[Music]
Well welcome 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 till 8 p.m. I'm a licensed medical herbalist
who trained in England and graduated there with a degree in herbal medicine.
I run a clinic in Garboville where I consult with clients about a wide range
of conditions and recommend herbal medicine and dietary advice. 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 "You Are What You Eat".
The number here if you live in the area is 923 3911 or if you live outside the
area the toll-free number is 1-800-568-3723. So you are what you eat.
This phrase has come to us via quite a tortuous route
Anthelm Brilat Savarin wrote in Physiology du Gout ou Meditation des Gastronomies
Transcendentes in 1826 saying "Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what
you are." In an essay titled "Concerning Spiritualism and Materialism 1863 to
1864" Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach wrote "De Mensch ist was er ist" so that
translates into English "As man is what he eats". Neither Brilat Savarin or
Feuerbach meant their quotations to be taken literally. They were stating that
the food one eats has a bearing on one's state of mind or and/or health. The actual
phrase didn't emerge in English until some time later. In the 1920s and 30s the
nutritionist Victor Lindler who was a strong believer in the idea that food
controls health developed the catabolic diet. Now that view gained some
adherence at the time and the earliest known printed example is from an advert
for beef in a 1923 edition of the Bridgeport Telegraph for United Meat
Markets. In Australia as elsewhere nearly half of the population will experience a
mental health problem at some point in their lives and this means even people
who are not personally affected are likely to know someone who has
experienced such an illness and research now suggests that depression and
dementia are affected by the quality of our diets across the life course. Indeed
studies from countries as diverse as Norway, Spain, Japan, China, the United
Kingdom, the United States and Australia show people whose diets are healthier
are less likely to experience depression. The most recent evidence points to the
importance of the mother's diets for the mental and physical health of their
children and I know Dr. Raymond Peat has been very keen to point out that
mother's nutrition is extremely important setting up the child's future
and Dr. Peat is with us in the show in a few minutes here we'll be introducing
Dr. Peat and hearing his perspective on You Are What You Eat because I know he has
some very unique ways and perspectives of looking at this subject. Now
the role of nutrition on development is an obvious one but mostly ignored or
overlooked in the perspective of health and well-being and the concept of
homeostasis that is the constancy of the inner environment or internal
milieu was first originally formulated by the French physiologist Claude
Bernard who was alive from 1813 to 1878 and he was a French
physiologist. Well Dr. Peat thanks so much for joining us.
Okay so as always people who have tuned into the show who may not have heard you
I would appreciate if you would give an outline of your academic and
professional background before we get into tonight's subject. After I had
studied in the humanities and taught art and English and various things I
decided to go back to graduate school in biology at 1968 University of Oregon and
wrote my dissertation on the age-related changes in oxidative metabolism in the
hamster uterus and how it affects fertility with aging and that involved
hormones and nutrition among other things and how the environment affects
those factors especially the efficiency of metabolism using oxygen and since
then I've been writing and doing consultations and trying to figure
things out still working on some of those same themes oxidative metabolism
and aging the whole idea of metabolic efficiency is one of my current themes
Lindar that you just mentioned his idea of the catabolic diet was to choose
foods for their metabolic inefficiency because people eating to satisfy their
appetite tend to get fat on the available foods and he found that he
could get people to lose fat very consistently and quickly by choosing
certain foods that increased their metabolic rate so that they could burn
calories faster than they were eating them that was in the 1920s when he did
that research and just by chance a few years later George Burr who was studying
the effect of fats in the diet found if he made his rats deficient in the
unsaturated fatty acids they burned calories at a terrific rate as much as
50% faster than normal and he thought that was bad and he became very popular
with the agricultural industry because they found that feeding those poly
unsaturated fats to pigs and chickens and such they would gain weight quickly
and cheaply without eating very much food just the opposite of what Lindar
wanted to do was to find foods that would decrease the efficiency of the
metabolism so that people would produce heat without gaining weight. Do you know
what kind of foods Lindlar advocated? Lots of fruits and vegetables including
fruit juices. Okay. The standard nutritional education emphasizes the
concept of specific dynamic action or the thermogenic effect of various foods
and it's widely recognized that eating protein increases your body temperature
and heat production. Okay. By quite a bit 15 or 20 percent and sugar a little less
than that. I know you've mentioned I don't mean to interrupt but I know you've
mentioned quite a lot in the past about coconut being thermogenic. Coconut oil.
