WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.000 The following interview with Ray Peat was recorded on May 18, 2012. 00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:11.000 If you'd like more information about Dr. Raymond Peat, you can go to his website, 00:00:11.000 --> 00:00:16.000 RayPeat.com, R-A-Y-P-E-A-T dot com, 00:00:16.000 --> 00:00:21.000 where there's many interesting articles for free available for your enjoyment. 00:00:21.000 --> 00:00:24.000 Also, if you're interested in hearing this show again, 00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:31.000 many politics and science shows are posted at RadioNumeral4All.net, 00:00:31.000 --> 00:00:38.000 RadioNumber4All.net, and when you get there, search for "politics and science." 00:00:38.000 --> 00:00:44.000 Hello and welcome to "Politics and Science." I'm John Barkhausen, your host, 00:00:44.000 --> 00:00:50.000 and today we're going to talk about some autoimmune diseases and some movement disorder dysfunctions. 00:00:50.000 --> 00:00:55.000 I'm intrigued by them not only because I have friends that are suffering from these, 00:00:55.000 --> 00:00:59.000 but also because the medical world offers so little knowledge about the diseases 00:00:59.000 --> 00:01:05.000 and so little hope or practical knowledge in terms of treatment for what to do to help people. 00:01:05.000 --> 00:01:10.000 I'm very happy that Dr. Raymond Peat is here to join me again today. 00:01:10.000 --> 00:01:14.000 Dr. Peat has a Ph.D. in biology from the University of Oregon 00:01:14.000 --> 00:01:17.000 and extensive knowledge of science history. 00:01:17.000 --> 00:01:20.000 There are many theories as to the causes of the diseases, 00:01:20.000 --> 00:01:27.000 and one common factor that is present in all of them and that most people agree on is inflammation. 00:01:27.000 --> 00:01:33.000 Ray, I just want to start off by asking you why is so little understood about these diseases? 00:01:33.000 --> 00:01:40.000 Well, I think there's a lot more known than the public is aware of. 00:01:40.000 --> 00:01:44.000 The medical journals aren't a good place to look 00:01:44.000 --> 00:01:48.000 if you're just wanting to find out how much is known, 00:01:48.000 --> 00:01:56.000 but if you read widely in not only medical journals but general science journals, 00:01:56.000 --> 00:02:02.000 you see that people have discovered really interesting things about all of them 00:02:02.000 --> 00:02:09.000 and that there are patterns that show up across the various diseases 00:02:09.000 --> 00:02:18.000 that I think really things could be put into practice more than they are. 00:02:18.000 --> 00:02:25.000 And there are people demonstrating improvement in the degenerative diseases 00:02:25.000 --> 00:02:32.000 with very simple antioxidant supplements and creatine supplements and such 00:02:32.000 --> 00:02:42.000 that you just don't hear about in the New York Times stories about advances in health. 00:02:42.000 --> 00:02:49.000 I think part of it is that when a generic substance looks like it might prevent 00:02:49.000 --> 00:02:56.000 or cure one of these horrible conditions, the drug industry isn't interested, 00:02:56.000 --> 00:03:06.000 so there's no advertising money to be made by running publicity about it. 00:03:06.000 --> 00:03:09.000 So nobody pursues it. 00:03:09.000 --> 00:03:13.000 Ray, can you explain where you're finding out this knowledge of hopeful techniques 00:03:13.000 --> 00:03:16.000 to combat these diseases? 00:03:16.000 --> 00:03:24.000 A lot of it you can find right in PubMed and Google. 00:03:24.000 --> 00:03:31.000 A lot of it in more obscure journals, but there's enough to keep a person busy for years 00:03:31.000 --> 00:03:39.000 just putting pieces together like making a meaningful puzzle out of scraps 00:03:39.000 --> 00:03:43.000 from the various lines of thinking. 00:03:43.000 --> 00:03:53.000 Like if you follow one disease over 20 or 30 years, like Alzheimer's, 00:03:53.000 --> 00:03:59.000 there are a number of styles focusing on the cholinergic nerve death 00:03:59.000 --> 00:04:05.000 or the accumulating fibrils, amyloid and such, 00:04:05.000 --> 00:04:11.000 and explaining that as a toxin that causes the disease. 00:04:11.000 --> 00:04:18.000 And the various different diseases, each one goes through its styles 00:04:18.000 --> 00:04:27.000 and what they think is interesting, but the pressure on funding the research and such 00:04:27.000 --> 00:04:38.000 pushes generally towards a genetic explanation that makes a simple drug solution conceivable, 00:04:38.000 --> 00:04:47.000 like something to stop that one genetic defect from taking its effect. 00:04:47.000 --> 00:04:52.000 So when you say styles, are you talking about there's certain fads in research 00:04:52.000 --> 00:04:55.000 that are prevalent at certain times? 00:04:55.000 --> 00:05:05.000 Yeah, definitely fads, but the basic big fad that has lasted for 100 years 00:05:05.000 --> 00:05:08.000 is the genetic explanation. 00:05:08.000 --> 00:05:19.000 Like in Huntington's disease, it's a certain repeat that causes a series of glutamine amino acids 00:05:19.000 --> 00:05:30.000 in the protein to increase, and that creates a protein that shows up as if it's doing damage. 00:05:30.000 --> 00:05:40.000 And so the framework idea is that the gene expresses itself in a protein 00:05:40.000 --> 00:05:45.000 and the protein causes the symptoms of the disease, 00:05:45.000 --> 00:05:50.000 and so it's the idea that the gene is causing the disease. 00:05:50.000 --> 00:05:55.000 But there are several ways of approaching that. 00:05:55.000 --> 00:06:05.000 One is that something is causing this repeat to be formed in the gene itself. 00:06:05.000 --> 00:06:09.000 For example, they've noticed that generations, 00:06:09.000 --> 00:06:16.000 even though typically Huntington's is thought to set in at the age of 40 or so, 00:06:16.000 --> 00:06:23.000 they've noticed that the children of those people develop about eight years earlier, 00:06:23.000 --> 00:06:29.000 and each generation anticipates and starts the condition earlier. 00:06:29.000 --> 00:06:40.000 So there's something causing that repeat in the protein to increase each generation, 00:06:40.000 --> 00:06:55.000 and that is something that's slow to sink into the genetic causality that things are happening right now, 00:06:55.000 --> 00:07:03.000 each generation creating a tendency to mutate in a certain direction. 