[Music]
Hello everyone, I'm Danny Roddy of DannyRoddy.com
and today I'm talking with painter, philosopher, biologist, Raymond Peat.
In this hour-long episode, we'll talk about the benefits and risks of various commercial
pharmaceuticals and supplements. In addition to thanking Ray for talking with me today,
I'd like to thank my patrons for making this show and all of the content I produce possible.
If you would like to become a patron, please go to patreon.com/dannyroutty.
As always, please do your own research and come to your own conclusions. And in the spirit of
William Blake, the true method of knowledge is experiment. Without further ado, here's the show.
[Music]
Hello.
Ray.
Yeah, hi.
Hey, how are you?
Good.
Is this an okay time?
Yep.
Okay, perfect. Thank you so much for talking with me. I sincerely appreciate it as always.
Also, I wanted to say the conversation with Gavin was extremely enlightening. I'm not especially
interested in politics, but I am interested in your painting of physiology. And just knowing
some of the things that you talk about, I was kind of interested in anarcho-capitalism.
And after reading that Gavin article, I was thinking that it kind of shook me out of
that mindset and was maybe thinking that capitalism wasn't the best thing for health
and society. Was that kind of similar to what you were saying in that article?
Yeah. The idea of accumulating capital so you can build machines, people wouldn't have built
steam locomotives and ships and such if they hadn't accumulated capital. And so lots of good
things come from accumulating capital and putting it in one place. But the trouble is, Marx pointed
out that it tends to accumulate all in a few hands, and then the system stops running because
no one can buy what is produced so efficiently in factories. And so you have business cycles.
And then Lenin said, well, they discovered that you can cure the business cycle by having
imperialism and invading countries to make them buy your product and keep the system running.
So as long as you have wars, capitalism has no problem. But that's the problem. It has its
internal contradictions and tends to cycle down to a crash every few years if you don't have some
way to break out of that. It almost perfectly put things into perspective of
something Bucky Fuller said. And he was talking about how he was trying to shake the notion of
everybody having to earn a living. And I was totally confused at what he was talking about.
But he was saying that technology was getting better and better, and that would free up more
people to this barbaric idea of having to earn your place on the planet. Is that what you're
getting at? Yeah, that was Fuller.
I think critical path, he said it somewhere.
Yeah, I admired him. I listened to one of his lectures when he came to Oregon.
Talked, I think, six hours steady until they closed the shop.
I was reading the CIA reports on him. And somewhere they mentioned that he had an
incredible capacity just to talk for many hours.
Yeah, he and Fidel were experts at putting the whole world story in one lecture.
Cool. Okay. That's awesome. I wasn't specifically wanting to talk to you about politics, but I
thought that was so good. And it really shifted my thinking. Oh, you know what? One last thing,
I was reading two other papers by a guy named Paul K. Piff, and he was talking about the
social and stress consequences of capitalism, too. He has papers called "Having Less, Giving
More" and "The Influence of Social Class on Pro-Social Behavior" and "High Social Class
Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior." So that seemed to just really tie in to the whole
thing you were talking about. Yeah, the culture, basically, it has functioned as a system of
illusions to help keep a dysfunctional system working to make the people think that they're
better off than they are. And so I think working on the culture is really where political work
should be done. Propaganda analysis everywhere, including science and philosophy.
It's almost like the food pyramid and then the political system synergize to destabilize a
person, like the undigested starches and then the capitalism. It's like a perfect storm for
a weird culture. Yeah.
Okay, let's get on to supplements. This has been just a constant evolving area for me. I don't
remember when I first heard you say that you preferred using the oily supplements on your
skin. It must have been years ago, like 2011 or something. And I heard what you said and I
kind of rejected it because it didn't really fit in with my life. And I put them on my legs and
they were too oily and got on my pants and it just didn't really work out for me. So years later,
just like probably like six months ago, I started putting them on my legs and stopped eating them
and just like various small kind of things resolve themselves. And then I forget who sent me
quote of yours saying that you only thought a few supplements were safe. Before we get to a lot of
the specifics, you could just kind of give us a background because you've been talking about
supplements like since the seventies and just perusing through nutrition for women again,
you seem to be saying like a lot of similar things that you should take a careful approach
to them. So, and I know you mentioned before that you were known for getting people off of
their supplements. And I always thought that was a funny idea. Yeah. In the late sixties,
when I came to Eugene, I knew someone who started the local free clinic. And
in Eugene in the summer, the fields all around under the north of town were growing grass for
the seed, lawn seed industry. And at the end of the summer, they would burn their fields
and all of the pesticides and things that had been put on the crops would be vaporized and blow into
Eugene and people with asthma would be more likely to die during the smoky seasons. And
after it caused some huge traffic accidents, they finally, after many, many years,
limited it at least. But during that time, allergies were a major problem. And so,
my friend with the free clinic was constantly sending allergy people to me. And I found that
they were all taking ascorbic acid and vitamin A and the usual things that people take for allergies.
