What does cloudy urine indicate? Is it the body wasting calcium or a yeast infection?
Well, if you're drinking lots of milk, for example, or a high meat diet, the phosphate has to get excreted.
And the phosphate shows up in the urine and precipitates in the presence of either magnesium or calcium.
And it only precipitates if the pH is above a certain point.
And so if you have a very high protein diet, most of the time your urine will be acidic and it will be clear despite having a tremendous amount of phosphate in it.
But when something raises the pH of your urine, which can be eating a lot of fruit or vegetables, or hyperventilating is another thing.
If you blow out too much carbon dioxide, the pH of your urine goes up to keep your blood at the right pH, slightly alkaline.
And when your urine pH is above, is neutral or higher on the alkaline side, then any phosphate and calcium is going to precipitate and make it cloudy.
Here's an email from Brenda. I recently started taking Progest-E and it's helped my cyclical mood symptoms very much.
I've been taking it for days, 14, 28 in my cycle. I hate to stop taking it because I have PMS moodiness the day after I stop.
Would there be any harm in just continuing to take it nonstop for a while, even if it means I miss a period or two?
I've known quite a few women who took it some every day and kept cycling without any problem.
But what they should be aware of is that if you take a little extra just before the expected time of ovulation, it will trigger early ovulation.
And then if you stop taking it or take less, it will bring on an early menstruation.
So if you're going to take it every day, it has to be every day the same amount.
What about someone perimenopausal that every now and then in the cycle, it just takes so long, the period just doesn't want to come.
You get the bloaty thing, but it just doesn't want to come. Is there any safe herbs or anything you can do to just kind of let her go so you can feel better and let her have your period?
Well, behind the problem with the balance of progesterone and estrogen, the basic thing is almost always low thyroid.
Some women will use a quick-acting thyroid so as soon as they start getting a symptom of PMS, they take just a little extra quick-acting stuff and they can adjust the hormones on a day-to-day basis that way.
Other people increase just knowing that they don't want to have PMS. They will take a little more of their glandular thyroid starting at ovulation.
And the opposite happens when a person is hypothyroid.
They might not have any ovulation at all or they might have extreme and prolonged menstruation.
And it's a very reliable treatment for prolonged menstruation to just get the right amount of thyroid.
You can usually turn off a hypothyroid excess menstruation in two days with a supplement.
But a quick-acting thyroid, that's generally a prescription?
Yeah, usually in the US, T3 such as Cytomel is a prescription.
Cytomel. How do you spell that?
C-Y-T-O-M-E-L.
And that's just a pig or cow or something thyroid, isn't it?
No, it's a purely synthetic but it's exactly the same chemical that we make or would get from an animal.
Oh, I see. Okay. Mark wants to know, "Why is burning sugar for fuel healthier for the human body than burning ketones?
Also, for diabetic ones to use fructose medicinally, how can fructose be used by the cells if the cells need glucose?
And does the body convert fructose to glucose or something?"
Yeah, the body can exchange the fructose enters the glycolysis process almost the same place glucose does
and then is oxidized the same way glucose is.
And a lot of doctors are saying that the brain and muscles and heart and such can't use fructose.
But actually, there is evidence that they do have the particular so-called fructose transporter or glucose transporter that works for fructose.
So the brain and heart can use fructose.
And ketones are good if you get them from fruit or vegetables such as potatoes.
But if you have to produce the ketones, they are only produced under stress in the body.
And so they're good when you can get them, but it's hard to make them yourself.
Okay.
Why does the Budwig diet against cancer have so much success when it uses omega-3 flaxseed oil when Ray's work has concluded that unsaturated fatty acids are not good for us?
Ask John.
In 1954, a professor from the University of Guadalajara had an article in Prevention magazine describing his success using purge for his laxative patients to get their intestine clean
because that's something that's been known for probably 3,000 years that laxatives are helpful for cancer patients because of the toxins produced in the intestine.
And he happened to use a cup of linseed oil or flax oil as the purge.
It would rush right through and clean out the intestine.
But until that time, Johanna Budwig had published as co-author a couple of articles in a soap and fat journal and wasn't doing anything at all unconventional.
But right after that article came out in Prevention magazine, she started developing her theory of the N-3 fats.
My theory was that she had gone insane during that period when she stopped being a research associate for the soap professor.