00:07:03.000 --> 00:07:12.000 There were many genetic theories that said that mutations do have a directionality, 00:07:12.000 --> 00:07:21.000 and they used to explain the growth of corn antlers on elks and swans getting bigger and bigger 00:07:21.000 --> 00:07:29.000 because of some tendency in the organism to go in a certain direction. 00:07:29.000 --> 00:07:39.000 Orthogenesis, they called it, but that was sort of vaguely anti-Darwinian 00:07:39.000 --> 00:07:45.000 and inclined towards Lamarckism, and so it dropped out. 00:07:45.000 --> 00:07:54.000 But the idea of a defect in the gene that causes it to get worse and worse quickly with each generation 00:07:54.000 --> 00:08:09.000 is more acceptable because in immunology, that was a solution to how antibodies can adapt so quickly 00:08:09.000 --> 00:08:16.000 to any conceivable infection or antigen. 00:08:16.000 --> 00:08:26.000 They said they have to adapt by mutating so fast that they can evolve in just a few days 00:08:26.000 --> 00:08:32.000 to match whatever antigen they're exposed to. 00:08:32.000 --> 00:08:42.000 So this idea of almost directed mutation got put into genetics by way of immunology, 00:08:42.000 --> 00:08:51.000 and there are the trends in a few places. 00:08:51.000 --> 00:08:59.000 John Cairns and Ted Steele are the people known to be working on the idea of directed mutations 00:08:59.000 --> 00:09:02.000 in a constructive way, not just destructive. 00:09:02.000 --> 00:09:09.000 Yeah, I'm awfully confused by this because I think of geneticists as saying, in the past at least, 00:09:09.000 --> 00:09:14.000 that genes were a permanent thing that were passed down from generation to generation 00:09:14.000 --> 00:09:17.000 and could not be changed easily. 00:09:17.000 --> 00:09:31.000 Yeah, they have been open to the idea, but they're still not seeing it as anything deliberate 00:09:31.000 --> 00:09:38.000 or constructive, just a way the defect can develop. 00:09:38.000 --> 00:09:47.000 It's a way to save the genetic causality rather than seeing that the same thing causing the symptoms 00:09:47.000 --> 00:09:53.000 of the disease might also be causing the genes to change in the same direction. 00:09:53.000 --> 00:10:04.000 That's what they don't want to see is a link between the way the gene changes and the function of the protein 00:10:04.000 --> 00:10:08.000 in the life of the individual organism. 00:10:08.000 --> 00:10:12.000 That's where it implies Lamarckism. 00:10:12.000 --> 00:10:17.000 You mean that the organism is directing the gene mutation? 00:10:17.000 --> 00:10:29.000 Yeah, or that something is causing the organism on the cellular, not genetic level, to change 00:10:29.000 --> 00:10:36.000 at the same time that the gene that regulates that cellular function is changing in the same direction. 00:10:36.000 --> 00:10:46.000 They shouldn't be coordinated that way so that the function and the gene change simultaneously 00:10:46.000 --> 00:10:53.000 or even with the information going from the function into the gene and then back out. 00:10:53.000 --> 00:11:01.000 Because that would mean that the organism is a propulsive being on the evolutionary level. 00:11:01.000 --> 00:11:04.000 Yeah, exactly. 00:11:04.000 --> 00:11:16.000 That's the whole point ever since the anti-Darwinians in the 19th century, Weissmann in particular, 00:11:16.000 --> 00:11:25.000 they hated the idea that things could be changing meaningfully or purposefully 00:11:25.000 --> 00:11:37.000 and wanted to say that there is no real change and genes were the way of proving that you might get a different mixture of traits 00:11:37.000 --> 00:11:44.000 but the traits are eternal and the gene is what causes that. 00:11:44.000 --> 00:11:54.000 One of the people questioning this, James Shapiro, was working along in ordinary bacterial genetics 00:11:54.000 --> 00:12:03.000 and he noticed that individuals exposed to an antibiotic could become resistant to it 00:12:03.000 --> 00:12:12.000 and that they could pass that information on very intentionally to their neighbors 00:12:12.000 --> 00:12:20.000 and even across varieties of one bacteria to another and spread it through whole systems 00:12:20.000 --> 00:12:26.000 and that got him thinking about this idea of purposive change 00:12:26.000 --> 00:12:40.000 and he's proposed that the organism does genetic engineering along the lines of what Barbara McClintock was talking about 00:12:40.000 --> 00:12:56.000 but he says this is the general way genetics works in the organism, that the organism is its own genetic engineer doing changes for its own benefit. 00:12:56.000 --> 00:13:03.000 Yeah, I can believe it because I was looking today at a physiology book trying to understand the nervous system 00:13:03.000 --> 00:13:09.000 because a lot of the diseases we started off talking about are diseases of the nervous system 00:13:09.000 --> 00:13:15.000 and it's pretty phenomenal if you open up an encyclopedia and look at how the nervous system is laid out. 00:13:15.000 --> 00:13:27.000 It's an awe-inspiring system and the idea that some scientists and philosophers think that that happened by random evolutionary trial and error 00:13:27.000 --> 00:13:30.000 seems impossible to my mind. 00:13:30.000 --> 00:13:42.000 Yeah, the establishment genetics biology system including most of medicine are attacking James Shapiro 00:13:42.000 --> 00:13:49.000 with his application of the Barbara McClintock way of thinking. 00:13:49.000 --> 00:13:56.000 And what was your point? 00:13:56.000 --> 00:14:01.000 The complexity and organization of it is. 00:14:01.000 --> 00:14:13.000 Randomness is such a deep part of their way of thinking that they are accusing Shapiro of being a creationist 00:14:13.000 --> 00:14:21.000 and he says well the creationists sometimes speak very reasonably 00:14:21.000 --> 00:14:28.000 and sometimes the so-called neo-Darwinians don't speak so scientifically and reasonably 00:14:28.000 --> 00:14:38.000 and so he is attacking the science invoking creations because sometimes their arguments are positive. 00:14:38.000 --> 00:14:45.000 Yeah, I mean I don't personally buy into the father figure in the sky looking down on us all. 00:14:45.000 --> 00:14:49.000 No, but he's saying that the organism itself is creating. 00:14:49.000 --> 00:14:57.000 That life has intelligence you've said before and that to me has the ring of truth to it 00:14:57.000 --> 00:15:04.000 because as you look around the world and see basically as you say the world organizing itself 00:15:04.000 --> 00:15:08.000 it's a good example of the intelligence all around us. 00:15:08.000 --> 00:15:15.000 And one of the things that sort of interested me that Carl Lindgren said in his book Cold War in Biology 00:15:15.000 --> 00:15:21.000 was that in order to practice science back in the 40s and 50s in the United States 00:15:21.000 --> 00:15:27.000 it was very helpful to profess some kind of belief in a god in order to keep your job. 00:15:27.000 --> 00:15:33.000 He said that professors were afraid to say they were an atheist or agnostic. 