also at K258BQ 99.5 on your FM dial.
Worldwide, we're on the web, kmud.org.
And let's get to a little music.
It's seven o'clock straight up.
Therab Doctor's next.
(upbeat music)
All right, we didn't have any luck on the third CD player.
Doc, can we just go live to the program?
All right, The Herb Doctor is in the house
and prepared to bring us another transformative
life-enhancing program.
Let's go to Studio B for certainly one
of my favorite programs on the Mudd.
Ask The Herb Doctor.
Doctor, take it away.
- Okay, all right, I guess first things first,
I just wanna make sure that Dr. Peat
is gonna be contacted, good, okay.
All right, well, sorry about that, folks.
I normally have the intro/outro music playing,
but for some reason, the disc's unreadable.
Okay, anyway, thanks so much for joining us.
This is Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMUD Galbaville 91.1 FM.
My name's Andrew Murray.
For those of you who perhaps have never listened
to the shows, which run every third Friday of the month
from seven till eight p.m., my wife and I
were both licensed medical herbalists.
We trained in England, graduated there
with a master's degree in herbal medicine,
and we run a clinic in Galbaville
where we consult with clients about a wide range
of conditions and recommend herbal medicines
as well as dietary advice and other nutrition advice.
So you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor
on KMUD Galbaville 91.1 FM.
And from 7.30 until the end of the show tonight
at eight o'clock, you're invited to call in
with any questions either related or unrelated
to this month's subject of memory, cognition, and nutrition.
So if you live in the area, the number's 923-3911,
or as is often the case, so many listeners
across different states are calling in on the 800 number.
So that 800 number, folks, is 1-800-568-3723,
which translates as 1-800-KMUD-RAD, R-A-D.
Okay, so we have Dr. Peat with us.
- I do have Dr. Peat, and I neglected to thank
our underwriter for Ask the Herb Doctor,
and that would be Jade Dragon Acupuncture.
Came to thank Jessica Baker of Jade Dragon Acupuncture
for her support of Redwood Community Radio,
practicing and teaching Chinese medicine,
herbalism, and aromatherapy.
Jessica's available for conferences, workshops,
and private consultations.
Located at 607 F Street, Arcata,
Jade Dragon Acupuncture can be reached at 822-4300.
Online at jadedragonacupuncture.com,
and that's all one long word, jadedragonacupuncture.com,
all lowercase.
Let's return to Studio B and the Herb Doctor,
and we do have Dr. Peat on the line.
- Okay, hi, Dr. Peat, you are with us?
Okay, I guess I just want to begin tonight's show,
as always, just by asking you to give us
a synopsis of your academic professional background
so that when people hear you,
not only will they hear that you know what you're saying,
but they'll also know that you've had a long time
doing what you do.
So go ahead and just let us know what it is
that you've done with the last 40 years of your life.
- Well, in the last 40 years,
I've just been studying independently by myself,
but before that, 1968 to '72,
I was a graduate student in biology
at the University of Oregon for a PhD in biology,
specializing in physiology.
Before that, in the '50s, '56 to the end of the decade,
I was working on a master's degree
at the University of Oregon,
and during that time, I took courses
in philosophy and psychology, among other things.
And also '59 to '60, I took some philosophy courses
at Ohio State University.
The phone is clicking.
Is the line still there?
- I'm not sure.
Yeah, you're on the, I can hear you, so.
- Okay.
- Okay, so you basically started
with philosophy, psychology,
and I know that your main interests,
although you have many,
your main interests are hormone, physiology,
reproductive biology, aging, and that kind of subjects.
- Yeah, the reason I decided to study biology
was that I didn't think people were working
on consciousness in the right way.
I thought I could get at it biologically.
- Okay, excellent.
Well, I know this evening's topic
is gonna be hopefully not too heady
and too unreachable.
I think, hopefully, what I'm hoping
is that it will stir the imagination
of people listening to see that,
as I've always tried to explain,
the world is a lot more than we see with our eyes.
So the subject tonight of cognition, memory,
and nutrition that supports successful memory forming
and recapitulation and memory retention
is gonna be tonight's subject.
Just want to mention that it seems strange,
but when I was looking at the people,
the pioneers of this subject in the last 100 years,
there's a lot of Russians involved in it.
