[Music]
Well, welcome to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name is Andrew Murray.
My name is Sarah Johanneson Murray.
For those of you who perhaps have never listened to our shows, which run every third Friday of the month from 7 to 8 p.m.,
we're both licensed medical herbalists who trained in England and graduated there with a degree in herbal medicine.
We run a clinic in Garboville where we consult with clients about a wide range of conditions and recommend herbal medicines and dietary advice.
So you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMUD 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,
which is a continuation of a previous topic on nitric oxide and its current trend,
or rather the current trends in nitric oxide that have come around the last year or two,
both in the sports industry, specifically for muscle building, for male performance enhancement, for want of a better phrase,
and also by the medical community.
But there's a lot of very recent research from 2013 to present 2015 research showing that nitric oxide is actually a very negative product,
even though we do produce it naturally, has some very wide-ranging damaging effects.
And Dr. Peat's research on nitric oxide in his newsletter that I think he's going to be producing next month will detail in a lot of detail,
or show in a lot of detail rather, a lot of the research that's supporting what we're going to talk about tonight.
So nitric oxide has many implications for many different conditions, from rheumatoid arthritis to diabetes, generalized inflammation, and old age.
But there'll be some specifics that we'll bring out in the show.
And so for those people that are listening tonight, if you have any of the conditions that are associated with nitric oxide's increase in the body,
then this will be an interesting show for you.
And we'd love you to call in to share your experiences.
So Dr. Peat, are you with us?
Yes.
Okay. Well, thanks so much for your time again.
For those people who perhaps have never heard the show or who perhaps may not have heard of you,
would you just describe your academic and professional background, and then we'll get going on the subject.
I did my master's degree in humanities at University of Oregon, and then went back years later in biology for a Ph.D.
and intended to study brain biology, but quickly shifted to reproductive aging physiology.
So I concentrated on the biochemistry of the steroid hormones in relation to aging largely.
Okay. So I guess I think I'll just open up the show by just demonstrating some of the things that if people were to search online
and be, for want of a better word, a victim of bad advertising, what they would find out about nitric oxide.
Unfortunately, the Internet is rife with lots of untruths and misconceptions,
as well as very genuine and good research to counter some of the accusations.
But nitric oxide, what I've seen, its main use, or it's touted for, is to help the immune system.
They mention it to be used to regulate blood pressure, to improve sleep.
And then there's the things that it's mainly advertised for, which is for endurance and strength, for bodybuilding,
and sexual performance enhancing, and also for helping gastric motility.
So Dr. Peat, given that we produce nitric oxide naturally, it doesn't mean to say it's always a good thing.
Like adrenaline, too much of that's a bad thing.
But given that we produce it naturally, what useful effect does it have?
And why does it have so many negative effects when we get into what it is you know about nitric oxide and why we should avoid it?
And also, why do they tout nitric oxide to be used for all those conditions when it isn't true?
Where are they twisting the truth?
My dissertation in 1972 focused on estrogen, but I saw that the effects of estrogen were indistinguishable from the effects of x-rays,
and aging, and oxygen deprivation.
How that works is that it changes the oxidative enzyme function, cytochrome oxidase.
And it was known that smog produces nitric oxide.
It wasn't known that it occurred naturally in the body until the late '80s.
But the effects of nitric oxide in smog were known to inhibit or damage that same respiratory enzyme.
And at the time I was studying estrogen, it was known that carbon monoxide and cyanide also blocked the effect of oxygen in the cell.
And so no one really thought about what nitric oxide was doing to the cell, except when they were exposed to a lot of smog.
As soon as it was discovered that it was produced in the body,
a series of publications over the next six or seven years up until the late '90s
identified the harm that it did in the various tissues.
For example, several papers clearly showed how inflammation or stress increasing nitric oxide damages the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas.
And so it's a major cause of diabetes, regardless of the particular person's history leading to the diabetes.
But not only damaging the cells in the pancreas,
but they were seeing similar damage to every tissue they looked at,
which seemed logical since it was a free radical analogous to cyanide and carbon monoxide in its function in the cell.
But then someone noticed that nitric oxide causes vasodilation during arousal and erection.