00:15:33.000 --> 00:15:44.000 Yeah, all of my professors were churchgoers which used to be in the 19th century. 00:15:44.000 --> 00:15:49.000 They tended to be agnostics, biologists specifically. 00:15:49.000 --> 00:15:59.000 But it really did get a religious boost in the 1940s with the anti, 00:15:59.000 --> 00:16:07.000 they considered it anti-materialist but what it was was a different kind of materialism, 00:16:07.000 --> 00:16:19.000 randomness based materialism rather than the idea that material is part of the purpose of intelligent life process. 00:16:19.000 --> 00:16:28.000 Bringing this back to our topic today and talking about the inflammation that appears to be present 00:16:28.000 --> 00:16:34.000 in all of these diseases we're talking about whether we're talking about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis 00:16:34.000 --> 00:16:40.000 which is ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease or multiple sclerosis which you've written about quite a bit 00:16:40.000 --> 00:16:50.000 or rheumatoid arthritis, all these diseases which they don't really have any known cause or cure for 00:16:50.000 --> 00:17:00.000 involve inflammation and maybe you could outline for us how science has perceived inflammation over the years. 00:17:00.000 --> 00:17:12.000 In the middle of the 20th century there was a heavy concentration on inflammation as a reaction to infection 00:17:12.000 --> 00:17:22.000 to the extent that about 40 years ago, 35 years ago when I mentioned to a recent graduate something about 00:17:22.000 --> 00:17:31.000 sterile inflammation she wouldn't let me continue and said there's no such thing as sterile inflammation. 00:17:31.000 --> 00:17:41.000 But in 1900 and before people were demonstrating that you could extract something from infectious organisms 00:17:41.000 --> 00:17:47.000 that would create inflammation even if it was sterile and then with radiation experiments 00:17:47.000 --> 00:17:58.000 they found that radiation created inflammation or trauma, completely sterile burns, 00:17:58.000 --> 00:18:07.000 shutting off the blood supply creates inflammation and I think the only way to approach inflammation 00:18:07.000 --> 00:18:19.000 is to think of it as a gap that shouldn't exist between the demands made on the cells or the tissue 00:18:19.000 --> 00:18:23.000 and the resources to meet those demands. 00:18:23.000 --> 00:18:33.000 If you traumatize or over stimulate a tissue or if you don't provide enough sugar and oxygen and carbon dioxide 00:18:33.000 --> 00:18:41.000 to meet that stimulation, to hold the stimulation under control, then things go wrong 00:18:41.000 --> 00:18:53.000 and the tissue becomes edematous and chain reactions happen that can kill the tissue 00:18:53.000 --> 00:19:05.000 or if the organism can manage to recruit enough systems to provide sugar for example 00:19:05.000 --> 00:19:10.000 and to stop the excitation then it can heal. 00:19:10.000 --> 00:19:18.000 A little inflammation rouses the organism to cause regeneration 00:19:18.000 --> 00:19:23.000 otherwise it can lead to fibrosis and atrophy. 00:19:23.000 --> 00:19:30.000 So let's use an example of one of these diseases like multiple sclerosis. 00:19:30.000 --> 00:19:37.000 The myelin sheath for some unknown reason according to the medical authorities 00:19:37.000 --> 00:19:42.000 becomes worn away or taken away and the nerves stop functioning 00:19:42.000 --> 00:19:44.000 and people start having trouble with motor control. 00:19:44.000 --> 00:19:49.000 They say it's caused by inflammation and how does that relate to your idea? 00:19:49.000 --> 00:19:53.000 I think it causes a lack of energy. 00:19:53.000 --> 00:20:04.000 It will cause a tissue to swell up, take up water and as it swells up the tissue tries to renew itself. 00:20:04.000 --> 00:20:09.000 Cells are always renewing themselves in a tremendous churning process 00:20:09.000 --> 00:20:13.000 of taking down the old stuff and putting up new stuff. 00:20:13.000 --> 00:20:22.000 For example, someone said that during the night I think it was 60% of our molecules in our brain, 00:20:22.000 --> 00:20:30.000 the fat substance that's a big part of the brain, 60% of them are totally re-synthesized every night 00:20:30.000 --> 00:20:41.000 and just an hour after death a massive amount of the brain substance has decomposed 00:20:41.000 --> 00:20:45.000 because it isn't constantly being reconstituted. 00:20:45.000 --> 00:20:56.000 So you have to think in terms of a healthy stable organism as being in extremely intense turnover processes. 00:20:56.000 --> 00:21:05.000 And so if you cut off the energy supply the first thing that happens is the cell takes up water 00:21:05.000 --> 00:21:10.000 and that excites the restorative process to run faster. 00:21:10.000 --> 00:21:16.000 But if it takes up more and more water that shifts the whole direction 00:21:16.000 --> 00:21:22.000 and the cell at a certain stage of excitation will de-differentiate 00:21:22.000 --> 00:21:30.000 and try to turn into a stem cell to grow new tissue as a healing process. 00:21:30.000 --> 00:21:35.000 And if there's even less energy then that process stops. 00:21:35.000 --> 00:21:45.000 But when you have just a chronic slight energy deprivation you get a chronic slight edema 00:21:45.000 --> 00:21:51.000 and that edema one of the things that happens is that the myelin swells up 00:21:51.000 --> 00:21:59.000 and while it's being taken down it isn't being re-synthesized efficiently. 00:21:59.000 --> 00:22:11.000 Thyroid, progesterone, pregnenolone and saturated fatty acids are things that support the reforming of the myelin. 00:22:11.000 --> 00:22:19.000 And when the energy is down for example thyroid is low then you can't make the pregnenolone and progesterone 00:22:19.000 --> 00:22:25.000 and so you just can't synthesize it as fast as it's being taken down. 00:22:25.000 --> 00:22:30.000 So it's really a condition where you're put under stress 00:22:30.000 --> 00:22:37.000 and you don't have the energy resources to keep rebuilding yourself under that stress. 