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And in just a moment, we will have Ask Your Herb Doctor.
[Music]
Welcome and thank you for joining us again this third Friday of the month.
My name is Andrew Murray.
My name is Sarah Johannison Murray.
Every third Friday of the month, we produce a program called Ask Your Herb Doctor.
And we are very pleased again this month to have Dr. Raymond Peat join us on the show
to share in his wisdom.
And this month's subject is going to be the antioxidants,
some of the myths about antioxidants, what antioxidants really do,
and how they're helpful, and how some of the history of antioxidants has been skewed
and our current understanding of antioxidants has been misled by the manufacturers and other parties.
So we're going to talk about antioxidants and their role in health.
I know we're coming into the fall here, and as the decreasing daylight hours, etc., combine,
most people are under an amount of stress.
And antioxidants, I think we all know them as anti-stress or at least free radical quenching.
I think that's most of people's understanding of antioxidants.
But we're going to explore antioxidants in more depth.
Okay, so people that are living in the area, it's a call-in show from 7.30 until 8 o'clock.
You're invited and welcome to call in about this subject or any other questions you may have.
The number, if you live in the area, is 923 3911.
Or if you live outside the area, there's a toll-free number you can call on.
That's 1-800-568-3723.
That's 1-800-KMUD-RAD.
So, like I said, once again, we're very pleased to have Dr. Raymond Peat with us to share his wealth of knowledge.
Thank you for joining us, Dr. Peat.
Okay, so as usual, there may be people that haven't heard of you
and people that have just tuned in for the first time perhaps.
So I'd appreciate it if you'd let people know your academic and professional background so people can hear more about you.
I have taught several universities various courses related to biology and biochemistry, for example, in Mexico.
I taught immunology and intermediate metabolism.
But my research was in reproductive aging at the University of Oregon.
And my dissertation advisor, Arnold Soderwall, happened to be a major figure in vitamin E research.
He found that hamsters remained fertile much longer if he gave them increasingly large doses of vitamin E.
And although I didn't work with vitamin E myself,
that was sort of the background for my research with estrogen, progesterone, and oxidative metabolism.
Okay, so I guess I think probably what we should do, I think most people, myself included, have a,
oh, I don't know, I call it a medical understanding of what we commonly know as antioxidants and their function in the body.
And I know when we get going, you're going to describe some of the ill effects that some antioxidants can have,
because they can kind of work both ways in how we can best get the best possible antioxidants from our food or other sources
that are certainly a lot safer than most of the vitamins that people will buy off the shelf of a health food store, for example,
or another whole food place.
So would you outline the effects of antioxidants and the body's system of antioxidants and why they are important to our health?
People often talk about the body's innate antioxidant system,
and they usually refer to the glutathione in cells and the enzymes that reduce glutathione when it has been oxidized.
And superoxide dismutase and catalase are considered to be at the center of our own antioxidant system
with uric acid as a circulating major protection against free radicals.
That's interesting. Can I hold you there for a second there?
Because uric acid is something that I was always led to believe was a cause of gouts.
Is that true enough?
It's involved in being an antioxidant.
It's also involved in protecting against inflammation because inflammation involves things that are thought of as oxidative damage.
Molecules get oxidized and changed.
And so even though uric acid is probably defensive against inflammation, it tends to eventually get crystallized in the process of defending against the inflammation.
And so you often find crystals of uric acid in an inflamed joint.
But people can have crystals of uric acid in the tissue with no symptoms at all.
And symptoms like gout can occur without the crystals.
And crystals of phosphate are probably more common in gout than uric acid crystals, but without analyzing them, people consider them to be uric acid.
So it's more the inflammation that someone would have anyway, whether it was in soft tissue or joint,
that uric acid would come onto the scene to be an antioxidant that then typically associates uric acid with gout.
Yeah, apparently, because it is considered our main, quantitatively, our main antioxidant defense.
Inside cells, glutathione is considered because it's the reductant that can block a lot of oxidative molecules.
And you mentioned superoxide dismutase.
Yeah, and recently, some studies of roundworms and aging have found that superoxide double dose actually might shorten their longevity.
A lot of things are being reconsidered in recent years regarding superoxide, for example, in the ionized air effect, in which negative air ions have anti-inflammatory effects.
It turns out that superoxide, which many people think of as one of the worst oxidants, it happens to be produced when we breathe negatively ionized air.
