Okay, here we go, hour two of our little show.
As I mentioned to Mr. Peat in an email,
and also to you, Adam Bergstrom,
who's a good friend and great researcher,
and he's on our show, oh, several times a month,
even more sometimes, and he's a fan
and knows a lot about the work of Mr. Ray Peat.
He's on the line.
Adam, are you there?
- I am here.
- There you are.
Ray Peat is a PhD in biology from University of Oregon.
His specialization in physiology,
the schools he's taught in include University of Oregon,
Urbana College, Montana State University,
National College of Naturopathic Medicine.
He started his work with progesterone
and related hormones in 1968,
and in papers in physiological chemistry and physics.
I mean, he's got such an incredible background
and very well respected around the world,
Ray Peat, and he's on the line.
Mr. Peat, good morning.
- Good morning.
- How you doing?
It's been a while.
- Yeah, I guess five years.
- Has it been five years?
(Ray laughs)
Yeah, yeah.
What are you most passionate about these days,
Mr. Ray Peat, and your work?
And by the way, Ray, say hi to Adam Bergstrom.
- Oh, yeah, hi.
I've read his stuff on the yellow fat disease.
Very, very great work.
- Thank you, Ray.
Thank you very much.
Thank you for turning me on to the concept
because the first time I ever heard the words
was out of your mouth.
- Oh.
- And you mentioned it on Patrick's show, too.
- Oh, really?
- The last time, yes, you did.
- When did you first get turned on
to the yellow fat thing, Ray?
- Oh, in the 1940s.
A family friend of ours was a chinchilla farmer,
and he found that fish were poisoning his chinchillas.
But that made me check the idea of essential fatty acids.
And at that time, in the late '40s and early '50s,
anytime someone mentioned the idea of essential fatty acids,
it was very tentative because in Texas,
one of the research institutes,
I don't remember the exact name of it,
1946 demonstrated that the so-called
fatty acid deficiency disease
was really a vitamin B6 deficiency
because they could feed them a fat-free diet,
cause the scaly skin symptoms and so on,
and cure the disease with a supplement of vitamin B6
without any fat added.
So I sort of grew up with the concept
that the fatty acid essentiality is,
first it was a mistake and then it turned into a fraud.
And then in the 1970s, I saw research
in which they fed saturated fat
or highly polyunsaturated fats,
or a mixture to rats through their whole lifetime.
And they found that it wasn't the quantity of fat
that made them obese, it was the degree of unsaturation,
so that the ones that ate saturated fats,
such as coconut oil, were lean at the end of their lives,
no matter how much they ate.
And the ones that ate only polyunsaturated fat
were fat at the end of their lives,
even if they had a low-fat diet.
- Now Adam, you jump in anytime, you don't need me.
You can just jump in, we're just having a combo here.
So these are the classic things Ray P. called PUFAs,
polyunsaturated fatty acids.
- Highly unsaturated fatty acids,
omega-3s mainly, DHA, EPA, ALA.
- Yeah, those are so sensitive to oxygen degradation
that people have checked the blood content
after someone eats a fatty fish
and finds that very little of them
even reach the bloodstream.
And when they do, they're an oxidized breakdown product.
The great majority of the fat is degraded
by the time it gets into your bloodstream.
- Really?
So overall, then, we humans, you don't think,
Ray P., we need to be eating any fish at all?
- Only because of the trace minerals
that are reliably in seafood.
Selenium and iodine, for example, aren't reliable.
If you eat foods grown only in one locality,
you can become deficient in a particular trace mineral.
- In your opinion, any fish better than others to eat,
if you're gonna have a little fish?
- Oh, yeah, the low-fat fish and the shellfish.
Shellfish are great sources of copper
because they generally don't use iron.
Oysters are high in iron, but squid is very good.
It's low in iron and high in copper
and has selenium and iodine and other trace minerals.
Cod and sole are low-fat fish that are safe.
- Cod and sole, huh?
- Mm-hmm. - Oh, oh.
So, but these fatty fish, you eat 'em
before they even get to where they're going,
they start causing the body a problem?
- Yeah, if you take, say, a fish oil supplement
and then look in your bloodstream,
there's enough of the oxidized fat already
to suppress the immune system.
That's why they use them as anti-inflammatories,
but the trouble is that they accumulate
and create progressive suppression of your immune system.
And people talk about them being required
for the brain structure because if you look
at an adult's brain, it's full of fish oil equivalent.
But a newborn, there have been many publications
saying that when they check the brain
of a newly born, say, miscarriage,
they find that the brain is very low
in polyunsaturated fatty acids.
And so they say you must supplement pregnant women
with fish oil or the equivalent
because babies are being born with a brain deficiency
of PUFA, but in France, there was a study
in which they did give a PUFA supplement
to pregnant women, figuring that they would advance
brain development, and so they gave a sound test
to the woman's abdomen to measure the baby's response.
They found that the babies learned more slowly
in utero if they had extra PUFA added to the diet,
and they were born with smaller brains.
And that shouldn't have been done in humans
because already in the 1960s and '70s,
experiments were showing that animals,
if the mother was fed a diet high in unsaturated fat,
the babies were born small-brained and slow learners.
If they were low in PUFA but fed, for example,
saturated fat, the babies had bigger brains
and learned faster.
- Are any of these unsaturated fats, like olive oil,
in your opinion, are good food?
- It's about 8% or 10% or 11% PUFA.
The rest of it is very good fat.
So if you hold it down to one or two teaspoons per day,
you're safe.
All during the growth time up to the age of 20,
the body is diluting the PUFA in the diet.
So the brain isn't seriously impaired
until about the age of 20.
When you stop growing in size and volume,
the brain and other tissues begin increasing
their concentration of PUFA.
So from 20 to the mid-40s,
the brain is becoming more and more polyunsaturated
and so more at risk of stress.
When you're under stress, you release these,
any of the stored PUFA into the bloodstream
where they can become oxidized and toxic.
- So in the fish oil and the APA/DHA arena,
not only what you're talking about,
isn't there also the issues of these things being rancid,
the way they're produced and stored and such?
- Oh yeah, that gives a head start on the problem.
- Yeah, wow.
- But even if you eat the most perfectly fresh PUFA,
by the time it reaches your stomach, it's deteriorating.
And then when it gets into the tissue, it's farther along.
And some of it reaches your brain and is stored for years.
But then every night,
your brain is renewing itself considerably.
But unfortunately, during the night,
your free fatty acids in the blood
coming out of your fat tissues rise.
And so the brain is trying to renew itself.
But what it finds in your bloodstream
by the time you're 40 is polyunsaturated fatty acids
that add to the damage of the brain.
So that every night, when you're over the age of 40,
your brain is at risk of deteriorating faster.
- Oh great, that's all we need, right?
(laughing)
Ray Peat is with us,
and Adam Berkstrom's co-hosting the show today
'cause he's done a lot of research with Mr. Peat,
Patrick Tempone, patricktempone1radionetwork.com.
If you'd like to join the show,
patricktempone1radionetwork.com.
Adam, what's the most fascinating thing
you've kind of picked up on the whole yellow fat thing
that you were first alerted to with Ray Peat?
- I found references of it also causing brown heart disease,
and it was known that cod liver oil was a cause of it
at about the time of the Civil War.
And there's several references,
maybe about a half a dozen or close to a dozen
that I've found from that time.
So this has been known for a long time.
And also, people forget that in 1982,
in the book "Life Extension" by Dirk Pearson and Sandy Shaw,
they basically told you to walk big circles
around omega-3s, and mentioned specifically DHA and EPA.
And the author of "Never Cry Wolf", I believe,
Farley Mowat, he also recommended avoiding fish,
and that the Inuit avoided fish,
and it was the government that gave them nets.
The Canadian government gave them nets,
and they wouldn't use it because they knew
if they ate just those fish, those cold water fish,
they would die.
And that is in his book about the Inuit,
the people of the deer, I believe it's called.
- Fascinating.
Ray Pede, so the DHA, EPA molecule, or whatever it is,
do we need any of this?
Like, just go right straight to some seaweeds,
or I don't know, something, do we need it?
And do we get it in other places
other than fish oils and stuff?
- No, if we eat only sugar, for example, for calories,
we synthesize the monounsaturated fat,
such as is the main fat of olive oil, oleic acid.
And from oleic acid, whether we get it from a good food,
like olive oil, or make it from our own sugar
or starch in our diet, that can be unsaturated.
And the normal polyunsaturated fat in our brain at birth,
is made from glucose by first making oleic acid
and then unsaturating that.