00:22:37.000 --> 00:22:49.000 Yeah and it's just remarkably similar in the processes in the degenerative brain diseases of aging 00:22:49.000 --> 00:22:58.000 or the development of cancer or of deforming arthritis, 00:22:58.000 --> 00:23:05.000 inflammation, chronic inflammation like pancreatitis, hepatitis, chronic kidney disease and so on. 00:23:05.000 --> 00:23:15.000 All the same processes are involved just in different proportions of energy supply and irritation or stimulation. 00:23:15.000 --> 00:23:19.000 Is that what Georgi referred to as the condition of being sick? 00:23:19.000 --> 00:23:21.000 Yeah, that was Hanselier. 00:23:21.000 --> 00:23:23.000 Oh, it was Hanselier, thank you. 00:23:23.000 --> 00:23:27.000 Yeah and that's just a shortage of energy basically. 00:23:27.000 --> 00:23:35.000 Yeah, I think the gap between stimulation and energy resources, 00:23:35.000 --> 00:23:40.000 it's been used to define excitotoxicity that kills brain cells 00:23:40.000 --> 00:23:46.000 but it's really the same process in your pancreas or kidney or skin 00:23:46.000 --> 00:23:51.000 and you are exactly the same energy systems. 00:23:51.000 --> 00:23:57.000 Slight differences in the particular proteins that are like in Huntington's disease, 00:23:57.000 --> 00:24:04.000 there's that polyglutamine repeat that accumulates 00:24:04.000 --> 00:24:12.000 but it's really just a symptom of an inflammatory state 00:24:12.000 --> 00:24:16.000 with a particular history that leads to that being a problem. 00:24:16.000 --> 00:24:20.000 But the fact that it usually waits until you're 40 years old 00:24:20.000 --> 00:24:26.000 means that the same with rheumatoid arthritis or Crohn's disease 00:24:26.000 --> 00:24:29.000 or any of these chronic inflammatory things, 00:24:29.000 --> 00:24:34.000 they almost never develop in little kids. 00:24:34.000 --> 00:24:38.000 It takes a while being exposed to certain environments 00:24:38.000 --> 00:24:41.000 for each kind of thing to develop. 00:24:41.000 --> 00:24:47.000 But there are a few common factors in the organism and its environment 00:24:47.000 --> 00:24:51.000 that are involved in almost all of these. 00:24:51.000 --> 00:24:55.000 Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, 00:24:55.000 --> 00:24:59.000 Lou Gehrig's disease, Huntington's, 00:24:59.000 --> 00:25:05.000 the various nervous dementia diseases and-- 00:25:05.000 --> 00:25:07.000 MS. 00:25:07.000 --> 00:25:14.000 Yeah, and the skeletal nervous inflammatory-- 00:25:14.000 --> 00:25:19.000 diabetes even involves inflammation 00:25:19.000 --> 00:25:22.000 and the failure to regenerate properly. 00:25:22.000 --> 00:25:28.000 Beta cells are being killed in the same way that brain cells are being killed, basically. 00:25:28.000 --> 00:25:34.000 And instead of making insulin, as the cells are renewed, 00:25:34.000 --> 00:25:39.000 the cells are killed as fast as they're renewed, so they stop making insulin. 00:25:39.000 --> 00:25:44.000 But if you stop killing them, then they can start making insulin again. 00:25:44.000 --> 00:25:46.000 Same with the brain. 00:25:46.000 --> 00:25:48.000 If you stop killing the brain, 00:25:48.000 --> 00:25:52.000 it's always in the process of repair and regeneration. 00:25:52.000 --> 00:25:58.000 I might have mentioned a man with ALS that I talked to about, I guess, 00:25:58.000 --> 00:26:02.000 eight or 10 years ago, 70 years old. 00:26:02.000 --> 00:26:10.000 And he had had all the best neurologists examine him, 00:26:10.000 --> 00:26:15.000 and he absolutely was convinced he had Lou Gehrig's disease 00:26:15.000 --> 00:26:21.000 and was declining the same as other people he met in the neurology offices. 00:26:21.000 --> 00:26:31.000 And he decided to start doing things to stop inflammation and support repair. 00:26:31.000 --> 00:26:36.000 And he did them consistently for a few months while still declining. 00:26:36.000 --> 00:26:42.000 But then he stopped declining and within a few months was repaired. 00:26:42.000 --> 00:26:46.000 It was less than a year of the whole process. 00:26:46.000 --> 00:26:51.000 And people he had met in the neurology offices went ahead 00:26:51.000 --> 00:26:59.000 with the same rate of decline and were totally disabled by the time he was totally well. 00:26:59.000 --> 00:27:01.000 That's impressive. 00:27:01.000 --> 00:27:06.000 So one of the things you've talked about in terms of helping your body rebuild 00:27:06.000 --> 00:27:09.000 from conditions like this is basically a very simple thing, 00:27:09.000 --> 00:27:11.000 just keeping your blood sugar up. 00:27:11.000 --> 00:27:15.000 Maybe you can describe what happens when somebody is low on blood sugar, 00:27:15.000 --> 00:27:20.000 reading you talking about what happens, basically this catabolic effect that happens 00:27:20.000 --> 00:27:24.000 in your body just from low blood sugar, to my mind is pretty convincing 00:27:24.000 --> 00:27:28.000 about how important it is to keep your blood sugar up. 00:27:28.000 --> 00:27:33.000 Yeah, the first thing when your blood sugar falls because your liver 00:27:33.000 --> 00:27:38.000 hasn't stored enough glycogen to turn into glucose, 00:27:38.000 --> 00:27:44.000 the first reaction is for adrenaline to increase to try to squeeze more glycogen 00:27:44.000 --> 00:27:48.000 into your circulation for your brain primarily. 00:27:48.000 --> 00:27:57.000 And when the glycogen is absolutely gone, the adrenaline keeps activating the breakdown 00:27:57.000 --> 00:28:07.000 of fat and provides increased amounts of circulating fat to make up for the lack of sugar. 00:28:07.000 --> 00:28:17.000 But after the fat becomes a source of energy, your cells still need some sugar 00:28:17.000 --> 00:28:24.000 to maintain their basic processes, and so they turn protein into sugar. 00:28:24.000 --> 00:28:33.000 And to do that, they increase cortisol, which breaks down muscle, skin, thymus gland. 00:28:33.000 --> 00:28:39.000 The thymus is the first to go, and the cortisol will eat up your muscle and skin 00:28:39.000 --> 00:28:48.000 and immune system pretty quickly to feed your heart, lungs, and brain to keep them alive. 00:28:48.000 --> 00:28:56.000 And so every time your blood sugar falls, you're shifting over to fat metabolism 00:28:56.000 --> 00:29:06.000 and breaking down protein so that your muscles are one of the places that store glycogen. 00:29:06.000 --> 00:29:10.000 So as your muscles get smaller, then more burden is put on your liver 00:29:10.000 --> 00:29:19.000 to keep your blood sugar steady, and that makes your liver progressively suffer. 00:29:19.000 --> 00:29:28.000 And eventually it gets to the point that your brain isn't getting either the right energy 00:29:28.000 --> 00:29:31.000 or the right kind of energy. 