And welcome back to the Source Nutritional Radio Show.
And if life seems like a big mystery to you, you might want to sit down and talk with Dr. Raymond Peat.
Dr. Peat, are you on the phone today?
I am.
Aloha. It's nice to have you back as our guest today.
We got such a nice response from our show last Saturday, Dr. Peat.
I always tell people, because Karen and I work in the natural food store,
people come in all the time and we get a lot of good feedback.
We get people's comments. But I wanted to start out this morning, Dr. Peat, I have in
front of me a book you wrote, Mind and Tissue, about Russian research on the human brain.
And I wanted to ask you, because in the news lately there's all this talk about brain damage
to the football players in our country. Have you heard this story?
Oh, not recently, but yeah, I know that there's a lot of brain damage in football.
I guess everybody was shocked in the sports world last week with Junior Seau's suicide,
and it was very sad, because a lot of us enjoy sports, especially since 9-11, it's a good distraction. But
can you tell us a little bit about this book, Mind and Tissue, and the research you have
on the human brain and how things work?
Well, maybe you've been hearing about the use of progesterone. I think they say it's in the last stage of clinical trials before getting approval to
use progesterone for treating brain injury.
After many years of animal studies treating with progesterone, they've advanced to the, applying it to people with recent brain injuries, and it has the
same good effects in humans as it does in animals.
Even if you cut out a nerve in a rabbit study, for example, several years ago, they removed a centimeter of nerve and then put
a fiber bridge across the gap, but impregnated the fiber with progesterone and found that
the progesterone even facilitated the complete regeneration across a missing piece of nerve.
The Russian research interested me because there were, here and there across Europe in
the 18th century, there were a few researchers thinking in an integral way about what an organism is and what sickness is, and realizing
that the whole organism is involved in the sickness process, and the thing that most
obviously makes a whole organism a unit is the brain and the nervous system, and that's
something that people have been aware of for thousands of years.
But in the 18th century, doctors, a few doctors, actually started thinking along that line.
But it didn't go over well in England, Germany, and France.
But for some reason, a little later in the 19th century, it really took off in Russia, and there was a
whole branch of medicine that they called nervism, realizing that the brain is a factor
in everything—cancer, tuberculosis, allergies, trauma, etc. And the famous Sechenov, who was, before Pavlov, had set the research
program to study how nerves work, what a reflex is, and so on.
And so when Pavlov began integrating central thing to how an organism
exists.
Pavlov said that the digestive system is an animal's closest contact with the world, and it uses its nervous system to integrate its reactions to the world.
And so he studied the innervation of the digestive system basically as a way to understand what
an organism is.
Well, when we talk about progesterone, Dr. Peat, and we do sell it in our store in Kailua, people
will always ask me, are there like foods that naturally have progesterone in it that they
can eat?
Milk, milk and cheese are the only foods containing measurable amounts of progesterone. I really like your information about progesterone being an anti-androgen.
How would a man use this if he were balding, for instance, and can you, would you remark
on when you see thinning adherence scale from both men and women, what that relates to? About 35 years ago, I had been experimenting with the oil-dissolved progesterone, and a
bald man in his 30s asked me for suggestions, and I suggested rubbing some of this oil progesterone
on his scalp.
And he came back two or three weeks later with fuzz on his head and was all enthusiastic
about it and started telling his friends.
And I sort of discouraged the use of it because if a man puts on too much progesterone, it has anti-testosterone
effects.
And if a man isn't expecting it and is willing to stop using it or adjust the dose, it might
make him think he's losing his virility.
And so occasionally I would mention it to a man, but for about 30 years I avoided talking
about it because so many men were just obsessed with the idea of growing hair and explaining what it does to their
testosterone was too involved.
But how would that affect a baby boy?
Say if you had a baby that had brain damage or...
Oh, sure.
If there's any... When a man has something more serious than baldness, I don't
hesitate to tell him what it does physiologically. And a child, the same thing, if they have
something really serious, then you don't mind if they delay their puberty a while. And so that's all it would do is delay puberty?
It would not make them become transsexual or something odd like that?
There hasn't been much research using it on kids or even young animals,
but animal studies suggest that delaying puberty is very, very good for the personality and
the general health of the animal.
The more stress they're under, the earlier puberty begins, and precocious puberty is
starting to be a big problem around the world because of exposure to estrogens and such.