And it's produced in the lung, and the lung is the main place where serotonin is detoxified and destroyed.
And serotonin is destroyed in the lungs under the influence of superoxide.
So is this why they say if you walk along a seashore and there's breaking waves, there's a release of negative ions and it's supposed to help your lungs?
Yeah.
Especially for asthmatics, it's supposed to help. Is that because it's lowering the serotonin in their lungs?
Yeah, there's a series of papers done in Poland that call it the serotonin irritation syndrome.
And there are the ones that concluded about a 20-year series of studies showing that the ions are helping to destroy serotonin in the lungs.
The superoxide dismutase that destroys superoxide, that has been thought of as a defense against this free radical.
But we don't necessarily just want to increase that antioxidant because sometimes it's involved with making inflammation worse if we get rid of too much superoxide.
When you hear this research coming out with, "Oh, this new antioxidant has been discovered," we have to look into it a little bit more because it could be counterproductive to have too much of some of these wonderful antioxidants.
Yeah, the advertisements often say this chemical is 100 times better antioxidant than vitamin E and so on.
That doesn't mean that it's going to be safe in the body because vitamin E fits into this system of superoxide and glutathione and vitamin C, uric acid and so on in a very tightly organized system.
And if you put in something that's 100 times more active against oxidants or free radicals in vitro, you really don't have any idea of what it's going to do in the body.
The main plant substances that are now being called antioxidants, most of them are polyphenolic compounds.
There's almost 100% overlap between the polyphenolics as antioxidants and the polyphenolics as estrogens.
I was just thinking about that overlap and how 30 or 40 years ago, these same chemicals were classed together as tannins.
And 50 or 60 years ago, someone had discovered that the tannins helped to seal the skin of a burned person.
That's right. I remember that being called an eschar.
To sort of prevent the seepage.
After doing that for maybe 20 or 30 years, they started seeing that it was a carcinogen.
So in the 70s, tannins were identified as very effective carcinogens.
Some of them injected into animals produced.
Okay. Well, I wonder if the same... I'm sorry. I don't mean to hold you up because the trainer thought where you're going.
I don't want to lose it.
The tannins, when they're used intravenously, I can understand.
But what do you think about topical use of tannins?
Because that was pretty big in herbal medicine school when we were studying.
Well, yeah. That's what turned up in the 70s.
These people who had been treated topically for burns were getting skin cancer.
Wow.
Cancers in the area treated.
Can you list some examples of these polyphenols or these tannins that are associated with increasing estrogen and carcinogens?
It's almost an endless series.
But the famous ones are elagic acid and gallic acid.
Those are the old...
From tan...
From like oak bark.
Yeah.
Because I always thought of the phenolics as very, in a classical sense, very heating and drying.
They were very hot kind of substances.
Yeah. They have many, many variations on their effects.
But it was just interesting that the very same substances that are now called antioxidants and estrogens used to be thought of as tannins.
Wow.
Okay. So the background from which they've come has changed considerably.
And now it seems that the industry is calling them yet another compound that can be marketed to people to help them in their quest for the antioxidant effect that they've been warned they need so much.
Yeah. Vitamin D is the famous oldest sold antioxidant supplement.
But it was, when it was first discovered, it was called the fertility vitamin.
And it was sold to increase virility and fertility and so on.
But the Schutt family in the 1930s found that it not only made infertile women more fertile by analogy with what my professor did 20 years after that, but he was doing it clinically.
And he knew that these women with excess estrogen who were infertile often suffered from blood clot diseases, venous clots, and sometimes embolisms in the lung and strokes and so on.
And he found that vitamin E not only made them fertile by antagonizing the estrogen, but it prevented the clotting problems.
And he showed very clearly its anti-clotting effect was part of its anti-estrogen effect.
And since the estrogen had also, during that same period of about 15 years up to 1940, it was known to intensify the effects of unsaturated fats in oxidizing.
It catalyzed their conversion into age pigment, interacting with iron and unsaturated fats.
So it was an oxidant, a clot former, an anti-fertility substance, and pro-inflammatory.
And as the oil industry began promoting their seed oils, first for animal, fattening animals, they were adding it to lab chow and such for research animals.
It turned out that the animals were suffering from degenerative brain diseases and testicular degeneration.
And someone found that vitamin E connected, apparently they were thinking of it as the pro-fertility vitamin to protect against the testicular destruction.
