Welcome to the Get Fit with Jodell podcast. I am Jodell as usual and I am happy once again to have Dr. Ray Peat with me here today.
Dr. Ray Peat is officially my forever go-to source for all things nutrition and health. He has a PhD in biology.
He has taught at many renowned schools and universities regarding all things nutrition and women's health specifically.
You can learn more about him by visiting RayPeat.com. That's RayPeat.com.
You will be as inspired as I am today as we are talking about digestion.
Dr. Peat, I am so very honored to have you back on the podcast again. You are always so generous with your knowledge.
I wanted to pick your brain about digestion today and all the digestive distress that at least I have seen in my practice.
From what I understand, digestion is one of the top five reasons people come to see their doctor.
Also, in my practice, it is one of the top five reasons people give me a call too.
I wanted to pick your brain. What do you think or why do you think there is so much digestive distress in our modern society?
Was it this bad 40 or 50 years ago?
One of the things that has been a general problem is the physical inactivity.
People who live in apartments have to take their dogs out for a walk every day because the digestive system tends to slow down when you aren't walking.
There are reflexes between especially the legs and the intestine.
In general, physical inactivity affects the whole process of appetite and digestion and elimination.
The change from a crude diet to a very refined diet was one of the factors.
Around the beginning of the 20th century, there were health organizations that emphasized using whole grains rather than refined.
Whole wheat flour rather than white flour, for example, because of the bulk forming effect of the bran of the wheat.
People who have studied the difference between, for example, Africans and Americans found that because there was a lot of potato in the diet of the Africans and other fibrous foods,
their transit time on average was about 12 hours from in to out.
The average American at the time the study was done had a transit time of 72 hours.
Oh my goodness.
A tremendous difference. I noticed that the rising incidence of bowel cancer in America has been really huge.
I looked up the rate of the same kind of cancer in Africa and there is almost no colorectal cancer in the undeveloped parts of Africa where they still eat a fairly fibrous diet.
You mentioned right at the first about people going for walks a lot more or they used to walk a lot more.
Now, do you think that a lot of our digestive distress is from a kind of a society of sitting?
Yeah, definitely.
Everyone who takes up the habit of walking for an hour or so a day notices improved digestion.
The general sense of well-being is largely because of the improved movement of the intestinal muscles but also improved secretions.
Feeling good and relaxing and moving around reduces the nervous tension and that increases the secretions.
You can see it even in saliva.
When you're very anxious, your mouth tends to go dry because of the shift from one part of the nervous system to the other shuts off secretions starting in the mouth but affecting all the way down.
Yeah, so there is kind of a north to south process, right?
So, would you say that the saliva is just as important as the stomach acid?
I mean, as it starts there and it works down to the stomach acid and then the CCK and all the different secretions that happen from the pancreas and the liver.
Is it pretty important to start with the fundamentals like keeping a good cephalic head phase of digestion going as well as good adequate stomach acid?
Oh yeah, anyone who has taken a drug that shuts down saliva production has generally had an outbreak of cavities.
The anti-cholinergic drugs and some of the anti-histamines reduce the production of saliva so much that it's not just the drying of the lower quantity of saliva but the composition changes chemically.
Instead of washing away and inactivating bacteria and their products, it tends to favor their growth.
So, you can see it as increased deposits on the teeth but especially in the extremely fast development of cavities when the mouth is dry.
Isn't that fascinating that digestion even translates to teeth health? So, I really didn't even have any idea about that.
I just assumed you were going to say something like not having the adequate saliva would lead to poor digestion too because they need that enzymatic breakdown in the mouth.
So, is that also the case?
There is a little that begins in the mouth and 50 to 70 years ago, some people were getting sort of fanatical about having to chew your food so many times to make sure you liquefied it.
But, the quantity of enzymes in the saliva is not very great compared to some animals and those same enzymes are secreted later in the stomach and intestines.
So, if you miss getting some of the digestion started in your mouth, your stomach can make up for it by secreting a lot of the starch breakdown enzymes too.
