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And without further ado, we're going to bring you our evening's program, Ask Your Herb Doctor.
Ask Your Herb Doctor.
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Don't forget everything we talked about with Dr.
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He's waiting.
Welcome to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name's Andrew Murray.
My name's Sarah Johannison Murray.
For those of you who perhaps have never listened to our shows, which run every third Friday of the month from 7 to 8pm,
we're both licensed medical herbalists who trained 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 we manufacture all our own certified organic herb extracts, which are either grown on our CCUF certified herb farm
or which are sourced from other USA Organics certified organic suppliers.
So you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor, KMU DeGarboville, 91.1 FM,
and from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o'clock, you're all invited to call in with any questions,
either related or unrelated to this month's topic, a mixed topic of endotoxin, stress and depression,
and how the body is affected physiologically.
And we're very pleased to have Dr. Raymond Peat join us on the show this evening.
And like I said, from 7.30, or in fact, if people want to call a little earlier than that, if they have pressing questions,
yeah, please do phone up and Dr. Peat's available with his collective wisdom to answer questions on many different subjects,
maybe not just pertinent to this evening's discussion on endotoxin and stress.
So Dr. Peat, thank you for joining us again this evening.
Yeah, hi.
As always, there's people I'm sure who've just tuned in now who maybe never heard the show and never heard you.
Would you be able to let people know your specific interests and your professional academic background?
Yeah, I studied biology at the University of Oregon,
and my dissertation was on aging of the oxidative processes in relation to reproduction
and how the hormones change with aging and affect the efficiency of oxidative metabolism.
And the main hormones that I've studied over the years have related directly to estrogen, progesterone and thyroid,
and the nutritional and environmental factors that influence those
and how all of the minor hormones and signaling substances in the body are interrelated between the environment
and those hormones and the respiratory energy production.
Okay, thank you for that.
So if people want to call in, the number here is KMUD 923-3911, the area code 707.
And so from 7.30 to the end of the show at 8 o'clock, people are welcome to call in.
Now, Dr. Peat, I know that you have a rather unique view of physiology and biology,
which is different somewhat to the scientific -- we'll call it the regular scientific,
because I know your methodology is very scientific.
But the regular biological community and the way that they've done their research
or their research has been funded by various organizations
has led them to be a little bit inaccurate in their perceptions of how cellular or biological systems are operating.
In terms of the body, I think probably what we want to try and go through this evening
are just to reiterate some of the problems associated with the modern diet, modern nutrition,
how we've been misled into believing that certain things are good for us.
And I know we're going to talk about serotonin this evening.
But in terms of what you've been researching, what you found out, what you've applied,
will you tell us a little bit about serotonin's effects?
Because I think most people would associate serotonin with something positive, and I know that it's not.
Yeah, since about the Second World War,
biology has been heavily influenced by several factors.
The agricultural industry is interested in promoting certain ideas towards food.
The pharmaceutical industry is promoting a very mechanical reductionist interpretation of health in general
based on the idea of receptors and genetic interaction with specific hormones and receptors and drugs.
And then there's the government and military orientation that has its commitment to certain kinds of psychology and science,
promoting, again, the reductionist, anti-holistic, anti-pattern-oriented kind of science.
So that's why our agricultural USDA recommended daily intake of refined carbohydrates or, you know,
breads and pastas and those types of foods.
And that was six to seven servings per day, and that was the bottom of the triangle.
And you can see that they are actually having their effect.
In the last 35 years, the consumption of flour and cereals, pasta and so on, has increased by 3 percent,
just as the agriculture department put in their triangle.
It should be a fat bottom on the triangle.
So they've influenced -- the agriculture area has influenced the government's recommended daily intake,
where if you look at diets from 80 to 100 years ago, the grains were not such a major part of the diet.
Yeah, and in these last 35 years, well, cereals and fats have increased.
Cereals are up 3 percent. Fats are up 7 percent.
During that time, meat, eggs, and dairy have decreased 3 percent,
and added sugar has even decreased 1 percent in these 35 years.
And where many people think that nutrition research should be exploratory,
looking for new ways that foods interact with the newly discovered biological possibilities,
the financing is heavily towards industrial food products as nutrients,
rather than exploring, for example, the thousands of fruits and vegetables that grow in the tropics.