And they found that it did in fact protect against the toxic effects of the unsaturated fats.
And this was a very sudden shift away from vitamin E as the anti-estrogen, and it started being called the antioxidant protective against the breakdown of the unsaturated fats.
And you were saying they added iron to the animals' feed and then they stopped seeing the beneficial effects of the vitamin E, correct?
Yes, for several years they found that the apparently supplemented feed no longer cured the brain degeneration.
And they found that the vitamin E was being destroyed right in the product by the presence of iron.
But the same thing happens in the organism.
Vitamin E and polyunsaturated fats are very interactive and pro-oxidative.
But the industries, both the estrogen industry and the seed oil industry, found that this was a way to distract the public from thinking of estrogen and the unsaturated fats as being dangerous.
Because if vitamin E was just protecting against oxidation, then all you needed was fresh oil and vitamin E to prevent the breakdown of the oil.
And they suppressed the idea that vitamin E was an anti-estrogen, anti-clot, hard protective drug for about 40 years.
And this made me think about prenatal vitamins when a woman is exposed to much higher estrogen levels.
I know eventually it's also much higher progesterone levels.
But prenatal vitamins have a large dose of iron and a large dose of vitamin C.
Like we were also talking about, that gets destroyed with iron as well.
Yeah, and that's analogous to something that happens inside the cell during stress if you're overloaded with iron.
When your cell can't use oxygen properly, any reductant, including vitamin C, will react to turn the highly oxidized iron into the partly reduced form, ferrous iron.
In which case, that iron then becomes a major oxidant transferring its electron to fats, proteins, DNA and so on.
About 10 years ago, a free radical researcher put some vitamin C.
First he started with a 500 milligram commercial tablet dissolved in a liter of distilled water and found it produced a terrible intensity of free radicals.
So then he got the purest reagent grade available.
And the same thing happened.
And he analyzed it and found that there were several heavy metals in it.
But since he knew about iron's effect, he used just a very small trace of iron.
Not adding any of the other oxidants, but found that that amount of iron was in fact enough to just turn the commercial ascorbic acid into a powerful oxidant.
Now this obviously happens in people's bodies.
And when they take ascorbic acid, which is a form of vitamin C, we see most often available in pills of vitamin C.
And obviously iron is prevalent in everybody's body.
And in a lot of foods.
And in foods, of course.
So this kind of thing...
Or in a multivitamin when it's combined together.
Yeah. So this is the same thing that's happening essentially.
Go ahead.
Yeah. This chemist said, "Isn't it amazing that this amount of free radicals you would think would kill anything?"
But he said, "It shows what amazing defenses our stomachs and intestines must have to survive taking ascorbic acid."
Wow. And I know in this country too, I'm not putting any blame down.
I'm just saying that there seems to be a kind of cultural trend towards mega dosing.
That was not something I was... I wasn't familiar with it when I first came here.
So, you know, doses of five or more grams of vitamin C a day was not uncommon.
Yeah. Linus Pauling pointed out that a goat that weighs as much as a person would be producing about 4,000 milligrams of vitamin C a day.
Okay.
And I had been taking large amounts of vitamin C and was reacting badly to it, having a cough and very chronic serious symptoms.
So I stopped taking it.
And after I hadn't taken it for a while, I wondered how much vitamin C I must be putting out in my urine every day.
And just on an ordinary diet at that time, including bread and potatoes and things that you don't think of as having any vitamin C,
I was still putting out 3,000 milligrams a day consistently.
Wow.
And that got me interested in where the vitamin C was coming from.
It turns out that meat, for example, is extremely rich in dehydroascorbic acid, dehydroascorbate.
And that is not measured.
They measure the reduced form, ordinary ascorbic acid, when they analyze foods.
And so they're simply not looking at the major form in food.
Most of the foods have more ascorbic acid than the analysts show.
And it's functioning in the cell as an oxidant, and that's how it's having a major part of its protective effect.
Because when something goes wrong with the oxidative system, if you just turn off the blood supply, for example,
the outcome of a temporary heart arrest, for example, if you get the blood restored,
you have great oxidative damage done from the lack of oxygen.
And if you have it temporarily shut off of the blood supply so that the oxygen isn't processing the fuels in the cell,
the electrons that are coming from fat and sugar and protein being metabolized,
these electrons will essentially escape and do random damage.
