Thank you and welcome to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor.
My name is Andrew Murray.
My name is Sarah Johannison Murray.
For those of you who perhaps have never listened to our shows,
they run every third Friday of the month from 7 till 8 p.m.
And we are both licensed medical herbalists who train in England
and graduated there with a degree in herbal medicine.
We run a clinic in Garboville where we consult with clients about a wide range of conditions
and recommend herbal medicine and dietary advice.
And this month we are again very pleased and fortunate to welcome Dr. Ray Peat
back to the show and we will be discussing the 10 most toxic things in our food.
So welcome to Ask Your Herb Doctor, Dr. Ray Peat.
Hello, thank you.
Okay, I think what I should start by doing is opening up this show
and just ask you to mention your academic background for those people who perhaps have never heard you.
Okay, I used to teach linguistics and literature and such,
but I got interested in nutrition and other parts of biology, endocrinology and such.
So I went back to graduate school in 1968.
I got a Ph.D. taking most of my coursework in biochemistry and reproductive physiology.
So it's mostly endocrine chemistry that I've been studying ever since.
So for the last 45 years, Dr. Peat has been doing nutritional counseling
in reproductive physiology and hormones, specializing in hormones.
Is that correct, Dr. Peat?
Yes.
I was doing it somewhat in the early 60s, just from what I could learn incidentally
without actually taking coursework in it.
Wow, so we have a very experienced nutritionist, physiologist, endocrinologist joining us tonight, Dr. Ray Peat.
We're very happy to have you on our show tonight.
Okay, I think what we wanted to go over this week for those people who've just tuned in
are the 10 most toxic things in our food.
Incidentally, I would say probably 50% of our interaction with clients consulting with us
is based on their diet and changing their diet, modifying their diet
in terms of getting them to cut out eating those foods that are negatively impacting their health
and encourage them to switch to other foods that are positively affecting their health.
And probably the other 50% is herbs and/or other preparations.
So diet is very important. I think that adage, "You are what you eat" is very appropriate.
And so for tonight's show, people that are listening, you should probably take note.
In England, there are very descriptive ingredients on all the foods that you'll buy.
It almost seems a bit ridiculous sometimes when you look at the wrapper of some foods
because there's such a lot of information about the ingredients
that it almost covers up the packets and the kind of advertising they're trying to do for the food.
But it's very good. It lets people know exactly what ingredients are in the product.
Everything has to be disclosed.
And I think that the thing that will come out tonight when we cover the 10 products
that are known to cause, I would say, disease or symptoms in people that may lead to disease,
these things are very easy to spot on packaging in England.
Whereas in America, there certainly is in the legislation allowable,
what I would say, non-disclosure of certain ingredients.
And Dr. Peat, when we go through these ingredients, you can perhaps expand on some of those things
that are allowable by law to be included and not be detailed on the ingredient packaging.
So I know one of the main things that has come to light
are the ever-increasing processing agents used in foods to the point now where food,
if you want to call it food in some cases, can be basically broken down into a soup,
re-homogenized, put into molds, pressed and formed into a certain type of food.
And this is becoming, I would almost say, an art, not in the sense of being creative or artistic for itself,
but for the sake of selling a product and turning a pretty non-edible food
into an apparently edible and apparently good for you food.
So the transglutaminases are a group of compounds that basically meet glue, if you like.
So these are the agents that will bind meats together.
So Dr. Peat, I know you have a lot of experience with the things that we're going to mention tonight,
so I'd be very pleased if you would talk a little about the transglutaminases,
what they do and their negative impacts on the foods that they're found in.
Celiac disease has been pretty much explained as an overlap between part of the gluten protein molecule
and a natural enzyme that we have in all of our cells and systems, the transglutaminase,
which sticks proteins together.
And this is induced by lots of things to increase its quantity or decrease it.
For example, the ACE inhibitors for treating blood pressure have been discovered to block it
to the extent that people's skin can fall off.
The epidermis separates and forms blisters and comes loose because of inhibiting the transglutaminase.
But other things can intensify the action.
Estrogen, for example, will cause premature hardening of the epidermis.
The cells are flattened and keratinized under the influence of estrogen, which is antagonized by vitamin A.