Right. Well, our country doesn't grow those, so therefore we shouldn't eat them and shouldn't --
Shouldn't eat them.
Yeah, that happens with the coconut oil industry, which was used widely in products,
Oreo cookies and fried foods and so on from about the 1850s on.
When the soy oil got tired of competition, they put out tremendous propaganda starting 20 years ago
saying that the tropical oils were poisonous.
And what they did was increase the consumption of their unsaturated fats.
And now heart disease and high cholesterol and --
Yeah, and obesity related to high blood pressure, cancer, and dementia.
And diabetes have all been on the increase.
Yeah, and these are known to be increased by unsaturated fats and cereals and starches,
exactly the things the government has promoted.
Well, hopefully a lot of our listeners don't listen to what the government promotes around here anyways.
I think they don't.
Okay, getting back to serotonin, Dr. Peat, like I said,
I think most people think mistakenly that serotonin is good for you,
and they said people have constantly in the past asked us about serotonin
and that it would be good for sleep and good for this and good for that.
What's the truth behind serotonin so people can realize what they've been doing or what they need to stop?
Well, an example of how confused the promotion has been is that one of the major antidepressants
that's called a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor that supposedly acts by increasing serotonin,
they knew that it was a good effective treatment for vicious dogs,
and they said that that's because it increases their serotonin.
But people studying the dogs after a month of treatment with this SSRI found that, in fact,
they were less vicious and their serotonin had gone down significantly.
So it didn't increase their serotonin, it actually decreased their serotonin.
Yeah, I think the antidepressants that work are actually in the long run shifting the balance away from serotonin.
But it doesn't matter now because the perception is out that serotonin is the good guy
and you take these antidepressants and it increases the good guy and you feel better.
Yeah, over the last 40 years, there have been many papers published showing that,
starting back with the LSD research, they saw that LSD counteracted the effects of serotonin on smooth muscle,
and then finally they showed an antagonistic effect where it inhibits the serotonin nerves in the brain.
So every place that they checked its function as an actual antidote to serotonin,
it was opposing serotonin and was improving functions such as learning ability,
many physical symptoms, anti-tumor and anti-inflammatory, many good health functions.
But because of the government campaign against LSD type drugs,
the drug companies came out with some modified forms of lysergic acid such as bromocriptine and lisuride
and some anti-serotonin drugs that were known to lower serotonin,
but they advertised them as pro-dopamine drugs rather than anti-serotonin or even anti-histamine,
in the case of one which was really primarily an anti-serotonin drug.
But they took advantage of the government campaign against the anti-serotonin drugs
to say that the psychedelic drugs made people insane,
and so they started promoting the idea that their drugs would make people sane and happy by increasing serotonin.
So that's how it began.
I know you've mentioned, and if you could just explain a little bit again to our listeners,
I know you've mentioned the fact that serotonin primarily is produced in the bowel.
Yes, it's a defensive chemical everywhere.
It's one of the primitive protective reactions, for example, in the bowel.
It causes spasms that clean out the bowel when you eat something poisonous,
and so it causes diarrhea and that's protective.
But in the process, if it keeps up too long, it increases the serotonin,
95% of it being produced in the bowel and only 3%, 4%, or 5% in other organs such as the brain.
If the irritation of the bowel keeps up very long, the circulation in the bloodstream becomes a problem systemically,
and it will cause vascular spasms, vascular leakiness, inflammation.
For example, when you have prolonged irritation of the intestine, tumors begin to promote serotonin release,
starting mainly in the appendix.
The lower part of the bowel is where it's most likely to be overproduced,
and that systemic effect hits the right side of the heart primarily,
and then the reason it is worse for the right side of the heart is that the lungs have the enzymes that destroy serotonin.
So the platelets pick it up from the intestine in the bloodstream and carry it to the lungs,
where if they're working, they can pretty much destroy all of the serotonin arriving in the lungs.
But the right side not?
Yeah, if the lungs fail to detoxify it, then the whole body can be affected,
but the right side is where it goes first and is pumped from the right side into the lungs.
So the right side gets it in its crude form, and then the rest of the body, if your lungs are efficient,
the rest of the body has a much lower level.
So what symptoms would somebody experience if they do have elevated serotonin leaking from their intestines
and then going and acting on the right side of the heart before the lungs inactivated it?