And I had just a little before that been trying out Linus Pauling's idea of big doses of vitamin C.
And my first bad experience with vitamin C was in the mid 1950s when it suddenly got
very cheap. I had had previous good experiences with tiny 50 milligram tablets that cured my
poison oak right away. So, when it became cheap, I tried a 500 milligram tablet,
woke up the next morning with a sore throat and cold symptoms. And over the years, I saw that
repeatedly happened that a good big dose of vitamin C always gave me some kind of a cold
symptom reaction. So, around 1968, when I started seeing these allergy people in great numbers,
they were all taking vitamin C and some other supplements. And so, I suggested that they try
stopping it. And just almost without exception, they would come back and say that their allergies
were gone for the first time in years, just within a week of stopping all their supplements.
- And you suspect it was majorly due to some kind of endotoxin or like irritation from the intestine?
- Yeah. One of the things the endotoxin does is to impair oxidation of the lining of the intestine
and create a reduced state of too many electrons. And the sulfites and ascorbic acid are a very
powerful reductants. And I think the combination of endotoxin and a massive chemical reductant
can interact and set up a big inflammation in the intestine and then reflexes from that cause the
nose to run and eyes to water and such. - Did that just shift your thinking to be
much more careful about the supplements after you experienced that?
- Yeah. I had previously found that after I had dental x-rays, it happened three different times
from the age of 10 to the age of 30. For about, in the first two times, I had leukoplakia on the
inside of my cheek for six months following the x-rays. And the third time it happened,
I've been thinking about what happens to stressed cells and membranes. And it occurred to me that
the vitamin A would be destroyed by x-rays just as much as it is by sunburn. And so I took a big
dose of vitamin A and it immediately, just overnight, cleared up the leukoplakia. And
knowing the similarity between cervical, so-called precancerous conditions,
leukoplakia can occur in the cervix as well as in the lining of the cheek. I told women about it
and they tried big doses of vitamin A and vitamin E and similarly got the precancerous condition to
disappear. But as I continued taking the vitamin A just as a regular supplement, I started getting
headaches from it. And I'm not sure if the product had changed or if I just happened to be at that
stage where I was more sensitive to it, but I found that just a touch of it on my lips would
give me a migraine the next morning. So I tried out a series of individual supplements and found
that riboflavin, a very important vitamin B2, was almost as powerful as ascorbic acid for giving me
almost immediate serious headache or asthma symptoms. One other that was very intense was
rutin, whatever they were selling as a rutin concentrate, was extremely allergenic. And
talking to people with allergies, pretty much they confirmed that ascorbic acid was
the number one problem for most people. But vitamin B2 and rutin and sometimes vitamin A
caused problems. With your biochemistry background, do you suspect why these substances,
are they made in just a cheap way and that poses some risks to the intestines? Or
why do you suspect supplements are these kinds of irritants a lot of the time?
When vitamin C was first on the market up until 1953 or '54, it was sold in very small 50-milligram
tablets. And that was during the time when all of the classical amazing results were published.
I think that was because it was free of contaminants. But the new cheap way of making
it from glucose at first involved sulfuric acid, oxidation of glucose, and the sulfuric acid was
almost always contaminated with some lead because of the way it was manufactured.
Over the several decades since 1955, there have been a series of chemical innovations for making
it even more cheaply. But apparently, each of them introduces some kind of chemical adulterant
in trace amounts. In the Journal of Free Radical Biology, I think it's called, in the late '90s,
someone published a study of the reagent grade best purity ascorbic acid that they got for lab
use. They dissolved a gram of it in a liter of highly distilled water and then measured it in
an electron spin analyzer, ESR or EPR, electron paramagnetic resonance, shows free radicals.
