[Music]
Well, welcome to the show and once again you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor, KMUD Garboval, 91.1 FM.
My name is Andrew Murray and for those of you who perhaps have never listened to the shows which run every third Friday of the month from 7 to 8 p.m.
Both my wife and I, who's not here this evening, we're both licensed medical herbalists and we graduated in England with a master's degree in herbal medicine
and we see and advise clients with a wide range of conditions with herbal and dietary advice as well as lifestyle change advice.
Okay, so you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor, KMUD Garboval, 91.1 FM and fortunately Dr. Peat is joining us again this month for the show's topic
which will be broadly encompassing allergy as a fairly pertinent time of year. Things are just starting to flower, the clocks have gone forward, we're on summertime.
Things are flowering and soon the grasses will be flowering, although that's just not the only source of allergy-related effects, but there obviously are plenty of other allergies, both food and environmental.
So once again we're very welcome to welcome Dr. Peat on the show who's going to share his insights into the mechanisms of allergy
and as always you probably won't have heard some of what he's going to say related to the explanation for allergies because it's fairly new material.
In fact some of it's very old material, it just hasn't been accepted, but Dr. Peat's break on rationale on the subject of allergies is both fascinating and insightful.
So thanks so much for joining us again Dr. Peat.
Yeah, hi.
For those people who have perhaps have never tuned into the show or never read your newsletters or maybe haven't heard of you,
would you just outline your academic and professional background before we get going with the show?
After I had studied humanities and linguistics for a while and taught linguistics,
I decided to study biology and spent four years, 1968 to '72, studying for a PhD at the University of Oregon.
In 1969 I attended their international immunology conference and seeing some of the most famous immunologists in the world,
I became skeptical of the standard theories of immunity because they were really ignoring some of the papers that were given at that conference
in favor of staying with the stereotyped official dogma.
Okay.
Alright, well that's a good introduction.
I know that you're extremely talented and you've done a lot of work over many decades here now of your own research,
looking at the reality of the science behind cause and effect.
And I know that you've written a lot of material on your own website,
giving people free access to some of the explanations that you've given and some of which have been borne out in mainstream science recently.
So that's good news that it's gradually getting out there.
For those people that are listening, I just wanted also to highlight the fact that from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o'clock,
you're both invited and welcome to call in with any questions either related to this month's topic of allergy or other subjects if you have them.
If we can try and stick on the topic of allergy, that would probably be best.
So the number if you live in the area is a 707 number, it's 923-3911.
Or if fortunately you're outside of the state of California and you wanted to call in from the East Coast or the Midwest,
we often get people calling in from those places.
So that's great to hear you all out there and I know even people in different parts of the world have tuned in.
There's a toll-free number which is 1-800-KMUD-RAD, which is 1-800-568-3723.
For people listening, they can also tune into the web version of KMUD.org and listen to the live broadcast on the air now.
So Dr. Peat, I think just starting off with some of the kind of medical model of allergy,
what I've been reading and what I've understood previously from my background is that IgE is the main mediated product as an antibody product
that causes the recognition and the reactive processes that lead to inflammation.
What do you see of IgE as the main cause or do you not even agree with that?
I think one of the reasons that it gets so much attention is that it fit with a hereditary idea of susceptibility to allergy and other diseases.
I think the facts are that it's as much an effect of allergy as it is a cause.
For example, it's known that the determination of the B cells or bone-derived white blood cells to make the IgE type of antibody,
it's determined by the signals in the body and histamine is the immediate, probably the most effective signal in telling the B cells to start making the IgE antibody.
So if you don't have inflammation from the stressed cells producing histamine, you won't be likely to have so much IgE.
One of the things that turns on the production of more mast cells or the secretion or leakage of histamine from the mast cells
is prostaglandins produced from the polyunsaturated fatty acids, especially prostaglandin E2.
Over the last 15 or 20 years, several researchers have seen that allergic women have babies that are born with higher polyunsaturated fatty acid content
and that those babies are more likely to develop allergies at an early age.
The polyunsaturated fats tend to decrease the low-density so-called bad cholesterol and increase the HDL, high-density type of cholesterol.
The HDL is associated with allergy and the higher LDL is associated with less likelihood of allergy.
PUFA and HDL, the supposedly good things, which have been increasingly promoted,
are believed by quite a few allergists now to be responsible for the great increase in allergy in Europe and America.
