Well good night and welcome to this evening's Ask Your Reb Doctor. My name's Andrew Murray.
For those of you who perhaps have never listened to the show, or just tuned in for the first time,
we do a once a month hour discussion on various topics, and we have Dr. Raymond Peat joining us
and using his wealth of expertise to add to what may or may not be known currently.
This month's topic is going to be about diagnosis as a double-edged sword,
looking at shamanism and other spiritual healing modalities, but then also looking at
what I know Dr. Peat is very interested in is that it's cultural ideas and the change in ideas
and how things develop and how language is used sometimes as a tool against us,
and other times as a tool to further our understanding, and a lot of scientific research that's done
doesn't often make it to the public sphere for quite some time, and so we go through
all the suffering that we go through being told that liquid oils, for example, are good for us
and they're heart healthy and they lower our cholesterol, when actually the exact opposite happens,
and so 40 or 50 years later we get this admission, but it's too late for a lot of people by that point in time,
and it takes a long time for those cultural beliefs to filter out.
So this month's subject, as I said, is going to be kind of two or threefold, things like diagnosis
and how that's sometimes a double-edged sword, environmental enrichment, and a little bit on nootropics.
And so I wanted to start the show off by Dr. Peat's latest newsletter.
He does one every month, by the way, folks.
For those of you who have listened or maybe haven't heard the shows before,
he does a, usually it's a once a month, or bi-monthly actually, I think it's a bi-monthly letter,
and I'm pretty sure he's still open to subscriptions to it,
although I know there can be a backlog sometimes because I think there's just so much going on.
It's difficult to keep it all maintained sometimes. I know what that's like.
So as I read his latest newsletter, it's quite funny because he put a sentence in there,
"First to deny that harm is done, we know the Hippocratic Oath, first do no harm."
And we've talked about that and the ethics in medicine of first doing no harm,
and a lot of current medicine and medicine really since the '30s or '40s has been doing a lot of harm.
But unfortunately, culturally and mechanistically from advertising and corporate planning,
we're not told the full story about things, and very often we're not told at all.
So first deny that harm is done.
Now this is going to be a tenet of Dr. Peat's discussion here when I ask him to come on in a few minutes,
and that rationale will get borne out for the rest of the show's discussion.
So during his newsletter, my thoughts went to Native American Indians, South American Shamans,
Aborigines, et cetera, as cultures where ritualistic dream quests,
typically involving some mind-body disengagement, et cetera, disengages the kiss of death
given by Western medicine's diagnosis over a patient by the environmental enrichment of the quest
and the very nature of both allegory and interpretation of the person's reason
for being involved ritualistically in healing as a journey,
especially if the patient has not received a diagnosis prior to the quest to fixate their mind.
Now the sentence in Dr. Peat's newsletter, "Where the organism is working meaningfully,
useless structures tend to atrophy as new structures develop,"
and the quote-unquote "meaningful" being the environmental enrichment of the pursuit of creativity,
altruism, selflessness, et cetera, this I believe can truly bring about what Dr. Peat quote says,
"unveiling of new possibilities for reorganization and repair,"
which I feel is akin to cure in the mechanistic sense.
Now perhaps there never was so much death and disease prior to the advent of a diagnosis in Western medicine
as I believe this can be the kiss of death to many founded in such a concrete mechanism,
and I don't doubt the substances that Dr. Peat has long supported
do affect the physiology for the good of the organism and help resist the disease process.
I also understand that antibiotics would have halted the Black Death in the 1300s
as well as the plague which ravaged Europe among the many incidences of it worldwide in time,
but I'm sure the older arts worked on a more subtle energy underpinning physiology,
psychology, and spirituality as a unified system, and in shamanism especially medicinal plants are central to the quest.
And for the critics out there on the forums especially, I'm not advocating neo-luddism here either.
So let me first introduce Dr. Peat and then I'll start questioning him.
Dr. Peat, are you there?
