the windows. And five
minutes in the midday sunlight in Mexico, I would have a lobster-looking skin color.
But after supplementing vitamin D, getting lots of milk in my diet, and avoiding PUFA
as completely as possible, the last time I was in Mexico, I was able to work the whole
day at about 7,500 feet altitude, extremely intense ultraviolet, no burning at all.
I've noticed similar myself. I now live in Idaho in the high desert, and I'm not impervious
to sunburn, but I can go hours out in the sun without getting a serious burn. It's quite
pleasant not having to worry about that.
Very, very convenient. I used to wear a hat all the time, but I don't bother with a hat
anymore.
You talk about milk consumption. A lot of people are concerned about drinking store-bought
pasteurized milk. They feel like there's all kinds of stuff in there that ruins the quality
of the product that you would get in raw milk. Do you have any thoughts on that?
The pasteurizing does slightly lower the vitamin content and so on. So it's still just about
the best food available even when it's not well-treated. But if you have a problem with
one brand of milk, I found that the taste of the milk is a good indicator of how easy
it is on your digestion. But some people do react probably to the way they've added the
vitamin A and D. They use an emulsifier and some of the emulsifiers might cause digestive
problems. But if you try different brands, you can usually find some kind of milk that
agrees with your digestive system.
If you haven't been a milk drinker, it's important to start with, for example, half a glass with
each meal and then gradually build up over a few weeks because it takes time to induce
enzymes such as lactase in your intestine. Even lactose intolerant people, if they go
at it gradually, can induce the enzymes needed to break down lactose.
So you don't seek out raw milk yourself? You don't drink that?
No. If I had a good clean source, a lot of even commercial dairies don't wash the udders
of the cow before they milk it. When we had a cow at home, we always carefully sponged
off the udder to get rid of the dandruff and any dirt that might be possible to get into
the milk. But lots of dairies don't do proper hygiene with their cows.
Should children drink low-fat milk or full-fat milk?
What kind of children?
Just children growing up. Should they drink full-fat or low-fat?
It depends on how active they are. Nowadays, kids are more likely to be watching their
computer or telephones than doing active calorie burning. So I think usually 1 or 2% fat content
is good even for kids. In a dairy country where people are working vigorously 8 or 10
hours a day, then full-fat milk is very appropriate because they need the calories and will burn
them but very often people who drink whole milk and have a sedentary way of life are
going to get fat.
Norman Ponser, P-O-N-T-Z-E-R, is a pretty interesting person. I highly commend his work.
It's quite interesting looking at the relationship between exercise and obesity.
One of the overlooked things that exercise does, if you're working for example, is that
physical activity increases your body temperature and the increased body temperature increases
your calorie burning ability. So it's similar to what thyroid supplementing does. The good
body warming effect of physical activity keeps your metabolic rate going with an anti-inflammatory
effect. If you're sedentary, your body's temperature falls and you go into a pro-inflammatory
state.
Of course, exercise also upregulates your resistance to oxidative stress which from
my understanding of that term is generally what it means in practice is a toxic effect
of omega-6 fat breakdown and exercise increases your ability to detoxify omega-6 fats in the
body and their metabolites.
Increased body temperature is a very powerful effect in reducing lipid peroxidation for
example. Higher body temperature lowers inflammation and lowers lipid peroxidation, makes you oxidize
properly rather than oxidizing fats that shouldn't be oxidized.
Right. So that gets another controversial position that you hold with the caveat that
I, assuming I understand it correctly, let me describe what I understand is that you
caution people against excess fish oil intake. Clearly, omega-3 fats are also susceptible
to lipid peroxidation just like omega-6 fats are.
Much more so.
Much more so, okay. So do you want to describe your position on that so I don't mangle it?
Yes. The number of double bonds and the fish oil is extremely rich in five and six double
bonds or the seed oil and minus six vegetable oils typically have two or three double bonds.
