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Hello and welcome. This is Taya Stey, your host of the 'Your Health' series,
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Hello again, this is Taya from World Food Network, broadcasting to your health.
And with me I have Raymond Peat.
And just a brief introduction, Raymond is an author.
He's written 'Nutrition for Women' for Additions, 'Mind and Tissue' to Additions,
'Progesterone in Othomolecular Medicine' to Additions and 'Generative Energy'.
He also has two patents for 'Progesterone in Tocopherol' 1984,
'DHEA and Other Steroids for Arthritis' 1986
and 'The Use of Steroids in Treatment of Osteoporosis and Other Degenerative Diseases'.
He received his PhD in progesterone and related hormones in 1972
and that was actually a very interesting story how they came about.
So I'm really looking forward to putting Raymond in the hot seat
and literally picking his brain at simplifying some very complicated topics on foundational hormones.
Raymond, hello.
Hello.
How are you doing?
Very good.
Fantastic.
So you did your PhD because you really wanted to study science.
You really wanted to dedicate yourself to something where you could discover something new.
Yeah, I had been studying interesting stuff, just trying to understand how the world works.
So I had specialized in linguistics, literature, painting and things that I was interested in.
But I decided I should make knowledge useful.
I was around the age of 30 I think when I decided that useful knowledge was really the purpose of the brain.
And you're now 73, is that correct?
Yes.
And you're still pursuing knowledge?
And what?
And you're still pursuing knowledge?
Oh, yeah.
That's why I do a newsletter every two months
because I'm still trying to get the big picture more sharply focused.
Yes.
I have actually read all your articles, just read all your articles on your website.
Some of them I've read two or three times because I really, really wanted to understand the complexity that you simplify
that you just said in a couple of sentences.
And what really fascinated me was the foundational hormones, the pregnenolone, progesterone and the estrogen.
I could not find that information anywhere and I have been researching that for personal reasons and for my clients.
And I find that people really need to understand foundational hormones to see the bigger picture.
And your thesis was actually energy interrelated with structure.
That was the purpose of you doing that.
Can you take us into the world of foundational hormones and why do we need them and what are they?
I have been working in Mexico for several years and when I moved back to the U.S.,
I started noticing the effects of the weather on my health and especially on young women's health.
In the winter at the university, lots of students would spend most of their time indoors
and sometimes get no sun at all for several months at a time.
I started seeing symptoms like premenstrual syndrome and depression that came on in the winter.
And people who had never experienced those symptoms until they came to Eugene,
which is a very cloudy place in the winter, I started realizing that the sunlight is a major factor
in allowing us to produce and use certain hormones and progesterone is the main hormone that is needed
for both brain development and fertility.
And sunlight, the reason animals are fertile in the spring is because the sunlight,
as the days get longer, the anti-stress hormones increase and that is mainly progesterone
that increases in the spring, causing the brain to function more with greater variety and energy
and it allows fertility to be carried to completion.
So that would be vitamin D, which is also a pro-hormone?
Well, that is one of the factors in sunlight.
The vitamin D allows us to absorb and use calcium and calcium holds down some of the basic stress hormones
that tend to put us into a torpid hibernation state when it is too dark.
And the hormones that make people depressed and sick in the winter are the same hormones that allow
animals in nature to go into torpor or hibernation when the days are very short.
Progesterone is the main anti-stress hormone that is inhibited if we are deficient in either calcium or vitamin D.
When vitamin D and calcium are not adequate in either the diet or the exposure to the environment,
the cells go into an excited, inefficient state and they have to be quieted and put into a torpor by various other hormones.
Progesterone keeps us out of that state, but to do it you need to have your calcium under control.
And it isn't just the vitamin D that regulates calcium, it is the energy produced in the mitochondria
under the influence of good hormones and good nutrition.
The mitochondria produce energy that keeps calcium out of cells and in the bones where it should be.
And if you are deficient in vitamin D and calcium, the hormones allow it to get into the mitochondria and poison them.
But if the days are very long, even if you don't have vitamin D, the light that penetrates into your tissues
is mostly red and yellow light and that light happens to quench the free radicals that damage the mitochondria.
So it's basically a low energy state that is caused by a deficiency of sunlight and/or vitamin D and/or calcium.
So we actually require the ultraviolet light from the sun to synthesize vitamin D, is that correct?
Yes, and also the red light to quench free radicals that are produced by stress.
Yes, and so if we go out in the sun in the morning, early morning, or probably after 5, we will not be getting enough ultraviolet light.
