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[Music]
Welcome once again to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor.
My name is Andrew Murray.
For those of you who perhaps have never listened to the show,
which runs every third Friday of the month from 7 to 8pm,
my wife and I were 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 you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMU DeGarboville 91.1 FM
and from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o'clock,
you are invited to call in with any questions either related or unrelated
to this month's subject of learned helplessness, nervous system,
and a generalized thyroid questionnaire about certain things that I've come to be asked over time
that very much come from misconceptions.
So I just want to clear up some of those too.
The number here if you live in the area is 923 3911.
If you live outside the area, the toll-free number is 1800 KMUD RAD.
And we can also be reached incidentally toll-free on 1888 WBMER
for further questions during normal business hours Monday through Friday.
Once again, this is becoming very usual.
We're very pleased to welcome Dr. Raymond Peat to share his wisdom with us
and to find out some of the latest work that he's been doing.
So thank you so much for joining us again, Dr. Peat.
Okay, so as always, for people who perhaps have never heard you
or never listened to the show even, it does happen for sure,
would you just please give an outline of your academic background?
In biology, I studied mostly at the University of Oregon 1968 to '72,
did my PhD dissertation on reproductive aging
and how the physiology of oxidative metabolism changes with aging
and interacts with changes in all of the hormones.
And since then, I've been developing some of the central ideas
that were involved in both aging and reproduction.
Okay, good.
As I know that a lot of your research has been fairly revelational
in terms of work that is being done both in academic universities
and other private research, but which doesn't always come to the fore
or if at least it does, it takes quite a significant time to reach the medical industry.
I think tonight's kind of beginning introduction anyway at least
for the nervous system has got some fairly new ideas attached to it, if you like.
But I think rather than getting too technical for most people perhaps who are listening,
because it is a very interesting subject and physiologically it's pretty intricate,
but for those people who perhaps don't have a very large amount of science background,
especially in physiology, I think it would be really good just to discuss briefly
the two arms of the nervous system, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic
before we actually get into the subject of tonight.
The general way doctors still think about them was a set of ideas established
just about 100 years ago with opposition between the relaxing side
and the mobilizing emergency side.
That has tended to be called the fight or flight reaction for the sympathetic nervous system
that is based largely on adrenaline.
The relaxing parasympathetic side is based mostly on acetylcholine.
But in the last 30 or 40 years a lot of complexity has turned up
even though in the general sense those oppositions are still accurate,
but it turns out there's a lot of overlap.
Each part of the nervous system does things that can also be done by the other side,
and each one has more repertoire than just adrenaline or acetylcholine.
They can interact in various ways with serotonin, histamine, and so on.
The relaxing side of the nervous system supposedly,
the 100-year-old idea is that it takes care of peristalsis and secretion largely.
It slows the heart rate for relaxation and weakens the strength of the heart contraction,
but it strengthens the peristalsis movement of the intestine and wall of the bladder and ureters
and stimulates secretion of a lot of glands.
But it relaxes the sphincters of the intestine and the bladder and gallbladder and such
so that it goes with secretion, digestion, and excretion,
all of the basically vegetative processes.
Right. So that's the parasympathetic nervous system.
It's all about what happens after you eat a meal, for example.
You relax, you take it easy, you digest your food.
Everything's being produced by the glands that are secreting enzymes into the intestine
or the stomach to digest your food.
The heart rate slows down.
You always think of the parasympathetic as being fairly peaceful and wet, if you like.
And it tends to take over at night.
It helps a person go to sleep by slowing the heart rate.
At least it should slow things down during the night.
But with problems such as diabetes or hypoglycemia or various metabolic disorders,
it can get overactive.
And instead of just calming things down, slowing the metabolism,
lowering blood sugar because you don't need so much,
it can cause too much insulin secretion and other glandular secretions,
for example, causing too much mucus formation.
And the increased insulin can lower your blood sugar too much.
And that can lead to intensified activity of the nerves,
intensifying both contraction and relaxation where it shouldn't be happening.
Okay.