Those are sufficiently toxic but when you get five or six double bonds in a molecule,
the instability is that much greater. The antifibrate effect of the fish oil, very highly
unsaturated, is that much greater than the seed oil. But the good thing is that they
are so unstable that a large part of them breaks down before they even circulate to
your tissues and it's the breakdown products, the oxidation fragments of the N-3 fish oil
type of PUFA that has the so-called anti-inflammatory effect. It's toxic to your immune system to
the extent that for the first few months, you can see a definite anti-inflammatory effect
by interfering with things such as prostaglandin synthesis and some of the inflammatory cytokines
and breaking down thymus cells that could be involved in inflammation. But the trouble
is that prolonged use, after about six months, this anti-inflammatory effect starts becoming
immunosuppressive and over a lifetime, the amount of the long chain, highly unsaturated
N-3 accumulates, stabilized to some extent by forming an ester with cholesterol molecules
and that happens in atherosclerotic plaques in the arteries and then when it does oxidize,
forming age pigment-like material in your arteries, that's part of the buildup of the
high cholesterol containing plaque but it's the PUFA esters that start the process of
forming age pigment and/or arterial plaques. But that process continues in the brain so
that the old person's brain has much more fish oil-like molecules than the baby's brain.
Any healthy pregnancy delivers a baby who is, according to the dieticians, deficient
in the so-called essential fatty acids. Their body is burning calories at two or three times
the rate of an older individual and their brain is learning at several times higher
rate than an adult. In the teens, the metabolic rate slows drastically in proportion to how
much unsaturated fat is in your diet, turning down your metabolic rate. With aging, these
anti-metabolic fish oil-like N-3 fats build up steadily in the brain. People are talking
about them as being necessary because they find so much of them in the brain but in the
late development fetus, just before delivery and right after delivery, healthy babies are
extremely deficient in all of the PUFA and the brain function corresponds negatively
to the amount of PUFA esters of cholesterol in the brain. So the actual available cholesterol
decreases in the aging and dementing brain. The cholesterol which is needed to make progesterone
in the brain, for example, is bound up to the PUFA molecules which accumulate. The demented
brain has more total cholesterol but it's inactivated by being stuck to the highly unsaturated
molecules that have accumulated from the diet.
From what I understand, babies are more naturally going in and out of ketosis. Is that a healthy
version because they're getting the ketones from the mother's milk?
Yeah, the mother's milk is.
So because they're not producing those ketones in their own body, it's a healthy type of
ketosis for them to have?
I don't think they should go into ketosis if the mother is producing sugar-rich milk.
The baby has such a high metabolic rate that they very quickly use up their sugar and need
to be fed again.
Let's distinguish between fish oil and fish consumption. I've read some of your posts
where you recommend eating some amount of fish but not necessarily the fatty fish like
salmon and mackerel and sardines that we're all told are the healthiest fish because of
the high omega-6 content. You mentioned at the beginning of this discussion Mexicans
eating crustaceans and having a healthy diet. Of course, the Japanese eat a lot of fish
and have a fairly healthy lifespan.
What the crustacean eats, the pufa derive generally from algae and the very simple sea
creatures or water organisms live ultimately from the nature of the simple single cellular
independent organisms. If the food that the crustacean eats has a more saturated fat because
they live at a warmer temperature, then the crustacean itself is going to have less of
the fish oil material.
For example, in the Amazon with a high water temperature, 85 degrees or so, the fish fat
there is closer to butter than to what we think of as fish oil from the northern seas
that are very cold.
Of course, the same effect holds true for vegetable fats that coconuts and palm which
come from tropical areas are much more saturated than grains which tend to grow in temperate
climates.
Yes, and you can show that effect. Someone put sweaters on pigs, for example, and showed
that their fat was more saturated.
That's very funny.
I just wanted to ask about some other things.
Interesting. Now, sorry, David, go ahead.
I just wanted to ask about some other things to avoid PUFA. Should people avoid the chicken
eggs from the grocery store, pork, fatty pork, fatty chicken because they have a lot of high
linoleic acid in the fat?
Right. When I make chicken broth, I let it cool enough to skim off as much of the fat
as possible. Someone sent me some of their pork. They had the fat analyzed where the
agriculture department found that their so-called saturated fat from lard was actually over
30% PUFA. But this pork producer sent me a sample of their foods, their bacon and such,
that by analysis had only 4% PUFA and butter is from 2% to 3% PUFA. So that pork would
be very safe.
And if you feed your chickens or your pigs a good diet, like my friends in Mexico feed
their chickens table scraps, lots of tortillas, carbohydrates, and let them eat bugs that
are relatively saturated, their eggs taste much better and are low in PUFA. The worst
thing is the supermarket egg taste. If they give them flax, for example, the eggs will
taste like fish because of the highly unsaturated fats.