Sorry. Yeah I think there are many reasons for that and the coconut is a
very highly saturated fat and it happens that the unsaturated fats interfere with
the mitochondrial use of oxygen in several ways by producing free radicals
inflammation and by interfering in a variety of ways with thyroid hormone
function. So all along the line the polyunsaturated fats slow down oxidative
metabolism and so if your body is soaked in these conventional seed oils
then when you eat coconut oil especially the shorter very mobile fatty acids
that are only a third or half as long as the standard fats these move in the
cells very quickly and oxidize without that antithyroid effect the seed oils
mostly have. Okay interesting. Okay so Victor Landler then came up with the
the paper on catabolic a catabolic diet so the opposite of anabolism which is to
build muscle and catabolism is to break it down with the production of heat.
Yeah in the 50s and 60s people were experimenting with what kind of diet is
efficient for losing fat and still maintaining your health. They did
experiments in which people would just have pure water for 10 days or 14 days
and then they would analyze what happened to their bodies and they found
that they lost almost pure fat a pure protein during that time very little fat
right right okay and if they have eight maybe six to eight hundred calories per
day during that same 10 to 14 days they would lose mostly fat and very little
protein. Interesting because that's the muscle mass that a person loses when
they fast or for example if they're using like you said that water for 10
days that you touch the first thing is you lose as your muscle mass isn't it?
Yeah and that's why so many women are dieting constantly and getting fatter
because. Explain that a little will you. If they eat an extremely low calorie
diet creating stress the high cortisol and other stress hormones cause them to
break down their protein and their big muscles shrink so that a typical
dieter will you can hardly see her calf muscles become so atrophied then the big
skeletal muscles even at rest burn fat to maintain themselves. Okay. Almost a
pure fat diet when they're at rest. Okay. And so the more dieting they do if they
do it extremely the smaller their muscles get and the easier it is to get fat the
next time they eat a normal diet. Right and you said with the addition of how
much how much fat was the addition that caused the the protein to be conserved
in that diet? Oh they fed them different foods like a mixed diet a little
protein a little carbohydrate and not especially a low fat intake but just so
that they they were able to get some of their calorie needs from the diet rather
than from their tissues because when you're in the first day on a fast your
body uses up the sugar that's stored as glycogen and as soon as your blood
sugar falls because you've used up your stores then your cortisol rises first
the adrenaline and the cortisol and the cortisol having no food available it
starts converting your thymus gland and the big skeletal muscles mostly to free
amino acids which then can be some of them are converted to glucose to feed
your blood cells and brain and eyes and so on because those have an absolute
requirement for glucose and so even a plain sugar diet to supply that minimal
amount of your brain and blood cells are required that will greatly prevent the
rising cortisol and loss of good tissue. Okay you listen to Ask Your Ob Doctor on
KMUD Garboville 91.1 FM and from 730 until the end of the show you're invited
to call in with any questions either related or unrelated to this month's
topic of you are what you eat we're joined by Dr. Raymond Peat and he has a
wealth of experience and knowledge that he's currently sharing and Dr. Peat it's
it's well established I just want to jump onto this next subject of and
probably spend a little bit more time on what's coming out in science about the
what they call the microbiome of a person's body it's well established that
your gut apparently is your second brain providing more input to your brain than
the brain provides to it and this is why your gut health is largely related in
your gut bacteria including your mental health and emotional well-being
so it's been there's quite a few quite a few journal articles that have come out
in 2013 and 2014 about the microbiome and making links as specifically to
disease processes and the microbiome and I know that you advocate several several
dietary factors that I think inadvertently are modulating if you
like the microbiome and I think they the science bringing about the explanation
of the microbiome is now justifying what you're saying about for example
indigestible fibers like bamboo shoots carrots etc as being healthful in terms
of their modulating the microbial content of the gut and along with things
like cascara and now you talk a lot about cascara not just for bowel
motility and improving bowel function and waste clearance but also
because the cascara itself has a cyclic structure quite similar to