Because they're signaling for inflammation.
Yeah, they increase the, among other things, the prostaglandins, which increase the histamine production.
Okay, so you mentioned the prostaglandins when you first started talking about the IgE antibodies,
they kind of go through a signaling process.
So these free fatty acids, these are very self-same free fatty acids that you often talk about as being important to keep down
because they're both inflammatory and destructive in their inflammatory mechanisms.
Yeah, besides making the prostaglandins in themselves, they cause changes in cells that disrupt their functions.
In fact, every function of the cell can be disrupted by too much of the polyunsaturated fats.
And one of the worst things they do is to interrupt oxidative metabolism.
And the energy deficit, I think, is ultimately the thing that leads to the really serious allergy problems.
Now, when you talk about energy production, again, I'm automatically thinking of the mitochondrial powerhouse of the cell
producing energy and thyroid and progesterone being those pro-supportive supplements, nutrients for it.
That's the correct way of thinking about it.
Yeah, and babies and very young children can oxidize fatty acids very quickly and get good energy from them.
But in proportion to how unsaturated they are, they over the years slow down the ability to oxidize anything.
And sugar doesn't do that.
Glucose doesn't cause the great problems with metabolism and energy production.
OK, so there's a kind of cumulative effect with free fatty acid buildup in the body that leads to a decrease in energy.
And that energy decrease is responsible in part for the arrival on the scene of the inflammatory mediators that usually poorly, poorly, poorly started.
They're triggered by things which normally people wouldn't be susceptible to or allergic to.
I think this is some of the rationale for why people get unexplained so-called allergies.
And I know as we get into the energy production side of your rationale on that, on allergies, we'll come up with some good ways to stave off that process.
Yeah, about 40 or 50 years ago, some people associated with Hans Celia in Canada did research on allergy and the shock that can be produced by allergens.
And in one of their studies, they graded allergens from the potentially deadly walnut oil allergy down to very mild allergies like pollen that would maybe cause the sniffles.
And they gave that range of allergens to animals that had glucose infused into their bloodstream to give them twice to three times the normal concentration of glucose.
And even the most deadly allergen didn't do anything worse than maybe give them the sniffles when they had high blood sugar.
But if they gave them a little insulin to lower their blood sugar, the mildest allergen could kill them with anaphylactic shock.
Got it. Okay, so sugar is a good mediator then. It's almost a stress reducing substance that prevents that cascade from even occurring then.
Yeah, lots of people have been able to give up their EpiPens or their epinephrine dosers just by keeping a Coke on hand.
If they are stung by a bee that they're allergic to or such, they drink a Coke quickly.
I find it so interesting that the industry wants to demonize all those things that have been shown time and time again to be beneficial for people.
So I know, I think I read today on while I was scanning the internet, trolling for different pieces of information and going through some of the stuff that I was going to discuss with you today.
I'm sure I came across an article about sugar tax that they're now imposing in England.
Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. I know it's a little bit of the subject here.
Anyway, sugar is very important, not just in terms of energy production, but for vitalizing the cell.
And it's also that same sugar then they're saying, which is directly responsible for directly reducing the inflammation.
Yeah. When you increase, like in these animals, when you give them extra glucose, it's able to get around the polyunsaturated fatty acid interference with energy production.
It can turn off the production of fatty acids and get directly to the mitochondria to produce energy.
Yeah. I think when most people think about sugar, they've probably been told by mainstream media how bad it is and what your glucose should be and hear about all the diabetes that's rampant now as a means or a reason not to consume sugar.
But we all know that the cause for diabetes is nothing to do with sugar.
And we've gone over various radio shows talking about the high fructose corn syrup in the industry's food chain and how that, along with the polyunsaturated, are directly responsible for the rise in diabetes.
So sugar itself, in terms of the sugar that would be necessary, I wonder if you know, if you remember the work or the articles about the amount of sugar.
You said two to three times what would be normally present as an average blood glucose.
Yeah. 300 milligrams per cent was the protective, completely protective level.
Yeah. Interesting. OK. Well, you're listening to Ask Your Ob Doctor. K.M.U.D.Gal before 91.1 FM.
From 7.30 till the end of the show, callers are invited to call in with questions about this month's subject of allergy.
