Broadcasting worldwide from the beautiful Hill Country in Texas, this is OneRadioNetwork.com
Well, a very pleasant good morning to you. This is Patrick Timpone.
Happy New Year to you. Happy New Year.
And a very pleasant good morning. We are pre-recorded, so don't call in or send emails.
We have plenty of emails already for Ray Peat, PhD in biology. We're going to have fun.
We've heard a lot about Dr. Peat and his writings and work.
First through a nice lady, Lita Lee, several years ago. We had her on.
And she's a great fan of Ray Peat's work.
So she told us about him and we've never been able to get together with Mr. Peat.
Dr. Peat, as I said, PhD in biology, University of Oregon, specializing in physiology.
He's taught at University of Oregon, Urbana State University, National College of Naturopathic Medicine,
University of Arizona in Mexico, I assume, in Mexico, a lot.
And he began his work with progesterone and hormones in 1968.
This will be great.
Well, Dr. Peat, how are you, sir? Happy New Year to you.
Very good. Same to you.
Nice to have you here. You live up in Oregon, Eugene, Oregon.
Yeah, on and off.
On and off. So you spend time in Mexico?
Yeah.
And what do you do down there?
Just talk to people, paint.
And what do you paint?
Oh, just everything. Landscapes, mostly.
Did you ever practice medicine or work with patients? Or just mostly research?
Yeah, when I was at the Naturopathic School, sometimes they would have a puzzling patient and they would get me involved.
Ordinarily, I just do consulting with doctors and sometimes they send their patients.
Nutrition counseling and teaching are the things I've mostly done.
So when you have a puzzling patient, what kind of things do you test or do to figure out, try to figure out what's going on with them?
Oh, it's always different.
I think the basic thing is to look at the person as a unique case and look at their whole history and what their aims are as well as their origins.
And you can often find out what the problem is just by what they've been doing and how their development has gone.
And they'll very often know pretty much what's wrong with them better than doctors do.
Doctors tend to indoctrinate the person to believe that they have what has been diagnosed in them.
But if you look at them as an individual, very often that's not a problem at all.
So you're saying deep down the patient often knows what's going on?
Yeah, very often better than doctors.
A doctor will take their blood pressure and diagnose hypertension, but that isn't necessarily what was bothering the person.
And increasingly high blood pressure is an invention of the pharmaceutical industry and never would hurt the person within the range that they're considering a sickness.
And the actual figures show that even by medical standards, accidents or misjudgments by the medical industry are killing hundreds of thousands of Americans every year.
If you interpret the evidence looking outside of hospitals, that's just hospital accidents account for 100,000 or so.
But it's close to a million people a year, even by conventional medical standards, who are being killed unnecessarily by these accidents.
So Dr. Peat, 160 over 90 or 180 over 100 or something, are you saying that that's not an issue, not a problem?
Occasionally, for it to get up to 160 over 90 isn't bad, but that same person, if you look at them in the afternoon when they aren't listening to the news or something that irritates them,
they might be 140 over 90, and that's perfectly okay for a middle-aged person.
But in the morning, when they are sort of dehydrated during the night, their blood will be thicker and they might be 150 every morning.
But if it goes down to 130 in the afternoon, that's perfectly healthy.
Is 110 over 60 even better?
For like somebody's 70, 40, 50, 60?
Well, sometimes it isn't, sometimes it is.
It really depends.
Yeah.
So if you've got a chart on the wall and you go by that, you're saying the docs are on thin ice when they do that.
Yeah, and the drug companies have convinced them.
Sure.
140 over 90 is a serious problem, but it isn't.
It's a few minutes after the hour here with Ray Peat.
We're going to get to all of your emails that you sent in.
So let's dig right into nutrition.
We are what we eat and all of that, Dr. Peat.
Are we all that different? Where Patrick, your host here, might do really nicely on whatever, you know, meat and vegetables, more paleo kind of thing.
And Ray Peat maybe may do better on brown rice three or four times a week.
But for me, maybe that's too much.
Talk a little bit about that, what you have seen all these years about when it comes to nutrition.
We're a very tough organism compared to rats, for example.