And Viagra came on the scene with a tremendous amount of funding for research.
So this is about 15 years ago now, is it?
Yeah, '97 I think it was.
Okay.
And suddenly all of the bad stuff was forgotten and everyone wanted to find out the wonder,
curative effects of the drug that could improve virility.
Right.
And very soon after it came out, I started hearing from people who were suffering things such as diabetes from taking the virility pills.
And that got me interested in it very, very early after the Viagra came on the market.
But it was fitting right into the things that I was already interested in.
There's quite a positive association, isn't there, between cardiac arrest and Viagra's use.
I think it's killed quite a few people at this point in time.
Well, it's probably killing more people than are being identified because nitric oxide is produced in any stressed cell or tissue.
And it decreases the function of the tissue by blocking the energy production.
So it creates a vicious circle in the same way too much estrogen can or stress of any sort can start a cycle of energy loss,
increased production of the stress mediators, including nitric oxide, exciting the tissue,
blocking the energy of the tissue and leading the cell to die.
So all these things that they're touting nitric oxide are good for, is there any thread of truth to this, to these statements?
Of the things you mentioned, it actually does one of those things, which is to make muscles grow.
But that's one of the things that Szent-Györgyi and Otto Warburg understood 50 years ago.
Is that because of his inflammation?
In the absence of oxygen, life can't do anything but grow and divide.
And so anything that blocks the cytochrome C oxidase, blocking oxidative metabolism,
tends to stimulate cell division because that's all life can do on the lactic acid producing cycle.
And experiments both with nitric oxide supplement or creating the conditions such as cutting off the blood supply to cause muscle tissue to produce its own excess nitric oxide.
They found that it stimulated the multiplication of cells in the muscle.
The satellite cells surrounding the muscle fiber itself multiply under the influence of nitric oxide or simply hypoxia leading to lactic acid production.
So it's a very inflammatory process, even though they're describing it as something that is wonderful.
You'll increase your muscles if you take supplements that are precursors for nitric oxide production.
Yeah, they found that you could cause muscle enlargement and growth just by putting a tourniquet on or if you combined mild exercise with a tourniquet.
Because of the oxygen deprivation.
Yeah, really big muscle growth from injuring it.
But that's the basic thing that cells divide like cancer when they don't have the energy to do what they should do.
So it's a kind of negative response to that stimulation.
Yeah. So anytime you injure a tissue, whether it's in the brain or heart or blood vessel, pancreas, whatever,
there are stem cells, the satellite cells and muscles are probably just the local stem cell,
which might be replenished from bone marrow, for example.
But anyway, they function as stem cells.
And so any time a tissue is injured, the lack of oxygen temporarily stimulates multiplication of stem like cells,
which have the potential of regenerating the tissue.
So it's a natural process that that would happen to stimulate cell growth,
but they're twisting it and saying that it's something good that it increases muscle growth.
Well, it's always a local, more or less microscopic process when it's natural.
But if you flood the system, hoping to grow all of your muscles bigger,
and you're also providing it to your brain, immune system, gonads, everything is being in effect deprived of oxygen.
So drugs that increase nitric oxide would be classed as carcinogens then?
In fact, yeah, that's starting to be recognized.
A very basic factor in promoting cancer development, growth and spreading.
Okay, well, you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMED Galbraith 91.1 FM from 7.30 until 8 o'clock this evening.
And you're invited to call in with any questions either related or unrelated to this month's topic of nitrous or nitric oxide and its damaging effects.
And the number here, if you live in the area, is 9233911 or there's an 800 number if you're outside the area,
1-800-KMUD-RAD, that's 1-800-568-3723.
So getting back to some of the things that they say nitric oxide supplements are beneficial for,
and actually it's never the nitric oxide that you get in a capsule or a tablet anyway, is it?
It's the precursor, it's the amino acid precursor that nitric oxide is manufactured from.
Is there any truth to the vasodilatory, the artery dilating effects that would supposedly help people with blood pressure?
I mean, is that just completely erroneous science too?
Oh, no, it does that. Nitroglycerin was used for a long time to open up heart artery.
You do increase the flow of blood by relaxing the arterioles.