And these are omega minus nine polyunsaturated fats.
They are natural fat.
An Australian researcher tested,
he found an easy source of omega minus nine fatty acids,
and found that they are very powerfully anti-inflammatory,
and they don't break down and oxidize easily
because they have nine carbons at the end
that are saturated, which are very stable.
And the acid at the other end is a stabilizing factor.
So omega minus nine fats are natural
and concentrate in the brain
and give good brain function
and good stability against oxidation.
The whole concept of essential fatty acids,
which was disproved in Texas in 1946,
it was brought back in the 1950s,
when the food oil industry found they had lots of,
oh, cottonseed oil was the first.
It was a byproduct of the cotton industry.
And they were polluting the country
with the waste cottonseed,
and they found that they could extract the oil,
make people eat it as a food lubricant, basically.
There was a great campaign around 1950
to sell Wesson oil, cottonseed oil.
They gave recipes for making special pastries and cakes
using that instead of butter.
So it was all an advertising ploy, starting in the 1950s.
- Yeah.
- And people accepted the advertising,
and people grew up believing in essential fatty acid concept.
So when they went to medical school and did research,
it became the official doctrine.
And by the 1960s, people were already being poisoned
by eating their cottonseed oil and soy oil and so on.
The medical industry had convinced itself
that there was such a thing as essential fatty acids,
and that they were protecting, was the advertising line,
they would protect you against cholesterol
and saturated fats.
And so they put several hundred veterans in Los Angeles
on a diet with only the vegetable polyunsaturated fats,
or a fairly normal diet containing some butter
and cream and lard and so on.
Not really a saturated fat, but just an average diet.
At the end of eight years,
there were three times as many cancer deaths
in the group on vegetable oil as on the normal diet.
And so they stopped the study and said,
well, it doesn't protect against heart disease,
so we'll stop.
But they didn't advertise the fact
that it greatly increased the cancer mortality,
which had been known in animal studies already,
but the medical industry fell
for the food oil advertising line.
- I grew up in the '50s, and I know,
I had 'em probably did.
I don't know how old you are, Ray,
but I can remember the Western oil commercials.
Boy, they were everywhere.
Yeah. - Yeah.
- Yeah, wow, everywhere.
So in general, from good sources,
most saturated fats are just fine to consume for us?
- Yeah, and the trouble is that even the good fats,
olive oil has eight or 10% PUFA,
butter has two or 3%,
even coconut oil has two or 3%.
And these are, the cells don't prefer to oxidize those
because they're dangerous and poison the mitochondria,
so they're packed away in fat cells.
And so even highly selected,
so-called saturated fat diet,
we're putting some of these in the storage
and they're getting into the brain and fat tissues.
And so by the time a person is 50,
even if they've been reasonable in their diet choices,
they're still gonna have too much of the PUFA in their body,
and that makes you more susceptible to any stress
when they come out and poison you more intensely.
- Wow.
- That's how you make--
- Go ahead, Adam.
- I was gonna say, it's how you make lipofuscin too.
And lipofuscin now has been shown
to be not just a passive waste product,
but it groups into iron, zinc, and other toxic metals
and uses them against the human body,
and any body, except if you're a salmon
listening to this show, then DHA is okay.
In 1970, when I was working on my dissertation
trying to understand why hamsters aged
and became sterile halfway through their lifetime,
I found that their uterus was accumulating lipofuscin,
and so I studied it,
and it becomes like a little oxygen-consuming,
it's a brown speck in the cell,
but it binds iron and other heavy metals, as you said,
and that acts like an artificial hemoglobin
that delivers oxygen to reducing agents,
and so it produces the breakdown products peroxide
and consumes oxygen before it can get to your mitochondria.
So you seem to be consuming oxygen,
but you're not using it.
When I was doing that, just for fun,
I bought a quart of vegetable oil,
might have been soy oil or one of the standard liquid oils,
and put a clear plastic tube in the neck of the bottle
and sealed it and put the other end of the tube
in a glass of water, and came back a few hours later,
and it was sucking up water.
I'd been using that method to measure
the oxygen consumption of hamster uterus and so on,
and I found that the bottle of vegetable oil
was sucking up oxygen in the process of degrading itself.
It was consuming oxygen just like an animal would,
so when you get it in your body,
it competes with your mitochondria
in a purely wasteful, destructive process.
- Wow.
Ray Peat and Adam Bergstrom and Patrick Timponi,
oneradionetwork.com.
Let's move on.
We got a lot of emails, and we're gonna get to 'em,
but I wanted to get Ray Peat's opinion,
'cause it's been a long time since I've talked to you,
and by the way, it's rayPeat.com.
You can check out his work, and he has a lot of stuff there.
So much has been talked about of late,
the grains and the lectins and all this stuff,
and they're not for us, and human consumption,
and whatever.
Give us your opinion on what you think,
just grains in general, and let's consider
that whatever you're talking about,
we'll be talking about good, well-farmed,
organic whatever, whether it be rice or wheat or whatever.
What's your take on all the grain thing
that's going on in the world today with all the--
- In the 1960s, I was living and working in Mexico.
I had a school there, and I got interested
in how people could be fed economically,
and grains are a very cheap source of starch,
but they come with a variety of defensive toxins.
For a plant, its leaves are important,
cows and insects eat their leaves,
and so they put some toxins in their leaves,
but they can regenerate the leaves,
but their seeds are essential
for the next generation to survive.
So the worst toxins that a plant can produce
are put into the seeds as defense against predators.
And so the traditional societies,
like the indigenous Mexican preparation
of any grain was to soak it in lye,
lye or lime, but in China and other countries,
the same thing was practiced.
If they used grain, they would have ashes left over
from their fires, and so they would put the ashes in
and boil the grains with acid, or with lye, alkali.
It would break down the starches and the storage proteins,
the gluten-like chemicals.
And so the native Mexican diet based on corn,
no one was getting pellagra, but in the South,
when people started growing corn,
they didn't know the traditional lye or lime treatment,
and so pellagra became an epidemic
through the Southern states
because of the corn in the diet.
And corn is one of the less toxic grains.
Any grain should be highly processed,
such as with lime or lye to degrade the toxins.
And just soaking a fresh grain,
if you soak it for a day or two,
that activates enzymes,
and turning it into basically a sprout,
then the toxins are reduced.
The root and the shoot will have some toxins,
but the worst toxins are in the seed itself.
- So if one wants to consume a good organic brown rice
or something like that, just soak it for 24 hours
is the best way to do it before cooking it?
- Yeah, it loses some of its characteristic taste,
but it's a lot safer.
- Here's an email for you all from Lindsey.
What thyroid medication does Ray P. recommend
for hypothyroid, and why is there such a scarcity
of natrithroid?
- It's a fairly long story.
I've got some articles on my website about it,
but until about 1940,
the Agriculture Department hadn't required
that it be removed from meats.
The waste from the slaughterhouses
used to be put into hamburger and such.
In 1940 or '42, the Agriculture Department
declared that the thyroid gland had to be sold
to basically the Armour meat company
to produce thyroid hormone by desiccating the gland,
removing the fat, adding glucose to it,
and putting it in tablets.
But until that time, anyone who was eating
a traditional meat-based diet, for example,
in Germany, they would put the thyroid gland
and other parts in the sausages.
And anyone that made traditional fish or chicken soup,
the neck and the thyroid and the head
would go into the soup.
So everyone was getting thyroid as a natural supplement.
After 1942, it was by law not permitted in food.
So at that point, we became dependent
on a supplement.
It's our natural antidote to the accumulation
of polyunsaturated fats in the tissues
because those, as they build up in the blood,
block every function of the thyroid hormone.
They block the production of it in your gland,
the transport in your blood,
and the reception and use of it in your mitochondria.
So PUFA are the great enemy of thyroid.
And if we aren't allowed to get it
in our natural chicken soup or fish soup,
then we're dependent on getting it as a supplement.
And Armour made a great supplement
for almost 100 years.
Then they sold their company to Revlon,
the cosmetics company, and the price went up
about tenfold, and in a series of sales,
the pills went from less than one cent each
up to close to a dollar each,
simply as a matter of financial arrangements.
But still, Armour has gone, with the new owners,
Armour has gone through a series of problems
because they changed the formula,
added various junk to it, but insisted it hasn't changed
because it's still called Armour thyroid.
Since then, other companies have taken over
more or less the traditional Armour formula,
but it depends on who they are getting
their glandular material from.
The Armour descendant, Forest Pharmaceuticals,
said several years ago that they were using
the raw material of the gland to extract
thyrocalcitonin to regulate calcium.