We can stand a tremendous stress that other animals couldn't stand for many reasons.
Our high metabolic rate and a big brain and a powerful glandular system give us a great adaptive ability.
You can see in areas that have lived for many generations on a certain kind of diet that their health shows that objectively that diet isn't good.
Something is either missing or too much.
What would be an example of that?
Some of the nearly vegetarian villages in Africa and South America, people age very fast and are dying off by the time they're 40 of infectious diseases.
And the explorer who about 80 years ago was studying the diet of the Eskimos, he observed that they could avoid scurvy by eating purely meat diet.
And he popularized the idea that you don't need the fruits and vegetables because meat is a good source of vitamin C.
But he himself observed that the people eating that traditional high meat Eskimo diet looked very prematurely aged.
And just in the last two or three years that is being explained as a phosphate poisoning basically.
The ratio of phosphate to calcium, when it's too high it accelerates degeneration.
There is a protein that...
And how do you get too high phosphate?
Well a pure grain diet or a pure meat diet, either one.
Either one.
So it can be vegetarians or meat eaters who are basically causing the same kind of toxic inflammatory reaction.
So most people should maybe look at if they're going to eat meat to also do some grains?
Well no, the grains are just as bad as the meat, a phosphate source.
Oh I see, I see.
So the ruminants live on basically leaves by preference.
And leaves have an extremely high ratio of magnesium and calcium to phosphorus.
And so their milk is a pretty safe ratio. It's got about one and a third calciums per phosphate, which is a very safe amount.
But vegetarians who either eat lots of fruit or who cook their greens,
there are some diets that have up in the high altitude areas of South America and Asia,
there have been people who eat lots of cooked greens as well as usually sheep or goat cheese and milk.
And that's a very longevity supporting kind of diet.
Really? Cooked greens and goat cheese?
Well that sounds pretty good.
So cooking greens, kale, cabbage, broccoli, all those things, it's a good thing?
We can't digest them in the raw form just because the cellulose encloses the nutrients and makes them inaccessible to our enzymes.
There was a study in about 1945 with feeding, people were talking about the loss of nutrients in canned vegetables.
And so they fed one group of rats vegetables out of cans and another group fresh vegetables of exactly the same kind.
And the ones eating the canned vegetables thrived through normally.
They're healthy.
And the ones eating the raw vegetables just couldn't digest enough to grow properly.
Interesting.
So Dr. Peat, is there anything going on if you have a nice big salad, romaine lettuce and maybe raw peppers and carrots and sprouts and stuff?
I mean are we getting anything there?
Well some people have a very vigorous peristalsis and they can get it through and it sweeps out their intestine and that can be a very good effect.
Because the liver puts out some of its toxins in the bile and tries to get rid of the toxins by excreting them through the intestine.
But if you have a sluggish bowel and not much moving through it, the intestine reabsorbs those toxins and so they recycle.
And many toxins accumulate, especially estrogen.
The liver should make all of the estrogen that it experiences into a soluble form and excrete them.
But if you don't have bulk or movement in your intestine, you reabsorb those and that messes up your whole endocrine system.
So people with a good physical activity and good thyroid function so that their intestine is active, the fibers of any sort will take down the toxins.
But because the raw vegetables or undercooked vegetables can be attacked by bacteria if they stay in the intestine too long and the bacteria will produce toxins,
many people by the time they're in their 30s will start having digestive problems if they're eating salad every day.
And it happens that root vegetables such as carrots have to defend themselves against bacteria and fungus in the soil.
So they have powerful antibiotics.
And raw carrots will go right through you without being digested and probably not being attacked significantly by fungus or bacteria.
But leaves, if you for example put a wad of lettuce into a baggie and put it in your pocket for a few days and a package of raw carrots in another baggie,
keep them at body temperature for two or three days, you'll see that the carrots are in pretty good condition despite being sealed and warm.
But the lettuce will probably be rotten and very foul.
Sure, sure.
And the same thing happens for folks who don't move it through the whole transit time quickly with raw.
Yeah.