00:29:31.000 --> 00:29:36.000 But one of the things that happens with aging is that we progressively, 00:29:36.000 --> 00:29:43.000 from the time we're born at birth, we're very highly saturated in our fats 00:29:43.000 --> 00:29:50.000 because they've been formed from glucose in utero, and we can only make saturated, 00:29:50.000 --> 00:30:01.000 monounsaturated, and omega-9 unsaturated fats when we're supplied with either sugar or protein. 00:30:01.000 --> 00:30:05.000 But once we start eating in the ordinary environment, 00:30:05.000 --> 00:30:11.000 our tissues start loading up on the polyunsaturated from the environment. 00:30:11.000 --> 00:30:22.000 By the time a person is 40, the brain is pretty full of either the arachidonic acid series, 00:30:22.000 --> 00:30:33.000 or if they have eaten a lot of fish, there will be mostly the long, highly unsaturated fats, 00:30:33.000 --> 00:30:42.000 which will mostly be the DHA type of fish oil-derived omega-3 fats. 00:30:42.000 --> 00:30:50.000 And even with a pretty average diet, the old person's brain is very highly biased 00:30:50.000 --> 00:30:54.000 towards the DHA type fats. 00:30:54.000 --> 00:31:06.000 And if you look at Parkinson's disease, their favorite genetic protein that some people like to say 00:31:06.000 --> 00:31:14.000 is the cause of Parkinson's disease, synuclein is the Parkinson's equivalent 00:31:14.000 --> 00:31:26.000 of the glutamine repeat of Huntington's or the amyloid or tau fibrils of Alzheimer's disease. 00:31:26.000 --> 00:31:32.000 Each disease tends to have its own protein that goes haywire. 00:31:32.000 --> 00:31:45.000 In the case of Parkinson's, it's the alpha-synuclein, and DHA, the fish type of unsaturated fat, 00:31:45.000 --> 00:31:55.000 causes the synuclein protein to change to its toxic form that appears in Parkinson's disease. 00:31:55.000 --> 00:32:00.000 And saturated fats tend to protect against that. 00:32:00.000 --> 00:32:08.000 So very clearly in Parkinson's, you can see the role of fat in inclining the brain 00:32:08.000 --> 00:32:12.000 towards that degenerative change in the protein. 00:32:12.000 --> 00:32:22.000 And since pretty much everyone in the environment accumulates these highly unsaturated fats, 00:32:22.000 --> 00:32:29.000 especially in the brain, but in all tissues, with aging, by the time you're 30 or 40, 00:32:29.000 --> 00:32:36.000 you become more and more susceptible to all of the degenerative inflammatory diseases, 00:32:36.000 --> 00:32:42.000 very much in proportion to the unsaturated fats. 00:32:42.000 --> 00:32:50.000 And you can find the breakdown products corresponding to the seriousness of Alzheimer's disease 00:32:50.000 --> 00:32:55.000 or Huntington's or multiple sclerosis. 00:32:55.000 --> 00:33:08.000 The specific breakdown products, such as acrolein, which comes largely from the omega-3 fats, 00:33:08.000 --> 00:33:15.000 the various reactive breakdown products show that these unstable fats are breaking down 00:33:15.000 --> 00:33:21.000 at an increased rate in the degenerative brain conditions. 00:33:21.000 --> 00:33:27.000 I see. And you've also, in that sort of cascade of bad effects from low blood sugar, 00:33:27.000 --> 00:33:34.000 after the free fatty acids are released, you said that actually pulls down your whole thyroid system. 00:33:34.000 --> 00:33:36.000 And maybe you could talk about that. 00:33:36.000 --> 00:33:44.000 Yes. A series of studies in France about 30 years ago, 25 to 30, 00:33:44.000 --> 00:33:52.000 showed that exactly in proportion to the number of double bonds in the fat, 00:33:52.000 --> 00:33:59.000 increasing from a purely saturated fat, such as uric acid or palmitic acid, 00:33:59.000 --> 00:34:07.000 through oleic acid, increasing with linoleic, even more with linoleic, 00:34:07.000 --> 00:34:14.000 and then greatly with the five and six double bonds. 00:34:14.000 --> 00:34:22.000 Each increased double bond impairs the thyroid function at the level of secretion, 00:34:22.000 --> 00:34:25.000 transport, and response. 00:34:25.000 --> 00:34:32.000 They looked at four different systems, different kinds of response in the cell. 00:34:32.000 --> 00:34:39.000 But every one of these was impaired in proportion to the degree of unsaturation 00:34:39.000 --> 00:34:43.000 of the free fatty acids in the blood. 00:34:43.000 --> 00:34:45.000 When was that study done, Ray? 00:34:45.000 --> 00:34:53.000 In the '80s, in the Annals of Endocrinology, a French journal. 00:34:53.000 --> 00:34:57.000 Well, they are traditionally, and up into recent history, 00:34:57.000 --> 00:35:01.000 the kings of using saturated fat in their cooking. 00:35:01.000 --> 00:35:05.000 French cuisine is known for its use of butter. 00:35:05.000 --> 00:35:14.000 Well, the French have fallen for the propaganda against saturated fats 00:35:14.000 --> 00:35:23.000 and cholesterol and so on, to the extent that some of their famous fat researchers 00:35:23.000 --> 00:35:28.000 were convinced that giving a fish oil supplement to pregnant women 00:35:28.000 --> 00:35:32.000 would make their babies smarter, even though animal studies showed 00:35:32.000 --> 00:35:38.000 that in proportion to the unsaturation of the fat in the pregnant animal's diet, 00:35:38.000 --> 00:35:42.000 the baby's brains were smaller and less able to learn. 00:35:42.000 --> 00:35:50.000 But anyway, the French fed some pregnant women the unsaturated fats, 00:35:50.000 --> 00:36:00.000 while measuring the fetus's ability to react to sounds applied to the abdomen. 00:36:00.000 --> 00:36:06.000 And they found that contrary to what they believed would happen, 00:36:06.000 --> 00:36:14.000 the learning was impaired by the diet with more of the highly unsaturated fats. 00:36:14.000 --> 00:36:20.000 And when the babies were born, in line with the animal experiments, 00:36:20.000 --> 00:36:22.000 their growth was retarded. 00:36:22.000 --> 00:36:29.000 Well, that seems really immoral to be testing that theory out on infants and their mothers. 00:36:29.000 --> 00:36:36.000 Well, the publicity of the animal studies has pretty much suppressed the fact 00:36:36.000 --> 00:36:44.000 that these fats didn't have consistently good effects on brain and eye development, 00:36:44.000 --> 00:36:52.000 but what got publicized were the few studies showing what were interpreted to be good studies. 00:36:52.000 --> 00:36:59.000 And on the basis of that, the baby food industry was allowed to add these things 00:36:59.000 --> 00:37:03.000 to their powdered milk for making baby formula. 