WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:14.000 If you have any questions for Politics and Science, you can direct them by email to politicsandscience@madriver.com. 00:00:14.000 --> 00:00:40.000 Politics and Science can be heard weekly on WMRW LP1 95.1 FM, airing on Mondays at 5pm and Sundays at noon, and in the Bellows Falls area can be heard on WULL LP Bellows Falls at 101.1 FM, airing from 3 to 4pm on Sundays and from 9 to 10am on Mondays. 00:00:40.000 --> 00:00:49.000 Politics and Science presents the viewpoints of its participants and does not necessarily reflect the viewpoints of any other person or organization. 00:00:49.000 --> 00:01:15.000 Politics and Science is a production of the Center for Autonomous Vehicle Research and the Center for Autonomous Vehicle Research and Development. 00:01:15.000 --> 00:01:36.000 And we were doing that in the context of what it is to be a healthy person and having, Ray said, not only enough energy to get your tasks done, but also enough to regenerate the damage that inevitably happens to everybody as they go through daily life. 00:01:36.000 --> 00:01:49.000 You said something last week which I thought was interesting, which was that we regenerate 25 to 30% of the fats in our brains every night, I think you said. 00:01:49.000 --> 00:02:17.000 There are different ways to look at it. It might even be more than that if you think about taking a phospholipid apart into its components and then rebuilding more phospholipids so that a chain will exist as a unit but be rebuilt into a bigger structure. 00:02:17.000 --> 00:02:25.000 That kind of turnover probably is more than 20 or 30% during the night. 00:02:25.000 --> 00:02:38.000 You can see 25% of that kind of turnover in, I think it was less than an hour in some animal studies. 00:02:38.000 --> 00:02:58.000 If you look at the actual oxidation and renewal of particular fats so that a fat is broken down into carbon dioxide, for example, and then new fats come in from the bloodstream, that's more like 5% per day. 00:02:58.000 --> 00:03:15.000 If you look at just arachidonic acid, for example, which makes up a considerable amount of the fat in the brain, that changes and is renewed by the bloodstream by 5% per day. 00:03:15.000 --> 00:03:19.000 Can I ask a dumb question? Why are we regenerating fats? 00:03:19.000 --> 00:03:33.000 The brain is metabolically very active. When you stress a rat, the turnover in the brain is even faster than at rest. 00:03:33.000 --> 00:03:48.000 But the brain is adapting for the whole organism and thinking up new ways to handle the environment. 00:03:48.000 --> 00:04:01.000 Whether you put a rat in a tumbling drum to stress it or just have it go through the 8 or 10 hours of darkness during the night, they're both stressful. 00:04:01.000 --> 00:04:14.000 The brain is trying to deal with the stress and make innovations or adjustments that help the body to cope with the next day's tasks. 00:04:14.000 --> 00:04:19.000 The original fats are being burned or are they just getting oxidized? 00:04:19.000 --> 00:04:38.000 A small amount, like 5% or so, maybe more, are actually being oxidized. A larger amount, maybe 30% or 60%, something like that, is being reshuffled from one molecule to another. 00:04:38.000 --> 00:05:01.000 There are many types of phospholipids and other fats in the brain and the subunits can change around so that the functions of the nerve cells are adjusted as the type of phospholipid changes. 00:05:01.000 --> 00:05:11.000 I see. When we're regenerating things like that, obviously you need enough energy to be doing that at night. 00:05:11.000 --> 00:05:21.000 But if you don't have the energy to reproduce parts of yourself that are getting worn out or need to be adapted, what happens? 00:05:21.000 --> 00:05:41.000 The brain synthesizes and stores glycogen similar to muscles and liver. With aging or stress, the glycogen is depleted and it takes deep sleep to regenerate the glycogen. 00:05:41.000 --> 00:06:01.000 The glycogen seems to be essential even if you have circulating glucose. The glycogen is used for those stress adaptive processes. 00:06:01.000 --> 00:06:25.000 Having all of your biochemical machinery available, thyroid and the vitamins and minerals and so on, is necessary. But then the deep sleep is needed to restore the glycogen so that you can meet the next stresses. 00:06:25.000 --> 00:06:51.000 I see. So when you're trying to regenerate and trying to get enough of the foods that you need to provide that energy, you've mentioned before that some foods are particularly unhealthy to your thyroid, which sounds like probably the key mechanism for keeping your metabolism up so that you have the energy available to use. 00:06:51.000 --> 00:07:04.000 Yes. You want to avoid the specific antithyroid compounds, the glycogens that you find in a lot of vegetables, grains and nuts. 00:07:04.000 --> 00:07:22.000 The polyunsaturated fats are antithyroid and tryptophan and cysteine that you find in muscle meats at a very high concentration are antithyroid. 00:07:22.000 --> 00:07:44.000 I don't know if we've really talked in any detail about your theories about thyroid. I didn't properly introduce you. Ray Peat we're talking to today is an endocrinologist and a physiologist and a science historian. 00:07:44.000 --> 00:08:01.000 As an endocrinologist, you have extensive knowledge about hormones and the function of the thyroid gland is a key part of that, our physiological system, endocrine system I guess you'd say. 00:08:01.000 --> 00:08:19.000 I was wondering, Ray, if you'd maybe explain the function of the thyroid a little bit and then we could talk about how the thyroid function is measured in this day and age and how that's changed over the years. 