Well thanks so much for taking your time to give here to share on the show.
I know lots of people listen online and lots of people pick up the audio tracks afterwards in their own time,
and it's also a very posterity-based altruistic deed that you do when you do this, so thanks so much.
If you would, just in case people haven't heard of you before, have heard you for the first time or just once or twice,
would you just outline your professional and academic background so people can understand where your training comes from?
As a new graduate student in the 1950s, I tried several different departments,
but mostly concentrated on the linguistics and the psychology of language,
and dropped out of several departments before going back to get a PhD after I got my master's degree with a thesis on William Blake.
I went back to study biology, intending to investigate how the brain can function in ways that could explain intelligence and language use.
I was partly reacting against Noam Chomsky's doctrine, which when I began thinking about linguistics in the late 1950s,
he was just taking over the culture of language theory,
and I considered him as one of the great evils of our culture, the way he was treating language,
leaping the brain and intelligence out of the whole thing.
It became a motor program, actually, for following rules laid down in the genes.
What was he a proponent of, then, in terms of that discussion?
His doctrine explicitly said that the behavior that allows us to make language and follow dramatic rules must be in the genes,
very much the way Conrad Lorenz said that all of our behavior is in the genes.
To improve the species, we have to kill inferior people.
Chomsky doesn't say that, but he has a very arrogant attitude towards people who question his very arbitrary genetic explanation of things.
So it's a bit like this kind of neo-Darwinism and Mendelian type situation, then?
Yeah, it's a kind of cultural arrogance.
It was based in MIT, with all the power of the Pentagon behind it.
So over the years, when I was trying different departments, I found that he had penetrated every department of the universities.
A friend and I did a course in the Honors College at the University of Oregon on interdepartmental views of humanity,
human nature, and we invited ten different professors to speak about that.
We picked a professor in each department that students thought was the outstanding professor in that area.
Each one of them said that his department's contribution to understanding human nature was Noam Chomsky's generative grammar.
Sociology, folklore, literature, all different departments of the university at that time, 1968,
thought Noam Chomsky had defined the world for them.
Oh my goodness. All right. So you've obviously had plenty of experiences with research that doesn't make it to the market,
with false ideologies, with the truth being there but not being revealed, lies getting around the world faster than truth can get her shoelaces tied.
I know you've mentioned this many times, so within education at that point in time,
there was this lie being spread and seeded rapidly through these different domains that all seem to agree on the same thing.
They're all deluded by the same lie.
Yes, and you can trace it going back to the beginning of the 20th century, being financed by various corporate interests, military interests.
All of the powers that were interested in expanding their power were promoting research and teaching in these areas
that really were presenting a very arbitrary and degraded picture of human nature.
Okay. I just want to let people know that you're listening to Ask Your Ob-Doctor on KMUD, Garbeville, 91.1 FM.
From 7.30 to the end of the show, callers are encouraged to call in with any questions,
hopefully related to this month's subject of diagnosis and the mind-body connection between disease and recovery,
as well as the environmental enrichment aspects that we're going to get into here as being very important to change the structure of cells
and promote natural autogenous healing and also get into a little bit again about nootropics
and get Dr. Peat's feedback on a nootropic that you probably don't think about as a nootropic.
The number here, if you live in the 707 code, it's 923-3911,
or if you're on the outside edges here of Northern California, we've got an 800 number for you, which is 1-800-KMUD-RAD.
It's 1-800-568-3723.
And obviously, hopefully, those guys who are on the Internet are listening to us in different time zones.
We'd be happy to hear from you guys, too.
So, Dr. Peat, looking at your newsletter, then, you mentioned again in the beginning of it the thing about heroic medicine 200 years ago.
And then the generation of this term that we, I think people still refer to it as a positive term,
but I think we've found out here that it's actually quite a negative thing because it doesn't imply real healing at all.
The healing crisis as a defective understanding seeking to integrate treatment to effect,
with the use of mercury and arsenic, for example, being commonplace then,
to the concept 50 years ago of hormesis, which a lot of people may not have heard.