00:37:03.000 --> 00:37:11.000 But even in the powdered milk, they're so unstable that breakdown products, 00:37:11.000 --> 00:37:17.000 toxic oxidation fragments, are just tremendously increased in these baby food additives. 00:37:17.000 --> 00:37:24.000 But still, the publicity is such that they're promoted as protective. 00:37:24.000 --> 00:37:30.000 So currently, as it stands today, baby formula that people are using 00:37:30.000 --> 00:37:33.000 has the DHA oils in them? 00:37:33.000 --> 00:37:37.000 A lot of them do. I don't know if there are some without it. 00:37:37.000 --> 00:37:41.000 Yeah, that's a little discouraging. 00:37:41.000 --> 00:37:45.000 Yeah, I can see adults, you know, going along with different fats 00:37:45.000 --> 00:37:50.000 and trying things out for themselves, but when you start experimenting with infants, 00:37:50.000 --> 00:37:52.000 it seems like not a very good idea. 00:37:52.000 --> 00:37:59.000 One of the things that happens at the same time these unsaturated fats are accumulating in the body 00:37:59.000 --> 00:38:08.000 is that the ratio of estrogen to progesterone in the body is increasing. 00:38:08.000 --> 00:38:15.000 So that by the time a woman is 40, she has, in an absolute sense, 00:38:15.000 --> 00:38:18.000 her estrogen is even higher than it was when she was 20. 00:38:18.000 --> 00:38:24.000 But even worse is that her progesterone has decreased, 00:38:24.000 --> 00:38:30.000 and the ratio has shifted very powerfully in the direction of estrogen. 00:38:30.000 --> 00:38:36.000 And estrogen happens to synergize with the polyunsaturated fats 00:38:36.000 --> 00:38:41.000 so that women have more DHA circulating in their blood, 00:38:41.000 --> 00:38:49.000 and these polyunsaturated activate the action of a given amount of estrogen, 00:38:49.000 --> 00:38:55.000 and at the same time interfere with the production of progesterone and suppress thyroid, 00:38:55.000 --> 00:38:59.000 which has the same bias. 00:38:59.000 --> 00:39:04.000 Lower thyroid increases estrogen, decreases progesterone. 00:39:04.000 --> 00:39:12.000 But the estrogen industry has convinced most doctors that estrogen is good for the brain 00:39:12.000 --> 00:39:17.000 and for preventing heart disease and strokes and so on, 00:39:17.000 --> 00:39:23.000 so that when the Women's Health Initiative pointed out that estrogen supplements 00:39:23.000 --> 00:39:27.000 increased dementia, heart attacks, and strokes, 00:39:27.000 --> 00:39:34.000 and things that reinforced what animal studies had shown, 00:39:34.000 --> 00:39:41.000 the medical establishment took two or three years to respond and come back and say, 00:39:41.000 --> 00:39:47.000 "We must have been wrong with that Women's Health Initiative study 00:39:47.000 --> 00:39:52.000 to incriminate estrogen in dementia and heart disease." 00:39:52.000 --> 00:39:56.000 That's what they're saying now, that the study was wrong. 00:39:56.000 --> 00:40:01.000 Yeah, the very heavy propaganda to improve the sales of estrogen, 00:40:01.000 --> 00:40:06.000 which dropped off drastically when that study came out. 00:40:06.000 --> 00:40:08.000 That was a very convincing study. 00:40:08.000 --> 00:40:15.000 Yeah, especially because it absolutely corroborated in not a too strong way, 00:40:15.000 --> 00:40:22.000 but it was absolutely in line with the animal research going back 50 years before that. 00:40:22.000 --> 00:40:27.000 And these diseases we're talking about today, they affect women way more than they affect men. 00:40:27.000 --> 00:40:32.000 I think MS is 10 to 1, and I forget what ALS is. 00:40:32.000 --> 00:40:39.000 Even Alzheimer's, in the '90s it was already well documented that women had two 00:40:39.000 --> 00:40:46.000 or two and a half times the incidence of Alzheimer's disease as men. 00:40:46.000 --> 00:40:51.000 And in spite of that, people who wanted to sell estrogen said, 00:40:51.000 --> 00:40:56.000 "Well, that's because women's estrogen declines with aging." 00:40:56.000 --> 00:41:01.000 But in fact, by the age of 40, it has increased tremendously, 00:41:01.000 --> 00:41:07.000 and that's when the brain damage is being done by the bad ratio of estrogen to progesterone. 00:41:07.000 --> 00:41:09.000 I know you've covered this before, Ray, 00:41:09.000 --> 00:41:14.000 but explain how it is that people think estrogen is declining when it actually isn't. 00:41:14.000 --> 00:41:17.000 It's increasing, and the tests just don't pick it up. 00:41:17.000 --> 00:41:26.000 Well, one thing is that the estrogen is stuck when it's in the cells working. 00:41:26.000 --> 00:41:31.000 It's bound to the things they call estrogen receptors. 00:41:31.000 --> 00:41:38.000 And progesterone's effect, which should rise right after ovulation, 00:41:38.000 --> 00:41:42.000 there should be this huge excess of progesterone. 00:41:42.000 --> 00:41:47.000 Progesterone destroys, decomposes the estrogen-binding proteins 00:41:47.000 --> 00:41:54.000 and activates enzymes that inactivate estrogen, getting it out of the cells. 00:41:54.000 --> 00:42:00.000 So if you're deficient in progesterone, you can't get estrogen out of the cells. 00:42:00.000 --> 00:42:07.000 And it not only stays there, but it even, with its own action, 00:42:07.000 --> 00:42:13.000 it tends to activate enzymes that create more estrogen, 00:42:13.000 --> 00:42:19.000 so that your aromatase in your fat tissue and fibrous tissue and various tissues 00:42:19.000 --> 00:42:25.000 increases making fat outside of the ovaries as you age. 00:42:25.000 --> 00:42:33.000 Even in a young monkey, they were studying the estrogen output in the ovary, 00:42:33.000 --> 00:42:38.000 and as a control, they used the blood coming from the arm veins 00:42:38.000 --> 00:42:44.000 and found that the monkey's arm was producing more estrogen than its ovary was. 00:42:44.000 --> 00:42:48.000 And that process increases with age. 00:42:48.000 --> 00:42:54.000 But most of the estrogen, when you're deficient in progesterone, 00:42:54.000 --> 00:43:00.000 most of the estrogen stays inside cells working, affecting the cells, 00:43:00.000 --> 00:43:06.000 rather than getting out into the blood where it could be excreted. 00:43:06.000 --> 00:43:13.000 And so the only way you can really tell how much estrogen influence a person has 00:43:13.000 --> 00:43:22.000 when they're 50 years old is to take a snip of tissue and analyze its estrogen content. 00:43:22.000 --> 00:43:27.000 And on top of our bodies producing more estrogen as we age, 00:43:27.000 --> 00:43:30.000 we have a huge environmental load coming down on us, 00:43:30.000 --> 00:43:35.000 because many of the chemicals we use in our modern lifestyle are estrogenic, 00:43:35.000 --> 00:43:38.000 and plus pollution is estrogenic. 