So I guess this first question, in the light of what we understand as the sympathetics and parasympathetics,
under the effects of stress, and I think when most people think about stress,
they talk about stressful situations, stressful job deadlines,
and all of those kinds of things that can raise your blood pressure or raise your heart rate,
make you angry, I don't know, stressful situations.
The excitotoxic, so this is the state of a cell where it's being stimulated so much,
the excitation, that stimulation can lead to that toxic effect and that cell death.
And this is something that I know you've written about in one of your newsletters recently
about the stress-induced excitotoxic effects of the parasympathetics,
and it's something I've never really heard about before in terms of what you've just mentioned about over secretion.
Would you describe that a little more?
The place that it started to be understood was in the learned helplessness situation.
They saw that when an animal believed it couldn't escape from a stressful situation,
its heart slowed down instead of accelerating.
The very same signal that would make an animal's heart race if it was wandering around freely
and had the possibility of escaping, if it was in a trapped situation,
its heart would slow down and it would, given a little too much stress and threat,
its heart would actually stop in a relaxed position
where without that belief in the impossibility of escape,
it would go on struggling for days, swimming in a tank, for example,
with the expectation that it wouldn't be able to escape.
It might drown in five or six minutes.
Wow.
So this is a kind of rationale for the explanation of hope being something that can keep a person alive.
Yes, exactly.
In the 1950s, a biologist shocked a lot of other biologists
by talking about the rat's hopelessness causing death.
Wow.
Okay, so I know you mentioned some part about the old,
I won't say old, but kind of the standard treatment for Alzheimer's
and how the method by which the approach to Alzheimer's was used is actually pretty bad science
in terms of what's understood now about the two arms of the nervous system
and how the drugs they're currently using to treat Alzheimer's are actually probably making it worse.
Yes, the brain processes that allow learning and intelligent behavior,
the cholinergic nerves of the brain are very important in that
as well as the serotonin, adrenaline, and several other types of nerves have to be functioning.
But several types of evidence have made doctors concentrate on the loss of the cholinergic system.
And if you stimulate the cholinergic nerves, you can improve learning and behavior.
But if you aren't increasing energy to keep up with that increased stimulation,
you put the cell in a stress between having to work harder but not having the fuel to do it.
So if your cortisol is high, for example, interfering with your ability to use sugar,
or if your blood sugar is simply low and you're being stimulated, then the cell tends to die.
And the reasoning that the Alzheimer's disease was simply a wasting away of the cholinergic nerves
led to treating it for the first 10 or 15 years
just with chemicals to increase excitation of the cholinergic nerves.
And that wasn't working at all.
People were dying at a higher rate with liver disease and such.
But from the 1950s, people were already suggesting treating dementia
and other brain degenerative diseases with atropine
and other chemicals that block the cholinergic nerves.
And amandadine, which is now used for treating Parkinson's disease,
was one of the chemicals considered anti-cholinergic in the '50s, '60s, and '70s.
And since people were seeing actual improvement with the anti-cholinergic chemicals
someone said, "Why not try adding that to the treatment
instead of stopping the excitatory cholinergic drugs?
Why not add one of these?"
So they reclassified them as acting against another excitatory nervous system,
the system that causes glutamate, MSG nerve toxicity.
So they now call it an anti-NMDA chemical,
memantine, which is similar to amandadine.
So it's a very similar chemical which used to be called anti-cholinergic
that's being used for both Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease.
But they still go on with the doctrine that they have to stimulate the cholinergic system too,
even though that has never shown improvement.
Oh, my goodness.
Okay, well, you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMED Gallivoo, 91.1 FM.
And from 7.30 to 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 subjects of learned helplessness, nervous system control,
and a generalized discussion on thyroid, et cetera.
The number here, if you live in the area, is 923 3911.
Or if you live outside the area, there's a toll-free number, which is 1-800-KMUD-RAD.
So I just wanted to ask you a little question about estrogen.
I know we've talked about estrogen and progesterone and the opposing effects of each
and the perceived beneficial effects of estrogen being so widely adopted in the '70s and '80s,
'90s even with hormone replacement therapy.
But now how the revelations are that estrogen is extremely damaging.
