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.
Redwood Community Radio comes in part from the Security Store, Inc.
in the Meadows Business Park and Redway, featuring watershed dry bags and pelican cases in many sizes.
Both have lifetime warranties and have been tested over time in Humboldt County.
The Security Store has solutions for all security needs and is open Monday through Friday, 9 to 5.
They can be reached at 923-2363.
It is 7 o'clock, 85 degrees outside our Redway studios.
We are Redwood Community Radio, KMUD Garberville, KMUE Eureka Arcada, KLAI Laytonville, K258BQ Shelter Cove, and on the web at kmud.org.
And the views and opinions expressed throughout the broadcast day are those of the speakers and not necessarily those of this station, its staff, or underwriters.
Time will be made available for other viewpoints. Thank you for joining us.
And KMUD thanks Jessica Baker of Jade Dragon Acupuncture for her support of Redwood Community Radio.
Practicing traditional Chinese medicine, Jessica treats conditions ranging from psoriasis to post-traumatic stress.
Located at 607 F Street in Arcada, Jade Dragon Acupuncture can be reached at 822-4300 or check her out online at jadedragonacupuncture.com.
And here comes Ask Your Herb Doctor.
[Music]
Well, welcome to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name's Andrew Murray.
And for those of you who perhaps have never listened to the show which runs 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 certified organic suppliers.
So as per usual, I've still got the same intro but Sarah is not joining me today.
So you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMED 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 environmental enrichment.
Amongst other things, we're going to cover a few other topics of interest as well as look at a couple of recent articles
that have caused a bit of a stir and that we are going to refute for the bad science they contain.
The number if you live in the area is 923 3911.
So from 7.30 to 8 o'clock onwards, call is very welcome to call in with any questions about the show's content
either this month's or any previous content they might have questions about.
If you live outside the area, there's a toll free number is 1800 KMUD RAD which is 1-800-568-3723.
And we can also be reached toll free on 1-888-WBM-HERB for further questions during normal business hours Monday through Friday.
So once again, very welcome to introduce a seemingly permanent fixture to the show, thankfully, for his wisdom.
Dr. Peat, thank you for joining us.
Hi.
Okay, I guess as always, I'd like you just to give an introduction of your academic background
for perhaps those people who've just tuned into the show and have never heard you before.
In the 60s, I taught biology and literature and painting and various things.
But then I went to graduate school at 1968 to 72 studying biochemistry, reproductive, aging, physiology in general.
And since then I've been continuing some of the same projects that I started back in the late 60s.
Okay, and you're fairly prolific. I think that's the right word in terms of producing newsletters that can be accessed by people wanting to make a subscription to your newsletters.
And also you're a pretty constant and avid researcher of topics, both old and new, finding out the truth, if you like, about where the science is coming from.
And that leads me on to a couple of articles I wanted to discuss.
I wanted you to discuss the bad science portion of the articles because one of them caused a fair amount of stir in as much as the topics that we've talked about in the past.
Things like salt being good for you and sugar being good for you and saturated fats being good for you.
The saturated fat seems to be working its way to the surface now with the medical establishment seemingly doing a U-turn on the polyunsaturates, saying that the polyunsaturates are bad for you now.
Actually, the saturated fats are good for you. And hopefully in time here, the same thing will happen with sugar.
But recently there's been an article that was published that seemed to shoot down the benefits of sugar and it was done with mice.
And they were using two different groups of mice.
The bottom line of the article was that it was calling sugar poisonous and was saying that it had the same kind of effects in terms of the results as when they tested mouse groups that were inbred.
And that the same negative effects were present in the sugar group as were in the mouse group that were inbred in terms of their ability to control territory and dominate others as signs of their healthiness and their ability to find the best place to sleep and mate with the best females.
So you're familiar with that study done in Utah, the University in Utah, that said that sugar was bad for the mice and it caused an early death and all sorts of things.
Yeah, it just came out a couple days ago and people have been contacting me about it because it basically says that the amount of sugar, fructose and sucrose in three sweetened drinks that Americans, a large part of the population, average that many per day,
that that amount given to mice causes extremely high mortality.
The next best thing to rat poison for the high rate of mortality in a period of I think it was 32 weeks or 36 weeks, 35% of the sugar reared females died and only 17% of the so-called stock diet females died.