The uterus and the skin and the breast are places that especially involve these interactions of the hardening enzyme.
And breast cancer and uterine cancer contain very large amounts of overproduction of the transglutaminase of certain kinds.
And the antibody reactions that are involved in celiac disease can inactivate the natural enzyme when it occurs.
For example, scleroderma, the hardening and calcification of the skin and other membranes,
can apparently overlap considerably with celiac disease involving over activation of the transglutaminase enzyme.
Would you say that being related to estrogen that females would be at greater risk?
Yes. All of the autoimmune diseases are much more frequent, five or ten times for some of them, in women compared to men.
And I'm not sure how big a role transglutaminase plays in those,
but that is one enzyme that is very susceptible to forming autoantibodies under the influence of estrogen.
These autoantibodies would be directed at attacking self.
Yes.
So typically, what kind of foods will contain larger than normal amounts of these transglutaminases?
Well, the worst thing about the use of these products is that they are industrially manufactured in microorganisms,
genetically modified. And for, I guess, about 30 years now, organisms have been used for modifying foods.
And when the Japanese pioneered the genetic modification of microorganisms to produce amino acids,
people were thinking they were buying a pure chemical substance.
But I ran across many people who said that they believed they almost died when they took a pure amino acid preparation.
And it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to thoroughly purify anything made in a microorganism to the extent that it won't be allergenic.
So the worst thing is that you're getting junk from microorganisms and industrial processes.
And these can't be removed? Well, they're very difficult to remove.
Yeah, as far as I know, it's impossible to absolutely purify them,
but they purify them enough to satisfy government regulations.
So they're taking bacteria, fungi, and yeast and genetically engineering them
and genetically modifying them to produce various chemicals.
And the transglutaminases are one of these things that get produced through genetic modification.
Yeah, and they're becoming more and more popular with restaurant chefs to prepare things individually rather than industrially.
Yes, there was a very interesting article you sent us that was talking about the chefs wrapping chicken with bacon.
And if they just applied a little bit of this meat glue, the bacon conveniently stuck to the little bit of chicken breast.
So they didn't have to use skewers or other.
And they're getting very skillful.
For example, soybean protein can be shaped and modified and glued together to resemble even the fibrous texture of meat.
And scraps that are salvaged from the slaughterhouse can be glued together to look like meat.
And they can form it so that it looks like specific lamb chop cuts or pork chops or rib steaks or whatever.
And they're very good, convincing copies.
They don't want to waste anything.
If they can find a byproduct or a waste product and turn it into a product, that's good for business, isn't it?
Probably where most people are exposed to the transglutamines would be in the chicken or fish chunks that are very neatly formed to a certain shape.
Or in delicatessen, they have a so-called roast beef or roast turkey that comes in very symmetrical tubes or lobes.
Well, most of us here in Humboldt County -- no, I don't know if I can say most of us in Humboldt and Mindo --
but fortunately in California we are blessed with a lot more natural food stores.
But still, it's very prevalent.
These delicatessen meats are very prevalent in the stores in California and throughout the United States.
Even though they might be eaten in greater quantities throughout the rest of the U.S., it's quite frightening.
So basically the pressed meats, any meat that appears in a delicatessen that's been pressed into a certain shape
and doesn't look as though it was off an animal in that way.
I know what you're saying.
They do look very different.
You may not notice it until you start looking at it properly,
but they're the kind of meats that will be pressed together and then sliced conveniently.
Or the chicken nuggets or the fish sticks.
I think some of the lobes that have been around for a hundred years or more, for example, head cheese,
natural gelatin was traditionally used to make a loaf out of that.
So that would be fine.
Right.
That's the way it was, and unfortunately it's been changed.
So just to recap on these transglutaminases, Dr. Peat,
they're something that our body manufactures naturally and they have a purpose,
but when we take them in increased numbers through these processed foods, is that when it starts to cause a problem?
Yeah.
Everything that we eat or inhale is processed by our immune system,
sampling things that hit the intestinal membranes or that leak through the membrane into the bloodstream.
And so the immune system has to decide what to do to these extraneous materials,
and it can either accept them and allow them to circulate or it can organize a defensive attack against them.
And it's the defensive inflammatory attack against the extraneous materials such as microorganism proteins
that can trigger the sometimes deadly allergic reactions.