And the person who did this experiment said that just spontaneously on dissolving purified
vitamin C in purified water, the content of free radicals was as high as would have been produced
by, I think he said, something like 6,000 rads of x-rays, basically a killing dose.
He said, "Isn't it amazing that this amount of free radicals doesn't kill her intestines?"
He said it was apparently from traces. He looked at the very tiny traces of heavy metals and said,
"Any one of those." But iron was adequate, but there were several other
trace metals that wouldn't be enough to create free radicals.
Unbelievable. And that's just like one problem with the supplements. I imagine like the casings
they're in and then the fillers, like those are all added variables to the allergenicity
of the products. Yeah. Every additive has its own manufacturing history and every reagent used
in making that thing has its own history. And you have to look, you know, it's like they used to
say about HIV infections, that one encounter can amount to hundreds of historical
encounters and opportunities for infection. But when you look at every
excipient in a product, each one of those has many components, each of which has its own
history and opportunity for contamination. You've obviously mentioned a couple core
things that you talk about a lot as being safe therapeutic agents, like things like thyroid and
progesterone. What is your general process for evaluating something, if it's safe or unsafe?
Is the history of the substance extremely important? Or like unpack your process, I guess,
for us. My thinking, I think, got started along a certain path in 1960 when they were analyzing the
amount of strontium-90 from atomic bomb fallout and collecting baby's teeth from all around
the world to measure their exposure to radioactive isotopes. But strontium-90 happens to be
concentrated in the bone, and the bone marrow is turning over rapidly. And so the exposure to
fallout would show up as mutated blood cells. And radiation exposure to the bone marrow is a known
promoter of leukemia. And so they were looking at the connection between childhood disease and
strontium-90. And because strontium-90 is similar to calcium, it associates in milk. And so the
government was warning parents not to feed their children so much milk because of the
radioactive strontium that the bomb tests were putting into it. But I looked at the other,
how did the strontium-90 get into the milk? And it falls onto the ground in the rain.
The plants that need the water and soil to grow absorb both calcium and strontium-90.
And so the concentration in the soil is relatively very high after a bomb test in the ratio of
strontium to calcium. And when the cow eats the grass, the cow purifies and selects for the
calcium over the strontium. If you look at the ratio in grass and cow meat and milk, the milk
has the least strontium-90 in proportion to other nutritional factors, especially calcium.
So every organism is a purifying system, getting what's good and excluding as much as possible of
what's bad, even to the matter of being able to select between the isotopes of potassium, for
example. Radioactive potassium goes down every time it passes through an organism on the food
chain. And so the safest thing is to get the purest food possible from an animal like a cow
producing milk, which is multiply filtered from the environmental source. When they talk about
the chemical purity, that's only a reality in the mind of the chemist, that it's maybe better than
something from a crude or factory. But in relation to biological nutrients,
it's just wildly out of the ballpark in terms of contamination. So any natural food
is extremely purified. Any supplement made chemically is going to be dirty, just in
principle. So sometimes somebody, I'll get an email of somebody saying, "I'm not eating liver,
but I'm taking vitamin A and the B vitamins, etc." And this is just a totally non sequitur,
the food versus just a litany of different pills? Yeah. And one of the problems is that you get
lots of unnamed and still unidentified nutrients in any living tissue or recently living tissue.
For example, in mushrooms, the content has hardly been just sketched out. There are thousands of
potentially valuable nutrients or paranutritional substances, things that influence your quality of
life that simply haven't been identified and tested. It's interesting you bring that up. That
was actually one of the motivators for me to talk to you because I don't know what about being here
in Mexico made it more interesting, but the substances you were talking about in foods,
like the apigenin, the norenginin, the various substances in mushrooms, those all became,
I don't know why, but suddenly more interesting than the various supplements. And since they were
so easily attainable, I was like, "Why don't I just try to fortify my diet with these things
rather than focusing on these pills or whatever?" Yeah. And some of the fruits that are most
interesting happen to have some of the most amazing still unidentified substances in them,
like the curimoya. Just like Mark Twain said, "It was the best tasting substance in the universe."
So those have a lot of medicinal qualities as well?
They haven't been studied, but if you eat them for a while, you can tell
that there is something amazing about them.
That's good to know. They're in my refrigerator. And then marmalade too,
like something you could make that is full of norenginin and then norengin, and this is
something you would normally throw away that could be, I'm doing air quotes, but like a supplement
with something with great value. Yeah, like orange peeling, people usually
throw away, but if they're good oranges and well prepared, the marmalade is like a super drug.