Shortly after that, several little booklets came out published by a Disney subsidiary in Europe describing her theory in very crazy terms.
Anyone who's interested in doing her program should get a look at those books because they were radically changed when they were presented in English to make it sound much saner than they were.
But her diet consisted of mostly cottage cheese or the equivalent, curds, and because of the low iron content of cottage cheese, both milk and cottage cheese are very good protective foods for people with cancer.
Fruits and milk, because of the low iron content and low PUFA content, are good for cancer patients.
But I think as far as the flax oil can work as a laxative, it's beneficial.
But when it's working as a food, then it has the risk of suppressing your metabolism.
We're talking with Dr. Ray Peat. He's a PhD in biology and it is about 15 after the hour.
This is Patrick Timpone. Happy New Year to you. Special show pre-recorded.
We'll be back live, I think, on whatever the 4th, next Monday.
I appreciate you being here. We'll keep Dr. Peat on as long as he doesn't kick us out and try to get rid of through these emails.
We have a lot of them. From John, "Ray's opinions on Hans Nieper's mineral transporters. Why does nobody talk about them anymore?"
For one thing, we don't really need mineral transporters.
People like Gilbert Ling many years ago showed that the doctrine that the cell is enclosed in an impermeable or semi-permeable membrane simply isn't so.
When they got isotopes that they could actually see the type of sodium atom that was being added to a system,
they could demonstrate that the sodium atoms were freely moving in and out of cells, no barrier function at all at the surface.
This applies to all of the dissolved minerals and other substances.
There's just no barrier there to deal with.
That's the basic thing. We don't have any need for a mineral transporter because minerals move freely in and out.
Jesse writes, "I love the show. I don't know if Ray Peat knows anything about the organic sulfur you've been talking about the last few months.
I've been taking the sulfur and iodine together, Lugol's."
Well, we don't recommend you take the sulfur with anything, but anyway, "My thyroid hormones have gone down.
I need to know if the sulfur will take iodine out too. Should they be taken opposite ends of the day?
Do you need to take extra Lugol's if you're taking sulfur? I'm taking a couple of tablespoons per day."
Too much iodine is probably the problem.
Too much iodine that can actually lower the thyroid?
Yeah.
How do you know what's a good amount of iodine?
Well, I've got a list of I think it's 70 articles from around the world looking at the incidence of thyroid cancer and thyroiditis.
They see that above half a milligram of iodine per day chronically increases the incidence of thyroid disease.
Well, that's not good. 0.5 milligrams. Wow. That's not a lot, is it?
No, but that's over a period of many years where it's chronically high.
Oh, okay. In other words, people taking, you'd have to do it over many years to have an issue.
Yeah.
I wonder how many drops of Lugol's. Do you have any idea, like you do one drop, how many milligrams that is?
I think it's a few milligrams.
Is it? So you wouldn't want to do more than just a couple. I mean, that's it.
Yeah.
Makes sense. Okay. I'm a follower of Mr. Peat's. I haven't seen him, anything mentioned about uterine fibroids.
What is his suggestion is the best way to get rid of them? Seropeptase and other enzymes have not worked for me.
I think normalizing thyroid is the best thing.
I had an experience with a woman who was, I think she was 40 at the time, and hadn't had any kids and wanted to get pregnant,
and had a fibroid plugging the end of her uterus by the fallopian tubes about the size of a tennis ball.
And I explained the physiology to her and got her confident that she knew what was happening.
And she adjusted, taking enough thyroid that she could keep her estrogen level down with the other hormones up.
And it happens that her pulse averaged about 110 per minute.
And her doctor told her she would die from keeping her pulse that fast.
But she had an ultrasound every month, and every month that she kept her thyroid at that level, the fibroid shrank.
And I think it was around March or April that she started.
And by August, the fibroid had disappeared and she was pregnant.
Is a slower pulse necessarily better?
No, generally it's not.
What could be?
Well, now we've already been told it is.
Like I've been exercising a lot and my pulse gets pretty low, just my resting pulse, sometimes 50 or so, because I do the rebounder.
So that could actually be a sign of some kind of weakness?
Yeah, very often it's hypothyroid, long-distance runners.
Oh, you mean low thyroid.
Yeah.
If you put a person on a treadmill, and in one experiment they had them walk so their pulse stayed about 120 beats per minute.