Okay, well let's talk about that, that north to south process.
So, I've always been an advocate for adequate stomach acid for proper digestion.
So, what are your thoughts on the stomach acid itself and how we can keep it adequate?
That's another thing that's regulated strongly by the nerves and hormones.
The ultimate source of the acidity is in oxidation and production of carbon dioxide which then is involved in the secretion of hydrochloric acid.
But, it's a respiratory process essentially and so if your thyroid is very low, your stomach acid is going to be low and the muscles become weaker at the same time that the secretions are weaker.
And so, slowing down the transit time for various reasons including inactivity, the slower transit gives time for abnormal, even yeast can develop at an extreme in the stomach when the acid is very low and the muscle contraction is very slow.
Food can stay in the stomach so long that around 1955 or 60 there were some cases in the news of people who were thought to be drunkards because they always reeked of alcohol and were half drunk all the time.
It turns out that they had a little brewery always going in their stomach and intestine.
If they would eat carbohydrate, starch for example, their own enzymes could produce enough sugar that yeast could grow on it producing alcohol and carbon dioxide.
They can produce enough to make a person chronically a little drunk but at the same time the yeast is poisoning them.
But, there are different degrees short of that when you look at the health, look at a big population like the US where a high proportion aren't very healthy and look at microorganisms at different points of the small intestine and stomach.
A small percentage, maybe 10% have a completely germ free stomach and small intestine, sterile all the way down until it gets to the colon.
And then a larger proportion, 30 or 40%, the lower half of the small intestine is fairly well infected and then I think it's about another third of the population has detectable germs all the way up to around where the pancreatic enzymes get in.
The enzymes have weakened to the extent that germs can survive right up to the area where the proteolytic and lipolytic enzymes are being secreted.
So, the slow transit and weak secretions allow organisms that sometimes can be pathogenic and in general they go with a reduced state of health.
A very high proportion of the population suffers from having some degree of microorganism overgrowth between the stomach and the beginning of the colon.
When they grow only in the colon, they're pretty harmless.
I want to come back to those microorganisms because as you know there's a big movement of people advocating for all of these gut healing protocols with probiotics and prebiotics and stuff like that.
So, I want to come back to that.
But as far as going down the north to south process, so going through the stomach acid, now we come to the liver and the gallbladder.
I'm assuming the liver and gallbladder are pretty important to digestion too, but as I'm seeing a lot of people have liver stagnation and then a lot of people don't even have a gallbladder anymore.
So, can you talk about the importance of making sure that even if you don't have a gallbladder, how important it is to keep your liver functioning well?
The liver absorbs nutrients and along with the nutrients will come the toxins, especially if you have bacteria growing with the digesting food where they shouldn't be.
They're necessarily going to produce toxins that will burden your liver.
So, one of the first things that goes wrong when your digestion slows and the bacteria and yeast start growing where they shouldn't is that the high endotoxin will start slowing down your liver function
and swapping the ability of the liver to detoxify and excrete these toxins.
That's where even if a person is sedentary, if they eat enough fiber, the fiber is going to bind and move along some of the bacteria and in the process of a bulk of fiber moving through you,
the fiber reduces the absorption of endotoxin and one of the functions of the liver besides detoxifying endotoxin is to keep the level of hormones under control.
Your glands increase the amount of hormone in your blood, the liver decreases it by attaching sulfuric acid or glucuronic acid to the molecule making it water soluble so that it can leave in your kidneys.
But some of it is excreted into the bile especially if you're overloading the excretion glucuronidation process.
Then these hormones like estrogen are coming out in the bile and they will be reabsorbed and give you a chronic excess of circulating estrogen if your liver slows down and that can be to some extent overcome by making sure that you're taking in fiber all the time to bind and move along both the endotoxin,
the bacteria and the excreted hormones such as estrogen and cortisol.
Yeah and in a little bit I want to touch on exactly what some fiber foods are that you would recommend for healthy digestion but also can you explain like in really layman's terms for people to understand endotoxin, how would you explain that?