I traveled down to Ecuador many years ago and the first thing that I ate when I got
there was a plate of scrambled eggs and I was absolutely blown away by how much better
they tasted than American eggs. The yolks were dark orange and I've never forgotten
how much tastier those eggs were. I've been trying to recapture that experience here in
America. It's not very easy even with pastured eggs because they do feed them a lot of grain
as a base diet.
If you keep them close to the house so they eat the food you are throwing away, they're
getting almost a good diet.
Right. Now something else that you just mentioned, how babies seem to be born in a state that
a medical doctor would describe as almost essential fatty acid deficient. There's a
fascinating paper that I came across. Of course, as I'm sure you're aware, one of the "signs"
of essential fatty acid deficiency is the presence of meat acid, which is an omega-9
fatty acid made by the body in the absence of omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids.
This paper looked at the cartilage of a variety of different species and noticed that every
single animal that they looked at when it was born had a high amount of meat acid in
their cartilage indicating that it was deficient, but also the fact that every single one of
them was born in that state indicates that that may be the state that we ought to be
in. What do you think of that point of view?
Absolutely right. There's a guy in Australia, I think his name was Clellan, who found a
way to get a practical amount to make supplements of an omega-9 equivalent of a prostaglandin.
Our bodies, when we're deficient in PUFA, will still use the enzymes that make prostaglandins,
but they will act on the omega-9 fats producing prostaglandin-like material, except these
are anti-inflammatory and restorative, regenerative, where the prostaglandins we know made from
N-6 fatty acids are invariably harmful. Even the so-called good prostaglandins have their
harmful side effects, breaking down bone structure, damaging nerve cells, skin cells, blood vessels,
everything the prostaglandins we're familiar with all have their very harmful effects,
but the omega-9-based prostaglandin-like substances are actually essential and beneficial to good
health, but you have to be deficient in these so-called essential fatty acids before we
produce enough of the meat acids to reliably make these anti-inflammatory protective prostanoids.
Several experiments, I've accumulated about 20 of them I guess, showing that any injury
to the animal is minimal when the animal is producing meat acids and deficient in the
so-called essential fatty acids.
Now, what do you mean by any injury to the animal is minimal?
They took some of them by the tail and whacked them against the furniture and gave others
cobra venom, all kinds of toxins that they could think of, poisons that would create
diabetes in other animals didn't hurt these deficient animals.
See, now that is again fascinating because one of the things, and I've posted about
this on Twitter a number of times, that I have noticed since going on a low omega-6
diet is that I am much more resistant to injury and especially to pain from injury.
At first it was so extreme that I was concerned that I was coming down with leprosy, of course
the primary symptom of which is peripheral nerve degeneration to the point where you
can't feel things.
But 10 years later it's still going on and I obviously don't have leprosy but I'm
still largely impervious to these little minor impacts.
I've never heard of animal studies actually showing that.
That's quite fascinating.
The corresponding accumulation that's generally related to age as you eat the standard diets,
the prostaglandins are easier and more abundant to produce with a minor injury the older you
are and the more of these unsaturated fats you have in your tissues.
And so an old person entering their tissues gets worse symptoms.
A three or four year old can get a bruise or a scrape or a cut and in three or four
days there's no sign of it left or an old person will sometimes develop a chronic problem
or at best it might take two weeks to heal an equivalent injury.
Right, yeah, that's exactly what I've noticed.
I heal much more quickly.
I'm much more impervious to pain.
I had a coal recently fly out of a campfire and land on my leg and it hurt a lot when
it was sitting on my leg burning me and burning a hole through my pants.
As soon as I took it off the pain went away and previously I would have expected a burn
to hurt for days and now the pain went away as soon as I had the source of the burning
off my body and it just blew my mind what a stark difference it was from my previous
experiences.
Hans Selye who is famous for the stress physiology, he carried his stress studies from the systemic
level down to the tissue level and found that such things as polyunsaturated fats caused
all sorts of susceptibility.
Canola oil, he found that it was the PUFA content of the original rapeseed oil rather
than the erucic acid that was eliminated to make canola.
He found that just the linoleic acid content of the natural rapeseed oil was enough to
spontaneously cause necrotic areas to form in the heart, spontaneous heart degeneration,
but he found that on the same amount of rapeseed oil if he added cocoa butter with a very high
stearic acid content, their heart was protected by displacing the harmful so-called essential
fatty acids.
