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[Music]
You're listening to Holistic Living, brought to you by EastWest Healing and Performance.
And now, here are your hosts, Josh and Ginny Rubin.
[Music]
What up everyone? This is Josh Rubin and Ginny Rubin of Holistic Living.
We're here today to share our radio show with Dr. Raymond Peat,
and we'll get to him in a little bit once Ginny calls in and clicks him in.
Today's show is on serotonin and endotoxin distress, and of course, like I've always said,
Ray Peat is going to school us on these topics.
But of course, before we get started, we just want to give you a little bit of update what we've been up to.
Of course, we do our radio show every month.
I can't really tell you when our next radio show is, because every month we kind of set up a date that works for Ray.
But definitely stay tuned to our Facebook page, Josh Rubin or Ginny Rubin.
You can stay tuned to our YouTube or email us directly at info@eastwesthealing.com to find out when the next radio show is.
It'll be sometime next month, so topic and date and time yet to be determined.
Other than that, business is growing. Everything is going well, of course.
We have clients all over the world that we work with.
So if you've got questions or concerns, call us at your free consultation, 760-597-9727.
We consult with people via phone or Skype.
And stay tuned to our website. We've actually invested a lot of money in our website.
We're redoing our entire website.
We're working with a great company in San Diego called Chimera Studios, Carl and his wife.
And their work is fabulous.
And our website is probably going to be launched, I'd say, easily within the next month, easily.
So it's got a lot of new, just flair to it look content.
It's going to have a little store.
Other than that, things are going well.
And also just stay tuned to our Facebook, YouTube page, and our Blog Talk radio show,
because in the next month or so, we're going to be talking about something pretty awesome.
And I don't want to say anything yet, what it is, what it's going to be about,
but we're pretty excited for it.
And it's going to allow us to really share what we've learned, developed, and studied
over the past 5, 10, 15 years doing this work and sharing it with people.
So definitely stay tuned to what we're going to be launching.
As I always say, I know a lot of people from following Facebook and from working with new clients
and getting emails from people every day that a lot of people are contacting Ray.
And Ray is a very humble guy, very quiet guy based on my perception.
He doesn't really ask a lot.
And just keep in mind that he's been doing this a long time.
He likes to answer questions via email, not phone.
And he really, from my experience, never says no, nor does he ever ask for money.
So like I said, please, if you could, look up his address on his website, RayP.com, R-A-Y-P-E-A-T.
Please, if you're emailing him all the time and he's answering your questions and he's helping you,
please send him something, a check, whether it's $1, $5, $10, $100,
whatever you can to compensate him for his time.
That's all we really ask because I know a lot of people are emailing him.
And if it wasn't for his research, you wouldn't have this information.
So you're just helping to facilitate his research.
So that's it. Let's get Jeannie and Ray on the line because I'm sure you're sick of hearing me talk.
Hold on one second.
Actually, no, before I get him on, I just want to introduce him because it's much easier without him on here.
Of course, I've introduced him many, many times, who he is, what he does.
If you want to learn more about him, all you can say is go to his website, RayP.com, R-A-Y-P-E-A-T.com.
He's got tons of articles on his website. He's got books and newsletter.
And all I can say is his articles are very in-depth and they're free.
And what else could you ask for? And you can learn a ton from them.
Also, check out his books.
And you can check out some of the other people that he's referenced in the past,
like Broda Barnes, and I don't know if I'm pronouncing her name right, Mary Shimon.
There's many other people. So look those people up as well because they kind of align with Ray Peat's philosophy,
like Dr. Shanklin and Dr. Brewer, Tom Brewer, and people like that.
So if you want to learn more about Ray and where he comes from, definitely check out his website.
He's a teacher, educator, researcher.
And today he's going to school us on serotonin and endotoxin. So let me get him on.
Hello.
Jeannie, you guys there?
Yes, we're here.
Hello.
All righty. How are you doing, Ray?
Very good.
Good. How are you doing, Jeannie?
I'm doing a great job, thanks.
Great.
So before we start, Ray, did you want to say anything, announce anything, anything to your intro
before we start talking about serotonin and endotoxin?
Not really. I've just been finishing another newsletter that includes stuff on serotonin.
Great.
And it's on osteoporosis, and serotonin turns out to be a major factor in causing that
and other aging degenerative changes.
Maybe we can talk a little bit about that today without giving all the information away.
Now, are you still taking sign-ups for your newsletter?
Oh, sure. Yep.
Okay. So people can go to your website at rayp.com and sign up for that newsletter.
Guys, it's super inexpensive, and it's a wealth of information.
So I highly recommend signing up for it as well as grabbing his books if you can get your hands on them.
So today I've gotten a lot of requests to talk about serotonin.
A lot of people don't know what endotoxin is.
You talk about it a lot, and you correlate it with serotonin in the gut and all these things.
So I thought it would be great to group it in there.
But a lot of people don't understand serotonin, what it is, you know, is it a hormone, is it a --
look, what is it, where does it come from, is it internal, external?
So I thought it would be great to do a show so you can kind of educate us on all these different factors,
as well as supplementation.
I think that's the most common question people have in regards to serotonin.
So I guess our first question is -- you know, we have a lot of questions,
and I have a lot of questions from listeners as well.
You know, you have specific focuses on your research.
Why so much focus on serotonin?
You can't understand the other things that I'm working on unless you know where serotonin fits in.
For example, estrogen and progesterone, estrogen does a lot of its work by way of serotonin.
And to understand unsaturated fatty acids versus saturated, you have to understand estrogen and serotonin.
And to understand thyroid, you have to understand all of those.
And so it's one of the emergency defense systems so that anything involving stress or compensating for stress,
you can't begin to understand it without seeing where serotonin fits in.
Hans Selye was one of the early researchers on the biological effects of serotonin.
That was one of the first places I started running across it.
Aldous Huxley was another person that got me interested in its variety of effects.
So when we talk about serotonin, you know, most of the Western research, allopathic research,
and, you know, most of what people, when they refer to serotonin, they talk about a brain chemical.
Where do you find, sorry, most of the serotonin in the body?
You know, where is it produced and what is its main function?
It's 95% of it roughly is produced in the intestine and the biggest concentration in the digestive system is in or around the appendix.
And part of how I got interested in the whole pattern of thyroid, estrogen, serotonin, and so on,
was that when I was about nine years old, I started becoming nearsighted and I occasionally had migraine headaches.
And I noticed that things that I ate would tend to bring on the headaches.
And there were a couple of girls in my school class who were also nearsighted
and I learned that one of them had migraine headaches.
And so I started looking at nearsighted people and over the next few years I saw that nearsightedness was much more common among girls,
especially starting around puberty.
And several of the nearsighted girls that I knew had migraines.
And so I started thinking about what I had in common with girls in puberty.
It was the thyroid question.
Estrogen and serotonin happen to be antithyroid factors.
And so if you're on the borderline for thyroid function, then you're very susceptible to excesses and imbalances in estrogen and serotonin.
The research was just barely starting.
I got interested in the symptoms before the substance was identified.
The ergot, a fungal disease of grains, was used for probably thousands of years to induce abortions.
And in the 19th century, attempts were made to use it to accelerate labor.
But it was fairly dangerous and would sometimes kill both of them up.
It causes spasms not only in the uterus but in blood vessels.
And when people were poisoned by this ergot fungus, they would develop gangrene and insanity, nausea, vomiting,
just about every unpleasant symptom you could think of.
In the early 1900s, people were starting to study the chemistry of the ergot fungus.