The trouble is that if you increase it beyond a temporary dilation,
it's going to start the damaging process of increasing collagen formation and cell multiplication and so on.
So you can get a momentary effect from sniffing nitroglycerin, for example.
But as a chronic thing or a systemic thing, it's not at all good.
In fact, it ages.
In a chronic situation, for example, where your intestine is being irritated, irritable bowel syndrome, for example,
or just mild digestive problems, you absorb both nitric oxide and endotoxin.
And these endotoxin increases the production of nitric oxide everywhere.
And in the blood vessels, the increased and chronic effect of nitric oxide is to promote thickening and atherosclerosis and hardening of the arteries.
So, in fact, it's actually going to be worsening the condition you're taking it for if you're taking it for blood pressure or...
Yeah, the momentary effect over minutes or hours can be helpful.
Like if you have a constricted area, the relaxation locally in that particular artery opens up and lets the blood keep flowing.
If when you do that systemically, all you're doing is adding to the chronic inflammation, stress and degeneration of the arteries, heart and all the other organs.
So the body should be producing a little bit of nitric oxide in that constricted artery is what you're saying.
Yes. When you take it, when you have a local like a pinch of an artery, the cells sense that they aren't getting enough oxygen.
And in reaction to the stress, nitric oxide is produced locally, opens it up, lets the blood through the stress point.
So it's like a local regulatory process and shouldn't ever be a systemic generalized process for treating high blood pressure, for example.
It's like when someone takes nitroglycerin.
Yeah. All it's doing is relieving a momentary pinch in the heart, which could be good, I guess, for the heart.
But systemically, for example, one of the things that it does is to increase aldosterone, the adrenal salt regulating steroid that produces inflammation and fibrosis as a side effect.
Okay. Now, aldosterone is also implicated for blood pressure regulation, isn't it?
Yeah. Too much aldosterone and you get high blood pressure.
So the side effect of chronic nitric oxide can be exactly the opposite of what they're promoting.
Oh, my goodness. Let me just outline for people that are listening that, and I may be wrong here,
I usually find information and/or have some previous knowledge information that you uncover fairly often to be incomplete or actually not quite correct.
But in terms of nitric oxide production, am I right in thinking that there are three major sites that the endothelia inside the vessel walls is one,
and then a neuronal synthase from nerve cells, and then there's the inducible form. Is that correct or is there any other methods?
Yeah, it's generally the inducible form, which can occur apparently in any cell, including nerves.
In response to inflammation or damage or...?
Yeah, any stress seems to increase the inducible one.
Because it made me think of a person who I was speaking with earlier who had, amongst other things,
one of the main symptoms that they had was an inflammation of the kidneys, both of them.
They had urethral obstruction, retrograde urinary flow backing up into the kidneys,
producing a chronic or rather an acute kidney inflammation.
And what I read in one of the articles, PubMed articles, was that the glomerulus, which is a functional unit of the kidney,
was unique in that the vascular networks have the potential themselves to express several, what they call isoforms of nitric oxide synthase
and can produce quite an amount of this in response to injury.
And I was wondering, in terms of the realistic inhibition of nitric oxide, I only found two compounds.
One of them I found advertised by Sigma Aldrich, which is a fairly big, well it's one of the biggest I think in America,
chemical firms that were charging a lot of money for a 5 mg sample.
But the other one apparently is almost as effective, but I think it has a slightly different mechanism,
and that was aminoguanidine.
And if you look at that online, it's actually sold as a blocker of the glycation process
whereby sugars and proteins form these glycation end products that are damaging.
That was its first recognized effect, but it turns out it's achieving that by blocking nitric oxide,
which leads to the oxidation damage to all of the blood vessels.
So is aminoguanidine as good? Because the other compound, it was, let me see, I have a note of it.
Yeah, there's another one that's just a variation on aminoguanidine called agmatine,
which is, it occurs in foods, meat, fish, mushrooms, for example.
Would you get enough of this product?
No, it's probably helpful somewhat.
The weightlifters who were using nitric oxide to puff up their muscles heard something about agmatine,
and they started using it, but then the word went around that it's inhibiting nitric oxide,
so I think there's some confusion currently.