And Dr. Peat, you mentioned a chap called Dostoyevsky
and Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
and gave an anecdote about a piece of the history
that you related to his change in his perception,
his cognition, as a result of imprisonment.
So perhaps if we can start just by you recounting that,
that might be enough to stir.
- In the biography written by Jim Rice,
a professor at the University of Oregon,
he tells the story about his nervous problems,
whatever they were that Dostoyevsky had improved
while he was in prison in Siberia.
And one of the odd things was that he began eating
chopped meat because that was available in the prison.
I guess in the winter they didn't have vegetables available
and so they had to hunt them.
Had meat available and his consciousness improved.
So the professor thought there might have been
a nutritional aspect to his change of consciousness
at different times in his life.
- Okay, so are you, we'll get into the subject
in more detail, but are you supporting
the necessary protein requirement in a diet?
I know that's something I don't want to offend
the vegetarians. - Yeah, that was, yeah.
If you're really seriously deficient in protein,
it absolutely affects your consciousness.
A professor friend of mine in Mexico said that
when some of his students at the university
couldn't memorize things, he encouraged them
to eat some protein and would invite them to dinner,
feed them some protein.
And when I was teaching language classes in Mexico City,
some of my students absolutely couldn't remember
anything that we went over.
And so I would start my classes with,
I made funny little cookies out of eggs,
sugar, and wheat germ, and I would serve those
with a cup of coffee at the start of the class.
Everyone was able to learn their lessons
just with that little extra boost of protein,
carbohydrate, and coffee.
- Okay, 'cause I know we're gonna mention
some of those dietary supplements, stroke nutrients,
of which caffeine is one of them.
Let's go on to explore the, gosh,
the philosophy behind the current thinking
based on some of these pioneering characters
like Dostoyevsky and Chomsky, and there's several others
that we'll hopefully get into a little bit later.
In terms of the development of the understanding
in which people remember things,
and the conscious versus the unconscious in everyday life,
as well as the subject of gestalt
or the deja vu experience,
how do you and how have you seen this development occur
from a linguistic background?
- In the 19th century, what Dostoyevsky was reacting to,
for example, in his story,
the dream of a strange fellow
in which the hero of the story is suicidal
because he sees the world as full of robots,
people operating according to cause and effect,
doing nothing other than what they're determined to do,
and he's driven to suicide by that,
but then has a dream that interrupts his suicide plan
and he comes back and becomes an advocate
of the position of free will.
At the time he was writing that,
Europe, including Russia,
was being swept by the mechanistic idea
of Huxley, a friend of Charles Darwin,
advocated the idea that molecules in the brain
selected by evolution are absolutely in control
of our thoughts and our mind is simply a shadow
of this determined mechanism.
And Darwin said that he appreciated
having such a nice robot friend.
Darwin didn't approve of that mechanistic idea
of consciousness, but he sort of joked
about Huxley's mechanical belief.
But that idea has persisted
and in my generation and subsequently,
the outstanding figures have been Noam Chomsky
with his idea that genes determine what he called rules,
transformational rules that limit or determine
what language, the form that language takes
and the reason we can speak is because our genes
specify these rules.
But 30 years later, he said,
well, rules can't explain anything,
but lots of people didn't notice
that he said it was all a mistake
because in fact, he still is sort of committed
to all of that academic work
publication on genetic determinism.
And the so-called cognitive science
and artificial intelligence are closely related
to the Chomsky position using the digital computer
as a model for understanding human intelligence.
And since computers, since the late 1940s
have been digital computers rather than analog computers,
that has led to a digitalization
of their consciousness theories.
But it's definitely not something
that grew out of biological understanding necessarily,
except through that robot philosophy
of Huxley and others.
- Now, I just want to interrupt a little bit.
When you say Huxley, I think of Aldous Huxley, but--
- No.
I can't think of his first name.
- No problem.
- The grandfather of Aldous.
- Oh, okay.
I was related then.
'Cause he was a gentleman that wrote
"The Doors of Perception."
- That was Aldous, the grandson.
- Yeah, yeah, okay.
All right, carry on.
Okay, so you're saying that Chomsky
did have a position that was,
I think you're trying to say that he didn't have
the position that was allied to the digital
or the digitized--
- Yeah, the rules were determined by genes
so that they were developed simultaneously
with the modeling of the brain
in terms of the digital analog computer.