And the great interest in fiber that developed in the United States, partly there was a trend around 1900 but it came back with the oat bran publicity in the 1970s.
Yeah.
And the person who had studied the effect of fiber in preventing bowel cancer in Africa came to the U.S. and said, "Why is everyone eating oat bran?"
He was talking about potatoes, cooked potatoes in the diet which are a great and pretty safe kind of fiber.
But Australian studies found that oat bran in particular promoted bowel cancer in rat studies.
Oh, good.
So are cooked potatoes pretty good?
Even sweet potatoes or those little organic new potatoes or baked potatoes, are they pretty good food?
Yeah, very good.
Really?
The Indians live on basically the traditional diet was almost pure potatoes for 51 weeks out of the year and then they would have pork feasts for one week.
No kidding.
And how long did they live?
A long time?
They didn't have any heart disease, not a high rate of cancer, any degenerative disease.
So potatoes, I have always thought Dr. Peat of those of having their share of sugar, turning to sugar similar to maybe rice or pasta or bread or something and could have some issues with the heart but not so.
Yeah, the starch, all the starches do turn to sugar but the other ingredients in potatoes are very different from the cereals.
The cereal is a storage form that has to be dormant for several months until the next season.
The potato is always moist and metabolizing and so it's always in a physiological state, not concentrated and dehydrated.
And that means that it has a good balance of all of the intracellular minerals associated with the starch so you have a better balance of phosphorus and calcium for example than in seeds.
The high phosphate concentration in the seed is in the form of phytic acid or a similar thing that binds minerals so that the minerals are concentrated in association with this phytic acid.
And when it sprouts, then it forms cells and becomes relatively good nutrition but a potato is always in that really living state with just granules of starch within functioning cells.
So there's no concern and it's been such for a long time of nightshades and arthritis and they're bad and where did all this come from and you're saying it's not true.
Oh, no, they are allergenic.
Oh, they are allergenic.
Yeah, nutritionally.
Potato is almost a perfect food but the whole family, eggplant, tomato, peppers and potatoes are pretty allergenic.
Oh, boy.
So how do we find out if we should be eating those things?
If you lay off some for about a week, you'll see if your symptoms subside.
Okay, so if you don't have any symptoms and you eat a baked potato or a sweet potato, what kind of symptoms would you get to give me maybe a clue that you've got some allergy thing going on?
Well, sweet potatoes are a special issue if they're orange colored. The carotene interferes with the breakdown of the starches and they're likely to have more fibrous starch than a white potato.
And so a sweet potato can cause a lot of gas because it's slow to digest because of the carotene in it.
So actually you mean a white baked potato is even preferable nutritionally to a sweet potato?
Yeah, for ease of digestion and the protein quality in any potato is higher than the protein quality of an egg.
So you can't look at a chart which shows you two or three parts of starch for every part of protein because much of the protein value is present in the form of small molecules that are equivalent to the essential amino acids.
So it just doesn't show up in the analysis as protein.
But when you eat it, it counts as better than egg yolk.
And it's okay to just put pounds of butter on them? It's good for you?
Especially with butter because pure starch digests quickly. It turns into pure glucose rather than half fructose.
And the pure glucose is a powerful stimulant to insulin secretion, fat production, and adding butter or cream slows the digestion so it isn't such a powerful insulin stimulant.
But it also reduces the chance of what's called persorption of starch granules.
A starch granule is a potato starch granule happens to be very big.
Other starches are more the size of a red blood cell.
But a potato starch granule is several times fatter than that.
But even these huge granules bigger than cells can get squeezed right through the wall of the intestine and/or the lymphatics in the blood system.
So within 30 minutes after you eat a starch without fat, you see these starch grains circulating through your blood.
And if they're big, they'll plug up your arterioles.
Studies in mice showed that a high raw starch diet accelerated their aging.
And you could demonstrate areas of every organ that were being killed by plugging up the arteries feeding the areas.
So the fat is key. The fat is key to have with starches.
Yeah, good thorough cooking plus some fat.
Good job.
We're with Ray Peat and as you could tell, he's a real scientist.
What a great fun.
It is called rayPeat.com, his website.
My name is Patrick Timpone.