It's like homeostasis or hermetic, but it's hormesis.
So, firstly, would you speak about this planting of concepts in our mind to create the false narrative we interpret now?
Well, the idea of genes and determining the nature of a species has its theological advocates in the 19th century.
And that genetic definition of a fixed, unchanging organism,
accidents were the only things that could change the genes and the genes controlled our being.
And so our being was essentially an accidental construction.
And on top of that understanding, which was well embedded by the 1940s,
the industries were starting to produce a reaction to their polluting processes,
especially when atomic bombs were being exploded in Nevada and poisoning everyone downwind all the way to New York and around the world.
People were getting concerned about the quality of air and water.
And city pollution was killing people with smog, factories and cars.
And so the industry started fighting back, saying that, well, look at history.
We see that what if something didn't kill you, it made you stronger.
Because we do hear that, don't we?
Yeah. If you survive the mercury treatments, then you were cured and a strong, healthy organism, supposedly, and the mercury stayed with you.
Right. So this was like this was the original heroic medicine.
And then it basically morphed into a like you mentioned, the atomic bomb testing and in the early 50s here,
where it took quite a while for public outcry to get to the gates, as it were, to start fighting this back so that it didn't carry on happening.
But the industries started funneling huge amounts of money.
For example, one current professor in Boston, someone figured that he has received more than 40 million dollars in research to promote this phony idea of hormesis,
which is several years, about 15 years ago, they started giving it the definition that it's a biphasic response,
meaning that a small amount moves the biology in one direction, a larger amount moves it in the other direction.
But basically, the idea was that a little bit of a poison is good for you.
And so the argument was that the leak from the nuclear industry, atomic bombs falling out, etc.
All of these were called low level radiation. And they used some pretty phony evidence and argument.
All of it turned out to be upside down evidence, but they argued that these so-called low levels of radiation or other pollution were actually causing biological benefit.
And that developed into the argument of the big think tanks financed by these same industries,
saying that the government should stop regulating industrial pollution,
because the regulation is causing damage to the public health because the pollution is so beneficial.
It really is unbelievable, isn't it?
Yeah, I kind of, it takes a long time, you know, I don't know what you feel, folks, when you hear this,
but it's like many, many things. You know, the wool has been pulled over our eyes.
And you know what? It takes a long time before we get into vision and get it into focus when it's lifted even.
So I know you've mentioned lots of things, and we try to keep them on the front burner, as it were, for people when we do the radio shows.
And I know we cover, you know, I won't say the same topics because they're not, they're quite different, but they're interrelated.
And so, but when you got to keep hearing things like, you know, the polyunsaturated oils are very damaging for you.
The industry would tell us that they're great. The industry told us or is telling us that fluoride is good for you.
And obviously, there's many places in America here that have banned it and wanted to get it out of the water supply if it's still there.
There's many foods that we consume which should not be even be on the market.
And all the time, they want to tell us that it's for our own good and use this kind of hormesis mechanism to justify it.
And I think that's carried through a lot into medicine, hasn't it?
There's plenty of medical procedures that you would look at is definitely dangerous and not at all beneficial.
And I think that understanding still supports that. And nobody really questions it. That's the worst part of it.
It's such a long-term thing. The vision that we have is so short-term and yet what happens does happen over the long term.
So especially things like radiation, you know, most people are just and it's shrouded in secrecy, obviously,
because if everybody was to fully gain the knowledge of what it's doing, we would be absolutely horrified,
aghast and really up in arms about it like never before and shutting it down completely.
But it's just kept on the edge of the field there so that we'd never really do too much about it, you know.
So it's very important that people hear it time and time again because it's like anything else.
It's like the lie that's mentioned over and over again. People start believing it.
So people also have to look for the truth and hear it more and more and more in order to gradually get the blinkers off
and get into focus what it is they're supposed to be looking at.