We've come to that time of year now, March, with the clocks going forward and everything breaking into flower.
Where people are probably going to start coming down with the things that they recognize as the start of spring.
So there's going to be plenty of advice here to understand the mechanisms by which allergy occur and how best to deal with it from a nutrition point of view.
I guess the underlying pathophysiology of allergy involves the immunoregulatory dysfunction, then, similar to those that's been noted in highly stressed populations.
And we'll get into the stress side here in a moment.
So the allergies themselves have been considered psychosomatic and they've worsened outcomes in patients with a high degree of psychosocial stress.
How do you see the cause effect aspect of stress modulating the allergy response?
Remember we were talking about learned helplessness? Stress that you can't escape from, even if it's not a very deadly stress.
The forced swimming test of the rats.
It becomes deadly and that's because you can't mobilize the anti-stress system. You get stuck in the cholinergic or parasympathetic side of the system, which tends to weaken and slow your heartbeat and weaken other defenses.
But it puts you in a predisposed to become inflamed condition.
And when they've looked at people with various inflammatory diseases, it turns out that their social economic status is additive to any particular learned helplessness situation.
So that a person with any bad condition is less likely to survive if they have a low social economic status.
But if they have overcome learned helplessness, they can also overcome their social economic status.
They're simply additive so that learned helplessness plus low status, low income makes you very susceptible to rheumatoid arthritis, heart disease, dementia and so on.
I wonder how best people could overcome that by either reading stimulating articles or being involved in discussion dialogue about alternatives that could be helpful.
I wonder that most people that have that poor situation where they are very much economically deprived, etc. have a, like you say, a kind of downward spiral mental outlook on things.
Yeah, an enriched environment is how they made animals overcome it. And in humans, anything that gets you out of the trapped sensation that makes your life interesting.
So just about any life enriching experience, meeting new people, going new places, helps break out of those patterns.
Okay, from a direct descriptive term then for allergies, for people that are, for example, allergic to pollen.
I know pollen is just one of many different allergens that can trigger an allergy response.
But in terms of some of the best treatment or some of the best approaches to this type of allergy mediated substance, what do you think would be probably some of the most important advice people could get for combating allergies?
It turns out that the same things that cure or help to escape from learned helplessness also help to stop or reduce the inflammatory reaction and reduce histamine production.
And T3, the active form of thyroid hormone, was one of the early things they discovered would cure learned helplessness. And it does several things that prevent overproduction of histamine.
It's been known to be anti-inflammatory for a long time, but one of its mechanisms is to stabilize mast cells so they don't secrete serotonin, histamine, and other inflammatory things.
Okay. Alright, so how about, we've talked in the past about you are what you eat.
And then at this point in time, we're talking about ingesting allergens, so potentially you can be triggered into inflammation by what you either purposely or inadvertently ingest.
So what perhaps is a rationale, or your rationale then, for the gut-derived link between inhaled allergens and allergy that can be decreased by specifically treating the gut with anti-inflammatories?
Sometimes the inflammation in a particular area, like in your nose, or ears, or throat, or eyes, sometimes that's really something irritating your intestine.
You can develop the IgE antibodies solely in your nasal membranes without having it in your general bloodstream, so you can have a local reaction to pollen or such.
But I think usually people who are getting these throat-nose inflammations, it's usually started from something happening in the intestine, triggering mast cells, which are very numerous in the lining of the intestine,
triggering the production of histamine, serotonin, nitric oxide, and other things systemically, prostaglandins in particular.
And those circulate to cause all membranes. They can cause hives of lumps on the skin and other skin conditions.
And so avoiding things that feed bacteria so that you don't produce so much endotoxin can help all types of allergy and inflammatory conditions.
And the standard theory of allergy is they used to say that only a protein is a potential allergen. But there's just perfect evidence that many things that don't contain proteins are very powerful, potentially deadly allergens.
For example, the alginate that dentists use for making molds of the mouth.
Did you say alginate?
Alginate.
Yeah, right.
It's a cousin of carotenoids, which is now in so many foods.
Right.
One person died of anaphylactic shock from having a mold made with alginate.
So allergic were they, huh?
Yeah, it's a polysaccharide, but lots of gums like guar and locust gum and xanthan gum and so on.
These are all allergens for some people, but they're used just almost indiscriminately in food.