I know you've always said it's been that way from the very beginning.
But how do you look at estrogen as its destructive features?
Why is it so bad for you?
A lot of people by now have heard that there's a premenstrual-related epilepsy that results from an excess of estrogen in relation to progesterone
because estrogen is excitatory while progesterone is calming.
And it happens that estrogen intensifies the parasympathetic part of the autonomic nervous system while progesterone tends to relax that.
You can see that parasympathetic function of estrogen in the uterus.
If there's too much estrogen in pregnancy, it will cause strong contractions of the uterus and can cause miscarriage.
And it's activating -- if you give the drug they give to treat Alzheimer's, which is a procholinergic drug,
it will cause spasms of the uterus just like estrogen.
The estrogen is acting with or through that part of the nervous system.
And for about 50 years, there was a puzzle about how acetylcholine or the cholinergic nerves could inhibit the heart and the sphincters
while causing contractions of the various ducts and intestines and so on.
And they proposed that something was being released in the cells that combined with acetylcholine to determine whether it was excitatory or inhibitory.
The main thing that happens there is that acetylcholine causes cells to produce nitric oxide,
the chemical that became famous with Viagra and Rogaine, which causes vasodilation.
People always also abuse nitrous oxide, don't they, as a kind of --
That's a different chemical.
That's actually just an anesthetic, pretty safe chemical, nitrous oxide.
But nitric oxide is the free radical that you find in smog.
And it's produced by any cell that's excited too strongly.
And in the situation where the cholinergic stimulation is causing relaxation in blood vessels where it causes vasodilation,
it's acting by way of increased nitric oxide.
And what the nitric oxide is doing is blocking energy production so the smooth muscle of the blood vessel or sphincter,
wherever it is, simply doesn't have the energy to contract.
It actually steals oxygen from the mitochondrion and blocks the use of any oxygen that's there.
And estrogen happens to activate the enzyme that forms nitric oxide.
So it works with the cholinergic system, and both of them act partly through increasing the amount of nitric oxide.
And progesterone, with its quieting effect, inhibits the enzyme that forms nitric oxide.
Okay, good. Now I wanted to ask you, in the presence of adequate metabolic energy in the form of sufficient thyroid,
would nitric oxide still be able to do this?
No. In situations where they were studying learned helplessness,
which produces increased acetylcholine and nitric oxide,
they found that either progesterone or thyroid, T3, would block the formation of that behavior.
It would keep them from dying prematurely.
And the thyroid and progesterone both interfere with the production of nitric oxide.
And in a situation of under function of the thyroid gland or system,
it's now pretty well established that high blood pressure in a very high proportion of the cases is produced by hypothyroidism.
And because of the belief that nitric oxide has a beneficial effect of increasing circulation,
as with Viagra and Rogaine, the thought was that hypothyroidism must be lowering nitric oxide,
but in fact it increases it while still causing contraction of the blood vessels and tightening up increasing blood pressure.
So the effect of thyroid is to stop excess nitric oxide or excess cholinergic function or excess estrogen.
But the medical ideas that have been built up on the idea that estrogen is a therapeutic thing across the spectrum
and that nitric oxide is beneficial because it's produced by multi-billion dollar drugs,
these interlock so that they argue that if estrogen produces nitric oxide, then nitric oxide is good and so on.
Each thing is used as an argument for the other, but when you put them in the context of thyroid and progesterone,
you see that the actual problem such as high blood pressure can involve increased nitric oxide,
even though that goes against the doctrine.
It's a kind of a rabbit hole that's unfortunately clouded by a lot of money and advertising thereof to make sure it stays in the forefront of people's belief systems.
Some of the changes with aging besides high blood pressure, for example, incontinence and edema,
swelling up of the extremities, constipation or at least slow movement of the digestive system,
leakiness of blood vessels, letting fluids swell out,
and then sluggishness of the lymphatic system allowing the edema to accumulate,
these things are all able to be produced and relieved by either increasing or decreasing the amount of nitric oxide in the system.
So an excess of the cholinergic function leading to overproduction of nitric oxide will cause constipation, incontinence,
swelling of the feet, just about all of the typical symptoms of aging, stress and shock and so on.