Fibrous deterioration of the valves on the right side of the lungs and ultimately pulmonary artery hypertension.
And surprisingly, the lung has some processes that see the opposite of what we usually think of for antioxidants.
Peroxide formed in the lungs by basically what seems to be a toxic oxygen reaction.
Peroxide helps to destroy the serotonin in the lungs.
So it has a very specific use of free radicals.
That seems to be how negatively ionized air helps to relieve asthma and many physiological problems
and improves mood because it helps to destroy serotonin in the lungs.
Okay, so pulmonary artery hypertension, that's one of the side effects of increased serotonin.
Yeah, that's where it got its name is from toning up the circulatory system.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, we want to talk about different foods and things you can do to try to decrease the bowels production of serotonin.
Okay, well, you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMED Gallipol 91.1 FM.
And from any time really from now until the end of the show at 8 o'clock, people are encouraged to call in.
And we've got a couple of questions they may have.
Dr. Raymond Peat's with us today.
And he's talking about serotonin, dietary changes, endotoxin production and stress
and how the medical establishment perhaps have had research done that's skewed, if you like,
to mention the word skewed in the direction of the funding party.
So, 9233911 or if you live outside the number here, it's 1800KMUDRAD.
Okay, so Dr. Peat, you were mentioning the effects of serotonin and specifically you mentioned the pulmonary artery hypertension.
So, if a patient had asthma or a client had asthma and constipation, say, or...
Or diarrhea.
Or diarrhea, rather.
And the irritable bowel syndrome is a typical high estrogen, high serotonin problem.
Have there been any conditions associated with the pulmonary side that would normally not be present in a healthy,
well, say, healthy person, but somebody who had a good oxidative metabolism
and their lungs were deactivating serotonin.
Are there any pulmonary changes that might happen in patients?
The best established are the asthma symptoms and the pulmonary artery hypertension,
but I think probably the emphysema category where you get thickening of the diffusion pathway between the membrane cells on the surface,
between the lung sacs and the capillaries.
Lactic acid and serotonin are closely connected.
One increases the other, and it's known that high lactic acid from too much exercise causes many athletes to chronically have an increased pathway
for diffusion so that their blood leaves the lungs less perfectly oxygenated than a person with lower serotonin and lactate.
So, and also with asthmatics, it's very common that if they can remove the food that they're allergic to
or that's irritating their intestine, then their asthma goes away.
Yeah, that's the direct effect of the serotonin on the contraction of the smooth muscles in the bronchial tubes.
That seems to be where the negatively ionized air can immediately help by destroying the serotonin faster.
I read in an article here that in the old days, and perhaps we can bring the question up a little bit about purgatives,
because that's always been something in herbal medicine from Culpeper on,
prior to Culpeper from the very beginning of herbal medicine in Greece,
the administration of purgatives was very important.
And so, to basically unstop people with constipation was looked at as a prime importance in treating inflammatory disorders.
And I know that you've quoted that inflammation of the bowel used to be a pretty well recorded
and quite frequently as a cause of death in older people, but it's seldom referred to now, if at all.
So, in terms of serotonin, that would have a bearing with that inflammatory bowel situation on autopsy?
Oh, yeah. When I worked in the hamster lab, we saw that the old animals practically always,
when they seemed to be dying of old age, were having a bowel inflammation.
And I looked up a lot of 19th century cases, and it was a very popular diagnosis of death at that time.
Right. Well, and it's also interesting in our herbal pharmacopoeias,
I'd say definitely over 50% of the herbs that have been traditionally used and passed down
and information on what conditions to use them for are either laxatives or purgatives
or collagogues that work on the liver or just herbs that help to restore normal bowel function.
A lot of the herbs that are in the pharmacopoeias are purgatives, are directed at the bowel and treating that.
And that was, you know, traditionally a very, very important place
because that's where we interact with our environment.
So, how important do you see bowel health to general systemic health?
Probably it's the central thing that everyone should think about more
because the connection can be traced pretty directly to Alzheimer's disease and other dementias
and liver disease, heart disease, arthritis.
They've known for many years that various types of arthritis are alleviated by prolonged fasting
because of relief of the inflammation in the intestine when a person just stops eating for a while.