tetracycline in terms of it being a similar antibiotic in the gut and how
this affecting bacterial colonies in a positive way to remove bad bacteria
naturally allows normal healthy bacteria to flourish and therefore modulate the
the gut as an organism yeah and it's interesting that both imodin from
cascara or a Chinese rhubarb and such and tetracycline and related minocycline
and doxycycline these are anti-inflammatory as well as antiseptic
and imodin and the tetracyclines have a surprising range of good effects
anti-inflammatory and probably mood improving minocycline is being found to
prevent possibly improve dementia Alzheimer's disease and imodin has every
year it seems like there are half a dozen new functions that are found for
imodin including improving the flora of the intestine. Imodin am I right in
thinking that imodin is also present in aloe vera? Yeah yeah lots of plant yeah
generally they're laxative plants but the you know it isn't the typical purging
kind of laxative if the imodin if the cascara isn't properly aged right it
does have an irritating purging effect but aging makes it insoluble in water
comparatively and it loses the irritating inflammatory property and
becomes anti-inflammatory and sedative and it actually increases the production
of energy while having a nerve calming sedative effect. And this again is that
red compound that you've mentioned in the past that has been is
energetically favorable in terms of its both electron quenching activity and its
anti-inflammatory activity? Yeah as sort of a sideline to my research in graduate
school on what causes oxidative metabolism to go down with aging I would
look for all kinds of plant and animals that were colored and do extracts and
look for things that stimulated oxidative metabolism and I got the
interest partly from St. Georgie's work he found that the the color of cells is
closely connected to the oxidative process for example the deep maroon or
purple color of the liver and certain areas of the brain are deeply pigmented
he knew that it didn't have any the usual functions of pigment and he found
that it was related to well he knew that semiconductors are generally black
because of a peculiar electronic arrangement that causes them to absorb
all the light that hits them and he figured that the life process involves
semiconduction and so pigments are especially relevant to the use of energy
and living things. That's right I mean in terms of transporting electrons from
one phase to another and therefore carrying either electrical charge
as a form of energy. Yeah I think last month we were talking about methylene
blue an artificial electron transporter and it can like vitamin C vitamin C in
this normal form isn't a pigment but it has some of the same electronic
behaviors both of those can pick up electrons from nutrients such as glucose
and pass them into the mitochondrion even if the first two units of the
mitochondrion are damaged methylene blue and vitamin C and probably many other
natural pigments can deliver energy electrons down to the third complex of
the mitochondrion and allow it to keep function functioning even after a
serious damage and so part of that function is to stop producing free
radicals which are mostly produced in the upper part of the electron transport
chain as it's being damaged. Okay so getting on to the kind of wider topic
of you are what you eat I think probably just to bring out some of those things
that you mentioned for many different conditions or processes that can be
corrected by various I mean you prescribe a lot of dietary advice in
terms of modulating the way people's physiology is working and therefore
bringing people back to good health in a very natural way with no side effects
it's not a drug orientated approach as very nutritional and I know obviously
you're very keen on saturated fats as opposed to the polys and the poly
unsaturated being very detrimental to health obviously sugar I know you talk a
lot about fruit juices and fructose in particular as an energy promoter in
terms of you are what you eat the the gut bacteria and the bacteria within the
bowel and what do you know from the studies that have been done on
the mood for example and or autism in children that have have shown some
definite correlation between gut bacteria and their intestinal flora and
the intestinal flora in populations that are not suffering with autism and how how
I think in the future perhaps the the antibiotics that are very useful and I
know you're an advocate of antibiotics and I know most people unfortunately
have a mistaken belief that antibiotics are bad I think just from the cases
where maybe females are getting thrush after using antibiotics it conjures up
this kind of popular myth or popular notion that antibiotics are bad but
actually we know that they're very positive influences on our physiology
and especially on our gut for wiping out bad bacteria but what's your thought
about altering the so-called microbiome of the body so that specific bacteria