That sounds bad on the face of it, doesn't it? You're going to explain the science behind the findings.
Yeah, twice as many deaths in this fairly moderate period of time just from drinking the equivalent of three sodas.
And that was so weird and extreme. I looked up what that group had been doing before this study and they were working on, as you mentioned, inbreeding.
And they found that the inbred mice had a high mortality and aggression was designed into their living arrangement so that they thought of it as accelerated evolution apparently in which the survival of the meanest would be evident in a very short time.
And it happened several years ago, just a year or two before they switched from their inbreeding studies to the sugar study.
There were three or four papers published showing that a diet enriched in starch and polyunsaturated fats powerfully increased aggression and mouse killing in rats.
So the connection between starch, polyunsaturated fats and aggression was clearly established and they had an environmental setup that allowed aggression to kill off part of the population fairly quickly.
And so I don't think it was just an objective study of the effect of sugar because the so-called stock diet consisting of some grains and soy protein or soy flour and corn starch added 25% corn starch.
So the grains contained the polyunsaturated fats and it was a model of the aggression promoting diet but they didn't mention that in their publicity about the fact that the so-called normal diet allowed higher survival in the females than the sugar rearing diet with the equivalent of three sodas per day.
So what they did was create an arrangement in which feeding one group of animals so that they became aggressive, the setup was such that they could take over the food supply, the nesting arrangement and generally bully the weaker animals.
So that extremely high mortality is not produced by drinking three sodas a day.
It would be if you had to associate the sugar reared population with the population living on starch and polyunsaturated fats and they injured the passive people.
Can you hear any buzzing on the line? How's this phone line to you Dr. Peat?
So far it's perfect.
Good. I just heard the buzz. Maybe it was just on my end.
So unfortunately, as another example of some skewed science to produce results in the direction that was favorable to the outcome which was that sugar was bad for you when actually it was not modeled correctly and the actual findings weren't realistic.
Okay, so that's the first thing and then there was another article from a study done in Italy which referenced the intake of T4, specifically Synthroid which is a fairly common prescription for thyroid deficiency and a link between Synthroid use and lung cancer.
So that caused again a little bit of a stir given that quite a few people were using Synthroid for low thyroid function.
In terms of Synthroid's use and its activity as a compound, what did you find about that study that was erroneous?
There were animal studies with lung cancer specifically that are very relevant to that and they found that T3, the active thyroid hormone, inhibited the growth of the cancer cells but that T4 increased their growth and increased the metastatic ability of them.
And that's similar to some studies that started about 30 years ago published in JAMA.
There was a study in I think it was the late 80s studying a group of five women who had been treated for hypothyroidism with T4 only such as Synthroid, comparing them to a group of women who weren't given any thyroid supplement.
So they had chosen a group of hypothyroid women and reported that the ones who received the T4 or Synthroid had a higher rate of osteoporosis.
But since low thyroid is compensated by high cortisone and high prolactin and other stress hormones which cause bone problems including osteoporosis,
what they were doing was looking at a population with a deficient thyroid problem treated insufficiently with something like 100 micrograms of T4.
And it has been known for decades that women are much less able to convert T4 or Synthroid into the active hormone.
So it's especially inappropriate for treating women with hypothyroidism to give them only T4.
Okay, from a perspective of being stimulant to turn up oxidative stress in terms of T4's activity, I don't think you're not really an advocate of just using T4 anyway in terms of its physiological effect and its usefulness.
In general, both of the thyroid hormones, if you can convert the thyroxine into T3, they both can have a very important anti-oxidative damage function.
By increasing the rate of useful oxidation, they keep electrons from escaping from the electron transport chain in the mitochondrion and prevent the random oxidative damage.
Just uncoupling the production of energy so you're wasting oxygen and fuel with some drugs, for example, that used to be used for weight loss which activated the oxidation the way thyroid does but without producing useful energy.
Even that kind of uncoupling is known to reduce oxidative damage.
So when you're finding increased oxidative breakdown products when you give T4, it shows that you're not activating oxidative metabolism the way thyroid normally does.
You're interfering in some way with the respiratory system.
Thank you for that. Those two articles, like I said, caused a bit of a stir but obviously they're not in the right context.