And histamine was the first thing they identified that caused muscular spasms
and would accelerate either miscarriage or abortion or normal delivery.
And for about 20 years, histamine was of considerable interest and led to the development of antihistamines.
But in the 1920s and '30s, continuing study of ergot turned up another, well, several,
a dozen different categories of amines that several of them would cause muscle spasms the same way histamine does.
And studying ergot was what Hoffman at Sandoz was working on when he accidentally discovered
the nervous properties of LSD.
And that led to a whole further development of chemicals for treating problems with the uterus
and circulatory problems and hormonal problems.
But at first, the connection with bodily functions wasn't understood.
An Italian in the '30s had identified an amine in the intestine that caused intestinal contractions.
And about 10 years later, some English studying huge amounts of beef blood found another amine, they thought,
that caused blood vessel contraction.
And then the Italian showed that that was the same thing he had found much more abundantly in the intestine,
thousands of times more concentrated.
And the English group wanted to learn how to assay it because they were thinking about it as the cause of hypertension,
strokes, blood clotting, and so on.
So they gave it to someone to try to identify a sensitive assay to measure the amount in a person
rather than having to extract it from tons of cow blood.
And the person that they gave it to try to develop an assay happened to have experienced Sandoz's LSD
and knew about its mental effects.
And he was working on the assay, finding that the serotonin extracted from the blood would cause uterine contractions,
blood vessel contractions, all smooth muscles.
And since he knew the chemistry, it was an amine parallel to some of the things in ergot,
he wondered if the effect of LSD was by having the same antagonistic effects that he saw the LSD had on the serotonin.
LSD would block the serotonin-induced contraction of the uterus or of the blood vessel or of the intestine.
Serotonin would block the kidney function so no urine was produced.
LSD would restore kidney function.
So since he saw straight across antagonism between LSD and serotonin,
he proposed that the brain contains a small amount of serotonin
and that LSD is having its effects by antagonizing this small amount of serotonin in the brain.
So we should all take a little dose of LSD every day to be anti-inflammatory and down-regulate serotonin.
Yeah, there's a new interest in LSD as a protective chemical.
They're finding that it prevents nerve damage caused by some of the serotonergic excitotoxic chemicals.
And they're even proposing it as an anti-psychotic treatment given in the right doses.
Interesting.
Well, maybe by the time I get to a nursing home, they'll have that figured out.
Go ahead.
The disease called carcinoid was just being understood at the same time in the 1950s.
And this turned out to be the result of a tumor in the intestine,
especially in the appendix, producing huge amounts of serotonin.
And normally the lungs destroy the serotonin as it's picked up in the bloodstream.
And en route to the lungs, that means that the blood rich in serotonin
passes through the right side of the heart before it's detoxified.
And these people were found to have disease of the right side of the heart,
the valves in the right side of the heart, and they would develop pulmonary artery hypertension.
And several of the problems associated with the carcinoid disease
included psychosis and a belligerent, aggressive attitude and diarrhea, nausea,
and lots of other symptoms of clotting, fibrosis, overdevelopment of collagen systems.
And that was well established as the effect of overproduction of serotonin.
So everyone at that time was thinking about the great possibilities of antagonists to serotonin.
And by 1960, people were already proposing LSD to cure or prevent migraine headaches
and a variety of other things associated with excess serotonin.
But then strange things happened all through medical research.
The government came out banning research on LSD.
And someone developed the idea that since LSD was an antagonist of serotonin,
and the reason for banning LSD was supposedly it made people insane.
Therefore, the great publicity was that if LSD, by antagonizing serotonin, makes you insane,
then serotonin must make you sane.
That really just spread like a plague through the national culture.
And that seems to be about the extent of the reasoning behind all of the stuff that you now find
everywhere in the Internet, television, newspapers, and so on, that serotonin is the happy drug.
Right.
Now, why is it found mostly in the appendix? Isn't there a lot of it in the small intestine as well?
Yeah, there's a gradient, though, increasing as you go down the small intestine.
And normally the upper part, starting at your stomach, almost everyone has a sterile upper small intestine.
And as you go down, the likelihood of having bacteria increases.
And as a person's thyroid function decreases, their intestinal secretions are reduced,
peristalsis is reduced, bacteria tend to creep farther and farther.
A really healthy person has an almost sterile, whole, small intestine.
And the sicker you are, the lower your thyroid function, the more bacteria live in your small intestine.
And that means that foods that are slower to digest are going to feed bacteria
and encourage them to live more abundantly higher up in your intestine.
But ordinarily, the gradient of bacteria is very concentrated towards the appendix,
lower end of the small intestine.
And it happens that the gradient of bacterial infection increases parallel to the gradient of serotonin.
And it's probably that the toxins from the bacteria interacting with the physiology of the person
are stimulating the production of serotonin, because the function of serotonin is to cause contraction of the intestinal muscles,
get rid of what is in there, cause diarrhea, and get rid of the irritant.
And so if you keep feeding the bacteria and coaxing them to live farther up your intestine,
you can produce serotonin more abundantly and farther up your intestine.
So it's when you're telling them to go farther.
The things that encourage bacterial growth are the ones that are slowest to be broken down by your own enzymes.
And since we don't have enzymes for fibers such as pectin or for the lignins and various complex fibers,
the bacteria live on those.
And the things that we can digest very quickly, sugars and proteins and fats, are pretty quickly absorbed.
These get absorbed high up in the small intestine, and the bacteria don't get a chance at it
because we're absorbing it faster than they can grow.
So for the listeners, can you just identify some of those foods that you're talking about,
the pectins and lignins that are not digestible or harder to digest?
Oh, lots of vegetables. The less cooked a vegetable is, the better food it is for bacteria.
And even the firm fruits, the ones that have a lot of fibrous material, such as pectin.
Crisp apples, crisp pears are very good bacterial food, very poor human food.
Pineapple too?
Yeah. The cellulose itself, the more pure the cellulose is, the less bacteria are able to break it down.
So some cellulose is safe, and then there are the cellulose fibers that are combined with antiseptic chemicals,
like the root vegetables.
Carrots, they have defenses that kill mold and things that would rot the carrot plant.
And so raw carrots have their germicidal defense that help to kill off the bacterial population where it shouldn't be.
So you talked about how where it's produced and what it does helps the prostatitis, the protective mechanism,
but could something as simple as just having a blood sugar handling issue,
maybe having the wrong ratios of foods, of course eating the wrong types of foods we just talked about,
actually do that stress reaction stimulate serotonin, or does it go the other way around?
When you're having an acute blood sugar decrease, you put out a lot of adrenaline and sympathetic nerve activity
that cuts the circulation for the fight or flight reaction. You stop your digestive processes,
don't deliver very much blood to the intestine so that your intestine is anemic during these emotional stress periods from adrenaline.
And that can give the bacteria a head start because you stop digesting and the food sits there letting the bacteria have a chance at it.
And then any kind of irritation will trigger the serotonin release, just a fairly mild irritation.
And then from there, I know based off a lot of your work, you're saying that serotonin itself will stimulate cortisol
and just keep perpetuating that issue as it synthesizes with estrogen and as you keep bringing down muscle tissue
where you store L-tryptophan so the process can continually be exacerbated.
Yeah, and even though the gradient normally is for the most serotonin to be down where the most bacteria live,
when you're under severe stress, experimentally they just strap a rat down so it can't move for a few hours
and that causes serotonin production in the stomach that causes bleeding very quickly.