This is oneradionetwork.com.
Happy New Year to you.
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Okay, we're prerecorded here this morning. Happy New Year to you.
This is Patrick Timpone.
And we recorded this late December.
And preceding our two weeks vacation with Dr. Ray Peat, PhD in biology, University of Oregon.
And you can look at his website. He's got some cool stuff. A lot of articles.
RayPeat.com. He does research. Travels to Mexico.
And he's a painter. And we're talking about one of our favorite subjects, nutrition.
And we're going to get your emails here.
I don't want to go too long before we get emails because we'll never get through them.
Let's see, what else about nutrition?
Oh, I know what. I wanted to ask you, Dr. Peat.
So often in the last couple of years, we've been hearing all the negative things about grains, right?
Rice, basmati rice, brown rice, of course bread, pasta, cookies, cakes, crackers, white flour.
That's kind of a-- I can understand that.
But just whole organic non-GMO grains.
There's a lot of people that just say these are just not good for us.
And we just weren't really meant to eat these things and wheat belly and all those things.
What's your opinion?
I mean, should we think about eating grains? Do we need them?
Would we be better off having brown rice one or two times a week?
What do you think?
They are relatively a deficient, nutritionally deficient food.
If you need the calories, that's their basic value.
Calories?
Yeah, and traditionally wheat in Asia and corn in the Americas, these grains go way back.
They were processed by boiling the seed either in lye made from ashes or in active calcium hydroxide to break down the toxic components.
You can get somewhat the same effect by sprouting the grain, but the traditional way and very quick and producing a tasty product was to boil it in the alkali.
Most people know hominy.
That's a form of--
Corn.
--alkali treated corn. And when you grind up hominy, you make the traditional tortilla or tamale.
And if people eat their corn in that form or the wheat in a similar form, they aren't susceptible to pellagra, for example, because niacin is created in the calcium treatment.
And it lowers the problem of too much leucine in the diet from the corn. So it nutritionally corrects the natural problems of the grain.
And after or separately from those very ancient processes, the Europeans for generations processed their flour by soaking it to let yeast grow in it to leaven it to produce a soft bread.
And the process of soaking it and letting yeast grow naturally in it takes about 12 hours at a moderate room temperature.
And in that process, enzymes break down the storage proteins that are so allergenic and release the minerals from the storage forms such as phytic acid.
And so the traditional leavened bread was much richer in B vitamins and protein and minerals.
And if you eat your grains without any of those old processes, you're going to have the lack of those positive nutrients as well as the excess of phosphate.
So in China and Japan now, the thousands of thousands of tons of white rice that they eat, is it just a pure calorie thing?
And they're just just getting calories and not a lot of much of anything else.
Yeah, because in much of the world, calories are the thing to keep alive.
I see. So it's keeping them alive, not necessarily nurturing them.
No, it isn't an ideal food, except when you're really hungry.
Yeah. So if we wanted to use brown rice, say for just some more calories, say we wanted to maintain weight or my case, I'd sure like to gain a little weight.
How is there a way that I could reasonably prepare, say, Basmati organic or brown rice or something like that to get the most bang for my buck here?
That wouldn't be too crazy with the preparation method?
Oh, yeah. If you...
What would you do?
If it hasn't been either roasted or irradiated before you get it, if it's still alive, then you can just soak it for a few hours and it gets softer and less starchy the longer it soaks.
Yeah.
But also more nutritious. The enzymes that are breaking down the toxic stuff are releasing nutrients but also synthesizing new proteins.
The storage forms of the protein are always either irritating or allergenic or toxic, but as the enzymes process them, they turn into living enzymes and structural proteins just like the plant.
So you just soak them and that does the trick. I guess then you rinse them off, put them in fresh water and then cook them up.
Yeah.
And just that simple process makes them a lot better food.
Yeah.
Then you get some calories if you want some calories.
Yeah, and it's especially good for promoting fat production and the insulin. If you're having enough protein with it, the insulin also can stimulate muscle building.
Would you actually eat protein with that meal? Is it okay?
Yeah.
Like a piece of steak and also some brown rice?