But the laxatives and purgatives are really the more practical,
ongoing way to prevent that chronic inflammation.
Starches and indigestible fibers have been tested on various animals from horses to rats.
And practically all of the fibers that are used as food additives, carrageenan and guar gum,
various other gums, oat bran, and even some of the semi-synthetic things, metamucil, agar, and psyllium,
all have been identified as carcinogens for the intestine and possibly other organs.
And getting those out quickly before they support bacterial growth.
And ferment.
Yeah, the fermenting bacteria are known to increase the serotonin and lactic acid production.
And the endotoxin that we've mentioned.
Yeah, and there's a back and forth increase of endotoxin by the serotonin and vice versa.
And just for our listeners, endotoxin is something that bacteria produce
in response to digesting these indigestible fermentable starches.
Yeah, and all of these, both serotonin and endotoxin, increase other factors such as carbon monoxide, surprisingly.
That's another of our short-term primitive defensive systems is the oxidation of the heme molecule.
And that releases carbon monoxide that is protective in some ways in the short term.
But in the long range, it's known to be closely associated with Alzheimer's disease, cancer, brain injury,
many kinds of tissue injury, and it activates the conversion of polyunsaturated fats to the inflammatory prostaglandins.
And all of these tend to release more of the pre-fatty acids,
so it becomes a vicious circle of starch, serotonin, endotoxin, and so on.
What would you have to say about the, oh gosh, people talk about dietary fiber.
What's your take on dietary fiber and what is important?
The two that I have run across in the literature and experimentation are raw carrots and cooked bamboo shoots.
And these don't support bad bacteria? It's all about bad bacteria.
Yeah, they are antiseptic or antibiotic in themselves.
You can store them for a surprisingly long time, or other vegetables tend to rot if you store them in a wet condition.
But carrots are used to living in moist soil, and so they can kill the fungus and bacteria.
And just as a side note, with hand towels, you know, in the kitchen that you dry your hands on,
they make these bamboo fiber towels, and everybody knows, like, you have a cotton towel,
after one day of it getting used, pretty much all day long, it doesn't smell too nice by the next day.
I guess it's because it's supporting bacterial growth, but the bamboo towels, it's amazing.
They don't tend to smell as bad the next day.
Yeah, I don't think all of the chemicals have been identified.
It's partly that their cellulose is very resistant to bacterial breakdown in itself,
and it doesn't have things like pectin, which pectin does support some of the bad bacterial growth and fermentation,
and the so-called soluble fibers in beans and other legumes support bacterial and toxin production.
Why do you think it is that the whole industry, both the medical industry and the agricultural industry,
has been so keen to push dietary fiber down the necks of people?
In terms of all those dietary fibers that we talk about, that we're telling people that really they should be avoiding?
Well, traditionally, we ate a very low fiber diet from--I mean, a low fiber diet from grains.
I mean, we would have eaten our fruits and vegetables, but--
The fibers like the acacia and guar gum, these things are very convenient for food processing.
Carrageenan is now very widely used.
They can increase the weight of meat by as much as 30 percent by infecting this water-retaining gum,
and it's used instead of cream for making ice cream, so it has a very long shelf life,
where if you used good cream or coconut oil, you could get a very fine texture that would last a long time.
But it's just a matter of the cheapness of carrageenan and these other gums.
So just to cover some of the other starches, traditionally, we would have eaten potatoes,
and South America ate a lot of masa, which has been partially digested.
So what can we do, Dr. Peat, with the grains,
or if thinking about how tradition has eaten starches and coped with it?
Dennis Burkett, who sort of started the fiber fad about 30 years ago,
when he discovered that Africans didn't have a very high incidence of bowel and liver cancer
and that they tended to have three bowel movements per day, where Americans are more likely to have one or fewer.
He said that he thought fiber prevented the retention of the carcinogenic toxins,
but he was talking primarily about potatoes,
and when he came to the U.S. and saw that people were interpreting it as oat fiber,
oat bran and various other grain fibers, a few people outside the U.S. did research,
showing that, in fact, those increase cancer incidence.
So if someone were to eat root vegetables and boil them very, very well,
this helps to break down the starch so it doesn't provide very much food for the bacteria,
and saturated fats such as coconut oil and butter put on the starches helps inhibit the growth of the bacteria.