And it isn't strictly the proteins. The immunologist doctrine used to say that it's proteins which are the allergens,
but many carbohydrates or starch-like gum materials are extremely allergenic,
and that has actually been known for 60 or 70 years, but allergists are just now barely accepting the fact.
Okay. You're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMU DeGarboville, 91.1 FM,
and from 7.30 or so until the end of the show at 8 o'clock, you're invited to call in with any questions,
either related or unrelated to this month's topic of the 10 most toxic things in our food.
My name's Andrew Murray.
My name's Sarah Johanneson Murray.
We are joined by guest speaker Dr. Ray Peat, endocrinologist, biochemist and physiologist.
The number here if you live in the area is 923 3911.
Or if you live outside the area, the toll-free number is 1-800-KMUD-RAD.
I just want to quickly, before we move on to the next food product or additive, Dr. Peat,
could you just quickly mention the health benefits of gelatin?
We mentioned the pressed meats and the use of transglutaminase to achieve that,
but gelatin was always used, and the gelatin's a very good product for you.
Would you just say a few words about gelatin?
Yeah, gelatin constitutes about 50% of the protein in an animal,
and it has the feature of lacking tryptophan, cysteine, and methionine,
which muscle meats, for example, are extremely rich in tryptophan and cysteine and methionine.
Those happen to inhibit the thyroid function, suppress metabolism, and promote inflammation.
Simply eliminating methionine, just one of those from the diet in animal experiments,
has increased the maximum lifespan about 40%.
Adults have an extremely low requirement for tryptophan, cysteine, and methionine.
They're used for growth processes.
So it's very important for children.
Yeah, so they're essential for kids to grow up, but once you've achieved your growth,
you just need a very small amount to make new skin and antibodies and intestinal membranes and hair and nails.
But you don't need the vast quantities that we get in the ordinary average proteins.
So an adult, 40 or 50 years ago,
nutritionists wondered how little old ladies could be so healthy just eating gelatin and toast
because they thought of tryptophan and cysteine as essential amino acids,
but old people can essentially live on it with just a trace of the others in things like bread and fruit.
Right, good.
Okay, so just another reminder for people that,
I think probably because it just helps reinforce in my own mind,
I think this kind of conditioning that gelatin is a bad product,
it's created from animal parts and these animal parts are not the things that shouldn't be in our diet,
but it's actually the reverse and actually gelatin is extremely important.
Traditional diets made very efficient use of things like chicken feet,
pig's ears and tails, beef and pork skin and so on.
Really very pleasant and nutritious foods.
And there have been studies showing the anti-cancer effect of gelatin as well.
Yeah, anti-aging and anti-inflammatory.
It was used medically very widely up until about 50 years ago.
Okay, very good.
Let's move on to the next food subject so we can try and get through as many of these as we can
before the phones start ringing.
So how about, gosh, I say additive number two on the list, citric acid and ascorbic acid,
the common ingredients that you'll find perhaps on juices, especially orange juice.
I started running into people who had mysterious allergies in Eugene.
They tend to start with the pollen season and then continue with the grass seed field burning in the later summer.
Allergies were extremely common in Eugene, but I found that some people had year-round allergies
and they were consistently taking all of the anti-allergy supplements, panacinic acid, vitamin A, vitamin C and so on.
And I suggested that they try stopping those for a while to see what happens.
And I got essentially 100% results in curing the local allergies
and that was when I started doing a lot of nutrition counseling
because everyone was so surprised to see that they had been allergic to the supplement.
And ascorbic acid, that caused me to investigate the history of it.
In 1953, when I worked in the woods, the word went around that you could cure poison oak with ascorbic acid.
And I tried it myself and in just two or three days,
I completely recovered from a horrible case of poison oak and never caught it again.
At that time, it was very expensive to make and the pills on sale were only 50 milligrams.
Several years later, they developed new ways of manufacturing it.
One of the processes Linus Pauling described as the lead room for making sulfuric acid,
which is then the sulfuric acid is slightly contaminated with lead and other heavy metals.
Then the cornstarch is processed, oxidized with this industrial sulfuric acid
and ends up as ascorbic acid containing quite a bit of heavy metals.