And they're all alleviated by thyroid and progesterone as the kind of opposites.
Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. All right.
So another question that I had actually was from an interaction with another person
who was potentially going to be using the product.
And this was a little bit, it's almost outside of the realm of the topic, but it's kind of similar.
And they were using DHEA.
They wanted to use DHEA.
And on the bottle of the DHEA, it gave a warning about increasing, possibly increasing estrogen.
And again, I think this is very similar to what you're saying about the stress-induced excitatory or excitotoxic,
effects of that.
The estrogen itself possibly would be produced in a person taking DHEA if they were under stress.
And if they weren't under stress, if they were using progesterone and they had adequate thyroid and, you know,
their diet was good with sugars, you know, fruit sugars, et cetera, in their diet, and they had enough metabolic energy,
they wouldn't produce estrogen from DHEA because of that.
Right.
And DHEA and progesterone both will break the learned helplessness pattern of too much nitric oxide.
But what causes DHEA and testosterone to be turned into estrogen excessively is anything basically causing stress,
irritation, inflammation.
The enzyme that makes estrogen, aromatase, is activated by anything that stresses cells.
And the processes that are reversed by thyroid and progesterone are activated by, for example, prostaglandins,
which are derived from polyunsaturated fatty acids, which happen to synergize with estrogen in many ways.
The prostaglandins activate the formation of estrogen and progesterone, thyroid, and aspirin too,
will turn off aromatase by, among other things, inhibiting the activity of the enzyme that makes polyunsaturated fats turn into prostaglandins.
I'm going to hold you there very briefly, Dr. Peat. We do have a couple of callers on the line already.
So let's go ahead and take this first caller. You're on the air?
Hey, my name's Jackie. I live right here. I live in Well Gulch.
Okay. Hey, Jackie.
I have that premenstrual seizure problem, but it's actually not just premenstrual.
In my experience, it's been about, more recently, it's been like a week before and after my period.
There's definitely hormonal cycles dictating that. That's clear.
How long have you had this for?
Oh, about three years now.
And how old are you?
I'm 28.
Okay.
So I have like a grand mal seizure once a month.
Wow.
I have a real memory problem because of that.
But I'm calling because I'm wondering, you talk about having more thyroid hormone,
but how do you promote the production of more thyroid hormone?
And does vitamin B6 have anything to do with that? I have more questions beyond this.
Well, Dr. Peat, just if perhaps you'd answer your way of approaching seizures,
as you mentioned at the very beginning of the show, it's pertinent that she's called.
I'm happy you did call in because I have lots of good advice for you,
and also your approach to its treatment.
Well, in an emergency situation,
you can have a good probability of either stopping or reducing the severity of seizures just with progesterone.
But in the long run, you want to stop the intake of the polyunsaturated fats that activate estrogen and inhibit thyroid.
The degree of unsaturation of the fat corresponds to the degree of interference with thyroid hormone.
So fish oil is more antithyroid than the seed oils.
And the singly unsaturated fat in olive oil, for example, is very weakly antithyroid.
Butter, coconut oil, cream, beef, and lamb fat, for example, are not antithyroid.
The traditional diets before 1940, even in the industrial countries,
people commonly got quite a bit of thyroid in their food.
If you would stew a chicken or a fish, for example,
the thyroid would always break up and be consumed as part of the food.
And with that traditional diet,
a person probably averaged about the equivalent of maybe 30 milligrams a day of armor thyroid
in the natural, fresh, glandular material.
So one thing that has contributed to hypothyroidism resulting in high estrogen
and overactivity of the parasympathetic excitatory system,
one factor is just the removal of natural thyroid from the food supply.
But at the same time, the diet has been industrialized to include lots of these seed oils,
which are both pro-estrogen and antithyroid.
And in themselves, they are excitatory, produce edema of the brain and so on.
Well, I've definitely had a history of the edema, right, like the swelling up.
I thought I was fat, and they gave me an IV diuretic in the hospital.
One day I peed out eight pounds of water.
So I've been using dandelion root to deal with the water retention.