Other studies of his showed that vitamin E which prevents the breakdown of polyunsaturated
fats protected against all of the consequences starting with histamine release from any kind
of injury you can think of.
In some experiments, you would pull tufts of an animal's hair out.
That was enough to activate histamine and other stress signals that would then be amplified
by prostaglandins from their PUFA in the tissues leading to calcification defensively and in
the absence of vitamin E, the PUFA prostaglandin histamine interactions would cause iron deposition
and scleroderma-like condition.
He showed that iron excess and vitamin E deficiency activating the PUFA oxidation created rats
that were like an armadillo.
You could tap them with a pencil and it sounded like they had a shell.
Their skin was so calcified.
Well, okay, that doesn't sound great.
That certainly doesn't sound great.
That's that is very interesting.
Have you heard of the term theroptosis?
Oh, yeah.
In fact, that's part of the current newsletter I mean to write in the next few days is how
that concept really is an extension of what Hans Selye was working on.
He would inject iron chloride, for example, and create a predisposition to tissue injury,
cell death, inflammation, calcification, fibrosis, and so on.
Interesting. Yeah, I mean, theroptosis to me sounds like a description of how iron catalyzes
PUFA oxidation.
And, you know, I think blaming it on the iron is a bit misleading.
Yeah, I think Hans Selye was on the right course 60 years ago.
Dr. Peat, how does one subscribe to your newsletter?
And I ask you this because I would like to, and I'm sure a lot of our listeners would
be interested in doing so as well.
Yeah, the email address is raypeat's Newsletter with the S but no apostrophe at gmail.com.
Gmail or Gmail?
Gmail.com.
And just send an email asking to be subscribed?
It costs $20 for 12 issues over two years, bimonthly.
Okay.
I wanted to ask you quickly, we recently interviewed Professor Bruce Hammack of UC Davis who's
been studying linoleic acid.
He was first looking at burn patients and how they were affected by their high amounts
of linoleic acid in their body and how their infections were correlated to that.
And then he discovered the soluble epoxide hydrolase enzyme.
Go ahead, David, sorry.
And he recently published a paper in Frontiers in Physiology describing that they were examining
severe COVID patients who had this ARDS disease and he said the majority of them were all,
you know, every one of the ones they looked at had this high amount of leukotoxin from
linoleic acid that was causing the acute respiratory distress syndrome.
Is that similar to what you would suggest is causing a lot of this recurring severe
cases for this pandemic?
Oh, yeah.
The iron and PUFA are exactly part of any stress reaction of viral inflammatory thrombotic
diseases.
That's all the sort of thing that Han Selye was exploring in the 1960s.
So iron is just as problematic as PUFA as a stressor?
Well, they go together.
When your energy production slows down because of PUFA, the tissue has many reactions so
that a defensive reaction to any sort of injury or infection increases the heme oxygenase
production and potentially antioxidant process, but the heme oxygenase breaks down heme depositing
iron in the tissue as well as carbon monoxide further slowing down mitochondrial energy
production while the iron accumulates.
And so the more iron that's available, the lower the energy production in reaction to
injury or infection, the worse the outcome is going to be.
So iron chelators, for example, can be therapeutic in some situations, but just reducing the
amount of iron in your diet and milk and cheese as major factors in the diet are going to
protect you very quickly against the retained iron excess, make you less susceptible to
degenerative injury, pharoptosis, inflammation and so on from any stressor including viruses.
So should you reduce your red meat consumption even if you've gotten rid of your PUFA consumption,
you know, reduce your seed oil consumption completely?
Yeah, the meat not only has a very out of balance iron excess relative to copper and
other minerals, it also has an imbalance in the direction of tryptophan and cysteine which
are anti-thyroid pro-inflammatory amino acids and an extremely out of balance excess of
phosphate which is an excitatory agent counteracting the protective quieting effects of calcium.
Some have suggested that these high amounts of PUFA consumption are creating and are inducing
a state of torpor in humans and that's why there's a constant low energy state and a
desire to overeat and be lethargic and to almost get ready for hibernation almost.
Yeah, the temperature is lowered, animals that are going to hibernate load up on seeds
for example in the late summer and early fall, they tremendously increase their PUFA content
and shift that brings up serotonin activity which helps to lower the body temperature.
Interesting, so you do believe that the high PUFA consumption probably is inducing a kind
of torpid state for people, for humans?