And with these new methods, I found that when people were taking 500 or 1000 milligrams,
they would often develop cold symptoms when they took it rather than when they didn't take it.
And it apparently is irritating enough to the intestine that it causes endotoxin absorption
and inflammation of the nose and throat and chest membranes.
And citric acid is manufactured by very similar methods to ascorbic acid.
And they really shouldn't be considered to have anything to do with the natural ascorbic acid or citric acid.
A person who can get very sick on 2 milligrams of synthetic ascorbic acid
can eat 4000 milligrams of natural ascorbic acid with no reaction at all.
I think that's a very important point.
Actually, even though they might call it the same product,
the industrial manufacture of it produces a very different effect.
One researcher dissolved a 500 milligram tablet of commercial ascorbic acid in a liter of water
and then put it in a machine that measures free radicals.
And he said it was like a storm of free radicals.
He said it's amazing.
It was equivalent to something like 600 rads of x-rays would take to produce that many free radicals in the water.
And here people are taking vitamin C for its antioxidant effect.
Yeah. He said it shows what tremendous antioxidant systems we have in our stomachs
that can't help at all and die with the first 500 milligram dose.
Wow. OK. So I guess let's move on because it's 7.27 now.
How about the gums?
We see things like guagum and locust bean gum and carob bean gum, xanthan gum and carrageenan, agar, agar
and these other similar gums and mucilages.
How about those?
I was reading the Encyclopedia Britannica yearbooks for the 1947 or so
and I saw that the FDA had declared that they were so allergenic they shouldn't be considered fit for use in food.
And now they're in everything.
Most ice cream, Scottish cheese.
Yeah. Run through a list of the kind of foods that you'll find these gums and mucilages in.
Oh, practically everything.
If they haven't figured out a way to get it into fresh eggs and oranges.
Not yet.
And even if it doesn't say on the label, that doesn't mean it's not in there. Right, Dr. Peat?
Yeah. And surprisingly, even organic foods,
sometimes they don't have to list things like sulfites on the labels.
But I think they do have to list carrageenan, but it can be in the food as a gum thickener, for example,
and still be called organic.
But not long ago, there was a publication of a person who died after having an alginate dental impression made with anaphylactic shock.
So they're very allergenic because an alginate would be like the agar agar, right?
Yeah. And in the dental school at the University of Kansas,
students were practicing making alginate impressions on each other.
And out of 227, there were close to 50 of them who developed blisters in their mouth.
Wow. That's about 18%, isn't it?
It took about five days to clear up.
And just contact can, in 20% of the people, create blisters, and in occasional unlucky people, it can kill them.
Wow. So these are really the things that if people that are listening to the show want to think about these things,
they're basically the thickeners. So the kind of foods that we found in, I mean, ice cream, believe it or not,
it's certainly present in ice cream.
And organic whipping cream, I noticed.
Okay, whipping cream. And how about cottage cheese?
I've seen cottage cheese with guava gums.
Yeah, Organic Valley and the Clover Cottage Cheese, those have it in there.
I'm a fan of cottage cheese, and I was hard-pressed to find one that didn't have it.
And finally, I found Nancy's. It's quite tart, but it does have it in there.
It doesn't have the guava gums in there.
And so what I eventually did is started making my own cottage cheese, which is quite simple.
So what are the foods? Let's just quickly mention other foods that people can just take a look at the ingredient panel
and see for themselves. So things like ice cream, cottage cheese, bread products, cookies, tortillas,
believe it or not. Any other foods that spring to mind?
A lot of processed foods. Just read the labels.
Yeah, it's the unfortunate thing that processed foods contain a lot of the things that we're going to talk about tonight.
Okay, so how about--let's quickly mention this, because I know we've spent some time at length talking about them.
But PUFAs, the polyunsaturated fatty acids, are a pretty big problem.
Yeah, in natural foods, I think there are two or three naturally occurring substances that account for some natural disease
and possibly all of the major degenerative diseases.
One of those are polyunsaturated fat, starches, and sometimes an excess of iron in some natural foods,
if you eat that exclusively.
For example, if you ate liver every day accompanied by orange juice, you would absorb a toxic amount of iron.
