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This free program is paid for by the listeners of Redwood Community Radio.
If you're not already a member, please think of joining us. Thank you.
The month from 7 to 8 p.m., 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 patients about a wide range of conditions
and we manufacture all our own certified organic herbal extracts
which are either grown on our CCUF certified herb farm
or which are sourced from other USA certified organic suppliers.
So you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMUD Garboville 91.1 FM
and from 7.30 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 subject of alkalinity versus acidity with reference to disease.
The number here if you live in the area is 923 3911
or if you live outside the area, the toll free number is 1800 KMUD RAD.
We can also be reached toll free on 1 888 WBMERB
for further questions during normal business hours Monday through Friday.
So once again, we're very welcome to have Dr. Raymond Peat
share his wisdom and expertise with us for this next hour.
Dr. Peat, are you there?
Yes, hi.
Hi, thanks for joining us so much.
Okay, so would you as usual just give the listeners who perhaps have never heard you before
or heard of you a rundown of your academic and professional background?
I studied biology at the University of Oregon
and have since about 1970 just continued on my own figuring things out
and talking to a lot of people and listening to their problems
and almost every time I talk to someone I learn something about physiology.
It's a very complex continuing thing.
You did a PhD in physiology, didn't you?
Based on hormones?
Yes, reproductive physiology and the aging was the subject of my dissertation.
Okay, because I know we've interviewed you quite a bit on the show now.
I know we really enjoy having you here to share your experience
because you're so factual in terms of your scientific reference
for what most people will just spout out as being the truth.
So that's something I very much appreciate with being able to have this opportunity
to talk to you and consult with you even.
So it's always refreshing to have the science behind the reasons why.
It just makes it a little bit more relevant.
I think people are only too easily suckered into believing that something is the way it is
just because they've been told.
So I really appreciate everything that you do to bring a scientific relevance to the subject.
So this month, I know we've mentioned impartial cancer
and I know that your specialism with metabolism and thyroid hormone
and the other physiological hormones that are pro-life and not inflammatory
brings me to this topic of alkalinity and acidity.
So generally summed up as pH.
There's lots of information on the Internet
and I know that most people that are listening to the show now
that might be interested in the subject will appreciate the kind of clarity
with which you'll bring to the reason that you understand the importance of maintaining healthy pH.
I think the main reference for cancer is that cancer seems to predominate in acidic environments
and that our diets for want of a better reason through the poor proteins
or other protein-based foods that we would eat, beans and seeds and some meats,
produce about acidic byproducts.
So how do you look at some?
These sort of traditional ideas about the acid-base balance of food,
they usually lead to a pretty good diet.
For example, the Indian diet, fruit, vegetables, and milk and cheese,
that's a good example of the alkaline residue diet.
And so I don't have any disagreements with the dietary recommendations
to eat lots of milk and cheese and fruit and vegetables,
but it's the small details that people use to argue for certain refinements of that diet.
For example, the fear of milk.
They talk about the loss of calcium in the urine as indicating that maybe it's too much acid,
but actually the residue of milk is on the alkaline side because of the very large amount of potassium
and calcium in the milk, very similar to the vegetables that the cows eat to make the milk.
They accumulate a huge amount of alkaline.
Let's just talk about that subject a little bit more, the residue, you've said.
That's the, if you like, what's left behind once the food source has been metabolized.
That's what actually dictates whether a food is what we call alkaline or acidic.
Yeah, and grains, nuts, beans, and meats do have a very acidic residue or ash after they're metabolized.
And the biggest part of that in meat and nuts and grains is phosphate.
Proteins have a lot of sulfur, turns into sulfuric acid when it's metabolized.
And those, it is possible to do biological harm by eating too much of those
and not enough of the potassium, sodium, magnesium, and calcium side.
Okay.
Which are predominantly found in fruits and vegetables.
Yeah, fruits, vegetables, milk, and cheese.
Okay, so would you be prepared to run through some of the more commonly experienced acidic production processes in the body,
whether they're respiratory or in producing urine or other wastes,
and how the body will deal with maintaining the pH balance in the body?
