Well, welcome to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name is Andrew Murray.
From the third Friday of every month... Could you try a different mic actually?
Okay, one minute. Let me just try this one here, number three.
Let's see what number three is doing tonight. How is this one going? That sounds better, doesn't it? Okay, good.
Well, thank you for tuning in, those who have tuned in to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name is Andrew Murray.
As I was saying, every third Friday of the month we do a one hour...
Well, we do, my wife and I, but it's just myself and has been for a little while now.
Okay, so I do a radio show every third Friday of the month for one hour and it is a call-in.
So from 7.30 until 8 o'clock we have the phone lines open with people asking questions related to the show.
And every month we do a different topic.
Sometimes it's a continuation of a topic that may take a month or two or even three to get through.
And every month, as has been the custom since about 2007 now, we're joined by Dr. Raymond Peat,
who has very much been a mentor and a listening ear, as well as an excellent guide for things that
I thought were true once upon a time when I was at university studying herbal medicine,
but which have just repeated doctrines and dogmas of professors and other professionals
who taught themselves by mainstream science in all of its splendor,
but with its very apparent mistakes and repeated mistakes.
So, like I said, every third Friday of the month, I'm very pleased to have Dr. Raymond Peat on the phone with us.
So let's just see if Dr. Peat is there with us. Are you there?
Yes.
Okay. Well, thanks so much, as always, for giving your time every month like you do.
I really appreciate it.
I wanted just for the sake of people that have tuned in or are just tuning in for the first time,
who may have never heard you, if you would just give an outline of your academic and professional background
so people can hear where you're coming from.
My early education was in literature, painting, general humanities, including philosophy.
And then after about 10 years, in 1968, I went to graduate school in biology,
intending to study nerve biology and finding that that was the most dogmatic of the biological studies.
I found the most empirical people in the department were working on reproductive physiology.
And so I did my PhD in basically reproductive endocrinology and physiology.
1972 was when I got my PhD and I've been studying and writing and consulting since then.
Yeah. Okay, good. I want to just quickly go back to last month and wrapping up the discussion on the effects of progesterone
and how the PROTECT and SYNAP studies are flawed and how that whole thing,
which showed in the paper that progesterone was not effective,
actually had some very bad designs in the trials and the flawed studies were quite apparent when you look to the science objectively.
And so we gave people information about that and where to go.
But I just wanted to say in the it's kind of shocked me a little bit because I don't often say these kind of things,
a little bit like their reversal on coconut oil being actually good for you now and the liquid oils may actually be harmful.
The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists actually gave a few guidelines.
And I found that these are pretty stunning. Given the debate about sugar, they said that diet.
And this is in relation to easing premenstrual syndrome. And this was in relation to estrogen and progesterone,
mainly estrogen supposedly being the good the good hormone and progesterone being the bad.
But we know it's the other way around. They said that keeping blood sugar levels up with more smaller,
frequent meals might be helpful. So I know you've been a big proponent of keeping blood sugar up with something,
whether it's liquid milk or orange juice or some liquid food or in fact,
carbohydrate or sugar containing food every two hours. I thought that was pretty good.
And they also mentioned calcium and magnesium, both found in yogurt and leafy vegetables, for example,
and that magnesium might alleviate mood swings and physical symptoms like bloating from water retention.
So they're actually giving a thumbs up to sugar, magnesium and calcium, which is good.
Before we move on to the subject of sleep and repair in this month's show,
I wanted to go over what you might be able to describe in your terms as the benefits of positive thinking.
And also just wanted to mention for those people that have tuned in, the number to reach us is 707-923-3911.
So from 730 until the end of the show, eight o'clock, that's the number to call with questions.
So I wanted to explore the remodeling of reality, which is possible from exercising the conscious mind
through higher ideals, through positive affirmations.
And that this remodeling also benefits the physical body in terms of cell repair like sleep.
And that's going to be one of the topics for a larger part of this show.
Now, biblically, the prophet spoke to the people in terms that they could relate to,
and they used agrarian concepts and analogies like sowing and reaping, harvest and famine, pestilence and abundance.
And now the mind really can be viewed as a garden also, and a good gardener tends his garden.
So negative thoughts like doubt and feelings of inadequacy and fear are the weeds which spring up automatically in your garden,
sometimes outcompeting the very garden of prosperity with its fruits and flowers, which we all have access to, with a positive mind.
So universal quantum and spiritual laws govern our lives, and if you think any other, you're wrong.
The soil is your mind, the seed is the thought, the water is your action, and the sun is your feelings.