Today someone sent me a label for an ice cream substitute that contains seven different gums, one of which is an allergen for some people.
Do you think that this food-based dietary involvement of allergic responses could be additive in any way where people just get worse and worse because their diet doesn't change and the insults just continue to come on in?
Yeah, I think this is probably the worst cause of learned helplessness in the biological sense.
Your body experiences that inflammatory state, which is psychological as much as biological.
It's so insidious, too.
It's so all-pervasive and all so insidious.
It's a pretty corporate machine that's being driven, I think, down the path of destruction for a lot of people in a lot of ways.
But that's why I know you advocate so many good whole – not whole foods as in the whole food store – but so many good whole food approaches to diet.
I know that your mainstay foods of choice and preference here are things like good quality dairy products, whether it's milk or cheese.
Yeah, the calcium and vitamin D are two of the things that are very strongly anti-allergic.
Magnesium is the most famous because a magnesium deficiency, they found, caused a terrific range of inflammatory diseases in animals.
And they were – they could cure skin diseases, heart disease, nerve disease, liver disease, and so on just by correcting a magnesium deficiency.
But vitamin D and calcium working with magnesium are very important so that some people cure their allergies just by supplementing vitamin D or vitamin K, which is the other major calcium-regulating vitamin.
Okay. Let's hold that thought there for a minute because we do actually have a call on the air.
So let's just open up the show to callers and let's see where this first call is going.
Caller, you're on the air?
Yes, hello. This is David from Missouri.
Oh, hey, David. What's your question?
Okay. I think this is still on target, but I've wondered about this for quite a while.
Do you think there's some kind of confusion that's been going on for a long time regarding the common cold and it actually being in the same category as an allergy?
For instance, you look at what happens around Christmas or the holidays.
You've got people that have reduced sunlight. They're eating extremely unhealthy food.
They're stressed out. And all of a sudden, everybody's getting the cold.
Sounds like a perfect recipe.
I'm just wondering – we also see this happen throughout the year where people are labeling something a cold or they're confused.
They even seem confused as to do I have an allergy or do I have a cold?
And the other thing I want to ask in relation to that, which I think covers both subjects of allergies and the cold, is why is mucus always a major part of either one of those?
Is that the body's intelligence trying to throw off the allergens?
Is it like a vehicle being used to try to exit things?
Yeah, mucus binds histamine and keeps it away from the cells and binds other toxins and irritants.
So it's our first line of defense, both against allergens and viruses and such.
But I think there is a great similarity between the variety of viruses that like to attack the intestine.
Things that we think of as respiratory viruses, I think, are primarily intestinal viruses.
Polio in one of its manifestations was really just a gastrointestinal infection.
But the famous gastroenterologist, Walter Alvarez, about 80 years ago, experimented on dogs.
And when he would give them a respiratory virus, he found that they would get a runny nose and inflammation in their head without any virus at all present in their nose.
And he found that the virus was growing in their intestine and producing symptoms in their upper respiratory system.
And then later, if they didn't throw it off, later the virus would show up all through their system, including their nose.
So what seems to be a nose cold, I think, most often is irritation in the intestine.
And I've seen dozens of people who learned that at the first sign of a cold coming on, such as a sore throat or runny nose, if they ate a carrot, they could break the pattern and not develop the cold.
Is the common cold considered to be a virus or a germ?
It's supposed to be a virus, right?
Yeah.
And so I've always thought this is interesting, too, especially after learning everything I have from you, Dr. Peat, that doctors are prescribing antibiotics, even though for a long time I was always irritated with family members going ahead and going to the doctor when they had a bad cold and getting antibiotics.
And I would say, hey, it's a virus.
So why are you doing that?
Why is the doctor doing that?
And they always said that it was because of a secondary infection.
But in reality, based on what we've been learning from you, it actually may be a good thing to do because it's attacking that endotoxin issue in the intestine.
Is that correct?
Yeah, I think so.
And you usually don't need nearly the dose that is typically prescribed to clear out a bowel infection if it has just come on.
Sometimes a third of the standard dose of penicillin or tetracycline or erythromycin will clear it up.
And then antihistamines that are stifling the mucus flow in a way are really kind of disrupting the intelligence of the body getting these allergens out.
Is that correct?
Except sometimes they can break the pattern.
Like vitamin E has antihistamine effect.