I think it helps to look at the picture in the very biggest context,
which is that mostly we're a huge lump of protein, and protein is on average acidic.
And if you just leave acid sitting around in the environment, it will accumulate the base that neutralizes it.
And so if we think of ourselves as a big piece of acidic protein,
this just spontaneously will associate alkaline material with it, potassium, magnesium, for example,
will neutralize the acidity of the protein.
But as we energize our system by burning carbohydrates and fat mostly,
the carbohydrate in particular turns into carbon dioxide,
and the carbon dioxide has to constantly be leaving the organism.
What comes in is oxygen. The oxygen combines with the fuel, carbon, and becomes carbon dioxide.
So you have a neutral oxygen coming in, and it's called oxygen, meaning the acid former.
The acid that it forms in this case is carbonic acid,
and we're constantly metabolically producing this acid, which is streaming out of our cells
and leaving through our lungs primarily, the kidneys.
We hardly lose any carbon dioxide or bicarbonate. It almost all leaves through the lungs.
And as the carbon dioxide is produced, combining with water, it turns into carbonic acid, which ionizes.
And so you have the acidic carbonic acid leaving the cell as a charged particle.
It takes the oppositely charged sodium with it, primarily sodium and calcium,
are constantly being drawn out of the cell by the stream of carbonic acid being produced inside the cell.
So the alkaline minerals reach the bloodstream in balance with the carbonic acid,
and then the carbonic acid leaves the lungs as carbon dioxide, leaving an alkaline trace in the blood.
The cell basically was neutral until it produced the acid.
Then that neutralized protein gave up some of its mineral alkaline material,
which then shows up in the blood.
So the pH of the blood is above neutral, about pH 7.4.
Because of the carbonic acid?
And in this healthy metabolite, well, the carbonic acid which left in your lungs,
the mineral gets pulled out of the neutral cell, originally neutral.
But as it's pulled out with the acid being constantly formed, the cell shows its basic protein acidity.
And so the respiring cell is normally slightly on the acidic side.
A good healthy cell with plenty of oxygen will be around pH 6.8.
And if you stress a cell so it isn't getting enough carbon dioxide, or stress it in any way, radiation,
not enough oxygen, not enough of any of the things that it needs,
the cell becomes activated and shifts to the alkaline because it can't make carbon dioxide to acidify itself,
and it begins producing lactic acid very inefficiently.
And the thing about lactic acid is that the sugar, instead of being oxidized all the way to carbon dioxide,
comes to the point of pyruvic acid.
And instead of that being oxidized, the cell reduces the pyruvic acid to lactic acid
by taking some of the energy substance that was produced in this metabolism,
wasting it to get rid of the electrons so that this NADH, NAD can go back and become reduced again
and produce more of the conversion of pyruvic to lactic acid.
And in that process, the lactic acid is taking protons out of the cell
and is raising the pH of the cell as the conversion of pyruvic acid to lactic acid increases the pH of the cell,
just the opposite of what the production of carbon dioxide was doing.
So the stressed cell becomes alkaline.
So when the popular theory is stated that cancer cells like an acidic environment,
it sounds like if a cell is stressed, it likes an alkaline environment,
then that sounds almost exactly opposite.
Well, it shifts internally to become alkaline when it's stressed,
but the produced lactic acid accumulates in its environment,
and that's where the acid is in the surroundings, and then it shows up in the blood.
Right. So that's like if you've stressed your muscle out too much,
then you're producing lactic acid, and that makes your muscle sore.
Yeah.
So that's a stressed cell. And does lactic acid play a big part in cancer as well?
Yeah. It not only acidifies the environment, which in itself could be actually protective
if it was acidified by carbon dioxide,
but it happens that the lactic acid acts as a signal to do all of the things associated with cancer,
such as stimulating the growth of new blood vessels so that the inflammation continues.
It signals a lot of inflammatory changes, vasodilation, and the formation of new blood vessels
and the release of carbon monoxide, nitric oxide, lots of things producing free radicals and injury.
So the lactic acid is functioning as a local poison or inflammatory agent.
And the acidity that it produces is a sign that something is wrong,
but it isn't the acidity in the tumor that's harmful because the tumor itself is internally alkaline.