Even though John Goffman was a major government nuclear researcher, he eventually started looking at the facts
and he gathered evidence showing that most cancer and a large part of the heart disease in the United States can be traced to medical x-rays.
And my brother who worked in the nuclear industry for most of his life said that every week they had a seminar
teaching them about the benefits of low-level radiation.
Oh my gosh. Yeah, and again, people that are listening, that's the other thing I think that you hit on the head there.
X-rays, they're so ubiquitous. I mean, who doesn't go to a dentist and the first thing they want to do is x-ray?
Who doesn't go to the ER department and the first thing they want to do is, well, not always, but x-rays or CT scans,
which are a thousand times worse. How often do you see imaging reports that are actually MRIs and not CTs?
I mean, like you've mentioned before, GE are heavily invested in their old technology.
They don't want to give it up yet. They need to recoup their costs and they're obviously very cheap to run them
so there's still a financial incentive using them, whereas the newer technologies are more expensive
and there's less incentive to utilize them because there's not such a return.
So you've got to question everything you come across. I'm not saying you need to be a conspiracy theorist about everything,
but you know what? It's healthy. A good, healthy dose of fear or healthy dose of suspicion is actually a very good help for most people.
So once again, the people that are listening here, if you want to call in from 730 on, the number here for live in the area is 707 986,
sorry, 923 923 3911 or there's an 800 number, which is 1-800-568-3723.
Getting away from the concept of the brainwashing and the repeated advertising and, you know,
whether it's printed press or TV or radio about how harmless things are.
In shamanistic, and I mentioned this at the very outset here, just because you piqued my interest in your newsletter,
and I've long held the belief, and I'm not a Luddite, but I've long held the belief that diagnosis can be probably one of the most dangerous things going
and for somebody to hear they've been diagnosed with some chronic disease or even life-threatening disease,
you know, it can be a coffee now sometimes for some people because there's such a strong mind-body spirituality connection in us,
and I'm definitely aware that we are spiritual beings, and then some people might want to argue with it, but there you go.
We're definitely very spiritual beings and we have a definite journey in this life, you know, I don't believe that this is it,
this is the one that matters, but it's very much a spiritual journey.
And so in shamanistic and ritualized medicine, then the healer is a mediator to a spirit realm,
then where a very different set of interpretation exists.
So what are your views on the mind-body-spirit approach to healing,
and do you think there are fundamental differences which would yield more beneficial results?
I think what you're calling the shamanistic view, their reality, I would call the simple basic reality,
and the world that the scientists and government people are advocating is a world of manipulation and control
and enforced agreement where all you have to do is back away from the way it's set up by the academic orthodoxy.
You back away from it and you see some of the reality that the shamans are working with.
It's a basic participation in the world around you. All organisms do it.
And so sometimes I call it the animal consciousness, but the shamans' therapeutic reality is to get the person back in touch
with the complex reality that they're living in, in reality, and not being attached to the story that they're being brought up with.
Yeah, I mean so often it's important to pull people out of this dream state that they're in,
that the world around them is something that doesn't affect them, and they don't need to question everything.
It's so much like The Matrix. I keep thinking about The Matrix, that movie, when I first saw it.
I just thought, you know, that is it. We're pretty much kept in the dark and just spoon-fed lies, you know.
And there's still a lot of good out there, but like you said, that view is a view of non-ordinary reality then,
which I think is very important for practitioners when they're trying to get into the psyche, if you like,
of a sick person, that they can make a connection to them and that person really hears.
Because it's so important to... I know you've probably spoken to thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of people,
and there are those people who will either just not come back because they've heard what they heard,
or there's some people that really follow through what it is that you're advocating.
And I've had that experience too, with quite a few people who were just so on it that they totally got the results
that they knew they could get, because they'd heard or read the science, and they knew that this substance
and that substance was implicated. And so making that connection with the person is so important.