And the brain basically stops developing at puberty, and so in countries where the diet
doesn't have so much polyunsaturated fats. Puberty used to come around the age of 18 in places that had a lot of coconuts in the
diet, for example.
And the brain and personality have a lot more chance to develop if it is delayed for several
years.
I actually heard that same information from Dr. John Gray, the author of the book
Women are from Venus and Men are from Mars.
He's definitely from Mars.
I like what he had to say.
You're kind of reinforcing what Dr. John Gray said,
if you can actually naturally, in a way, delay puberty,
that it enhances the brain growth in the child. Now how about, what about if you had a, say a baby boy who fell into that autistic spectrum
and you wanted to use pregnenolone and progesterone, would that be fine and dandy?
Is there any precaution that we should take into consideration in using pregnenolone for
kids? Well, pregnenolone is even easier to use. It doesn't have any known so-called hormonal
effects in itself. It does seem to help the body handle the tone of connective tissue and sphincter muscle and such, those
aren't recognized as hormone effects.
So pregnenolone isn't considered a hormone, but it's a precursor, like a nutrient for
any tissue that does use the steroid hormones.
So it just helps balance the things that the body is naturally trying to do.
Progesterone will neutralize the component in pregnant women is that it stabilizes
every physiological process, and it's there in these massive amounts, hundreds of milligrams
of it being produced every day late in the
pregnancy process. And those huge amounts prevent any surges of estrogen or testosterone
or cortisol, anything that destabilizes the developmental process is blocked by these huge amounts of
progesterone.
So that, for example, the adrenal steroid albosterone that regulates salt balances,
if you have too much albosterone and a lot of progesterone, you don't have salt retention
the way you would with just too much albostrone.
And if you don't have any albostrone, but you have lots of progesterone, you don't lose
salt catastrophically the way you would just for the deficiencies. All of the steroids functions are represented in the single molecule of progesterone, even
without it being converted into anything else.
For example, in the 1940s, Hans Zellweg was studying all of the steroids and having his assistants inject large amounts
against all kinds of different conditions, and even removing the adrenal glands from
a rat, if they were giving these large injections of progesterone, the rat would live with perfect
health, a fully normal lifespan, no adrenal glands at all, just progesterone.
Wow, that's amazing.
So as far as, since you mentioned how profound a role progesterone plays in brain development in babies.
If that were missed out on during the pregnancy, could one compensate somewhat after the birth
if they knew it would cause the damage?
Could they give their child progesterone and pregnenolone to try to repair some of that
damage?
That was sort of overlooked because of the doctrine that the brain and the heart don't regenerate, but
now in the last 10 or 20 years since stem cells have been recognized, a few people are
starting to think about that.
Stein's studies of brain injury show that the progesterone is actually helping to regenerate the destroyed
parts of the brain, but the animal studies show that the brain really continues growing
throughout the lifespan.
About 40 years ago, a sort of compendium of changes that occurred during the aging process
measured the amount of DNA in the brain and found that the human brain contains a steadily
increasing quantity of DNA up to the age of 90 and more, showing that the cells keep increasing throughout
the whole adult lifespan, contrary to the idea that growth is something that happens
only in childhood.
Yeah, that's interesting to me.
I actually never heard that.
Now, if I wanted to administer Pregnenolone to one of my grandchildren, what would a good
average dose be for a child?
What would I maybe want to give to a grandchild?
I know that you said that it's non-toxic, but as far as pocketbook savings, what would
be a good average dose if you wanted to try to repair some brain cell damage?
No one has ever studied that officially.
So we could just take a stab at trying maybe 100 milligrams a day and see what happens?
Well for an adult, even 10 or 15 milligrams.
I've seen people snap out of a depressed mood minutes after taking 10 or 15 milligrams.
And the body normally produces about 30 milligrams a day of pregnenolone at least, 30 to 60,
something like that.
And even those very small doses are sometimes enough to just stop a stress reaction.
Well, what if somebody wanted to use it for a facelift effect?
Could we use 300 or 400 milligrams with no problem?
Yeah, for an adult.
I've seen one person said he was getting no results, couldn't feel anything from 300 milligrams. A couple days later he called back and said he had taken a heaping spoonful of it and
woke up looking like he had had a facelift.
How many milligrams would you guess is in a heaping teaspoonful?