Whatever you plant in your mind and water, the same will also have to grow.
There are times or seasons, and you've heard phrases like "when the time is right" or "in due season",
for the descriptive spark which ignites the flame of action. So be careful what you plant and give yourself to.
And positive affirmations and the cultivation of a beautiful garden of the mind benefit the organism in ways which science is just beginning to put into words,
as we are now ready to understand, and I've said many times that we're in the age of knowledge, and it is exponentially increasing.
Quantum physics now explains the observer effect, as best demonstrated by the double slit experiment,
which shows that the very act of observing interacts with the observed, affecting the outcome,
and the same can be inferred that the mind and thoughts can and do affect conscious reality and physical health.
So, what comes to your mind, Dr. Peat, listening then to the subject of positive affirmation, and that your mind is a garden?
Do you have any thoughts on that?
In between working in literature and linguistics, and going back to school to study biology,
I had an experimental college, Blake College, and my theory there was that there are deliberate attempts
to plant bad seeds in our garden. And my approach to education was that if you create the right environment,
people can uproot those planted bad seeds and create themselves a fresh, new way of looking at the world.
And we found that people who had thought they were inferior students in just four, five, or six months,
in that environment where they were expected to be fully functioning, became fully functioning,
and achieved more in five or six months than the average American college graduate achieves in the whole four years.
This is through a kind of more of a liberal, for the sake of the word being liberal,
philosophies to the subject of understanding and learning, rather than just rote memory and recapitulation of facts.
Yeah, because lots of bad intentions are being implanted along with the educational indoctrination that most people are getting.
Yeah, I mean, you've had complete access to that indoctrination in your own studies in terms of what the professors believed
and what attitudes they had towards students that were challenging that with some kind of new science perspective,
which actually wasn't new, which was actually probably 80 or 100 years old, but had been supplanted, if you like,
by the new dogma, especially in genetics and this genetic determinism, the whole theory of it.
Yeah, which was powered largely by a political ideology.
Malthusianism and genetic determinism were very consciously political ideas which were then accepted into science, supposedly,
because the funding came from the people with that political orientation.
It's not a long stretch, but what do you think about faith healing?
Just to put it out there, I haven't asked you, I haven't prepped you with these questions, but I just want...
Well, that's exactly analogous to what we were doing at Blake College,
which was healing people from the cultural disease that had been given.
And there's a fairly recent book, last 20 years, I think, it was published by Larry Dossie called, I think,
"Words that Heal" or "Healing Words," something like that.
And an older book published in Russian in 1930 and then in English in 1959,
it's called "Words as a Physiological and Therapeutic Factors,"
the word as a way to handle ideas and thoughts.
In both of these cases, they're treating words or thoughts as healing physiological factors.
So it's exactly putting in scientific terms that idea of faith healing.
Yeah, I mean, do you think that the concept of, because I've always said, and I've long believed it is true,
fortunately or unfortunately for some or even myself, but in terms of medicine,
I often find the word diagnosis is almost a kiss of death for some people.
When you get a diagnosis for something and the doctors or the scientists want to put it in terms that
will help you come to terms with what it is that they're diagnosing you with,
I find that when people don't actually, because I have quite a lot of contact with people who,
as you can imagine, and obviously from your background, come from an alternative background,
and they're not sold on mainstream medicine, they're not sold on mainstream science,
but they're very open-minded and able to understand concepts which certainly are based in science
and which maybe they haven't really heard of too much of, but it's there when they go searching for it.
These people that I consult with that maybe haven't had a diagnosis that they will tell me in terms of symptoms
and/or other physical facts point me in a direction where, although I'm not saying it as a diagnosis,
because that's not what I do, it's in terms of just generally counselling with people and recommending changes that will be positive.
Those people that come with a diagnosis, I think sometimes a diagnosis is a very roadblock to their improvement,
and when they haven't come with a diagnosis, but I'm fairly sure what a diagnosis would be if they were in front of a traditional doctor,
they make some pretty quick progress through change.
Partly because I had the experience of my father having been diagnosed as diabetic, and he had acquaintances
who were dependent on injecting insulin every day, and he didn't like that idea, so he wasted away to,
I think it was less than 100 pounds before searching in libraries.
They found old books that described using brewer's yeast, and for a few weeks he lived on pure brewer's yeast
and completely overcame the conversion of food to glucose in the urine, and put on weight and lived 40 years, 45 years more.