And I think perhaps that is also what you're talking about in a shamanistic worldview,
as well as any uncoupling agents that might be used to deeper penetrate someone's subconsciousness.
Lots of people ask me about a cancer diagnosis they've had, and when I ask them exactly how was the diagnosis made
and what did it really find, what are the actual observations, sometimes they're annoyed that I question the simple fact
that they have a terminal cancer underway. But very often, I would guess almost nine times out of ten,
it turns out the diagnosis was very exaggerated. They're given the impression that invasion is underway,
but you look at the actual pictures and try to find out what the pathologist was really saying.
And basically they have slightly abnormal tissue in most cases, and if you press the pathologist to explain,
they'll say, "Well, it's abnormal. It'll undoubtedly turn into cancer, and so it's good to get rid of it."
Right. Okay. All right. Well, I'm going to pit this next question to you, but in the meantime,
I think the callers are starting to call in, and the lights are flashing. So if you're in the area, 707-923-3911.
If you're outside this number area code, there's an 800 number you can call, which is 1-800-568-3723.
We're very pleased to have Dr. Raymond Peat joining us. So how about the idea you mentioned earlier
about a little bit of something harmful is good for you concerning toxic substances like carbon monoxide,
which I think most people do agree is probably toxic because that's the thing that we're looking out for
in inadequately burnt gas, for example, or combustion. But then there's nitric oxide.
I hear people all the time using nitric oxide, and then I hear people – I don't even have to say I hear people using it,
but later, I mean, one of those things that I first learned when I was studying herbal medicine here
was apricot seeds containing this hydrogen cyanide, and the hydrogen cyanide was useful for you.
It was anti-cancer. And so these kind of substances that supposedly a little bit of it does you good.
What do you think about those in terms of what I've mentioned?
Well, the composition of city smog is rich in carbon monoxide and nitric oxide.
And so it's interesting that these now become medically and biologically desirable.
It makes the fear of smog pretty much go away if you think that there are real defense.
They're calling carbon monoxide a very powerful anti-inflammatory agent in our bodies.
Carbon monoxide?
Yeah, carbon monoxide.
What?
And it just happens to make smog in the city look beneficial rather than harmful if it's stuff that we produce for our own benefit.
But when you look at how it's produced in the body, it breaks down the heme group,
which is involved in all of our essential oxidative metabolic processes inside the cell, not just in the bloodstream.
But it does break down the heme of blood, but also the heme of respiratory and detoxifying enzymes.
And as it breaks it down and releases a molecule of carbon monoxide, it also releases an atom of iron, liberating it.
We're going to act randomly as an oxidant.
And the first step of degrading the heme goes into biliverdin, which is quickly turned into bilirubin.
And bilirubin is being touted as a very powerful anti-inflammatory, antioxidant agent.
So both carbon monoxide and bilirubin are said to be antioxidants.
And something I've been pointing out for many years is that cancer is extremely endowed with antioxidant processes.
That's why it can resist chemotherapy and radiation so well, because of its antioxidants.
And what makes a cell healthy and able to endure and function is the whole system of oxidative processes.
And if you stop, if you plug up the ability to run the oxidative machinery, you go into a reduced state.
And that's the antioxidant power of a cancer cell that pushes reductive processes against the failure of oxidative processes.
And that's what you have when you increase your carbon monoxide and bilirubin.
And bilirubin has the extra function of exciting nerve cells.
And so you get the process of inhibiting respiratory enzymes by both carbon monoxide and bilirubin.
At the same time, you're exciting the nerves, exactly the formula for excitotoxic death of brain cells.
And that's the so-called very powerful protective antioxidant.
It does have that reductive function in certain contexts, being an antioxidant.
But those processes are among the very most dangerous things that can happen in cells.
So like you said, this is the way that cancer can evade this kind of treatment. It has enzymes that are able to...
It turns off the oxidative process and that produces things like lactic acid, which is a reductant.
It took me a while to get this concept too, because I think, again, it's one of those things that's just so in your face.