that are known to be detrimental to health can be eradicated and leaving the
positive bacteria behind to actually influence the populations within the
digestive tract about 1990 I read an article from a fertility clinic in which
a lot of the women were trying to conceive and the fertilized ovum just
wouldn't implant and the doctors thought that might indicate that there was an
infection in the uterus so they gave all of their patients a course of
antibiotics and besides improving their fertility a lot of the patients said
suddenly that their chronic headaches had disappeared and so they gave them
hormone tests to see what was going on and causing both fertility to improve
and headaches and other symptoms to disappear they found that the
antibiotics had lowered their cortisol and estrogen production and increased
progesterone their serum explaining the increased fertility but a whole range of
other symptoms related to stress and following reading about that I suggested
that because I knew that the estrogen which is excreted by a healthy liver in
the vial is much of it is reabsorbed and stays in the circulation if you have a
sluggish intestine and so I suggested that if they eat a carrot every day to
stimulate the intestine the carrot will bind the vial and lower the serum
estrogen level that's now generally accepted that any fiber tends to lower
your absorption of estrogen from the vial and within three or four days these
people tested their estrogen cortisol and progesterone and it was doing the
same thing that the synthetic antibiotics had done and knowing about
carrots and they can get very tiresome if you eat one of these for years I looked
around for other foods that were antiseptic yeah I'd have that same
effect and bamboo shoots are something that you don't get too tired of they
don't have much flavor so you can put them in a lot of different foods and
cooking a bamboo shoot doesn't destroy the fiber the way it cooked carrot does
so you have to eat raw carrots or cooked bamboo shoots. Do you know of any other fibers Dr. Peat that have that effect?
Mushrooms I think. Mushrooms? Yeah because they grow underground in a very decaying environment they have to have powerful
antibiotics. Interesting do you not okay I suppose you surprise me when you say
mushrooms because I wouldn't have thought that would have been naturally
one thing that you would have said to someone would be okay to eat but you're
I don't know anything about mushrooms actually but except that principle yeah
they are okay antiseptic and okay they have a high value protein and the
protein happens to be pretty low in methionine which is the most toxic of
the amino acids. Methionine are the amino acids that most slow your metabolism and
so you're getting two of the metabolic stimulants lowering the estrogen
disinfecting your intestine. Okay hold it there Dr. Peat for a moment because we do I
think we have one or two callers on the air so let's start let's just start with
the first caller and see where we're going with this. Caller you're on the air
and where you from? Hello is this me? Yes you're on the air where you from? Hey I'm
from Eastern Oregon. Eastern Oregon okay welcome to the show. Well thank you thank
you for having me I just have a question the last month I developed very very
high blood pressure that spikes very high and I don't have it running my
family and I never had it before I had normal and what I did is about two months
ago I had increased had my t3 medicine increased a little bit and I got heart
palpitations okay so I was titrating down off of that for over a period of
six weeks and I still had the heart palpitations until I went to nothing and
then I heard your show last month and I started magnesium and the heart
palpitations went away. Yeah we Dr. Peat mentioned that didn't he for
palpitations. Yeah thank you so much but my but I also in October went on a silly
little thing where I was trying to increase my body temperature because even
with the thyroid supplement it still is kind of low okay and I heard that if you
eat a lot of more sugar and salt and high dense foods that you can do that so
I increased my salto quite a bit and I wasn't worried because I always have
low blood pressure medium low you know normal oh my and then and then over this
last month my blood pressure has just skyrocketed and it was kind of scary and
I went to the doctor now I'm on medicine but I was wondering could could coming
down off of the thyroid which I went back on and and also that high salt diet
could that have contributed to this really crazy high blood pressure. Well
first the first thing's first let's just how much salt were you using? Quite a bit
I just poured on everything and just throughout the day I don't I never
measured it or anything quite a bit. Yeah. More than I normally did. Yeah. My guess is maybe
three or four thousand milligrams that like almost like two days worth in one
day I did that for a couple three weeks and I stopped. Okay.