That caused me to ask people how their diabetes was diagnosed, and over the years that I've been doing that,
40 or 50 years, I've only found two or three people who actually had a sane diagnosis in terms of what was known at the time.
For example, in the 1940s it was known that excessive cortisol would create all the symptoms of diabetes,
wasting away of the muscles and other tissues, turning it into glucose.
As I inquired, I found that the practical approach to diabetes was simply to see if they had high blood sugar,
maybe even sugar in the urine, and then prescribe the insulin or one of the other treatments to lower the blood sugar.
But I don't recall ever running into someone who's cortisol and prolactin and parathyroid hormone and all of the relative things,
growth hormone and so on, whether those were even considered at all in the diagnosis.
So as a separate subject, perhaps I wasn't going to go in this direction, but we don't have to go there for long,
but do you definitively see diabetes as an example here of pancreatic islet cell destruction per se?
You probably see the destruction in terms of a different process, or do you define it like that even?
Yeah, it becomes a side effect of whatever else is killing you.
The stress, which might be malnutrition or emotional stress, overwork, many things can cause the high cortisol,
which then damages the beta cells and mobilizing the fats from storage during stress.
A lack of sleep, for example, creates a diabetic condition and chronic stress, including poor sleep quality,
leads to the hormonal situation, which damages the pancreas.
And the fatty acids, when you are treating it improperly, you keep exposing the pancreas to these toxic fatty acids.
It turns out that glucose, when it's predominant in the blood, causes regeneration from stem cells,
regeneration and differentiation of new beta cells.
But when you're under stress and improperly treated, your free fatty acids and cortisol come in and kill the new cells.
Let's hold it there for a moment, because I think when I get into your sleep and aging newsletter,
I think there's reference and relevance to the question of diabetes in there.
So for those people who've just tuned in or just listening to the show now, from 7.30 to 8pm,
we'll open the phone lines up to question Dr. Peat, either about this month's subject,
or it's going to be the sleep and aging, and/or the opening topic of Positive Thinking.
The number to reach us is 707-923-3911.
Okay, so Dr. Peat, sleep and aging then.
So concerning sleep and the varying lengths one species needs compared to another,
do you see sleep more necessary for brain repair or restructuring and energy renewal,
or for tissue repair throughout the body, or all of it?
And then what do you suggest is a minimum number of hours for a sleeping adult?
The rest of your body can't repair itself unless it has a brain in good working order.
The most sensitive thing to the stress is the brain itself.
When the brain can't repair itself and impose the resting state on the rest of the organism,
then you get things like the chronic excess of free fatty acids and cortisol,
which destroy not only the pancreas, but all of the other organs to different degrees.
So these stress hormones directly affect sleep?
Yeah, when the blood sugar isn't able to produce the carbon dioxide that it should,
it's wasted, becomes a lactic acid rather than carbon dioxide,
raises the pH of the cell interior, creates a catabolic excited state
in which the brain cells ultimately end up dying or being blocked so that they can't act,
even if they stay alive.
And in reaction to the falling oxidation of glucose,
you get the rise of adrenaline, which tries to activate cells.
It provides more glucose if you have that in storage,
and that can remedy the situation.
That's why it's there.
The adrenaline should bring up the glucose and stop the stress reaction.
But if you don't have enough stored glucose,
then you resort to the cortisol level of stress adaptation.
The cortisol provides the glucose by breaking down your muscle cells
and thymus skin cells, turning it into glucose.
And if that glucose doesn't solve the problem,
then you get a chronic recurring stress,
low blood sugar, increased adrenaline,
increased cortisol and whole breakdown process.
Okay. So I think getting on to the subject of how science and scientists view the brain
and in terms of its overarching control of the body and homeostasis,
there seems to be kind of two trains of thought
where they have what they call "the cognitive scientist"
thinking of the brain as a computer,
and then other more open-minded scientists
looking at the brain as a kind of cybernetic control system
with a kind of a life, obviously it's alive,
but a kind of life of its own in terms of being an autonomous functioning unit
rather than an on-off switch.
Norbert Wiener, who invented cybernetics in the English-speaking world,
he, I would consider,
probably the best information theorist in terms of the brain and how it works
as a control mechanism integrated intimately with the metabolism of the body.
So it's a metabolic control system as well as an interpreter
of how the body relates to its ecosystem.
Relative to Norbert Wiener's view of the organism,
I think you could consider the average cognitive scientist
as somewhat autistic or abstracted out of reality.