You're listening to Ask Your Ob Doctor on KMUD Garbaville, 91.1 FM, from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o'clock.
Callers are invited to come in with any questions they have either about tonight's subject or previous subjects.
The number if you live in the area is 9233911. If you live outside the area there's a 1-800-568-3723 number.
Let's move on to the main topic of tonight. The subject of environmental enrichment in terms of negating the effects, if you like, or staving off the effects of brain atrophy and also the reference to Alzheimer's.
Seeing that this enrichment now is proposed as a new approach, if you like, for the treatment of Alzheimer's, another neurodegenerative disease where lab findings show an association between Alzheimer's and increased levels of destructive inflammatory mediators like nitric oxide and cortisol as well as prostaglandins.
What do you know about this topic of environmental enrichment and its perspective to energy and anti-inflammation?
That observation that Alzheimer's people have drastically reduced living variety, they tend not to socialize as much as people who are resistant to Alzheimer's,
that started me thinking about the general range of stimulation and animal studies beyond simple more or less voluntary isolation that old people often develop the habit of just staying at home and watching television or something.
Beyond that, animal studies did various things, isolation at different ages, separating the baby animals from their mothers right after weaning, giving them solitary confinement until they're middle-aged,
and even tightening up their environment to the point of holding them so they can't do anything at all.
There's a gradient all the way from living in a playground basically with slides and wheels and various colored objects, balls to push around and so on, all the way down to being rolled up in a blanket so you can't move.
But you see the same things happening. The worse the stress is, the smaller the brain gets.
Depression is known to increase cortisol and cause atrophy of all of the tissues and that includes the brain.
So they see that after about three years of just being psychologically depressed, people show a smaller reduction of the brain volume.
Animal studies starting in the 1960s at University of California, Berkeley, they first found that animals given stimulation, a big playground to roam in when they weren't eating and sleeping, they found that they learned better, could solve problems better.
So they examined their brains to see what was happening and they found that the enzyme cholinesterase was increased in proportion to how much they were stimulated and how well they learned.
They kept that study going on generation after generation and found that it not only increased this enzyme that destroys acetylcholine, it involved enlargement of the whole brain, especially the cortex.
Each generation, both the enzyme increased and the brain got larger.
So it's passed on. Yeah, in a physiological sort of inheritance, which is getting some study now in the last 10 years. But at the time, they were just interested in the fact that the environment could cause these major biological changes, especially in the brain.
But a lot of people said, "Well, if you're destroying acetylcholine at a higher rate and the brain gets bigger, that must mean you have more activity of the cholinergic nerves making acetylcholine."
But that isn't what they found. They found that the enzyme that destroys it was increased as the brain got bigger.
That kind of reasoning without facts shifted over to thinking about the deterioration of the brain in Alzheimer's disease.
They saw that there was less tissue in parts of the brain, especially in the cholinergic part.
No one suggested that maybe overexposure to acetylcholine might have something to do with why the nerves atrophied, because the various stress signals increase the various factors that cause brain shrinkage.
So, they proposed poisoning the enzyme called anesterase, which was associated in the animal studies with increased intelligence, memory, and brain growth.
They proposed doing just the opposite, poisoning that enzyme to increase the amount of acetylcholine in the brain.
The enzyme was tacrine, the name of the chemical. Several studies by the late 90s, they were seeing that it did absolutely nothing for the Alzheimer's dementia, but it did cause a terrifically high incidence of liver disease.
In the 70s, it happened that Parkinson's disease was, they were looking around for other things than L-DOPA to treat it with because that didn't work too well.
Some virus treatment investigations had found that a derivative of camphor or a similar compound that was used to cure herpes and influenza also had nerve protective action.
They thought, why not use this amandidine or adamantine amine to treat Parkinson's disease?
They found that it did benefit Parkinson's disease, which involved, among other things, an excess of acetylcholine.
This amandidine was known right from the time of the virus studies, it was known to be an anti-cholinergic drug.
It was recognized as an anti-cholinergic when it was being used to improve Parkinson's patients.
But the Alzheimer's people, seeing the success with Parkinson's disease, wanted to try it in their population.
But since they were already treating with something that increased the cholinergic acetylcholine, they couldn't very well switch right over to something absolutely the opposite to inhibit the cholinergic system.