Oh, sure. You should always have some kind of carbohydrate with protein.
Oh, boy. Now you're – does broccoli count? That kind of carbohydrate?
Yeah.
Okay.
It's pretty starchy.
Pretty starchy. Okay. So you don't have to have a complex carb like a tortilla or grain or bread or something like that or pasta.
No. The trouble with a pure meat diet is that your brain and blood, for example, need sugar and your body is always going to produce some sugar, some glucose.
And if you're eating a pure meat or pure protein diet, your body is going to turn some of that into glucose and some into fat for energy.
Okay.
But the process of breaking down the protein to make sugar is also going to affect your own physiology.
And I've known people who – a woman, for example, was told by her doctors to eat more protein because they saw that her urine contained a lot of amino acids.
And she went up to I think it was three pounds of meat a day and she was getting weaker as well as fatter because her cortisol production was extremely high because that's involved in turning amino acids into sugar.
So if somebody – many of our listeners have weak adrenals, have been told they do, and blood sugar issues, keeping that balanced, what are some foods that help to keep the blood sugar more stable?
The main thing that keeps your blood sugar stable is the ability of your liver to store sugar wherever it got it.
And the thing that it needs to store sugar is the active form of the thyroid hormone.
Thyroid.
The thyroid hormone also makes you use your sugar very sparingly, producing many times more ATP molecules per unit of food than you get if you burn it or if you metabolize it into lactic acid, which you do when you don't have enough thyroid.
So thyroid makes you spare your glucose, not waste it, and store it in the liver.
So it's the basic thing for stabilizing your blood sugar.
And if you have the cholesterol, which is produced only if your liver is in good condition, low cholesterol is behind a serious adrenal failure because cholesterol is the raw material for making the steroids, pregnenolone, progesterone, DHEA, and cortisol.
And if your cholesterol is low and your thyroid is low, then you can't make any of these.
And if you don't make enough of the other steroids, then you will turn any trace of progesterone or pregnenolone into cortisol and get excess cortisol.
So you can get either adrenal failure or adrenal overactivity as a consequence of having a sick liver or an underactive thyroid.
Is a good solid number in cholesterol of 2 or 225, is that a sign that your thyroid may be pretty good?
Yeah, anywhere between 160 and 230, it's a healthy range.
But if your thyroid is a little more active, the cholesterol will probably go down to 200 or 190.
There's this mirror image relationship between cholesterol and thyroid function.
Are you ever supportive of folks using some kind of natural pig thyroid or whatever to keep it in balance?
Oh, sure.
Are you okay with that?
Yeah, when someone has been poisoned basically by stress and a bad diet, many things interfere with the ability to form thyroid hormone and to use it.
And polyunsaturated fats will interfere both with the production of the hormone, with the transport of it, and with the ability to respond to it, poisoning the mitochondria that use thyroid and sugar.
Those old poofers that Lee-Lee talked about.
Yeah.
And so when you're under stress, by the time a person is about 30 years old, their tissues have had time to store the poofer.
Even if they're not eating very much in the diet, the body preferentially oxidizes saturated fats and sugar and puts the poofer into storage.
So then when you're stressed and 30 years old or more, your blood is going to fill up with poofer, which blocks all of these thyroid functions as well as the production of progesterone and the other protective steroids.
And tell folks what poofers most people eat in our culture.
Oh, the liquid cooking oils, salad oils are mostly the high poofer polyunsaturated fatty acids.
Corn oil, soy oil, canola, safflower seed oil, fish oil, all of these are the antithyroid.
Oh, even a good fish oil. You're not a fan of those.
Yeah. The fish oils happen to be so unstable.
They were used as varnish.
They were easier to oxidize than soy oil, so they made better varnish.
But that same thing happens in the body.
In the 1950s and 60s, they were seeing when they fed too many fish to their lab animals or minks or other farmed animals, they had what was called a yellow fat disease, which was from the breakdown of these long polyunsaturated fats in fish oil.
But when it came out in the 1970s that the seed oils, which had been promoted to lower cholesterol, the corn oil and cotton seed oil, turned out that they were causing heart disease as well as cancer.