For example, it prevents the formation of prostaglandins and as a consequence will prevent the degranulation of mast cells.
And so it can prevent the shift to the IgE antibody in the whole thing.
You're saying the histamine is creating a vicious cycle, so we do want to break that cycle?
Yeah, breaking the cycle.
Even various antihistamines and other drugs can help to break that cycle.
And you said before that nitric acid is also kind of a vicious loop going between histamine and nitric acid.
I think you mean nitric oxide, don't you?
Histamine turns on the production of nitric oxide and nitric oxide signals a bunch of other inflammatory processes.
But the worst thing is that it interferes with oxygen energy production.
Okay. So the mucus flowing, though, is probably a good thing, but it may be a part of that vicious cycle, I guess, that we would like to stop.
Yeah, the mucus itself is fine. It's helpful.
But you wouldn't have to produce it if you didn't have the inflammation.
Okay, there we go. That's what I was looking for. Okay.
Okay, well, hey, thank you.
Yeah, thank you for your call.
Okay, well, we do have two more callers, and I just want to let other people listening know, from now until the end of the show at 8 o'clock,
you're invited to call in with questions related or unrelated to this month's topic of allergy, local areas, 707-923-3911.
Well, there's an 800 number for people living in a different state, across the states, or outside of this area, toll number, the 707 number.
It's 800-568-3723.
So we have two more callers. Let's take this next caller.
Caller, where are you from, and what's your question?
Hi, I'm Christina from the San Francisco Bay Area.
Hey, Christina, what's your question?
Before I ask my question, I first just want to thank Dr. Peat.
Dr. Peat, you've absolutely changed my life through Dr. Murray, who I've been consulting with over the past year.
My hair has gotten thicker, my energy has increased, anxiety and depression have tremendously improved,
and so I just want to thank you both, Dr. Peat and Dr. Murray, for all that you do.
Awesome.
The two quick questions I have is I've been experiencing terrible allergies for the past month,
and noticed that my symptoms dramatically flare up right when I go to sleep.
Like it's very difficult for me to fall asleep.
And do you know why that happens?
That's the first question.
The second question is what do you recommend I do to alleviate those symptoms?
Yeah, I think it's because that's when the parasympathetic system kicks in and lowers your blood sugar,
and that combination turns on the histamine release and inflammation.
And I experimented, I had a pattern of sleep onset asthma,
and I found that gymsin weed or atropine, the belladonna type chemical,
breaks the muscarinic part of the parasympathetic reaction,
and I found that that would keep me from going into that very low blood sugar state.
But the trouble with relying on the anticholinergic is that it tends to dry your mouth
and gives you tooth decay from the absence of saliva flow during the night.
So it is an emergency treatment, but the real thing I think is to adjust your thyroid and progesterone.
Progesterone has a broad variety of antihistamine effects.
Estrogen turns on both the multiplication of mast cells and their tendency to release histamine and serotonin.
And so getting your thyroid to a good level will reduce your estrogen and increase your progesterone
and shift the balance in histamine production.
Aspirin is another antihistamine that works indirectly by reducing prostaglandin production
and nitric oxide production and such.
You could easily take three, say, 325 milligram tablets in a day.
I know some people take considerably more than that,
and in conjunction with vitamin K, one drop per 325 milligram tablet,
if it's a one mil per drop vitamin K2 solution,
is adequate to offset any potential hemorrhagic or hemodynamic effects of blood thinning that some individuals may get.
It's relatively rare.
So 900 milligrams a day, that would be a fairly--
for people that were suffering with allergies, that would also be quite a good approach to self-treatment.
I think so, and sometimes just taking 300 to 500 milligrams before bedtime
so that it has time to get absorbed before you actually start falling asleep.
Sorry, there was another part of your question, I think, that you--
Those were actually-- both of them.
I do have another one, but I can let the next person have a chance.
Well, what's your next question? Now's your opportunity.
My old naturopathic doctor told me that I was getting eczema flare-ups as a result of eating eggs,
and surprisingly, although I know that you mentioned, Dr. Preet, on this show many times that eggs are good for you,
surprisingly, eczema still comes back when I eat eggs, and I get kind of a migraine after I eat eggs.
It's a headache that really hurts.
So what do you think causes that?