That used to be a part of the natural thyroid supplement.
So now it's hard to know whether your thyroid glandular
has been pre-extracted, losing the calcitonin component.
So since the 1990s, I've been using a product
made in Mexico called CINOPLUS,
which imitates the Armour formula.
The Armour company made a synthetic equivalent
of the glandular and called it Thyrolar,
and that formula was exactly copied
by a couple other companies, but CINOPLUS continues
to make the Armour equivalent in a synthetic form.
When I started buying it, 100 tablets cost 60 cents,
and now they're selling for about $20 for a bottle,
but still it's cheaper.
The equivalent made in the US
is close to $100 for that many tablets.
- Ray Peat is with us, and Adam called back on the landline.
We were getting lots of weird noises on your Skype.
Thanks for doing that, and you know, Mr. Peat,
I've been real curious about, let's see if I have this right.
Well, you've been kind of a proponent,
and I think it has this thyroid functionality to it
of a faster pulse rate, meaning actually been more healthful
like a 70 beats per minute rather than 60,
and an indication of thyroid function.
Is that correct?
- Yeah, there were some studies in the 1980s
of various things related to heart rate.
They found that brain function closely corresponded
to heart rate.
They looked at kids in school, in high school,
and saw that their grade average corresponded
to their heart rate, and that led them to look
at people with pacemakers.
They would give a person with pacemakers set at 70 beats
a mental test, and then they would just turn the regulator
up and give them an 85 per minute heart rate,
and their mental functions all improved.
And there were studies that showed that if your blood
pressure and heart rate increased every year a little bit
on average, you were doing well, but they saw that if,
for example, at the age of 70 or so,
your pulse rate stopped increasing
or even started decreasing, those people
didn't have a long life expectancy.
- Really?
- As long as things were tightening up with age,
in effect compensating for the increased inefficiency
because of the PUFA storage.
If you could keep increasing your blood delivery,
you were making up for that inefficiency
from the stored lipofuscin.
- I'll be darned.
Yeah, the reason I ask is 'cause mine's about 55 or 60,
and if I get 65 or so at night, Mr. Peat,
I mean, I can tell if I'm above 60,
and I don't feel good, it feels kind of anxious
and feels like a body doesn't wanna sleep.
It's almost, you know what I'm saying?
- Have you checked your temperature at those times?
If your hands are cold as you're increasing
your heart rate, that means you're running on adrenaline,
which is not good.
- Oh, okay.
- Your hands should be warm, and your oral temperature
shouldn't be too much above your hand temperature.
Keeping your adrenaline low will let your heart rate
correspond to your metabolic rate.
And when you get your temperature up
so that your temperature rises to about 98 when you wake up,
and then gets up to 98.5 or six or seven
when you're moving around, then your heart
will have a corresponding increase in rate.
And that goes with also an increased stroke volume
of the heart, so it delivers more blood per beat.
If you're having high adrenaline or other stress hormones,
your heart is going to have a short stroke,
not deliver very much per beat,
and so it has to beat faster.
And that leads to inefficiency and tissue stress.
- So if you get the body temperature up,
am I hearing you correctly, the heart may beat
a little faster, but you won't feel the anxiety
because of it?
- Yeah, yeah.
- That's what you're saying?
- Yeah, when your metabolism is going at a good high rate,
you're producing carbon dioxide in proportion
to your oxygen consumption.
And the carbon dioxide has a relaxing,
constructive, sedative effect.
- Adam, you talk a lot about the carbon dioxide.
- Yes, definitely.
I got the information from Dr. Ray P.
(laughing)
And by the way, let me add that we're just discussing
the snowflake on the tip of the iceberg
because Dr. Ray P. is a true polymath.
He's a Renaissance man.
I recommend you go to his website
and read his numerous blogs.
He also sells a newsletter.
And I don't know when his books are coming back online,
but he writes books also.
- Well, good plug there.
Ray P., stay right there, Mr. P.
We're gonna do a couple commercials, okay?
- Okay.
- You guys stay right there.
Wow, what fun.
Patrick@OneRadioNetwork.com.
We have lots of emails here.
I'm not sure how long Mr. P. can hang out.
I'll ask him when we go back.
And let's do a few things here
and then we'll be right back.
Stay right there.
Previously, we talked with Dr. Rulan Zhu
about using Perlcium on your teeth.
- You have to experience it.
You'll believe it.
- Yeah, you do.
That's what I've been saying to my listeners.
I keep saying, can't even explain this.
Just buy it.
Just click on it, buy some.
Trust me, just trust me.
And you're gonna like the way your teeth look.
That's what I keep telling them.
- Dentists, they did an experiment on their clients
and they literally prove
and they literally show the picture every day.
And when they take it in a few days,
their tooth literally become, like you said,
like a pearl.
Like a pearl.
And it looks so beautiful
and really white and shiny.
Yeah, it really works.
And it's also scientifically proven by the experiment.
And he literally proved it is not only good for your teeth,
he also proved it's also good for your gum.
- Try some of this Perlcium.
I think you're gonna love it.
You can try it internally as well.
Helps with sleep.
Great way to get the absorbable calcium
and also on your face.
And you'll see the green ad there,
the beautiful green container.
Get the capsules or the powder, Perlcium.
Click and order, juanradionetwork.com.
Previously with Andrew Goss,
I asked him why would someone want to buy coins
from his company?
- So if you don't know coins,
you better know your coin dealer.
And you shouldn't buy coins
from someone who isn't well-known registered dealer.
So if they're an NGC dealer,
they're registered with NGC.
If they're a PCGS dealer,
they're registered with PCGS.
Ask questions.
Don't just, oh yeah,
here's 10 grand or 50 grand or 150 grand.
I just want to buy coins,
let me know what I'm getting.
And no, that's not how an intelligent investor does it.
And we do not let you do that.
So if you're not willing to learn
about the coins that you're buying,
maybe you should find another coin firm.
Don't call this one.
'Cause we're gonna insist that you know why
and how a coin is rare.
And once you know that,
then I think you can take that knowledge
into the marketplace
and make intelligent investment decisions.
- Aha, what a concept,
intelligent investment decisions.
I've known Andrew for 25 years.
He's the real deal.
His company, STL 800-468-2646.
Give him a call if you're interested.
800-468-2646.
Once again, our just heartfelt thanks to all of you
in the outpouring of love and affection
and goodwill for Andrew Goss,
who left us at the mortal coil, as they say,
a few days ago of suddenly brain aneurysm
and just hundreds of emails and all kinds of stuff.
So we really, really appreciate it.
PhD in biology, University of Oregon.
He's really well studied for a long, long time,
as you can hear, Dr. Ray Peat.
As Adam said, his website is rayPeat.com.
You're gonna find all kinds of things there,
a newsletter and his books and things like that.
Mr. Peat, let's stick with the temperature a minute.
So let's see if I'm hearing what you're saying.
So is the body temperature,
so the whole Broder-Barnes idea of in the morning,
you wanna have it, what, 98.6 by mouth or 97.6 under the arm,
something like that.
Is that a mechanism of thyroid only
or there must be other things going on?
Does it necessarily mean you have a pokey thyroid?
And if you do have a pokey thyroid,
what's your best suggestions?
- Broder-Barnes spent most of his career
up in Colorado at a high altitude
where people were seldom overheated with high humidity.
And in Eugene in the summer,
with some days were very humid and hot,
I found that hypothyroid people
would come in with normal temperatures.
And I realized that even a dead person
would have a fairly good temperature
when the environmental temperature is very high.
So I started looking at the pulse rate
as well as the temperature.
And there were lots of experiments
with the quality of brain function
according to brain temperature,
as well as pulse rate and delivery of blood,
glucose and oxygen to the brain.
Someone devised sort of a heating pad
integrated with a helmet
so they could heat the head specifically.
And again, they would give people mental tests,
mental calculation and memory and so on.
And they found that when they heated the head
up to I think 101 degrees or slightly more,
their mental abilities increased
with each degree of warmer.
And if you look at some fairly small-brained animals,
if they have a high body temperature,
like crows and parrots run around
with well over 105 degrees Fahrenheit temperature
with a very small brain, they're extremely intelligent.
It isn't brain volume,
it's a combination of brain volume
plus the working temperature.
The warmer you can stand,
you don't want to force yourself to get warmer
because your liver has to keep supplying
a good stream of glucose
and your lungs have to regulate
the oxygen delivery efficiently.
But if your system can stand it,
the brain works better the warmer it is.
- Yeah, so again, the mechanism for cold hands and feet,
is it totally thyroid or other things going on?