Okay, moving on to the subject of energy
and what I understand now through talking to you and working with others,
in terms of what you've always mentioned as the Achilles tendon reflex
being a predominant indicator of hypothyroidism
because the energy state of the cell in a healthy cell
ultimately is charged, electrically charged, positively rested and ready
to begin an action potential and that in the tendon reflex
when there's a slow return to the resting state
that shows that the cell has been overstimulated
and just like in sleep, if we don't get enough sleep
we are essentially too excited in terms of people that are insomniacs,
for example, too excited to be able to get that
relaxation so that we have that energy in the morning when we get up like we do
when we're healthy and strong and we get lots of sugar in our diet and our
thyroids are good and vitamin D and everything else and calcium
so that we're charged and ready to go. So the ability to relax and to accumulate
energy and the substance of differentiation then,
this is a predominantly oxidative high energy
production system. And as a third
dimension of this, comparing the brain to the cramping calf muscle in the
Achilles reflex test, if you think of the cancer cell
as an energy deprived, overexcited cell, it has the exact situation
of the fatigued or are seizing brain cells or the cramping
muscle cells. Deficiency of sugar or oxygen will cause cramping in the
muscles, insomnia or seizure in the brain and
compulsive growth and diffusion in the cancer cell.
And so this excitotoxicity,
the term for this then, it would refer very well to cancer cells. They're
just completely excited and unable to
relax ultimately. Apart from apoptosis and the regular cell death
mechanisms by which normal cells or the body maintains its normalcy rather
than growing out of control or out of the bounds of what's
needed of it. Some doctors have mentioned that you could diagnose
cancerous lymph nodes in the armpit in relation to breast cancer just by
touching them without needing to do a biopsy because
it turns out that cancer cells are hardened the same way
a cramped muscle is hardened. Just by the touch
of a cancer cell, it shouldn't be hard. It should be
relaxed and full of energy, ready to work but it's in the cramped working state.
Right, interesting. Okay, so this is when they describe these things.
Okay, well here's the thing. They describe soft tumors and hard tumors.
Don't they have a different, the doctors as it is, you know,
don't have a differentiation for these kind of tumors?
Well, the soft tumor is harder than that tissue is normally. Right, right.
Okay, so the hard tumors are just at the stage beyond that.
Okay, all right, well it's coming up to 7.30 now so if people want to call in
about this month's topic, sleep and aging and/or the positive
thoughts, affirmations and how that controls our reality
in terms of the double slit experiment and the
actual evidence of an observer effect changing the state of the observed and
the whole quantum physics thing. I know it's a pretty big subject but I
think it's totally open to debate in terms of
supporting its tenants. The number is 707-923-3911.
I do see the lights flashing so I think we do have our first caller. Caller,
you're on the air. What's your question and where are you from?
Yeah, I'm from Brooklyn and the question is right on topic. About a month ago,
out of the blue, I developed a rash on my neck inside of my
forearms and in my underarms. It's just red. It's not, it's just
very red and bumpy so it feels like there's a little bit of fibrosis.
Never had this before. Other than that, I have no issues.
You know, 60-ish and at night it wakes me up or seems to
be correlated with waking up between one and two, literally only
sleeping like two and a half hours, three hours.
Then I'm up for several hours and I go back to sleep. So the comment about sleep
and aging and the comment about sort of diagnosis
sort of is brought together here with this issue because I did go to a
dermatologist and they said, "Oh, you have this rash."
And they gave me a product called Triamcinolone
acetinide cream which has precautions of
allegedly reversible HPA axis suppression,
manifestations of Cushing's syndrome, hyperglycemia
and glucosuria, all of which apparently are reversible. So I didn't
fill it but it's been 30 days. I've tried a bunch of different things,
kind of like your father did with the brewer's yeast and the thing is still
there. So I was just wondering for what would say an otherwise, you know,
repeat type diet which has been very positive with eyesight,
you know, muscle strength, no pain in the joints,
all that's good but this rash comes out of nowhere and it's literally going on a
month now. So it's becoming chronic which has elevated my concern. So
in summary, I didn't take the antibiotic they provided
and I'm not taking anything other than putting
you know some aloe vera on it. Somebody recommended something called rose hip oil
which does have, you know, maybe some PUFA related additives
and something called, you know, black cumin seed oil which also has
omega-6s in it, I mean 50 percent, but these are things I've been trying and I
was just wondering whether you have any commentary on both the
sleep issue and, you know, what one might do to get rid of the stress
associated with this skin rash. Yeah, okay, well I know that quickly the
rose hip oil was probably a vitamin c component of that although you mentioned
the oil was probably a polyunsaturated, but Dr. Peat,
what do you have to say about the rash that he's just described?