But the presence of the oxidative dehydroascorbate in the cell functions as a substitute for oxygen for a short time.
And it soaks up these random damaging electrons being turned back into ordinary ascorbic acid,
which then becomes water-soluble, leaves the cell.
Wow, so there's a huge amount of this form of vitamin C that plays an extremely important role in our physiology.
And when the food analysts have looked at levels in food, they're just not even looking at this level.
So they say all these foods that contain a form of vitamin C do not contain any vitamin C.
So it's another like black is white kind of story.
People who don't eat a significant amount of bread, pasta and beans will typically consume in their other foods,
3,000 to 4,000 milligrams of vitamin C a day, equivalent.
And this is in the form of fruits or?
Fruits, meat, milk, fish.
OK, Dr. Peat, I'd like to hold it there for a moment because we have a caller on the line so we can run this caller through
and then we can carry on unless there's any other callers.
And we want to come back and talk about the food sources of vitamin C in the supplements when they say they're food-based.
Yeah, we want to mention lots of different things.
So let's just take this next caller.
Hi, you're on the air.
Hello.
Yeah, you're on the air.
Oh, hi. I thank you all so very much for doing this.
I have a question a little bit off topic, very off topic.
It's about milk.
Dr. Peat, I know how much of a proponent you are of milk drinking even as a primary protein source.
And I was increasing my milk drinking sort of after your example.
And then I came across a paper titled "How Milk Causes Osteoporosis."
Are you aware of that paper?
Yeah, there's almost an organization of anti-milk people.
And that's one of their worst publications.
It just doesn't -- everything about it is --
Unscientific probably.
Mistaken, yes.
Well, I know it does -- the prefacing remarks or sort of their foundational statements talk about the protective effects of estrogen.
Now, I understand that you don't agree with that.
There's so much evidence.
I'm tending toward your reasoning.
But the thing that kind of gave me pause was when they paralleled the high bone density of the people in, you know,
countries where they drink a lot of milk and the correlated high rates of osteoporosis.
And that -- I mean, can you say anything -- address that at all?
Yeah, much of it is the lack of vitamin D in those countries.
If you compare someone in Vietnam who eats maybe 600 milligrams of calcium from vegetables
and someone in Sweden who might get 2,000 milligrams from milk and cheese,
the people in Vietnam are outside a lot getting sunlight and vitamin D.
And their diet is rich in magnesium and other nutrients.
But a lot of the -- since milk production is high in the high latitude countries,
part of that effect that some people talk about is the lack of vitamin D.
So it's a lack of vitamin D in the northern hemisphere that's causing the osteoporosis,
even amongst milk drinkers.
But having said that, 2,000 milligrams of calcium a day,
you have to drink almost a half a gallon of milk a day to get that.
And, I mean, I don't know if you know any Swedish people that drink half a gallon of milk a day,
but I certainly don't know any myself.
That's the amount that I consider to be protective against high blood pressure
and heart disease and such.
But for the bones, 1,000 to 1,200 is probably an acceptable amount.
Doctor, do you -- so there's no truth -- there's no accuracy to their claim that,
essentially, we have a finite number of osteoblasts and we use them up?
No.
Did I state that clearly enough for the audience?
What was that?
Yes, you did.
Did I state that clearly enough for the audience?
I couldn't understand that.
Oh, I'm sorry.
For the sake of the people listening that didn't read this paper, did I state that clearly enough?
Oh, yeah, I think so.
The osteoblasts are regenerating, being renewed, so there's no finite population.
I mean, that's not even normal medical science to say that there's a finite population of osteoblasts
and osteoclasts.
They're constantly breaking down bone and constantly building bone.
And another point about the osteoporosis is that when they do these bone mineral density scans,
it's not actually looking at the health of the bone and the protein structure.
It's just looking at the minerals through an X-ray,
and it's not looking at the overall picture of the health of the bone.
So it's not an accurate way to determine someone's health of the bone.
It shows a part of the picture.
But when you look at a population that's similar in other ways,
the difference between milk drinking and not milk drinking corresponds to strong bones and weak bones
or smaller bones, and animal experiments really are the clearest way to understand medical issues.
But whenever a medical doctrine chooses to sell a product that conflicts with the animal studies,
they say we can't go by anything except double-blind human clinical studies.
Much of medicine is based on animal studies, and they're a perfectly valid way for most issues.