- Yeah, you can't have cold hands and feet
except during stress.
Emotional stress raises your adrenaline
and will make your hands and feet and nose get cold.
But if your thyroid is low,
you experience stress almost all the time.
So people run around doing their business
with cold hands and feet
and wonder why they're inefficient.
If you're highly stressed, for example,
during the night, cortisol rises to a peak in the morning
because your blood sugar is falling.
Low thyroid people have extremely high cortisol
in the morning, as well as sometimes adrenaline.
That can make your morning temperature misleadingly warm
because the cortisol is tearing down your protein tissues
to turn them into glucose.
- My goodness.
- And the adrenaline will make your skin cold
to increase your core temperature.
So it can be misleading unless you check
all of those things.
The cortisol and adrenaline will show up
as your increased morning temperature and heart rate.
But then if you have some orange juice and milk,
for example, a couple of hours later,
if your temperature and pulse rate are slower,
that means you're under heavy stress during the night.
- So once again, it's back to our reaction
to this world around us, what we call stress
is a huge player in, well, everything, right, Mr. B?
- Yeah, everything is less stressful
when your thyroid is good.
- If we had a good thyroid medication possible,
are you okay with people doing that for a little bit
to keep your thyroid up, or you like to do other ways,
recommend other ways to get the thyroid just working good?
- Sure, unless you're eating chicken neck soup
or fish head soup every week,
everyone really needs a certain amount
of thyroid supplement by the time they're 30 or 40.
- Chicken neck soup or fish head soup, really?
- Yeah, if you're on a farm or where you get the--
- The real good stuff, yeah.
- Yeah, for a while, at Safeway stores,
I found that chicken necks contained,
about one in 10 contained the whole thyroid gland.
But when I mentioned that, everyone started buying it,
and Safeway stopped selling their necks
because they didn't want to get in trouble
with the agriculture department.
- Oh, you mean, so if you could find some good,
just chicken necks from Farmer's Market or something,
they'd probably have a little thyroid in there
and just cook it's soup and make some of that?
- Yeah, that works just like the pill.
- I'll be darned.
Oh, we have so many emails here.
Let's see what we can do here.
Here's what I'm confused about.
Many practitioners who support Dr. Peat's ideas
of reducing PUFAs in favor of saturated oils
always make an amendment for people
that carry APOE4 gene, like myself.
For this population, the advice is to lower
the amount of saturated fats and use more mimosa
and more, and polys, because they can't utilize
these fats properly.
They become plaque in the arteries and brain,
leading to Alzheimer's.
Does Mr. Peat have a comment?
- My recent newsletter on cholesterol,
there were two of them, but I reviewed the effects
of PUFA on plaque and cholesterol.
And with aging, the free cholesterol in the brain
drastically decreases.
People talk about the cholesterol increasing with age,
but free cholesterol is decreasing
because it's being bound to polyunsaturated fats,
which make it toxic, and it piles up in the brain
and lowers brain metabolism and brain function.
And in the plaque, it's the in proportion to the PUFA
attached to the cholesterol as an ester form
that makes the plaque.
In that newsletter, I go in detail over how the enzymes
are changed under the influence of PUFA.
So the plaque is strictly a matter of excess PUFA.
About 40 years ago, people checked the lipofuscin content,
basically yellow fat disease of the arteries,
and found that the plaque was loaded with lipofuscin,
the degenerated form of free fatty acids.
- So back to the PUFAs again.
Just don't eat these things.
- Yeah, they cause plaque as well as other problems.
That's in medical books too.
- What's that, Adam?
- That is actually in medical books
that the plaque is formed as PUFAs,
and they wish people to believe
that they're saturated fatty acids doing it, and it's not.
- For about 40 years, the agriculture department
was listing lard as a saturated fat.
So there are hundreds of publications
on so-called saturated fat damage,
and they were using lard as their saturated fat.
Two or three years ago, it came out someone measured
that lard saturation found that it was about 30% PUFA.
- Oh, you're talking about the hydrogenated classic Crisco
or something like that.
- Fully hydrogenated fat is very safe.
There was a Russian study of using saturated peanut oil,
very hard saturated fat shortening,
and they found that it reversed
the aging changes in mitochondria.
And since that time, I've shifted
to using hydrogenated coconut oil,
which is now available on the internet.
- And that's okay, that's good.
- Very good, yeah, because it has zero PUFA.
- Okay, is it actually hydrogenated
or just kind of pure or vergage in coconut oil, right?
- No, it's actually chemically hydrogenated.
- That's okay.
- And yeah, we're looking for ways
to get the pure saturated form by distillation
or something other than the chemical treatment.
That isn't available yet, but it would be the ideal.
- Any advantages over like a good coconut oil like that
or maybe a well-sourced, like an organic farmer
that's doing pigs or something
and you get the real pure fat that way?
Is there any preference in your mind?
- In Mexico, out in the country
where you can get chickens or pork
that were fed on fruit and tortillas and--
- Yeah.
- Rather than soy and corn, they're very safe to eat.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Here's an email, Patrick and Adam
have been recently discussing Dr. Emanuel Ravisi
and his use of the periodic table
to correlate catabolic and adiabolic imbalances in the body.
Can Mr. P discuss how the thyroid might be an influence
to those states and how we supplementing
with thyroid extract could possibly correct the imbalances?
- Yeah, Ravisi was very good on noticing
the effect of the day-night cycle.
And I started thinking about that about 40 or 50 years ago
that you have to look at the hormones in context.
If your liver is in very good condition
and your muscles are working right,
your body should store several ounces,
maybe 10 ounces of sugar,
which can be drawn on during the night.
And if you didn't store your sugar efficiently
because you were not producing carbon dioxide
but instead lactic acid, that wastes your sugar.
So during the night, you run out of sugar
and that raises your adrenaline and cortisol
and you start breaking down your tissues,
releasing whatever fat is stored.
And that's what causes bone loss
during the night, for example.
And if you can keep your body well-stocked on sugar,
then you can avoid that nighttime deterioration stress.
- Well-stocked with sugar, and how do we do that?
- Avoiding the PUFA is the essential thing.
And eating adequate carbohydrate.
I've known people who got very sick
when they were on a pure meat diet
because of several reasons.
Poor balance of amino acids,
but mainly the high phosphate content
creates stress and increases the cortisol and adrenaline.
- Gail writes that sometimes I wake up
in the middle of the night,
and like Patrick talks about sometimes,
it's just funny to have some kind of a carbohydrate
and it just puts me back to sleep like a little baby.
And Gail, she wants to know,
what's going on in my body when it reacts like that
to a carbohydrate?
- Salt has a similar effect
because it's needed to absorb the sugar from your intestine.
And when you have too much PUFA in your body,
that poisons the ability
to produce carbon dioxide from sugar.
And so in making lactic acid from glucose,
you use several times more glucose per minute
than when you're making carbon dioxide.
It just churns through the stored glycogen in your body.
So within an hour or two of going to sleep,
your body rings the alarm that you need more sugar.
It turns on the stress hormones.
And so if you have,
sometimes just a little salty snack will do it
because that makes your intestine absorb the sugar
more efficiently and lowers stress hormones.
But for example, a tablespoon of sugar
in a glass of milk, could be honey,
will usually put a person back to sleep for a couple hours.
- But you said actually a salty snack
would do the same thing.
- Very often it does.
I've seen people with hyperactive kids
who never wanted to go to bed,
gave them a little bit of a salty consomme or something
and just right out like they'd been given a shot
of morphine or something.
- I'll be darned.
Here is Mark, he's in Tennessee.
Whenever I drink coffee with sugar,
when I drink orange juice,
I develop a slight heartburn for a short period of time.
- How might it alleviate this problem?
What could be the cause?
- Good oranges are very important.
Much of the orange juice that's sold commercially
is from unripe oranges.
And if they accidentally happen to get ripe oranges,
they add acid to it to make it taste like people expect.
So good sweet oranges are very easy on the stomach.
And coffee, the various brands vary,
but coffee is always somewhat acidic.
And it's much easier on the stomach
if you put some good heavy cream in it as well as sugar.
- And that kind of smooths out coffee, doesn't it?
The heavy cream.
- Yeah, makes it taste better
and is much easier on the stomach
and you absorb the caffeine more slowly.
- Overall, you're okay generally.
I'm sorry, I haven't read a lot of your work.
Just get so busy here,
but just with good dairy and cheese and things like that,
you think the body's okay with all those things?
- Oh yeah, cheese and eggs and milk
and occasional shellfish.