And the idea that the brain cells communicate
according to an on/off, all or nothing signaling
was derived from that same kind of quantizing philosophy
that the switch of a digital computer,
each bit of information is just on or off.
And that was taken up by biology
with the idea that when a nerve fires and is active
and then becomes quiet,
that's all the information that was sent,
one impulse, one bit of information.
But P.K. Anokhin in Russia,
who grew up with thinking such as Fyodor Dostoevsky's,
was critical of that idea.
And many other people have noticed
that you can't explain hearing
and the full range of volume, of frequency,
and tonal quality and such transmitted on nerves
which are only on/off switches.
And so P.K. Anokhin followed through
many types of experiment and showed
that it's probably impossible to explain brain function
on the analogy of a computer using binary digit
types of information.
- Right, right, being either on or off.
I mean, I think we'd probably all want to imagine,
certainly with the greatest of hope,
that the digital on/off is definitely not what we are
as people and that there's so much more
to biological living systems
than what science would readily explain by the on/off.
And that's how these kind of breakthroughs
in quantum physics are occurring
and how Einstein's theories are being challenged
in terms of the latest thoughts on physics
and how matter is interacting and space and time
all interact to produce this other dimension
that I think we all like to imagine
that we are living in, in a biological way,
that we are influenced far more acutely by our environment
and that there's so much more to us than is going on
that could otherwise be explained by nerve firing,
as you say, the example of electrical impulses
being generated, traveling down a nerve axon,
crossing the synaptic cleft, reaching the receptor,
having an effect, and then triggering a chemical impulse
in the brain, say, or a secretion of a hormone
or a neurotransmitter.
There certainly is much more to thinking
and cognition than just straight on/off.
So-
- Yeah, in Anokin's view,
it would be more like a picture traveling down each nerve,
but not necessarily traveling at the time of the impulse,
but that each nerve would be transmitting
complex information, not just a bit.
And these quantum-related ideas,
the essential ideas there are resonance and coherence,
the interrelatedness of things separated in space and time.
And those were part of biology back when quantum,
when Gestalt psychology was current in the '30s,
'40s, and even into the '50s,
people were still arguing in favor of the Gestalt
as being an image having a space-filling function
in the brain in some way reflecting the spatial
and temporal arrangement in the real world.
And that was developed at the same time
that the field concept in embryology
was the main line of thinking.
And all of those ideas were replaced by a digitalization
and a mechanization of biological causality
around between 1945 and 1950.
And in that pre-computer time,
quite a few people were talking about the resonance
from sensory interactions, for example,
in the nose would be a molecule vibrating,
stimulating some kind of an analogous vibration
so that in effect, the actual aroma of a molecule
would be reproduced along the nerve and in the brain.
So that the brain itself would contain the smell in effect.
Or when an image, when light is absorbed
by vitamin A molecule in the retina,
it would excite a resonance of a similar luminous quality
that would travel down the nerve
and be reproduced in the brain
so that in the gestalt view,
you would actually have something like a luminous event
in the brain when you saw light in the world.
- What makes me think at this point in time,
I'm thinking of those, not for the sake
that it was found to be a little bogus in the end,
but the Uri Geller type effect where he was shown,
or if someone was shown a picture, an image of a star,
and they were gonna transmit this to Uri by thought,
that kind of thing, I'm sure does exist.
And that is something that can be either learned
or can be exercised in terms of thoughts
traveling across space from one place to another,
and how that can be incorporated
into the kind of growing brain, if you like,
through exercise or through, yeah,
through exercise of that kind of behavior.
Is that resonance or that coherence,
anything similar to that kind of model
where it's an extra sensory perception
is transmitted across space from one person to another
without actually the other person seeing the object?
- Yeah, there are several experiments currently going on.
The Noetic Institute, I think, has one
with random number generators,
but on the internet, you can see several
very interesting experiments.
Michael Persinger, a neurologist,
has some interesting publications and videos
in which he is arguing for a resonance
between everyone's brain
and the electromagnetic resonance frequencies
of the Earth environment and the Earth resonating
as a unit which can be sort of a medium
through which individuals can resonate.
- Okay, let me hold it,
just get you to hold it there for a moment.
You're listening to Ask Your Ob Doctor,
on KMU DeGalbaville, 91.1 FM,
and from 7.30 until the end of the show at eight o'clock,
you're invited to call in with any questions
either related or unrelated to this month's subject
of cognition, memory, and nutrition.