But just over the period of several years, you can see the accumulation of the polyunsaturated fat in the tissue.
So that old animals have highly polyunsaturated brain tissue, and all through the tissues, it's more unsaturated.
The long-lived animals that are remarkable for living longer than you would expect are unusually saturated in their fat.
Okay, all right. So we'll just basically mention the kind of things.
So PUFAs, you'll find these polyunsaturated in things like corn oil, soy oil, fish oils to some extent.
And these are things that, not so much fish oils, but the corn and the other oils,
the things that are certainly used as frying oils, the things that are basically fried chips or fries, french fries,
and other products that are usually fried in these kind of oils.
So certainly things to look out for.
In terms of what they do, Dr. Peat, just quickly mention some of the conditions that they can lead to.
Arthritis, cancer, dementia, wrinkly skin, susceptibility to sunburn.
An article that just came out two months ago was looking at the pigment epithelium in the retina.
And they found that the linoleic acid in particular, but all of the polyunsaturated fatty acids,
created an inflammatory process that basically accelerates the degeneration of the retina.
One of my newsletters a couple of years ago went over that, but this was just a couple of months ago.
A new article showed that sturic acid or saturated fatty acids don't do that.
And for many years, some researchers on alcoholic liver disease have been showing that it's the polyunsaturated fats
which cause cirrhosis and hepatitis when they drink alcohol.
In India, alcoholics who are in the butter, ghee and milk eating regions don't get cirrhosis.
Okay, so the cirrhosis is not apparent at all in those people then.
It's purely those people that would drink or consume alcohol in the presence of polyunsaturated oils in their diet.
Yeah, and a group led by a man named Nanshi has demonstrated that saturated fats can basically cure alcoholics cirrhosis and hepatitis.
Even in the presence of them continuing to drink, I think you said 32 ounces of vodka a day?
That wasn't Nanshi's group, but it was about 30 or 40 years ago someone did allow them to drink a quart of vodka every day
and they still recovered when they had their saturated fats.
So naturally occurring saturated fats, to recap for our listeners, are butter, coconut oil, palm oil,
if it's been separated because there's two portions of the palm oil.
Beef and lamb fat and cocoa butter.
So those are the saturated fats and the polyunsaturated fats, to name a few more, sesame seed oil,
or even the nuts and seeds in high quantities will provide a lot of polyunsaturated fats if you eat primarily nuts and seeds.
And chickens and pigs, if they're fed on a high corn and soy diet.
Which they all are in this country.
Yes, their fats will be representative of what they were eating.
Even our eggs, because all chickens, even if they're fed organic feed.
Yes, they used to talk about the high saturated fat and cholesterol content of eggs,
but about 30 years ago someone decided to reanalyze and found that at that time they were already almost purely polyunsaturated.
So eggs don't even have saturated fat anymore because they feed the chickens corn and soy as their main primary food.
Okay, well you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMED Garboville 91.1.
At any time now until 8 o'clock you're invited to call in with any questions,
either related or unrelated to this month's topic of the 10 most toxic things in our food.
My name's Andrew Murray.
My name's Sarah Johannison Murray.
And we're joined by guest speaker Dr. Raymond Peat, endocrinologist, biochemist and physiologist.
The number here if you live in the area is 923 3911 or if you're outside the area 1800 KMUD Rad.
Okay, so let's go on to the next group of food products or food incorporations into food.
Things that make up the bulk of food in some people's diets.
Yeah, well, Dr. Peat, you kind of categorize saying three toxic things that are in our foods naturally occurring rather than as food additives are the polyunsaturates, the starches and excess iron.
So let's talk about starches.
A man named Gerhard Volkheimer, an immunologist in Berlin, had apparently read some of the older studies about 100 years ago,
and he tested on his medical students having them drink a solution about a cup full of corn starch stirred into water or potato starch, various vegetable starches.
And then he would draw a blood sample periodically.
And at first it was very clear that within about 10 or 15 minutes of drinking the starch solution,
you would find a lot of the unprocessed starch pellets in the bloodstream, the same size that they were when they were ingested.
And in some of these starches, the diameter of the starch grain is as much as 100 microns across, 10 times as wide as the cells that line the intestine.
So how did it get through?