People might worry about the fact that marmalade is more sugar than orange peeling, but
the sugar itself is part of the nutritional wonder drug.
When the health gets really, like in a really serious condition and supplements or drugs
would be of value, are there certain ones you typically think of that have a proven safety
record or are more physiological than other drugs? Like I guess a few that you frequently mention?
A general rule about drugs is that the oldest ones are best. They've been tested for more years.
Since the pharmaceutical industry sort of took over the world and the government,
they have had 20-year cycles in which they talk about a new generation of the drug.
And the first generation is usually the safest and most effective. The second, third, and fourth
generations are more weirdly dangerous, but the toxic side effects just haven't been published yet.
Because you'll typically read some negative effect of like literally any substance,
is there any way of understanding side effect data to understand like the real risks?
Yeah, 50 years, I assume that most of the middle term side effects would have been noticed.
If it's going to bring on cancer, you have to use it for at least 20, preferably 40 years
to know whether it's safe because cancer is a developmental process that typically takes at
least 20 years. And then regarding like if it causes your children or grandchildren to be born
without heads, that's worth knowing. And they aren't going to know that for quite a few years
for all of the drugs that have been patented in the last 20 years.
Just because it came to me, but the finasteride is probably a pretty good
example of that. It just seems like it's ruining lives left and right.
What drug is that?
Finasteride, Propecia.
Oh, yeah, I hear from a lot of people who have had trouble from that.
What kind of effects would you expect with inhibiting 5-AR? Is that
just because I get the email, I think, all the time?
Well, brain chemistry depends on it. The metabolism of progesterone
as well as testosterone in your brain, if you block any of the enzymes used in making it,
you're going to have a weird brain.
There's some famous quote from the FDA saying that dihydrotestosterone apparently wasn't
used in the organism or it had like no function or something. So that was the kind of thinking
that apparently was going into making that drug, which is nice to know.
Yeah, but it works on the progesterone system too. They said progesterone is only
pregnancy-related drug chemical. Neglecting that the brain absolutely depends on making it and
absorbing some of it that's produced in the ovaries and adrenals and skin. But it's a major
brain hormone that you're messing with when you try to stop the production of DHT.
So just to finish that thought, restoring the pregnenolone, DHEA, and thyroid function would
be probably a good start to trying to resolve somebody from taking that substance?
Yeah, and even better probably to start with increasing your cholesterol production,
which means keeping your intestine and liver in good condition.
Switching gears a little bit, can we talk about nutrient deficiencies and maybe common ones
that you maybe think about often, have experienced yourself or written about,
and then the best ways to go about restoring the nutrients? And I imagine that's with the
simple foods.
Yeah, I had fairly interesting experiences like the fact that 50 milligrams of vitamin C
cured horrible cases of poison oak. I thought I was going to have to quit working in the woods,
but over the weekend, I took two doses of 50 milligram vitamin C and the poison oak was gone,
never had it again. And around that same period, I was feeling gloomy and happened to take a
tablet of, I think it was maybe 20 milligrams of vitamin B1, and in minutes, I had a clear,
happy perspective on the world. And when I worked in the woods, I always by about mid-summer
was getting acne. And people talked about how sunlight was supposed to be good for your skin,
but for some reason on exposure to the sunlight, I would get pimples. And one night,
I think it was in the winter in Mexico, I was lying on my bed with a bright light hanging over
my head and I went to sleep, spent about eight hours lying on my back with a bright light shining
on my closed eyes. And I woke up with pimples starting. And that started the biochemical
thinking going. And I realized that my retina uses a lot of vitamin A just in the process of
making the visual pigment and so on. But then the eye is the main regulator of your reproductive
hormones. And when birds are exposed to constant light, for example, they'll be constantly in their
mating season, like with artificial light in the winter, birds will become fertile and start
nesting. And it's because light is the signal that is springtime and it activates your adrenals and
gonads to produce lots of steroids. And the production of steroids is a heavy consumer
of vitamin A. And so from that enlightening insight, I took a big dose of vitamin A and
immediately the pimples subsided. Then around that same time, I was getting interested in the
curative effects and I read Adele Davis and a friend in Mexico City was dropping by and saying
that his little niece was in the hospital with uncontrollable diarrhea. And he would stop by
two or three days in a row saying that the final day he said they didn't think she would live
another day. But at that point, he accepted an idea from Adele Davis. And I gave him a tablet
or two of vitamin B6, 10 milligrams, which he took to the hospital, gave to the little girl,
and within an hour or so, her diarrhea stopped and instant recovery. About a year or two after that,
a neighbor of mine had a big alcoholic nose. He was a terrific consumer of gin and tequila. He
bought it by the case. And his nose was red and large and shiny. And he had a terrific problem
with vocabulary. He was a hobbyist short story writer. And he would struggle for a long time
to get the right word he wanted. He had it in mind, but he couldn't call it up. And he had this
odd habit of when he was looking for a word, he would put his hand on his forehead and nose.