And in less than an hour, their blood showed almost no T3, the active hormone.
And if a person is healthy, as soon as they catch their breath and rest for a day, their T3 is right back where it should be.
But if there's anything wrong with their diet, just that moderate amount of exercise every day can push your thyroid lower and lower.
And one of the ways that you might see a bad effect of a low pulse is if the distance between the top and the bottom blood pressure is very great.
It should be no more than 50 points difference.
And blood pressure difference, okay.
Yeah, it's called pulse pressure.
Okay.
So the systolic minus the diastolic should be 50 or less.
If it's less than 50, a low pulse is...
Well, sometimes it goes with a big surge of pressure, like from a blood pressure diastolic of 60 to 120.
That's a 60-point spread, which is more than desirable.
Okay, so that would indicate perhaps a low thyroid.
Yeah.
And you'd want to get that checked out and maybe get that thyroid boosted up.
So people that exercise a lot, it's not necessarily that their heart...
But isn't your heart stronger if you're beating less per minute?
Not necessarily.
No?
You can give a person an antithyroid drug and their heart rate will just go slower and slower.
No kidding.
Antithyroid, in other words, lower the efficiency of the thyroid and your pulse slows down.
Yeah.
I've known people who had 40 or 50 pulse at rest and who were really very miserable.
And when they got their pulse up to 70 or 80 at rest by taking thyroid, they felt much better.
But that's something you don't want to do on your own necessarily.
It would be better to get somebody that really knows their stuff.
You can often do that just by diet, avoiding the foods that are blocking your thyroid function.
Which are?
Mostly in America, it's mostly the polyunsaturated fats.
But some people, I've known people who were eating a pure soy diet or a lot of raw cabbage and broccoli.
And those people just stopping the diet for a week or two popped right back.
So the poofers in the soy, they're definitely antithyroid.
But what about broccoli, cauliflower, the cruciferous?
But if you cook them, are they okay?
They're still slightly antithyroid, but people don't have any problem with them.
If a person wants to really test what low thyroid is like, they can juice some cabbage or broccoli raw and drink a glass or two of that per day.
And you can feel it?
Yeah.
What are some things that boost the thyroid function?
The milk and orange juice.
I'll be darned.
You know, I love orange juice and I just kind of stayed away.
I bought into that whole too much sugar idea.
I don't know where I got that, but man, I'll try some of that and juice some oranges.
And it actually boosts thyroid function.
Yeah.
I'll be darned.
That's great.
Boy, so much thyroid stuff, as you know.
Here's another one, Ann from Michigan.
Can you talk a bit about Hashimoto's?
Is that overactive for our autoimmune thyroid, right?
Hashimoto's?
It's underactive.
Oh, underactive, but it's an autoimmune issue?
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, so-called.
So-called.
Most of the autoimmune things, the antibodies really are part of a recovery process.
Okay.
Anytime you injure a tissue, your immune system will try to eat up the junk and it treats
the tissue as if it had been infected.
So that's why they started calling it thyroid.
So it's not the immune system attacking your thyroid.
It's doing what it's supposed to do.
Yeah.
If you block the thyroid function for some reason, then you have to stimulate it more
strongly with thyroid stimulating hormone.
And just that stimulation creates a type of inflammation.
And if that goes on too long, for example, blocking it with too much iodine or too much
PUFA or estrogen, then your immune system will come in and clean up some of the junk.
So we have people say that you really can't OD on iodine, but you're definitely saying
the opposite here today.
Yeah.
Okay.
Ann says, "I'm 44 years old and the day before my period, I start to get a headache.
I'm assuming the headache is caused by low progesterone.
Any suggestions on how to balance out the hormones?
I have been doing paleo diet for over three years now.
It has helped."
I know that this is a broad question, but any suggestions would be appreciated.
Well, usually some good tropical fruit and/or orange juice and milk or cheese will get the
thyroid back to normal functioning.
But in the short run, a thyroid supplement, there have been studies where just giving
even a synthetic thyroid for five or six months will correct the antibody problem in the Hashimoto's.
And then what if somebody has kind of a hard time with casein or lactose?
Can that be corrected if you'd like to try some cheese and milk?
Yeah, there's no lactose in cheese, so if there's a lactose problem, cheese will take care of it.
Like a raw cheese maybe, raw grass-fed if you can?
Yeah, preferably without additives.