The process is called persorption, but basically it just means they are pressed on one side and they pop out the other side.
The cells are much more flexible than people imagine.
And you said 100 microns?
Yeah.
And the red blood cells are about 7.
That's the potato starch, I think.
Yeah.
Since the capillaries are just a few microns across and a red cell at 10 or 11 microns has to bend a little bit to get through a capillary,
the starch grains can get, if they're just the right size, they could enter a capillary and get stuck.
But the bigger ones will plug the arterioles before they get to the capillaries.
Okay.
And so a full timer fed a high starch diet to mice and then sliced them up and found that every organ contained areas where cells had been killed by plugging up an artery with --
Ischemia.
Ischemia. And that it accelerated the aging process by killing areas in the heart and brain and kidneys and so on.
So that's causing heart disease then, basically.
Yeah.
And in his medical students, after the first 15 to 30 minutes, he tested the urine and found that the same unprocessed starch grains were showing up in the urine right through the kidney organelles.
And somewhat later, he found it in the bile and even in the -- about an hour later, he could find it in the cerebrospinal fluid.
Wow.
Okay.
We do have a -- I know I want to explore this a little bit further, but we do have a caller on the line.
You're on the air?
Hi.
How are you doing?
Good.
And you?
Good.
I'm doing well.
Thank you.
I just want to thank you for your show.
It's a wonderful show and just really full of great information.
And I'm calling about my -- I have a 13-year-old daughter who has allergies.
And I've heard you mention it a couple of times.
And we eat pretty well.
We live locally and eat pretty good organic food.
Probably about 15% is packaged, you know, just ice cream and bars maybe or potato chips, you know, and good -- anyways.
And so she -- my daughter has these allergies, and the symptoms are stuffy nose and then some bumps, sometimes on her face or sometimes on her legs.
We had her tested for allergies, and she tested positive for Johnson grass and some molds,
and then sensitivities to wheat, dairy, and corn.
We did an elimination diet and determined that those seemed to be the culprits,
and the dairy seemed to make her more stuffed up, and the corn and wheat sort of generated the bumps.
And I was just wondering if -- you know, what your -- how would -- what your take on that is.
And it seemed to come on about when she was between 6 and 8 years old is when these allergies started to manifest.
Okay. And how old is she now?
She's 13, about to be 14, so 13, yeah.
Okay. Well, Dr. Peat, do you want to comment on this?
With allergies, it's similar to autoimmunity except not so serious.
The estrogen begins to rise, especially in girls, but in boys, too, around the age of 7 or 8.
It's distinctly rising in the average person.
And the estrogen changes the immune function, tends to shrink the thymus gland, and increase antibody production without the guidance of the thymus cells.
And that seems to be why it predisposes to allergies, asthma, and autoimmunity.
Asthma is now very well recognized to be increased by burst control pills, menopausal estrogen, or even the cyclic premenstrual rise in estrogen.
And partly that's the effect of lowering the blood sugar, because if your blood sugar falls, the immune cells become much more reactive.
An experimenter gave animals -- first, he ranked the food allergens from nuts down to some fruits.
And the mild allergens, if he lowered the animal's blood sugar with a little insulin to 50% of normal,
the mildest allergens could kill the animals with an allergic reaction.
But if he infused glucose while exposing them to even the worst allergens, the worst allergens might give them the sniffles or a red nose, but nothing worse.
So just increasing glucose or decreasing it can make just a total difference in your sensitivity.
And since thyroid and progesterone are the main things that allow your liver to store adequate glycogen,
and estrogen is the main thing that interferes with that, that's why the sensitivities of various sorts come on around puberty.
Wow. Okay, good.
All right, so, you know, that's probably another misconception that sugar's bad for you.
Just say a little bit more about sugar in terms of its physiological effects
and maybe why the culture has been turned off of sugar and onto artificial sweeteners.
Oh, the cultural thing is a really complex story.
But the white sugar was already being blamed for causing diabetes 150 years ago.
And the treatment for diabetics was to absolutely forbid sugar, which was a completely crazy idea.
A French and an English doctor said that if they're losing a pound of sugar per day in their urine,
they're surely going to die sooner if they don't eat any sugar.
So he fed them up to 12, 14 ounces of sugar.