Was your TSH measured as part of the thyroid exam? When I first was on I've
been on T4 for six months and when they first started it it was like three but
then it went down to below zero yeah it's like point zero three or something
it's way low. TSH causes a lot of the symptoms of hypothyroidism and so a T3
will cause your T4 to go down and if it goes too low your TSH might come up and
TSH does a lot of things that go with hypothyroidism including high blood
pressure it makes your red cells more rigid your blood and serum more viscous
and it tightens up small blood vessels everything it does tends to create higher
blood pressure so if your TSH is currently extremely low then you
probably should have your other hormones such as adrenaline checked to see what
might be causing that. Dr. Peat you always advocate a TSH as close to zero
as possible just because it's a fairly inflammatory chaperone molecule anyway
don't you? Yeah. Yeah so it's a caller your right your question has if you if
you understood the answer or? Well I'm from what I understand is that my THC
if it gets pretty low as a T3 you'll make it lower and if you increase okay I
think I got mixed up I'm sorry so something about the TSH that extra T3
can cause it to start rising up again or am I incorrect? Yeah if you had lowered
your TSH by taking fairly large amounts of T4 thyroxine. It was 25
micrograms. Oh well that isn't very much. No but it was still low it got low under
one it got it became 0.03 or 0.04 it was really low and then I and then they and
then several months later I they incorporated T3 at 25 and I cut it in
fours and spread it throughout the day and I've done really well and that went
on for a month and then they increased it another 25 which we made it 50 and I
split those throughout the day and in fours and then lo and behold I started
having heart palpitations at night and all these other symptoms and so I
titrated down and I don't know I went to the doctor because I was a little
frightened and they said they checked my thyroid and they said it's fine but you
know I know that numbers their numbers might not be optimal. Were the other
things like albumin and blood sugar okay? They didn't say I don't know I don't
know I suppose I can find out and they probably have the record so I can find
out about the albumin. They didn't say they said all my lab was fine what they
said. Do you get a fairly balanced diet like with milk and cheese and eggs? Yes I
stopped doing that silly little thing I did for three weeks there with the extra
with the high dense different kind of eating and prior to that and since then
I I drink milk a quart and a half or so and organic fresh squeezed orange juice
quart and plus and and cheese and eggs yeah and and Great Lakes gelatin. Is
there anything that might be irritating your digestive system sometimes that
can cause stress and increase pressure? No but do you think that maybe
that they may say that my numbers are fine and maybe they may not be as
optimal as they could be like the TSH and I'm sorry what numbers did you ask?
It's good to have albumin well above 40 okay and blood glucose anywhere 70 to
110 should be okay yeah and potassium and sodium should be around the middle
of the scale. Okay well they put me on medicines and now I'm on medicine so I'm
a little leery about it but it was pretty scary it was up to like 200 and
over a hundred and then it would kind of go down and then it would fluctuate in
between that. Yeah sounds a lot like an alarm reaction a stress-related alarm
reaction of adrenaline producing that kind of blood pressure because a thyroid
what do you think about thyroid hormone Dr. Peat and blood pressure I mean it's
actually a regulator of high blood pressure when people get high blood
pressure generally they are subject to adrenaline and that other sympathetic
you know hormones that drive blood pressure up and thyroid hormones
specifically antagonizes that and brings blood pressure down into it.
Especially when it comes on quickly like that it's adrenaline or maybe
serotonin the reason I asked about any irritating food if you don't dissolve
the gelatin thoroughly sometimes that can cause gas and irritation by feeding
bacteria in the intestine. I don't dissolve it I kind of put it in my
orange juice and stir it and cold orange juice and drink it that way so I don't
like cook it or anything. I mix it in with the orange juice but I don't
like my stomach's irritated but I don't know maybe it is and I don't know it I
don't feel like it's causing gas but I thought if I started back up on the T3
like I had and I've been on it for several weeks maybe three weeks now that
maybe eventually it would normalize the blood pressure is that a possibility?
Is your pulse rate about where it was? About where it was prior to all this?