I think the average person benefits from having liver
two or three times a month
because so many of the foods are unreliable
for nutritional content.
- Shellfish has a lot of cholesterol,
but we want to keep our cholesterol up though,
right Mr. P?
- Yeah, the cosmetics companies have caught on to the fact
that old people's free cholesterol decreases tremendously.
The skin aging is basically a cholesterol deficiency
syndrome, the way Alzheimer's disease,
it gets the fatty acid ester, which is toxic,
but the real cholesterol is down by about 50% in aged skin.
The cosmetics companies are building on experiments
which showed that if you add cholesterol to the skin,
it restores the cell function.
Live cells come back, the dead flaky cells aren't produced
when there's adequate cholesterol.
So they're actually adding cholesterol
to the cosmetic creams.
And that biologically is very appropriate
because the reason old people need more vitamin D
is because vitamin D is made when sunlight hits
the cholesterol in the skin.
And if you're old, the skin has only half as much
cholesterol as a young person,
so you produce half as much vitamin D.
So an old person just doesn't,
they need twice as much sunlight as a young person.
- A lot of studies we've recently seen, Mr. P,
out of Europe about the higher the cholesterol number
for people 60, 70, and 80, the longer they live.
- Yeah, there were studies in the US too
in which people in rest homes and such,
they looked at their cholesterol
and checked how long they lived.
250, 260 were the longest living.
It's the same idea.
If you look at how much progesterone an ovary produces,
it's exactly proportional to the amount of cholesterol
in the blood going into the ovary.
Same with your adrenals and brain, any tissue.
It makes its hormones like DHEA, pregnenolone,
and progesterone by converting cholesterol
straight into the steroid hormone.
And to do that, thyroid is the catalyst.
- Do you have a number that you go by
that you'd like to see the minimum cholesterol
so people can do the whole hormone thing,
testosterone and the rest of it?
- Yeah, 180 is good for a middle-aged person,
but by the time a person is 50,
according to the Framingham study,
the incidence of Alzheimer's disease is higher
in people who are not over 200 in their cholesterol.
- Patrick, this is an interesting question from Leroy.
Patrick recently had a good friend
that had a brain aneurysm and just left.
Can Mr. Peat explain the overall mechanism of strokes,
whether they be in the brain or other parts of the body?
- Experimenters have produced aneurysms
in as short a time as one hour
giving the angiotensin hormone.
You produce angiotensin when the kidneys
aren't getting what they need.
Kidneys send out a signal, renin,
which causes many tissues to produce angiotensin
and the angiotensin converting enzymes,
the inhibitors are used as drugs.
That's one of the few drugs that has a logical basis.
If you give an animal an overdose of angiotensin,
it immediately damages the artery
so much that it has an aneurysm.
And if you block that angiotensin,
you can reverse aneurysms,
simply restoring the energy to the blood vessels.
And you don't produce excess angiotensin
if your kidneys are getting the blood supply they need,
nourishment they need.
And so thyroid and a diet adequate and free of PUFA
is what keeps your kidneys getting the nutrients they need
so they don't raise your angiotensin.
- So that could be the connection with the kidneys
and the filtration and the classic high blood pressure
and the strokes?
- Yeah, and salt is another thing
that guarantees adequate blood volume,
perfusing the kidneys so they don't produce
those toxic angiotensin reactants.
Salt lowers your aldosterone produced by the adrenals
and aldosterone works parallel to the angiotensin
causing tissue degeneration.
There are now drugs coming out to lower
or oppose aldosterone to protect the failing heart.
High aldosterone is produced by chronic deficiency
of sodium in your diet.
And aldosterone causes fibrosis,
aging of all of the tissues,
but the heart is usually the first one
that shows up the effect as heart failure.
So the low sodium diet is one of the most dangerous things.
- And that's why some people I think have a good experience
maybe using salt before bed,
even like a half a teaspoon just straight away with sleep.
That makes sense, huh?
- Yeah, even a fourth of a teaspoon is very helpful.
- Here's an email from Robert.
Does Ray Peat still drink three quarts of milk a day?
And what are the benefits of milk?
Are you still drinking three quarts of milk a day?
- Yeah, sometimes 20, 30 years ago,
I drank a gallon a day.
- Really?
- The problem with grains and leaves
is that the plants produce these defensive toxins.
And if a cow ate those and didn't process them in some way,
the cow would succumb to all of those toxins.
But the cow has an extra stomach
that lets bacteria and protozoa and yeast
process out those toxins.
So it's a very complex chemical detoxifying process.
Before the cow absorbs the protein and amino acids
and sugars into the blood,
the plant material has been very detoxified.
So you're getting all of those nutrients
multiply filtered.
It's filtered before it gets into the bloodstream
and from the bloodstream to the udder,
it's filtered again.
So it's the most highly refined food
that we can get economically.
- And I suspect you're talking about raw,
really good grass-fed and all that stuff.
- Yeah, but even low-fat pasteurized milk,
still the best food available,
even if it isn't organic and raw.
- No kidding, really.
I'm surprised to hear you say that
because there's so much negative stuff said about,
Mr. Peat, about pasteurizing milk and all that.
- Yeah, it's better when it's unpasteurized.
- Sure.
- And the whole milk is superfood,
but just 1% milk from the supermarket
is better than most alternatives.
- Steve writes in, "Fats are fun.
"Nothing like butter, coconut oil.
"How about wheat germ oil?
"I heard it helps build the myelin sheaths.
"Is that true?
"And what are the positive or negative effects
"of consuming wheat germ oil?
"Is it actually made from wheat?
"Or if so, would there be concern about the source?"
- The samples that I tried 30 or 40, 50 years ago
always were chokingly rancid,
dark color and deteriorated by oxygen
because it's so highly polyunsaturated.
I think it's a very toxic oil,
but it does have the vitamin E in it.
So if you've refined it to any degree,
then it is a source of vitamin E,
but I think it's very dangerous
because of how easily it gets rancid.
It's the same with lecithin.
Commercial lecithin generally ranges
from yellow to brown to black,
depending on how deteriorated it is.
Fresh lecithin is pure white,
and it's the polyunsaturated fats
turning to pre-yellow fat.
Turns yellow right in the bottle.
- Lots of lecithin in it, really good.
Range, eggs, you like eggs?
- Yeah, if the chickens have been fed--
- Good stuff, yeah.
If they range in the pasture.
And in Mexico, people feed their chickens tortillas
and such things, vegetables, fruits, tortillas,
and let them eat bugs.
Then the eggs are very saturated.
I've looked up the degree of polyunsaturated fats in eggs
over the last, I think it was 80 years.
- Oh, wow.
- And there's a tremendous,
the commercial eggs are now,
mostly polyunsaturated fat.
- Wow.
- Where 100 years ago, they were extremely saturated.
So I've reduced my US egg consumption to one per day,
figuring that I can count on detoxifying some of the PUFA.
- Yeah, so I wonder, Ray Peat,
farmers markets around the country,
you can find farmers that range feed their chickens,
but sometimes they have to supplement,
and you can find farmers that are doing good organic grains
with no soy even, here in Dripping Springs,
if you can believe it, no soy.
Now are those grains,
even if they're well-tended organic grains,
are they adding to the PUFA in the eggs?
- Yes.
- Are they?
- And you want to check the box
to see that they haven't given them flax
or any of the omega minus three,
because those make the egg taste fishy.
- Oh, so you want to make sure there's no flax.
What else in the feed that they don't want?
You know, just omega three stuff, right?
- Yeah, I don't know if it's even legal to put fish meal in,
but for a while they were getting fish additives.
- So this is a good question, yeah.
You've been talking so much about PUFAs, Mr. Peat.
Can you just list some of the most active
and popular PUFAs that people are consuming?
- Oh, fish oil, krill oil, fatty fish.
People advocating salmon,
but I stopped eating salmon 45 years ago, I guess.
And then the various cooking oils,
soy, corn, safflower oil,
all of the highly unsaturated oils
should be avoided perfectly.
- So salmon's a fatty fish.
- Yeah.
- Oh, man.
A lot of people eat salmon.
Yeah.
Is avocado filled with PUFAs as well?
Says Lynn, which is the best liquid oil to cook with
and the best oil to consume on salads besides olive oil?
Good question there.
- If the avocado oil comes from the seed,
it's pretty saturated and safe.
But if they use a whole fruit,
that would be very unsaturated.
So I think you shouldn't eat
a lot of fresh avocados regularly.
- And so, and she's asking the best liquid
that you like to cook with?
I mean, like oil, yeah, oil, sorry.