So mashed potatoes with lots of coconut oil and some butter for flavor, or if you need to gain weight, lots of butter.
Yeah, and it happens that phosphate, which you get in the grains,
this might really be a part of why the fiber is carcinogenic from grains,
because seeds and grains and nuts are so rich in phosphorus,
and phosphate stimulates the breakdown of these soluble or indigestible fibers by bacteria,
and calcium blocks that phospholysis of the fibers by bacteria.
And so a high calcium, low phosphate diet goes with saturated fats in suppressing the toxic effects of the starches.
And what about fermenting grains, you know, like traditional sour bread, sourdough bread?
Yeah, that digests it. The longer it digests, the more it turns into a sprout,
and the sprout is basically a little sugar and mostly proteins and water,
where the starch is mostly indigestible proteins and starches with a high phosphate content.
While we're talking about phosphorus and calcium, I was looking on the web today,
doing a little bit of preparation for today, and I couldn't believe an article written by a research,
no, not a research professor, they were a medical doctor, but they were specializing in a certain area,
and they seem to have an air of credibility about them,
but they were really putting down the need for calcium and also reducing the need or the international units for vitamin D.
I think they were only quoting about 400 IU or 4 to 600 IU for vitamin D,
when I know we've heard and you've mentioned 2 to 4, 6,000 IUs of vitamin D.
And the calcium intake, they were trying to say that actually more is not better,
when I think most people's intake of calcium is fairly low, given the traditional sources.
And I know that you would defend the increase in dietary calcium as being very pro or anti-inflammatory,
being very quelling.
Yeah, I was thinking about the diet traditionally of the Maasai and related tribes in the high altitudes of Africa,
they at least for half the year when the cows are producing milk, often drink 5 to 10 liters of milk a day.
It isn't exceptional.
And so they're getting 5,000 milligrams of calcium and more very often.
And they don't suffer from usual degenerative diseases.
I think this doctor was talking about all the problems of calcification,
you know, it's higher when you have a high calcium diet and then the chances of getting calcified, you know, arteries, etc.
Well, that's something way back in 1940s and 50s.
Adele Davis reviewed it in her books that doctors consistently get it wrong.
They think mechanically that if you eat more calcium, you're going to calcify your kidneys and arteries.
And it's been known very consistently for 60 years roughly that when you're low in calcium and/or vitamin D or vitamin K,
your parathyroid hormone increases and it helps to increase it from any food calcium that's in your intestine.
But when that isn't adequate, the parathyroid hormone, it's increased by high phosphate,
but it takes calcium out of the bones to balance the phosphate and puts it into the arteries and kidneys.
And so the surest way to guarantee calcification of your brain and heart and arteries and kidneys is to have a high phosphate,
low calcium, low vitamin K and vitamin D diet.
Perhaps that study was funded by the producers of Fosamax or those other drugs because they know that if people aren't getting their calcium
and vitamin D at adequate levels, that they will have more bone disease and heart disease.
And some of the biggest, we have a call on the line, but very quickly, some of the biggest source of dietary phosphorus is legumes, isn't it?
Beans and peas.
Yeah.
Yeah. Okay, so we have a call on the line. So you're on the air.
Hi, yes. And for just that reason, I've always just chosen the intake in moderation because what kills you one week is the fountain of youth the next week,
it seems, from these studies.
So it seems that having a little bit of everything and not too much of anything is probably the best answer.
And of course, food pyramids, I've never eaten one.
The closest thing to that maybe is a tortilla chip with that shape, but I always chewed it up first because that shape's hard to swallow.
My questions are about serotonin.
I always learn a lot from you, Dr. Peat, and I was always under the impression that serotonin was mainly a brain chemical.
But since you mentioned its effect on the digestive system, I'm wondering what the counteraction or interaction of melatonin would be in comparison to serotonin.
And also, is alcohol considered an endotoxin and what foods may actually cause alcohol to be created within the gut?
I've heard that people can actually get somewhat intoxicated from alcohol by eating certain foods which ferment within the gut,
especially good to know since there's a DUI checkpoint in Humboldt County somewhere this weekend.
And I'll take your response off the air. Thanks for the program.
Thank you for your call.
Okay, so what part of the questions do you want to go for?