00:08:19.000 --> 00:08:42.000 People think of the thyroid as being regulated by the pituitary hormone TSH, which does its major activator, but it's responsive to practically everything in the internal environment. 00:08:42.000 --> 00:09:03.000 If your estrogen is high, the enzymes in the gland become less responsive and the gland accumulates rather than secreting hormone and progesterone facilitates the enzymes that are needed to secrete the hormone. 00:09:03.000 --> 00:09:23.000 Polyunsaturated fats inhibit those same enzymes and so if your body is experiencing a deficiency, your pituitary will increase the TSH, thyroid stimulating hormone, to try to get the gland to compensate. 00:09:23.000 --> 00:09:43.000 If you have a lot of estrogen and polyunsaturated fats circulating, the gland will enlarge under the stimulation of the pituitary but without secreting very efficiently. 00:09:43.000 --> 00:09:57.000 During puberty and pregnancy, it's very common for women to have an enlarged thyroid because of the estrogen inhibiting the release of the hormone. 00:09:57.000 --> 00:10:19.000 And then with a change of circumstances or diet or having the baby, when the estrogen goes down, sometimes there will be an episode of hyperthyroid function as that stored hormone can be released. 00:10:19.000 --> 00:10:36.000 And that will often scare the patient's doctor if they see their pulse running at 125 beats per minute at rest and their hands being pink and warm and sweaty. 00:10:36.000 --> 00:10:49.000 And that's classical hyperthyroidism but a lot of doctors will kill your thyroid with radioactive iodine or cut it out when they see symptoms like that. 00:10:49.000 --> 00:11:12.000 It's really usually just a natural adaptive process in which the enlarged gland is returning to normal size and it takes a few weeks usually to safely unload that amount of stored colloid or fibroglobulin. 00:11:12.000 --> 00:11:22.000 Some people have told me that they never felt better in their lives than when they were in their month or two of hyperthyroidism. 00:11:22.000 --> 00:11:32.000 But unfortunately, that's the opportunity for surgeons and radiologists to destroy the thyroid. 00:11:32.000 --> 00:11:52.000 In the 1950s, it was discovered that one molecule called T3 triiodothyronine is the active promoter of respiration. 00:11:52.000 --> 00:12:02.000 But it took decades for that information to circulate through the American medical community. 00:12:02.000 --> 00:12:12.000 The Japanese, Israelis and Russians were the first ones to really assimilate that information. 00:12:12.000 --> 00:12:27.000 Since estrogen inhibits the activity of the thyroid, women are about five or ten times as likely to have thyroid problems as men. 00:12:27.000 --> 00:12:52.000 But when one form of synthetic thyroid, T4, which isn't the active respiration promoter, when that was created chemically and became a product, it was tested on 25-year-old male medical students, good health young males. 00:12:52.000 --> 00:13:04.000 It was found to act just like the desiccated thyroid gland that had been used at that time for 50 years as a medical supplement. 00:13:04.000 --> 00:13:14.000 So the marketers began selling it to females without really testing it on females because it worked on young men. 00:13:14.000 --> 00:13:29.000 But in fact, it very often interferes because the pituitary and brain will respond to it and shut off the thyroid stimulating hormone. 00:13:29.000 --> 00:13:41.000 And so it's good at turning off a woman's thyroid gland without necessarily being converted in the liver into the active form. 00:13:41.000 --> 00:13:58.000 An experimenter in the 1960s who hadn't assimilated the knowledge of the two hormones normally existing in a ratio of three or four to one, 00:13:58.000 --> 00:14:16.000 this experimenter sliced up pieces of muscle, kidney, liver, heart, brain, and so on, and then added what he called the thyroid hormone thyroxin or T4 to the solution. 00:14:16.000 --> 00:14:28.000 And he found that it suppressed oxidative metabolism in the heart and muscle and brain. 00:14:28.000 --> 00:14:43.000 And the liver was the only gland that was strongly responsive to increasing its respiration rate in proportion to the amount of added thyroxin. 00:14:43.000 --> 00:14:55.000 And so he said he had demonstrated that respiration isn't the important thing done by the thyroid hormone 00:14:55.000 --> 00:15:03.000 because how could it be important if the thyroid hormone suppresses the metabolism of the brain and the heart? 00:15:03.000 --> 00:15:18.000 But in fact, the liver is the source of about 70% of the active thyroid hormone that circulates in the bloodstream. 00:15:18.000 --> 00:15:38.000 The thyroid gland secretes a little bit, 25 or 30% of the active hormone, but the liver, as it senses the need for energy in the body, converts T4 to T3. 00:15:38.000 --> 00:15:45.000 And the brain doesn't have much of that capacity for activating the hormone. 00:15:45.000 --> 00:15:58.000 And so when the T4 increases beyond a certain small amount, it displaces the active hormone and suppresses brain metabolism. 00:15:58.000 --> 00:16:03.000 And I've seen that happen in numerous women. 00:16:03.000 --> 00:16:13.000 The first time I heard about it was at the University of Oregon Medical School Hospital in Portland. 00:16:13.000 --> 00:16:27.000 A woman who had been on one grain of thyroxin for some time was getting worse, so they raised her dose to two grains. 