Beyond that, since I've cut out estrogenic foods from my diet as much as possible,
like including soy stuff and all, like, unprocessed or improperly processed soy,
my gut has gotten a lot flatter, and I really haven't been working out.
But my source for progesterone is chase tree berries.
I am under the impression that over time it can work even just like the time-released IUD,
so that after like a year I may not even have my menstrual cycle anymore,
but that it accumulates over time.
That it will help rebalance my hormonal imbalance,
and I'll have more progesterone and less estrogen.
I wonder if you know anything about chase tree berries, if you've heard of this.
It's also known as Vitex berries.
Yeah, Vitex has traditionally been progestogenic for sure,
and definitely used for menstruating women to reduce the severity of symptoms of high estrogen,
which would typically be edema, PMS, et cetera, mood swings, and long, heavy bleeding.
Just very briefly, did you say dandelion root?
Did you mean dandelion leaf?
Both of them.
Okay.
The root is the strong diuretic, and the leaf is the mild diuretic.
Yeah, the root is actually a cologog.
It's more of a biostimulant, and the leaf is specifically a diuretic,
and it contains potassium, so it's better than the furosemide
and the other so-called potassium-sparing diuretics.
But anyway, I'm more interested in helping you out here.
With Dr. Peat's advice for your epilepsy,
I think that's probably the most pertinent part of what you said.
The minerals are very important too for getting the balance of the nervous system,
making sure you have enough of all of the alkaline minerals, potassium, sodium, calcium, and magnesium.
And fruit and milk are very important for those.
Yeah, you recommend--I know you recommend magnesium.
A good source of that is coffee.
And calcium, obviously, is the milk and dairy products.
And then sodium was just from regular salt, and you do advocate people use salt,
and that's been a whole topic of other previous shows,
so probably best not to go in that direction.
Well, I can add to this too.
I tried to have a vegan diet for a while, and I basically starved myself and depleted all my minerals.
So along with the high fluid, I was regularly being diagnosed with low sodium,
and I've just become more aware of the need for these other minerals.
But I find that calcium and magnesium, you can get that from nettles, actually.
Yeah, or from any green, any large leafy green that you would--
You're emphasizing the alkaline, and you say drink coffee to get these things.
Coffee is really a good thing.
Well, for magnesium--well, Dr. Peat, what do you say about coffee and acidity?
Well, decaf is fine as a source of niacin and magnesium,
but another good source of all the minerals, but especially magnesium, is well-cooked green leaves.
The undercooked greens aren't digestible and can actually increase your inflammatory nitric oxide and such.
Irritation of the intestine from starchy, undercooked vegetable matter will--
Increasing the nitric oxide, that causes water retention, causes the intestine to suck up water and put it into the bloodstream,
but it causes the kidneys to lose sodium.
So the problem that happens with a lot of stress and degenerative conditions is centered around the water retention,
and the imbalance produced by losing sodium too fast.
So first aid is just to get your minerals up.
For example, resuscitation can be done more efficiently with extremely hyperosmotic concentrated mineral solution,
sodium chloride, for example, six or seven times more concentrated than the physiological solution.
Just injecting a small amount of that can bring a person out of shock because it inhibits the formation of nitric oxide,
helps the kidneys retain sodium, and starts the system producing energy.
But just making sure that your daily diet includes plenty of sodium and the other alkaline metals is very helpful.
Okay, we do actually have three other callers, so I don't want to--
Well, can I just add one more thing?
Sure, sure.
Because you're talking about Alzheimer's.
I learned that turmeric, this herb, can be very helpful for Alzheimer's because Alzheimer's can be a result of iron deposits in the brain,
and just as much as turmeric can remove free radical iron from the joints and blood system, it removes it from the brain.
So just a real answer to Alzheimer's, too.
We can leave it at that. Thank you.
Okay, no problem. You're welcome.
Okay, so let's get these next callers.
You're on the air?
Yes, this is David in Missouri.
Hey, David.
This is a question, a very general question, about learned helplessness, and I think we can define this as learned helplessness.
You know, I'm just looking at what's going on in the world right now, and especially in this country and Europe.