Now, what are the hormones that serotonin kind of synthesizes with?
Obviously, it's not just by itself release. You talked about histamine. What is its correlation with estrogen?
Estrogen activates the enzyme that turns tryptophan to serotonin, the rate limiting tryptophan hydroxylase
is activated by estrogen and inhibited by progesterone.
And that's the route into the serotonin and the route out of serotonin is, for example,
the monoamino oxidase type A happens to be inhibited by estrogen so it doesn't break down serotonin
and it's activated by progesterone so it breaks down serotonin.
So, the in route is increased by estrogen and the out route is decreased by estrogen
and progesterone has the opposite effect protecting you against serotonin.
And so, we've known in our lab we saw that estrogen treatment would cause the animals to first,
it would enlarge their adrenal cortex, activate it, cause intense stress, adaptive reactions
and then the adrenal cortex would start bleeding and then dying and then it would kill their adrenal cortex.
And the mechanism there has been worked out that the stress increases serotonin,
serotonin increases the release factor that increases the pituitary hormone which drives the adrenal cortex.
So, the stress acting either through estrogen or serotonin ends up overworking your adrenal cortex.
Well, this is quite dangerous because, you know, I mean, a lot of people we work with,
a lot of women too that are coming in, they're on SSRIs, they're on synthetic estrogens,
not eating the right foods or right ratios or they're starving themselves
so they're having these huge metabolic shifts in regards to regulating their blood sugar.
So, it's almost like what they're taking and what they're doing is pushing them towards
exactly where they don't want to go, where they think what they're taking is actually helping.
That's where the polyunsaturated fatty acids come in too.
They are specifically effective at releasing tryptophan to enter the brain
or other cells to produce more serotonin.
And the serotonin activates the enzymes that convert polyunsaturated fatty acids
into the prostaglandins as sort of executors of the inflammatory process, amplifiers of it.
And estrogen activates specifically, interacts with the polyunsaturated
so that the estrogen becomes more excitotoxic under the influence of unsaturated fats.
And the unsaturated fats, again, are directed down the pathways towards inflammation
under the influence of estrogen.
So, the unsaturated fats increase brain uptake of L-tryptophan, is that what you're saying?
Yeah.
Now, is that why a lot of Western research shows that serotonin is a brain chemical?
Because if you read a lot of literature, at least what I've read,
most people don't say that serotonin is found in the gut.
Or if they do, it's a small amount, they say the opposite.
Well, yeah, that orientation comes from the drug industry exclusively.
If they had been paying attention for the last 100 years, they would have known otherwise.
But it's just that the pharmaceutical industry subsidizes and directs research where they want it to go.
And they don't want people noticing the diseases that would be cured or prevented
if people would have a different understanding of what tryptophan, serotonin,
estrogen, and polyunsaturated fats are doing.
All of those happen to have their industrial investments
that really very powerfully direct medical school research, newspaper publicity.
Everything is herded away from understanding that just about every acute
or degenerative disease would be alleviated by controlling serotonin.
So I'm sure there's a lot of women listening or people, men, that are taking SSRIs.
They think they're helping themselves.
And the Western thought you need it because you have a low serotonin, in a sense,
low levels of serotonin.
And what you're seeing is there's actually excess in making it worse.
What are doctors basing their --
It's really sort of fun to read the medical publications.
It's similar in the case of estrogen.
But in serotonin, for example, instead of measuring the amount of serotonin in the serum
and/or the amount of breakdown product hydroxyindoleacetic acid in the urine
and seeing correlations between that and symptoms, for example,
men with more than 100 nanograms per milliliter of serotonin in their blood serum
are tending to be imperfectly fertile or infertile or impotent the higher it goes.
And the normal range is said to be various numbers,
but roughly 50 to 250 nanograms per milliliter.
But men are sterile at the upper end of that.
And when you look at the amount produced by a cell being injured by radiation,
it's below 25 nanograms per milliliter until it has been injured by radiation.
So I would infer from those in vitro studies that everyone who has more than 25 nanograms per milliliter
in their serum is experiencing some sort of inflammatory degenerative process.
The articles, instead of looking at those correlations,
will say they're measuring, for example, the total serotonin in the whole blood,
and they say there's no difference between this group or that group.
But it's absolutely decisive whether the serotonin is being bound in the platelets in the blood
where it's being carried to the lungs to be destroyed,
or whether it has leaked out of the platelets into the serum
where it can act on the wall of the blood vessel and the heart and the lung,
causing hypertension and fibrosis of the lungs and heart valves and so on.
And they will look at the amount of the breakdown product, 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid, in the urine.
And if it goes up, they'll say, it depends on whether they see it corresponding to a good effect or a bad effect,
but they'll either say that it means that there's less serotonin in the brain when they see more in the urine,
because if it's broken down, it can't be acting.
In other words, they can choose what they want to interpret as happening in the brain
by looking at something very remote, the breakdown product in the urine.
So if your lungs are working effectively to destroy it, you'll see the breakdown product.
If the lungs aren't working effectively, you won't see the breakdown product.
So it'll look like you might not be experiencing serotonin stimulation
when that's exactly why you're experiencing it, because you aren't forming the breakdown product.
Now, can you elaborate for the listeners on the correlation between melatonin and serotonin?
Because I know you talk a lot about melatonin and melatonin supplementation.
Yeah.
An Italian researcher has been seeing melatonin very closely associated with rheumatoid arthritis.
High melatonin goes with high rheumatoid symptoms,
and the inflammation of the rheumatoid arthritis is worse at night when the melatonin is high and so on.
But melatonin is actually being produced in the inflamed arthritic joint
or in the inflamed cancerous breast, for example.
And I interpret that not to mean that melatonin is causing the inflammation or the cancer,
but that, like in the brain, serotonin is turned to melatonin.
I think it's a detoxifying process.
When stressed, if you can destroy the melatonin by this alternate route
rather than by the mono-amino oxidase route,
if you can turn it to melatonin,
then you've disposed of a good part of your inflammation problem.
Did I lose you?
Hello?
I thought I lost you for a second.
My phone cut out and I grabbed Jeannie's phone.
I just wanted to make sure you were still there.
I'm just saying that I interpret the association of melatonin with these inflammatory problems
as being a detoxifying process.
Now, which one is a precursor to which?
Melatonin is a precursor to serotonin?
Yes.
When you get rid of serotonin, you turn it into melatonin.
A lot of these people that are supplementing with melatonin,
they think they're helping themselves, especially at night.
They're actually putting themselves into an immune-suppressive state
as well as stimulating cortisol because serotonin stimulates cortisol.
So the very thing they're doing to help with sleep is actually going to make it worse.
The difference of toxicity between serotonin and melatonin is so great.
It's just sort of an indirect problem.
If you take 10 milligrams of melatonin, then that's going to be a problem,
but a milligram or so is probably harmless.
But the 5-hydroxytryptophan turns massively into serotonin.
That's where people are going to get the problem.
So the 5-HTP that people are taking for maybe depression or to help with sleep,
you're talking about?
Yes, that's really much more dangerous than melatonin.
Okay.
Because of its immune suppression and the stimulation of cortisol.
Yes, and turns to serotonin.
Right.
And so I've recently talked to people who had eye problems, cataracts or glaucoma,
who had been prescribed to take fish oil and 5-HTP.
And you can create cataracts almost instantly with a dose of serotonin,
and the serotonin is high in sick eyes with cataracts or glaucoma,
and the fish oils break down, increasing the formation of serotonin in the eye,
just as it happens in the blood and other tissues.