I won't monopolize the conversation, but I thank you so much.
Bye-bye now.
Thank you very much for your call.
Thank you for your call.
Okay, just want to remind people again,
you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMUD Galbraithville 91.1 FM.
And from now 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 antioxidants.
We're very pleased to have Dr. Raymond Peat with us.
The number is 923-3911, or if you live outside the area, 1-800-KMUD-RAD.
Okay, so Dr. Peat, going back to vitamin C,
I think it's probably the vitamin that most people recognize as antioxidant and health-promoting,
especially for colds and coughs.
They market it for flu and that kind of thing, and it's kind of very much promoted in the wintertime.
Can I just ask you about experiments that were done with ascorbic acid that were kind of --
would make you shy away from it?
I know you mentioned the ascorbic acid itself is pretty damaging
and is not the kind of form that you would find in foods,
and the form that you would find in foods from meat and fruits, et cetera, is certainly more suitable.
And the iron that most bodies contain and/or foods contain is very harmful in its own right as a free radical.
The damage that's caused by it is a lot more than is to be avoided by taking a vitamin for it.
You know what?
There's actually a caller on the air.
So let's take this caller before we go too much further with that.
I'll try and hold that thought.
Sorry.
Caller, you're on the air.
Hi.
I'm calling with a question about diabetes.
I am newly diagnosed with diabetes.
I'm 68 -- I mean 67.
I guess I feel older already.
My question is, is a restricted calorie diet helpful?
And another question -- another issue I wanted to bring up was an article I read in the science section of the New York Times a couple weeks ago.
It titled "High stress can make insulin cells regress."
It said in mice with type 2 diabetes,
the researchers showed that beta cells that had lost function were not dead at all, most remained alive but in a changed form.
They reverted to an earlier developmental progenitor state.
So I'm thinking maybe that would lead to some kind of treatment.
But anyway, I'm trying to get on top of it and trying to control it with diet if I can and not being very successful.
So I wondered if -- Dr. Peat, if you had any suggestions?
Well, the cells can replace themselves in several different ways, and that thing of regressing and re-differentiating is one way.
But a well-established way is that the alpha cells in the pancreas are converted steadily into beta cells.
And so you can completely kill off all of the beta cells by eating too much unsaturated fat, for example,
and have supposedly the type 1 diabetes in which you're not making any insulin.
But if you stop killing the beta cells, the alpha cells are known to be able to replenish them.
But the stimulus and the defense to keep the replacement going from the alpha cells is sugar.
That's just what diabetics avoid.
Yeah.
So for our listeners, unsaturated fats include all of those vegetable oils that are liquid.
Yes, I have read some of your articles, Dr. Peat, and I've been omitting that from my diet and using coconut oil.
And it can take up to four years for you to replace all of your polyunsaturated fat cells with a saturated fat cell.
You've probably seen some of the news about a hundred-year-old study.
They used to use aspirin to cure diabetes, and in the last year there have been some articles commenting on that
and confirming that it in fact helps you handle glucose fairly quickly to lower your blood glucose.
And aspirin happens to be a very powerful antioxidant of a safe kind that prevents the excess electrons from things such as polyunsaturated fats,
destroying cells such as the beta cells.
So the aspirin is not only intensifying your ability to immediately use glucose,
but it's also protecting against any of the residual polyunsaturated fats that are still stored in your body.
And if you eat like 325 milligrams a day or --
Some people take that much with each meal to get their blood sugar down,
but if you're taking that much, it's important to take vitamin K,
since that's the only serious side effect of too much aspirin is that it can make you have a bleeding predisposition.
So if you take more than one baby aspirin a day, you need to take one milligram of vitamin K with each standard aspirin tablet of 325 milligrams,
and that is equivalent -- and if you see in the health food stores, you'll see that they can come in micrograms.
So that would be 1,000 micrograms of vitamin K with each aspirin tablet.
With each 81 milligram or with each 325?
With each 325.
If you take more than 80 milligrams, then you need to supplement -- I mean 90 milligrams of baby aspirin -- you need to supplement with vitamin K.
Oh, okay.
Well, I appreciate that information.
But what about -- I've heard that sometimes people go on a very restricted calorie diet.
I heard about like 600 calories a day with some liquid stuff and starchy vegetables
that cause some people who had diabetes less than four years to have the condition.