00:16:27.000 --> 00:16:33.000 And every six months or so she would be worse, and so they would increase it. 00:16:33.000 --> 00:16:45.000 They finally reached the level of the equivalent of five grains, which was 500 micrograms of I think it was synthroid. 00:16:45.000 --> 00:16:58.000 And at that point she went into a coma called a myxedema coma, in which the skin and other tissues puff up with a gelatinous edema material. 00:16:58.000 --> 00:17:02.000 And she was deeply comatose. 00:17:02.000 --> 00:17:17.000 And luckily some doctor knew about T3 being the active hormone and gave her intravenous T3, and immediately she came out of the coma and was okay. 00:17:17.000 --> 00:17:38.000 But I've seen that happen to lower degrees in women who would lose their memory or concentration or get strange sensations, neurological symptoms when they were taking pure T4. 00:17:38.000 --> 00:17:51.000 But if they would take a balanced product like natural desiccated thyroid, their symptoms would disappear. 00:17:51.000 --> 00:17:59.000 And how does estrogen become a problem in pregnancy? Because I thought that's when progesterone was high in the cycle. 00:17:59.000 --> 00:18:12.000 Yeah, if a person is low in thyroid going into the pregnancy, or if they don't eat enough protein and certain vitamins so that the liver can function, 00:18:12.000 --> 00:18:31.000 the liver, in experiments if you put a source of estrogen where it goes directly to the liver and measure the amount coming out of the liver, in a healthy person it's 100% going in and 0% coming out, 00:18:31.000 --> 00:18:36.000 meaning that the liver totally inactivated the estrogen. 00:18:36.000 --> 00:18:50.000 But if it doesn't have enough protein or certain vitamins, the liver can't inactivate estrogen and so 100% goes in and maybe 99% of it still comes out. 00:18:50.000 --> 00:19:07.000 And so the estrogen is allowed to reach very high levels and the thyroid would activate the liver metabolism and restore its ability to destroy estrogen. 00:19:07.000 --> 00:19:23.000 But it becomes a vicious cycle in which if your thyroid is a little low, the liver lets estrogen accumulate to a very high level and that makes your thyroid go lower by blocking the gland itself. 00:19:23.000 --> 00:19:26.000 And so it's a vicious circle. 00:19:26.000 --> 00:19:46.000 And since thyroid is needed to synthesize progesterone, converting cholesterol into progesterone, what happens in that situation is that your cholesterol rises and your progesterone becomes very low. 00:19:46.000 --> 00:19:59.000 I see. And that brings us to another common issue which is many people have high cholesterol and maybe you could, I don't know, maybe you don't need to elaborate because you just said it. 00:19:59.000 --> 00:20:21.000 Yeah, in 1936, papers were published showing that if you measure the cholesterol at the time a person's thyroid gland is removed surgically, there is a steady sharp increase over the next few weeks in the blood cholesterol. 00:20:21.000 --> 00:20:30.000 And then when you put them on a thyroid supplement, the cholesterol returns to normal. 00:20:30.000 --> 00:20:55.000 And if you are charting the metabolic rate, oxygen consumption of the whole organism, it's a mirror image of the cholesterol. The metabolic rate and oxygen consumption fall as the cholesterol rises under the hypothyroid circumstance. 00:20:55.000 --> 00:21:06.000 And if you supplement thyroid, just as the metabolic rate increases, the cholesterol decreases. 00:21:06.000 --> 00:21:26.000 And I've seen a couple of people who were in a hurry to get their cholesterol down hundreds of points. One had 400 milligrams per cent, the other one 500 and something. 00:21:26.000 --> 00:21:44.000 They took the active T3 hormone in physiological amounts, roughly five micrograms per hour. And in a week, they had restored their cholesterol to the normal range of around 200 milligrams per cent. 00:21:44.000 --> 00:21:53.000 That's remarkable. So is it just that a lower metabolism, you are not converting the cholesterol into the other steroids? 00:21:53.000 --> 00:22:06.000 Yes. Some cholesterol is converted to form bile acids, steroids that help to emulsify fats in the intestine. 00:22:06.000 --> 00:22:24.000 But the formation of DHEA, pregnenolone, and progesterone uses a massive amount of the circulating cholesterol. 00:22:24.000 --> 00:22:47.000 And the amount of progesterone coming out the other side of the ovary corresponded directly to the amount of cholesterol going into the ovary. 00:22:47.000 --> 00:22:57.000 And so if your cholesterol level was lowered, the progesterone produced by the ovary was lowered. 00:22:57.000 --> 00:23:07.000 And that experiment didn't adjust the other components such as thyroid and vitamin A that are involved, 00:23:07.000 --> 00:23:16.000 but those were kept at a functional level so that progesterone varied directly with cholesterol. 00:23:16.000 --> 00:23:26.000 So when they're worried about the cholesterol, it sounds like really the cholesterol is just a sign that your metabolism isn't functioning well. 00:23:26.000 --> 00:23:37.000 Yes. And if you artificially lower the cholesterol, you tend to lower the adaptive hormones, especially progesterone. 00:23:37.000 --> 00:23:51.000 And the early studies, I think the first big one was done in Hungary, they saw that lowering cholesterol tremendously increased cancer mortality 00:23:51.000 --> 00:24:05.000 and total mortality and increased death rate from accidents and homicide and even heart disease and strokes. 