Yeah, the experimenters have deprived them of PUFA and they didn't go into torpor or
hibernation.
Animals, animal models.
Yeah.
Interesting, so that's interesting to consider that as what's going on here then.
Well, there's also a human experiment, I mean an N=1 where a woman who was on a low omega-6
diet started eating omega-6 and her metabolic rate went down pretty promptly.
That was done with...
About 50 years ago, someone did a very illuminating rat experiment.
They divided I think it was 15 different diet compositions with either high and low PUFA
content and either high or low saturated fat content and intermediate diets to all of those
and at the end of a long period, most of their life, they analyzed their body composition
and found that the highest body fat corresponded to the proportion of PUFA in the diet, not
the quantity and was lowest in the diets with the proportion of saturated fats, not the
quantity, so that the high saturated fat diets produced leaner animals ultimately than a
low PUFA diet.
It was the proportion, not the quantity.
So now, so that's the...
Sorry, go ahead.
That illustrates the slowing of the metabolic rate.
So that's the PS ratio, the polyunsaturated to saturated ratio that Ancel Keys suggested
having a high PS ratio would protect you from heart disease and when that was tested experimentally
in humans in the Leon diet heart study, they found a massive decrease in subsequent cardiovascular
events in the people with the low PS ratio.
It sounds like that may be a more fundamental indicator of health than just the effects
on obesity.
Yeah, the saturation index, the opposite of the PS ratio, high saturated proportion corresponds
to species that are naturally longer-lived, they are naturally more saturated and the
cancer-prone individuals are low saturation index, they are more highly polyunsaturated
if they're likely to get cancer.
Interesting.
A researcher named Brad Marshall went and researched the USDA data for food consumption,
caloric consumption for Americans in 1938.
He looked at different groups and he found that the average caloric intake for a unit
for a human was like over 4,000 calories a day in 1938 and everybody was relatively thin
and they weren't eating the poofa like we are today.
Do you believe that they were eating higher amounts of calories on average in those days
than we are today?
Oh yeah, even in the 1930s, Broda Barnes studying different populations found that there was
a fairly significant part of the population that was hypothyroid but that proportion has
drastically increased during the time that we've been promoting unsaturated seed oils
as a major so-called essential fatty acid source and when you look at the amount of
grains in the diet and things that are sources of unsaturated fats versus fruits for example
that help us make the saturated fats, the obesity of the population corresponds to the
starches and poofa in the diet, not the sugar.
Even table sugar?
Sorry, go ahead.
I was just saying even table sugar doesn't have a core connection?
Yeah, the same thing that the diabetes doctors 150 years ago found.
Even table sugar supports our metabolic calorie burning better than a grain-based starchy
diet.
Interesting.
So Dr. Peat, what's the takeaway for people?
Of the things we've discussed and of obviously the larger body of work that you've put together,
what would you say are the most important alterations one ought to make in one's diet
to achieve a more optimal health?
More fruit and milk would be the key simple things and sunlight and definitely avoiding
all of the added poofa.
Everything you buy in the supermarket is somehow distorted or even trying to put poofa in the
milk by feeding chemical mixtures to cows that prevent the protective saturation that
the rumen does.
What about olive oil?
You hear a lot of people wanting olive oil as a healthy thing.
Yeah, if it's actually good tasting, first-pressing olive oil.
Also when you don't want is what they call light olive oil.
It has a much higher poofa content, but a good first-pressing olive oil is only 8 or
10% poofa usually.
Very good.
Right.
This all has been very fascinating, Dr. Peat.
We really appreciate everything you've shared with us.
Yes.
It's as always great cause for thought and further research.
Thank you for your time.
Can you give out that email again for those who want to subscribe to your newsletter?
RayPeat's newsletter at gmail.com, $28 for 12 issues over two years.
Just to be perfectly clear, that's because I've already tried to send an email to it
and mistyped the email address and got a correction sent back to me.
It's RayPeat's newsletter.
If you leave the S out, somebody will send you back an automatic correction.
That's good they corrected.
I suppose whoever it is has gotten a lot of these.
But at any rate, thank you, Dr. Peat.
This has been very educational.
I've got screen fulls of open references from our conversation and it's going to take a
little while to process all of this stuff, but it's been really quite enlightening.
Good talking to you.
Yeah, you too.
Take care.
Have a great day.
Bye.
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