So that opened up the market for the other poofer, the fish oil type, DHA and EPA.
Some folks take a lot of that too, don't they?
Yeah. But their good feature is that they break down so fast that they aren't as easily stored to become a chronic problem as the shorter, more stable seed oils.
Do we need these DHAs or EPAs? There's people that suggest if we do some oils like borage and coconut and these kind of things that the body will make, they'll make the DHAs and EPAs that we need.
Like flax oil, primrose, pumpkin, extra virgin coconut oil.
Actually, there's no definite clear evidence that any of those is an essential fatty acid.
And the best thing I can say about the fish oils or the N-3 fatty acids is that they can protect to some extent against the N-6 seed oils.
But in themselves, they have been associated with causing increased metastatic cancer, reduced brain size, brain edema, all of the degenerative problems, slowed conduction of the nerves.
Some of these are turned into virtues such as immunosuppression, which ordinarily is a bad thing.
You can suppress your immune system and have temporary relief of inflammation.
And what kind of oils do this?
The fish oils.
The fish oils, yeah.
And they also slow conduction. So in some situations, you can reduce arrhythmia of the heart just because you're desensitizing the heart.
But it also slows your nerve conduction.
And we don't hear much in the mass media about the bad effects of the long fish oils, but there are lots of publications demonstrating.
So are the safest olive oil, coconut oil, palm kernel oil, those kind of things?
And butter.
And butter, yeah. Those are the safest and the healthiest.
You want to do some emails?
Sure.
Okay. So here's some emails that we asked our listeners when we found out we were going to – and they've sent these in even though we're pre-recorded here today.
I'm male, hypothyroid, and have been on thyroid therapy 13 and 14 for six months.
I've accumulated a lot of body fat over the last few years.
And so what's the safest way to lose weight and lower estrogen, prolactin, et cetera, while keeping free fatty acids low?
Should I take vitamin E to help while the weight is coming off to protect against prostaglandins?
One thing that often surprises people who want to lose weight is that milk drinkers as a group are the least likely to be fat.
I saw this the first time it got me interested, and it was when I was traveling.
I saw the Russians in Moscow and Leningrad, tremendous rate of obesity, and their diet was heavy on bread, and they had a terrible milk supply.
I went across the border to Helsinki, and everyone there was slim, and all the stores were full of cheese and milk.
And that started me thinking about the role of calcium and dairy products in preventing obesity and degenerative diseases.
And it turns out that the calcium itself is a major factor in preventing the inflammation process, which is important in turning on the fat storage business.
So you're okay with cow dairy, raw, grass-fed cow dairy, milk, cheeses?
Yeah, that's the best practical major protein because of the very high calcium ratio to phosphate.
Here's an email from Matt. I think he maybe – I was recommended by you. Do you have patients?
No.
I wonder where he said he was recommended by you, okay, to drink orange juice as a means to increase my pregnenolone production.
Oh, well, I always recommend drinking orange juice and milk because of the sugar and the anti-inflammatory other ingredients in the orange juice, the high mineral content.
So good old-fashioned, just pure orange juice is a good food, in your opinion?
Yeah, and these minor ingredients, norengin, for example, they're very important anti-estrogenic foods and anti-inflammatory.
They're going to probably turn out to be major supplements when the orange industry finds a way to concentrate them cheaply out of the peelings.
I often heard over the years, Doc, that just orange juice like that is just too much sugar, too much sugar to be drinking pure orange juice.
Well, it comes with these high potassium, which works to dispose of the sugar safely.
Okay.
And some magnesium and calcium and so on that also help to stabilize the blood sugar.
Matt goes on, "I feel extremely hypo if I don't take thyroid. This seems to be my only side effect.
However, I have some problems with orange juice. It makes me feel very cold.
If I drink about a quart, I feel almost like I dropped several degrees.
I also feel like the juice just collects in my stomach and just lays there like a balloon.
Is this some kind of allergy?"
I think that's where the milk or cheese is very important to keep the metabolic rate up and watch the thyroid function.
And there are several ways without having a blood test that you can make a pretty good guess about what your thyroid is doing.