Right. So as a side point, what do you think of foods that are high in lactic acid?
Well, even when we make it ourselves, it has these pro-inflammatory, swelling-producing, tumor-promoting functions.
And when it's made by bacteria, it's somewhat more toxic.
And when the body receives it, either from a stressed muscle or a tumor or from too much yogurt
or some food that has been fermented, it goes to the liver to get detoxified.
So every time you eat something with lactic acid, it's the same as if you had been stressed physically.
Your liver has to work extra to detoxify it, and it has to have a source of energy to detoxify the lactic acid,
turning it back into glucose. And the glucose is right back where you started.
So you've lost ground every time your liver has to process lactic acid.
So would you consider any amount of lactic acid-containing food to be a stress to the liver,
or do you think there's some margin of benefit?
A healthy liver doesn't notice an occasional dish of yogurt or sauerkraut or something.
But how I got interested in it was a long time ago, I discovered kefir on some store.
Kefir?
It tasted good, and so I drank a little more than a cup of it, I think, each day for lunch.
But every time I did that, I would get a migraine-like headache every afternoon, and that started me looking up
what happens to your blood sugar and inflammatory mediators when you get more lactic acid than your liver likes.
Interesting.
How do you think about people's lifestyles promoting an acidic situation from stress,
and how that would negatively impact someone's health in a scientific way?
That's the reason why. How does stress...
The nervous system is in control of metabolism to a great extent, so you don't have to run five miles
to shift over into that stress metabolism if your nervous system and emotional systems are very stressed.
Just the thought of what you're doing, I mentioned it before, that if you hang an animal by its tail
or put it in a tube where it can't move, it will very quickly get an ulcer with lactic acid going to all of its systems,
releasing histamine and other serotonin mediators of inflammation.
But if you give something for the animal to bite, even though it's in the same restrained stressful situation,
as long as it can defend itself by biting back, it doesn't get the ulcer.
Do you think this could possibly explain why, as people have said in the past,
people that are angry, as long as they let it out, they generally don't get cancer.
The people that are angry that hold it in and don't do anything about it, they get cancer.
The rat experiment really suggests that.
Okay. So do you think that if we can coin the term in the acidic lifestyle,
the stressed businessman who's always trying to meet deadlines, that he's hard pushed to make,
just missing the plane or just missing his appointments and being very stressed out,
that's a potential for a situation where cancer could arise because of the acidity from stress?
Well, it's actually the things like lactic acid and serotonin.
And the stress really is doing its damage by creating an intracellular alkaline condition.
It's the alkalinity.
So when someone is under surgery, they often get ulcers just from being operated on somewhere else.
And if they are respirating them, that stress will very often give them lung inflammation
and brain inflammation and so on.
And they've found gradually, 60 or 70 years after the people originally discovered it,
they've found that if they don't ventilate them very thoroughly
and let them accumulate quite a bit of carbon dioxide, their lungs and brain are protected and don't swell.
So the acidity from carbon dioxide is extremely anti-stress and protective.
It's the alkalinity that goes with producing lactic acid which does the harm.
Right. I think just to explain that, you're saying that the acidity is produced by the production of hydrogen ions,
say, that are in the extracellular medium from the cell.
So the cell is alkaline.
Yeah, it just shifts the protons out of the cell.
So that's why people get stomach ulcers if they're stressed because instead of their cells in their stomach holding onto the acid,
it's like releasing it into the environment and then it damages the stomach lining.
Can you look at it like that?
Yeah, it's really the serotonin and other inflammatory things in the stomach rather than just the acid.
The stomach is very good at holding extreme acidity safely.
But when stress gives the wrong kind of signals and you don't have continuing respiration, then you get the damage.
So it's the presence of that acid in a stress cell that's then triggering the inflammatory mediators.
You can't actually just measure it because everyone's stomach is acidic.
It's the most acidic environment ever.
I mean, they say when you have stomach ulcers, you shouldn't have this acidic food,
but it's not really down to the acid that you're saying.
It's more down just to the other inflammatory mediators.
Oh, yeah.