He said the best white granulated sugar he could buy.
And he cured his patients just by feeding them as much sugar as they were losing.
And the process of washing it eliminates most of the allergens.
So the finest white sugar is really one of the safest foods available.
Okay, because I know there's a very big trend towards molasses sugar and the kind of brown, golden sugars.
Okay, there's another call on the line, Dr. Peat. So let's call you on the air.
Hi, I have some questions about coconut oil.
Okay.
First of all, could you explain the difference between the coconut oils and the coconut milk as far as what they are and their health effects?
And then the other question I have has to do with recipes for coconut oil.
I find it works great in stir fries if you mix it with sesame oil or something,
but it doesn't really have a flavor that's conducive to, you know, eggs or things like that.
And I'm just wondering if you have any suggestions for recipes for coconut oil that would go well with.
Thank you.
The coconut water is a pretty safe material.
When the coconut is relatively fresh, the liquid should be almost clear and very sweet.
And it's been used medically, and it's surprisingly low in allergenicity.
But the white material that is sold as milk is an industrial manufactured substance made out of basically emulsifying some of the solids and oil with the liquid from the coconut.
Another source of guar gum, I think, is in coconut milk.
The solids in coconut are very starchy and can be pretty allergenic,
so I recommend using the highly filtered deodorized form of coconut oil, which is extremely cheap.
Currently, it's about $50 for a five-gallon pail of it, where the aromatic delicately scented ones that haven't been filtered,
some people just a teaspoon of that can make some people very sick from an allergic reaction to the starches that are left in it.
And if it's very well filtered, high-quality oil, it tastes fine for frying chicken.
I've been frying chicken in coconut oil for many years, and it works with eggs, but it isn't as tasty as butter for some foods like eggs.
What's available here is the coconut oil, which is like a clear solid, like a wax almost,
and that's what I've been using for stir-fries, and it doesn't seem to have quite the flavor that goes well with some recipes.
And then there's the coconut milk that you buy in the cans that you use in curries and Thai-style food.
So that's what's available.
There have been some studies, even in the Philippines, in which the people who used milk traditionally were having health problems.
So even in the traditional forms, it is probably not a very good food to use.
You sent us an article, Dr. Peat, that was showing an increased risk of breast cancer in women in the Philippines who ate a lot of coconut milk in their food recipes.
But just to answer your question, Collar, the Chautauqua sells the tropical traditions Expeller Press coconut oil, and I think you've had some of that too, Dr. Peat.
That seems to be the best one I've found that doesn't have the coconut flavor, therefore it doesn't have the allogenicity that could be provided by the coconut.
And it's relatively tasteless, and it doesn't taste like anything, basically.
It's the non-organic Expeller Press tropical traditions, and they do sell it at Chautauqua.
I don't know if you live in southern Hubble or northern Hubble.
No, I don't.
What I see available is this waxy stuff.
It looks like the pure oil, but I find confusion about the health effects of the oil, which I've heard you recommend quite a bit.
And it seems to make me flush and raise my body temperature sometimes.
And the coconut milk, which sometimes I think has the same effect, but I don't cook with it that often because those recipes are so tasty that I overeat.
So anyway, I'm trying to figure out how to work it into my diet if it really has these positive effects in a way that makes it appetizing.
Thank you.
Thank you for your call.
One of the very pleasant ways to use the deodorized oil is to emulsify it.
A little bit of egg yolk is all it takes.
If you warm the oil and the milk, just a touch of egg yolk will allow it to emulsify about 50 percent oil to milk or whatever concentration you want.
And you can make ice cream or cheesecake, all kinds of buttery, creamy, consistency foods using instead of cream or cream cheese, you can use the coconut oil emulsified.
OK, great. Thank you.
Let's move on.
I think I wanted to cover the starches a little bit more, but let's move on to the next ingredients.
The GMO microbial enzymes and the vegetarian rennet.
These are kind of cheese replacements.
Will you talk a little bit about rennet and why natural rennet from a cow's or young calf's stomach is not being used now,
but it's being genetically modified on yeasts and other microorganisms and how this has contributed to allergies in people and people that say they can't eat cheese, etc.?
I think it's the trace allergens, parts of the fungus or the bacteria.