Now, while we're talking about 5-HTP,
I know there's people that are listening now, will listen later,
that have or are taking it for an emotional issue and feel like it helped,
food, depression, things like that.
Or, you know, what's the mechanism behind that?
Is it helping at the expense of really damaging the metabolism?
If it happens to drive up their cortisol,
cortisol makes everyone feel good temporarily by stopping inflammation.
So that's one of the possible good feelings.
Some of the effects of the SSRIs are really surprising.
Some of them do pretty directly increase your exposure to serotonin.
You can find it in the body fluids after taking the drug.
But they have treated aggressive dogs with one of the SSRIs
and find that they work to decrease their aggressive viciousness.
And at the time that they become friendly dogs,
they measure the amount of serotonin in their blood
and find that it has decreased greatly.
And that was one of the symptoms of the carcinoid people in their last stages.
They were often unmanageably aggressive.
And that whole thing about the anti-aggression, anti-anxiety,
all of those happy associations are just --
they look at something they want to look at
rather than what's really present and acting in the system.
Can you talk about serotonin's correlation with the thyroid and CO2 levels
and what does it do to lowering CO2 levels to lower thyroid production?
What does it do to the what levels?
CO2.
Oh, oh.
Serotonin activates prolactin, for example, along with cortisol.
When you're low in thyroid, your serotonin goes up.
And the TSH is partly increased by the rising serotonin.
And low thyroid people very often have increased prolactin
as well as thyroid-stimulating hormone.
Those both are increased by the rising serotonin from the --
low thyroid people have high estrogen and low progesterone,
and those are involved in causing the serotonin to rise.
Rising serotonin increases the prolactin and TSH.
And if your thyroid can't respond vigorously to correct the whole situation,
bring up your progesterone, lower the estrogen,
turn off the production of serotonin, and get your TSH and prolactin down,
then you get stuck in this high TSH, high prolactin, high serotonin situation.
And all of those things, the pituitary hormones included,
create inflammation, promote clotting, the formation of lactic acid,
suppression of the mitochondrial respiration, which produces carbon dioxide.
So your whole energy system is pushed down when you get in that pattern.
The absence of carbon dioxide is a place where you can start.
If you survived a polyunsaturated fat diet and so on,
and were in good health, didn't have high serotonin or inflammatory problems,
didn't have leaky blood vessels and water retention and so on,
if you just wanted to experiment and you handed hyperventilating for a minute,
you would find that the loss of CO2 in your blood raised the pH in the blood platelets,
which are moving the serotonin to your lungs to be destroyed.
Instead of carrying it to your lungs, the loss of carbon dioxide causes the platelets to spill their serotonin,
causing blood capillaries and arterioles to dilate and become leaky.
And within a minute, you can create a hyperserotonemia edematous condition.
And once you get that, then it tends to become self-perpetuating if it has become too intense.
So just going back to what you said at the beginning,
it's the damaged metabolism and maybe the bacterial overgrowth and the overburden on the liver
and the estrogen dominant thing that doesn't allow the liver to detox the serotonin,
which increases serotonin levels and pushes people into this state?
Yes, and those changes make you hyperventilate, make you tend to lose even more carbon dioxide,
and everything tends to reproduce itself, making the condition worse,
unless you intervene with thyroid or progesterone or carbon dioxide.
The carbon dioxide, besides holding the serotonin in place in the platelets,
helps to detoxify and anti-inflame all the other parts of the system.
It prevents the overproduction of adrenaline, for example.
It tends to calm the whole system.
You can sedate a person if you give them a fairly high amount of carbon dioxide.
So it's acting on everything from your nervous system down to your bones in a stabilizing effect.
And at the other extreme, there's the lactic acid and serotonin
that are destabilizing everything at all levels.
So could you say a lot of people who are being diagnosed with asthma,
they're actually just hyperventilating?
Yes. Estrogen, women taking estrogen will tend to hyperventilate,
have a slightly alkalotic condition, and that increases the release of serotonin and histamine,
and those cause contraction of the muscles in your breathing system,
and will bring on everything from a slight flemminess to tightness of the tubes
all the way up to terminal fibrosis of your respiratory system.
Great, great stuff.
Can you elaborate a little bit?
You talk a lot about environment and all these different things in the internal system,
and you talk about this a lot in some of your articles and in actually some of your books.
Can you talk about light and what does light have to do or even darkness have to do with serotonin?
The popularity of the morning light treatment, everything that makes someone feel good,
it turns out they'll say, "Oh, that's because it's increasing your estrogen and your serotonin
and your prostaglandins," and everything they have to sell, they'll say,
"If you feel good after doing something, it's because you need more of our product."
And it's the same with the light boxes.
Getting enough light makes people feel good, so they say, "Oh, that's because it's increasing your serotonin."
But in fact, the peak serotonin in the blood is at midnight in the winter,
and the enzymes that produce it and detoxify it are under the influence of light, too.
So there are direct effects of light on the enzyme systems that regulate it.
And when you look at the end product, being depressed and inflamed,
the worst time is around midnight and the worst season is in the winter.
People get sick, tend to have strokes, depression.
All kinds of diseases are exacerbated under the influence of darkness and high serotonin.
[ Indistinct ]
Is that better? I'm having some technical difficulties today for some reason with the host here.
Is that better?
Yeah, you were skipping for a second there.
Yeah, it's acting really odd today. I apologize to everyone.
I'm not sure, but I just have to keep rolling with it.
So we can say basically that in a sense, light is more stimulatory to progesterone,
and darkness is more stimulatory towards estrogen, serotonin, melatonin, things like that.
Yeah, that's been known for a long time.
It's the increased day length in the spring that makes animals turtle from rising progesterone.
For example, they've mated an animal that has delayed implantation.
They would mate the animals in the winter and then watch when the female that had been mated
over a span of six weeks or so, they would watch when she actually became pregnant.
It was about March 21st when the days became as long as the nights.
Suddenly the hormones, progesterone, would rise to the point where she would implant and become pregnant.
So if you kind of correlate this with, you know, I'm from Boston originally,
and a lot of people in the winter get seasonal affective disorder, quote, unquote,
because the days are shorter.
So you can kind of correlate that with people becoming almost serotonin dominant.
And if people maybe got outside a little more, eliminated glucose from their diet,
and maybe used light therapy later on in the day,
you could down regulate the inflammatory effects of serotonin.
Yeah, there are direct effects that you can demonstrate in a cell that, for example,
sunlight, the ultraviolet part, will excite electrons and create free radicals.
It takes usually several hours for those to fade out, but if you expose it to red light,
in other words let the penetrating rays get to the tissue,
the free radicals are quenched almost instantly.
With animals, they can give them a lethal dose of gamma rays.
And if they, within the first hour, expose them to red light,
that quenches the excited electrons and stops the death process.
When you get sunburned, your skin is being killed by the ultraviolet,
but the red light is all that penetrates deeply.
The red light from bright sunlight will go all the way through your trunk.
We're semi-transparent to the red light because the only thing that absorbs it significantly
is the respiratory enzyme, the copper.
It's a blue enzyme that absorbs red light,
which is our respiratory enzyme that depends on thyroid function.
That happens to be what is damaged by serotonin, estrogen, and free radicals.
Now I've got a question from one of the listeners.
We can talk a little bit more serotonin, then we'll go to endotoxin,
because you could probably sit here and talk about serotonin for the next couple hours
and never get to endotoxin, but I want to because we don't have all day.