Yeah, I've had that reaction many times to-- liver is the other good food that can cause that reaction,
but when you're tending to have the high histamine or parasympathetic dominance,
a dose of very high-quality protein powerfully stimulates insulin production and drops your blood sugar,
and so it's the same reaction that happens when you go to sleep.
Your parasympathetic system lets inflammation develop,
and so I learned to never eat more than one egg per class of--
10-ounce class of sweet orange juice, at least that much to balance the protein in one egg.
Wow, that makes sense, because I've been eating two eggs and just a little bit of orange juice,
so I'll try that. Thank you so much.
Okay, you're welcome. All right, so let's take the next caller.
Caller, you're on the air. Where are you from?
Hi there, this is Coleman. I'm from Garberville.
Oh, hey, Coleman. Go ahead. What's your question?
Thank you very much for this wonderful program,
and thank you for the graciousness of the lady that just spoke being ready to get off the phone,
and the guy from MO might listen.
I'm interested because you were talking about anaphylactic shock and how sugar could help,
and I used to carry Sudafed in my truck glove compartment because I was paranoid about rattlesnakes,
and I understood that that was a possible use, you know, on the way to getting help.
Is sugar also something that could help in that regard? Thank you very much.
Yeah, I would think so. Dr. Peat, what's your take on that?
Yeah, having a Coca-Cola or Pepsi I think would work,
but most people I know have had Coca-Cola work.
A 12-ounce glass contains, I forget, but it's like 8 teaspoons or more, 8% glucose, sugar.
Okay. And I think it's mostly the sugar, but the caffeine contributes to the same thing,
helping to keep your blood sugar up.
And ephedra is more powerful than caffeine, but working in the same direction.
Okay. Talking about ephedra, Dr. Peat, thanks for that caller.
Ephedra used to be a par excellence herb for asthma.
I used to use a lot of ephedra, and unfortunately it got abused
and withdrawn from the marketplace probably 10 years ago now.
But as a stimulant and for reducing the effects of inflammation and allergies,
do you think that it was its sympathetic drive or some antihistamine quality that it had
that was responsible for it?
I think they're all the same thing.
The pharmacologists like to talk about specific receptors being activated and so on,
but there's just an extreme overlap, the same way the steroid hormones,
all of them overlap either positively or negatively.
The benzadrine, amphetamine, ephedra, dopamine, adrenaline, diphenhydramine,
cyproheptadine, all of these things that are--
they have different names and categories, but they all have a good antihistamine,
pro-blood sugar, pro-respiratory effect.
Okay. Just a shame that they've been maligned because of some of their tachycardic
or hypertensive effects, I think, in the extreme.
I think that's probably one of the main reasons that ephedra was pulled from the market.
I think people doing long-distance truck driving, etc., were abusing it to stay awake,
and I think there were some incidences of, oh, I don't know, probably stroke in some people
or high blood pressure in others that caused them to pull it off the market.
Do you know if there's any of those sympathetic stimulants that maybe don't have such a stimulant effect
to change blood pressure or pulse rate but would still have an antihistamine effect
and had a different mechanism of activity?
The currently popular alternative that's legal is one that's produced in the brain,
but it's a close relative of dopamine and adrenaline.
It's called phenethylamine, P-E-A.
Okay, phenethylamine.
People, again, are talking about 500 to 1,000 or 1,500 milligram doses, which I think are crazy.
I think a helpful dose would be maybe 5 or 10 milligrams.
Okay, and that doesn't have a stimulant effect on the cardiovascular or the...
Well, I think it wouldn't with those tremendous, crazy doses.
At 500 milligrams, it probably would.
Okay, well, you're listening to Ask Your Rev. Dr. K. M. Udgav, 91.1 FM.
From now till the end of the show at 8 o'clock, you're invited to call in with questions
either related to allergy or allergy-related subjects or unrelated.
The numbers, if you live in the area, 707-923-3911, or there's an 800 number, which is 1-800-568-3723.
You can use the call in between now and about 5 to 8.
Well, Dr. Peat, I wanted to get on to the other subject related to allergies.
It's the topic of atopic dermatitis.
I know I've known several people with chronic dermatitis that's basically gone on to become severe, eczema, weeping.
And I read the article where in...
And this is one of those PubMed articles that they've found 95% of people that have atopic dermatitis,
chronic atopic dermatitis, get colonized with Staph aureus.