Is it in the range of 70 to 90? Yeah it's always been around around that
more towards the 70. Yeah it hasn't my pulse hasn't changed too much. Magnesium and
calcium are two nutrients that help to lower blood pressure but potassium is
probably the most powerful. Orange juice is a very good source of potassium so a
quart of orange juice spread out through the day. Okay. Not a potassium. I'm taking extra
magnesium since that helps with the palpitations and I drink lots of milk
and orange juice. And one other nutrient that can powerfully lower blood
pressure is vitamin K. For example the drops that deliver one milligram of
vitamin K per drop. I know a doctor who for several months had his blood
pressure had been 240 over 140 no 240 over 70 and within two or three weeks of
using a lot of vitamin K his pressure came down to 140 over 70. Okay. So vitamin
K in terms of a daily a daily trial of vitamin K what do you think would be a
reasonable? Well that doctor who got such extreme results was taking 40 or 50
milligrams per day. Right 40 or 50 drops of that. Yeah. Okay. Okay all right I wrote
all this down thank you so much. I also too though there they put me on
medicine now and I'm on lisinopril plus diuretic with it. So that might kind of
add to the mix now somehow I'm sure probably. Yeah I'm sure I'm sure the it
will be difficult to tell what your proper blood pressure was all the time
you're using something like lisinopril. Yeah I just started it I just started
that well last two weeks and now they add and it didn't help and so now they
added it with a diuretic. I don't know I didn't know what to say. You know it
definitely sounds something more than anything to do with your thyroid that
you've been using because it's definitely very very short and very
quick to come on you know it's a very rapid onset so as Dr. Peat was saying
it's much more much more indicative of something hormone or a catecholamine
based that would have a such a rapid onset. Okay yeah it's probably a little
bit outside of the scope of this talk show just a comment on this any further
though but I appreciate your call. Thank you so much I appreciate you you too
thank you. You're welcome. Okay so what other callers we have the next caller
you're on the air where you from? Missouri. Okay hi go ahead. Hello this is
David from Missouri. Yeah go ahead David I didn't I think we got some
interference between you. Yeah well you know just so you know normally you would
be able to hear the radio show when you're waiting on the phone and it's not
doing that so I had to listen to that. Unfortunately there's some hum here in
the studio that I can hear and whenever the lights flashing I also hear that too
so I think there's some kind of it's it's not uncommon unfortunately. That's
what I was saying normally you can hear the radio show while you have the phone
you know listening to the phone while you're put on hold and you can't do that
got it some reason so they're doing something differently. I'm not sure.
Yeah you know one of the things does listening to the news cause high blood
pressure? Quite probably if it's bad news. That was one of the things you didn't
ask her so I quit listening to the news and my blood pressure went down. There you go.
But anyway you know I've heard for years that coconut oil is anti an antibiotic
and also antifungal and number one I wanted to ask Dr. Peat if that is true
and then how would that work if that were the case and then also I think
along the same lines is you know I've heard him or I shouldn't say him Dr.
Peat I've heard you say that when you eat starch that the starch is able to
get into the bloodstream and creates all sorts of problems in capillaries and
different vessels and that the saturated fat helps to prevent that so how does
saturated fat help along those lines as well is it somehow coating the bacteria
and the the molecules of starch? Yeah it slows digestion enough that it keeps
things in an emulsion that the enzymes have time to start breaking down the
starch particles. It isn't known exactly why that happens but Gerhardt
I forgot his name at the moment the man who did the presorption research showed
that the starch without fat would immediately in 15 or 20 minutes show up
in your bloodstream but with fat it didn't show up in the bloodstream and it
probably is because it gives it time to break down a little bit but I think
the most important effect of the fat is that germicidal action suppressing the
bacteria that if your digestion is really working right your whole small
intestine should be sterile free of bacteria and sluggish digestion low
thyroid people often get bacteria growing all the way up close to their
stomach and in that case when you eat any starch it feeds the bacteria the
bacteria produce endotoxin which causes your intestine to produce nitric oxide
and serotonin and histamine and the nitric oxide is a very powerful poison
of oxidative metabolism so the combination of bacteria especially in
the small intestine and any kind of starch that isn't quickly absorbed in
your bloodstream is going to feed the bacteria increase the nitric oxide and
basically poison your respiratory metabolism all through your body many
years ago people experimenting with germ-free animals their whole life