00:24:05.000 --> 00:24:14.000 So let me just interrupt. To clarify that, you're talking about lowering cholesterol artificially through statins and stuff like that. 00:24:14.000 --> 00:24:20.000 Yes. Well, I forget which chemicals they were using at that time. 00:24:20.000 --> 00:24:29.000 It sounds like, I think you've said this before, that cholesterol, even if you're not turning it into steroids, the cholesterol itself is protective. 00:24:29.000 --> 00:24:44.000 Yes. Since about 1920, they showed that just injecting pure cholesterol is protective against all the types of toxins that they tested, 00:24:44.000 --> 00:25:03.000 bacterial toxins, mercury, plant toxins and so on. And it protects red blood cells from being broken down by mercury and enzymic toxins, 00:25:03.000 --> 00:25:07.000 spider and snake poisons and so on. 00:25:07.000 --> 00:25:14.000 And yet there is evidence that a high cholesterol rate, when you get into the, I don't know. 00:25:14.000 --> 00:25:22.000 Well, I don't know. Really just because you don't get a high excess cholesterol in the blood without being hypothyroid. 00:25:22.000 --> 00:25:23.000 I see. 00:25:23.000 --> 00:25:33.000 And you can correlate high cholesterol with lots of things such as poor learning ability and so on. 00:25:33.000 --> 00:25:43.000 And in experiments, if you inject cholesterol right into the brain, it improves learning ability and nerve function. 00:25:43.000 --> 00:25:46.000 I think I'll pass on that experiment. 00:25:46.000 --> 00:26:02.000 It's the low cholesterol, the low thyroid, which is responsible for the high cholesterol that accounts for the disease that they associate with the high cholesterol. 00:26:02.000 --> 00:26:12.000 So when they say strokes are caused by high cholesterol, it's actually that you're just hypothyroid and your metabolism isn't functioning. 00:26:12.000 --> 00:26:22.000 And when you can't make the protective adaptive steroids such as progesterone and DHEA out of the cholesterol, 00:26:22.000 --> 00:26:36.000 your body does its next best adaptive procedure, which is to increase the cortisol or cortisone. 00:26:36.000 --> 00:26:46.000 And the chronic elevation of cortisol, which is associated with high cholesterol and low thyroid, 00:26:46.000 --> 00:26:57.000 that's one of the toxic effects that you see in people with high cholesterol. 00:26:57.000 --> 00:27:05.000 The chronic exposure to excess cortisol weakens blood vessels, for example, and promotes bleeding, 00:27:05.000 --> 00:27:16.000 but it also can promote clotting and osteoporosis and various tissue degenerative processes. 00:27:16.000 --> 00:27:20.000 But cortisol also has a positive purpose, doesn't it? 00:27:20.000 --> 00:27:21.000 Oh, it protects you. 00:27:21.000 --> 00:27:29.000 If you don't have enough pregnenolone, DHEA, and progesterone, you need cortisol to handle stress. 00:27:29.000 --> 00:27:46.000 But the way it handles stress is to depress inflammation, but it does it at the expense of tissues such as your thymus gland, muscle, skin, and liver, 00:27:46.000 --> 00:27:56.000 converting protein to fuel to use for energy to combat the stress. 00:27:56.000 --> 00:28:03.000 So it's spending your organism rapidly to get you through a crisis situation. 00:28:03.000 --> 00:28:07.000 I see. So it's an emergency adaptation. 00:28:07.000 --> 00:28:10.000 And then that sounds like it makes you even more hypothyroid, 00:28:10.000 --> 00:28:20.000 because you've explained before that when you start digesting your own muscle, that that produces more antithyroid chemicals. 00:28:20.000 --> 00:28:27.000 Yeah, probably the cortisol directly signals the liver. 00:28:27.000 --> 00:28:43.000 They've done in vitro experiments that indicate that the cortisol is blocking the enzymes that convert thyroxine into the active T3 hormone. 00:28:43.000 --> 00:29:03.000 So it's doing many related things, increasing the circulating cysteine and tryptophan to suppress the gland itself and changing several levels of physiology. 00:29:03.000 --> 00:29:10.000 So that sounds like a difficult situation to get out of once you slip into that unhealthy state. 00:29:10.000 --> 00:29:15.000 Raymond, let me just interrupt for a minute. We're listening to Dr. Raymond Peat. 00:29:15.000 --> 00:29:23.000 We're halfway through the show, and Dr. Peat is an endocrinologist and physiologist and science historian out in Eugene. 00:29:23.000 --> 00:29:29.000 And we have a pretty weak signal again today, Raymond. It seems like that new phone is not working very well. 00:29:29.000 --> 00:29:31.000 Is it turned up all the way? 00:29:31.000 --> 00:29:32.000 Yeah. 00:29:32.000 --> 00:29:37.000 Yeah, it doesn't seem to improve. It could be our connection possibly that's messing us. 00:29:37.000 --> 00:29:40.000 I hear some fuzzy static in the background. 00:29:40.000 --> 00:29:49.000 Do you? Yeah, I hear it here too. I'm not sure if perhaps – I think it's all right if you talk straight into the phone. 00:29:49.000 --> 00:29:52.000 Do you want to try the other receiver? Is that handy? 00:29:52.000 --> 00:29:55.000 No, I'll just talk closer to it. 00:29:55.000 --> 00:30:07.000 Okay, that does sound better. So, well, it sounds like quite a downward spiral if you get into that low hypothyroid situation. 00:30:07.000 --> 00:30:23.000 And I thought – I hate to dwell on negatives, but I thought – now, you've said before that you think they've changed the way they judge people's thyroid functions such that in the '30s or so that they thought – 00:30:23.000 --> 00:30:29.000 How many people – what percentage of people did they think were somewhat hypothyroid? 