Do you think that using aminoguanidine as a competitive inhibitor of nitric oxide
would be a reasonable approach to a kind of systemic inflammation that you'd find, say,
in rheumatoid arthritis patients?
I think it probably is, but I think there are safer things that have been studied more.
Aminoguanidine has been known chemically for over 100 years, I think,
but it just hasn't been researched as a medical treatment enough that I would feel very confident of that.
The safest inhibitors happen to be niacinamide, which has two or three different routes for inhibiting it.
Aspirin, which has two or three at least direct and indirect ways of inhibiting it.
And progesterone, which is partly acting by blocking estrogen's increase of nitric oxide.
Interesting, because you mentioned niacinamide,
and this is the compound I remember you talking about most for lowering blood sugar in diabetics
or type 2 diabetic patients.
It does just about everything protective.
It protects nerve cells against nitric oxide's damaging effects.
And one other pretty safe inhibitor is methylene blue.
Okay, yeah.
I'm starting to see more of that compound come up on PubMed articles
for quite a few different approaches to disease, but I don't know.
At this point in time, I remember seeing that also as a chemical that was advertised on Sigma Aldrich's website.
I don't think it was too expensive either.
So methylene blue would certainly be a reasonable approach.
If somebody had chronic inflammation,
that would most likely be due to excessive nitric oxide production in that tissue.
Yeah, at first I would try aspirin, niacinamide, and progesterone as the most physiological.
What kind of doses do you think would be a reasonable suggestion
for somebody who wanted to try either niacinamide or aspirin?
Aspirin, if you take vitamin K, is safe up to several grams a day,
but usually with two doses of 500 milligrams, you get pretty good systemic protection.
Vitamin K, incidentally, is in several ways helping to hold down nitric oxide production.
And then how about niacinamide?
It's probably safe up to 1,000 milligrams a day,
but I've only had experience seeing people take about three or four doses of 125 milligrams each dose.
So a total of 200 to 500 milligrams a day can do really dramatic things for curing nerve degeneration and such.
Okay. All right, we've got our first caller here,
so let's take this first caller and see where we're going with this one.
Caller, you're on the air.
Hi, I had a question.
Yeah, go ahead. And where are you from?
Yeah, I just wanted to know if Dr. Peat could briefly discuss what is cystic fibrosis
and some practical strategies for overcoming that condition.
Yeah, I've never worked with anyone that had it,
except some people suspected they might have it,
and it turned out they were just very hypothyroid.
And the function of the adrenals can cause you to leak chloride
so that you have extreme saltiness of your skin, high chloride content,
and that is often used to diagnose cystic fibrosis.
But just correcting the thyroid and adrenal function,
the people that I've seen turned out not to have cystic fibrosis,
just a bad reaction to low thyroid function.
Okay, thank you.
Okay, thanks for your call.
Okay, so the number here, if you live in the area, is 923-3911.
If you're outside the area, there's an 800 number, 1-800-568-3723.
Okay, I think we have another caller on the air, so let's take the next caller.
And where are you from, caller?
Hi, this is Amy from New York.
Amy from New York.
Welcome to the show.
Thanks.
Thanks for this excellent show.
I had a couple of questions for Dr. Peat.
I'm studying a breathing method that's supposed to increase carbon dioxide levels,
and they talk about always breathing through the nose.
And I was worried a little about whether that would, you know,
increase my nitric oxide levels because you're always breathing through the nose.
No, anything that irritates your membranes will cause -- if you get a runny nose from something you ate,
for example, that increases the nitric oxide in your nose.
And so you want to avoid inflammatory things in your food or atmosphere
because you do get local and systemic nitric oxide from any inflammatory thing.
But breathing through your nose itself doesn't contribute anything to that local production.
Okay.
The idea -- the best way when you breathe through your nose,
especially if you have a good long nose, you have better retention of carbon dioxide.
The dead space between the air sac in your lung and the outside world,
some of the Buteco people breathe through about an eight-inch tube to extend the pathway.
But the idea of having a good long nose is that that extends the dead space
so that you keep a higher concentration of CO2.