If a person has very sluggish digestion, it only happens occasionally, but yeast can grow so freely if the intestine is sluggish
and the membrane cells are weak that the overgrowth of yeast can turn sugars into alcohol.
Some people stay drunk all the time when they have yeast that are able to live in the upper part of the intestine or even in the stomach.
So then, would those people, if they drank alcohol, would they feel even more drunk more quickly?
Yeah.
Because they already have a baseline level.
Yeah, and that tends to increase the carbon monoxide. That's the toxic part of it.
The alcohol itself in those small amounts, chronically, they might be mildly drunk,
but that isn't probably as harmful as the fact that carbon monoxide is increased by the alcohol.
That's one of the problems with drinking any sort of alcohol chronically.
It tends to push up carbon monoxide production.
One of the problems with carbon monoxide besides blocking oxidative metabolism,
just like when you're poisoned by external carbon monoxide,
the enzyme that makes the carbon monoxide releases iron and iron deposits in the brain and liver and other places with a toxic effect.
And arteries.
Yeah.
So how about the connection between serotonin and melatonin?
I know you asked that as his first question.
It's clear for a long time that the pineal gland is converting serotonin to melatonin,
and it's activated by adrenaline during stress.
And so it's generally seen to have this reaction to adrenaline and it has opposite effects from serotonin.
So I think of it even in the brain as a detoxifying system against serotonin.
And people studying rheumatoid arthritis and heart disease see the same.
And I think breast cancer was another area where you see the enzyme that is able to convert serotonin into melatonin.
So it's probably defensive against these inflammatory carcinogenic and degenerative effects of serotonin.
Would you consider that it would be useful to supplement with melatonin?
I think it has its anti-inflammatory effects, but I think it's much better to work at the other end.
Especially --
Making it unnecessary by reducing your tryptophan intake, for example.
Good.
And reducing the starches and inflammation-producing things.
Okay, good.
And anything that irritates the intestine is going to cause the intestine to produce more serotonin as well.
Yeah, including unsaturated fatty acids.
Which are all the vegetable oils.
I know we have another two callers on the line.
Actually, one of them was me.
I was going to ask, when you get your stomach all in knots from either love or fear or stress or whatever,
is there serotonin being released?
Or what's the biochemical basis of that, if you knew?
In what?
Our programmer here said that when you're in love or you're really stressed and your stomach gets tied in knots,
is serotonin involved in tying your stomach in knots?
Or is it adrenaline?
Under some conditions, yeah.
It's the thing that causes stress ulcers.
The main thing, I think, that causes stress ulcers, like the immobilized rats,
experimentally will quickly get intestinal bleeding and stomach ulcers.
And if they're allowed to defend themselves in some way, even though they're still restrained,
they can block that stress reaction and lower the serotonin.
And the way they were able to defend themselves was biting on a stick.
Yeah.
Quite an interesting experiment, because it's a very good illustration of that ability to defend yourself.
I think of that as analogous to the two types of muscle exercise,
the concentric so-called exercise where you're basically walking uphill and shortening the muscles under force,
and eccentric where your muscles are stretching against the attempt to contract them,
like walking downhill, it makes your muscles sore.
I think of the ability to bite the stick as the same as doing concentric exercise.
They've shown that old people with very damaged mitochondria in their muscles,
two or three weeks of doing concentric exercises, only shortening the muscles under resistance,
they can repair or create new functional mitochondria in their muscles.
And I think that same sort of thing happens in the nervous system when you can do something protective or constructive.
Now, I wonder, just on a side note, would the anabolic exercise of perhaps curling dumbbells, I mean, that would be concentric.
Yeah, mostly.
So, other weightlifting exercises when you're stationary.
Yeah, they have machines that will let you put force while shortening your muscles
and then let you relax as the arm or leg goes back into position.
Yeah, because these don't destroy the muscle fibers so much as the eccentric.
Okay, I think there's two more callers on the line, so let's take the next caller.
Hello, is that me?
Yes, you're on the air.
Okay, I was driving so I couldn't call when you were talking about wheat and people having so much refined grains and so on.
I'm an old guy and I was on the farm in the '30s and '40s and the wheat that were grown then,
well, the wheat that's grown now by big agribusiness since World War II, particularly in the '70s, '80s and '90s,
has almost 90% more gluten, which is a lectin.
Lectin, lectin, I don't know how to say it.