they're isolated from bacteria and they have a very healthy life low mortality
until extreme old age and they eat about 20 or 30 percent more calories than the
ordinary germ-burying mice but they are leaner much smaller fat deposits and
they don't suffer from anxiety and how to explain that it means that the
bacteria are producing something that poisons your metabolism the George Burr's
research with the polyunsaturated fats he demonstrated that these fats have a
similar poisoning effect on your oxidative metabolism so that without
them the animals burn 30 to 50 percent more energy without getting fat so the
possibly polyunsaturated fats are contributing to the nitric oxide
production but definitely the bacteria eating starch are a major source of this
anti-metabolic material and you know so is the coconut oil because of the short
chain and the medium chain possibly better in that action that you just
described then say butter and no all of that really matter saturated fats are
pretty good anti-fungal and antibacterials but I think the the
shorter chain the athletes foot remedy that kills fungus very efficiently is an
11 carbon saturated fat or a mono unsaturated and the shorter they are the
faster they diffuse and apparently they're they're more active as a toxin
or antiseptic if they're a little shorter than the steric acid of butter
but okay so so pop traditionally known as a good antiseptic and that's usually
made with a steric acid you know dr. Peat based on several things that you've
recommended I you know I grow different bamboos and so I can't wait till the
spring because I'm going to try this soup and I'm just curious what you think
about it I'm going to use a acne juicer and I'm going to get the juice from
potatoes and then I was going to cook the bamboo sprouts in there and now that
I for some reason I always thought that you didn't think that mushrooms were
possibly good but I would love to have shiitake mushrooms in that soup and then
put plenty of butter and coconut oil and that do you think that's a in some salt
do you think that's a decent soup I think so but it's really good to make
sure you don't get toxic mushrooms well you know I the only thing I grow is
shiitake which is that is that possibly a good mushroom you know I have to
interject here and tell you that the only thing that I'm allergic to is
shiitake mushroom I came out in a widespread body rash and I couldn't
explain it first time around I thought it was very strange and I've contracted
something serious I was seriously worried about it took about four weeks
for it to resolve and then again about four years later the same thing happened
again and I made a connection I made a connection to shiitake mushrooms and as
you know I'm a I'm a naturopathic doctor and I work with extracts and I make
extracts of shiitake mushrooms and the third time around when I was handling
shiitake mushroom powder the same thing happened I got a widespread rash over my
face and my hands where I'd been not just handling the product but must have
breathed some of it in and got it in contact with my face so I find it a very
allergenic product so I would just put that out there that not just because
people were growing them for a while and eating them but I've been trying not to
you know consume too many but I've never seen a direct relationship to any kind
of problems that you know that's the only thing I've ever been reactive to
you know dr. Peat has talked about Gerald Pollack a few times and I listened
to an interview recently that I thought might be interesting for everybody he
was talking about grounding which I think I've mentioned before on a show
about you like walking barefoot and then the electrons flowing into the body from
the earth and one of the things that he was mentioned he said of course there's
no scientific studies to validate this but he you know he's really into the
idea of structured water and he was saying how walking barefoot and getting
natural sunlight could very possibly be helping to structure the water in the
body I thought that was pretty interesting kind of you know puts a few
things that you've been talking about for a while does that make sense at all
to you dr. Peat well definitely the flow of electrons is the basic thing that
structures water the when I talk about energy and structure I'm thinking about
the primarily first of all the fine layers of water adjoining proteins and
fat in the cells and that's created and maintained by the flow of electrons
mostly from glucose to oxygen through the various catalysts and when that's
interrupted when oxygen isn't able to keep pulling the electrons and this is
this flow of electrons that generates the structure just like if you stir a
pot of spaghetti all the strings line up in certain direction is what happens
microscopically the the energy flow generates structure and that has all of
the consequences of cell diffusion I didn't mention that he had talked about
which totally aligns with what you said he said the red wavelengths of light or
what helped to structure the water which I thought was really interesting Oh a
German researcher a young guy named Andre summer has been doing extremely
interesting research showing exactly that but the red light itself organizes