Okay.
I find snorkeling does this same thing.
It does?
Snorkeling.
Snorkeling?
Because you're extending your nose.
Swimming underwater, just holding the breath.
I had one more question for you, but it's off topic.
Go ahead.
I think that you mentioned that it often takes about four years or even longer
to get rid of the unsaturated fat stores in the body.
And also --
Well, that's for a complete exchange,
but you can see it decrease as soon as you change your diet,
but it's gradual over a period of years.
Yeah, and we do have a preference to burn saturated fats, I understand,
because it's a better -- a cleaner burning fat.
But you mentioned a study that found that the pigs that wore sweaters,
they ended up with larger stores of saturated fats than the pigs that weren't wearing sweaters.
Yeah, a biochemist actually did that,
and it's just a demonstration that the production of unsaturated fats is a defense against cold
because saturated fats harden at low temperature.
And so if you grow corn or soybeans in the tropics where it's always 85 to 95 degrees,
they'll produce fairly saturated fats.
And fish in the Amazon River have close to the saturation of butter in their fat.
But do you think that that's a viable strategy for people, for example, in cold climates,
that they want to lose as much of their stored unsaturated fats as quickly as they can?
Would that be a safe way to --
Keeping your arms and legs warm is very important for your systemic metabolism,
but the pig fat was basically deriving from a starting corn or soy fat,
and the pigs, if they're cold,
extend it to make the highly unsaturated long chain with five or six unsaturated bonds rather than two or three.
And so when you synthesize unsaturated fats from sugar or starch,
they're going to be pretty safe omega minus nine fats based on the mead acid,
which are much less unstable than the fish oil type.
I see.
So it changed what was stored, the new stored fat,
but it didn't change the fat burning preference on the existing fat stores?
Keeping your body temperature up does help you oxidize fat safely.
And when you said that about the cold pigs having much worse fat stored,
it reminds me of -- have you heard of this brown fat and these guys that they go into freezers
and take cold showers and things and they try to increase their stores of brown fat?
And the reason they do that is it burns off all of their white fat.
Yeah, I think keeping your thyroid function up is better because the cold activates a variety of stress hormones
that cause some side effects besides just getting rid of the fat.
So to oxidize your fats while at rest by having a good resting metabolic rate
and high body temperature is the safest way to handle them
rather than increase the stress to increase the fat burning.
Okay. Well, thank you very much.
You're welcome.
I think we have another caller on the line.
Let's take this next caller and find out where you're from, caller.
Hi, I'm from Madison, Wisconsin.
Okay, welcome to the show. What's your question?
My first question was that I've been taking T4.
It's working really well for me, but I get some eye pain sometimes in the process of titrating it.
Say that again. I didn't hear that part.
Oh, I get some eye pain in the process of titrating T4.
Some eye-- I didn't hear that.
Eye pain.
Oh, you're saying you got some eye pain.
Yeah, I'm sorry about that.
Okay. So what was your question, whether or not that was normal or whether that was--
Yeah, if it's just a normal part of the titration process.
Now, when you say titration, do you mean you've just taken small doses,
gradually increasing the dose or--
Yeah, I started on probably like 7 micrograms.
Okay.
And I'll go from 7 and then up to 12, and I responded really well to it,
but it seems like I get a little bit of eye pain.
Now, this is-- we're talking about T3 now.
Oh, I'm sorry, T4.
T4, I beg your pardon. Okay.
So, Dr. Peat, as a very small amount of T4,
the caller is asking whether or not you've ever heard of any relationship to eye pain.
No, I haven't.
But I would back off on the T4.
If your liver isn't effectively converting it to T3,
it can have an antithyroid effect by accumulating, turning off your pituitary,
and your liver normally is where you get most of your active thyroid hormone.
So if your liver isn't doing that, you can accumulate so much T4,
it has stress-activating actions.
Do you think it would be better for this person if they wanted to try the active hormone?
Yeah, I think it's always better to use the combination in the traditional way,
or if you're for some reason in a hurry or think you have a very bad liver,
then small amounts of the active T3 can be done safely.