That's one of the problems because you go to the restaurants and stores and they've got gluten-free this and gluten-free that,
like bread and all, but the reason is back in Grandpa's day we didn't have so much problem with gluten because the grains,
they've been breeding to have more gluten in the grains.
At one point I worked for General Mills in Minneapolis and I learned a lot about it from that point of view.
It makes the breads and the pizza and dough and all that stick together better,
but I think the doctor knows what I mean when I'm talking about those lectins or lectins,
which are a plant protein which protect the seed of the plant.
They're a sticky protein and make up part of the plant's natural immune system,
but when you have a high amount of these lectins, and they're in a lot of the foods,
not just wheat but all sorts of stuff, beans, dairy, eggs,
and when you eat these lectin-containing foods your body can't digest or eliminate those proteins,
but you see in the plant world these lectins protect the plant from harm.
For instance, the pumpkin seed is surrounded by this sticky protein, these lectins,
and they fight off enemy invaders, mold, parasites, and so on,
but when they get in your body they don't know they're in your body,
and they travel through your digestive tract, get into your bloodstream, and they're looking for a fight,
because by nature they're designed to attach themselves to sugar molecules.
They were former plant protectors, and now they're in your body,
and they're raising a lot of problems,
because you've got sugar molecules that are healthy in your cells and your digestive tract and everything,
and they're attacking that, and that's why there's so much problem with people having digestive problems,
and they're allergic to the modern agribusiness wheat.
So, the problems with plants are forced by agricultural chemicals?
Well, there's that too, and stuff, unless you can get some organic grains.
But anyway, there is a way.
I'm taking something which contains sacrificial sugars,
which are decoys that attach to the lectins,
and so your cellular sugars are protected.
That's working out for me.
I just came onto that this last year,
and I'm not having the inflammation and problems in my digestive system that I used to have.
I wondered if the doc could address that a little more articulately than I can.
There are a lot of defensive chemicals, many different kinds.
For example, bananas are extremely allergenic,
probably because of their intensive production in poor soils that they're overproducing,
according to the plant's own preference,
and so the plant produces more defensive chemicals.
Even the polyunsaturated fats in seeds are known to have a specific effect against digestive enzymes
and add to the absorption of the lectins and more specific immune-disrupting chemicals.
Ordinary sugars, sucrose, for example, has a tremendously protective effect
in resisting all of these inflammation-producing factors,
from polyunsaturated fats to the allergens and gluten-type chemicals.
Fructose catalyzes the ability to use glucose efficiently,
and so sucrose is better than even well-cooked starch at protecting the immune system
from these irritants and toxins.
So are you still there, Collar?
Okay.
So I hope that answered his question.
I think he's taking a supplement of some type of sugar that is helping to block the lectins,
so I guess that explains that.
And we did have a caller who called in to say that swing sets for adults were their health tip for the evening.
Yes, well, stress, going back to the stress, a way to block stress and how that affects your health so positively.
Was that the end of the callers?
Dr. Peat, stress, that's probably a good point to pick up on.
In terms of what stress does to people physiologically,
would you let people know how it's affecting them badly?
People always talk about stress being bad for you, but there's a very good reason.
Yes, the only mistake that I think Hans Stelje made in all of his work on stress,
he in some places talked about a limited ability to adapt to stress
because we are born with a certain amount of adaptive energy or stress-resistant energy,
but I don't think there is such a thing as adaptive energy.
I think it's such things as sugar, sucrose and fructose, which let us deal with these menacing things such as serotonin,
starches, indigestible fibers, various plant irritants.
The sugars are directly oxidized to energy and inhibit the interfering substances such as oxidizing unsaturated fats.
I think what the equivalent of a lack of adaptive energy that Stelje proposed,
I think what it is is that we have such a bad environment to adapt to,
that we get worse as we adapt to bad things such as polyunsaturated fats
and chronic excess of serotonin defending us against those chronic irritants.
So I think these immediate adaptive substances that in the short range protect us
when we have to keep adapting with these short range measures that, for example,
serotonin increases collagen production, leads progressively to fibrosis of blood vessels, liver, kidneys,
even the brain develops collagen under excessive stress and serotonin.
And so too much adaptation to a bad environment, I think,
is what causes aging and degeneration rather than the lack of this hypothetical adaptive energy.