So they suddenly discovered that as well as being anti-cholinergic, amandidine and a very similar amandine, they found that they also inhibit the excitotoxins, the glutamate aspartate excitatory system.
So suddenly this anti-cholinergic drug became an anti-excitatory drug and was fit to be used in Alzheimer's patients in combination with tacrine or the galantamine or other drugs to poison the enzyme which this new drug was activating.
Wow. Do you know, these two compounds you mentioned, tacrine and galantamine?
Well, amandidine and memantinine, are they still prescribable drugs?
Oh yeah, amandidine I think is now a standard Alzheimer's treatment along with whatever toxin of the cholinesterase inhibiting.
So this was, because I was always, I mean in terms of my physiology studying herbal medicine, I was always taught that acetylcholine was a very important neurotransmitter and it was mopped up in a synaptic cleft by acetylcholine esterase and that prevented any overstimulation firing.
So, for what you were just discussing right now, we're talking about a kind of excess situation where there's an excess?
Yeah, inescapable stress, the stress hormones rather than pushing higher and higher on the cortisol and adrenaline direction to excite things, run the heart at a faster rate.
The body shifts when it sees futility, inability to escape.
It can simply switch gears and turn off that system and turn on the acetylcholine cholinergic system.
And the confinement inescapable stress, which is the extreme of isolation, the extreme opposite from enriched environment, this turns on the cholinergic dominant system,
which lowers blood sugar and in consequence, lowering the blood sugar activates histamine release.
Some of the acetylcholine nerves, such as the vagus nerve, amplify their influence by releasing histamine, which is very similar in its effects to acetylcholine.
So, you can think of this kind of inescapable stress as turning on the histamine type of cholinergic reaction.
So, this is really a kind of death situation. This would be going towards death and away from life?
Yeah.
Biologically?
In the learned helplessness experiments of the 60s, Martin Seligman is the person who made that famous.
He's now doing military research.
Whoops.
He found that if you almost drowned a rat but saved it, even the rats that saw it being saved would swim on for days before they drowned.
And if you put the saved rat back in, the experience of being saved would cause it to swim much longer than the average rat, which might give up after a day.
That sounds like the seed of hope to me.
Yeah, but if you simply held the rat in your hand until it got the idea that it was powerless, one experience of being unable to escape, you would drop it in the water and it would basically drown in 30 minutes.
Wow, wow, far out. Go ahead.
The state of the heart, they found, was in a turned off state, basically a cholinergic anti-mobilization energy state.
Wow. We do have a couple of callers, obviously. Thanks for that explanation. That's pretty profound.
So, let's take the first caller. You're on the air?
Is that me, please?
Yeah, you're on the air. And where are you calling from?
From Oregon House, California, which is close to Nevada City.
Okay, thank you.
Yes, the first question has to do with toe fungus. Dr. Peat, you mentioned in the past that sulfur was good for fungus, and I was just wondering if it would work with toe fungus and if I should use some DMFO to get it in there.
And the second was, I was wondering about your thoughts on irradiation of food.
There's a 10% sulfur soap sold at drugstores. They might not stock it on the shelf because it's too cheap, but it works very well for an athlete's foot, anywhere on the body.
This is a bit deeper than an athlete's foot. It's actually in the nail bed.
Yeah, once it gets into the nail, it's very hard to get anything in there. But it's possible that DMFO would help it penetrate through the nail.
But the fungus actually lives right inside the thick nail material.
I have been using a Dremel to thin it out as much as I can bear, but I'll try that too. So about irradiation of food, do you have any thoughts about that?
Yeah, it's been known for a long time that it breaks down all of the fragile, easily oxidized nutrients, changes some of the amino acids, turns tryptophan into some toxins.
The advocates of it, the radiation waste disposal industry, it's a good way to get rid of radioactive waste, put it into factories.
They do studies and claim that it almost doesn't change the food at all.
It seems like the idea behind it, in part at least, is that they could supposedly drop their sanitation standards to zero and then rely on the radiation to kill bacteria.
Yeah, but it does, it changes the flavor fairly drastically. It gives it a rancid flavor almost instantly.
But the public gets accustomed to degraded food.