Once again, we have guest speaker, Dr. Raymond Peat,
bringing his 40 plus years of study
on top of his academic background to bear on the subject.
We are gonna get into the subject of brain nutrition
in a while, but just to let people know
that from 7.30 on, calls are welcome.
Dr. Peat, that reminds me, anxiety.
And you mentioned the Noetic Institute.
So I was gonna bring up the subject of the noosphere,
and that was proposed by a Russian, Vladimir Vernadsky.
But is this Noetic Institute, it's the same thing,
it's an institute for the study of the noosphere,
perhaps, is it?
(laughing)
- Of consciousness?
- Yeah, didn't you mention Michael Persinger
and the Noetic Institute?
- Oh, yeah, I don't know who's in charge
of the Noetic Institute right now, but it's--
- But there is an institute that's studying
that the world of the mind, as it were,
the world of conscious thought.
- Yeah, yeah, that's included.
- The priest, Teilhard de Chardin,
followed Vernadsky's idea of the world
becoming more and more conscious
with supporting the growth of more and more
conscious organisms, specifically people.
- Yeah, okay, and you know what, we actually have a caller.
So let's take this first caller
and see what direction we're going in.
Okay, caller, you're on the air, and where are you from?
- Hi, I'm calling from Mendocino.
This is Jeff Wright on Mendocino Coast,
and it's a beautiful day in paradise, as we say here.
Yeah, I got a question for you, Dr. Peat,
and I always appreciate your brilliant enlightenment
to us all here, and you're taking the time to do this.
I have heard of several cases where music is used
for therapy for people who end up comatose
and with spinal injuries, and it has led me
to make the statement about magical, mystical, medicinal,
musical moments, and those cumulatively
can help people come back.
It helps us on a daily basis by releasing endorphins,
which insurance companies haven't figured out a way
to get from us yet.
No suggestions allowed on that one.
But good music always brings those spinal chills
and good feelings to the body,
and in going with the resonance of the universe,
since everything is vibrating, including string theory,
strings vibrate on musical instruments,
I'd just like to kind of put that out,
and I'll leave the line to see how you respond to that,
and thanks again for all you do, man.
- Okay, thanks for your call.
So, Dr. Peat, how about music therapy?
- Yeah, I think it's something much more subtle,
but more powerful than endorphins.
I think the very structure of nerves
is a kind of resonance,
and carries possibly as a semiconducting system,
but it carries a function that's analogous
to the objective music outside the body.
And so when you give the organism a chance
to relax and begin to respond to the music,
you're reinforcing or enabling a process
that is very basic to the life of the brain cells
and all of the living organism.
If you believed in the mechanistic cognitive science,
artificial intelligence interpretation of consciousness,
you would see the present moment
as an infinitesimally thin division
between past and future that's moving along
like a line on the graph,
analogous to a certain measurement of depth,
width, and height, except moving along the timeline.
But the unreality of that,
the complete nonsensicalness of it, in fact,
you can see when you whistle a tune,
or listen to music,
or see a performer who is doing a performance
in an intricately whole and organized way
of song or other performance,
a director who can organize everything in the orchestra
to produce the desired effect
is having to see where the particular moment is going
and where it has been.
The pace of the music and all of the qualities
that are developing in each moment
depend on what you're perceiving to come
and as recently past.
So the brain is like a musical composition.
It doesn't exist only in the present.
The moment of consciousness spans time
so that you're simultaneously present
in an infinity of these infinitesimally thin presences.
- Interesting, okay.
I just, another thought process has gone off in my mind
of the Buddhistic kind of teachings of stilling the mind
as being a way to enlightenment.
And I wanted to bring up the other subject of,
you mentioned that there was some test that was done
and it took groups of people,
some of who were lying down to perform the test
and some of which were standing up to perform a test
and how measurably better they did
when they were lying down.
So how do you see that stilling the mind
and releasing yourself from anxiety as a mechanism
to which your brain would be more active,
more effective?
- I think it's a matter of the breadth of time
that your consciousness, when you're standing up,
you're ready to react quickly,
but to a short-term influence.
When you're lying down, you refer your reference of meaning
goes out farther in all directions
what you're going to do and what you've been doing
come into the picture.
And that allows you to achieve a better product
in whatever you're thinking about
than if you're under the pressure
of meeting an immediate result.