The first thing I would do or that I do whenever I have a symptom like that is
to put lots of sodium chloride,
get it for ice cream freezers so you can put
a couple of pounds in a bathtub and about a pound of baking soda
and make a slightly hyperosmotic solution and soak in it for a while and
that usually takes care of minor skin problems, but some people
make an application of baking soda and sodium chloride just as a soothing
thing, but it has much of the effect that a drug like
triamcinolone or glucocorticoids in general,
which doctors love because they'll make everything feel better even if it's
making you sick in the long run. Yeah, exactly, it was definitely a band-aid
approach, kind of what Andrew was saying earlier.
So you're saying a pound of sodium chloride, that's not salt though, you got
to say it's just any clean salt and
standard baking soda make a fairly salty bath and soak in it for
half an hour or more. Okay, so it's a pound of
baking soda and a pound of sodium chloride?
Something like that, it doesn't have to be exact, but
when people experiment with the solutions it can be
up to two or three times as concentrated as sea water
and the average sea water is about twice as concentrated
as our body fluids for sodium. How about like that dry CO2 you talked
about in the past, is that worth doing too? The CO2?
The dry CO2 bath, is that? Well, the baking soda has that function
because the sodium holds the bicarbonate in
solution so it doesn't bubble out of the warm
water, but your body has such a high affinity
for carbon dioxide that it will pull, even the bicarbonate will be
pulled into your body against the gradient,
which the body is already pretty concentrated with
with CO2, but the bicarbonate will help to increase that and
the warm water doesn't hold much gaseous carbon dioxide, but
it's a healing component in mineral water, which is carbonated,
but it's a very low concentration compared to what you can get from the
baking soda and a pure CO2 dry bath
instantly starts raising your body's carbon dioxide with the anti-inflammatory
effect. There's a good article published in a
US, I think Michigan State Medical Journal,
1905 on the uses of a carbon dioxide
gas bath. Is that good to do as a separate matter, like for 30
minutes? I mean, I did it once and it was cold
initially, but then it sort of makes your skin hot, which is kind of odd.
Yeah, because it relaxes the blood vessels and
when you notice your skin getting pink, that means you're fairly well
saturated with it. Got it. So does it matter whether you do
it 10 minutes or 30 minutes or an hour? Does it matter? Or is it
better to do it like maybe, given that I have a chronic
condition, like a few times every day or a couple times a day until
this goes away? Yeah, I think it's fine to do it an hour
or more every day if you're doing something like
strengthening your bones. Recent Japanese studies
have tried applying it externally to the skin for squamous
cancer of the mouth and getting good results.
Right, right. Okay, that's great. And the sleep thing about getting up
between, so I get up and then like I have a carrot salad or something
and a glass of milk and then I use the red lamp and I can get back to sleep, but
that's a lot of work. I mean, it sounds like I ought to, you know, to
your point about degeneration of the brain, etc. I mean, my
brain seems okay right now, but you know, getting a straight
shot of six hours, you know, with three one and a half hour cycles, maybe a
little bit of dreaming would be a much better thing than
waking up at, you know, sleeping three and a half hours,
waking up for two hours, then sleeping another three and a half
hours to get seven or four hours to get seven and a half hours of sleep.
I think the main thing that causes that age-related
interrupted sleep is that things like decreased thyroid
function slow your digestive processes and as
your blood sugar falls in darkness and when you're
sleeping, the falling blood sugar lets you
experience a toxic reaction to the whatever is in your intestine and the
irritation, inflammation, and absorption of endotoxin and
surges of serotonin from the intestine, those get into the bloodstream,
finish off your stored glycogen and wake you up with a stress reaction.
And so trying to have the calmest, cleanest intestine possible
at bedtime. Does that mean having a carrot salad before bed or something?
Because it doesn't seem like I have a stomachache or any problems or anything.
I mean, maybe, is it always the case that it has to be the intestine?
You know, I mean, I don't know, I guess. What do you do to prevent this?
Having a carrot salad or a good bowl of cooked mushrooms or some
slightly antiseptic fiber like that in the early afternoon
and then having a fairly low protein, high carbohydrate supper right before
bed like ice cream or a chicken broth
that's very salty. A combination of salt and sugar right at bedtime
helps to relax the intestine for a longer period.
Okay, we do have another caller on the line. I appreciate
you calling in and I just want to make sure we give time to other people
that are lined up. For those who are listening, the number here is
707-923-3911 with Dr. Peat on the line.