You have all these different things occurring, such as NSA and possibly going to war in Syria when, you know, 92% of the people are against it,
and just on and on and on, all these different things that the government are actually engaged in,
and, you know, you have all these different people that either want to put their head in the fan, or there are people that want to fight,
and there are all these people in between, and I'm just curious, Dr. Peat, what you think about, you know,
I'm also saying this in the context of the rats that are, you know, put into a situation where they can't fight back,
or they can fight back, and the difference between there being hope and then they're just giving up.
Do you think about that very much in terms of humanity?
Oh, that was exactly why I decided to write this newsletter right now.
I've been following the research actually since 1960, and it was especially the social behavior of the government
and how they have manipulated the press and the public helplessness, actually.
It's been designed since the late 1940s.
It's been actual government policy to manipulate the mass media and events to create helplessness in the population.
You know, and I guess I'm just hoping that everybody listening, that we don't see this as being negative,
but we see this as, you know, we all have to be engaged in standing up against everything that's going on
because it's just awesome, the force that's being exerted against the people, you know, in Europe and here and everywhere.
It's mass media, Floyd.
People are surely as smart as rats, and rats just needed a little hint of a possibility of escape.
Yeah, and you know, it's almost like what we're really lacking is intelligence and creativity,
which I know you talk about a lot.
It's obvious that these things have been suppressed.
I mean, like you say, it's an active program to condition and brainwash
and just cause us not even to really even think about resisting.
You know, it's like, "Wow, wake up."
You know, it's like, "This is a very small amount of people that are in control,
and we've got, you know, seven billion people on the planet."
You know, it's like, "Wow, okay. Well, I guess that's how it is, huh?"
So anyway, that was one of my things.
I just keep thinking about, you know, all the dynamics of the health of the organism
and the psychological aspects and, you know, all these things that are going on right now.
It's got to have a profound effect on the health of human beings, you know.
It's just amazing.
In one of the studies in which rats had been taught learned helplessness,
so they would drown in five or six minutes,
just being able to see another rat escape would let the informed rat go for days without drowning.
Just the recognition that someone else did it can make all the difference.
Yep. Amen.
Wow, that's something.
Well, I hope we all resist, whoever's listening.
So anyway, I have one just other really quick question,
and I know there are no definite answers to these things.
I know there's a lot of variables, but I raise my own chickens, and I really feed them healthy.
You know, they're pretty much free-range.
They eat all organic, non-GMO.
In fact, I grow a lot of the feed that I feed them.
And I'm curious, if you know where that egg's coming from,
is there a benefit to eating these raw?
It does not bother me putting an egg in a glass and drinking it,
but sometimes I think maybe there's a bacteria in there,
especially what I've learned from you, that maybe we don't want that in the stomach, you know.
I'm just curious, is the egg actually better for you raw rather than lightly cooking it
or a hard-boiled egg being just as good,
or maybe all of them having different variants of nutrition depending on, you know, how it's prepared?
In moderate amounts, even raw eggs are fine, very digestible,
and they're antiseptic in the raw state.
So they've seen the raw egg yolk kill viruses that other related chemicals weren't able to destroy.
Well, you know, they say you shouldn't wash the eggs because they will spoil quicker
and because there's actually a natural envelope around the egg of bacteria.
Have you heard that?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, okay.
So is there a benefit to eating raw eggs, overcooking them,
because you're going to get certain types of vitamins and minerals in the fats maybe that --
I'm thinking they're probably polyunsaturated fats to a certain degree.
Are those fats maybe better because they're not cooked?
If they would be -- if the chickens were fed a more saturated diet like they used to
with orchard waste, apples that were spoiling and away from the cheese industry,
then the animals eating those foods -- in Mexico,
old tortillas are fed to the chickens regularly with chopped fruit and vegetables.
Yeah, these guys eat everything.
I mean, they eat fruit.
They've been eating watermelon now for days, and they eat cantaloupe and, you know, and seeds.
So the sugar in that instance is what's giving them the --
Yeah, that makes the egg fat much safer.