Okay, well thanks very much.
Thank you for that cool caller. Okay, do we have any other? Yeah, Michael, let's take the next caller please.
Yeah, hi, I'm calling from the Saline Creek Watershed and I got a question about kava, that you know, supposedly the most powerful anxiolytic there is.
Am I on air? Hello? Yeah, you're on the air, I can hear you.
And all of the studies done, I went to an herb school in the eastern part of the country and you know, it was my teacher's favorite herb also and it's something that I use chronically.
I guess, yeah, anyways, the thing that I'm curious about is like I've heard that a lot of the studies done that say that it has liver damage were done on like, you know, like one of those studies where they gave the above ground parts instead of just the below ground parts.
I'm just curious about your thoughts and opinions on that and if you know anything about that study.
Yeah, I do. The parts that I use anyway are the roots and the study that showed this, another good example of skewed science,
showed the hepatotoxic effects of kava were actually done with a hexane extract of kava kava and actually the hexane was probably more carcinogenic than anything else.
In terms of its use in Fiji and parts of the tropical Philippines where they grow kava and use kava in Hawaii to, you know, ceremoniously,
there's no real recorded incidence of any liver toxic effects of it so you would think, I know that's probably an aqueous extract so I don't think they use ethanol to extract it which it is typically extracted in a 45% or 60% ethanol.
You can definitely make, I've definitely made fresh kava tincture with 95% and it works great.
Yeah, well that was the main bit of science that came out was with the hexane extract and I believe it was to animals, it was in an animal study so I think it was a rat or mouse study that showed liver damage and the liver damage almost exclusively was done to the hexane.
Well, do you see any long-term negative effects of using kava tonically?
I can't say that I've witnessed any long-term effects myself. I know a lot of people use it for skeletal muscle relaxation, that's its main indication is to relax skeletal muscle which is why it's termed an anxiolytic.
Yeah, I think ceremoniously when it's used it's probably ingested in large amounts and so I think it does have a fairly profound relaxing activity.
If you were to use kava kava in a quote therapeutic sense, the dose would probably be nowhere near as much and you'd probably experience some general anxiolytic action but not as profound perhaps as you would if you were in a kava ceremony.
Totally, I feel like the way it makes your mouth tingle it makes your whole mind and body tingle too, that's how it works.
Yep, that's the hallmark of kava.
Well, thanks for your input.
Yeah, you're very welcome.
Have a good one, bye.
Yeah, thank you for calling.
Okay, we have another caller on the line, let's take the next caller.
Hello?
Hi, you're on the air.
Yes, I want to ask something in regard to the thyroid. Now my situation is my thyroid is a bit low and they have me on 88 micrograms of something I think they call levothyroxine.
Yeah, levothyroxine.
Okay, is that the same as the synthroid?
Yeah, it's T4.
Okay, it's T4. All right, now, yeah, sometimes I get the 3 and the 4 mixed up. And I asked the doctor, the endocrinologist, do I need to take the T3 as well as the T4 and he said that we convert T4 into T3 automatically.
Yeah, well.
Is that true? Do we do that?
Well, the reason women have 5 to 10 times the number of thyroid problems of all sorts than men do is that their liver is relatively unable to convert T4 to the active T3 hormone efficiently.
In the 1940s when T4 was synthesized and brought out as a product, it was tested on male medical students and it worked in them just the same as armor thyroid extract. But they didn't bother testing it on a female population which...
Well, I've been having tests fairly regularly to see how it's doing and they keep telling me that my thyroid is now normal.
Well, the old normal concentration in the blood of T4 and T3 when the gland was producing it and the liver was activating it or when a person was using armor thyroid as a supplement, the ratio...
Well, I'm not using that. So, I mean, is this working for me or is there a reason for me to take the armor instead or what?
Well, if you have any symptoms of hypothyroidism remaining, then that would mean that your liver isn't activating the T4.
Well, when they do the blood test and they say that my thyroid is at a normal level, that's...
Well, they changed the normal level previous to the use of pure thyroxine. There was a very slight difference like a 4 to 1 or 10 to 1 ratio of thyroxine to T3 in the blood, but now they consider 50 to 1 to be normal.
So, you're saying that the blood test isn't reliable for me to know?