One of the listeners has a question in regards to serotonin in exercise
and says that a lot of the popular articles say that aerobic exercise is good because it raises serotonin,
and of course we know you're not a fan of aerobic exercise.
So is serotonin affected by exercise, and what is the best kind to make sure that excess serotonin isn't produced?
Yeah, there have been some experiments showing that resistance exercise of a very moderate sort,
muscle building, the kind that is best for building muscle, is best for lowering inflammation and serotonin.
So more aerobic?
Yes, staying below the lactate threshold.
Okay, yeah.
So just doing an anaerobic workout, I mean, do you recommend anything nutritionally during a workout,
pre or post, other than that to downregulate serotonin or focusing on specific foods?
Yeah, the sugars, keeping your cell energy up, producing carbon dioxide is the best way to minimize the serotonin.
R-juice?
Yeah.
Okay.
Cool.
That's good stuff on serotonin.
Let's move on to endotoxin because, you know, there's a lot of questions.
I get questions from listeners.
I have questions, but the past hour definitely has flown by,
and I want to talk about endotoxin a little because you never really hear it out there.
The first time I was exposed to it was through you.
So what is endotoxin?
Can you explain it to the listeners?
Yeah, its technical name is lipopolysaccharide.
It's some fatty acids of a specific kind attached to a short starch-like molecule, the polysaccharide,
and it's made by a whole variety of bacteria, the gram-negative type, produce it,
and it's part of their structure so that as they live, they're building more structure
and leaking some of this fat starch molecule.
And it's so representative of this whole category of bacteria that animals have evolved, apparently,
to recognize the presence of lipopolysaccharide as the presence of bacteria,
and it activates the innate immune system to do things that defend against the bacteria,
to get ready to eat bacteria.
And it's a toxic effect that seems to be a physical effect on the cell
rather than a chemical effect or even an immunological effect.
It seems to have a soaping-type action on cells that destabilizes them,
lets them know that they've been irritated,
and that amount of physical irritation is enough to activate things like the production of serotonin,
the release of histamine, the activation of proteolytic enzyme systems,
and creating a shower of things that are part of our very basic defense against bacteria.
So it's just sort of a basic threat that happens to be produced by most of our familiar bacteria,
intestinal bacteria of several different genuses produce it.
We've adapted to living with it so that it's sort of a stimulus when it's in the right amount.
It tones up the system and gets things running,
and we normally can destroy all of it that gets into the bloodstream by the time it gets to the liver.
But if your liver is overworked or under-energized,
then the endotoxin gets through in your bloodstream
where it starts having this irritating, destabilizing effect all through your system.
And its direct effect on the cell destabilizes it enough
that it lowers mitochondrial energy production,
forces the cell to shift over to lactic acid production.
So it's acting directly in harmful ways that start the leaky process,
letting stuff leak out of your bloodstream into the surrounding tissues.
So you can demonstrate that it makes problems like multiple sclerosis worse
by letting more stuff leak through the barrier into the brain.
But starting right at the intestine, if the intestine is in very great condition,
it can stop the endotoxin before it gets to your liver.
And your liver is the next layer of defense.
But at each of these, every place the endotoxin reaches,
it activates the serotonin and other innate inflammatory reactions.
And those include nitric oxide, which goes with like a shower of mutual excitation.
Endotoxin, serotonin, nitric oxide, and the prostaglandins,
these are things that normally are under control and don't do much harm.
But once they reach a certain level of interaction and promotion of each other,
then they all add up to suppression of our oxidative metabolic system.
So something as simple as a stress reaction from anything,
excess cortisol production, could cause an increased production of endotoxin.
Something that simple.
Increased absorption of it, yeah.
From there is an onslaught of dysfunction.
A lot of starchy food, undercooked cereals,
and poorly cooked vegetable material will feed the bacteria,
increase their production of it.
And then that excess production of endotoxin increases serotonin release from the intestine.
And then just basically that cascade of everything we just talked about for the past hour,
any of those possibilities could happen.
So they kind of go hand in hand in a sense.
Well, I mean everything kind of goes hand in hand,
but there's a high correlation between endotoxin and serotonin.
Yeah, very close.
I think that's probably the closest way to account for the gradient of increasing serotonin
as you move from the stomach to the appendix.
I think that's because of the increasing production of endotoxin.
Right.
So besides what other foods in the body can actually cause an increase in endotoxin?
You know, besides maybe eating the wrong foods you've talked about,
you know, eating maybe undercooked cereals and things like that,
of course unsaturated foods with unsaturated fatty acids.
The things that are high in phosphate have some of the overlapping effects with the inflammatory things.
Calcium, if you have a high ratio of calcium to phosphate,
calcium happens to suppress the fermentation of fiber and starch in the intestine.
So high calcium intake will actually reduce the production of the endotoxin
as well as reducing the consequences of your reaction to the endotoxin.
The saturated fats, having some fat in your food does various things
that can be helpful.
There's a germicidal effect of the fatty acids that helps to keep the intestine sterile
and you should be able to absorb your fat by roughly half to two-thirds of the way down your small intestine
where it's still sterile.
But if you eat fat with a fiber, the fat helps to suppress the bacteria
and it can help the fiber persist and go all the way through your intestine.
So it can turn what would be a harmful fiber-supporting endotoxin
into a useful sort of a bowel-stimulating bulk former.
Right.
So even, you know, like of course these cereals, uncooked foods, unsaturated fats,
even a lot of these things that people are eating like the carrageenan, gums, beans,
all those things can actually cause the overproduction of endotoxin as well.
So going back to the foods that actually protect against it, that's where, you know,
the informatic shells and dairy come into play as being a protective mechanism.
Yes.
I don't know that these things could protect you even against carrageenan.
Well, I mean against endotoxin.
I don't mean against carrageenan, but I mean against endotoxin, you know, at least.
If you'll start to eliminate those things from your diet.
Yes, against real foods, but I think they're really trying to poison us
by putting carrageenan in our whipped cream and lunch meats.
They'll succeed.
They are succeeding.
Right.
What?
I said they are succeeding.
Oh, yeah.
So you talked about calcium, how it's protected.
For the listeners, what types of foods do people get for calcium?
Because I think we've talked about before, you know, people taking calcium supplements,
but what's the best source of calcium for people?
Powdered eggshells really are by far the next best to milk and cheese.
In the case of milk, you have both the fat and the lactose helping to absorb the calcium.
In the case of the powdered eggshell, at least it's in the form of calcium carbonate,
which is the form that it's going to be most beneficial.
Calcium carbonate is how calcium is integrated into the bone.
I think the reason they see some counterproductive effects from calcium supplementation
is that they're using such strange things as pills for nutritional supplements,
calcium phosphate, orotate, gluconate, aspartate, and so on.
You don't want to use any of those.
The calcium carbonate from eggshell is very pure and the right chemical.
Now, while we're talking about food and we can kind of group serotonin in this,
you've talked about carrots and bamboo shoots before as well,
which help the body kind of reabsorb and detoxify against estrogen, serotonin, and endotoxin.
Correct?
Yes.
Now, for the listeners, can you explain why you recommend a raw carrot versus a cooked carrot?
The cooking does something to make the carrot fiber acceptable to bacteria,
and the bacteria will thrive on cooked carrot,
where almost no microorganism can multiply on a raw carrot.
From a cooked carrot, you absorb almost all of the carotene, and the carotene has an antithyroid action.