You know, whether it's in dietary supplements or foods that are advertised for their ability to be antioxidants.
Now, you've mentioned before, and I don't know if other people have got this, but it certainly has tripped me up in the past.
Because I always understood the word and term antioxidant to be beneficial.
But you're actually saying that oxidants, so vitamin E and C, are actually the beneficial substances.
In a healthy cell, vitamin C exists in the oxidizing form.
And it stabilizes the structure of the cell by keeping things from being excessively reduced by oxidizing things.
And vitamin E fits into that picture too.
Okay. All right. We did have a caller, but that caller's dropped off.
Okay. So we'll just carry on. But if people want to ask any questions, Dr. Peat, numbers 800-568-3723.
So I guess just getting back to the doctrine then of hormesis, which is opposed to the precautionary principle, which we did a show on back in January.
How does this concept work into our consciousness and subjugate our well-being in terms of the way it's just constantly purported as something that we need to be paying attention to and it's good for us?
And I don't know how it is that people can wake up from what it is they're being bombarded with in terms of finding information.
I think this is something that you've brought out in the past that medical abstracts no longer reside in libraries and real data is actually pretty hard to find.
And the initial documents that were written or the initial papers that were written can get buried quite easily.
And so actually what we hear is usually the result of well-funded research.
So I think you've long held the tenet perhaps that it is actually, I say conspiratorial, but it is actually a fairly blatant act and that what's actually proposed in many papers that are written does not reflect the true science that there is behind the reality of it.
The theory that is repeatedly taught and publicized of what consciousness is, what the brain is doing, fits into this picture that is beneficial to industry.
They want to present the brain as having, for example, programs that are genetically determined or trained by so-called adaptive learning,
the behaviorist approach that you learn by repetition rather than by insight.
And this programmed behavior tends to be digital or have very concrete symbolic units of meaning.
And the actual organism deals with patterns, holistic, very rich information field patterns so that in a moment's perception,
a book called I think it was Eye and Brain by Gregory in the 60s had the illustrations showing if you looked at one image with one eye and the other image with the other eye,
you could see a three-dimensional image which involved I think it was something like a million different points of information which had to be processed in an integrated way by each eye and put together by the brain.
That kind of input sensory assimilation of millions of points of information every moment is something that is denied by the culture that wants to have controllable,
educable people who will deal only in symbolic forms of information.
So again, it's another example of the reductionist view, worldview.
Yeah, and the only way those types of mental calculation can be conceived is in a simultaneously presented form of consciousness so that the formula exists as something out of time.
It works the same way backwards and forward where the actual organism is embedded in time and seeing the implications in the future and reinterpreting the past input.
So that logic and math are distractions from the way the organism is integrating its information.
I wonder what do you think it will take given where we've come from and where we seem to be going?
What do you think it's going to take for medicine to actually change and be beneficial and do no harm?
I think it's going to take a public recognizing the extent of the harm that is happening.
I've seen that happen locally where doctors, it only took four or five patients standing up to the doctors to absolutely change them 180 degrees.
Yeah, again because it's such a powerful effect that this kind of brainwashing has.
And I think the personable nature of most people, I've heard it from several doctors here now that their training was so brutal, they use that word, it was so brutal and put them under so much stress that there was a very corporate feeling of one-upmanship that was displayed by many people in their training as doctors
or when they were specializing and going onwards to become surgeons that it was almost a rite of passage that you had to dominate and I won't say destroy but dominate and control the other peers in your field and wouldn't take no for an answer and what you were doing was absolutely right and you weren't to be questioned.
And there was very much a pecking order in medical school that I think caused some people to drop out and others to become really very resistant to change.
I think there are lots of doctors who are open to the opportunity that would be presented if the public would start asking for that other kind of medical approach.
The doctors I think feel trapped by the system just as much as the patients.
Yeah, I can understand that too because I think financially there's quite a lot of strings being attached and they certainly wield their own effect in terms of debt when you've graduated and then also in terms of becoming successful.