00:43:38.000 --> 00:43:44.000 In the 1930s, before the estrogen industry took off, 00:43:44.000 --> 00:43:49.000 people were studying what estrogen is and does, 00:43:49.000 --> 00:43:54.000 and they found that soot is estrogenic, 00:43:54.000 --> 00:44:02.000 and that the same things that produce the estrogen effect produce inflammation and cancer, 00:44:02.000 --> 00:44:08.000 and that basically it's a process of cell excitation, 00:44:08.000 --> 00:44:14.000 followed or accompanied by blocking oxidative energy production. 00:44:14.000 --> 00:44:22.000 And that was pretty much covered up when the estrogen industry convinced doctors 00:44:22.000 --> 00:44:29.000 that estrogen was the female hormone that would prevent infertility and aging and so on. 00:44:29.000 --> 00:44:33.000 Yeah, good for their business and bad for everybody else. 00:44:33.000 --> 00:44:41.000 The interaction of estrogen as an excitatory thing with the polyunsaturated fats, 00:44:41.000 --> 00:44:44.000 which are excitatory things, 00:44:44.000 --> 00:44:50.000 these besides producing inflammation and blocking energy production, 00:44:50.000 --> 00:44:54.000 they activate other systems. 00:44:54.000 --> 00:44:59.000 For example, the glutamate, glutamic acid, 00:44:59.000 --> 00:45:06.000 it's why monosodium glutamate produces brain injury, 00:45:06.000 --> 00:45:13.000 because that excites cells to the point that if there's not enough energy supply, 00:45:13.000 --> 00:45:15.000 the cells will die. 00:45:15.000 --> 00:45:25.000 But estrogen and the unsaturated fats both activate this glutamate excitatory system, 00:45:25.000 --> 00:45:33.000 and those interact, all of them to increase a set of enzymes. 00:45:33.000 --> 00:45:40.000 The transglutaminase is the enzyme that's involved in celiac disease, 00:45:40.000 --> 00:45:43.000 the gluten sensitivity disease. 00:45:43.000 --> 00:45:53.000 And this enzyme is normally involved in maturing cells that are under the influence of stress, 00:45:53.000 --> 00:46:00.000 as in the surface of the skin when it's maturing into a hardened keratinized layer, 00:46:00.000 --> 00:46:08.000 or in the uterus as estrogen is causing the lining of the uterus to mature 00:46:08.000 --> 00:46:11.000 and cause keratinized cells to form. 00:46:11.000 --> 00:46:18.000 But in the brain, this excitation from unsaturated fats, lipid peroxidation, 00:46:18.000 --> 00:46:24.000 breakdown, and estrogen, and the glutamic acid system, 00:46:24.000 --> 00:46:30.000 these excite the formation of the transglutaminase. 00:46:30.000 --> 00:46:37.000 And transglutaminase happens to form polymers and fibrils 00:46:37.000 --> 00:46:46.000 and deposits of these various enzymes that are known to accumulate in Huntington's, 00:46:46.000 --> 00:46:50.000 Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, and so on. 00:46:50.000 --> 00:46:56.000 The tau protein, for example, in Alzheimer's disease, 00:46:56.000 --> 00:47:04.000 transglutaminase activates a reaction at the end of the tau protein, 00:47:04.000 --> 00:47:10.000 or in various places with all of these other proteins that accumulate and form fibrils. 00:47:10.000 --> 00:47:18.000 And this enzyme works on amino groups, 00:47:18.000 --> 00:47:28.000 which when the metabolism is healthy and producing energy by use of oxidative metabolism, 00:47:28.000 --> 00:47:33.000 it's producing a constant supply of carbon dioxide. 00:47:33.000 --> 00:47:39.000 And carbon dioxide spontaneously combines with amino groups, 00:47:39.000 --> 00:47:41.000 all kinds of amino groups. 00:47:41.000 --> 00:47:47.000 Every protein in the body should have a supply of carbon dioxide, 00:47:47.000 --> 00:47:53.000 preventing the action of enzymes such as transglutaminase, 00:47:53.000 --> 00:47:58.000 which would bind them and cause them to condense and form fibrils. 00:47:58.000 --> 00:48:05.000 And I suspect that in places where estrogen is dominant, 00:48:05.000 --> 00:48:12.000 or in the skin where the cells are exposed to pure air, 00:48:12.000 --> 00:48:17.000 the carbon dioxide is displaced either by the effect of estrogen 00:48:17.000 --> 00:48:20.000 or just by the high saturation of oxygen. 00:48:20.000 --> 00:48:25.000 And the absence of the carbon dioxide allows this transglutaminase, 00:48:25.000 --> 00:48:31.000 the cross-link, inactivate and harden the proteins. 00:48:31.000 --> 00:48:34.000 But when it happens inside your brain, 00:48:34.000 --> 00:48:41.000 you get these abnormal deposits of protein that should only happen in cells 00:48:41.000 --> 00:48:46.000 that are terminally differentiating and getting ready to slough off. 00:48:46.000 --> 00:48:48.000 And your body's getting rid of. 00:48:48.000 --> 00:48:49.000 Yeah. 00:48:49.000 --> 00:48:53.000 So CO2 is very important to the health of the body. 00:48:53.000 --> 00:48:58.000 There was a survey in Nepal at very high altitudes. 00:48:58.000 --> 00:49:02.000 They found lots of sick people, 00:49:02.000 --> 00:49:07.000 but they didn't find the degenerative brain diseases 00:49:07.000 --> 00:49:13.000 that you would expect at lower altitude, poor populations. 00:49:13.000 --> 00:49:18.000 And I suspect that it's because when you adapt to high altitude, 00:49:18.000 --> 00:49:23.000 your body retains a much higher level of carbon dioxide. 00:49:23.000 --> 00:49:28.000 Your blood is more in the carbamino state, but probably all your proteins are. 00:49:28.000 --> 00:49:31.000 And you've said that reduced thyroid function, 00:49:31.000 --> 00:49:35.000 not having enough of the active thyroid hormone, T3, 00:49:35.000 --> 00:49:38.000 if you don't have enough, that's when you start having trouble 00:49:38.000 --> 00:49:42.000 not only with energy levels, but also the myelin sheath. 00:49:42.000 --> 00:49:46.000 Your nerves can't regenerate without the T3; is that right? 00:49:46.000 --> 00:49:48.000 Yeah. 00:49:48.000 --> 00:49:55.000 The first five people that I met who had a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, 00:49:55.000 --> 00:49:59.000 I was starting to believe there wasn't such a thing as multiple sclerosis 00:49:59.000 --> 00:50:06.000 because all of those first five people had such classical symptoms of hypothyroidism. 00:50:06.000 --> 00:50:08.000 I pointed that out. 00:50:08.000 --> 00:50:12.000 When they took thyroid, their symptoms totally disappeared. 00:50:12.000 --> 00:50:21.000 So it's very easy to confuse hypothyroidism with multiple sclerosis. 