00:30:29.000 --> 00:30:34.000 About 40%, I think, by the end of the '30s. 00:30:34.000 --> 00:30:42.000 And that's a pretty huge number. I'm surprised they came up with that. And how did they decide what's normal and what isn't? 00:30:42.000 --> 00:30:59.000 They were measuring the ability to extract oxygen and burn calories, and they thought that the lower a person's oxidative metabolism was, the more symptoms they had. 00:30:59.000 --> 00:31:12.000 And they found that giving desiccated thyroid to increase their oxygen consumption, the symptoms would be alleviated. 00:31:12.000 --> 00:31:30.000 And so they had a large list of diagnostic symptoms, everything from having yellow palms of the hands and soles of the feet from accumulated carotene. 00:31:30.000 --> 00:31:40.000 Infertility, which they found was associated very often with red spots in the ovaries. 00:31:40.000 --> 00:31:52.000 The corpus luteum, it means the yellow body, but in hypothyroid people, it was found to be a red body because it contained so much carotene. 00:31:52.000 --> 00:32:01.000 And the carotene was blocking the conversion of cholesterol to progesterone because vitamin A is needed. 00:32:01.000 --> 00:32:17.000 And low thyroid people accumulate the carotene because they aren't using the vitamin A fast enough, and then they can't convert cholesterol to progesterone and become infertile. 00:32:17.000 --> 00:32:23.000 The same process happens in the adrenals and the testicles. 00:32:23.000 --> 00:32:41.000 And in the brain, any place that vitamin A is used, vitamin A is needed to antagonize estrogen in probably all cells, including the skin. 00:32:41.000 --> 00:32:51.000 And carotene accumulates and interferes with the use of vitamin A. 00:32:51.000 --> 00:32:58.000 So you could just look at a person's palms and very often diagnose hypothyroidism. 00:32:58.000 --> 00:33:13.000 Falling hair, thinning hair, thinning skin or thickening skin, either one, depending on their cortisone response. 00:33:13.000 --> 00:33:19.000 Sweating excessively or not at all. 00:33:19.000 --> 00:33:31.000 And if a person had been chronically hypothyroid, their growth was usually either deficient or excessive. 00:33:31.000 --> 00:33:44.000 Very often, people who hadn't reached an average height were found to grow to a normal height when they took thyroid. 00:33:44.000 --> 00:33:56.000 And the people with an excessive growth hormone were found to lower their symptoms of acromegaly if they took a thyroid supplement. 00:33:56.000 --> 00:34:10.000 So how does, well maybe they try to explain it, how would they explain that we went from 40% of the population was hypothyroid to now, what do they consider the level to be now? 00:34:10.000 --> 00:34:12.000 It's much lower, isn't it? 00:34:12.000 --> 00:34:22.000 When they did that experiment on medical students and showed that the synthetic hormone supposedly worked just like the real stuff, 00:34:22.000 --> 00:34:27.000 that went with an advertising campaign. 00:34:27.000 --> 00:34:47.000 When I was in junior high and high school, all the fat kids were reciting what they had heard from their doctor that they were just gluttonous and lazy and didn't have a hormone problem. 00:34:47.000 --> 00:34:59.000 Because a blood test was circulated at that same time that measured protein bound iodine. 00:34:59.000 --> 00:35:05.000 And that test showed that 95% of the population were normal. 00:35:05.000 --> 00:35:11.000 Only 5% had a low protein bound iodine content. 00:35:11.000 --> 00:35:21.000 And so even though at least 40% of the people would have benefited according to the pre-war diagnostic methods, 00:35:21.000 --> 00:35:32.000 if they got anything it was likely to be the inactive thyroxine rather than the real active hormone. 00:35:32.000 --> 00:35:47.000 And that contributed to the belief that since people didn't benefit, that confirmed the idea that 95% of the people at least were not hypothyroid. 00:35:47.000 --> 00:35:58.000 But about 20 years later, the protein bound iodine test was found to have essentially nothing to do with thyroid function. 00:35:58.000 --> 00:36:16.000 What it had accomplished though was to teach doctors that whole picture of things that only 5% at most would need a thyroid supplement. 00:36:16.000 --> 00:36:24.000 And when they got it, it probably wouldn't help very much because it was likely to be the inactive thyroxine. 00:36:24.000 --> 00:36:37.000 And so over the years, new blood tests came out that actually measured the various thyroid substances in the blood. 00:36:37.000 --> 00:36:45.000 But they kept the doctrine that 95% of the people were not hypothyroid. 00:36:45.000 --> 00:36:51.000 And so their normal definition made the new tests irrelevant. 00:36:51.000 --> 00:37:01.000 I see. So they just adopted that foregone conclusion that a certain percentage were normal and based everything on that. 00:37:01.000 --> 00:37:10.000 Huh. So that's a little bizarre that they would fall for that. 00:37:10.000 --> 00:37:15.000 But I guess they're often confused by they adopt markers as indicating a condition. 00:37:15.000 --> 00:37:21.000 Is that right? They adopt sort of these medical blood test markers. 00:37:21.000 --> 00:37:43.000 Yeah. And one of the problems with the work up to the 1930s with thyroid was that everything from cancer and heart disease to dry skin and falling hair were known to be caused by hypothyroidism. 00:37:43.000 --> 00:37:54.000 And that sort of ruined the medical business if you could cure everything practically with a thyroid supplement. 00:37:54.000 --> 00:38:04.000 And so they said the belief in a panacea is irrational and we have to be scientific. 00:38:04.000 --> 00:38:12.000 And each disease is a separate thing that we have to study and treat with a specific remedy. 