And in the raw state, it has that germicidal effect.
And I've known several people who cured their leukemia by drinking eggnogs, fruit juice, milk and raw eggs.
And then just one other question regarding a raw product.
And, again, I think I understand where you're coming from, you know,
from different things that you said regarding milk.
And there really not being a problem with it being pasteurized because it's still such a high-quality food.
But if you're sourcing raw milk that the cows are pretty much just eating grass
and you're obviously not having an allergic reaction,
is it better as far as the nutrients to drink it raw, if you can find that?
Yeah, slightly better.
Okay.
But it's not that big of a deal.
No, if you have really good milk, it's okay to pasteurize it,
but it's slightly better in the raw state.
Okay.
All right. I better hold you there. Thank you for your call.
Thank you.
Yeah, you're very welcome.
We do have another caller on the line.
I want to make sure we get to them and anyone else who'd like to call in.
So, next caller, you're on the air?
Hey, this is Pat up in Bayside.
Hi, Pat. What's your question?
I just had a question about 5-HTP, namely if you think it's safe to take as a supplement.
Dr. Peat, did you hear that?
Well, it does tend to increase serotonin,
and serotonin, like histamine, can increase nitric oxide
and set those inflammatory processes in motion.
So, 5-HTP is not a good thing to take?
It is not?
It's not, no. Did you hear Dr. Peat's explanation?
Well, any form of tryptophan tends to increase the serotonin,
and the serotonin tends to increase those inflammatory things, estrogen and nitric oxide.
Okay. So, that's not good?
No.
All right.
You shouldn't take it.
Okay. You're welcome.
Okay. So, we've got 10 minutes left.
People would like to call in. It's 1-800-KMUD-RAD.
We're joined by Dr. Raymond Peat.
We're talking about some generalized questions now about thyroid
and people's misconceptions about it.
I think I get asked fairly frequently these days,
"Does thyroid do this? Does it do that? What about this? What about that?"
I thought best just to answer some questions very quickly.
People think about thyroid hormone as being a stimulant, Dr. Peat,
and that they'll get problems with high blood pressure if they take thyroid.
I know it's not true, but would you just explain that?
Yeah. I was just previously mentioning that hypothyroid people have increased nitric oxide,
but at the same time, they have a tendency of too much contraction of the blood vessels
and high blood pressure.
So, at least nitric oxide isn't able to maintain a good blood flow if your thyroid is low.
I think the basic thing that relaxes the blood vessels produced by thyroid hormone is carbon dioxide.
Hypothyroid people tend to have chronically increased lactic acid in their blood,
which displaces carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide relaxes blood vessels in a very different way
than the interfering with energy supply that nitric oxide does.
Carbon dioxide retains a high energy level while relaxing,
partly just by changing the electrical pH behavior of the cell.
It acidifies the cell, which relaxes it.
That relaxing effect of increasing carbon dioxide from higher thyroid function
makes your capillaries and arterioles relax and let the blood flow through,
providing oxygen to the tissues, which then produce more carbon dioxide
and keep the system active and circulating.
Carbon dioxide and thyroid both tend to increase the stroke volume of the heart
the same way progesterone does,
where the parasympathetic nervous system and estrogen decrease the stroke volume
and weaken the heart.
Thyroid has an energizing but relaxing function.
It increases the ability of cells to retain magnesium
because magnesium is bound to the ATP energy carrying molecule.
By increasing the oxidation of the cell to produce ATP,
the cell then binds magnesium and releases calcium, which is the excitatory thing.
If you have magnesium in your system and are producing carbon dioxide,
your cells will retain the relaxing magnesium.
You can see that in the way your muscles work your heart.
It shows up in the electrocardiogram as a quick repolarization,
getting ready and relaxed, ready for a new stimulation.
In your brain, it shows up as a quick transition from wakefulness into sleep at night
without having to go through a lot of preparation.
The brain is able to quickly relax by increasing its ATP and oxygen and carbon dioxide.
Excellent.
Okay, listen, we do have a few more callers, Dr. Peat.
So perhaps we should see if we can quickly get each one through
so the next person has a chance to ask their question.