Well for a year I took a heaping teaspoon every day on average and ate a whole kilogram in a year.
So I was getting about 3,000 milligrams per day just to see how it felt.
How did it feel?
Very good.
It didn't feel that much better than 100 milligrams a day though.
I see, so it would be just something that people could safely experiment with until
they find what the dose for them would be?
Yeah, but you have to be careful with the excipients.
So many products have strange junk.
I don't advise eating, you know, stilica for example is something that's in
a lot of products and methylcellulose isn't good. Just have to be careful of what the
additives are.
Is there any pure pregnenolone on the market anymore? Oh yeah. There's one company in the U.S.
I don't remember their exact name.
Is it Life Extension?
Well, I don't think they have a pure powdered without excipients.
They do have some good products.
There's one company that sells 20 grams of bulk progesterone for $20.
You can find those things on the internet.
We really like your progesterone and we've experimented with that and I have to say that
I know you speak about it taking an excess, people can feel a little loopy and we felt
that way and it's actually kind of a relaxing, nice feel.
Yeah, you don't want to experiment with any of those things when you aren't completely
at leisure and don't have to do anything, because I've talked to people who would take a fourth of a teaspoon of progesterone mixture and
feel drunk.
Now why does such a small dose cause that feeling in some people?
If they don't have the antagonistic estrogen cortisol, then they feel the full effect of
that much progesterone.
Other people, if their thyroid is low and their estrogen high, 100 milligrams of progesterone,
they can't feel a thing.
So regarding the cortisol and estrogen, is it possible that anybody is really low estrogen?
Has that ever happened?
Occasionally, yeah.
A very slender person sometimes has a safely low amount of estrogen.
So that wouldn't be something you'd be concerned about?
It's more the pregnenolone and the progesterone that would sort of maintain a balance of all
the other hormones?
Yeah, the healthy people tend to keep their estrogen low most of the time, and when they're in the low estrogen time is when they can be very sensitive to a big
dose of either testosterone or progesterone.
Now as people age and they tend to get the little weight accumulation, if they're taking
an adequate dose of progesterone, why does that happen?
Why does what happen?
Why do they continue to gain weight?
I know some people who are using thyroid and progesterone continue to gain weight.
Depends on what they're eating I suppose.
If you don't eat the right things to support heat production and good energy production, a lot of it will get stored as
fat.
Some people just eat too much fat or too much starch.
The unsaturated fats and starches in general are probably the main causes of obesity.
The unsaturated fats turn off the processes that raise heat production and have a catabolic
effect on your protein, muscles and such. And the starches stimulate the processes that synthesize fat rather than just accelerating
the burning of the sugar.
So I'm going to ask you in my own case, I do take thyroid and I take pregnenol and progesterone
and I'm still cold.
So would it be safe for me to add some DHEA to see if I could kick that heat production
up?
My first suggestion would be to check your intake of calcium and sodium as well as magnesium
and potassium.
But calcium and sodium are often the things that are missing when someone is putting on
fat instead of producing energy.
I think 2,000 milligrams of calcium per day is a good, safe, standard amount.
For example, a quart and a half to two quarts of milk will provide enough calcium
to keep your machinery running so you're burning calories.
Okay, so you don't necessarily recommend it in a supplement form as much as a food form?
No, the best supplements of calcium would be eggshell or some oyster shell from a clean part of the ocean if you can find that.
But even those aren't as well assimilated as from milk and cheese.
Now that's what I always heard about the oyster shell based calcium products Dr. Peat, that
they were very hard to assimilate by the body.
But if you're just tuning in, you're listening to the Source Nutritional Radio Show with our guest today, Dr. Raymond Peat. And Dr. Peat,
when we started the show, we were talking about some new research that's come out that
has kind of debunked the fish oil supplement industry, saying it does not affect heart
health. And considering that fish oil supplements is one of the top five nutritional supplements
that today's doctors are recommending, what's your feeling about fish oil supplements is one of the top five nutritional supplements that today's doctors are recommending.
What's your feeling about fish oil supplements?
Oh, studies like that were coming out seven or eight years ago or longer.
Like 40 years ago, yellow fat disease was associated with eating too much fat fish.
It was known to be seriously toxic as long ago as the 1950s, 1960s.