00:50:21.000 --> 00:50:23.000 So in the few minutes we have left, Raymond, 00:50:23.000 --> 00:50:28.000 maybe you could just run over what are some of the simple things people can do 00:50:28.000 --> 00:50:32.000 to alleviate their symptoms or even avoid them entirely. 00:50:32.000 --> 00:50:41.000 Well, it's known that aspirin prevents most of these degenerative conditions. 00:50:41.000 --> 00:50:49.000 People who have chronically used some aspirin are much less likely to have Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. 00:50:49.000 --> 00:50:57.000 And caffeine is another generally protective thing against inflammation, fibrosis, and degeneration. 00:50:57.000 --> 00:51:05.000 And avoidance of the polyunsaturated fats, I think, is the basic and most important thing, 00:51:05.000 --> 00:51:09.000 and avoiding antithyroid foods. 00:51:09.000 --> 00:51:14.000 The worst antithyroid foods are these polyunsaturated fats. 00:51:14.000 --> 00:51:17.000 And protein levels, keeping your protein level up. 00:51:17.000 --> 00:51:24.000 Yeah, and gelatin seems to have a therapeutic anti-inflammatory effect. 00:51:24.000 --> 00:51:31.000 So eating the cheapest cuts of meat, bones, and skin. 00:51:31.000 --> 00:51:38.000 In the U.S., few people eat the skin, and since the fat avoidance fad, 00:51:38.000 --> 00:51:42.000 people tend to eat skinless chicken and so on. 00:51:42.000 --> 00:51:51.000 But when the animals are fed a good diet, the skin fat is more saturated. 00:51:51.000 --> 00:51:55.000 So pork rinds are a very good source of gelatin. 00:51:55.000 --> 00:52:01.000 And if you boil a chicken, even without the feet and other parts, 00:52:01.000 --> 00:52:10.000 the skin and bones will release a lot of gelatin, which is an anti-inflammatory protective protein. 00:52:10.000 --> 00:52:15.000 And you mentioned how important it is to keep your blood sugar up to handle stresses. 00:52:15.000 --> 00:52:17.000 And how should one do that? 00:52:17.000 --> 00:52:20.000 I have a feeling that a lot of our problems today, at least in some people, 00:52:20.000 --> 00:52:23.000 is that they're avoiding sugar because it's gotten such a bad rap. 00:52:23.000 --> 00:52:31.000 Yeah, every day I hear at least one or two people saying what happened when they started eating sugar. 00:52:31.000 --> 00:52:39.000 One guy this morning said his hair stopped falling out a couple days after he started eating sugar. 00:52:39.000 --> 00:52:50.000 A kid who was having seizures and had gone down to 112 pounds in just two or three weeks 00:52:50.000 --> 00:52:59.000 is back up to his normal weight from eating something like eight or nine ounces of sugar added to his other foods. 00:52:59.000 --> 00:53:07.000 In a crisis, sugar in itself, just a simple honey or sugar can be very therapeutic. 00:53:07.000 --> 00:53:17.000 But in general, you want to shift your diet towards fruit rather than grains and starchy vegetables. 00:53:17.000 --> 00:53:25.000 Just to finish up, you were saying that starches were a bad way to get sugar, like wheat is bad. 00:53:25.000 --> 00:53:29.000 Yeah, partly because of the other things they're associated with. 00:53:29.000 --> 00:53:37.000 But one of the things they do harmfully is to support bacterial growth. 00:53:37.000 --> 00:53:49.000 The poorly cooked starches or the more undercooked vegetables and complex forms of starch support bacterial growth. 00:53:49.000 --> 00:53:57.000 And bacteria produce endotoxin, and endotoxin works with these other pro-inflammatory things. 00:53:57.000 --> 00:54:13.000 Some of the structural changes of the degenerative proteins are very similar to the structure that is defensive against endotoxin. 00:54:13.000 --> 00:54:21.000 So some of them might be provoked by the presence of endotoxin as a defensive reaction. 00:54:21.000 --> 00:54:33.000 But it's well known that the polyunsaturated fats activate the prion formation and so on. 00:54:33.000 --> 00:54:42.000 But the unsaturated fats are probably biologically analogous to the endotoxin produced by the bacteria. 00:54:42.000 --> 00:54:58.000 Yes, and you've written a lot about the relationship of maldigestion of food creating a lot of the problems that we've been talking about or helping to exacerbate them. 00:54:58.000 --> 00:55:09.000 Yeah, and the unsaturated fats contribute even at the digestive level because they interfere with protein digestive enzymes 00:55:09.000 --> 00:55:13.000 as well as after they get into the bloodstream. 00:55:13.000 --> 00:55:16.000 Well, we've filled up the hour, Ray. 00:55:16.000 --> 00:55:21.000 It's gone very fast, and I really appreciate you coming on Politics and Science again. 00:55:21.000 --> 00:55:32.000 And perhaps at some point we can follow up and get into some of the details of how digestion does relate to disease 00:55:32.000 --> 00:55:36.000 because I think that's something that the medical world doesn't cover at all. 00:55:36.000 --> 00:55:46.000 Yeah, if you go back to the mid-19th century, you see that medicine was really making progress. 00:55:46.000 --> 00:55:54.000 And then into the 20th century, the Russians were continuing digestive physiology. 00:55:54.000 --> 00:56:02.000 But after about 1920s in the U.S., it was pretty much ignored. 00:56:02.000 --> 00:56:09.000 All right, well, thanks so much for sharing your knowledge with us, and I'll give out your contact information when we're done. 00:56:09.000 --> 00:56:10.000 Okay. 00:56:10.000 --> 00:56:11.000 All right, thanks a lot, Ray. 00:56:11.000 --> 00:56:12.000 Yeah, bye-bye. 00:56:12.000 --> 00:56:13.000 Bye. 00:56:13.000 --> 00:56:20.000 You've been listening to an interview with Dr. Raymond Peat, recorded on May 18, 2012. 00:56:20.000 --> 00:56:24.000 More information about Dr. Peat's work can be found at raypeat.com. 00:56:24.000 --> 00:56:29.000 That's R-A-Y-P-E-A-T dot C-O-M. 00:56:29.000 --> 00:56:34.000 You'll find many, many articles all there for your enjoyment 00:56:34.000 --> 00:56:39.000 and all searchable for whatever topic you're interested in. 00:56:39.000 --> 00:56:45.000 If you're interested in this interview or other interviews that are done by Politics and Science, 00:56:45.000 --> 00:56:53.000 you can find some of them posted at their podcast page, which is radio4all.net. 00:56:53.000 --> 00:56:59.000 That's radio and then the number four, and then all dot net, radio4all.net. 00:56:59.000 --> 00:57:05.000 And when you get to radio4all.net, search for Politics and Science. 00:57:05.000 --> 00:57:07.000 I've been your host, John Barkhausen. 00:57:07.000 --> 00:57:14.000 I hope you've enjoyed this interview, and please tune in again next week for another edition of Politics and Science.