So you have a lot of problems with doctors prescribing that T4,
is that when someone is low thyroid and they take T4,
their livers usually aren't active enough to convert the T4 into the active,
because T4 on its own doesn't have any action at all, doesn't do anything.
It has to be converted to T3.
And if you take enough T4, you're going to turn off your brain's production
of stimulating the thyroid gland, which naturally produces about one part T3 to four parts T4.
So that's why taking a natural glandular ratio of one to four of T3 to T4
is what Dr. Peat's recommending.
In the 1940s when drug companies synthesized thyroxine,
they tested it on male medical students and said it worked just like real thyroid.
That's T4, thyroxine.
Yeah, T4.
But the thing is that women with high estrogen compared to men always have more sluggish liver,
and women are the ones who, especially the 25-year-old medical students, seldom have liver problems.
But a 40-year-old female very often has a more sluggish liver,
so that thyroxine or T4 is very often causing problems in women.
Right, because the estrogen they are subject to at that age has that competitive inhibition.
And actually, the T4 can make people's problems, low thyroid people's problems even worse
if they don't convert it into T3.
It actually increases adrenaline and makes a person feel worse than they did before they took it.
And one of the effects of good thyroid function is to lower nitric oxide.
Nitric oxide, contrary to the advertising, can increase pressure inside your eye.
And so hypothyroidism can create enough nitric oxide to cause symptoms such as hardening of the eye, increasing pressure.
That's interesting. So I was wondering, like, maybe I was switching over from cortisol to thyroid,
and maybe my eye was running low on energy or something.
I couldn't understand it.
The caller said that he was switching, he was coming off of cortisol and trying to go on to thyroid,
and he was wondering if his eye was running out of energy.
Well, cortisol increases the pressure in the eye.
So it's possible that you were still producing too much cortisol relative to the protective pregnenolone, progesterone and such.
Okay, interesting. I had another question. Is that okay?
Yeah, go ahead.
I was wondering what percentage of popular lab tests are fraudulent or useless.
I had a TSH test done, and I was taking thyroid, and I stopped for like a week before the test.
And my doctor said that my TSH was normal, but when I went off the thyroid,
I started getting, like, oils on my scalp and other problems.
And I was curious how many of the tests out there kind of don't have very much value.
Well, I think the main problem is that doctors are taught that the TSH normal range is something like 0.4 to 5.0,
but that number has been decreasing. The American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists has lowered it to 0.3 to 3.0.
And a population of healthy people without thyroid cancer or other thyroid problems,
they averaged 0.4 TSH or less without taking a thyroid supplement.
Meaning that if you're anything over 1 or 1.5 or getting anywhere closer to 2,
you definitely seem like you would benefit from using the hormone.
Yeah, I think I was like at 3.7 or something.
Yeah. That would be outside of the range according to the lowered revised figures that have been issued.
And isn't it correct, Dr. Peat, that while someone might be taking T4 and not really converting it much to T3,
their TSH would still lower?
Yeah, and the stress hormones will lower it, too.
So you can't really diagnose anything by TSH alone, even though that's how most doctors do it.
Especially when someone who's low thyroid, they're usually running on excess adrenaline,
and if excess adrenaline will lower the TSH and give you a false positive or false negative.
And high cortisol lowers it and also at the same time causes the liver to turn thyroxine into reverse T3,
which interferes even more than thyroxine with the active T3 function.
It blocks the real T3 from actually doing anything.
Okay.
That's interesting.
All right. Well, thank you.
Do you have anything else to say? I'm sorry. I'm going to cut you off.
Oh, well, are his books still available?
Dr. Peat?
They have been converted to electronic form, and we're going to figure out how to make them available fairly soon electronically.
Okay, great.
Well, I just wanted to say thank you very much, Dr. Peat, and also thank you, our doctors, very much.
I appreciate it a lot.
You're very welcome.
You're welcome. Thank you for your call.
Okay. So I asked the engineer, do we have anyone else on hold at the moment?
No? Okay.
So the number here, if you live in the area, is 923-3911, or if you're outside the area and want to use a toll-free number,
that's 1-800-568-3723.