- Yeah, I use a little olive oil for some foods,
quite a bit of butter for frying eggs,
and for frying chicken wings, for example,
saturated hydrogenated coconut oil is ideal.
- Adam, are you familiar with what Ray and Peat
are talking about this hydrogenation of coconut oil
and how you like coconut oil?
- Yes, I am.
Definitely a lot of the coconut oils
in the health food store are not pure oil.
So at the very least, you get a pure oil,
which Ray and Peat used to get,
if I remember right, from some company.
But now the hydrogenated oil,
I understand that he's gone to.
And it may have been my experience
because the coconut oil that's called virgin coconut oil,
often in the health food store,
contrary to popular belief,
because there are some poofers in there,
it does go rancid.
So I definitely take Dr. Peat's advice.
- Ghee too, right, Mr. Peat?
That's a good one?
Some ghee?
- Some what?
- Ghee?
- Oh, ghee, yeah, that's fine.
Fresh butter, it's just a way of concentrating
the fat from butter.
But I actually like the taste of fresh butter
better than ghee, but ghee is nutritionally good.
- Does Mr. Peat have an opinion about the TSH level?
So many people vary on their numbers that they go by.
That would be a determination for a low thyroid.
- The problem with TSH is that
the medical profession practically,
totally ignores the factors that regulate TSH.
When you're under stress, the stress hormones lower it.
So you can look like you're hyperthyroid.
You can have 0.005 on your TSH
and seem to be a hyperthyroid person.
But it could be your stress hormones lowering it.
And if you don't measure the stress hormones
and your T3, reverse T3 is also increased
by those same stress hormones.
So people are being diagnosed as hyperthyroid
when they're extremely stressed and hypothyroid
with very low real T3 relative to reverse T3.
So you have to measure several things at the same time
to know what the TSH means.
I've never seen a person who really felt good
whose TSH was as high as 2.0.
And people are healthiest when their TSH is 0.4 or less.
- Wow, that's pretty low, wow.
- Yeah, the range has been adjusted down over the years.
But then a couple of years ago,
some pressure was exerted and they reversed
and went back up for a while.
But the safe range seems to be now recognized
by quite a few experts as 0.2 to 2.0.
- Oh, be darned, that's pretty low.
This is a good question.
John says, "Patrick has talked from time to time
"and had an interview a fellow up in Pennsylvania,
"from Birmingham, Pennsylvania, Amos Miller,
"where you can actually buy fresh thyroid
"from well-tended cows."
Would Mr. Peat think it's a good idea to eat some of those?
- Yeah, you want to recognize the potency, though.
- Yeah, why be strong?
- Yeah, one gram of dehydrated gland
is equal to 15 grains of thyroid.
I knew someone who liked chicken necks
when he worked on the farm.
And on the day they had chicken, he would eat five necks.
And he said that afternoon,
he was always too hot to work very well.
(laughing)
He was getting about five grains in one meal.
And that can make you overheat.
So one grain would be 15,
one gram of dehydrated beef thyroid
would be equal to 15 grains of the medical--
- Oh, I see.
So one gram of like a beef thyroid,
if it's fresh or whatever it was,
equals 15 grains?
- Yeah. - Of desiccated, right.
Of desiccated.
- Yeah, so you want to divide it into 15 portions.
- Yeah, be pretty careful there, yeah.
- Yeah. - Wow.
Please ask Mr. P what a person should do
who's had their thyroid radiated.
- Oh, boy.
- Then you need to take thyroid.
Probably the healthy young person's gland
produces about four grains of thyroid per day,
the equivalent.
And doctors will often supply only thyroxine,
only T4, and that will suppress your TSH down to zero,
but you aren't necessarily getting
any thyroid function from that
because it depends on good sugar supply
and selenium for your tissues to convert T4
to the active T3.
So using a glandular thyroid or the equivalent,
such as Cynoplus or Thyrolar,
you should think in terms of a healthy person
being able to produce four grains per day.
You can usually maintain good function at two grains,
but just in case symptoms show up,
you shouldn't resist taking the full four-grain supplement.
Armour Company used to make lots of five-grain tablets,
and veterinarians generally recognized
that cocker spaniels often needed a five-grain tablet,
even though they weighed maybe 50 pounds.
And lots of human patients required five grains.
I knew a couple people,
one woman who was very sick for about 30 years.
Her hips were about a yard wide,
and she had to use a walker, could barely get around.
She found a doctor who would prescribe five grains,
and she improved so much over a couple of months,
she went to another doctor and got an additional five grains
and on 10-grains supplement, she was almost well.
She found a third doctor,
and taking 15 grains a day in just two or three weeks,
she was totally healthy and got a job.
And after 30 years of extreme hypothyroidism,
that was apparently because her liver had been poisoned
so that she wasn't able to convert the T4 component.
And with 15 grains of Armour thyroid,
she was really getting the equivalent
of a good four-grain function.
- Now, do I understand, is a grain, that's 60 milligrams?
- 60 or 61.
- Wow, I mean, so the body makes, what,
240 milligrams of healthy thyroid?
- Yeah, when a healthy person is working well,
it can make that much.
- What does Mr. Peat think about collagen from bone broth?
Good for us?
- Yeah, if you don't use the marrow,
avoid the long bones, use just the joints,
so that there's a lot of cartilage and ligaments.
Those are the source of the gelatin.
Very little comes out of the bone itself.
- Oh, you mean like chicken feed and stuff like that,
they have a lot of collagen.
- Yeah, chicken backs and necks and skin and wings,
those are the greatest chicken soup.
- Are the cosmetic companies that Mr. Peat talked about
adding LDL, HDL, or a combination to their skin creams?
- I don't, I assumed that they were just using
a fairly refined cholesterol,
rather than the actual stuff out of the bloodstream.
- Here's from Don in New Jersey.
Do you think NAD IV treatment is safe, NAD?
Never heard of that one.
Never heard?
- NAD?
- NAD IV treatment, right.
- No, niacinamide raises your cellular NAD,
and that's what you want.
But if you inject things intravenously,
I think you're risking reactions en route to the cell.
Niacinamide is taken up,
and the cell does no harm in the cell,
and it's converted to NAD,
so you can raise it in a safe way.
- Leslie is in Sacramento.
Supposing we're on a good, well-balanced,
totally organic diet,
are there supplements that Mr. Ray Peat suggested
that we should be taking just because we need them?
Good question.
- It depends on what's in your diet.
Often people will include green salad
and whole grain bread,
and maybe legumes and some things that are high in toxins.
The number of people who are chronically sick
because they're eating green salads, it's amazing.
I've seen people get well from chronic problems
just by leaving out their green salads.
- Well, what's with the lettuce?
What's going on?
- It's the defensive chemicals in the leaf.
They aren't as intense as in the seed,
but they are designed to block digestive enzymes
in the grazers.
Cows, goats, and insects, and worms,
and things that would eat their leaves get poisoned,
unless they, like a cow, have a rumen to detoxify those.
And people don't have the detoxifying system,
and so their digestive enzymes are simply blocked
by the chemicals in the leafy greens.
Unless you cook them thoroughly,
that breaks down a lot of the toxins.
- So that's the argument for a lot of people,
Ray Peat, of cooking vegetables rather than raw.
I know my grandma used to, she'd say,
"Oh yeah, you should cook your lettuce.
"Don't eat raw, cook your lettuce."
She lived to 96 and never was sick a day in her life.
- Yeah, she-- - She knew.
- Yeah, she knew, even without reading the research,
apparently. - Yeah, yeah.
Well, it's funny.
Here's a lady that, she's got swollen ankles,
a lot of knees, and both knees have knobs sticking out.
I also have a pregnant-looking belly fat,
and the wrists and knees are about two years old,
and I'm wondering if Mr. Peat would suggest
like progesterone and maybe thyroid product
for potential benefit.
- Yeah, the basic problem is usually
that a low thyroid person has slow digestion,
and so foods are feeding bacteria in the intestine.
Bacteria produce endotoxin,
and if your intestine is irritated and hypothyroid,
you absorb that endotoxin into the system
along with some allergens,
and so the combination of low thyroid and slow digestion
will cause various inflammatory degenerative processes.
And when you're low thyroid,
you aren't converting cholesterol
to the protective hormones,
and so if your cholesterol is very high,
that means you're probably deficient
in those protective hormones like progesterone
and pregnenolone and DHEA.
And I've seen people supplement,
like a woman came visiting from Sweden
to give lectures in Eugene,
and she had had, I think it was two joints replaced,
and was about to have knee and shoulder replacements
because all of her joints were getting so deformed.