If your hands and feet are colder than average, that's because your adrenaline is holding your temperature up for your brain and heart by cutting the circulation of the extremities.
So the oral temperature is a good indicator in general, but the cold extremities are the first sign of failing thyroid function.
I see.
"If a benign fatty tumor or lipoma is inflamed tissue that is gathered to protect the body from improper diet or drugs,
what are some ways to melt the enclosed fat in order to shrink the lump, which is about one cup in size?
Wow! I have removed all grains and other inflammatory foods."
I've known quite a few people with fairly sizable lipomas, maybe not that big, but I don't think anything is very clearly known.
I think that some kind of a systemic inflammatory problem is involved causing the inability of the body to clear that out.
I don't know of any reliable way other than it's usually a very simple surgery just to have a lipoma cut out under the skin.
I've got a golden retriever doc that's had one for, gosh, years and years and just stays there and the vet says, "Oh, she's fine. Don't worry. Just leave it there."
It doesn't grow and it doesn't seem to bother her, you know.
This is from Rainy. "So do you think the sugar has a huge effect on hot flashes?
I've been going to a naturopathic doc for a year now and still have hot flashes, but it might be worse when I have more sweets."
Well, no. There have been studies in which someone would eat a huge amount of cornstarch, for example, at bedtime and that would turn off their hot flashes during the night.
Really?
But how it works is pretty well worked out.
It just isn't well publicized, but there have been studies demonstrating that the flushing, especially around menopause, this periodic flushing involves the release of nitric oxide in the blood vessels causing vasodilation, causing heat loss.
The brain has a temperature regulator which activates the production of nitric oxide to cause this heat loss because something is setting this thermostat in the brain lower.
Your brain is telling your body to cool off even though it's already some normal temperature usually.
And what happens is the stress apparatus, usually they talk about the pituitary and adrenals, but above the pituitary there is the corticotropin release hormone in the hypothalamus which turns on the whole stress system.
This CRH, corticotropin release hormone, directly activates the nitric oxide in the blood vessels causing the flushing.
And the things that turn on the stress reaction are primarily related to hypoglycemia.
So if your brain senses it isn't getting enough sugar, it wants to in effect hibernate, reduce the body temperature so it doesn't waste the sugar which it's short of.
So if you can tell your brain that you have plenty of sugar, that will suppress the corticotropin release hormone and that will stop turning on the nitric oxide and stop the flushing.
Interesting. Here's an email from Len. I'm a 60-year-old male and every now and again, not often but several times a year, sometimes more, I have a panic attack that lasts about 60 minutes.
I feel like I'm going to die but I don't and I'm just wondering how I can possibly find the root cause of these. Thanks for your help.
Hyperventilation is often involved in that and a hormone imbalance and checking the thyroid, probably having a blood test for the steroids as well as the thyroid hormones.
The steroids?
Such as progesterone, pregnenolone and cortisol.
Oh, and a blood test can do that?
Yeah.
And that gives you, if they get out of balance, then the body might do a whole anxiety attack thing?
Yeah, when your progesterone is low or your estrogen is high, that tends to cause hyperventilation and once you start hyperventilating, the loss of carbon dioxide causes your blood cells to release serotonin and other nerve transmitters that cause all kinds of nervous and emotional effects.
So that's why people breathe into a paper bag?
Yeah.
Did that work?
Oh, yeah. I've seen people lower their blood pressure in two or three days and never have another problem of, for example, 160 over 90 or 100 blood pressure with several times a day for two or three days. People can very often get their blood pressure down as easily as that.
So what do you do? I've seen people do it, but I've never done it. Do you actually put it over your mouth and your nose?
Yeah, pinch it tight around your face so you can't get any fresh air.
Right. Just breathe.
You inhale so it collapses the bag and then blow it back in the bag. It just takes about a minute before it gets really oppressive, hot and humid, but at the same time, you've used up the oxygen and are starting to breathe almost pure CO2, which gets very uncomfortable.
So you can only do it until it is too uncomfortable, but each time you do that, it tells your brain to reset things and tolerate a little more carbon dioxide and acidity.