So let's take this next call. Caller, you're on the air. Where are you from?
What's your question? Hello, am I on the air? Yeah, where are you
from and what's your question? I'm from Arcata, California. Okay.
I have a question about the Brewer's Beast and the diabetes
and I'll take an answer off the air but I'm just wondering, I have to give myself
an insulin injection every day. I'm very attracted to the idea of not
having to do that but how might one, well,
A, why does Brewer's yeast work and did Dr. Peat's father just
eat nothing but Brewer's yeast? How might one
transition from a possibly healing Brewer's yeast diet
and get off insulin or, anyway, that's my question. Just some
elaboration on diabetes and Brewer's yeast. Thank you.
Okay, thank you. I think one of the functions of Brewer's yeast
is the high niacin. Okay, you need to turn your,
hang up the phone, I think so. Okay, go ahead, Dr. Peat.
The high niacin content of the Brewer's yeast
is a very effective thing for lowering the free fatty acids
and the free fatty acids are the main things killing the beta cells
and there are a couple of articles on glucose
and diabetes on my website that describe the results of
a couple doctors in the late 19th century and the high sugar diet but
niacin and sugar are two things that hold down the liberation of the toxic
free fatty acids and anything you can do to
interfere with those free fatty acids which are toxic to the
pancreas will help it heal. Okay, good. All right, let's hold it
there. Okay, so unless there's no one else at
the moment, let's just check in with the engineer.
Okay, good. All right, so actually I had a question, Michael from
Woodway calling. Go ahead. Can you talk a little about water and the best water and
about how much water and the importance of water in the diet?
Dr. Peat doesn't really believe in drinking water but let's ask Dr. Peat
what his opinion is about water. Yeah, go ahead. If you're really thirsty,
water is what you need but if you're drinking milk
and orange juice to get your calories and protein and calcium and
so on, you usually don't need any plain water because the amount of water
you're taking in to get those nutrients is usually on
the order of a gallon or so. Okay, there you go. Good. All right,
well the lights have started flashing in the studio again so the engineer's
answering the call. Let's see if we have another caller here.
No, okay, they hang up. All right, so Dr. Peat, I just wanted to
move on in terms of the sleep and aging article that you've mentioned here that
the concentration of cortisol found in the blood
started to increase when the light was turned off and that this darkness is a
stimulus for cortisol production and now this is whether the person was asleep or
not. So just the pure presence of darkness, obviously this is
why the long winter nights are probably very damaging for most people because
they just don't get enough exposure to sunlight and showing that
the stress of darkness creates an
inefficient catabolic state where you start breaking yourself down
and this is mainly from cortisol again in order to generate glucose and that
sleep to some extent reduces the stress but
you mentioned and this is again part of red light
therapy and red light treatment that people use just during the daytime for
things like skin conditions as you mentioned that
first caller from Brooklyn perhaps the red light there but that
red light itself is a electron quenching wavelength of light
that the stress of darkness you know we sleep every night and now
this month about the article on stress sorry sleep and aging the stress of
darkness is itself very damaging and
you mentioned here where cortisol rises generating
free fatty acids and all those stress hormones that are very harmful to us
but yet the sleep is so necessary and deep sleep especially so necessary for
tissue repair and you know cell healing that
it's a kind of double-edged sword you know you get
exposed to darkness whether you're sleeping or not but especially when
you're asleep and your cortisol starts to rise but
that red light and exposure a pre-bedtime exposure to red light can
mitigate a lot of this yeah the Chinese study found that it
not only improved the depth of the sleep but it improved the
athletic performance the next day after the
good sleep following the red light treatment
about 40 years ago someone experimented with putting living tissue
for example a seed was a very self-contained easy to study material
they found that if it was exposed to ultraviolet light or sunlight
and then you put it in an electron spin resonance
machine or paramagnetic resonance device to measure free radicals or
free electrons but after the ultraviolet light exposure
it kept in the machine it would show free radicals or free electrons for
hours and hours without any new exposure but if they
right after putting it in the machine if they shined red light on it
it went quiet the red light just knocked out the free radicals
immediately and experiments with gamma rays on frogs showed the same thing
a dose of gamma rays that would kill the frogs
if it was followed immediately by red light exposure
it quenched the excited electrons and the frogs didn't die
in the past we've talked about we've done a show on red light and
light in general in terms of these anti-inflammatory effects
what kind of distance under the skin do you think red light will penetrate
the deepest core of the body? yeah you know when someone is has their
back to the sun how red their ears look or if you put a
flashlight under your hand in the dark you see the red light coming right