So therefore, even though we are getting the sun, we are actually not getting the synthesis for vitamin D, is that correct?
Well, we are getting the anti-stress effect.
If you get enough calcium and other nutrients, you can really get along with an extremely low vitamin D intake or synthesis.
They have done experiments with animals in which they gave them a diet lacking vitamin D and low in calcium,
but when they gave them sugar rather than starch, simply the energy efficiency of the sugar
allowed them to build strong bones and avoid rickets.
So it's much more complex than just taking vitamin D. It's the whole balance of nutrients.
Yes, that makes a lot of sense.
And you did talk about sugar or glucose and starch, and some people actually don't know the difference.
Carbohydrates are carbohydrates, and there are different types of carbohydrates.
What do you mean by starch and sugar?
Well, in one of the basic lab experiments that physiology professors have traditionally given their students,
you would feed a rat with a stomach tube a huge gob of corn starch or other pasty starch mixed with a little water,
the equivalent of about a quart for a person.
And then you would wait five minutes, and you were instructed to find how far the starch had moved in the digestive system.
And in just ten minutes, the students would find no trace of starch.
It had been totally dissolved, turned into sugar, and absorbed in ten minutes,
even though it was the equivalent of a quart for a human being.
And starch is a chain of glucose molecules,
and so if you eat a given amount of energy or calories in the form of starch,
what you get is an instantaneous blast of glucose.
If you eat the same amount of energy in the form of sucrose, just plain granulated sugar,
the absorption of the sugar is slower, the glucose stimulates insulin and tends to turn on fat production.
Fructose slightly inhibits the production of insulin and slightly inhibits the blood sugar disturbing effect of the glucose.
That's kind of interesting because the corn starch is very predominant in most foods these days.
I mean, you would find corn starch in the form of melted oxygen,
and I personally tell people not to take that because even though it seems to be harmless,
it actually does cause quite a high blood sugar increase.
Not to mention the side effects of, you know, a little bit of gas and flagellants,
and I think when people take that ingredient out of everything in their diet, there's enormous improvement.
Yet it seems so innocent because it's added to everything, melted oxygen, as a corn starch.
Yeah, if the starches are instantly absorbed, as in the rat experiment, they cause obesity.
And if they're mixed with other ingredients so that they are more slowly absorbed,
then they are fermented in the intestine,
and that type of slowly digested starch was found to cause animals to become fearful and aggressive
because of the toxic effect produced by fermentation in the intestine.
So that's a classic of "we are what we eat,"
and often we don't realize the effect that food has on our moods, our brain chemistry, energy level,
because we think if we could buy it from a supermarket, if it's being promoted on television, it's harmless.
And yet a lot of the times it actually does impact our health, even interferes with hormone production.
Is that correct?
Yes. Sugar is needed for the liver to activate the thyroid hormone,
which is what produces the energy that prevents stress and regulates minerals and growth and so on.
And if someone tries to eat a low-carbohydrate diet,
or if they eat only starches so that their blood sugar is going up and down very quickly,
their thyroid doesn't function properly.
Sugar is the essential ingredient for about 70% of our thyroid function,
which involves the liver's activation of thyroxine into the active thyroid hormone.
And without the active thyroid hormone, none of the steroid hormones can be made.
So the adrenals, the ovaries, and even the brain, which is a major source of steroids,
can't adequately produce the protective steroids.
And why do we need protective steroids?
Well, the steroids are a feature of all life.
It's not really sufficiently studied exactly what their role is,
but cholesterol, for example, is known to be involved in the process of cell division,
and the expression of genetic information.
Every function of life involves either cholesterol or one of the steroids made from cholesterol.
So it's some function that if a cell is living and dividing, it's going to need steroids.
Few people really know about pregnenolone.
When I often mention it, because it's probably, in my opinion, the safest one to take,
if you wanted to up up your boost of foundational hormones,
as we live in a world of stress, stress is unavoidable, it's predictable, it's always there,
and some people actually get addicted to stress.
We actually get addicted to the adrenaline.
I think if that is what we do, then we probably need a boost of pregnenolone after the age of 40,
yet most people don't know, probably because it can't be patented.
Is that correct?
Yes, pregnenolone is the first hormone produced from cholesterol when our thyroid function is adequate.
And I'd just like to emphasize it is made from the LDL, which is classified as the bad cholesterol.
Is that correct?
Yes.