But when the so-called essential fatty acids, linoleic acid and linoleic when they were identified with not only cancer, but heart disease and clotting
diseases.
Then the fish oil industry stepped into the advertising scene and started saying that
those were the safe unsaturated fats.
But it was just as the fats that were promoted in the 1950s, as they were being incriminated
as toxins, then the fish oil came in and said, we're not as toxic as those fats.
And that's true.
They break down so fast that they
don't have the long-range effects in the stored tissues
that the linoleic and derivative arachidonic acids have.
But it's only by being less toxic.
If you do an experiment and are feeding your control animals a deadly amount of linoleic
acid, such as corn oil or safflower oil, and then you add some fish oil, it will slightly
block those toxic effects of the linoleic acid.
And that's how they do the research to show the health benefits from fish oil.
But if you compare it to coconut oil or butter or no fat, the fish oil always turns out toxic.
They were showing toxic effects in humans seven or eight years ago. For example,
raising the C-reactive protein, an indicator of inflammation in the blood.
Well, you mentioned butter, which happens to be my favorite food. I have a horrible
craving for butter all the time. Is there a problem with exceeding a certain level of butter?
Yeah, you can get fat on butter, but in context, its main you need, such as calcium and sodium, to keep
your metabolism going at a high level, and adequate protein.
And gelatin happens to be a protein that you can increase considerably without worrying
about increasing inflammation and the
protein in milk, casein especially, is an anti-stress type of protein but
especially if you supplement that with gelatin, the balance is very
anti-stress and as a consequence, anti-obesity.
And how do you recommend that we use the gelatin?
Oh, it depends on your needs for treating inflammatory bowel disease and liver disease,
kidney disease, diabetes, and so on.
They've used as much as an ounce or two of pure gelatin
added per day, even more people sometimes use temporarily.
And it's important to have a good gelatin without additives and it generally should
be thoroughly dissolved rather than eating it as a powder.
It should be mixed with hot water or milk until there are no granules left so that it's easy to digest.
So would it be unusual for someone to be allergic to gelatin?
Yeah, I think it's unusual, but some people think they react more to pork gelatin than
to beef, but the only reactions I've heard, it's mainly just poor digestion of
it getting gas or something.
And so how could one offset that initially?
Could they take some digestive enzymes temporarily to...
Or just try a different brand of gelatin.
Some people do okay with beef gelatin rather than pork.
And you think the Great Lakes gelatin is a good?
Yeah, they have both kinds and they also have hydrolyzed that some people think it's much easier to use
and they think it might digest more easily.
Well, I'm intrigued that you mentioned that it has an effect on diabetes. How would that be?
I think it's the anti-inflammatory effect.
Diabetes is basically an inflammatory problem resulting from a chronic accumulative effect
of the polyunsaturated fats that interfere with the use of sugar by the cells and at the same time
have a toxic inflammatory effect on the cells of the pancreas that produce insulin.
And those cells, incidentally, are actually being regenerated constantly.
Cells in other parts of the pancreas are gradually transforming themselves into the insulin-producing
cells.
So, it's like a stream of stem cells constantly waiting to replace the beta cells that produce insulin
as they're destroyed.
But if your body is saturated with the toxic unsaturated fats, every time they get replaced,
they're killed again by the breakdown products of the unsaturated fats.
So are you saying that diabetes has more to do with these polyunsaturated fats and they're
blocking the metabolic process than it does with sugar?
Yeah, in fact glucose is a factor in helping to regenerate the beta cells.
Well the unsaturated fats are killing them, but just increasing the sugar isn't enough
if you don't remove the unsaturated fat from the diet. 150 years ago in France and England, a couple of doctors
demonstrated curing their terminal, wasting away diabetic patients by giving them 8 or
10 ounces of sugar per day, along with other foods, where they had been losing pounds per week of body
weight, they quickly stopped producing such huge amounts of glucose in their urine and
their weight loss stopped.
And within a few weeks, they had returned to good health, no diabetes at all.
Wow. What are the types of oils that you would recommend, Dr. Peat?
Oh, well, butter and coconut oil.
But again, I'm intrigued about what you just said, because pretty much everything has those oils that are so corrupt in them, like all the packaged
foods, pretty much all of them have those oils.
So could it be that our obesity epidemic has much to do with the over-ingestion of those
polyunsaturated oils for so many years?