Well, it's chemical name is lipopolysaccharide, it's a group of fatty acids attached to a carbohydrate that has something analogous to a soaping action physically that the fat is absorbed in the cells and it drags in this carbohydrate that acts as an irritant
and the cells are basically irritated and inflamed when they absorb it and the gallbladder, every tissue is damaged by endotoxin but the gallbladder receiving the chemicals estrogen and endotoxin for example
that haven't been completely detoxified, the system leading up to the gallbladder and the muscle and duct leading out of the gallbladder becoming inflamed and this will show up for example in pregnancy if estrogen is extremely high,
the cholesterol will tend to accumulate there and the bile becomes abnormal, tends to precipitate cholesterol and a variety of chemicals that form sludge or stones in the gallbladder at the same time
the endotoxin is weakening the contractile function of the gallbladder but the estrogen besides creating that tendency to be unable to excrete, it can cause a spasm of the duct leading out of the gallbladder
and that can bring on a crisis in which a stone might not be able to be expelled or the bile can accumulate and just build up pressure
so thyroid deficiency is extremely closely associated to gallbladder problems because of the lowered detoxifying function of the liver when the thyroid is low
I think without exception the people I've known who've had gallbladder disease especially surgery were extremely hypothyroid chronically and that usually goes with too much estrogen that can cause spasms anywhere in the smooth muscles
starting with the gallbladder and the duct but even the small intestine in x-ray studies they've given a big dose of estrogen and they can see the small intestine going into a cramp so it blocks the duct out of the gallbladder
or it can cause spasms anywhere along the line and when you get into that over excited under energized state of the smooth muscle of the intestine local irritation can send out waves of contraction
and it can go backwards especially during sleep when the nervous system is relaxing irritation way down the small intestine it can go into spasm not allow passage and instead a wave will head north from the spastic block in the intestine
and it can cause regurgitation irritation of the esophagus and lots of people wake up with a bad taste in their mouth that's often because of reverse peristalsis
and enterologist who had medical students to experiment on put microscopic particles that could be easily identified club moss spores and had them put it into their rectums in the afternoon and then in the morning they took swabs from their mouth
and those who regularly had morning breath found that the spores could be identified in their saliva showing that it's extremely common to have reverse peristalsis all the way from the rectum to the mouth during the night
Wow you also were talking about how the gut can go spastic as well as the I think you mentioned something else about endotoxins there was another symptom you had mentioned but what are some of the digestive symptoms someone might experience if they have a high level of endotoxins
When the intestine gets in trouble the symptoms can be throughout the whole body because when the energy is low permeability is high in other words the blood vessels leak in the wall of the intestine
and what should be absorbed as digestive food going into the lymphatic system to be processed by the liver as nutrients instead of going the proper route all of the blood vessels in the intestine become over permeable
and the toxins then get into your general circulation so when the intestine is in bad shape the so called leaky intestine is letting the toxin go straight to your brain and heart and lungs
so it can contribute to symptoms like obstructive pulmonary disease, emphysema, shock like symptoms, just poor lung function in general, reduced heart function, heart failure, various insomnia, sleep apnea, all of these things involve endotoxin poisoning
as a rule.
Those are some huge, I mean that really tells us that there is so much correlated with endotoxin when you lay out that list. What about some lesser known symptoms you know like would gas and bloating for someone be and that's a clear cut issue that they've got some endotoxins going on or
Gas and bloating if you tap on your belly and it sounds like a drum that's the accumulation of gas and if the muscle tone is proper as gas forms it should be constantly released a little bit at a time but when you're in that spastic
state the sphincters don't let it out, the peristalsis doesn't move it along and so it forms great balloons of gas that can cause pain and that pressure in itself can for example cause migraine.