You do get more potassium, calcium, magnesium out of the cooked carrot,
but the point of the carrot isn't nutrition, it's to help cleanse your intestine.
Right, it's more medicinal in a sense.
Now, what about keto proteins?
In one of your articles, you talk about keto proteins,
and I think it's in one of your serotonin and endotoxin articles.
Can you talk about what keto proteins are and why you recommend them in regards to maybe being anti-serotonin?
No, I'm not sure what you're talking about. Keto, did you say?
Keto, yes.
I think it's your article on, or one of your newsletters on serotonin,
you talk about keto proteins for ketones and then for keto acids, you know, for potatoes.
Oh, yeah, these are the equivalent carbon framework of the essential amino acids,
but they lack the ammonia needed to make the complete essential amino acid.
And potato happens to be very rich in these.
Probably a lot of fruits are, but they haven't been analyzed.
But we juiced a potato and ran it on paper chromatograph
and saw that it was very rich in all of the equivalents of the essential amino acids.
But when you test it chemically, it has a very low amount of protein in the potato.
But when you eat it, these keto acids are changed once they get into your bloodstream.
Just by absorbing ammonia, they change into the essential amino acids
and can support protein synthesis.
So if a person has very low kidney function and can't get rid of a lot of urea,
instead of needing dialysis, if they eat these keto acids instead of protein,
they can recycle their ammonia over and over instead of making it into urea that needs to be excreted.
And potatoes are a very rich source of this protein equivalent,
such that if you mash two pounds of potatoes,
you can think of it as being equivalent to a quart of milk for protein value.
And it also has a good balance of all the other nutrients.
So if you juice it and get rid of the starch,
then you have an extremely concentrated high-value nutrient.
That's good stuff. I've always wondered that and I was reading it and it was kind of confusing me,
so I'm glad you clarified on that.
Guys, I forgot to mention, and I hope everyone knows,
we're always taking callers, so don't forget to call in at 347-426-3546
if you want to call in and ask Dr. Rapide any questions.
I do have some questions coming in from some listeners on serotonin and endotoxin that I could ask you.
One of the listeners asked if you know any correlation or cause of raised moles,
moles, things like that, in regards to unsaturated fat serotonin.
Yeah, I was just reading some articles on the handling of tryptophan and serotonin by pigmented molds.
And other pigmented skin. It's just starting to be investigated.
But I've had a lot of experience with just the effect of thyroid and related hormones on molds.
A couple of doctors in about 1980 told me I should have a biopsy on a mold that had become big and rough and totally black.
And I was experimenting with DHEA and progesterone at the time and knew that I didn't want to get involved with cancer specialists.
And after I'd been experimenting with the steroids, I saw what looked like a maraschino cherry where the mole had been.
And over the next three or four days, the inflammation went out of it.
And what was left was a small brown mole that I had had all my life in that place that had wanted to turn into a melanoma.
And since then, every time I have become hypothyroid from not taking a thyroid supplement, I notice that I get molds growing.
I've probably had 20 or 25 that would easily be diagnosed as melanomas.
For example, a white mole with a blue and black spot that changed position every three or four hours.
Extremely turbulent metabolic activity just churning around, changing shape and colors.
And those disappear in just a matter of hours or days, adjusting the thyroid and progesterone, pregnenolone, and DHEA.
Right. Now, while you're on the thyroid, I just got another email from another listener.
And this might be a large question, but if you could elaborate a little bit more on or talk a little bit about anemia in correlation with the thyroid.
Broda Barnes brought that to my attention. He believed that hypothyroidism was usually the cause of anemia and probably never recommended an iron supplement.
He cited an experiment in which rats whose tail bones never make red blood cells normally,
their tail was inserted through a little nick in their abdominal wall and sewed inside their body.
And later, after staying at core body temperature for a couple of weeks,
they took the bones out and found that they were producing red cells just like their rib bones or hip bones, whatever, would be producing.
And it's simply a matter of temperature. If your extremities are cold, the bones are too cold to make blood cells.
And low thyroid people, even if their core temperature stays up, their extremities tend to get very cold.
There you go. Well, thanks for answering that.
I got another question from a listener. I guess people decided to email in today instead of call.
But like I said, guys, don't be afraid to call 347-426-3546.
Another question from one of the listeners, you talked about serotonin and bacteria in the small intestine.
His question is in regard to candida or yeast overgrowth.
And if you can elaborate a little bit more on that and maybe if it has a relation to serotonin.
Oh, the candida normally is harmless in the intestine,
but like the other organisms, it shouldn't be living very abundantly above your colon.
Low thyroid people sometimes have candida growing even in their stomachs.
And when they drink anything sugary, they brew beer or wine in their stomach
and can make so much that they get drunk every time they eat sugar.
But ordinarily, they shouldn't be living there, and that's mainly because your thyroid function is low.
But if you want to make a yeast angry, don't feed it sugar,
because a yeast needs sugar to grow normally.
And when it's deficient in sugar, it will sense sugar in your intestine in the blood
as where any glucose that it can sense is available.
So it will drill holes in your intestine and send filaments down into your intestine
to get some glucose, which it needs.
But if you keep feeding the yeast sugar, the worst you'll get is a little drunk.
That's kind of what most people recommend.
There's a lot of people out there that say don't sugar feed.
Well, it does. Sugar feeds on fungus, and if you have an overgrowth of starvin, it will go away,
which in all reality, it does feed on sugar, and you actually need it to downregulate it.
And the less you take in, the more overgrowth you're going to have.
But the raw carrot is a very good antiseptic for candida and other fungus.
Just one a day keeps the doctor away.
We've seen people who had the typical high estrogen, high cortisol, premenstrual syndrome,
in just three or four days of the carrot salad have another blood test, and everything is normal
because the carrot is preventing the reabsorption of estrogen,
which is blocking your liver function and your thyroid function.
The carrot, by eliminating the endotoxin, lets your thyroid and other glands function properly
to bring up your progesterone and lower your estrogen and cortisol.
Now, the list is when you say carrot salad, do you just mean a shaved carrot?
Do you just mean raw? I mean, is there anything else in there, salt, pepper, oil?
Raw is good, but if you want it to be really antiseptic, you shred it lengthwise preferably
because the length of the fiber is important.
You don't want to put it in a blender, but you want quite a bit of the fiber to be intact.
And a few drops to a spoonful of vinegar without additives and an oil, olive oil,
just a teaspoon or so improves the taste.
And either coconut or olive oil will have a germicidal action that normally you would absorb
the oil high up in your intestine and it wouldn't get as far as the bacteria in the lower intestine.
So the carrot absorbs some of the germicidal acetic acid and olive oil or coconut oil
carries them along with it and its own intrinsic germicide is increased
by these other antifungal chemicals.
Same thing with the bamboo shoots.
What kind of bamboo shoots do you recommend cutting up and cooking them?
Yeah, I've never tried raw bamboo shoots, but they're a very interesting vegetable.
I like them with a cheese or egg sauce.
Sounds good to me.
Guys, if you want to call in and ask questions, 347-426-3546.
Is there anything else, Ray, you want to talk about in regards to serotonin and endotoxin?
Anything, of course, we probably forgot or didn't chat about based on a lot of your research over the years?
Oh, keeping in mind that the so-called scientific community, the corporate product research community,
is very determined to keep the public thinking a certain way about estrogen and serotonin
and so they never mention certain topics and they always try to read the data
so it looks like it's beneficial even when it isn't.
And if you think of anything bad, then you might consider what the role of estrogen and serotonin is in relation to that.