And so it started me thinking about the memory and the circulation to his nose being a problem.
And possibly the circulation of his brain was affected by the same thing.
And so I quoted from Adele Davis again, and described how vitamin B2 is essential for
oxidation. And the blood supply is carrying oxygen. So it has to carry extra oxygen when
you're deficient in vitamin B2 to make up for the inefficient use of the oxygen. And so I kept
telling him this idea to try a vitamin B2 supplement. And he couldn't remember it. So
I kept giving him notes and he would forget to take the note. And I think we tied the note to
his finger. And he finally got to the doctor with the note. And the doctor gave him a shot of
vitamins. And I saw him within a day or two, he was talking as fluently as anyone, no hesitation
in vocabulary. And his nose was completely normal pink color. Then he got a weekly shot.
But on some holiday, he forgot to go to the doctor for his weekly shot. Next time I saw him,
he was hesitant in his vocabulary. And his nose was red and shiny again.
Once you're deficient in vitamin B2, it can raise your requirement for a long time afterwards.
So basically, it's endless what could be considered deficiency, like any kind of
abnormal behavior or... Yeah, a friend of mine had a four-year-old
kid who was having every afternoon, he would have a violent tantrum and was getting dangerous,
really vicious episodes. And at night, he would wake up screaming and having a horrible nosebleed.
And the nosebleed brain connection reminded me of my friend with a shiny nose. And we made up
some milk powder, egg, and sugar cookies with 10 milligrams of vitamin B2 powdered up in this batch
of maybe, I guess, six or eight cookies, which he ate that afternoon. That night, he slept through
the night without having his nightmare and nosebleed. And he never, as far as I knew in
the next years, never again had his horrible tantrums. What are your thoughts on the versatility
of the body? Does it need everything every day? Because the gentleman with the larger nose,
he needed a large proportion of the B2 versus the child that needed just one dose.
Is there any way to tell what you need personally? Someone did experiments on rats and found,
looking at the cornea, which gets its oxygen without blood vessels, so it depends on oxygen
diffusing in from the inside and out. They used the cornea to test the effects of a vitamin B2
deficiency and found that the mitochondria were essentially collapsed or structurally changed
so that they no longer would take up vitamin B2 when it was given to the metanormal concentration.
So I think that might be a unique vitamin deficiency causing more or less charitable
damage to the mitochondria, which you can regenerate, create a new crop of mitochondria,
but it takes support and good condition over a period of probably quite a few weeks.
So your nutritional requirements depend on your parents, your grandparents,
and every generation before that? Yeah. For example, something that makes your
mother low in thyroid or high in estrogen or low in glucose, for example, during your gestation,
that powerfully sets a pattern in your nerves and endocrine glands that will greatly increase your
requirements. And if you intensely work on them, the earlier in life, the better, but at any age,
if you put enough effort into it, you can overcome those pre-settings.
You've mentioned that meat eaters would normally get a fourth to a half a grain of thyroid in their
food every day. Do you look at thyroid? I remember being interested that you called it like a
supplement where a lot of people like to label it as like a drug. Do you look at thyroid like
eating oysters and liver, except it's almost impossible to get because the FDA made it
illegal? Yeah. Seeing the various ways the country people ate in Mexico and in other countries,
I realized that just the meaning of a traditional diet to a large extent was that it was nutritionally
very complex and included hormones, especially the thyroid gland. People always would eat the
chicken necks and fish heads, and they would save all of the glands from pigs and all of the
food animals, sheep and cows and such. And they would use those in sausages with the smaller
animals. The whole animal tended to be stewed and used in a very comprehensive way. But
the blood, for example, carries a lot of hormones, and blood is a very frequent
component of food in basic traditional diets. I forgot where you said it, but I think when
you were talking, it might have been in relation to progesterone or thyroid, but when you used to
consult very often when somebody had a problem, you would have them read books on it before
they actually took anything. Do you think that's a good approach? Or is just doing
it the way of really learning about it? What are your thoughts on that? Because sometimes
it seems that there's just a lot of confusion involved in embarking on thyroid.