The same enterologist that I mentioned before experimenting on his medical students at the time they were shifting the paradigm of 19th century everyone believed that the intestine was a source of toxins very well based scientifically but around 1910 to 1920
the medical industry was being modernized and they wanted to get away from all of the traditional food can be your medicine they wanted to throw away that concept and so they suppressed the idea of self-intoxication from the intestine
and did various things to argue that it's nothing but pressure not toxicity and so what Walter Alvarez the professor did was to insert big wads of cotton in the rectums of his medical students in the afternoon and when they came back
those of them who had a susceptibility to headaches and migraines they all had a headache brought on just by the pressure of cotton in their rectum he said see it isn't auto toxicity it's just pressure from not moving the bowels often enough
so in a way he was blaming it on behavior rather than on the nature of the food and the digestive process.
Do you think that anxiety has anything to do with endotoxin or gut distress I mean you hear the whole gut brain connection so what do you feel about that anxiety?
It goes both ways the absorption of toxins they have fed different kinds of fiber to experimental animals rats in particular and found that type of fiber soluble fiber that feeds bacteria
that's the kind that's being recommended by a lot of companies as a prebiotic feeding bacteria but in the rats they found that soluble fiber increased their fearfulness and their aggression.
Definite brain changes just from adding this one type of fiber feeding bacteria but it can go the other way if you have some kind of an emotional experience the shift towards high sympathetic adrenaline activity takes the blood away from your digestive system makes it available to your muscle system
for the fight or flight reaction but the intestines suffers oxygen and sugar deprivation meanwhile and if that's continued that energy deprivation leads to the increased permeability and absorption of toxins
so it can cause a chronic brain syndrome all the way to epilepsy. Animal experiments have shown that the combination of pressure and irritation and hypoglycemia is enough to bring on epileptic seizures in animals but short of that you will experience mood changes,
aggression, fearfulness, anxiety and so on from different lower degrees of bloating and toxin absorption.
You mentioned with the cotton how it was kind of a what they were calling the prebiotic fiber but and let's talk about that what about probiotics what about this trend where everybody's taking these mega spores and probiotics as well as eating prebiotic fiber what do you think about that?
Animal experiments when the doctor Dennis Burkett showed that Africans were pretty free of bowel cancer because of eating fiber that started a fiber craze but instead of saying people should eat potatoes which he was saying
in Africa Americans had waste cereal fiber to sell bran and so that started the craze of using oat bran as the fiber and so people started doing research on oat bran happens to break down into bowel carcinogens
estrogenic fiber breakdown products and so they compared a clean cellulose fiber relatively wheat bran didn't break down to the carcinogens the way the oat bran did but the good thing about cellulose is that
it's practically resistant to bacterial breakdown so it functions only as fiber stimulates peristalsis cleans out binds a lot of the estrogen and endotoxin so it's very safe and usually effective but what they're selling now it's a very ornate bunch of assumptions
building on the function of how it breaks down they like to see the short chain fatty acids which they concentrate on some local effects that seem to be protective to the intestine but when you look at the systemic effects of these lactic acid tends to go with butyric acid and
propionic acid as products of the breakdown of these soluble fibers and these contribute to systemic problems as well as local damage to the intestine so there's a huge amount of research but it's very selective and in a limited context
I see it as a giant advertising industry supported by the food products manufacturers
yeah and as far as like the probiotics that they're selling do they have any benefit like you know you'll hear bifidus bacteria is a big one and even in my early career like I would I always thought that that was the one that I wanted to help people with their digestion with because 70% of our bacteria is made up of that and it seemed like a lot of people were lacking it so is there any benefit or now I don't advocate for probiotics anymore because I'm I don't understand the mechanism of how it works
I don't understand the mechanism of adding bacteria in when we're in a world of bacteria if we could just eat the proper foods like what you're saying we can remedy some of this so what are your thoughts
the people who lose the safe type bacteria well first of all the small intestine shouldn't be having any bacteria but the safer bacteria in the colon are competed against by the more irritating bacteria
and it's the bacteria which are present that establish a whole ecosystem and even if you eat a yogurt type bacteria a lot of them will not survive a healthy digestive system
the stomach and pancreas secretions will simply keep them from growing but when they do get through and reach the colon the existing bacteria will usually just suppress their growth