She spread progesterone over all of her body
and spent two or three days in Eugene
walking around seeing the sights
with absolutely no joint pain.
- Gail writes in, "I'm taking 90 milligrams of pig thyroid
"and I feel good.
"I just wonder if I take it ongoing that it's harmful
"or will my thyroid ever get back to doing things normally
"without the pig thyroid?"
- People have experimented with that,
experimentally giving higher and higher doses
of a supplement, watching what is happening
with the glands output.
And they would increase the dose
until the thyroid shrank and stopped producing.
And then they would stop the dosing and measure the return.
And it's almost immediate.
I've seen people who could feel a stretching sensation
when they were changing their thyroid dose.
Once I was supplementing a full four-grain dose,
and I noticed that I had indentations
beside my Adam's apple where my thyroid had been.
So I stopped taking it.
The very next morning, my neck was smooth.
The glands had enlarged enough
to fill out those empty spaces.
So it's extremely fast at coming back when it's needed.
- So what are some of the key things
that people should do in lifestyle or diet
if they wanna start trying to cut down on the pig thyroid
and get this baby working again?
What would be some things that they would play with
so they don't feel terrible during the process?
- Vitamin D is extremely important.
It works right along with the thyroid to regulate sugar
because calcium regulates everything.
And vitamin D is an important calcium regulator
along with thyroid.
And people sometimes are depressed
or have other nervous symptoms
just because they're vitamin D deficient.
But vitamin D, part of what it does
is to suppress the parathyroid hormone.
When you're low in calcium and vitamin D,
the parathyroid hormone tears the calcium out of your bones
to keep your blood level where it should be or higher.
And that causes many degenerative symptoms.
And eating about 2000 milligrams of calcium per day
I think is pretty close to ideal
if your vitamin D is also up around the middle
of the range on the blood level.
- So what else?
Can we get enough vitamin D from the sun in your opinion?
- Yeah, but if you're over 50,
your time in the sun has to be much longer
than when you were younger.
And it takes from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the United States
is usually the only time that you're gonna get
like a whole body exposure.
In 30 minutes, you can do it right at the middle of the day.
- And you wanna get on the skin, right?
- Yeah, it has to be directly onto the skin.
- So to boost up thyroid function
while you're cutting back,
you just mentioned vitamin D, calcium, anything else?
- Enough good sugar in the diet.
That's why I recommend orange juice.
A quarter or two of orange juice
is very supportive to your thyroid.
- Oh, be done.
Adam, what's your,
didn't you say orange juice at a certain time
is the best thing for the thyroid?
What was it, nine o'clock at night or midnight?
- Well, I usually take it in the morning,
but it's good anytime.
And I can tell you one thing,
that oranges, I won't go into details, changed my life.
It was one of the most important things
I learned from Ray Peat.
I've been eating one almost every day for six years
since I first heard Ray Peat.
- I'll be darned.
- A couple of people have told me
that their melanoma disappeared or got under control
when they started drinking a lot of orange juice.
- But see, I've always heard, you guys,
that, oh, there's just so much sugar in orange juice.
You don't wanna drink orange juice, you know?
- Yeah, they're advertising conspiracies
against salt and sugar.
- Yeah.
Does Ray Peat have any opinion on John Elliswater
from Maggie in New York?
- No, I don't know what it is.
- I don't know what that is either.
Do you know what that is, Adam, John Elliswater?
- No.
By the way, on a kind of a offbeat question,
a friend of mine will not forgive me if I don't ask this.
What does Ray Peat think about pleomorphism?
- Pleomorphism?
Is that like another thing,
another other than earthly being, you know,
on Prime Video, or what is pleomorphism?
- Apparently, a bacteria can change into a virus,
vice versa, and other things like that.
And anyway, a friend of mine would like the answer to that.
- Yeah, there is a lot to that,
but the particular practitioners,
I think, drove it into the ground
by trying to sell their particular treatments.
But yeah, there are various alternative forms.
And it relates to a bigger question.
We actually have pleomorphic cells,
stem cells in our tissues,
which are pleomorphic in the sense that they
are pluripotent.
They can develop into what we need
unless we're poisoning them with PUFA
and heavy metals and radiation.
And our tissues should be able to change form as needed.
And incidentally, when you eat a particular food,
like beef or chicken or fruit,
you are absorbing and integrating some of their DNA
into your own structure.
And that increases, I think, in the long run,
our capacity to produce the changes that we need.
We have only about 5% of our DNA is really in use.
And we have that big reserve
that we can draw on under stress.
- Interesting.
- I've heard that they call that horizontal DNA
versus the vertical DNA.
- Yeah.
- You guys are geeks with horizontal and vertical, man.
I tell you.
- Horizontal transmission of DNA.
- Here's a good question.
Leon, late at night,
I have a very, very slight teeth chattering.
And not because I'm cold.
Does Ray Peed have an opinion on what could be the cause
and the cure of that one?
- I think that's, again, the adrenaline.
- Ah, the adrenaline.
- Yeah, and sugar and salt and calcium,
milk and vitamin D are behind the thyroid function
to keep your blood sugar steady.
- So let's see.
So he could increase the sugar and salt
and that would lower adrenaline,
which would increase thyroid and then lower that down.
So you think it's the adrenaline hit
that's the teeth chattering?
- Yeah, I think it is.
- Interesting.
Lynn wants to know what digestive enzymes would be helpful
for eating more raw foods or even cooked foods?
- Nothing, well, you could eat fungal enzymes
to break down cellulose and such,
but the problem is that you get traces of the fungus
along with the enzyme.
So I think it's better to try to not break down cellulose
in your intestine.
The cellulose is having a good function
to sort of sweep things along,
help them not be reabsorbed.
Your liver excretes toxins into the bile.
And if you have fiber moving through your intestine,
that will prevent that toxin being reabsorbed
so you can excrete it.
- Interesting.
Oh, here's a good...
People are hearing a lot of,
so much about too much stomach acid,
not enough stomach acid.
You know, after Jonathan Wright did his whole thing,
well, everybody over 50 doesn't have enough stomach acid.
They should take HCL or apple cider vinegar.
What's your experience with it in research?
And would there be a reason why,
just because somebody is 50, 60, or 70,
revolutions around the sun or age,
that they would just not have enough stomach acid
to do their thing?
- Yeah, the thyroid is really the source of acid.
- There you go back to the thyroid again.
- Yeah, oxygen is named, means the source of acid.
And thyroid acidifies your tissue
with carbon dioxide production, carbonic acid.
And that should keep your cells inside acidic
and outside relatively basic.
And the stomach depends on that carbon dioxide production
to produce the hydrochloric acid.
- Fascinating.
- In ability to use oxygen and thyroid,
increases with age because of the PUFA
and heavy metal accumulation.
And so getting your thyroid metabolism right
will usually improve all of your digestion,
including the acid.
- Interesting.
So maybe a lot of this low acid stuff that we're hearing
is all coming back to this plethora,
just epidemic proportions of underactive thyroid.
- Yeah. - Yeah, wow.
- By the tests that were used up to 1940,
easily 40% of the American population is hypothyroid,
just by the medical standards up to 1940.
Then the drug companies got involved,
sold their phony tests,
like the protein bound iodine test in the late 1940s,
convinced everyone who had been taking thyroid,
they showed normal on that test.
And so they stopped taking thyroid.
Doctors taught everyone that the reason
they're fat and lethargic is because of their bad character
rather than low thyroid,
because the tests showed they were normal.
20 years later, that test was shown to be
absolutely unrelated to thyroid function.
So for 20 years, people were indoctrinated
to believe that 95% of the population
has good thyroid function, where it was a phony test.
But on the basis of that belief
that only 5% might be hypothyroid,
the new tests, TSH,
is meaningfully related to thyroid,
although ambiguously.
But those new tests were interpreted
in terms of the 95% not needing thyroid.
So no matter how good a test it is,
if your assumptions are wrong,
the test isn't gonna do you any good.
- So if we take supplemental iodine,
Lugol's or detoxify the Edgar Cayce thing,
does that help the thyroid function?
- No.
And over the years, it's likely to make it worse.
- Oh, good.
- Most people, iodized salt is usually,
around the world where they have iodized the salt,
they see increased thyroid gland degenerative conditions,
increased nodules, inflammation, Hashimoto's disease,
and so on, you can produce it
by just a moderately excess of iodine.
- So you're not, I take it then,
you're not a supporter of taking
supplemental iodine at all?
- No, seafood, once a week, eating seafood
gives you all the iodine you can use.
- And again, you said the low-fat,
I've written it down, but the low-fat fish
are cod and sole?