When you don't know the client very well, it's best to give them the information that can make them
take responsibility for themselves. But sometimes when I saw someone in desperate,
like a suicidal condition, I would intervene by giving them a quick-acting thyroid or
dosing them with some progesterone. When you can see it happening, you know that the person is
in a desperate condition and that if they're going to be converted into a well person within an hour,
you can take the time to oversee it yourself. But otherwise, if you are just consulting more or less
random people, it's better if you make them get informed so that they can watch themselves
undergo the changes.
Yeah. For what it's worth, I think in your, from PMS to menopause, you have like a Q and A format.
And when I was first learning about your work, that was, I feel like, one of the most helpful
things that I embarked on when I was reading your literature at first because it was super
easy to understand. By the way, are you thinking about putting your books up anywhere anytime soon?
Yeah, I've got them in electronic form, but they're so big that I can't email them. And so
we've been trying to just find out how to make them easily accessible electronically.
Awesome. Awesome. I think I get emails every day for people asking when your books are available.
Okay. Nutritional requirements for a hypothyroid versus healthy person. I know you've mentioned
that vitamin A can be kind of a double-edged sword. Is there any other nutrient that is needed
in, well, I know vitamin A is needed in lesser amounts for the hypothyroid person. Is something
like magnesium especially important for the hypothyroid person, anything like that you can
think of? Yeah. Thyroid is required to retain magnesium by cells. So when you're hypothyroid,
the slightest stress makes the magnesium fall out of your cells and get lost in the urine.
And so a constant daily supply of magnesium is essential for things like preventing cramps and
depression and all of the inflammatory things that come from magnesium deficiency.
But once your thyroid is up where it should be, then you can go for really probably two weeks or
more without anywhere near the required amount of magnesium. So most nutrients you can go without
for a couple of weeks as long as you're getting energy. That's interesting. So you don't need
everything every day. There's lots of versatility in the, yeah, okay. That's good to know. And that
Traskin study on vitamin A, he thought that the healthier people needed more vitamin A. Is that
similar to your thinking as well? Yeah, because you're turning over your cholesterol to progesterone
and testosterone chemistry constantly. And that uses lots of vitamin A. And when your thyroid
is low, then you have a very low requirement for vitamin A that the FDA sees. If you had to do a
general ballpark of somebody, a healthy person with high thyroid activity, how much thyroid,
I'm sorry, vitamin A do you think they would need? During my twenties, I apparently needed around
50,000 units per day. The researcher, dentist, Emmanuel Traskin at one of his conventions
circulated a questionnaire and asked people to list their symptoms and all of the supplements
that they used. And he published a chart showing a straight line of inverse relationship between
the amount of vitamin A from no supplement to 100,000 units a day. And the number of symptoms
went from, I forget how many, but multiple symptoms down to zero symptoms in the high metabolizers who
were using a vitamin A 100,000 per day supplement. Is there any dead giveaway? Because the vitamin D
is pretty easy because there's a test. And I guess a vast majority of the emails I receive, and then
that causes me to go look for papers or search through your work. And it seems like the vitamin
A and then vitamin K are a little more ambiguous to how much a person actually needs and whether
it's suppressing the thyroid or helping or not. Is there any dead giveaway for a vitamin A deficiency
or the need for vitamin K too, do you think? Or is it just kind of experimentation?
Dr. McKeon I think experimentation is best. When a person
has extremely high blood pressure, especially the difference between systolic, diastolic, if that's
70 or more, I figure they should try some big doses of vitamin K because it is needed for
keeping calcium out of your arteries. And as they become vitamin K deficient and calcium overloaded,
they become stiff and you get a very hard kind of circulation. The pressure rises sharply on
contraction and then falls drastically on relaxation because there's no elasticity in the
system. And I've seen people in just a week or two bring their top and bottom numbers much closer,
like a hundred point difference disappearing in just a week or two from a big vitamin K supplement
like 40 or 50 milligrams. Dr. McKeon
Speaking of vitamins D, A, and K2, these tend to have, I mean, reading from your work and then
doing some reading on my own, they seem to be extremely therapeutic when given the right amount.