00:38:12.000 --> 00:38:14.000 I see. 00:38:14.000 --> 00:38:22.000 I just happened to run across an article about published by a big medical publishing company. 00:38:22.000 --> 00:38:34.000 I think it was Lippincott. And the subtitle was something about panacea for the next millennium, estrogen receptor modifiers. 00:38:34.000 --> 00:38:56.000 So if the industry supports a panacea, you can talk about it. But the fact that thyroid supplements had functioned as the equivalent of a panacea was used as propaganda against it, that it was irrational quacks who wanted to cure everything with one pill. 00:38:56.000 --> 00:39:04.000 Right. So it didn't fit into reductionist thinking, I guess, where you have all those specialties. 00:39:04.000 --> 00:39:15.000 So continuing on talking about thyroid is a common problem and something that affects all of us in our health. 00:39:15.000 --> 00:39:26.000 So if your thyroid isn't functioning, it sounds like we were talking about cell regeneration in the beginning and it sounds like it's a key part of providing the energy for you to regenerate. 00:39:26.000 --> 00:39:31.000 What happens to your cells when you don't have the energy to regenerate? 00:39:31.000 --> 00:39:44.000 Well, the cell will start the process when a cell is injured and accelerates renewal and healing. 00:39:44.000 --> 00:40:01.000 One of the signals for starting accelerated renewal and healing is the fact that the damaged cell doesn't respire properly and doesn't use its thyroid environment to good effect. 00:40:01.000 --> 00:40:22.000 So it shifts over to the injury metabolism of glycolysis producing lactic acid. 00:40:22.000 --> 00:40:36.000 So injury damages the thyroid governed metabolism and starts up the process of accelerated renewal of the tissue. 00:40:36.000 --> 00:41:05.000 But if you don't have the proper thyroid available when the tissue has recovered, the tissue might still stay in that stress or injury adapted condition and go on producing lactic acid and stimulating cell multiplication. 00:41:05.000 --> 00:41:25.000 Collagen secretion and all of the wound adaptive processes increased formation of blood vessels and clotting very often is accelerated. 00:41:25.000 --> 00:41:37.000 So if the whole body doesn't have enough thyroid and other supportive hormones, the injury can develop into a tumor. 00:41:37.000 --> 00:42:01.000 But normally if your thyroid is functioning properly, instead of having those locally accelerated regenerative processes, every place there's an injury or stress, the whole body is normally slowly and at different rates according to the local needs. 00:42:01.000 --> 00:42:11.000 So the whole body is renewing itself in the process of tissue streaming or organ streaming. 00:42:11.000 --> 00:42:31.000 So thinking of the cells as like a fountain of cells coming out of one part of the organ or tissue and growing and functioning and then disappearing in another part of the tissue. 00:42:31.000 --> 00:42:48.000 In the cornea of the eye, for example, they've applied a dye and found that the cells literally stream over a period of days from the edge of the cornea up onto the cornea. 00:42:48.000 --> 00:42:54.000 A constant movement of cell renewal creeping over the surface of the cornea. 00:42:54.000 --> 00:43:15.000 And in the liver and adrenal glands, skin and the intestine, people have demonstrated this constant renewal, streaming or flowing of new cells into the tissue and the disappearance of old cells. 00:43:15.000 --> 00:43:27.000 Blood supply is an example of that. New cells are born, live for about three months and then disappear. 00:43:27.000 --> 00:43:30.000 And the material is recycled. 00:43:30.000 --> 00:43:38.000 Every tissue is undergoing that kind of renewal from stem cells. 00:43:38.000 --> 00:43:56.000 But that, for various reasons, even though the research was done, Alexis Carrell, for example, at Rockefeller Institute in the early years of the century, 00:43:56.000 --> 00:44:10.000 and then Polezhaev, a Russian researcher in the 40s and 50s, demonstrated regeneration and renewal even in the brain. 00:44:10.000 --> 00:44:27.000 And Polezhaev was regenerating whole dog muscles in the 1940s, but that violated one of the main medical biological doctrines. 00:44:27.000 --> 00:44:45.000 The establishment was creating a particular business model of medicine and biology that took over very completely in the late 1940s. 00:44:45.000 --> 00:45:12.000 And the idea of organ regeneration as a normal biological process was just stamped out very thoroughly so that people thought of aging as a simple natural process in which each cell had its finite lifespan. 00:45:12.000 --> 00:45:18.000 And when that was used up, the organism would die. 00:45:18.000 --> 00:45:39.000 You can see it in the film. Many doctors believe in the ovary having a certain number of eggs when the woman is born and menopause occurs because they have depleted their lifetime supply of eggs. 00:45:39.000 --> 00:45:48.000 The same thing applied to the lifetime supply of brain cells or heart cells or whatever. 00:45:48.000 --> 00:46:05.000 The idea was that they had a finite lifespan, but in fact, for 100 years, the evidence has been showing otherwise, that it just wasn't admitted into mainline science and medicine. 00:46:05.000 --> 00:46:10.000 And it sounds like it was there before the 40s and basically got stamped out. 00:46:10.000 --> 00:46:17.000 Yeah, it was developing nicely up through the 30s. 00:46:17.000 --> 00:46:37.000 The idea of a developmental field was taken from embryology and was being applied to cancer physiology. 00:46:37.000 --> 00:46:53.000 I think it was in 1830, but it had developed a good scientific context by 1930 and was being integrated with embryology. 