You're listening to Ask Your Ob-Doctor on KMU DeGarboville 91.1 FM from 7.30 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 subject of alkalinity versus acidity
in reference to certain disease processes.
Dr. Raymond Peat is joining us in the studio.
And until 8 o'clock, if people would like to call in with any questions related or unrelated, please go ahead.
OK, so Dr. Peat, how realistic is it?
I mean, because there's a thing that they call the potential renal acid load of a food, right, the P-R-A-L,
that I guess is the measure of how much ammonia or protons are within the food when it's metabolized,
and that's the kind of ash value, as it were, of the food.
How realistic do you think it is to consume alkalizing materials
and how that would affect the overall acid-base balance when the stomach is so acidic?
Well, I think it's very safe to consume a great excess of the alkaline material,
which the fruit and vegetable and milk people do.
And the body can produce -- can change protein, for example, into ammonium.
And if it doesn't have enough mineral, it will waste protein, turning it into the equivalent of the alkaline material
and using the ammonia as the cation equivalent of the sodium, so it can save the sodium and calcium and so on.
Okay, because I always looked at ammonia as the NH4+ as being able to dissociate into hydrogen protons,
but I probably missed the point of somewhere along the line.
I always look at ammonia as -- I know ammonia is a base, it's not an acid, but I think I got it messed up in chemistry.
When it becomes the ammonium, that is the equivalent of sodium.
Right, that's the NH4+, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
All right, so how realistic do you think it is to consume?
Do you think that consuming things that have an excess of potassium and magnesium and calcium
can actively work to raise the pH of someone's environment?
Well, I think they have -- the main function is sparing protein that you would use for the kidneys to help to regulate the minerals.
And, for example, when a person is fasting for several days, they will generally lose more protein than fat
because the stress hormones rise and they live on a pure meat diet when they're fasting as their tissues break down.
Right. Okay.
So if you drink that fast, if you just drink the minerals, salt water, baking soda, potassium, magnesium and calcium,
any of the alkaline minerals will radically spare the amount of protein that you would be consuming and wasting.
So a fast is much less stressful and harmful if you're getting the alkaline minerals.
Okay. I know that you've mentioned sodium bicarbonate as being -- there's a caller.
Yeah, okay, we have a caller on the air, but I think we better take this caller first.
Hello, you're on the air?
Yes. This is fascinating, and thank you very much, yourselves and Dr. Peat.
Is the carbon dioxide circulation or exchange that the doctor just spoke of,
is that why it's so calming to re-breathe carbon dioxide when you're in stress?
Because stress, that's really a primary thing that stress does, shifting to the alkaline and making lactic acid.
The cells are in danger of getting into a chronically activated state.
The panic attack is a typical thing where the body too easily shifts over into making lactic acid instead of carbon dioxide.
And so the person feels that they're suffocating, but in the long run,
that same thing can lead to degenerative diseases or cancer in which the cells are stuck in a panic attack condition.
And if you think of the original state of the cell as being the protein acid which attracts the minerals to neutralize the acid,
you can restore that condition with carbon dioxide, just re-breathing it,
getting your percentage of the acidic carbon dioxide dissolved in the blood up where it should be.
You can stop the production of lactic acid, reverse these stress processes,
and restore the cell to its relaxed, unpanicked condition.
And that's through like bad breathing?
Yeah, and for example, you can generally lower your blood pressure just breathing a minute or two in a paper bag a few times a day.
I've seen people take their blood pressure down 30 points in just a day or two that way.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for your call.
So it really is a de-stressor not only for the mental state, but for all the other cellular states that are panicking.
Yeah.
Every cell or tissue that you look at, it's protected if you restore the proper amount of carbon dioxide.
And the carbon dioxide in the gaseous form, it's easier if you think about the pH, acid-base balance of the organism,
if you think of it as being pushed by a few factors, one of which is the amount of dissolved or gaseous carbon dioxide.
So that breathing in a bag is one of the most powerful ways to restore the proper balance.
If you need more bicarbonate, the gaseous carbon dioxide will allow you to make more bicarbonate.
And that will help you regulate your minerals and even help you retain more of your alkaline minerals.