And I know we mentioned at the beginning of the conversation that they might be better off
used topically. Can you maybe explain maybe your own process or what has worked for other people
when using them topically? Dr. McKeon
Oh, you have to use about, oh, sometimes 10 times the oral dose, depending on, you know,
if you're going to bathe every day, you for sure need about 10 times as much on your skin because
it takes some time for the vitamin D to soak in. And as your skin, the faster your skin is
being replaced, the more of the vitamin D that you put on it is going to be lost with the shedding
cells. So if you have some symptom like extreme weakness, that muscular weakness and the skeletal
muscular symptoms will disappear in a day or two when you get, if you bring your serum vitamin D
level up from say five or 10 nanograms to 30 to 50, just a tremendous difference in the brain
function, muscle function, absence of bone pain and so on.
Aaron So if you wanted to use 5,000 IU of vitamin
D per day, you should put 50,000 IU on your skin?
Dr. McKeon Yeah, but you still should,
after doing it for a while, you should have a blood test. Some people with very sensitive thin
skin might absorb as much as 30 or 40% of what they put on.
Aaron And then A and K2 would be a little more
ambiguous because the tests aren't so good for those?
Dr. McKeon Yeah, you can get the vitamin A measured,
but I think it's very expensive. And usually it's not worth having it done because if you just eat
eggs and occasionally liver, you're going to have plenty.
Aaron Do you use a combination of those every
day or is it kind of just like a once or twice a week kind of thing?
Dr. McKeon Of the skin?
Aaron Yeah, of the oily vitamins.
Dr. McKeon Yeah, in the winter, I try to do it every day. In the summer,
the food supply is usually fresher and so I often don't use them every day in the summer.
Aaron Your thoughts on the probiotic strains B-liciniformis
and then B-subtilis? And they're contained, I guess, in a product called Biosporin that's
from Europe somewhere. Go ahead.
Dr. McKeon There are safe antibiotics that can work for
a lot of people with a bowel dysbiosis, bad bacteria overgrowth. But I think the first thing
is just to cut out the foods that are supporting the bad bacteria, which are usually polyunsaturated
fatty acids and hard to digest starchy fibrous foods like grains, beans, seeds and such.
And then the disinfecting foods such as cooked mushrooms and raw carrots, these are natural
antibiotics. But when you have a really serious, intense bacterial problem, these subtilis and
B-liciniformis, those are useful. Life Extension Magazine, I think this month, has a good article
on the phage bacterial virus that kills lots of the toxic bacteria.
Aaron Would this be useful in place of antibiotics
like penicillin and minocycline and the macrolides? Or would this be kind of a law,
like if all those fail, then this would be something to investigate?
Dr. McKeon Yeah. But I've seen just carrot salad
everyday work just as well as penicillin for reducing the stress that's causing a hormone
imbalance, for example. If you're having very high cortisol and estrogen and low
testosterone and progesterone, sometimes the supplement of any of the antibiotics can do it,
but so can just having a raw carrot salad every day.
Aaron Do you think if you're going to use
aspirin consistently, do you think it should be dissolved in water? And then, two, do you mind
talking a little bit about the relationship between aspirin and vitamin K2?
Dr. McKeon It's not an acute thing. The aspirin,
one of its effects, the famous effect, but it's a very trivial effect in the actual benefit you get
from aspirin, is the knocking out of the clotting platelet function. And that effect that can cause
uncontrolled bleeding from too much aspirin is by blocking or interfering with the proteins
that are produced by the liver under the influence of vitamin K. So not everyone experiences this,
but if you have taken antibiotics and have a deficiency of the type of bacteria that produces
vitamin K in your intestine, then you're susceptible to aspirins knocking out of this
vitamin K-dependent clotting protein. So just as insurance, it's good to have a source of vitamin
K in your diet. Aged cheese or well-cooked greens are ordinary foods that are good sources.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani These are the protein S and C?
Dr. McKeon Yeah, those are made under the
influence of vitamin K in the liver and they are the anticoagulant factors dependent on vitamin K.