so you need something which along with the harmless bacteria like the lactobacillus you need something that produces basically a competitive antibiotic that will give themselves the chance to compete against the more irritating bacteria
years ago they were selling a product called earth based bacteria I think or earth derived bacteria and that started in the second world war the Germans in North Africa noticed that the indigenous people didn't suffer from dysentery
where their soldiers were all having terrible diarrhea and they found that the remedy locally was to eat a little bit of camel dung and so they looked at what was in the camel dung and I think it was three main bacteria
and those were sold in American health food stores as these earth based bacteria and in the Ukraine and some Eastern European countries that has continued I tried one product called Biosporin which was I think Bacillus subtilis and Licheniformis I think was the other one
and they produce a very strong antibiotic and at certain times of the year unpasteurized cow's milk has a lot of these which make the milk very extremely resistant to bacterial growth which would be a good condition to have in your colon
and in Grants Pass when I was in school there one of the dairies was proud of its raw milk and there was no air conditioning in the county fair building during the summer and so it was always hot where they displayed milk
and his competitors milk would go sour by the first afternoon so they had to change their display because it would separate into a curd and green or yellow whey and he kept his raw milk on display all the whole week of the fair
and that can only be explained by the presence of antibiotic bacteria such as subtilis which are natural when the cows are healthy and the milk isn't too pasteurized.
Yeah and that's not one you hear about normally in any of the supplements but you mentioned since you mentioned camel dung it got me thinking about what about our poo like is our poo like a marker of how our digestion is doing would you say that you can look at your poo and decide do I have a lot of endotoxins am I doing okay like the structure of our poo itself?
It should be basically of the color and odor of the babies and if it starts smelling rotten usually you're feeling rotten and getting that through you quickly is one of the functions of a good inert fiber
and the right kind of bacteria can survive your digestion and living in your colon it can simply act as an antibiotic to kill off those horrible rot producing bacteria.
So let's talk about some of those fiber foods and maybe a food like that's an antibiotic type food that you recommend for someone to improve their digestion.
If you look at foods at plants that grow in a warm moist dark environment which is like our intestine to survive in that kind of a bacteria and fungus rich and supportive environment they have to contain their intrinsic antibiotics
and root vegetables typically contain that sort of antibiotic and the difference between a moist above ground vegetable like lettuce I've experimented putting it in a room temperature or warmer place in a low oxygen environment
like a bag and then put a carrot in the same situation after three days or the usual transit time the lettuce will be a rotten mess and the carrot will still be almost like you put it in
I'm showing that the carrot has a very powerful antibiotic system so that got me started on the carrot salad idea if you shred the carrot finely and lengthwise so that you maximize the fibrous property of it
that's a physical binding agent that releases as it travels along slowly releases some of its antibiotic substances but if you eat it with a little olive or coconut oil and a little vinegar both of these saturated fats are bactericides or bacteriostats
and fungicides so you have three types of antibiotic substances in a pleasant tasting salad and doing that every day kept my intestine healthy for about 20 years
and I eventually wanted to branch out for something less boring and I found that bamboo shoots if they're well boiled don't have any intrinsically harmful properties a little bit of cyanide but that's harmless in the slow absorption
but they contain quite a bit of antibiotic and an inflammatory effect as well as lots of cellulose and very little of the type of material that could support bacterial growth
and well cooked mushrooms are a very different kind of fiber that carries with it antibiotics and anti-inflammatory chemicals and then for short use well cooked oat bran or wheat bran is fine for getting a temporary cleaning out
but you just don't want to eat a lot of oat bran every day for 30 years because it does release that mild carcinogen.
What foods would they want to eliminate? Obviously there's a lot that they could choose from but what are some of the key foods someone would want to eliminate with digestive issues?
The things that are hard to digest so all raw vegetables except for carrots as far as I know. There were experiments early in the food industry in which they would make a selection of raw vegetables that were popular canned items in grocery stores
and then they would feed one group of rats nothing but those vegetables and then another group of rats they would feed the exact choice of vegetables but from cans cooked at a high pressure and quick cooking to make them soft and tasty
and the rats that ate the canned vegetables thrived as long as the experiment went on. The ones on the raw vegetables couldn't digest them got diarrhea and wasted away with digestive problems.