Aspergillosis is a very serious disease,
and people who work in some of these enzyme factories are exposed to dust from the microorganisms and develop allergies of various sorts.
But the regulators assume that the people who eat the stuff aren't going to have the same sort of reactions.
Aspergillosis is farmers' lung, isn't it?
They get it from moldy straw, and it's another respiratory pre-occupational disease for farmers.
Yeah, and all of the organisms used in manufacturing amino acids or proteins or enzymes,
all of them have their risk of the impurities being left in the product.
The food producers are being pressured in various ways to give up the natural material and buy their stuff in a can and do it like they were in a chemical lab rather than a kitchen.
Many kinds of pressure are affecting the food supply so that people are coming to believe that the industrial way is necessary.
You can see government and commercial websites that say these things are necessary for high-quality food.
If you're going to keep the food on the shelf for a month or two, maybe it's necessary.
For example, Nancy's cottage cheese used to be natural cottage cheese,
and the way cottage cheese was always made was to drain the curd and salt it, and draining it left the curd free of lactic acid.
A couple of years ago, someone convinced the Nancy's yogurt people to start using what they call a dressing consisting of lactic acid and something else to give the cottage cheese a very long shelf life.
Lactic acid suppresses the growth of organisms, but it's also just as toxic to the people who eat it as it is to the organisms that are being suppressed by it.
It very quickly can stimulate the whole inflammatory chain reaction, the same as the polyunsaturated fat.
If that inflammation is continued chronically, then it increases fibrosis.
The same as radiation, any of these chronic inflammations eventually increase the risk of cancer.
We're told it's good for us. Lactic acid is great for your intestinal health, right? That's what we're told.
We have a caller on the line.
We'd better be very quick though, because it is four minutes to, and I do want to give people some more information about Dr. Ray Peat.
So, it's going to be for about two minutes, unfortunately, but you're on the air.
All right, I'll take ten seconds. I just wanted to ask, what do you think of olive oil and canola oil? And I'll go off the air.
Okay, thank you. Dr. Peat?
In small quantities, like a teaspoonful or so of olive oil, it's fine, safe, because it's only 10 percent of the toxic polyunsaturated fats.
Canola oil is very high in the polyunsaturated, and it got its reputation as being a healthful oil about 30 years ago,
when they learned to lower the erucic acid content.
But Hans Selye demonstrated that it is not the erucic acid which was causing it to cause heart damage and other degenerative processes.
It was the linoleic acid itself, the so-called essential fatty acid, which was causing death of heart cells.
And he showed that just by adding stearic acid from cocoa butter, he could neutralize the toxic effect on the heart.
So, it's the ratio, and the canola oil has a very high content of the dangerous polyunsaturated.
Thank you for that, Dr. Peat. I just want to summarize the rennet with referring to the cheeses.
The natural sources of rennet that have been used for thousands of years are animal rennet,
or non-animal natural sources are fig juice, nettles, thistles, mallow, creeping charlene, cardoon thistle, vinegar, lemon juice, or just letting the milk sour to form a curd.
Artificial sources of rennet are enzymes, vegetarian rennet, microbial enzymes, and they are either derived from molds, so they're very allergenic, or they're genetically engineered.
So, vegetarian rennet, folks, is not a safe rennet.
Okay, well, we apologize for not mentioning Dr. Ray Peat's contact details at the end of last month's "Ask Your Heart Doctor."
We had the program on the dangers of medical radiation. It was very interesting, and unfortunately, Dr. Peat wasn't mentioned there as the contact details.
So, he can be reached on his website. He has a website, and it's www.raypeat.com. That's R-A-Y-P-E-A-T.com.
And we can be reached toll-free on 1-888-WBM-ERB for consultations or further information.
And once again, thank you, Dr. Peat, for joining us.
Okay, thank you.
It's always a pleasure.
Well, we've probably only got halfway through the food ingredients.
Unfortunately, it's an unfortunate thing about most people.
Yeah, don't often think that much about what they are putting into their bodies, and people should just take more time to look at the ingredient panels on the foods that they eat,
because you will find a lot of hidden material that does cause problems.
So, basically, take a good look at what you're eating.
So, thank you to all of you who listen regularly, and those who tuned in this evening.