Sure. And then the casein in the milk?
Oh, it's a good protein. It has many good features, but an even better protein is the juice out of a potato.
In a few extreme cases where a person had no digestion for any kind of ordinary protein,
if they juiced some raw potatoes and then cooked that juice, they could instantly assimilate it.
I'll be damned.
Got over their sensitivities, their proteins.
Hasn't that been in the past? Or is some kind of an anti-cancer therapy in Europe where they juice potatoes?
Did I read that somewhere?
I haven't heard of it. It's an amazing food.
That's crazy. Please ask your guest about bioidentical hormone replacement.
If in favor of it, which testing protocol would be best and when we should stop the treatment?
It just depends on what the person needs.
That term can apply to testosterone, progesterone, DHEA, thyroid, any of those, but it is also applied to estrogen.
And it happens that the most dangerous of the estrogens, estradiol, is bioidentical.
So it doesn't make it safer, whether it's synthetic or natural estrogen, you still have to be very careful.
Okay, here's another email.
What does Mr. Peat think about the ketogenic diet? High fat, low carb, low protein.
What does Ray think about Bulletproof coffee?
Will you whip up coconut oil or butter into your coffee similar to Tibetan tea?
And what about refined bleach coconut oil, expeller pressed?
Ketogenic diet first.
Okay, well, I already talked about that.
It's a matter of stress.
Anything that stresses you can turn on your production of ketones.
Okay.
So it's better to have some sugar in your diet so you don't have the stress that makes the ketones.
But if you can get ketones from fruit and potatoes, for example, they're fine.
Okay. Bulletproof coffee, ever hear about that, where you put up coconut oil or butter into your coffee?
A lot of people tell me they're doing that, but cream in the coffee is so good.
Yeah.
And it mixes nicely where the coconut oil and butter just float on the surface.
Yeah, cream probably does the same thing.
What about refined bleach coconut oil or expeller pressed? Any issues there?
That's the only thing I've used because I used to occasionally get some homemade coconut oil that was just delicious for making ice cream,
coconut ice cream with fresh coconut.
It's just a fantastic taste, but it happens to be allergenic.
If you have any stress problems or digestive problems, it's better to use the refined deodorized coconut oil.
Brian in Illinois has a question for Dr. Ray Peat.
I would like to know what to do to overcome radiation therapy.
I was not foolish enough to receive radiation.
I was foolish enough, excuse me, for prostate.
I did not finish the total number of treatments, but following the treatments, I'm still having radiation issues.
I no longer have cancer, which I think is probably the result of holistic.
So how can you kind of heal from radiation kind of damage?
There have been studies of people 60 years, I think it was, after Hiroshima and 20 years after Chernobyl,
in which they could still see inflammatory processes in the blood that could be traced to the radiation exposure.
And so it's really a lingering inflammation that you have to deal with.
With that kind of radiation, nothing is actually placed in the body like with fallout.
The stuff we're getting from Fukushima now is actual isotopes which stick in the body.
Those are a different kind of problem.
But the lingering effect of external radiation puts you into an inflammatory state.
And all of the things we've been talking about, the good high-energy foods, milk, cheese.
How to heal that.
Keeping your thyroid function up activates the repair system, which lowers inflammation.
And any time your energy falls, you move towards inflammation.
So don't hyperventilate. Do everything to keep your blood sugar steady.
And the inflammation will gradually subside. The anti-inflammatory hormones are all protective in their situation.
But basically diet and thyroid are.
William is a naturopathic doc, and he wants to know, Dr. Peat, what do you think about Dr. --
not Dr. -- but Brian Peskin's claims that omega-3s are unnecessary.
The fish oils and these parent essential oils that we mentioned earlier are the best way to go to supplement rather than fish oil.
Well, he's right about the fish oil. There's no evidence that it's an essential fat.
But also there is no evidence that I've seen --
The PEOs do it either.
It sounds good. Let's see.
What's the best way, writes Catherine, about testing for food allergies regarding the heart rate?
My heart rate's about 85, sitting down, standing up about 110.
I was told I had POTS, postural orthostatic tricardia.
My blood pressure is good, but a bit on the low side, including Celtic sea salt in my diet.
So first off, yeah, best way to -- have you come up with some good ways to test for these food allergies that we may have?
The blood tests are often misinterpreted.