This was a Dr. Oz report, and I've heard just other stories of people -- is that like give your pancreas a big rest?
If you're not eating a lot or is eating small meals good?
I mean how do you pamper your pancreas?
Some of the low-calorie diets were analyzed, and I think the person doing some of these studies was named BPUYU.
He found that if you simply reduce the polyunsaturated fats but kept the calories the same,
you got the same protective effect as a very low-calorie intake.
When you're reducing your calories to the bare minimum,
you burn the polyunsaturated fats for energy and they don't get loose to do the damage.
Oh, really?
So if you didn't have a lot of polyunsaturated fats in the first place,
it wouldn't matter if you ate normal-sized meals.
But if you are eating polyunsaturated fats, small meals, somehow --
It could be dangerous.
Burn it up?
Yeah.
The polyunsaturated fats?
Yeah.
People who have a high metabolic rate aren't hurt so much by the polyunsaturated fats
because they burn them for energy.
Oh, so aging might be -- maybe your metabolic rate kicks down
and you're not taking care of them so well and that could be a factor?
The PUFA inhibits your thyroid function and blocks your oxidative metabolism,
allowing the free radicals to get loose and damage things,
so you get a progressive destruction of your ability to oxidize food.
And so you become more and more susceptible to those things as you get older.
Yeah.
Well, thank you so much.
I appreciate being able to talk to you, and you're being generous with this information.
So thanks a lot.
I'm on a learning -- steep learning curve.
So thank you very much.
Thank you very much for your call.
Thank you.
In one of my articles about a year ago,
I mentioned some studies that were done in Paris about 1860 and then in England
in which some very serious diabetes cases,
these people who were basically had only two or three months to live,
they were wasting away so fast,
putting out almost a pound of sugar in their urine every day at the expense of their body tissues.
And these two doctors cured their patients by giving them as much sugar in their diet
as they were losing in their urine.
And that they simply didn't know how to explain the cures,
but they described the recovery of patients on about 10 to 12 ounces of sugar added to their diet every day.
And more recently, people have seen that fructose in particular maintains the cell in a state of low phosphate
and intense oxidative energy and chelates iron.
Iron is one of the major things that interacts with the unsaturated fats produced for radicals,
but fructose keeps the cell oxidized,
including keeping the iron from catching the electrons that make it toxic
and lower the phosphate which produces inflammation.
And fructose is found in sugar.
Well, white sugar is half fructose, half glucose,
and also all fruits have a certain percentage of fructose in them as well as glucose.
So the old-fashioned sugar diet was not only preventing tissue wasting,
but it was having an antioxidant effect in the pancreas,
and the sugar was an essential factor for supporting the regeneration of the beta cells.
To produce insulin.
Yeah.
Cool.
Okay, our engineer has a question.
So I have a 13-year-old dog who has a wasting syndrome right now.
He's been just losing weight, and he eats not as much as he used to, but he eats a fair amount.
But literally, he's close to death because he's losing so much weight.
Should I try adding sugar to his dog food?
Yeah.
I have a friend who has been feeding his dogs mostly meat.
One of the dogs he put on a mostly milk diet, and it recovered from his cataracts on the milk diet.
But this other dog, he thought it was about to die,
so he put a tablespoon of sugar on each of its servings of meat, and it's recovering.
And I've seen great results with recovering an injured fowl, ducks and geese, with egg, milk, and sugar.
As a convalescent food.
Dr. Peat gave me that recipe.
And then also with a goat, too.
I did the same thing with a goat, and it's amazing how you can turn a blind goat into a seeing goat,
and a duck that's nearly bled to death into a laying hen again.
And so you should have custard if you're sick, I guess.
Exactly.
One of the very, very foods that Dr. Peat maintains is--
Does vanilla have a medicinal effect?
It's quite--
Vanilla does happen to be anti-inflammatory and antioxidant.
There you go.
I have a great recipe, Michael.
I'll give it to you.
Great.
Well, listen, I'll tell you what.
I'll pull back my question earlier on about vitamin C.
Let's move on to something different.
Well, I do have one more thing to say about vitamin C.
Okay.
And that is when you--for those listeners who might be wanting to get a supplement,
and they think, "Okay, well, I'm going to get a food-based vitamin,"
because there's lots of vitamin companies that advertise that theirs is solely food-based.
It's like you're just--it's concentrated food you're getting your vitamin C from.