So the immediate response of serotonin to give somebody when they're stressed either constipation or diarrhea,
well, that's one way of short term possibly helping if it's helping clean out the bowel with diarrhea.
In the long range, constant exposure to the stress is what causes all these degenerative diseases you just mentioned.
Yeah, and a high calcium diet and plenty of sugar and reducing those things that support bacterial growth
will keep your thyroid working and keep your carbon dioxide up.
Carbon dioxide keeps the serotonin bound and out of trouble.
And so when you're stressed and make lactic acid, that displaces the carbon dioxide and activates the release of serotonin.
And when you're stressed, you hyperventilate more easily and then you blow off more CO2.
So you even have less protection.
OK, I know. I know. I don't mean to cut you short, Dr. Peter.
I know there's one more caller who wants to get his question in.
And I know we've got six, five and a half minutes here before we're off the air.
And I want to make sure that I get enough time to let people know where they can find out more information about you.
So let's take the next caller and let's try to keep this down to about three and a half minutes or four minutes at the most.
You're on the air.
Hello. Yeah, you know, my first depression hit in 1964.
And I didn't know anything about depression back then.
They put me on Elevil, which didn't do a thing.
And then we tried megavitamin therapy and that did nothing either.
And this happened six months after I took some very potent Sandos LSD.
And a lot of it was just the shock of realizing that everything in my life was false.
And subsequently I went through a divorce and terminated my employment.
I stood up with my family. A lot of trauma.
And if people haven't experienced a major depression, they just can't understand.
I'm balanced now. I'm taking the vaccine.
And that presents problems because I have prostatitis and that irritates the prostate.
So I'm also taking -- oh, I think it's an alpha blocker.
It helps deal with that.
The biggest -- I'm going to try to make it fast.
The biggest problem in dealing with depression is the whole stigma of it.
I've noticed not very many people have called up and expressed what they're going through with depression.
And it's got to change because it is just rampant.
A lot of it is stress-induced.
I know that mine used to be called chemical depression and now it's called reactive depression.
And all the chemicals you're talking about, I deal with those.
One thing I really wanted to throw out there was early childhood trauma.
And one of the things I went through was I took these -- they're called gas treatments.
You probably haven't heard of them.
And they need to be brought back again.
And what you do, you'll get the value of it.
But it starts off breathing some nitrous oxide enough to put you into a bit of a hypnotic state.
And I don't think the doctor realized the full implications of what was going on.
But then they'd switch it to a mixture of oxygen and carbon dioxide.
So that would kick off the medulla thinking you're suffocating and you would hyperventilate.
You would not only hyperventilate a lot of carbon dioxide but a lot of oxygen.
And I've got to tell you, it would take you out there.
I mean, it was a real trip, a trip to hell for me.
You need to bring your question to a very close point because we need to --
Okay.
Yeah, balance is everything.
And I think that a lot of that comes through sharing.
And I've been in therapy for years.
And I'm very happy with myself.
So I'm just going to hang up and listen to what -- I've had a heart attack.
You have to put your ears right into it.
And --
Okay, we're going to have to leave it there, I'm afraid,
because we just don't have enough time.
It's 7.57.
We've got a couple of minutes to hear from Dr. Peat and also to give out his information.
So, Dr. Peat, thank you again very much for joining us this evening.
I don't think we've even got time to ask you for your views on that last caller.
I'm afraid that was probably a little bit too broad a subject to wrap up in a couple of minutes.
But for those people that have been listening to Dr. Peat this evening,
he can be found at www.raypeat.com.
On his website, there's a lot of research information and articles.
And that's spelled R-A-Y-P-E-A-T --
Dot com.
Okay, and you can also contact us during business hours, Monday through Friday, at 1-888-WBM-ERB.
We can be reached and obviously can consult via Dr. Peat.
So, Dr. Peat, thank you so much for joining us again.
And I know that the people who have called and have heard you have certainly benefited.
And just once again, thank you so much.
Okay, thank you.
Thank you.
All the listeners, thank you for your calls, and we really appreciate your support.
Yeah, and it's Midsummer's Day on Tuesday, folks.
So, enjoy the fact that the days are still getting longer,
because in a few days, they'll be getting shorter.
Okay, thank you so much.
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