the structure of water interesting so I think it's important to do like Adam and
even and walk naked in the garden in the sunlight okay David I appreciate you
cool that's a great idea I appreciate you cool but I think we have another one
lined up here so best okay thank you best again that's cool thank you I know
dr. Peat you talk about red light a lot as a free free radical quenching
substance and anti-inflammatory so yeah and it desorbs nitric oxide from the
cytochrome oxidase okay somebody called in during that dialogue there and I
think they've left the question with the engineer so if the question wants to be
read out then perhaps we can go from there yeah she was just basically
wondering now she said she's 64 years old and wondering about under eye
puffiness a 64 year old lady sounds like low thyroid but dr. Peat what do you
think yeah sometimes low thyroid or something missing in the diet can be a
factor but most often it's low thyroid with for example if your thyroid is
chronically low your cholesterol is likely to be chronically above average
right as a compensation I rate should turn cholesterol into the steroids
progesterone pregnenolone and DHEA and those should regulate the water and the
inside outside the cell a balance of water okay I think we have another
caller who's just just called in just a moment ago so let's see let's take this
next call a caller you're on here and where you from okay let me turn my radio
off hang on a second okay I'm from the north coast here okay I had a question
what do you know about sulfites in wine digestive problems yeah and our wines
were companies that produce wine required to stay that sulfites are in
wine do you know anything about sure yeah it's a labeling recommendation for
sure and sulfite free wine can be labeled sulfite free other wine that
isn't normally has to be labeled contains sulfites I know dr. Peat has
always mentioned that sulfites are very allergenic can cause many different
symptoms from headache to rash to respiratory disorders but dr. Peat what
what else do you have to say about so for digestion well it's a potentially
very pro-inflammatory and it interferes with the handling of electrons I think
that's why it is so dangerously allergenic for so many people and I've
I've had the experience of sulfited wines that gave me a vertigo and extreme
symptoms for several days which I think were from causing inflammation of the
intestine okay so just yet how the general the my question refers whether
what about messing up a digestive system and causing pain in in digestion that's
why I'm wondering if it's related to that well red wines contain their own
histamine which can cause symptoms in a lot of people
thanks a lot okay you're welcome okay well I'd I'd stop right there dr. Peat
and just thank you so much for spending your time again this month with the show
I just want to let people know how to find out more information about you okay
thanks so much okay well thanks to the callers that have called in and yeah
again there's certainly more scope for expanding the discussion on you are what
you eat dr. Raymond Peat's website has a wealth of information where people can
find lots of articles that are fully referenced scientific articles his
website is www.raypeat.com and then there's like I say probably something in
the order of 40 to 50 articles on various different subjects all of which
are his specialism in hormones and endocrine subjects so his website
www.raypeat.com we can be contacted Monday through Friday during business
hours at 1-888-WBM-ERB and yeah this is a couple of days until the winter
solstice the darkest time of the year Christmas is coming up I hope everybody
here is paying attention to what it is they're gonna eat over Christmas lots of
hopefully no polyunsaturates hopefully people are cooking with butter and
animal fats and making sure that what you eat is organic again like I said you
know you are what you eat and the food chain is an extremely toxic product the
whole food industry is extremely permeated with lots of different
chemicals now that make food not what it used to be so when people say it's not
like my grandmother used to cook that's because she was cooking with real food
and unfortunately a lot of our food now is not particularly real so yeah always
eat organic source and support organic production and watch what you eat until
the third Friday of next month Merry Christmas
www.raypeat.com
[Music]
All right, thanks to the Herb Doctor for that awesome segment we had. Came out also
thanks Jessica Baker of Jade Dragon Acupuncture for her support of Redwood
Community Radio. Practicing and teaching Chinese medicine, herbalism, and aromatherapy,
Jessica is available for conferences, workshops, and private consultations.
Located at 607 F Street in Arcata, Jade Dragon Acupuncture can be reached at
822-4300 or online jadedragonacupuncture.com. Also support for K-Mug
comes from the Inn of the Lost Coast and Shelter Cove. Fireplace, spa, and sauna
suites overlooking the ocean offer views of migrating California whales. Fish Tank
Espresso and Delgada Pizza and Bakery are open daily. Inn of the Lost Coast, home of
the Yellow Submarine, where all that's needed is love and a reservation. For
more info the phone is 986-7521 or online
innofthelostcoast.com