The blood test has been standardized on a population of people who have been using only thyroxine rather than the natural thyroid or people who have no thyroid problem at all.
Well, now if I took the armor that has the T3 also, does that mean that I'm going to get, you know, make better use of it or I'm just going to be...
It's exactly the proportion that your own gland secretes and then the liver, if your liver is responding to the active T3 secreted by the gland, the liver will go ahead and convert the rest of the T4 to T3.
But if you take armor thyroid and metabolize it perfectly, your blood test is going to show excess above normal T3 because they've standardized the test to say that normal is what is produced by taking thyroxine.
Well, if it's going to help me, I might try it. How long does it take to take it before the test will show differently?
Well, if your TSH is in the low normal range and if your temperature and pulse rate are good and if you don't have any symptoms, then you're handling it properly.
What are the symptoms of having a low thyroid?
Cold hands and feet are very common, low blood sugar, anxiety, fatigue, depression, dry skin, edema, inability to go very long without getting hungry, craving sweets.
I don't think I have too much of that. What happened is I had had atrial fibrillation and they discovered that I had a high thyroid or overactive thyroid, which I'd never had before.
I don't know what caused it. It came on and the only symptom I had was the heartbeat, irregular heartbeat.
So they told me basically I could take something called methimazole, which would lower the thyroid, but it would make me very susceptible to bad infections and lots of difficult side effects.
The other thing they said I could do was have my thyroid, basically most of it destroyed by taking a radioactive iodine treatment.
That sounds drastic, but it seemed like, well, if I shrink my thyroid down below normal with this, then that's it and all I have to do is take thyroid and that's not going to have the side effects of the methimazole.
So I chose to do that and then gradually the thyroid started to shrink and it seems to have stabilized where I need to add the 88 micrograms and then I'm okay.
What do you think about doing that if you have a hyperthyroid?
There was a study of people with hyperthyroidism treated by three different kinds of doctors.
One did surgery, one did the radioactive iodine to kill the thyroid, and the third group got just the thyroid suppressing chemical.
The patients on the chemical, most of them after six months recovered and the portion, about 30 percent, that didn't recover in six months, with another six months, they recovered just with the suppressing chemical.
Then they went on to have a functioning thyroid afterwards rather than having it destroyed.
Well, for me, I already had it, but it didn't totally destroy it. They calibrated it so that it would just be a little bit below normal and I would still make some thyroid, but I'd have to have it add some.
I just didn't want to take the chance on the chemical because there were so many side effects.
Whereas once you lower it with the radioactive thing, then that's done.
You're no longer radioactive. They say it goes straight through the thyroid gland and shrinks it and it doesn't go anywhere else in your body.
So that's what's going on, so now I have to add the thyroid.
So you're saying that if I don't have symptoms of hypothyroidism, then I should just stick with what I'm doing and I don't need the armor?
Yeah, the temperature, pulse rate, and symptoms are good indicators.
Yeah, I don't have cold hands and feet. I think everything's normal.
Sometimes I get fatigued, but I think it might be a result of going through the intense heart thing because it took a while for that to get balanced.
But now everything seems to be getting better.
Well, thank you. I want to give somebody else a chance. Thank you very much.
Okay, bye.
Thank you, beautiful.
All right, we do have a couple of other callers, obviously, so let's take the next caller.
You're on the air?
Yes, this is David from Missouri.
Hi, David.
Dr. Peat, I wanted to ask about what I'm starting to gather from reading most of your nutritional philosophy and then also looking at the East-West Healing Cookbook that you wrote the foreword for.
I've noticed that on a lot of the food preparation that they will take the seeds out of, like, cucumbers and tomatoes and, you know, you always skin the potatoes.
And I think I understand why, but I just wanted to understand this a little bit better.
I know that we don't want seeds because they have polyunsaturated fats, but you would think that a lot of those seeds would just pass through.
Is it because a lot of these things will lodge in the crooks and crannies of the intestine and possibly just sit there and become an irritant, or possibly the bacteria will feed off of that because it's --
You know, some seeds do pass through harmlessly, like cactus pear seeds. They're so tough that they pass through without being an irritant.
Tomato seeds are so tender that if they get crushed by chewing, they release fairly toxic materials, protein oxidizing.