00:46:53.000 --> 00:47:15.000 The aging process was being seen as nothing but an extension of embryological development, and that was seen in terms of holes or fields rather than each cell being an individual running on a clock. 00:47:15.000 --> 00:47:25.000 It was sort of the Leibniz and his monad theory in which there is no interaction between the monads. 00:47:25.000 --> 00:47:35.000 Every individual cell or person has its internal model of the universe running like a clock. 00:47:35.000 --> 00:47:40.000 It doesn't matter where it is, it will do the same thing. 00:47:40.000 --> 00:47:47.000 That really was the model that took over medicine after the Second World War. 00:47:47.000 --> 00:48:05.000 I've talked to many doctors who said maternal nutrition during pregnancy doesn't matter because even if the mother is almost starving to death, it isn't going to hurt the baby's development. 00:48:05.000 --> 00:48:11.000 It's really the Leibniz monad doctrine that nothing interacts. 00:48:11.000 --> 00:48:19.000 I see. It's more of the reductionist thinking that everything is a separate independent piece. 00:48:19.000 --> 00:48:24.000 Yeah, reductionism to the point of psychosis. 00:48:24.000 --> 00:48:30.000 I'd say that's true. 00:48:30.000 --> 00:48:48.000 When you're talking about regeneration, you mentioned Hayflick last week as being one of the persons who did the experiment that ended up convincing most of science that you can't regenerate, only a certain limited... 00:48:48.000 --> 00:49:07.000 The fact that he worked at a very influential laboratory that sold biological material, cell cultures and such, and rats to laboratories all over the country, that helped to give him a reputation. 00:49:07.000 --> 00:49:12.000 People just assumed that an idiot wouldn't be working for a big company like that. 00:49:12.000 --> 00:49:13.000 I see. 00:49:13.000 --> 00:49:25.000 I don't know whether I suspect... In one of my newsletters I give reasons for suspecting that he wasn't as stupid as he seems. 00:49:25.000 --> 00:49:38.000 For 30 years I thought he was just a very remarkably stupid person, but then I saw he had financial motives that might save his mental reputation. 00:49:38.000 --> 00:49:43.000 Not his moral reputation, but his mental one. 00:49:43.000 --> 00:49:50.000 It makes me wonder where the peer review process was when he came up with those results. 00:49:50.000 --> 00:49:55.000 It's pretty much where it always has been. 00:49:55.000 --> 00:50:10.000 I've been following the estrogen receptor doctrine for many years. 00:50:10.000 --> 00:50:12.000 The promoter of that came up with his idea. 00:50:12.000 --> 00:50:14.000 He was working in chemical warfare. 00:50:14.000 --> 00:50:23.000 He even titled one of his articles "From Chemical Warfare to Breast Cancer Treatment." 00:50:23.000 --> 00:50:33.000 Making that transition, he created the idea of the estrogen receptor as what makes estrogen effective in the organism. 00:50:33.000 --> 00:50:52.000 The biologists had been demonstrating how estrogen is metabolized and how the metabolism of estrogen is integrated in the cell physiology in meaningful ways that relate to oxidation and reduction. 00:50:52.000 --> 00:51:06.000 It was a little complicated, but very well founded in all of the known information about enzymes and metabolism. 00:51:06.000 --> 00:51:19.000 Elwood Jensen, because of his military connection, got funding and support from the Atomic Energy Commission. 00:51:19.000 --> 00:51:34.000 It was extremely expensive to create a molecule with radioactive isotopes labeling it, but the Atomic Energy Commission provided the stuff. 00:51:34.000 --> 00:51:42.000 No one else had the funding or the government permission and support to do similar experiments. 00:51:42.000 --> 00:51:53.000 On the basis of his experiment, he claimed that estrogen is not oxidized in the tissue and doesn't participate in enzymic oxidation and reduction. 00:51:53.000 --> 00:52:00.000 He said it only acts through this protein, which he called the estrogen receptor. 00:52:00.000 --> 00:52:21.000 Because of the prestige of his funding and government support, and his using a fancy technical experimental procedure that no one else could get, he shaped the whole biological culture. 00:52:21.000 --> 00:52:31.000 These enzymologists that he said were just ignorant, incompetent, old-fashioned fools kept on working. 00:52:31.000 --> 00:52:37.000 Now everyone knows that they were right, that estrogen is reduced and oxidized. 00:52:37.000 --> 00:52:42.000 Estrone turns into estradiol and back and forth. 00:52:42.000 --> 00:52:47.000 The reduction is what makes it toxic as an estrogen. 00:52:47.000 --> 00:53:00.000 But the culture served its purpose and created the whole industry of estrogen receptor selective modifiers, the panacea of the next millennium. 00:53:00.000 --> 00:53:09.000 And all those receptor, I mean the receptor idea is, do you think there's such a thing as a receptor, as a place where things plug in? 00:53:09.000 --> 00:53:12.000 Yeah, the whole cell is a receptor. 00:53:12.000 --> 00:53:22.000 It's like a perceptual process, because the state of the cell governs what the receptor is going to do. 00:53:22.000 --> 00:53:25.000 The cell is in charge. 00:53:25.000 --> 00:53:37.000 The receptor can do one thing or another depending on what the cell needs and how the cell is using its perceptive capacity. 00:53:37.000 --> 00:53:47.000 It just seemed the receptor idea was such a good marketing ploy because it fits our need to have one thing do one other thing. 