So I'm not bashing the doctors, I know there are some very good ones out there who are very altruistic but I think the main model and concept of medicine really put somebody up on a pedestal and I think that is, I think human beings are very vulnerable to that kind of pressure, that kind of temptation too I think which comes with large salaries, private practice, etc.
Okay, so I'm getting on to another subject you brought up and then this brings us back to those things like pregnenolone, carbon dioxide, glucose and you mentioned warmth obviously as a function of temperature and presumably that's all tied in with metabolic rate.
But you said that experiments done over the last 60 years showing that these substances during embryonic and fetal development can affect the growth of the brain and the brain's way of guiding future development and adaptive ability.
Do you think outside of gestational sufficiency of these that supplementation of the things I just mentioned can make up for lack of these things earlier in life or is there a finite replacement or reorganization event occurring in the brain?
Yeah, I think every night we're producing masses of stem cells that are going out and attempting to renew worn out or damaged tissues and with age things accumulate, polyunsaturated fats and iron and bilirubin for example accumulate making it too hard for the stem cells to grow.
Making it too hard for the stem cells to do full repair and so instead of getting repairs, we get fibrosis and gliosis and degeneration of the various organs but with the right support both in the way the person is using their brain or their self
and the way they're getting access to what they need in the environment.
I think at any late stage those repair cells can be integrated and taken advantage of.
Okay, so this would support what everyone would probably, some of the truth that they hear in this repeated statement is that most of the repair happens at night time and that's why a good night's sleep is very important and you do advocate and I know it's probably, it sounds strange to people when I mention it and they say well how much?
You think like nine hours or more sleep is good for someone right?
In the winter when days are short I think more hours of sleep are protective and I've seen examples where very, very damaged brains, sometimes lifelong damage can very quickly show radical restructuring.
It's like the brain knows how to rebuild itself when it's given the right opportunity and materials.
Alright, this brings me on to my next question then. You stated that in experimental situations and the epigenetic changes produced by stress are reversible but when the organism stays in the same sort of environment that started the process reversals become less likely with increasing age
and that polyunsaturated fats amplify this effect by generating carbon monoxide and prostaglandins liberating themselves carbon monoxide from the breakdown of heme and prostaglandins which activates heme oxygenase and aromatase production which you've mentioned in the past which produces estrogens from androgens both of which are degenerative and destructive processes.
So the picture of learned helplessness comes to mind here coupled with lack of environmental enrichment and do you see these as paramount transformations necessary to drive change in the right direction and can cultivating a positive attitude in the absence of this suffice?
I see adaptation as constantly choosing between two directions. One to become more, to know more and have more ability to move into the future.
The other defensive adaptation simply surviving on the cellular level and the brain if you look at it across generations the mother who is under stress or actually both parents under stress contribute to the outcome of the developing baby.
But the brain is the first thing it's a very expensive organ and so stressed parents will tend to have babies with a less functional brain even a smaller brain and that at any point the brain is willing and eager to repair itself and grow.
But if the background has been very poor and restricted then that means that the repair situation has to be more intense.
So the conscious attitude has to be pretty deliberate to avoid getting in the harmful routes of helplessness and to seek the particular things that will for example stop that production of prostaglandins,
reduce the storage of polyunsaturated fats, help to eliminate the iron which is causing lipid proxidation and activating aromatase and so on.
The substances I've talked about so much are active at these various points. For example, aspirin against the production of prostaglandins and lipid proxidation, progesterone against the prostaglandins and the aromatase and the elimination of carbon monoxide and iron.
Let me hold you there for a moment because we do have a caller here who's just been on hold for a little while but let's take this next call.
Call away from and what's your question?
Yes, hello from Trinity County out here in Virginia.
Okay, welcome.
And I've been hearing you mentioned polyunsaturated fats quite a lot. What about monounsaturated fats and does this include all these things like olive oil for cooking?