And when you're standing up,
you're ready to move quickly when you're lying down,
you're relaxed and your mind can go out in time and space.
- That's probably some of the reason
why the psychologists want you lying on the couch
whilst they conduct their inquiry.
- Yeah, and when you're under stress,
glucose is the immediate source of energy.
Well, electrons probably are the immediate source
of the carbon dioxide produced from the glucose
acts to modify the electronic properties of your cell
so that it can perform these resonant,
coherent interactions.
But glucose is the material
that keeps that conscious process possible.
And if you're under stress
and they're using your glucose too fast
or don't have enough of it available,
then your nervous processes go into an emergency state
where only the here and now,
the immediate present and location are relevant.
And so anxiety associated with hypoglycemia or stress
will flatten the way your consciousness works.
And it might give you quick reactions,
but they aren't necessarily going to be
the most interesting reactions.
- Again, so once again, we've,
touting glucose as positive, helpful, creative, energetic
when constantly, I can't believe the amount of times
I see adverts for low sugar this, low sugar that,
and hear people talking about how bad sugar is
and it does this and it does that and it causes cancer.
It's completely the opposite.
I don't know how people can be so brainwashed.
- If a person has been under stress
and not eating very well, besides protein,
vitamin B1 is sometimes the thing
that can make the biggest difference most quickly.
When it's absorbed, if you've been deficient in it,
well, a great deficiency can cause psychosis
and hallucinations and so on,
but a mild deficiency can just make you feel sluggish
and depressed and not have a very good short-term memory,
not able to remember what you want
or function as acutely as you should.
When you take that in a deficient condition,
suddenly your whole mood and world seems to change.
- What kind of dose would you say,
physiologically, is sufficient?
- Oh, I've experienced it with as little as 10 milligrams,
but if it's just for an emergency,
100 milligrams is okay.
- All right, we actually have another caller on the air,
so before we lose the thread of that B1 deficiency,
let's take this next caller.
You're on the air, and where are you from?
- Hello, is that me?
- Yeah, you're on the air.
Where are you calling from?
- Hi, I'm from New Jersey.
- New Jersey, hi.
- I've been on before,
and I thank you so much for what you do.
This is just a fascinating show.
Dr. Peat, I was reading, and I'm so sorry,
this shows you where my sort of brain fog is.
I deleted this beautiful quote
about how neurogenesis can take place in the hippocampus,
but also in the olfactory bulb.
And he went on to describe how,
if I'm remembering, the hippocampus
could be stimulated by exercise,
but I think we are hearing that from so many quarters
that maybe we don't need to explore that.
I would like to explore the olfactory aspect.
Can one go around smelling things
and start firing neurons or creating new neurons?
- Yeah, Luca Turin, a perfume specialist,
has some very good videos on the internet,
one on pharmacology,
but he's talking about antidepressant drugs in that case,
but really his main interest is in olfaction.
And I think that along with Heraclitus,
who talked about the nose essences
as being at the center of consciousness,
really the olfactory system is very closely connected
with our highest and best conceptual work.
- Wow.
Pardon me, you said Luca Turin,
and the second name was who?
- First name is L-U-C-A, Luca,
and Turin, T-U-R-I-N, last name.
- Okay, and then you mentioned another individual.
Am I right?
- Another?
- Another name? - A different person.
- I don't recall.
- Okay, all right.
Well, I'll listen to the archived version.
And would we have to, I mean, I guess what you're saying
is that, you know, I'm gonna explore this,
I'm gonna look into this,
but in your understanding, is there,
would we perhaps have to surround ourselves
with a particular kind of smell?
I mean, if you know, I mean, would it have to be acrid
or as opposed to sweet or, do you understand me?
- Oh, no, just the becoming conscious
of the smells around you.
And each type of smell has its inclination
to reinforce certain types of function.
But the whole process of becoming conscious
of odors in your environment,
that's very closely connected
with the higher parts of the brain.
And conceptually, you can use odors to stimulate memory.
The way they connect to the rest of the brain,
you can sometimes, with a thought,
you can associate the memory of a smell,
and sometimes the smell can bring back
certain types of thought.
And the stimulation of the hippocampus,
any type of experience helps to stimulate that.
For example, taxi drivers in a big city
who have learned all the streets have a bigger hippocampus.
But stimulation works everywhere in the brain.