- Sole.
- Cod and sole.
Wow.
Is there an adrenal supplement we can take
to lower the adrenal problem, writes Robert?
- If you're on a farm, the adrenal gland
is very good nutritionally.
It contains pregnenolone,
and a small supplement of pregnenolone,
if you can find a safe source, which I can't.
But pregnenolone used to be a good, reliable support
for adrenal problems.
- But it's hard, you can't find a clean one, Mr. Peat?
- Yeah, everyone is tending,
women get breast pain or uterine cramps from it,
which means it's probably contaminated with estrogens.
- George wants to know, what's Mr. Peat's opinion
on hemp plant and the hemp oils, or the hemp protein?
Are these worth looking at?
- Protein is okay.
- The hemp protein?
- Yeah, but you have the seed protein problem,
it should be properly processed.
Lime processing would make it more digestible.
But the oils are highly unsaturated,
so I think it's good to be very cautious with them.
- They're poofers.
Linda wants to know what the negative effects
of flax seeds, are there negative effects in flax seeds?
- The high polyunsaturated is the main problem.
There are some good components, but some bad.
Most people who use the flax seed as a laxative or bulk
are absorbing very little of the substance.
So if you're using it as a bulk fiber, it's okay,
you aren't absorbing much of the bad stuff.
- They have some good, theoretically good organic psyllium
husk kind of fiber things, are those reasonable things
to take?
- Yeah, some people are--
- Do okay with them?
- Yeah, some people do very well, others get more
constipated with it, so you have to try out the fiber.
Cooked bamboo shoots are good, safe fiber for most people.
Well cooked mushrooms work for fiber for lots of people.
- Oh, good on you.
- Raw carrots worked for me for about 20 years,
but then I developed bacteria that could eat the carrots,
apparently.
- Dom wants to know, is there any way to regrow
tooth enamel?
- Only in the most superficial sense.
Before it has penetrated to the dentine,
the proteins of the enamel can capture calcium
from the environment and reconstitute the seal.
But once it has entered the dentine,
then it should be treated with a filling of some sort.
- Couple more, then we'll let you go, Mr. Peat,
you've been very generous with your time, thank you,
we really enjoy this.
So would drizzling a bit of lemon juice on a salad
help to break down the anti-digestive toxins
in the raw greens?
- No.
- No?
Doesn't do it.
- Nope.
- You know, it's interesting you mention about
the raw vegetables, you know, in Ayurvedic medicine,
I'm kind of a fan and studied it somewhat over the years,
I'm no expert, but they're not very big on raw vegetables
at all, just nothing, nothing.
Cook 'em, cook 'em, they say.
You know, 5,000 year old methods,
so maybe on to something.
Are scrambled eggs, cooked eggs, poached eggs,
any different?
- Yeah, raw eggs are nutritionally very, very good,
they have an antiviral effect in the intestine,
the fresh form, but cooked, they're extremely nutritious,
except for the cumulative effect of the PUFA.
- Oh, you mean it just depends on their diet,
and you gotta be, really be careful about that.
Well, Mr. Peat, it's been so much fun having you on,
thanks, we won't wait so long,
would you come back again sometime?
- Oh sure, any time.
- Oh, that'd be great, it'd be fun to have you on.
Adam, do you have anything else you'd like to say,
or ask Mr. Peat, or whatever?
- One more thing.
- Go ahead, Ray.
- Go ahead.
- Go ahead, sorry.
- One more thing about, to validate the DHA thing,
is that a salmon is lucky, it's high DHA,
and it's lucky if it lasts to nine years.
An orange ruffe is the lowest fish of all in DHA,
and it lives to 149 years.
- Really?
The orange ruffe does?
- I've heard 300 years.
- That's, oh come on, a fish can't live 100 years, can they?
- Oh sure.
- Really?
- Yeah, some of, I'm sure some are older than that.
- Isn't that amazing?
So the salmon only live to, well salmon though,
they swim upstream and get girls and stuff,
I mean, no wonder they die early, you know?
(laughing)
- When they feed fish oil,
they lose endurance and age quickly.
- Oh, Peat, yeah.
And boy, when you talk about fish too, folks,
be careful about all this, you know,
you go to some stores and they say responsibly farmed fish,
and you have no idea what that means, right?
Have no idea what they're feeding them.
I think Whole Foods has some pretty good standards,
but be careful.
I would suspect, right Peat,
that the wild fish Atlantic would be a good choice.
- The southern fish around the equator
have the least pufa.
- Oh, and which one, oh so they're back,
is that back to the cod and the sole?
- They are still pretty high in pufa,
but you pretty much have to live in the region
to get the warm water fish.
- Oh, I see, yeah.
Well, Mr. Peat, thank you so much, we appreciate it.
Tell folks before you leave what they might find
if they visit waryPeat.com.
- Oh, there are about 100 articles there
on all the subjects we've talked about.
- 100 articles, and do you have your own
private kind of newsletter?
- Yeah, every two months now.
It's $28 for two years for 12 fish.
- Oh, man, I'm gonna sign up for that guy.
28 bucks for two years, God love you.
That's great.
And what part of the world do you live in?
- Eugene right now, Oregon.
- Ah, man, yep, down the left coast.
- Yeah.
- Eugene, Oregon.
- Oh, and a listener wants to know how old you are,
if you don't mind.
- 82.
- No, really?
- Yep.
- Well, you don't sound like a day over 50.
That's great.
82, 82, and you're in good health?
You feel good?
- Yeah, I haven't been to a doctor,
so I don't really know 50 years.
(laughing)
50 years without seeing one.
- Our friend Adam here, he's 75 around the sun, I'm 72,
and we're always kidding people, say,
"Okay, now, when you guys start to listen
to some of us folks over 70 revolutions about longevity,
that's, you know, rather than the kids on YouTube
who are 30 telling you how to live a long time, it's funny."
(laughing)
They all mean well, though, they all mean well.
- I compete as an artist, too.
- Oh, you are?
What do you paint?
- Oh, there are some of my pictures from 20 years ago
up on my website.
- Ah, great.
Well, we'll keep in touch.
We'd love to have you back anytime,
and thanks for being here this morning.
- Okay, thank you.
- Thank you, thank you, Ray Pike.
Well, Mr. Adam, thank you for being here.
That was fun, huh?
- It was, thanks for inviting me.
- Oh, yeah, it was great, great having you guys on.
And I had no idea that he was
82 revolutions around the sun, man.
- Yeah, he's doing great, too.
I like that he doesn't know how healthy he is
because he hasn't been to a doctor to get it validated.
- That's right, that's right.
That's the way it goes, man.
All right, brother, thanks a lot.
Appreciate your ongoing support.
Boy, we really lost a good one with Andrew, right?
Wasn't that pretty amazing?
- We did, quite a shock, quite a shock.
But like Don O'Leary said,
like it or not, we all survive our decent burial.
- We all survive our decent burial, we sure do.
Okay, Adam, we love you.
Say hi to Vibrant Gal.
We'll probably be connecting with you
during open phones tomorrow.
- Love, you bet.
- Okay, bye-bye.
Patrick Timponi, Andrew, oh, no.
I'm just thinking about Andrew.
Ray Peat and Adam Bergstrom will have this show up
on the website very soon, oh, a couple hours.
And this would be a good one to pass on
to everyone that you care about,
especially folks with a thyroid.
And I think most of us have it.
Just a few of us got your thyroid nuked,
but even then, he has some ideas for you.
So I love you all very much.
Again, thank you for your outpouring of love and support
with Andrew Goss going on his cosmic vacation suddenly.
It's been just amazing.
My inbox just doesn't stop, and Facebook.
And wow, it's just, I know the family
really, really appreciates it.
They heard the little show we did yesterday.
They were listening, and they really appreciate
all the love and support you had for Andrew.
And again, I'm just, I was just so fascinated.
I know he had a big impact and had a big audience,
but to the extent that people really cared about him
and loved him and felt like they knew him was just,
you know, I should have realized that,
but boy, I sure do now.
Anyway, so I love you all very much.
Thanks for your ongoing support of our website.
Don't forget there's over 1,200 hours of just Andrew Goss.
1,200 one-hour shows of Andrew Goss,
and that'll be available to you at no cost.
And you can have your education, your PhD,
and financial history,
and the way the money deal works.
And thanks for your support to all the products we promote.
That's how we pay the bills on our house payment.
We appreciate that you support the people
that we really like, and we know so many of these people,
and we really do know this source.
So thanks for buying stuff through our website.
I love you all very much,
and I'll see you tomorrow, open phones.