So it will help correct your balance either in the acid or base direction.
Taking a sodium bicarbonate, for example, will actually acidify cells that are in need of more carbon dioxide
because when the bicarbonate has been deficient, when a cell is exposed to the bicarbonate,
it will convert it into the acidic carbon dioxide and be able to lower its pH, even though you've taken the alkaline baking soda.
So is that why you recommend baking soda for athletes, to help lower their... does that help balance out that high lactic acid?
Yeah. There have been experiments, for example, in the marathon or bicycle races in Death Valley where the altitude is very low.
They found that I think it was a tablespoon of baking soda at the start of the race made them tolerate the stress much better.
All right. Good. There's another caller on the line, so let's take the next caller.
Hi, you're on the air.
Hi. My question involves a study I heard just recently on, I think, NPR about the cultures, the Western civilizations,
that the mortality rate for Japan, and they're the highest smoking population of all Western cultures,
is actually much higher than here in America.
I'm wondering, does smoking increase that carbon dioxide that you're talking about in the body to release, to relax it?
I'll take my answer off the air. Thanks.
Could you rephrase the question? What was higher in the other cultures?
He said smoking, and I think he was trying to get at, was smoking an efficient way of raising your CO2, but it's monoxide, I think.
The carbon monoxide is something that we produce under stress, and it lowers our ability to use oxygen and to produce carbon dioxide.
Carbon monoxide is what you inhale as part of the cigarette smoking, right? It increases your carbon monoxide, no?
Yeah.
Okay, so the caller that called in the carbon monoxide from smoking is pretty damaging,
and it's not something that would improve your CO2 content.
I think Michael has a question.
Do you have any thoughts as to why the Japanese culture has such longevity compared to, or lower mortality,
especially since they do consume a lot of tobacco?
Much of that is propaganda.
When you look at the actual details of the population, it isn't as great as some of the articles have been saying.
For example, one of the articles, if you look at the mortality figures, it suggests that the average lifespan is 300 years.
If you don't look at the whole structure of the population, it's hard to get an idea of what the real age-specific death rate is.
You have to look at how likely a person is to die when they're 60 or 70 or 80 or 90 years old,
rather than looking at the mortality per population.
That's the trouble with the United States since the turn of the century.
They stopped publishing the actual raw figures, the given age-adjusted mortality rate.
I don't think anyone outside of the Bureau of Statistics really is sure what the longevity of Americans is doing right now.
Back to what that call-out question was, you don't think that smoking raises carbon dioxide in any way?
It does, but it raises the carbon monoxide so seriously that that's the main effect and it's harmful.
Right.
Okay, so you're listening to Ask Your Ob-Doctor on KMUD 91.1 FM.
Until 8 o'clock, rather, from now until 8 o'clock, people are invited to call in.
Dr. Raymond Peat is here joining us in the studio.
If you live outside the area, it's 1-800-KMUD-RAD, or if you're lucky enough to live in this area, code is 923-3911.
Okay, so Dr. Peat, you mentioned the sodium bicarbonate for the athletes in Death Valley
would actually give them a greater interval between getting stressed.
The potassium bicarbonate, is that something that could be used similarly as sodium bicarbonate?
Yeah, the average person is very good at getting rid of the sodium,
and so the sodium bicarbonate is something that most people can use without experiencing edema or disturbance of blood pressure.
But the potassium bicarbonate, it has a relaxing effect on your blood vessels,
and so it can help to lower your blood pressure even more than the sodium bicarbonate,
but you have to be cautious because too much of it can relax your heart.
And just for our listeners, in case people don't know what sodium bicarbonate is, it's baking soda.
I'm just making sure we've mentioned that. I'm not sure if we have.
If we have, I'm sorry to repeat that, but sodium bicarbonate is baking soda.
Okay, so what would your suggestions be, Dr. Peat, for the people that are out there
that have been thinking about acid and alkalinity and cancer problems with maybe an acidic situation?
What would be an ideal lifestyle that you would suggest?
Well, the only foods I would suggest eliminating would be the grains and beans and most of the nuts,
and probably reducing most meats. Gelatin happens to be the part of the meat that doesn't have so many
of the disturbing acidic pro-inflammatory effects.