Yeah, if you look at the consumption, food consumption records, U.S. Department of Agriculture, for the last 40 years, you see that fat consumption,
which is mostly the polyunsaturated seed oils, increased about 7% during these years, while
sugar consumption decreased by about 1%.
Wow.
You didn't mention olive oil, Dr. Peat.
Is that one of your favorite oils?
It's very good for flavoring and has very good drug actions, the so-called anti-oxidant
factors or anti-inflammatory factors.
But it also has 8 to 10 percent or even more of the polyunsaturated fats.
So you shouldn't use it in bulk, but a spoonful or two per day is fine.
Wow, that's really interesting. So, if you have a child with diabetes, from what you just stated, it would probably be
possible to actually repair that pancreas if they abstain from all the polyunsaturated
oils and get their thyroid in order?
Yeah, from the research, that is what I think is the case.
Before I was born, my father was a diabetic, and insulin was already institutionalized
as the only treatment.
And he was putting out a tremendous amount of sugar in his urine and had gone down in weight
to something like a hundred pounds.
And he refused to get on the lifetime insulin injection program. He looked at the old Nature of Pathic and Traditional Medicine texts and found that
brewer's yeast was a traditional remedy.
And so he ate brewer's yeast only for, I guess, several weeks, he completely recovered and progressed and his wife was able to eat
everything just like anyone.
Wow.
Yeah, we like to put brewer's yeast on our popcorn at nighttime as a snack.
Now, let me ask you again, with that in mind, would that be a recommended avenue for a parent
to do with a child, say for instance their
diabetes occurred after having mono or Epstein-Barr?
Well, I think the nutritional factors in the diabetes, in the bird's yeast, are offset by some potential toxic factors.
The starch, the high phosphorus content, and the estrogen
are things that you have to take into account.
If you're just curing something over a period of a few weeks,
you don't worry about nutritional imbalances and allergic reactions and such.
But I think it's better to get the same nutrients from fruit, eggs, and liver, and milk, rather
than counting on brewer's yeast to do it, because of the possible toxic effects from
eating too much brewer's yeast.
Okay. And I know this is a really, this is not a fair question, but I'm going to ask it anyway.
If there was one thing that you would tell someone, especially a child who had diabetes,
if there was one thing they should eliminate from their diet, what would that be?
Oils.
Okay, but that would not include coconut oil, I'm assuming.
No, butter and coconut oil are pretty safe.
They have about 2 or 3 percent of the dangerous fats, but those are a minimal danger compared
to the benefits of the saturated fats.
Our phone lines are lighting up here, Dr. Peat.
We only have a few minutes left.
Somebody called in and asked the question if they already have a goiter or are taking
these various life-supporting substances that you recommend, pregnenolone, progesterone,
thyroid hormone, and coconut oil, is there any danger in taking that if somebody has
an existing goiter?
Yeah.
I think people who have a noticeably enlarged thyroid gland should use a thyroid supplement or a good, simple
protective diet until they have shrunk the gland before they use any of the steroid supplements
such as progesterone, because I've known a few people who did have a huge gland
who took progesterone and it normalized
the function of the gland so that it was able
to secrete the hormone instead of storing it, but they went into a hyperthyroid
state, and since they knew what was happening, they didn't worry about it.
But when women, usually in their early twenties or around menopause, when they go into a hyperthyroid
state with a 125 resting pulse, for example, and extreme amounts of sweating and oily skin
and so on, doctors will immediately want to destroy their thyroid, but when they know that the gland is normalizing itself, then
they can just set it out for sometimes two to four, five weeks as the gland unloads.
Well, that's so fascinating.
Well, we have a caller on the line.
Aloha, welcome to the Source Nutritional Radio Show.
You had a question for our guest today, Dr. Raymond Peat.
Yes, I had two and I'll listen on the radio. What then do you think is the best ratio between
omega-6 and omega-3? And also, have you ever heard of leptin?
Leptin, yeah, leptin is part of the inflammation promoting system.
They said it was a sticky protein.
A what?
A sticky protein that disrupts a lot of things in your body.
She says it's a sticky protein?
Leptin, that's L-E-P-T-I-N?
Yes. in. It's a little peptide produced by the fat cells, which it was promoted by the drug
industry 10 or 15 years ago as a cure for obesity, but then it turned out that it also
promotes inflammation and cancer.