through your your hand one night i let my eyes get adapted
by sleeping until about four in the morning
and then put a red light behind my thigh and i could my whole thigh
was illuminated a bright red color except the bone left a
shadow like an x-ray. okay all right so i wanted to carry on
here with just another reference to the permanently contracted
unable to relax state of cells and this relationship to stress
and in the the elderly okay so most and again i'm fortunate you know i'm not
i don't know about you i think you probably have very good sleep too but
i've never had a problem sleeping and i sleep oh i can sleep for 10 hours for
sure and i wake up feeling just fine and
don't get any kind of insomnia if i wake up at all in the night i'm back to sleep
again in about 30 seconds and so with old people though right as
people get older they talk about people needing less sleep and i think this is a
a bit of a misnomer i don't think people need less sleep i think people need the
same amount of sleep and when they don't get it they get less relaxation
so they talk about the elderly and that their hearts
failing and the muscle being another typical muscle
i mean although cardiac and skeletal muscle do have physiological differences
they're still muscles and when the cardiac muscle can't relax
just like a skeletal muscle can't relax when it's over excited and it
the thyroid hormone is not adequate enough to allow relaxation fully
they basically get these heart failure type pictures
scenarios coming on as part of their old age and it's not at all related to their
old age it's because they just don't don't have enough relaxation going on
so how about this in terms of the elderly and the inability to
relax or their insomnia and it's related to their cardiac cycle
i think it's exactly the same thing the
heart doesn't beat strongly because it doesn't relax
fully the the diastolic relaxation just isn't there
as the energy production decreases and the same thing with the brain the
relaxation is impaired the same way as the heart
relaxation all right so now you're getting on to
that uh revisiting rather the uh the red light
thing that um you've you stated in your newsletter here that
if you're exposed to it at the beginning of the night
it can not only improve your sleep but also
the next day's performance and this was a japanese
our paper that was written in 2012 so they have objectively looked at the
performance of a group of people that they were studying who actually
physically performed better the next day directly proportional to their
red light exposure the night before yes wow yeah incredible okay
so the number here if anyone's listening and they want to question dr
pete uh is 707 923 3911
so i had a question that was posed by a person i think they wrote this
wrote this question in and i wonder actually if it may have got
asked last month but let me ask you again um
somebody who was uh wondering about using pregnenolone
and i think because of bad publicity or whatever else you know
that they've been worried about progesterone and pregnenolone they've
kind of put them in the same basket um they've read about this subject
called pregnenolone steel where people with worn out adrenals
apparently uh get this issue where pregnenolone is
stolen and converted into cortisol is that even possible
oh whenever you are making cortisol you're making it from
a pregnenolone ultimately and uh it you should have a huge
excess of pregnenolone and progesterone and only make small amounts of
the terminal hormones such as cortisol and
estrogen as needed but the bulk of the steroids produced
should be heavily in favor of pregnenolone and progesterone because
those are stabilizing materials i don't even
consider those to be hormones the only direct action that
has been identified for pregnenolone is that it
helps tissues give up excess water and it allows the fascia
the connective tissue to regain its normal tone and so it can
when you reach the right level it can make wrinkles in your
your saggy neck skin disappear okay all right uh well let's take this
next caller uh caller you're on the air where you're
from what's your question i'm up on wilder ridge i wanted to know
about the red light is it like a light bulb a lamp that you
have on in your bedroom or yeah i wanted you to elaborate on the
red light well the sunlight or any incandescent
light bulb has a spectrum the sunlight is the
middle of the sun spectrum is yellow the middle of
an incandescent light bulb spectrum is orange and you get the full red light
benefit either from sunlight or or incandescent light bulbs you don't
have to get rid of it except for convenience you
don't want a brilliant shiny room around you if you're trying
to relax and so the dim quality of bright red
light it isn't necessarily any brighter than
a 200 watt incandescent bulb would be but
you don't need the the blue and green part of the spectrum
for the therapeutic effect those bulbs that are supposed to be like daylight
which are they too bright um no if you don't need the bright white
light during the daytime i have a 250 watt
reflector bulb called an infrared bulb but it it looks like
an ordinary white light but it runs at a lower temperature than a
standard bright incandescent bulb so it's heavier
on the the red part of the spectrum i got you
thank you so much for your time and your effort and all your love
Dr. Peat you're awesome okay thank you for your call caller thank you
so again presumably uh the more skin uh you can bear to a red light the better