And in the news currently is the pink slime issue, which is made from connective tissues,
but it seems to me that that might be the best part of the meat.
Okay, we do have another caller on the air, so let's take this next caller. You're on the air.
Hi, thanks for taking my call.
Whenever I do rather short walks, like half an hour, I get muscle soreness for a couple of days afterwards.
So I'm assuming I'm making too much lactic acid somehow.
So I started taking baking soda baths, and I wondered if taking these baths with about two pounds
of baking soda per day is safe.
Dr. Peat, did you hear that?
Yeah, I think it's good. Salt, magnesium sulfate, epsom salts, and baking soda are all good.
The baking soda helps you absorb magnesium if you have epsom salts mixed with it.
So that's a good combo, like maybe one pound baking soda and one pound epsom salts?
Yeah, and some experimenters in naturally carbonated mineral springs found that people were absorbing carbon dioxide
through their skin. Even though their body contains a lot of carbon dioxide, the body has such an affinity for it
that it will soak it up from the mineral water against the gradient. It's as if we had pumps in our skin.
Because it's going from a high concentration, I mean a low concentration, to a high concentration.
Yeah, it's a matter of solubility. The enzymes turn from the bicarbonate into the gaseous carbon dioxide
form which dissolves in our fats and cells.
I can't actually remember the person that was talking about this, but it was in relation to a cancer treatment.
They were purporting the use of ascorbate at the rate of up to 130 grams a day.
It was 9 parts ascorbate and 1 part ascorbic acid. It was supposedly keeping certain types of cancer from growing
and actually causing some to regress. Do you know much about that?
Because it's vitamin C, but I understand the processing for these things is less than desirable.
Yeah, they keep changing the technology. I don't know exactly what they're doing now,
but as recently as about 10 years ago, a free radical chemist dissolved a gram of pure powdered ascorbic acid
in a liter of distilled water and found that there were enough heavy metals in that purified vitamin C
to produce as many free radicals as a killing dose of x-rays would have produced.
Oh my goodness. So it's citrus season. That's a great source of vitamin C.
Yeah, all of our foods except grains and beans basically are very good sources of vitamin C.
The analytic methods have generally ignored it in meat and some of the solid foods like that,
but it's present in meats at a very high concentration in the oxidized state.
All you have to do is metabolize and you turn the oxidized ascorbic acid into the common ascorbic acid.
So is that the theory why a concentrated orange juice still has absorbable vitamin C?
It's just a slightly changed form when you boil?
Yeah, and most of the tests don't really look at the molecule.
They just look at the reducing power, and in some vegetables and meats, for example,
the tissue has oxidized it partly into dehydroascorbic acid, but as soon as you eat it,
it turns back into ordinary ascorbic acid.
Well, they say in Britain it was the fish and chips that prevented the British people from developing scurvy
because potatoes have quite a lot of vitamin C in them as well, don't they?
Yeah, and fish.
And fish, right, and the fish.
All right, so how about, would you be to clarify a little what the people out there with,
unfortunately dealing with cancers who are reading things like, you know,
the problems with acidic states in the body and kind of getting confused about how exactly to do anything about it,
what would be the best way of maintaining enough energy in the body to deal with it, really,
I think in terms of not only making things acid, but not making...
The so-called alkaline ash diet, lots of fruits and vegetables, milk and cheese,
all of those are things that will help to let the stressed cancer cell repair itself as far as it can.
And things like breathing in a paper bag to increase the carbon dioxide are probably helpful.
As long ago as 1910, the insurance companies knew that people who lived at very high altitudes
had a very low cancer mortality.
And that has been tested experimentally 50 years ago, taking implanting tumors in rats
and leaving them near sea level, all of them quickly died, taking them up to 17,000 feet altitude,
half of them threw off the cancers and had no symptoms left.
Just from the carbon dioxide retention when the oxygen retention was lowered.
The carbon dioxide, one of its basic functions is to assure the delivery of oxygen to the tissues.