So let's take the first caller.
Quick and easy through me.
Are you aware of Hawthorne University in White Thorne
and are you a part of that?
You know what?
No, I'm not.
That's a great question.
How about the next caller?
You're on the air?
Hello?
Yeah, you're on the air.
Hi.
I have a lot of questions, so I'll ask a short one.
I understand that there's a Dr. Horowitz, among other people,
who claim that listening to sounds at 528 hertz will heal DNA.
What is your understanding of this?
A good person to read on that issue would be Harold Hillman,
who did experiments with it in England and got fired or got retired prematurely.
But it's definitely something.
Russian research in the early '70s showed that certain musical tones would cause muscle
to increase its ATP production,
and that was disregarded because the level of the energy in a given vibration
is considered to be too small to exceed the thermal agitation of the molecules of the muscle.
But actually the muscle is organized with long-range structures in the water,
which form, in effect, an antenna that can receive sound waves of these very low energies.
So it's physically very plausible and verified by Harold Hillman.
Excellent.
Well, as always, thanks so much for that.
Obviously you're not saying like an emphatic yes,
but you're saying it's totally within the realm of possibility?
Yes.
Excellent.
We better take the next call.
I think we've got three or four more.
You do well.
Bye-bye now.
Yeah, thanks so much for your call.
Next caller.
Do you believe in time management or energy management versus time management?
And it's always easier to ask your own questions.
I've got one last one, maybe.
I don't know.
I think that was a rhetorical question.
We've got an engineer with a rhetorical question.
No, that was an actual question from people, but people, I cannot give a complex question.
I can give a three-word question for you,
and I think we're actually out of time for callers today.
It's 7.54, though, engineer.
We've got plenty of time.
If you can get a 30-second question in with a one-minute response, please call 923-3911.
So are you saying there's no more callers on the air or not?
Correct.
They dropped.
Okay, fine.
Okay, well, we've got five minutes left here, Dr. Peat.
So how about a very quick breakdown of cholesterol's control by thyroid?
Okay.
In three minutes.
In the 1930s, it was demonstrated and graphs were published showing that when a person's thyroid gland was removed,
as their metabolic rate declined, the blood cholesterol increased.
And when they were given a supplement of thyroid, it was just like a mirror image.
As the metabolic rate increased, the cholesterol declined.
And at the time, that was just a gross empirical observation,
but it allowed many doctors to diagnose hypothyroidism simply by looking at elevated cholesterol in the blood.
It was one of the well-recognized signs of hypothyroidism.
But when the essential fatty acid lowering of the cholesterol and drugs to lower cholesterol came on the scene,
it was discouraged, the connection between thyroid and cholesterol,
because it was too simple to cure high cholesterol, to correct it, despite correcting the thyroid function.
But how it works is that it activates the conversion of cholesterol to primarily pregnenolone and progesterone.
And that was demonstrated by pumping blood into an ovary and measuring the amount of cholesterol going in
and the amount of progesterone coming out.
If they decreased the cholesterol in the blood, the ovary produced less progesterone.
Excellent.
OK.
Well, it is 7.57.
We still have three minutes left, but I won't go on too much because we don't want to go over time.
So thank you very much, Dr. Peat.
I'll just let people know how they can get hold of your material and find out more about you.
OK.
Thanks so much for your time again.
Thank you.
I really appreciate it.
OK.
Well, I know we had a bunch of people there who wanted to ask questions and unfortunately didn't have enough time.
Maybe we should open up the airways at 7.20 next time.
Who knows?
You never know whether we get lots of people or just a few people.
So www.raypeat.com.
raypeat.com.
Plenty of information there, articles and all the rest, and lots and lots of scientifically proven documents.
And we can also be reached 1-888-WBM-ERB, Monday through Friday, for any questions.
Thanks so much for calling and I really appreciate your involvement.
And until next month, good night.
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My apologies if I'm sometimes a little abrupt on the telephone, but I can't talk to you.
I need to pay attention and engineer the show.
Coming right up, we have "Funk'd Up" with Cousin Mark.
He's in the house, so get ready to enjoy.
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