And in two or three days, you can train your brain to hang on to more carbon dioxide, which improves circulation of the brain.
I'll be darned.
That same effect you can get briefly by baking soda in water. I've seen a couple people have just almost instantaneous recovery from a stroke by drinking some baking soda, which opens up the blood vessels in the brain.
In the brain. So when you have the paper bag thing, is that breathing through your nose or your mouth?
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter because it's all going to the same place.
Yeah, and it's all humid.
I'll be darned. And the CO2 that you're breathing in opens up the brain and helps everything just kind of get reboots your brain a bit.
Yeah, but not only the brain, it also happens to activate the mitochondria all through your body.
It's making things more efficient.
Very interesting. I'll be darned.
And people have told us, I think I'm correct, that when we breathe through our mouth at night rather than through our nose, that can cause to get rid of too much CO2 and could be a problem.
Is that right?
Yeah.
The medical opinion is often that people don't breathe enough during the night.
But when you look at their changes of pH and the actual blood chemistry, the usual thing is that they hyperventilate during the night because as their blood sugar is pushed down to go to sleep, their adrenaline comes up periodically.
And the adrenaline and changed disposition of the sugar makes them have, in effect, higher estrogen, higher inflammatory hormones that drive hyperventilation and blow off too much carbon dioxide.
And then they don't breathe for a while.
Then they wake up.
They wake up with a feeling that they have died or haven't been breathing enough.
And the best chemical treatment for that is a chemical called Diamox or acetazolamide that causes the body to retain more carbon dioxide, which keeps stimulating the brain to keep breathing at the right speed.
But it prevents the body from losing the carbon dioxide that holds it in the blood.
Diamox. How do you spell that?
D-I-A-M-O-X. That's the brand name.
D-I-A. Is that a prescription or just go over the counter?
Prescription.
Yeah. Diamox.
It's well established as a cure, basically, for the sleep apnea.
I'll be darned. Diamox. Never heard of that one.
And it's also used commonly for skiers who go to very high altitude to prevent altitude sickness.
I'll be darned.
Because rather than lack of oxygen, altitude sickness is essentially a lack of carbon dioxide.
But it's not really a cure, Dr. Peat. Would it be more of treating the symptoms so you'd have to take it on going?
Well, yeah. Sometimes it gets it going.
Well, it's like a thyroid. Sometimes two or three days of a thyroid supplement is all a person needs and their own gland will take over.
It's the same with sleep apnea. Sometimes they can get out of the stress and not have another problem.
But usually you have to work on finding why the hormones are going bad, especially at night.
Get your blood sugar stabilized. Get a good diet, enough protein and enough fruit in the diet.
And supplement the thyroid as long as it's needed.
What was the other name you had for Diamox?
Acetazolamide is the chemical name.
Acetazolamide.
It's a diuretic as it's traditional use, but it's probably most often used now for high altitude sickness.
Interesting. So speaking of sleep, while we're there for a minute, folks, insomnia, as you know, is just an epidemic around our country.
People just waking up, can't get to sleep. They fall asleep, can't get back to sleep. They wake up.
Are there any particular foods or things that you have seen over the years that help to facilitate people getting a better night's sleep?
Food or nutrients?
Yeah, a very practical, simple thing is a glass of warm milk with an ounce or two of either sugar or honey in it.
And the milk makes the sugar or honey absorb more slowly. And the effect of the sugar is to lower your adrenaline, which the older a person gets,
the more problem they have with sleep hypoglycemia causing increased adrenaline.
And that can lead to high blood pressure problems so that old people who are told to take a blood pressure drug will often get worse insomnia as their blood sugar falls
and their adrenaline goes up. And sometimes just by eating enough sugar and salt during the day and a little extra at bedtime, they can not only cure their insomnia,
but sometimes their blood sugar is corrected enough that the blood pressure problem disappears.
So actually a little sugar before bed may help things sleep.
Yeah, especially when it's with a food like milk or something that keeps it in the stomach for a while.
Like butter or something?
Yeah, ice cream.
Oh, ice cream. Now you're my kind of doctor.