You can see a reaction in the blood, but sometimes it's just showing that the person tolerates --
has been exposed to a food, doesn't really correlate with the symptoms of allergy.
So I think testing a food, leaving it out of your diet entirely for at least a week,
if the symptoms go away, then you can guess that you're allergic to it.
But there's no real chemical test for the allergic reaction.
And then an issue when you're sitting down and standing up, you've got some kind of --
high estrogen affects the nervous system so that your sympathetic side is weak
and the parasympathetic is overactive.
And that's why women get varicose veins so much more often than men, especially around pregnancy.
High estrogen weakens the wall of the vein.
Progesterone tones up the veins.
And when the veins aren't returning the blood to the heart, when the blood falls into your legs,
then your heart has to beat faster.
So progesterone and thyroid are the things needed to tone up the veins
and return the blood to the heart so that the heart has a good, strong beat.
Dr. Peat, do you have any recommendations for rebuilding or healing the vagus nerve,
encouraging the parasympathetic system and proprioception?
Parasympathetic, that's when we can rest and sleep, and the vagus nerve,
I guess some kind can get damaged, huh?
Well, my last few newsletters have been talking about the problems of stress.
For example, learned helplessness, it's called learned despair.
If an animal is restrained and doesn't have the experience of being able to escape,
they might just, if they fall into a tank of water, might let themselves drown in two or three minutes
where a normal rat with better experience would swim for days.
And that's from too much of the parasympathetic activity.
So I've been working out some of the implications of what happens after middle age
that are equivalent to learned helplessness,
where the body has experienced so many problems that it can't deal with
that it starts shifting too strongly to the parasympathetic.
And when we go to bed at night, normally we don't need to spend a lot of energy,
so the parasympathetic lowers our blood sugar.
But after middle age, it can lower the blood sugar so much
that then the other side of the nervous system reacts with surges of adrenaline and cortisol,
and that's where the degenerative things come in.
But they can be triggered by compulsive overactivity of the parasympathetic and vagus.
And in liver disease, for example, they found that they can prevent inflammation and fibrosis of the liver
just by cutting the vagus nerve so it doesn't reach the liver.
So you don't want to overstimulate the parasympathetic.
And the Gulf War syndrome, a lot of it had to do with exposure to organophosphate nerve gases,
but people are being exposed to similar chemicals in insecticides or even in the airliners,
which comes from the lubricants in the air pressurizing system,
puts basically a little bit of nerve gas into the air.
And all of these exposures are creating an overactive vagus syndrome
so that many people in the general population have something like the Gulf War syndrome.
Just from the chemicals.
And the drugs that the Army used to treat nerve gas poisoning, atropine was the main drug,
and that can be used for an extreme case of some of these stress-related learned helplessness syndromes.
Next email for Dr. Peat. What is the underlying cause of severe allergies, runny nose, sneezing,
that occur after a meal? Is it low thyroid, high estrogen, or both? And how to correct this?
It's usually something in the intestine, not necessarily what you ate in this meal,
but sometimes what you ate yesterday or the day before will be farther down your intestine,
and eating starts the peristalsis, and it moves an irritant down to a sensitive place in the intestine.
And runny nose and sneezing are the main, most common symptoms,
but that kind of stimulation in the intestine, animal experiments,
and even one doctor's experiments on his medical students showed that just pressure in the rectum
or intestine can trigger migraine headaches, runny noses, and coughing and sneezing,
and even epileptic seizures just from stimulating the intestine.
Disturbed blood sugar intensifies the sensitivity of the intestine and makes those reactions worse.
Is there such a thing as thyroid resistance, high reverse T3, that doesn't show up on blood tests?
Yeah, I think it's important to measure reverse T3.
If you're going to measure the thyroid hormones at all, you can't interpret the T3 itself,
which is the active hormone, unless you know how much reverse T3 there is,
because that can interfere with the active hormone.
So you have to look at the ratio of active to reverse T3.
Here's an email that said that after eating peanuts, his mouth cracked and inflammation, lesions,
and a lab said he had fungus candida. I'm on a homeopathic remedy.
Currently using Benadryl, which may provide short-term relief, but inflammation returns.
Was he just allergic to peanuts? Isn't that as simple as that?
That could be, but when it lingers for a long time, there could be several things.