We're talking with Dr. Raymond Peat today about nitric oxide and its popular use for bodybuilding and for male enhancement,
amongst other things, and how damaging nitric oxide is and how much information and research there is to show that,
actually, it's probably more carcinogenic than anything else.
Talking along the lines of a carcinogen, I saw articles that were demonstrating that nitric oxide was responsible for damaging DNA,
and that's how they could directly implicate it in being a carcinogen.
Yeah. Just several years ago, radiation biologists were seeing that cells which were hit by X-rays or gamma rays emitted something
which would cause apparent radiation damage in the neighborhood.
So you could take the irradiated cells out of the culture dish, put new cells in, and they acted as if they had been irradiated.
And nitric oxide has turned out to be a major transmitter of that effect.
So it's like you're being irradiated.
You do produce a lot of nitric oxide, and it spreads to adjoining cells.
So anything that starts the inflammation tends to spread the nitric oxide,
which not only breaks the strands of DNA, but it also changes the methylation.
So the whole control system for expressing DNA in your chromosomes is altered under chronic excessive nitric oxide.
Okay. Hold it there a moment, Dr. Peat, because the light's flashing away.
I think we've got one person on hold and another caller coming in.
So let's start by taking this next caller. And, caller, where are you from?
Say that again now?
Where are you from, caller?
The what?
Where are you calling from?
Eureka.
Eureka. Go ahead. What's your question?
I've just probably covered this before, but I wanted to know what alternative to blood pressure medicines.
Okay.
If you look at the symptoms of chronic hypothyroidism, hypertension is one of the prominent things.
A very large proportion of the people who think they have a high blood pressure problem are simply hypothyroid.
TSH itself, which rises when you're hypothyroid, even within the normal range, it's increasing your various stress hormones and increasing your blood pressure.
So TSH is a pro-inflammatory factor and one of the factors causing hypertension.
So you want to keep that low just for general health.
So, caller, you could ask your doctor for a test of TSH, and if it's above 0.4, then perhaps you can think about taking a thyroid supplement.
Okay. I think we have another caller on the line, so let's take this next caller.
Caller, where are you from?
Is that I?
Hi. You're on the air. Where are you from?
Garberville.
Garberville. Go ahead. What's your question?
I wanted to know the name of your practice and the telephone number.
Oh, okay. Well, let's give that out at the end of the show.
Oh, you won't be giving it out until the end of the show?
Yeah, let's not spend the time on that now. We'll wait until the end of the show.
All right. I'll hang on. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you. So I don't know if there's anybody else on the line.
Oh, we did have one person call in and ask just not to be on the air, but about COPD. He was diagnosed and had just any information.
All right. Dr. Peat, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. There was a caller who left a message with the engineer.
As an inflammatory or a fibrotic or fibrous type inflammation, how do you see that, the etiology of it or the treatment?
I've known several people who have it. One of my friends who was in his 80s, when I visited him in Toluca, 8,500 feet altitude,
he was blue in the face and just panting, sitting down, and didn't recognize me. His brain wasn't getting enough oxygen.
I gave his daughter some pregnenolone, progesterone, and thyroid to give to him a little bit every day.
When I came back two weeks later, he was back at work in his upper floor office without an elevator and took me around the city making me pant.
Just a dramatic improvement in oxygen absorption in his lungs.
Is that how you would see that plausibly being a mechanism by which someone could regain their breath again?
Yes. High estrogen and nitric oxide are two things that can cause a leakage of fluid into the air sacs and a thickening of the pathway between the air and the capillary
so that the oxygen has to pass through such a thick layer. It just isn't getting to the blood at a high enough concentration.
Pregnenolone alone seems to sometimes very quickly improve oxygenation.
What would be a good recommended starting dose for pregnenolone and progesterone and thyroid for someone with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease?
With thyroid, you want to start very slowly because it increases your need for oxygen as well as improving the lung function.
So it's good to start with pregnenolone, I think, which doesn't have any hormonal effect.
It does help to prevent edema and swelling of the membranes.
The dose of pregnenolone doesn't really matter.
You just don't want to take such a big dose that you're getting additives and contaminants.