And that's Staphylococcal aureus bacteria that produces the yellow pus and becomes responsible for the kind of boil-type appearance of the broken skin of the dermatitis.
That is actually being used, the anti-stress method that we've mentioned earlier on as a cause for allergy reducing stress.
But not only that, but you piqued my interest when you were talking about vitamin D.
And vitamin D is being responsible for anti-allergy.
And then again with magnesium and magnesium deficiency and how thyroid basically stabilizes magnesium in the body.
Do you think atopic dermatitis is something that can be treated through the gut in the same way that you think allergies can?
Yeah, the gut and the skin have some antigens and enzymes that are so closely connected that when one is inflamed, the other one gets inflamed.
And thyroid and vitamin D are the most common solutions to those hypersensitivity of gut and skin.
Okay, so we talked about environmental enrichment now as a way of changing the tide as it were against inflammation.
I think we'll pick that up just after this next caller.
So let's just take this next caller. You're on the airwave, Ron?
Dr. Peat?
Hey, caller. You're on the air.
I'm so very grateful. Thank you very much.
Colorado calling.
Colorado.
My name's Jana.
The question is, I wake up every night with a hypnic headache.
Is it related to the caller before that?
It's a headache that comes on every night at 3 o'clock or 4 o'clock or 1 o'clock in the morning.
And coffee is about the only thing that will relieve it.
Yeah, I think it is exactly the same thing.
The parasympathetic system is overactive, pushes the blood sugar down, and then the inflammatory things get loose in the intestine and blood vessels.
And I've used sugar and milk as a very compact and easy way to interrupt the night.
If you expect that to happen at 1 or 2, if you wake up at, say, 1230 and have maybe a half a glass of milk with a heaping tablespoon of sugar in it, it will usually help you get through the rest of the night without it.
How would you see low thyroid as a mechanism by which to help control blood sugar in relation to hypnic issues?
Yeah, I think the low thyroid function is the basic thing.
It develops because of accumulating PUFA, polyunsaturated fats, in the system.
And then when your thyroid is low, the prostaglandins are let loose and activate the histamine release.
And so at the base of the problem, if you can't get rid of the polyunsaturated fats, which takes years of being careful with your food, increasing your thyroid can achieve pretty much the same thing,
stabilizing your tissues so that they don't release so much unsaturated fat during the night.
Thank you, Dr. Peat.
Another question, does the coffee enema, is it the same effect as drinking coffee?
I think drinking coffee with cream in it is better because you absorb it slowly and steadily, especially if it's with some food.
Maybe a raw carrot, for example, will extend the absorption of the caffeine and keep your blood sugar up.
Thank you so much.
The coffee enema gives you a very sharp increase that can be stressful.
That makes sense. Thank you very much. That makes a lot of sense.
Okay, thank you for your call, caller.
Okay, well we've just about got about six to eight minutes left, so if anybody else wants to call in, either related or unrelated to this month's subject of allergy, please do so.
There's a 923 number, which is 3911 for those who are local in the 707 area code, or there's an 800 toll-free number, which is 1-800-568-3723.
Once again, we're very pleased to have Dr. Ray Peat's wisdom shared with us.
Dr. Peat, talking about some of the herb plants that have been used traditionally to treat allergies,
I wonder how many of these might actually have more of a gut-related anti-inflammatory effect, and that is how they become allergy treatable type approaches.
So, things like turmeric, I was reading, I mean, we know all about turmeric in terms of its anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer type mechanisms,
but I wonder whether those tourmarines and those other potent compounds within turmeric could be more gut-related in terms of their anti-inflammatory effect, and that way have an effect on allergies.
I suspect they are.
The soothing, the famous soothing teas, such as chamomile, I think are working largely on the intestine, and cooked mushrooms are definitely acting on the intestine primarily.
Have you heard of a compound called chromolin and sodium chromoglycate?
Yeah, but I've never used them, but I've heard about them a lot.
These actually, I looked this up, and they come from a plant, an Egyptian plant that I've known in herbal medicine, but never used it, called amivisnaga.
Apparently it's been used for a couple of millennia in Egypt, so that's one of those other alternatives.
And then the methylxanthines, I know I've heard you speak fairly extensively about xanthines and methylxanthines before,
so things like theophylline from cocoa beans apparently contain a lot of methylxanthine.