A nutritional deficiency might have been co-acting with the allergy,
and a lot of B vitamin deficiencies can make sores around the mouth,
and inflammation in the intestine can activate viruses to break out inside the mouth or on the lips.
So a food allergy is often responsible for a coated or cracked tongue,
a lot of different mouth symptoms.
The Benadryl lotions are antiseptic and soothing.
Another ointment that you can get at a drugstore, benzocaine ointments and similar local anesthetics.
Benzocaine happens to be antiseptic as well as anesthetic,
and will often clear up a little skin problem, whether it's a virus or germ or fungus.
A benzocaine ointment can help.
Lindsay says she's on low thyroid. She has a low thyroid on 120 milligrams of nature,
but still experiencing many symptoms.
I'm not sure where she lives, 917. I think that looks like Southern California.
I'm wondering if you could have ideas on where she could find some help.
People can email me through my website, has my contact.
But if a particular brand of thyroid doesn't work, I think it's good to change brands.
Armor thyroid is fairly reliable.
There's a synthetic called Proloid S, which is an old established brand that is available in many countries.
CINO+ is made by companies related to the ones that make Cytomel.
CINO+ is very similar to Nature Throid and Armor, but being synthetic,
it lacks some of the potential allergens that the natural thyroids might have.
So just trying different brands and otherwise changing the diet to make sure there's more of the metabolic promoters,
such as calcium and the anti-inflammatory foods.
Only a few more here, then we're going to let you go, Doc.
Dr. Peat's website has removed his bookstore for his newsletter and books.
Are you going to get that back?
Yeah, when I get the books reprinted, I'm going to put the list back.
Okay. So, but right now, can people cannot sign up for your newsletter or can they?
Oh, yeah, they can.
On the website?
Yeah.
Why? Okay, we've already done that one.
Let's see.
What is the ideal diet for type 2 diabetes?
What food should I avoid?
I'm taking a thousand milligrams of L-tryptophan at night for sleep.
Do you recommend I discontinue this amino acid?
Yeah, there are articles on my website about -- related to diabetes and explaining how the unsaturated fats are an essential problem in causing diabetes
and sugar is not a problem and has been used as a cure.
So, getting the right diet and making sure the thyroid function is optimized, those are the basic things.
Aspirin is well known to help to regulate blood sugar and lower inflammation problems associated with diabetes.
Stella says, "I keep getting acne.
I don't know how to deal with it.
I sweat and saunas and take chlorella and make green smoothies but still have issues with acne.
What can I do?"
Thyroid and vitamin A are the basic things, but the skin and the intestine are very closely connected
so that you want to make sure you aren't eating any foods that aren't well digested or that irritate your intestine
because that can contribute to inflammatory and even problems with excretion of fats and sweat and so they can be influenced by irritation in the intestine.
Lisa wants to know about using the far-infrared sauna and niacin together.
If you have broken capillaries from rosacea, how do you say that?
R-O-S-A-C-E-A?
Rosacea?
Yeah, rosacea.
Using niacin with a far-infrared sauna.
Well, niacin sometimes refers to nicotinic acid or even its slow release form.
Nicotinic acid happens to increase your histamine, serotonin, and prostaglandins, all of which are inflammatory.
So I don't think it's good for anyone to take nicotinic acid other than as it occurs in food.
Niacinamide is a form of that same vitamin that is active in cells and doesn't release those inflammatory problem materials.
So niacinamide is safe?
Yeah.
That's a B3, is that B3?
Yeah.
Brenda writes, "Could you please ask Dr. Peat to speak about natural ways to reverse high prolactin levels in women?
I recently started taking his Progest-E to raise my progesterone levels, hoping this may help to lower my prolactin."
Sometimes it does, but thyroid is the basic thing.
The tryptophan and serotonin happen to turn on a trigger that increases prolactin and thyroid-stimulating hormone.
They tend to go together.
If your thyroid doesn't respond adequately to the rising thyroid-stimulating hormone, it isn't able to lower the prolactin.
They're tied closely together, and so a supplement of thyroid is sometimes needed.
But without that, sometimes increasing the salt in your diet and using a vitamin B6 supplement, those can sometimes correct the prolactin.
The B6 is involved in correcting the tryptophan, serotonin metabolism, so it doesn't cause the inflammation and high prolactin.
One more, and then Ray P. gets to go on about his day.