So 15, 20, 30 milligrams is often a therapeutic dose, but it's okay to take 100 or 300 milligrams if you know the stuff is clean.
With progesterone, same thing, 10 to 30 milligrams can make a big difference.
I wanted to ask you the question about the relationship between antibiotics and not the latest and greatest antibiotics, but specifically minocycline.
I saw some articles on PubMed again demonstrating that it lowered the inducible form of nitric oxide and cytokines that are pro-inflammatory.
What do you think about minocycline?
For several years, it's been recognized as a helpful factor for Alzheimer's disease and other brain problems.
Is that just because it's blocking the endotoxin production?
It blocks the nitric oxide production.
Directly blocking the nitric oxide production?
Yeah, directly blocks the enzyme the way niacinamide does.
Wow.
Okay, and then I saw another article again for another old-fashioned antibiotic, tetracycline.
What do you know about tetracycline?
It's in the same family, doxycycline, tetracycline, and minocycline.
Tetracycline, the only problem with it is that it's too cheap, so doctors are not educated to...
So I wonder if cascara would have a similar effect because it has anthraconones that are very similar to the tetracycline.
Yeah, I think that structure is what's happening.
We have another caller on the air here, so let's take this next caller call away from.
Uh, Ukiah?
Ukiah, hi. What's your question?
I was wondering if you guys could talk about the human growth hormone at all.
Okay, in relation to anything particular?
Well, some of my friends were talking about it because they do weightlifting.
They were talking about it's a good thing to build your muscles.
Yeah, same problem with nitric oxide, I think.
So, Dr. Peat, what do you have to say to somebody who's using growth hormone?
Well, you have the same problems that you get from nitric oxide or estrogen.
Women, surprisingly, chronically during the reproductive years have a high growth hormone chronically,
and the growth hormone causes a breakdown of fat into free fatty acids.
So women, under the influence of estrogen, typically have a chronic exposure to free fatty acids,
which is if they're unsaturated, increases oxidative damage.
And that's just a standard function of growth hormone is to raise your free fatty acids.
And that's probably why they see an increase thickness in the wall of blood vessels in the kidneys,
causing a progressive loss of kidney function from over exposure or chronic high exposure to growth hormone,
and suspicion that it increases the risk of diabetes, which free fatty acids are known to cause.
So it's very inflammatory.
Yeah, I think most of the, it's unfortunate, but it's like another cult.
And unfortunately, males are a little bit seduced by the potential of growing bigger muscles
using anabolic steroids and other compounds.
And so obviously growth hormone, again, is advertised very widely in bodybuilding magazines.
What does anabolic mean?
Muscle building.
So it's the opposite of catabolism, which is muscle breakdown.
But it's unfortunate that most muscle bodybuilding magazines are reasonably rife with products
that I know would not be founded on science to be beneficial for you.
That's unfortunate.
And also the supplements that are touted to increase nitric oxide, people want to avoid those,
like arginine and...
Citrulline.
Okay, we probably need to wrap up the show this evening anyway.
Thanks for all the callers that have called in.
Dr. Peat, as always, thanks so much for your time and your dedication.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show.
Okay, thank you.
Okay, so I'll just spend the next couple of moments letting people know how they can get information
from the website, either Dr. Peat's research articles or I think that one person there was talking about a book.
And I know that he said that recently here they've turned to an electronic form of the couple of books that he has written for sure.
So his website is www.raypeat.com, R-A-Y-P-E-A-T, and he has lots of articles there that are fully referenced.
And then the caller did call in about us.
So, yeah, our business name is Western Botanical Medicine, and we have an 800 number.
Sarah?
1-888-WBM-ERB.
Okay, I didn't know if you wanted to say that or not.
Anyway, so we can be reached, you know, 9 to 5, Monday through Friday after the show.
So until the next month, next -- third Friday of next month, I wish you a good night.
It will be more like fall next month. It will be dark when we arrive at the studio at 7 o'clock.
And so as we wind our way into a gentle winter without any rain at this point, I wish you the very best,
and happy Halloween for that coming up here about in a week or so.
Thank you for listening.
Good night.
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Alright, 759.
Be going into winging a prayer, maybe like a minute early. Here we go.
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