Caffeine is my favorite of the category, but there is one that's used medically that has, I think it's five carbons added to it to make it a little more stable in the intracellular.
It's a phyllo, I can't think of the name of it, but it's a medically approved version of caffeine.
Okay. Alright. How much are you aware of, I know you've mentioned Datura quite a lot too, as being a good anti-cholinergic, and it's a muscarinic antagonist then.
But, and I know we've talked about the dry mouth syndrome, for me in herbal medicine traditionally,
I would always, in England I can't say that I do it here because I'm not allowed, but in England I could prescribe Datura or atropabelidon
and give it to the patient with the caveat that when they just began to get a dry mouth, that would be their threshold point at which they could back off their dose slightly,
and that would be their maintenance dose for treating them for asthma, for example, with Datura.
Do you know whether or not the physiological tolerance for something like that class of compound to be used for allergies and asthma could be tolerated over long term?
Oh, yeah, I think the dry mouth is really the only serious side effect.
I've known people who loved it so much that they ruined their teeth.
Wow. Because they used it enough because that was what they were using it for, you're saying, because it was chronic?
Yeah, they would have night seizures or night asthma or night headaches or whatever, and it's very good for that, but it's very bad to do it chronically.
You can do the same thing safely with the oily vitamins, vitamin E, vitamin D, vitamin K in particular,
and vitamin B6 and thiamine are important for stabilizing the mast cells and blood sugar, and magnesium is essential.
It works with thyroid, so you can't expect magnesium or thyroid to work perfectly without the cooperation of the two at the same time.
Yeah. Okay, so once again, then we come back to the subject of adequate sugars, adequate thyroid hormone,
avoidance of the polyunsaturated set block thyroid hormone, and the necessity of getting a clean diet with bowels moving correctly
and not suffering from constipation and reabsorbing endotoxin as a pretty good way forward in terms of just those things
which are fairly easy to do for the approach to asthma and/or allergies in general.
And I think getting back to the gut origin of allergies as you made that link, not just to the kind of inspired respiratory airborne allergens,
but actually a lot of it can start in the gut, and I know you've mentioned a lot in the past cascara as a good bowel laxative
and a compound which has a fairly similar structure to tetracycline chemically.
Yeah, and the drug companies are seeming to get interested in it as a cancer treatment, treatment for dementia and heart disease,
and it has a tremendous range of beneficial protective effects besides protecting the intestine.
So I'll have to watch out for that one being banned, I presume.
Yeah, it's so good.
In the short term, it'll just get too many good things going for it, and they'll pull it off the market under the guise of some toxicity, I would think.
Anyway, all right, well, it's 5 to 8, and obviously too late for anybody else to call in,
but wanted to just thank you so much for your time and your giving of yourself to come to these radio shows,
and I know that you've become pretty much the mainstay of the show here for quite a few years now,
so I do appreciate your time and appreciate everything that you do for us, Dr. Peat.
Okay, thank you.
Okay, so for those people that have listened to the show and want to know more about Dr. Ray Peat and about his work and his life,
his website is www.raypeat.com, R-A-Y-P-E-A-T.com.
He has a lot of articles there which are fully referenced, bibliographic, fully referenced articles, very scientific.
I know some of it's a little heavy going if you are just an average person who doesn't really have a science background,
but there's enough in the writing there anyway just to get the gist of what he's saying,
and some of the stuff also could be looked up, but anyway, it's very well worthwhile reading.
A lot of the material, you won't find it anywhere else.
A lot of what he advocates, you will not hear the mainstream media advocating.
So, www.raypeat.com.
We can be contacted any time Monday through Friday on 1-888-WBM-ERB,
or our website address is www.westernbotanicalmedicine.com.
So, we're in the springtime now, and it'll just be getting lighter and warmer and brighter and drier,
so there's that to look forward to, but for those people perhaps who are going to get the allergies coming on here,
I hope there's been lots of information in this show, not both dietarily,
but with those other things that one can do to either avoid the learned helplessness in social environments,
and also to enrich their environment with positive things,
as well as using herbs and other supplements with which to offset that inflammation that is the hallmark of allergies.
So, until the third Friday of next month, thank you so much for joining,
and for those questions who called in, thank you for your time.
I'll talk to you next third Friday of April. Good night.
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