the absorption of the light although i'm sure to some extent whether you're
wearing t-shirt or a light shirt red light will
penetrate some of that yeah people have experimented with
pigeons despite their feathers they can see the the systemic
effect coming through their body because the red
light penetrates pretty much anything living material all right we have
another we have another caller so caller you're on the air where you're from
and what's your question uh new york is just related to the
points just made on the pregnant alone how do you know whether you need it i
mean you mentioned older people and stuff i mean because i
think in previous shows Dr. Peat you said you
took it for a while and now you no longer take it so i'm just
wondering how does one decide whether whether you
should be taking it or not um in the 1980s when i first
experimented with it a lot of younger people
wanted to try it and uh good healthy people in their 30s and early 40s
felt nothing they could take a spoonful and
have absolutely no noticeable effect but when someone was in their late 40s
or early 50s and feeling hopeless and depressed even a pinch of it 15 or 20
milligrams in 15 minutes their faces would light up and they
would grin and and get ambitious projects going again
decide not to quit their their job so if when you need it it's a
very vivid effect even with a small amount okay so
you're saying that you would the trigger would be hey if
you're feeling really down but if you're not feeling really down you're doing all
the other stuff and your energy is pretty steady and
you're as lucky as andrew to sleep the way he sleeps that's pretty impressive
you know then you know then you're saying your body probably makes enough
of it yeah okay that's probably why you don't
take it the other thing is on water i think in one of your write-ups
you you mentioned water earlier um babies are 80 percent water and older
people are 55 percent water so i'm just i'm just wondering and i guess
high metabolic rate relates to high water percentage in the
body if you're older how is it not possible if you have
dropped to a much lower percentage of water that
you wouldn't need more water maybe it's sparkling water to get the co2
and yeah the co2 and the atp are the things that hold good water in the cells
while squeezing out unwanted improper water
uh pregnenolone progesterone uh atp and co2 all have that
effect on the cytoplasm in particular to keep it from taking on
disorganized water but making it hang on to
the water that's organized and running its
metabolism so i i think old people will take up a lot of cellular
metabolic water that increases their metabolic rate when they repair their
mitochondria reduce stress hormones so you're saying
there's good water and bad water and hanging around your cells and yeah
a healthy kids cell that contains lots of water is metabolizing
intensely keeping its co2 up and its lactic acid down and
that the water is part of of letting the cell run at a high rate
and you can restore some of that metabolic active water with those things
such as progesterone pregnenolone thyroid and carbon dioxide
a great great interest one last quick question vitamin i'll just get off
vitamin a d k how do you know what ratio and how much you actually need
particularly for you know people as you age
i mean how do you know that how do you get it
um what's the ratio for example of a to d is it five to one is it four to one or
i don't think there's a definite ratio because
as your thyroid function increases you're able to use
lots of vitamin a in making pregnenolone and progesterone
it's coordinated with a thyroid hormone and cholesterol to convert
cholesterol into the good hormones and if your
thyroid is low then too much vitamin a
interferes and lowers the thyroid function can i ask you a quick question
dr p i know we've got to wrap it up here
because it's just a couple of minutes to top of the hour but
in terms of pregnenolone and its production or rather its conversion
cholesterol is the main building block from which these hormones are built from
correct yeah and the reason cholesterol rises
with age is that things like low low thyroid
function and low vitamin a availability interfere with the
production of pregnenolone and progesterone
and so your body compensates by increasing
the cholesterol and the cholesterol increase can cause your tissue
production of pregnenolone and progesterone to increase
to to up to the limit of the cell's capability governed by
vitamin a and thyroid okay hold it there dr p let's
get the last minute or two just to let people know
where they can find more of your information thanks for your time okay
okay so for those people who've called in thanks for your calls
uh there's other people that called in i don't think they got a chance
um to ask questions but thank you for trying
um for those people who want to find out more about dr p um his website is
www.rayPeat.com and he's got lots of articles that are
fully referenced as only a post grad student would produce a
paper so lots of references there for all the things that he's saying
and that caller with the uh brewer's yeast question and diabetes that there's
a couple of good articles there on his website which go into great
detail about diabetes and the dysfunction uh that is part of the
cause um for those people uh who wanted a call
but didn't and just listened uh Dr. Peat's uh he's still doing what
he's doing so um thank you very much Dr. Peat for your
tireless effort and until the third friday of next month
uh what with the solstice coming up here um we'll see you then