And seeds in general are protected for the plant's benefit by toxins that are aimed at whatever predator threatens them.
So many seeds contain toxins that are intended to prevent mammalian enzymes from digesting them.
Ah-ha. So like a blackberry seed, you know, blackberries, I mean, they seem so good, but those seeds, they seem like they're just going to get stuck in the intestine somewhere.
You know, they're so hard. Is that a possibility? Are those going to pass through, or are they going to create that toxic effect?
They pass right through unless you chew them and have an allergic reaction.
Okay. And so like the potato skin, obviously that is not digestible, so that's going to probably sit in the intestine and feed bacteria, or is that going to pass through too?
No. Cellulose is a very harmless fiber because bacteria generally can't break it down.
Only a few types of bacteria can attack cellulose, so it passes through just as bulky fiber.
But the potato family, like the tomatoes, the whole family includes chemicals that are highly allergenic.
So if you're allergic to tomatoes, you're likely to have some reaction to chilies, eggplants, and potatoes too.
So you're saying just the whole potato in general or the skin itself?
The skin has the most allergens.
Okay, so it is a good idea to peel that then, more than likely.
Yeah.
Okay. And then the other thing is, you know, I've noticed that you recommend, it seems like you don't say for sure on this,
but you usually will say just plain white sugar rather than like if you're on the health food store now,
they're always promoting these cane organic sugars that aren't refined, so they're not white.
They're like branished colored and different things.
I guess the problem with these things that are not more purified is that they have allergens in them
or possibly things from the processing of the different substances.
Is that --
Yeah, if you've ever tasted blackstrap molasses, sometimes you can taste smoke in it.
And they used to burn the cane fields to make them easier to harvest, and so they would be smoky.
And then they would boil it down, and the molasses would collect minerals, a lot of nutritious stuff,
but also the junk and smoky material.
Wow.
And even with very clean material like maple syrup or the maguey juice, those come out very clean,
and when they're cooked, the high temperature, if it's browning the sugar, that's breaking down the sugar itself
and producing some highly irritating, possibly toxic materials.
So if these different sugars were produced properly, they would be great,
but we're kind of playing it safe by just getting white sugar because it's probably the purest form of glucose and fructose, right?
Yeah, if it could, for example, be concentrated in a vacuum with a moderate temperature,
maybe something like pasteurization temperature,
that would be a very safe way to make sugar without having to wash the brown stuff out of it.
So you could --
And so like the fructose that you can buy, like, in the health food stores,
you had mentioned to me in an email one time that, you know,
you've just got to make sure that you don't have a reaction to it.
I guess what you were indicating there is that how they produce it again is potentially a problem.
Is that correct?
Yeah, I think it's all made from cornstarch industrially, and you have to just test it yourself.
Some people have a fairly intense, quick reaction, allergic to it.
Some people do beautifully on it,
and I'm not sure if it's the person's difference or the product's difference.
And if you did find a fructose that worked best for you, or if it worked and you didn't have an allergic reaction,
that would be the ideal sugar, right?
Yeah, but fruit is really ideal because you get so many other nutrients with the sugar.
And, you know, just one more question.
Since you brought up fruit, like eating grapes that are seedless grapes,
is that skin a problem on a grape?
Is it going to stick in the intestine and then feed bacteria, or is it usually broken down pretty quickly?
One problem with grapes, if you don't wash them very carefully, is that the white bloom on the skin,
if you rub it and polish it, that comes off.
It's because yeast grow on the waxy surface of the skin.
I've wondered about that, because you can almost see it.
Yeah, and so the fungus growing on the skin always has its normal amount of estrogen in it, which could be a drawback.
So even if you just chewed it really, really well, it probably still wouldn't help in that aspect with it.
Well, yeah, but a moderate amount of grapes, I don't think that amount of irritation is going to worry most people.
Okay, well, thank you.
Thank you, if you'll call.
Okay.
Okay, we do have -- we've got two or three more people, but we're definitely going to have time for one more.
And depending on how quick the caller is, their question or their question is, then we might get to some more.
But let's take the next caller.
A very quick addendum to the last call is, does cooking deactivate the enzymes in tomato seeds?
And then we'll get to our next caller.
Yes, it deactivates the enzymes, but it doesn't destroy the allergens.