But Dr. Peat pointed out that they can call a food-based vitamin when they take cornstarch
and oxidize it with lead to produce the vitamin C.
So if you're having allergic reactions, check your vitamins.
Stop them.
Okay.
So, Dr. Peat, how about the other antioxidants that are beneficial?
I know you mentioned selenium.
I think selenium is a very important antioxidant, especially with vitamin E.
Yeah, and the selenium activates thyroid,
and thyroid by making the cell use oxygen and consuming all of the potentially harmful electrons.
Thyroid functions as an antioxidant, even though its function is to increase oxidation.
It prevents the random harmful type of oxidative damage.
And estrogen, by interfering with the thyroid-activated functions,
estrogen produces a lot of reductive stresses to the cell,
causes water uptake, shifts the balance towards the reductants away from the oxidants.
So it's like anti-vitamin E in its effect on the cells.
Well, it's very aging.
And progesterone opposes those effects,
working with thyroid to keep the cell in its resting oxidized state.
Okay, very good.
We do have another caller on the line, so let's take this next caller.
You're on the air?
Hello?
Hi, you're on the air.
Hey, good.
I love this show.
Let's get back to sugar for a minute.
I've got a brother who's been 10 years sober,
but he is like a dry drunk in a sense,
and he consumes gory quantities of Mountain Dew and ginger ale
within the second ingredient besides water is hydroxychloroquine.
And he works outside in the sun and sweats it out, his basic foodstuffs.
Then he starts drinking it up in the afternoon,
and by the evening he's like Dr. Drickle and Mr. Hyde,
like he used to be when he was drinking booze, you know?
So he's getting to a point where he's getting -- they have another syndrome.
They've identified on the air about people like him who have the warrior gene,
the intermittent outbursts, like an eruption over nothing,
make things into things and then react to them.
Do you know what I'm talking about?
Yeah, go ahead.
And the sugar seems to me to be feeding it because it --
he gets wired the same way he used to do when he drank.
And he's one step away from picking up a lamp and hitting you.
In fact, he's a couple of times on me done this,
and it doesn't seem to me too funny when it happens,
but just talking about it seems weird.
But he's doing it, and he's acting out.
I wonder if it's -- it's probably not so much even the high fructose corn syrup,
but probably the other products within those kind of drinks.
The deficiency of other nutrients.
Yeah, I was going to ask you,
does he just drink these sugary drinks and not eat any protein or --
Oh, no, he'll do that, but then he'll have three candy bars
and pour a bunch of ice in a big 16-ounce thing, drinking the ginger ale and stuff,
and then he just keeps doing that until he's saturated with his stuff.
Well, he could be just very deficient in protein and other B vitamins.
I don't know.
Intermittent explosive disorder is what they've got.
There's a terrific NOVA on this,
but I think the sugar and the alcohol, because the molecule is similar, you know what I mean,
is doing something there.
Have you ever been to an AA meeting where people just drink lots of coffee with a lot of sugar in it?
Actually, the sugar and the alcohol have almost exactly opposite effects on the cell,
contrary to a famous video.
The alcohol itself versus the sugar itself?
Well, fructose in particular is almost an absolute defense against the cellular damage done by ethyl alcohol.
So if a person is being poisoned by ethanol, you can pretty well counteract the damage with fructose.
But fructose--
Well, he's pre-diabetic.
He wrote me a couple of years ago saying he was pre-diabetic,
but he's acting like he's got the--I don't know if you saw this or not, but you should if you haven't.
NOVA this week has a terrific thing on can science stop crime.
It's about a half hour long, and they talk about all this stuff.
MAOA, a gene works in the brain cells to regulate levels of neural activity,
and a third of the population has--the men have this warrior gene, you know,
but it doesn't always come out.
In fact, the researcher had it, the gene, and the scan, they did brain scans on these people,
and the researcher himself did, and he had it too.
So there's environmental factors.
If you were abused as a child, didn't have a lot of friends or whatever,
it can bring it out, the loner type of thing, you know what I mean?
But, yeah, I think the sugar is driving a lot of it in the evening especially.
So you got no comment about that, no idea?
That idea has been around as long as I have.
It got a big boost in the '50s with the publicity for the fat-based damage to the circulatory system
and the reaction that, no, it was the fructose, not the fat, which is poisonous.