Nerve cells are maintaining each other
so that anything you do consciously
is tending to enliven the rest of your brain.
It just happens that vision and smell
are among the very powerful things.
Music has the function of extending us through the moment,
expanding our moment that we feel present.
But the mechanists proposed an idea of memory
that was sort of like a computer
in which you could, in one type of computer,
you could say that memory was punching a hole
in a piece of paper or putting a signal on a tape,
some definite thing that you could find later,
go back to that card or that tape and repeat that signal.
And so they said, well, there's some kind
of a signaling process in the brain
in which we might make a specific protein
or RNA molecule and sort of drop it
in a certain location for later use.
But if you think about the type of process
that you would have to go through
to find the right memory molecule when you needed it,
the process and apparatus with which you would find
that molecule already explains
that you know where it is that you have the memory.
So you already have the memory in effect
if you can go to find the molecule.
Otherwise, molecules would just be jumping at you randomly
and your memory would be like a computer
that spews out things at random.
- And I think you indicated,
I know sometimes I've smelled something
and it has evoked memories
that I thought were forgotten.
- Yeah, that's, oh, Heraclitus was the person I mentioned,
the Greek philosopher.
Simply, so many people have noticed that,
that an odor can recall a whole situation
that you thought you had forgotten.
Many things, much fun.
I'm gonna say bye-bye for now.
Bye. - Okay.
Thank you for your call, Carla.
Okay, so we've got Dr. Ray P on the show with us tonight.
We're exploring cognition, memory,
and nutritional factors
that will support cognition and memory.
Number here, if you live in the areas, 923-3911,
or if you're outside the area,
there's a toll-free number, which is 1-800-KMUD-RAD.
Okay, so until eight o'clock,
people are invited to call in.
Dr. Peat, getting back to nutrition,
you talked about B1 deficiency
as a cause of a poor cognition
and using as little as 10 milligrams.
And I know that those foods
that typically people might associate the B1
will be things like sunflower seeds and bread,
but there are other things.
I heard that macadamia nuts have some B1 in them.
Are there any other sources of B1
that you say would be a good quality source of B1?
- Oh, all of the animal foods.
Eggs, milk, cheese.
- Yeah, okay, all right.
Okay, and I wanted to question you
a little more about vitamin A.
I know you said, and link this with anxiety.
When you're very keen to stress that anxiety
puts us in a very bad position
to be able to remember things, to learn things,
to have our brain working properly,
and the whole anti-anxiety supplements
that would reduce anxiety.
- Yeah, vitamin A, besides being a matter of sensitivity
to electronic excitation, such as in the eye
and acting sort of as an antenna
for interacting with electromagnetic energy,
the other region of vitamin A activity
is in activating the enzymes that make steroids,
and especially brain steroids,
so that if your vitamin A is deficient,
you not only have poor vision and skin problems and so on,
but your ability to make pregnenolone, progesterone, DHEA,
and their derivatives is limited,
and the brain is the major steroid-forming organ.
The skin, the gonads, adrenals, and the brain.
The brain is probably the most powerful
steroid-forming organ when it's working right,
and vitamin A is essential for making those.
- Okay, I got a thought about the misplaced belief
that fish oils are good for you,
although there is a lot of vitamin A in halibut liver oil,
and I think in the past,
when we've discussed vitamin A and its sources,
that halibut oil has such a concentrated form of vitamin A
and so little PUFA, which is the whole point
of avoiding the fish oils, that it's relatively safe.
I know little will contain it too,
but what else would you say about
the amount of vitamin A in liver, for example,
as a good nutritional food source
versus halibut liver oil?
- Well, the halibut liver oil gives you a lot of vitamin A
and some vitamin D and probably traces of vitamin E as well,
and not too much of the PUFA, so it's a good source.
- Okay.
- The liver itself, fish liver or chicken liver,
beef liver, any kind of liver is a great source of vitamin A.
- Yeah, and then eggs, I guess, are another.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
- And milk and cheese. - Of course, dairy, okay.
- And vitamin B12 happens to be crucial
for turning carotene into vitamin A.
- Okay, okay, all right.
So there's three things there then
that can be definitely, yeah,
relegated to the brain food section.
So vitamin A, B1, and then B12,
because of its help converting carotene,
beta-carotene to vitamin A.