For example, ergot was used to produce abortions and that led to it being a drug to facilitate childbirth,
but the ergot derivatives and serotonin are involved in impaired fertility, lack of sperm formation in men,
birth defects if a woman is exposed to high serotonin while pregnant,
difficult delivery because of high serotonin causing reduced circulation.
The whole preeclampsia syndrome is very centered on high serotonin.
When fat women have a problem with pregnancy,
it's typically because the estrogen and serotonin are reducing circulation to the uterus.
Just practically any problem that people have, if you investigate it,
it's going to turn out to involve those three types of systems,
the prostaglandins, fatty acids, the serotonin/tryptophan system, and the estrogen stress system.
It's kind of scary because a lot of people are taking estrogens and synthetic estrogens and SSRIs,
and infertility is up, and C-section drop, and preeclampsia, and just all these things.
Weight gain, it's almost like the very thing that people are trying to build up and work on
is actually breaking them down and just perpetuating illness.
The famous brain degenerative diseases, Huntington's disease, ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease,
multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease,
these all involve the serotonin effects.
Forty years ago, someone identified increased serotonin as a demyelinating factor
as well as a blood vessel leakiness factor released by platelets
that concentrate around the plaques in multiple sclerosis, for example.
And all of those are increased by high estrogen, high prolactin,
and tend to be corrected by progesterone and thyroid.
All of this stuff that has been known, very clearly demonstrated 30, 40, 50 years ago,
the drug science culture manages to get everyone to forget.
Now, just going back, one more key point that kind of popped in my head right now.
I know you've talked a lot about progesterone being kind of antagonistic to estrogen and serotonin
and sort of a facilitator to the metabolism of the thyroid.
What about vitamin E and aspirin?
You know, you talked about decreased circulation in the uterus,
and I know you talked about aspirin actually increasing circulation in the uterus.
Yeah, and it's gradually being used more to treat preeclampsia and pregnancy problems,
and it's very, very powerful against serotonin in many of the ways that thyroid works,
aspirin and thyroid, and some of the sugars like fructose work in the same ways against serotonin.
In an animal model of the very serious lung disease, pulmonary artery hypertension,
they can cure it just with aspirin.
And cancers of various types are promoted by serotonin and inhibited or cured by aspirin.
Yeah, for those listening, it doesn't mean go out and start buying aspirin and popping it.
There's a rhyme and reason to everything.
You know, make sure you know what you're doing, but if used correctly, it can be very beneficial.
Yeah, the aspirin is filling in for a lack of the other natural things,
calcium, thyroid, progesterone, pregnenolone, carbon dioxide.
Now I just got another question from a listener, and I think I know what you're going to say to this.
I think you've actually already answered this question kind of indirectly,
but he asked about serotonin's effect on libido
and what could one do, a male, in regards to raising libido by lowering serotonin.
It's just by increasing calcium, eliminating unsaturated fats, increasing saturated fats, all that stuff.
Yeah, all of those anti-inflammatory things.
And keeping your carbon dioxide up high by not doing aerobic exercise, I think, is very important.
Sometimes the thyroid is the crucial missing thing.
Sometimes vitamin B6 is all it takes to get things going very suddenly.
Niacinamide to inhibit the pre-fatty acids that in most people are mostly polyunsaturated.
Niacinamide, especially if you accompany it with orange juice,
to reduce the breakdown of fat from your deposits,
that can stop the stress enough to get your thyroid and androgens going again.
Now a quick question for you on niacinamide.
Have you ever seen people take niacinamide?
Have you ever seen a dose, maybe too much of a dose, cause GI upset or diarrhea?
No, I've never known of that with the niacinamide form.
The old, it's still popular, the nicotinic acid that makes people turn red,
what it's doing is increasing the release of serotonin and activating prostaglandin production,
stuff you don't want to happen.
And even the kind they call no-blush, no-flush niacin,
it's inositol hexonicotinate, I think is its name.
It still releases nicotinic acid which releases serotonin,
where the niacinamide doesn't do that.
And even the slow release or the nicotinic acid are for sure going to increase the risk of diarrhea
by increasing your serotonin and prostaglandins.
Right.
Good stuff.
Once again, anything else you want to elaborate on?
I don't have any more questions and I don't have any more questions from callers.
And I definitely, we've got a little bit more time.
I don't know if you wanted to add any more of your two cents, which would be great.
But we have covered a lot.
Anything?
The idea of fibrosis, if you can find an old book with Hans Selye's work in it,
you will find some interesting stuff on serotonin and the calcifying diseases
and the fibrotic diseases.
And he was very quick to assimilate serotonin into his study of inflammation and stress.
Is that what it's correlated to with prolactin in calcium?
It does many things to cause calcification.
It increases the parathyroid hormone even, which takes calcium out of your bones
and puts it in your blood vessels and kidneys where you don't want it.
And Hans Selye demonstrated that it would calcify the skin,
turn a rat's skin into like a turtle shell.
Yeah, I know a lot of people.
I've tried to look for his books, his encyclopedias and all that.
They're out there, but you've got to drop some bank on them to get them.
They're pretty expensive.
Oh, yeah.
But it's interesting stuff.
So obviously it would be increasing calcium intake to downregulate that internal excretion
to downregulate parathyroid hormone.
Yeah, and sodium is sometimes a missing factor.
All of the trace minerals, I advocate some kind of seafood once a week
to get your selenium and copper, for example.
The copper is needed for the thyroid to work in the respiratory enzyme.
Selenium is needed for the thyroid to work in the deiodinase systems.
Now, you talked about sodium.
Do you recommend people using salt, specific types of salt?
Yeah, clean salt without additives.
I use Morton's Kenning and Pickling salt.
It seems okay.
Because there's no additives.
Now, what are your thoughts on the Celtic or like the Himalayan and all that?
The red color in the Himalayan stuff is iron mostly.
Where you find iron, you're likely to find worse heavy metals.
What about like a gray Celtic sea salt, is that gray tint iron?
Yeah, that's basically French mud that makes it gray.
Is that mud high in iron content as well?
Yeah, usually there's quite a bit of mineral content.
Anything from the English Channel is now likely to have uranium.
They're dumping their nuclear waste into the Channel.
Awesome.
Yummy Celtic sea salt.
Well, we've got about 15, 20 more minutes.
Like I said, I don't have any questions.
I went through about maybe 20 or 30 of my questions.
We've had a lot of listeners email in and ask questions,
and I think we covered a lot.
Before we hang up, guys, if you do have any questions,
feel free to call at 347-426-3546 or pop me an email quickly before we end the show
and before we see if Ray has anything else to add.
Anything else, Ray, you want to elaborate on?
Anything else you're working on or anything else about serotonin and endotoxin
you want to kind of get in there before we have to go?
The current newsletter is going out in about a week on osteoporosis
and how serotonin fits into that.
And the one I'm starting next is going to be on sugars,
especially fructose because of the craziness that is circulating in the culture now,
telling people to fear fruit even.
Yes, it is pretty crazy because if you look out the window, it's just so simple.
What people are doing is not working.
Just because it doesn't fit into their paradigm, they just poo-poo it,
but everyone's getting worse, and it is craziness.
So just a quick question regarding osteoporosis and serotonin.
Is it in correlation with the parathyroid hormone and prolactin like you talked about
and calcification, and it's in correlation with estrogen and cortisol that lead to osteoporosis?
Yes.