And one of the subdivisions of that school of thought is that the sugar is addictive,
and if you stop eating it, you have withdrawal symptoms.
Another aspect is that it shifts the balance of the brain transmitters as part of the addiction process.
I think that's about it.
But a lot of those things, those theories are done by very limited laboratory groups pushing an ideology.
For example, they have a particular doctrine about what serotonin does to behavior.
And contrary to what you can see in dogs and other animals in which aggressive dogs have high serotonin,
and if you lower their serotonin, they become peaceful, contrary to studies like that,
the publicity is saying that serotonin is the drug of peace and tranquility
and that you need to raise the serotonin and that sugar spoils that effect and so on.
So I don't think those judgments about sugar causing an alcohol-like syndrome are very accurate
or very scientifically based, I think is what Dr. Peat is trying to say.
Oh, I agree with you there.
I'm just saying that the sugar that he used to eat before and then now as well,
and it's just feeding something inside of him because he gets reactive.
It's almost like he's high.
Well, it sounds like he might have some other nutritional deficiencies.
Okay.
Well, put it on the air if you've got any news about it.
I'd like to know because I'm about ready to kick his ass.
I don't want to do that.
A nutritional deficiency often goes with having a reaction to a certain food
simply because those drinks don't have any magnesium to speak of.
Right.
Without magnesium, then your brain transmitters leak out and get out of balance.
So a magnesium supplement would be something for him to try.
Yeah, I'll stop doing the other stuff.
Anyway, thanks a lot.
I appreciate you talking to me about it.
It's good to be a violent thing in the family, and I'm his older brother,
and it's on me.
Thank you very much for your call.
Thank you.
Bye.
Okay, thanks for listening.
Okay, well, it is 5 to 8 now, so I'm not too sure we're going to have any more callers for sure.
So, Dr. Peat, I just want to say--go ahead.
Okay, before we wrap this up,
I just want to mention something about vitamin E, Dr. Peat, that you had mentioned.
It's important if people are going to be supplementing with vitamin E,
and it's especially important if people are eating PUFA fats,
polyunsaturated fatty acids that are found in pork and chicken and fish,
and/or eating vegetable oils or fried food,
a vitamin E supplement is much more needed by the body,
and it's important to get a mixed tocopherol, not just the D-alpha tocopherol.
Yeah, the D-alpha was the antioxidant,
but they suppressed the information about the complete vitamin E,
which related to preventing clots and tumors and estrogen symptoms and so on.
So a vitamin E supplement might be safe, but a vitamin C supplement definitely isn't.
No, you can get as much vitamin C as your body can use just from foods.
Okay, so to sum up again, and for those people that are listening,
I know Dr. Peat is a very strong proponent, and rightly so,
of saturated fats rather than the polyunsaturated fats,
and that yet again there's another way of supporting your health with foods principally
and avoiding the polyunsaturated that are so linked to thyroid suppression
and all the negative effects of that.
And aging.
I know you mentioned very quickly, you mentioned that lipofushkin,
that's age pigment, being a productive effect of free radical damage and low thyroid.
Do you think that's a very quick question,
but do you think that's a good gauge of how much stress someone is under cellularly,
if they have a lot of age spots?
Oh, yeah, definitely.
If you can see them on the skin, you're getting them in your brain and other organs.
And it's dietary.
Yeah, and if they're fairly new, vitamin E and even other things can reverse it fairly quickly.
I've seen progesterone and vitamin E and even a tiny bit of vodka can help to remove them.
Okay.
Thanks so much for your time.
I know we've only got two minutes left,
so I wanted to make sure that people can access your website and find out more about you.
So thanks so much for joining us, Dr. Peat.
Okay, thank you.
Okay, so Dr. Raymond Peat's website is www.raypeat.com,
and on his home page there are probably something in excess of 50 fully referenced scientific articles on many subjects,
and well worth a read because you'll find a very different opinion about things that you perhaps have believed from the media.
So I very much encourage you to go and check his website out.
Also, he has approached -- people have approached him through his website as well for his time
and his opinion on various medical matters.
So a great resource, and I'm always very pleased to have Dr. Peat sharing his wisdom with us.
So until next month when the clocks will go back and it'll be dark and winter's going to be coming,
thanks so much for tuning in and listening to Ask Your Ob-Doctor.
My name's Sarah Johanneson Murray.
My name's Andrew Murray.
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