"Thanks for being here. I appreciate all your time. It's really been a long show, which has been great.
Carl in Urbana, it's an interesting one. He's in his 70s. He's observed lower thyroid, testosterone, muscle tone, increase in estrogen.
Recently, he was thinking that the Eskimos live in a very cold climate, and they said to be eating a diet of 70% fat.
He did that. He said, "I no longer feel cold all the time, and my energy and sleep are much better.
I've seen to be in an adrenaline state early in the evening and sometimes awake with higher temperature and a higher pulse rate.
Then I can get back to sleep and progress into colder, lower pulse rate, thus a high cortisol state.
Since my cortisol is the highest in the morning, would it be best for me to avoid any foods that would stimulate insulin production in the morning?
Could you explain what is going on here?"
It's normal. The whole thing that we've been talking about, the parasympathetic system increasing at night lowers your blood sugar,
and that increases adrenaline, and finally, during the night, it will increase your cortisol so that almost everyone has their highest cortisol of the day at dawn.
That's because basically, darkness is very stressful, and cortisol is protecting us against all of those inflammatory stress processes that develop during the night.
If you can keep the adrenaline and cortisol lower by what you eat at bedtime or even snack on during the night, and having some fluid in the night helps to keep your blood thin and circulating
so that you are less likely to have a stroke from the high cortisol when you wake up.
The high cortisol and thickened blood are fairly dangerous in the morning, so it's good to start with orange juice, for example, to get some fluid and minerals into your blood.
In the morning?
Yeah, and to get the cortisol down.
What would you drink in the middle of the night? Just water?
That's better than nothing, but if you're having a sleep problem, then maybe juice or milk, sugared milk, and even chicken soup, something that appetizes.
Oh, really? Maybe chicken broth?
Yeah, a good chicken consomme with plenty of salt will lower your adrenaline.
It lowers your adrenaline, the salt does. Yeah, it's good for the adrenals.
Yeah, there have been studies on people, old people with both hypertension and insomnia who are on a low salt diet, and low salt is very often responsible for serious problems such as that.
And again, foods then that lower adrenaline and cortisol at night would be?
Milk and honey or sugar, fruit, oranges, tropical fruit, gelatinous things such as consomme.
Oh, bone broth, like the Western Price bone broth stuff, that kind of thing?
Well, you don't want to use marrow bones because of the high iron content, so the joints that have the tendons and cartilage attached.
Oh, just kind of leg bones and stuff like that?
Or tail bones.
Tail bones, but not the joints where they get all the… I thought the cartilage, didn't Dr. Peat, doesn't that have a lot of good…
You do want the cartilage and the tendons, you don't want the hard bone with the marrow in it.
Oh, okay, you want the more joints, so you don't want the hard marrow bones.
Yeah, so the tail is all joints and so that's very good.
So chicken feet and stuff like that are good, but not shin bones and that that you give the dog, those big hard bones, they have too much iron in the marrow?
Yeah.
That's interesting. Well, Doc, this has been great fun. Thanks for being here.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, it's been really nice. Thanks for spending so much time with us and a great way to start off the new year.
So your newsletter is available on Raypeat.com, right, so people can sign up. And how often do you send that out?
Every two months.
And you do a lot of writing on your website. Do you have books as well?
Yeah, five books.
And you're going to get that back in the bookstore. Are they available on Amazon?
No, I'll probably have some on Amazon when I get them reprinted. It'll be a couple months.
Well, we'll keep an eye on that. So thanks a lot. We dearly appreciate your time.
Thank you.
Thank you. Dr. Ray Peat, well, that was quite fun. Man, a couple hours there, didn't we? Had a good time?
Nice man. Raypeat.com. Okay, baby, take that to the bank and see what you think.
Please pass on these links to everyone that you care about.
We just keep digging and digging, seeing if we can figure out how these old bodies work, right?
How these old bodies work. How these young bodies work.
Excuse me. Happy New Year.
Sharon kept me up late, like all till five. Just kidding.
Adam Bergstrom will be here next Monday, and that's when I'll be back live with you.
Monday, the 6th of January. I love you all very much.
2014's going to be a blast, baby.
Broadcasting from the beautiful Hill Country in Texas, this is Juan, Radionetwork.com.
© 2014 Juan Radionetwork. All Rights Reserved.
[BLANK_AUDIO]