Yes, monounsaturated fats are fine. They're a part of our nature. If we eat nothing but sugar, we'll make monounsaturated fats of our own.
And those are the N-9 fats like in olive oil and butter. And we produce that ourselves even if we eat only starches.
And then from that N-9 series of fats, we produce our own polyunsaturated fats called the N-9 or the omega-9 series.
And it's the lack of those partly which is the damage done when we eat things like soy oil and safflower seed oil and so on.
They inhibit our ability to produce our own polyunsaturated fats which are stable and beneficial.
So you're saying it's better to consume the sugars that will help us produce that in our bodies as opposed to putting it in our food?
Some people have researched finding organisms that will make the equivalent N-9 series polyunsaturated fats and they find that they are very protective anti-inflammatory agents.
They're the things that we would be producing if we weren't poisoned by PUFA.
Okay. Now, maybe I missed a little bit here, but what is a major difference between monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats?
So the monounsaturated are almost always the N-9 fats like oleic acid. And from that, if we aren't interfered with, we make our own omega-9 series.
And the ones that are synthesized in seaweed or soybeans, crops, things that grow in a cold climate can't use the more saturated fats.
They produce their own polyunsaturated fats for the sake of being fluid in cold weather or in the cold ocean.
So the cold organism polyunsaturated fat happens to be unstable when you make it as warm as we are.
98.6 degrees, for example, will cause very quick oxidative breakdown of the fats that are stable at almost freezing temperature in fish.
Fish oil is very good for fish, although when they gave a more saturated fat diet to salmon, I think it was,
they had greater endurance than if they had the algae or fish oil in their diet.
Can I interrupt you there for a second because we do have one more caller who I think has got a very quick question and has been waiting some time.
So thanks for your call, the caller. Next caller, where are you from, what's your question?
Hi, I'm from Kansas City. I have a question. I'm on PubMed where they did a study about hypothyroidism and heat intolerance and anxiety.
And I ask because I have that and I've never heard about it before. And I wondered if Dr. Heat had anything to say about that.
Because I do wake up with a low temperature in the morning, but I'm very sensitive to heat and I become overheated very quickly.
Have you checked your temperature during the times when you're feeling overheated?
Yeah, it usually doesn't seem that high. I mean, it's never usually more than 99.
If you're really hypothyroid and have, say, a 97 degree temperature when you wake up,
it's important to keep taking your temperature and pulse rate during the day to see what the effect of food and activity is on both your temperature and pulse rate.
Lots of people who have discomfort in the heat have a very high nitric oxide production,
and that causes vasodilation and reddening of the skin, but that will lower the core temperature.
So to understand what's happening metabolically, you should check your temperature before and after those experiences of heat intolerance.
Okay, well, I'm glad to see both of you there. I'm glad that person got a chance to put their question.
Thanks so much for your time, Dr. Peat, and I've got to give out your information. I appreciate you joining us again.
Okay.
Okay, well, there was one other person here who was on hold, but not too sure why everybody left it to the last 10 minutes,
but I can only imagine that's because they wanted to hear Dr. Peat and didn't want to interrupt him with their questions, but who knows.
Okay, so Dr. Peat's website is full of very, very well-researched information.
You're going to find things there that you won't find anywhere else, and a lot of what he's saying has already come into pass.
So you'd do well to go there and find out more about him and what he's been supporting and purporting and researching for the last 40 years.
It's www.raypeat.com, R-A-Y-P-E-A-T.com.
Excellent website, lots of articles, fully referenced, and he does – he emails lots of people.
So I'm not saying he wants any more work to do, but, you know, people have emailed him before in the past, and he's actually been very good and responded.
So for those people who were tuned in tonight, thanks for listening.
For those people that got their questions in, thanks for calling.
We'll be back next year, 2018.
What can I say? It's the end of another year, and we'll see where the cryptocurrencies go from here on in.
Anyway, all the best, good night, and see you next year.