So people who have excess clotting problems are sometimes told to avoid vitamin K,
but if you haven't measured the proteins S and C, it might be the worst thing to do is to
avoid vitamin K because vitamin K is required for the normal resolution of stimulated clotting.
And so you can have a tendency to strokes if you're very extremely deficient in vitamin K.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani People talk about vitamin D being an epidemic
like a deficiency. Do you think vitamin K is similar?
Dr. McKeon Yeah, I think it's just about as general as
vitamin D. The reason people are so deficient in vitamin D is mostly in the northern latitudes
working indoors, only getting maybe a couple of weeks of good sunlight when they're on vacation.
And in Muslim and Catholic countries, women have traditionally gone out in public, very covered up.
And if you're dark-skinned, it takes a very large amount of sunlight to produce as much
vitamin D as you need. So working indoors, wearing too many clothes, and having dark skin,
all make you more susceptible to a vitamin D deficiency. And the use of sunscreen makes it
even worse because people go on vacation and block their vitamin D formation even when they're in the
sun. Dr. Justin Marchegiani
Does the inclusion of mushrooms change any of your general diet recommendations? And part two of that
question, can you replace the carrot if you just eat mushrooms every day?
Dr. McKeon Yeah, I've done that. I got tired of carrots
after eating one a day for 20 years. Bamboo shoots are another alternative. We made more
interesting recipes than raw carrots. Dr. Justin Marchegiani
Would it be risky to replace eggs with mushrooms? Dr. McKeon
Oh, well, mushrooms have really a good broad spectrum nutritional value.
But you just have to eat an awful lot of them. Dr. Justin Marchegiani
How much have you been averaging, Ray? Dr. McKeon
Oh, sometimes ridiculous amounts like once every week or two, we'll have a big bowl of mushroom
soup, which is almost like porridge. But I think we must eat eight ounces at least each in the soup
days. Other days, much less when it's just like tonight, we're having a liver with mushrooms,
probably four ounces of each. Dr. Justin Marchegiani
Yeah, I keep being kind of shocked on how cool mushrooms are. So I appreciate your work on that
in turning me on to them. I have pretty much one last question for you. If you could take any
substance on a desert island, what would it be? And including your just normal diet, whatever it was.
Dr. McKeon As a supplement?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah, like just like a substance
you think is really helpful, I guess. Dr. McKeon
I think it would probably be either pregnenolone or progesterone. If you, for example, fall off a
cliff or get sunburned or get bitten by a strange animal, no matter what happens to you, you want to
have a lot of progesterone or pregnenolone. It's kind of a universal antidote. Like if you're in a
car wreck and can move, you should squeeze a bunch of progesterone in your mouth.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
Cool, Ray. Is there anything else you wanted to touch on that I glossed over too fast or we
didn't get to? Dr. Ray
No. Dr. Justin Marchegiani
And what are you working on right now? Dr. Ray
Oh, I've just finished my November newsletter on autoimmunity. And I'm thinking of the next one
being on glucose as an anti-aging nutrient. Dr. Justin Marchegiani
That'll get some attention. And then can you let people know how they can purchase your newsletter?
Dr. Ray Yeah, the email is
raypeatsnewsletter@gmail.com. No apostrophe in Ray Peat.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
And that's 12 issues every two months. I'm sorry, one issue every two months. And that's for
over two years. Awesome. Ray, thank you so much for talking with me. It's been a complete pleasure
as always. Thank you so much. And thank you. Dr. Ray
Okay, thank you. Dr. Justin Marchegiani
I'll talk to you soon, Ray. Take care. Dr. Ray
Okay, bye. Dr. Justin Marchegiani
That's going to conclude this week's episode. I'd like to thank Ray again for talking with me today,
along with my patrons for their support of the show and making all of the content I produce
possible. That was a real special episode for me. I always enjoy talking to Ray and I hope you
enjoyed it too. There were so many questions for this episode and I kind of dropped the ball and I
didn't ask them all. So I didn't want to keep Ray past an hour, which I, that's what I said I was
going to do. So I apologize if you had your question in line and didn't get to it. I myself
didn't ask a lot of questions. I was personally interested. So thank you so much for listening.
I have an amazing listenership with this show and the podcast and all of the content and I
sincerely appreciate it. If you're listening to this on YouTube, hit the like button and that
really supports the show. And again, thank you so much for listening and I sincerely appreciate it.
And I'll talk to you guys soon.
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