So raw vegetables are people often tolerate them but they aren't really good for anyone.
Would you say like eliminating gluten would be another one people would want to do like gluten containing food?
Oh yeah all of the seed substances combine either protein and oil or protein and starch and that combination is always hard on the digestion.
When the protein is in the if you just grind the seed in its natural form the protein is in a storage form in which the number of molecules is much smaller than the sprout will contain.
The sprout uses those as growth substance before the plant develops the ability to make its own food so it needs some way of concentrating the essential amino acid equivalents.
They are not in the seed but the atoms needed to make the essential amino acids are there. So if you eat the seed a bean for example has supposedly a high percentage of protein but it's the atoms that are needed to make a high quality protein that you find in the bean or the cereal.
Rather than the protein itself if you soak the seed to the point of sprouting one experiment found that there was as much as two and a half times more protein value for soaking a seed to the point of sprouting.
In the process of making those functional proteins those resemble animal proteins to a great extent but in the storage form gluten is just one storage protein that has been famous for its irritating properties.
These proteins that are designed for storage have to have a lot of ammonia stored in a bound form.
So the lysine for example all of the amino acids with an amino side group these are concentrated in the storage proteins and then they're broken down and the amine, the nitrogen is released and resynthesized into different amino acids.
Arginine for example is one of the potential irritants and when we digest it it can feed the increase of nitric oxide that goes with irritated intestine from endotoxin.
So a combination of bacteria and arginine from a grain or bean becomes multiply toxic and irritating.
The quality of protein is simply so low that some specialists have said you can't consider legumes and cereals as food proteins at all.
They rank at 6% or so where milk ranks at 70%, egg yolk at 100% and on that scale potatoes at least of some varieties rank at higher than 100% because they contain materials that can use the ammonia or nitrogen containing groups
that are waste in our bodies, recycle them and make them into essential amino acids so the protein and potato equivalent is basically more than perfect.
That is so fascinating. I've heard you say that before and I just think that's such an interesting thing you don't hear.
As far as advice you would give someone and supplements or lifestyle habits, what other advice would you give for someone who is looking to improve their digestion?
The setting, living in an interesting way, avoiding anxiety is an essential thing.
You don't want to eat while working on something anxiety provoking, you won't digest it properly.
Avoid the indigestible raw proteins and undercooked cereals and keep the nutrients in balance. Milk protein and other things in milk have non-food value.
Milk is designed biologically to facilitate digestion and assimilation of both of the nutrients.
So it's a very complex system of favoring the working of the intestine.
For a long time people investigating digestion have found different ways to study it.
For example Pavlov used a pouch into the stomach to watch what happens.
The conditional reflex psychology grew out of his discovery of what happens in the stomach.
He found that if the lab workers dressed in a certain way it could disturb the dog's digestion.
Unexpected things could delay their digestion by a long time.
He made it very clear that the setting in which you eat is a very crucial part to the whole process.
That's now being amplified to see that those changes occur all the way along your digestive system.
Saliva, stomach, gallbladder, pancreas, wall of the intestine, all the way down.
Mood is very powerful.
I think I could do a whole other part two with you on this. Digestion is just unbelievably related to good health.
I appreciate your time today. This has been wonderful as usual.
Could you just tell the listeners briefly about how they can get your newsletter?
I think it's really important that people keep up with what you're putting out.
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If you email raypeatsnewsletter@gmail.com you can get information on how to subscribe.
By email it's $28 for 12 bi-monthly issues. That's two years, 12 issues.
It's the least we can do for all of the wealth of knowledge you give to us so generously in these podcasts.
We really appreciate your time. Thank you. I hope that this gives people some insight on how to improve their digestion.
It seems to be very important. Thank you, Dr. Peat. I look forward to talking with you again.
Okay. Thank you. Bye.
Bye-bye.