Okay, next caller.
You're on the air.
Oh, hello.
Hi.
I'm Yvonne from McKinleyville.
Okay, thank you for calling.
And I wanted -- one of my questions was already answered regarding his position on sugar, so we can skip that one.
Okay.
And I wondered what his position on salt and fats is.
Dr. Peat.
Each one.
Salt and fats?
Salt and fats.
What kind of fat?
Salt.
Yeah, what kind of fat were you asking about?
At the beginning of the program, you said something about his positions on sugar, salt, and fats.
Okay, so --
I can't remember what you said about fats.
We were talking in relation to saturated and polyunsaturated.
Dr. Peat is very much a pro-advocate of saturated fats.
Okay.
And he's very much behind using salt and getting adequate salt in your diet as a --
And does he talk about what kind of salt?
Well, I know, Dr. Peat, you want to answer?
Yes, clean white salt, like sea salt without additives is good.
Yeah, okay.
All right.
That's the end of me, so maybe somebody else can have a turn.
All right.
Thank you for your call.
Thank you.
We do have one more caller, and if the caller wants to keep it short, we should be able to squeeze you in.
Go ahead.
Hi, I'm calling from Will Gulch, far west of --
Okay, thank you.
I have a question, but I also want to say to the other callers that what's been recognized about Alzheimer's
is that it can come with iron deposits in the brain,
and this traditional herb from India, turmeric, has been recognized as being able to chelate that iron.
Like you have curcuminoid receptors throughout your body, curcumin, the active chemical component of turmeric,
so you can consume turmeric to help with Alzheimer's.
It will help remove the excess iron deposits, and above that, it also helps rebuild the collagen
and removes the other deposits from your joints, too, so it helps with arthritis.
And as for the toe fungus, neem is the traditional medicine to use.
Neem oil you can use topically.
Neem you can take internally.
Also, potentially activated charcoal, because it's likely that a dude has, like, a bacterial problem in his body,
and you could consume the activated charcoal, but you can use the neem oil directly on the fungus also.
And to facilitate the liver, you can consume dandelion root.
It's an excellent liver tonic.
Dr. Peat, what do you think about the iron deposits?
I know you've always mentioned iron in a very dangerous reactive element.
Yeah, that fits right into what we've been talking about, the stress hormones that lead to Alzheimer's disease.
Iron is sort of the end point of all of these changes.
Nitric oxide and prostaglandins activate enzymes which release and deposit iron in the brain,
where it then continues amplifying the destructive reactions.
I love the functionality of it.
Okay, I'm afraid it is almost 8 o'clock.
So I want to make sure that I give out Dr. Peat's contact details for people who want to find out more about him.
And we'll just spend this last couple of minutes thanking Dr. Peat for his time.
Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Peat.
Okay, thank you.
Thank you.
So, okay, the web address of Dr. Peat is www.raypeat.com.
He has lots of articles that he's published and all fully referenced scientific journal articles, if you like.
So go to his website.
He's got a big resource there for information, not just on tonight's topic,
but lots of information on thyroid, hormones, good fats versus bad fats, salt, sugar, etc.
So until the third Friday of next month, my name is Andrew Murray.
We can be contacted on 1-888-WBM-HERB for any questions Monday through Friday.
Next month will be in September, folks, and heading towards the fall.
I hope the weather is going to be good where you are.
Okay, until next month.
[Music]
Support for KMUD comes in part from Golden Dragon Medicinal Syrup,
an herbal elixir made without heat or ice.
Golden Dragon Medicinal Syrup is edible, topical, cosmetic, and water-soluble.
Information is available at goldendragonmedicinalsyrup@gmail.com.
This is Redwood Community Radio, KMUD Garberville, KMUE Eureka Arcana, KLAI Laytonville, K258BQ Shelter Cove,
and on the web at kmud.org.
It is 759, 81 degrees outside our Redway studios.
We have a special treat.
Little Rock is sitting in, but you will get just as thunked up as you normally do.
So enjoy.
[Music]
Please remember that this program is supported by the listener members of Redwood Community Radio.
If you like what you hear, please consider becoming a member of KMUD or renewing if you've already joined.
A regular yearly membership is $50, but we accept any amount.
Help us keep free speech alive.