They were noticing that people on the SSRIs for a few years
were getting exaggerated degrees of osteoporosis,
and that led the people who had been looking for products,
searching for genes that they could replicate and make a product out of.
These people were looking in all of the wrong places.
They would find something that they thought would work like estrogen
to prevent osteoporosis according to their way of looking at the world sideways.
Then it would turn out that their product caused fibrosis of the lungs,
promoted cancer, and even was associated with osteoporosis increasing.
One of the groups that had been working on the genetics, trying to find products,
they said basically when they looked up and looked around
and noticed that the intestine was the source of the serotonin that was causing the osteoporosis,
they said they rediscovered whole animal physiology.
And when is this newsletter going out in a week?
I didn't hear that.
He said when is this newsletter going out in a week, you said?
Oh, the osteoporosis is going out in a week, yes.
Okay, good.
So everyone, you've got a week to sign up.
Go to his website, raypeat.com, R-A-Y-P-E-A-T.com.
Sign up for his great newsletters, and you can get this newsletter
and many more that are going to be coming out.
We do have a caller, if you don't mind taking a call.
Sure.
Caller from 253, you're on the air.
Justin calling from Tacoma.
My question was for Ray to possibly elaborate upon what he talked about earlier
in regard to the healing effects of the red light.
I live in the Pacific Northwest, and I'm sure as Ray is familiar with, up in Oregon,
we have long, seemingly very stressful winters with not much light, a lot of cloud cover.
So what I was looking to see if Ray could answer is possibly some practical applications
for the use of that light.
I've heard the 250-watt infrared light, high-voltage or high-watt incandescent mercury
vapor light, just a practical guide of what he would do.
Thanks, and I'll take my question off the air.
With the mercury vapor ultraviolet lights, you have to be really careful that you don't get sunburn.
That will cause you to make vitamin D.
I personally prefer to use a little vitamin D, absorbing it through my skin,
rather than try to fiddle with a safe amount of ultraviolet light exposure.
But it does work for keeping your parathyroid hormone down under control
and your calcium where it should be.
Eating excess calcium is very helpful for regulating the parathyroid hormone
that tends to rise in the winter.
I think we need more calcium during the winter.
Everyone should, in a cold, dark northern climate, you can get these.
They're called 130-volt reflector bulbs, meaning that they're designed to run on a higher voltage
than the standard 120.
On the normal voltage, they produce an orange-colored light that's very poor in the blue part of the spectrum
and very rich in the red and orange part that's biologically good.
Since they produce a lot of heat with less of the bright white light,
they help to heat a room in the winter.
I have two of them aimed at the area where I work,
and two of them are generally enough to keep a room warm even in cold weather.
But it wouldn't hurt to have three of them, 750 watts, aimed at you for your general well-being.
So they're 130-watt reflective bulbs?
130-volt, and they're usually about 250 watts.
They call them infrared, which just means they're designed for a different voltage.
Good information.
I'm sure a lot of people up in those areas, as well as the East Coast and snow areas,
could benefit from that in the wintertime.
Well, we've got about 10 minutes left.
We're kind of running out of time here.
I think that was a great show.
We really appreciate you coming on, Ray.
And once again, everyone really benefits from the material and the work that you're putting out there.
I know we get lots of e-mails from people, and I'm sure you're getting way more.
And people just appreciate all the work that you're doing and the information that you're putting out.
So I know I'm speaking for a lot of people when we say thank you.
Okay.
Did you want to add any more to the serotonin/endotoxin topic?
Well, the antidepressant thing, did I mention the dog that was found to have low serotonin?
The things that lower your serotonin are likely to make you less aggressive but happier.
One of the interpretations of what serotonin is doing that I think makes sense,
the person who founded the line of thinking was named Cloninger.
It's that the behavioral system for harm avoidance and general behavioral inhibition is what serotonin is doing.
And so when you reduce your overproduction of serotonin,
you stop thinking about harm avoidance and have a more positive, constructive, exploratory attitude.
So you're saying the lower the better?
Yeah, the lower the better.
That's so great.
I love it.
It's great because a lot of stuff that you say to me makes so much sense,
but it's just opposite of what everyone is saying.
Yeah, that's pretty much an intentional thing.
The business culture took over science after the 1940s.
There used to be a lot of doctors around who knew how to use thyroid and cure arthritis and insanity and dementia
and everything with thyroid, but they were educated before the Second World War.
Then the corporations took over the medical schools,
and everyone educated since the 1950s doesn't know any of that stuff about thyroid.
And the serotonin issue came in really with the introduction of fraudulent science governed by the pharmaceutical industry
with their estrogen theory.
A whole theory of aging and stress was invented by the estrogen industry,
and that was already established for about 15 years when serotonin came on the scene.
So they worked serotonin into the system so that it didn't impair the advertising campaigns for estrogen.
So the whole system reinforces itself.
The way science is done and the way things are interpreted,
it is all designed really just to support the advertising system of the drug industry.
So buy any book before 1950 and not anything after 1950.
So you have to be very careful with the stuff after the 1950s.
I know you have your books and articles, but a lot of people do ask as well,
can you recommend any other books or people just off the top of your head in regards to serotonin or endotoxin that people can look up?
No, not on those subjects.
Just check out your articles?
Yes.
You just have to be critical and look for how they're arguing.
They'll basically say anything.
When you say this product improves the situation or ameliorates it rather than increases or decreases,
if they say simply it changes it, increases it, or decreases it, they might be honest.
When they say that they're improving the enzyme function of the rat,
you can suspect that they have some product in mind.
So be wary.
Yes, about 90% of the things you run across.
Just in the general journals, it's biased very heavily,
but by the time it's filtered through the television and newspaper system,
then it's like about 98 to 1, 98 to 2 for the industry and against science.
It's tough. There's so much out there.
I guess that's why you kind of stick with your articles and just go from there.
Keep you on the right track.
Keep everyone on the right track.
Well, I think we're about to wrap it up.
I've got a couple of minutes here to kind of say goodbye to everyone.
Once again, great show.
Really appreciate you coming on. I know everyone appreciates you coming on.
Have a great weekend and a good day, Ray.
Okay, thank you. Bye.
Bye.
So another great show, guys.
Ray Peat, serotonin and endotoxin.
It's a lot to take in.
We probably could have talked for hours and hours and hours on this,
those two topics alone, especially serotonin.
I have a lot of emails that I couldn't get in, unfortunately.
I only have a couple minutes left.
But definitely listen to the show over again.
If you have questions, email us.
You can email Ray, like I said, just make sure you compensate him for his time.
And just keep in mind, his philosophy is based on science and how the body works.
It's not a diet.
It's not do this to lose weight.
It's based on the human body.
It's based on how it works and what the body needs, what it can break down,
what's going to facilitate the metabolism, reduce inflammation,
and not cause disease in a sense.
There's so much going on out there about what Ray thinks and what people should eat and this and that.
And just realize that he doesn't truly have a plan,
and everything out there is people's interpretation of his work.
That's why I've talked to many people, and everyone's using his philosophy very differently.
So just, you know, study it, practice it, and realize it takes time,
it takes effort and consistence and fine-tuning to meet your body's metabolic needs
every single meal, day, week, and so forth.
And then when you think you get it, you got to fine-tune again to keep layering that healing process.
So, hopefully everyone enjoyed the show, enjoyed my little pep talk or whatever it was.
Thanks for tuning in.
Stay tuned to our Facebook and YouTube for our next show with Ray.
Next month I'll be posting it, hopefully in the next week or two, once I chat with Ray.
And I'm out of here.