00:53:47.000 --> 00:53:57.000 Yeah, it's a perfect model of reductionist biology that really has no sound scientific basis. 00:53:57.000 --> 00:54:04.000 I just got a book out of the library called "The Secret History of the War on Cancer" which I haven't had much of a chance to read. 00:54:04.000 --> 00:54:07.000 I was kind of amazed glancing through it. 00:54:07.000 --> 00:54:11.000 I read the preface and she had some amazing quotes. 00:54:11.000 --> 00:54:15.000 It's written by Devora Davis. 00:54:15.000 --> 00:54:18.000 I think it's a fairly recent publication. 00:54:18.000 --> 00:54:30.000 But she talks about working at the NSA and how she had a theory that a lot of cancer was caused by environmental things and she was going to write a book about it. 00:54:30.000 --> 00:54:41.000 Her boss, Frank Press, said that, let's see if I can find the quote. 00:54:41.000 --> 00:54:43.000 He nodded as I told him of my plans. 00:54:43.000 --> 00:54:46.000 He said, "Gravely, it had better be a good book." 00:54:46.000 --> 00:54:52.000 I replied, "Well, I guess I think it will be. They're offering more than half my annual salary. That's quite a lot for a first-time author." 00:54:52.000 --> 00:54:56.000 "It had better be a really, really good book," he said. 00:54:56.000 --> 00:55:00.000 "I didn't understand. Of course they expect it to be good," I said. "So do I." 00:55:00.000 --> 00:55:08.000 "Well," he said, "it had better be because you won't be able to work here after you write it." 00:55:08.000 --> 00:55:14.000 I guess she added that he was a very consummate diplomat and he knew how things worked there. 00:55:14.000 --> 00:55:20.000 So that's the NSA, which is the National Academy of Sciences. 00:55:20.000 --> 00:55:22.000 Is that a government? 00:55:22.000 --> 00:55:26.000 N-A-S, excuse me. 00:55:26.000 --> 00:55:39.000 I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA was involved too because following up Elwood Jensen's Atomic Energy Commission connections and germ warfare, 00:55:39.000 --> 00:55:57.000 I found that the estrogen receptor gene people have been involved in military-financed sterilization and cancer studies continuing through the University of Chicago. 00:55:57.000 --> 00:56:06.000 Currently, they've moved to the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory and the University of California. 00:56:06.000 --> 00:56:16.000 Some people have formed a link right from World War II down to the present studies at Lawrence Radiation Lab. 00:56:16.000 --> 00:56:20.000 She had another interesting quote too that ties in with that. 00:56:20.000 --> 00:56:27.000 She talks about some of the first modern studies on workplace causes of cancer, the dangers of medical and environmental hormones, 00:56:27.000 --> 00:56:35.000 and the cancer-causing properties of tobacco were carried out and published by scientists around 1936, including many who worked in Nazi Germany. 00:56:35.000 --> 00:56:41.000 Yeah, I read about that conference against the dangers of smoking in Germany in '36. 00:56:41.000 --> 00:56:49.000 And she goes on, she says, "In June 1945, Robert R. Kehoe, an Army captain who was a member of the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, 00:56:49.000 --> 00:56:58.000 traveled throughout Germany gathering information on chemical and hormonal hazards for the U.S. Army Field Investigations Unit and the British Secret Service. 00:56:58.000 --> 00:57:05.000 Sixty years later, these files remain unpublished." 00:57:05.000 --> 00:57:16.000 A lot of American financing has gone into how to use that information as chemical biological warfare. 00:57:16.000 --> 00:57:23.000 I see. So probably national security is the reason that it's never benefited the public. 00:57:23.000 --> 00:57:34.000 I think so. It has extended into the virus theory. 00:57:34.000 --> 00:57:46.000 It works against environmental causation of cancer and creates myths about cancer causation and so on. 00:57:46.000 --> 00:57:56.000 So it's hard to separate ignorant results from deliberate propaganda results. 00:57:56.000 --> 00:58:02.000 Well, maybe we can go on to untangle some of that in another show. 00:58:02.000 --> 00:58:08.000 I'm afraid we're out of time again, Raymond. It's been fascinating and fun and it's gone by too quickly. 00:58:08.000 --> 00:58:09.000 Okay. 00:58:09.000 --> 00:58:11.000 But we'll hopefully talk to you very soon. 00:58:11.000 --> 00:58:12.000 Okay. 00:58:12.000 --> 00:58:13.000 Thank you very much, Raymond. 00:58:13.000 --> 00:58:14.000 Bye. 00:58:14.000 --> 00:58:15.000 Goodbye. 00:58:16.000 --> 00:58:26.000 And we've been talking to Raymond Peat, endocrinologist, physiologist, and science historian from Eugene, Oregon. 00:58:26.000 --> 00:58:37.000 Raymond Peat has a website. It's called Ray Peat, R-A-Y-P-E-A-T, all one word, RayPeat.com, 00:58:37.000 --> 00:58:45.000 where you'll find many interesting articles covering subjects of science history and health and nutrition. 00:58:45.000 --> 00:58:54.000 If you have any questions for Politics and Science, you can direct them by email to politicsandscience@madriver.com. 00:58:54.000 --> 00:59:00.000 That's politicsandscience@madriver.com. 00:59:00.000 --> 00:59:11.000 Politics and Science can be heard weekly on WMRW LP1 95.1 FM, airing on Mondays at 5 p.m. and Sundays at noon. 00:59:11.000 --> 00:59:19.000 And in the Bellows Falls area can be heard on WULL LP Bellows Falls at 101.1 FM, 00:59:19.000 --> 00:59:25.000 airing from 3 to 4 p.m. on Sundays and from 9 to 10 a.m. on Mondays. 00:59:25.000 --> 00:59:34.000 Politics and Science presents the viewpoints of its participants and does not necessarily reflect the viewpoints of any other person or organization.