So, heavy breathing, hyperventilating is a way to lower the oxygen in your tissues
because you blow out the carbon dioxide and you need a lot of carbon dioxide in your tissue
to deliver the oxygen, open up the blood vessels and let the oxygen circulate and be used.
Okay. A little digression perhaps, but it's on a kind of anti-cancer path.
What do you think about Gerson therapy and what he was putting forward as a diet for anti-cancer?
I happened to get a copy of his book just a few years after he died in the mid or early 1960s.
And I read it and was very impressed by his detailed studies.
I seem to have read just about everything about cancer in the first half of the 20th century.
And so I tried to figure out how it was working and the minerals are a very important part of it.
And restoring the oxidative metabolism, he regularly gave his people armor thyroid.
I think two grains was a very common dose for his patients.
Okay. I have a question about thyroid.
If you say you took thyroxine and you took armor thyroid and you were suddenly without the ability to get armor thyroid,
how much of a mammal's thyroid would you need to eat in order to get the dose you needed?
The armor product was standardized to imitate the fresh glandular weight.
And so they would powder, defat the gland and powder it and then dilute it with glucose or lactic acid
or something to increase the weight and volume until it was similar to the fresh piece of gland before dehydration.
And so they called that the normal dilution.
And the powder itself was called the 3X concentrate,
meaning that the gland is three times more concentrated than the old armor thyroid pills.
And that means that one gram of the gland is equal to 15 grains of armor thyroid.
So one gram of the fresh gland is equal to 15 grains of the armor thyroid.
Yeah.
Okay. We have another call on the line.
Go ahead. You're on the air.
Hi. I always enjoy the program.
This is Jeff Frider on the Mendocino Coast.
And my question may sound flip, but Dr. Peat, I always listen to what you say
and try to put together what you're saying in a question that I really am intrigued by.
So I'll put it in these terms.
What would a double latte espresso, pink slime milkshake with baking soda, a tablespoon on the side,
do for an athlete's performance in the Death Valley race?
Would it enhance their performance or would it give deeper meaning to Death Valley?
It would need a lot of ice, I think.
The caffeine tends to enhance performance in mysterious ways that no one has really figured out how it works.
But the gelatin has an antistress effect.
That mixture seems like it would be pretty good, the baking soda, gelatin content.
And you would need quite a bit of sugar with it, preferably fructose.
That actually brings up another question I have for you, Dr. Peat.
I know we've had several programs again, but I think the people that may have just tuned in and listened
have read that the cancers feed on sugar and you've got to starve a cancer from sugar.
Actually, they feed on amino acids and turn the amino acids into sugar and then turn some of the sugar back into fat
and then they metabolize the fat.
And with all that silly chemistry, they produce a lot of heat with no light or no function to speak of.
That's why you can identify a cancer, because it's so hot, because it's burning protein,
turning it into amino acids and then into sugar and then into fat.
So is that why thermography is quite an accurate way at looking for cancers in the body?
Yeah.
So if you can feed it as much sugar as it wants, then it won't eat your protein, at least not so fast.
Okay.
So it could prevent the wasting disease associated with cancer then.
Yeah, and saturated fats aren't probably as good as sugar for quieting stress tissues,
but they do have specific anti-stress functions.
So I would recommend avoiding all of the polyunsaturated fats, because those turn on the stress reactions,
increase your adrenal corticoids, adrenaline, pituitary hormones, and so on,
and while the saturated fats inhibit those same stress systems.
So just for our listeners, in case you're not aware of what the PUFA or the polyunsaturated fat is,
it's the liquid vegetable oils not including olive oil.
So everything but olive oil and coconut oil is the saturated fat that's very, very useful,
as well as beef and lamb fat if it was from an organic animal, and butter, of course, butter and cream.
Okay.
I have another quick question for you.
I think there's going to be another caller here who's being attended to, but going back to the Gerson diet,
you mentioned one of the things that I've looked at and it kind of caught my attention,
because I know you've always been a great advocate of consuming liver from a vitamin point of view.
What was with the injected liver extracts?
Oh, that was a way to get all of the essential nutrients.
Right, okay.