What kind of things would use up someone's,
apart from somebody not consuming enough vitamin A
in their diet, there are definitely things
that will consume vitamin A, so that even if you do eat some
of those vitamin A-containing foods,
you may actually be deficient.
- Ultraviolet exposure destroys it very easily in your skin,
and that's one of the things involved in sunburn.
Vitamin A reacts with the ultraviolet
and then spreads the damage to any unsaturated fats
that are in your skin.
- Huh, interesting.
So in this sense, then sunlight exposure
is not particularly good for you,
although you have to weigh up the pros and cons
of adequate vitamin D from sunlight,
and/or the other beneficial effects of red light
and electron quenching.
- And vitamin E protects against that breakdown
and destruction of vitamin A.
- Is that right?
Okay, so if you were to supplement with vitamin E,
and again, a vitamin E supplementation would be coming
from something like wheat germ oil, but any other--
- Yeah, liver and milk and butter all have some vitamin E.
- Okay, so there are other factors, then,
that would increase someone's ability to retain information
and/or develop, for want of a better word, new connections.
And energetically, that's an important consideration.
If you don't have sufficient energy in the system
to drive those things,
then it's not gonna be possible to work efficiently.
And I know that you would suggest thyroid
and other, maybe pregnenolone or progesterone
as anti-estrogen substances that would also work
towards that.
- Yeah, and serotonin is, when you're under stress
or are eating irritating foods,
your intestine gets inflamed and releases extra serotonin,
which some of it can get to the brain
and signal the stress system.
And then signaling the stress system
can activate other serotonin-producing systems
that can create a vicious circle.
- Would this be part of an endotoxin-type scenario?
- Yeah, endotoxin triggers nitric oxide and serotonin
and various types of stress and depression
tend to slow nerve function in many ways.
And people experience it as a feeling of need to withdraw,
being depressed or anxious,
sometimes defensive and aggressive.
If you feed rats beans, for example,
containing the soluble fibers that can feed bacteria
that create irritation and increase the serotonin,
the rats become both anxious and aggressive,
fearful but defensive and quick to attack.
- Okay, 'cause what I'm getting from this
is that anxiety is probably one of the main
things to avoid in terms of having a competent memory
and a competent cognition.
The whole physiological effect of stress and anxiety
are all working against having that kind of stillness
that would enable one to recapitulate events
or to remember even simple facts.
- And hyperventilation, for example,
when you're feeling anxious,
it's common to breathe harder and deeper
and lose carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide seems to be a nerve stabilizer,
protects nerves against many types of stress
and inflammation.
And as the carbon dioxide goes down,
your platelets release more serotonin
and probably other inflammatory things.
And so just hyperventilating is enough to trigger
a process that tends to slow you down,
make you retreat and not think very clearly.
So interestingly, anything that will increase
your ability to retain carbon dioxide
tends to help you think calmly and clearly.
- And you say that thyroid does that.
It helps you retain CO2?
- Yeah, thyroid and progesterone and pregnenolone,
all of the anti-stress things.
- That reminds me about magnesium carbonate.
I was thinking about that earlier as a,
not a laxative, but definitely as a product
which will produce a relatively smooth bowel movement.
And not to joke too much about it,
but in itself, magnesium carbonate would liberate
some CO2 in that sense, wouldn't it?
- Yeah, and thyroid lets your cells retain the magnesium.
So magnesium carbonate is in a way
a short-term thyroid supporter.
Keeping your brain warm is another thing
that just running at a higher temperature,
your brain produces more CO2
and generally will retain the magnesium more efficiently
as if it's under the influence of thyroid.
- Right, so the thyroid hormone itself,
in a healthy individual with adequate thyroid function,
that would happen anyway.
So you'd be running at an adequately warm enough temperature
for your brain to be doing that.
- Yeah, I've known many people who complained
about memory problems and a foggy consciousness,
sense of being in a fog.
And they often had a temperature,
oral temperature of 96 or under 97 degrees
and getting their brain temperature up
towards 98 or 99 degrees Fahrenheit,
their memory improves tremendously.
I've noticed when I was in school,
if I had neglected the study for a test,
if I would take some vitamin B1 the night before,
and then read the book,
and then take some just before the test,
I mentioned that to a couple of other people
and it has worked for everyone I know who has tried it.
They always got perfect A's on their tests.
- Wow, you've let your secret out.
Okay, so let me just think.