And around the time I read his book, I had been -- I met Leonel Strong,
who developed the cancer-prone strains of mice, who developed spontaneous breast cancer,
and he had been curing cancer just with an extract of liver.
And that was my first research project was using to try to find out what it was in the liver that,
in these liver extracts, could cure cancer.
But he also wanted to eliminate salt from a diet, too,
and that's a little bit of a strange one for me to get my head around,
because I know you're, again, an advocate of salt as actually a very good product,
rather than what modern dietary trends would have us think otherwise.
Another person who studied cancer at the very basic level was Frederick Coke, William Frederick Coke.
He, in working on the parathyroid hormone before he did his famous cancer preparations,
he found that the alkaline minerals, to a tremendous extent, would substitute for each other.
So you could, for example, cure -- you can take out the parathyroid glands,
which cause a calcium problem, but you could cure that with sodium or potassium or magnesium.
So the salt could replace the calcium or the potassium or the magnesium.
Yeah.
To a great extent, any of those alkaline minerals can replace the others.
You don't have to worry about the balance so much, because having an excess, your body can sort them out.
Well, that's a good fail-safe mechanism of the body.
I think we have another caller on the line.
And first I have a brief question for someone, because it's simple.
Can you simulate being at high altitude by eating a lot of baking soda?
Yeah, that's what the racers, bicycle racers, were doing.
In Death Valley?
Yeah.
When someone who lives at a high altitude goes to sea level, they very often get sick.
And vice versa.
Oxygen poisoning is really worse than deprivation.
You recover quicker.
We do have one more caller for you, Dr. Peat, so let's get this caller in.
Because we only have five minutes left before the end of the show.
You're on the air.
Hi. I'm wondering, is this diet stuff you're talking about specifically for people with cancer,
or can regular people adjust their diet?
I'm vegan, and I'm looking for different sources of protein.
Well, potatoes are the best vegetable protein known.
They're better than eggs in terms of quality.
What's the best protein?
Potatoes.
Potatoes are actually -- they have --
more than 6% of the protein quality ranked next to egg yolk.
Right.
So eight ounces -- I think eight ounces of potato has eight grams of protein.
Oh, wow.
I had no idea.
I thought it was a carb.
When you're eating the starch, too, a liter of potato is like a liter of milk on average.
Yeah, if you make potato juice and don't drink the starch that settles out.
If you make potato juice, then it's more like eating pure egg yolk.
And you can even make a scrambled egg-like preparation from potato juice, and it's quite tasty.
Wow.
And this would be healthy for the general public or for only people with cancer?
Well, I've seen that for people with mysterious ailments who seem to be dying,
and they have one or two meals and they just popped out of it.
No one really knew what was wrong with them, but I've seen it happen.
Okay, so what about the raw potato juice?
You'd recommend cooking it, right, Dr. --
Yeah, I think there's someone who is now testing the raw stuff,
and he's going to tell me whether it made him sick.
My experience is with cooking it, like scrambling an egg.
Let the starch settle out before you cook it.
We are wrapping up.
We have three minutes left before the end of the show.
Thank you very much.
You're very welcome.
Thank you for tuning in.
Okay, let's leave it there, and let's let people know where and how to contact Dr. Peat.
So for those people that have heard this evening's show, maybe for the first time
or have heard Dr. Peat on the radio before, just a reminder,
his website is www.rayPeat.com, R-A-Y-P-E-A-T.com.
Lots of scholarly articles there written by Dr. Peat, fully referenced.
And as far as I know, correct me if I'm wrong, he is open to being e-mailed.
Is that right?
Yeah, good.
Okay, so there's the word from the doctor himself.
Okay, so for all of those people who have contributed by asking questions
and being part of the show, thank you so much.
We can be reached for further questions on 707-986-9506 or toll free.
On 1-888-WBM-ERB.
Yeah, so take a look at Dr. Peat's website.
It's very useful information.
It's not what you're going to find in mainstream,
and if you do find some of it in mainstream,
you'll probably find it confused with some other erroneous information.
So go to Dr. Peat's website, and you can be guaranteed that he's done all the research for you.
Thank you for joining us, Dr. Peat, and thank you for all those callers.
Have a good night and see you in April.
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