Okay, yeah, I was just kind of go back
to sodium, I know you've mentioned that sodium itself.
And again, this is another controversial subject,
but that's what this show is all about, I think.
It's not so much controversy, but it's actually the truth.
And it sounds so shocking that it seems to be controversial,
but sodium in the form of regular table salt.
And I know we've done lots of different shows
or interjected shows with mentioning how good
and positive and healthful and beneficial salt is for you,
even though that most of the advertising media
wants to tell you how bad it is, just like sugar.
That salt itself is very important
in terms of retaining the magnesium that you're saying.
- Stress and aging tend to make it harder
to retain the sodium.
Hyponatremia is a big problem for sick old people,
but occasionally it happens in hypothyroid younger people
because the thyroid making carbon dioxide
is an important factor in retaining sodium
so it doesn't get lost in the urine.
And when your body is sensing too much loss of sodium,
the adrenals produce aldosterone to save the sodium
and aldosterone tells the kidneys to lose magnesium.
And so if you take enough sodium
to keep your adrenals from making aldosterone,
your kidneys are gonna save magnesium.
So in that situation, eating extra salt
is going to be equivalent to having more magnesium
in your diet because you'll lose it less quickly.
- I mean, you're an advocate of salting your food
and using salt in recipes and yeah.
- Salt, protein, progesterone and thyroid
are the main things for keeping your brain temperature up
and functioning well.
- Okay, well, unfortunately it's coming up
for three minutes to eight o'clock.
So in order to let people know more about you,
I'll have to cut the show short there,
but thank you so much for joining us again
and sharing your wisdom with us.
- Okay, thank you.
- Thank you.
Okay, so for those people who've been listening,
if you wanna find out more about Dr. Raymond Peat,
you can visit his website.
That website address is www.raypeat.com,
R-A-Y-P-E-A-T.com.
There's lots of articles there.
He's not selling anything.
He's just so into what he's doing
that he's passionate enough about it
to put it all on his website and it's fully referenced.
So if you want to learn more about some of those things
that you think of controversial that we've mentioned,
like salt is good for you or sugar is good for you,
please take a look at his website
and you'll find out for those people
that have any need to know the science behind it,
it's the best place to go.
For those people who are perhaps not so interested
about the science,
but just want to understand it a little more,
it may seem a little heady,
but it's all fully referenced and his work is pioneering.
I can't say anything less than that.
A lot of what he's said and espoused
has certainly been taken up by even the mainstream.
And I know recently in this last 12 months at least,
polyunsaturated fats are now being looked at as the bad,
the bad guys, which is what he's always said,
polyunsaturates, the liquid oils, the fish oil,
it's all the bad stuff.
And that salt and sugar is actually very beneficial for you.
There's many different reasons why.
Okay, so rayPeat.com.
And for those people who want to contact us
Monday through Friday,
we can be reached at 1-888-WBM-HERB.
So every third Friday of the month,
it's the show, "Ask Your Herb Doctor."
So until June of next June,
here we go in the middle of summer already,
gosh, it's only a few weeks away from the solstice.
Until June, we wish you all good night.
Good night.
- All right, I want to thank the Herb Doctor and Dr. Peat.
For another great program.
And I want to let you know about an important event
coming up tomorrow.
And it doubles as underwriting here on the mud.
And that's really a good thing.
Support for KMUD comes from
Humboldt Waste Management Authority,
hosting a household hazardous waste collection day
at the Caltrans Yard in Garberville,
tomorrow, Saturday, May 17th, from 9 a.m. until 2 p.m.
So you can get rid of your household hazardous waste
and still get to the block party.
Households can bring up to 15 gallon containers
or 125 pounds.
Materials accepted include liquid paint,
auto and garden products, cleaners, aerosols,
pharmaceuticals, medical sharps, and a red biohazard box.
And up to 10 fluorescent and three HIDs.
No ammunition, electronics, or appliances at this event.
More info is at 707-441-2005 or hwma.net.
It is 6.59 and 38 seconds.
And I'm kind of waiting for someone to come in here
for Funked Up with Cousin Mark.
If no one shows up, I've got a couple things queued up
and we'll take it from there.
And we'll keep it funky right up to the 10 o'clock hour
when Madman Mike gets here.
Came with thanks Jessica Baker of J Dragon Acupuncture
for her support of Redwood Community Radio, practicing.