And cholesterol has been injected into animals, and when they're being trained,
they become more intelligent and learn more quickly when their cholesterol is higher.
And in the Framingham study, it was found that people at the age of 50 or more
who don't have cholesterol above average, above 200 milligrams per cent,
which the ideal is supposed to be 160 or so, so it's slightly above what is considered optimal.
If they don't have at least that much cholesterol,
they have a much higher risk of becoming demented.
Cholesterol is a very important brain chemical,
but one of its main functions is that the brain can turn it into pregnenolone and DHEA
and progesterone in very large quantities.
And if you're limited in your ability to turn it into those hormones,
taking pregnenolone bypasses one of the steps.
And so you can sometimes see a tremendous improvement of a person's ability to cope
when they take just a little bit of pregnenolone.
Yes, I have definitely noticed that,
and a few people that I have recommended to take pregnenolone,
if they really, really needed it,
they actually noticed improvements in their brain function within the first few days,
and they just actually couldn't believe that it worked so fast.
If we are avoiding cholesterol and if we are avoiding eggs,
most people are shocked to eat two or four eggs a day,
which kind of makes sense because the egg yolk has everything you need to make pregnenolone.
So if they're only having two eggs a week, that obviously would be deficient in pregnenolone
and probably progesterone, is that correct?
Well, you can make cholesterol if you have enough of all of the other nutrients.
Such as?
I recommend drinking a quart or two of orange juice per day
for a person who wants to bring their cholesterol up quickly.
It's much more efficient than eating a dozen eggs.
Yes, I don't think eggs actually raise cholesterol as most people are being trained
or through media to believe,
and I do think that probably a high sugar diet or carbohydrates
would raise cholesterol to a glitter, it's faster than anything.
If people are lowering their cholesterol, which is the aim of,
we should all have low cholesterol, I don't agree with that,
then they would be avoiding the very things they need.
So what other things could they take in terms of supplements?
Well, vitamin A is the main cofactor for thyroid
to be able to turn cholesterol into those hormones.
And that vitamin is from animal sources?
Yes.
In the 1930s, one of the signs for diagnosing hypothyroidism
was a progesterone deficiency.
And when some of these women who had had severe symptoms
of high estrogen and low progesterone,
when some of them had their ovaries removed,
the corpus luteum, which means the yellow body
where progesterone is synthesized,
these parts of the ovary were found to be bright red.
They had accumulated carotene in place of vitamin A
and carotene at that high concentration competes
for the enzymes that use vitamin A,
and so it has an anti-vitamin A function.
And unless people eat things like chicken livers
and once again egg yolks, or take cod liver oil,
which is not very pleasant,
they're probably not getting enough vitamin A
from that retinol source.
Yes.
If your metabolic rate is high,
your vitamin A requirement is very high
because you will be producing large amounts
of pregnenolone and progesterone,
and that uses up vitamin A very quickly.
Sometimes people notice that in bright, sunny weather,
they'll get acne or dandruff
or some of the annoying little symptoms.
And if they just take a big supplement of vitamin A
and watch their thyroid,
because vitamin A can inhibit the thyroid function,
if those are in balance,
then you're able to make the amount of progesterone
and pregnenolone that you need to respond
to the long summer days.
So you had some very interesting experiences yourself
when you were implementing some of those steroidal hormones
like DHEA.
I mean, that's quite amazing.
I have read that you grew one and a half inches
at the age of 46.
Did you really need to grow?
Yeah, I had grown up in Oregon,
and the winters in all parts of Oregon
are pretty dark and stressful.
And I didn't know that I was hypothyroid
or lacking in hormones because, for example,
when I would work in the woods,
I would eat sometimes over 10,000 calories per day.
I ate tremendous amounts and didn't get fat,
so it took me a long time to realize
that I could be hypothyroid
and still have such an extremely high metabolic rate.
But when I did try taking thyroid,
I found that my rate of metabolism decreased sharply.
It did something to increase my efficiency,
which was probably increasing my production of progesterone
and pregnenolone.
And so that led to a series of other experiments
in which I tried taking each of the hormones individually.
And some doctor friends had noticed
what they thought was a melanoma growing very fast.
It looked like an arrowhead, irregular and rapidly enlarging.
And I didn't intend to have it removed,
but I was watching it.
And it happened just a few days after I began taking the DHEA.
That thing flared up, and within about three days was gone.
And around the same time, I noticed that my wisdom teeth,
which had started to erupt when I was around the age of 18 or 20,
had just stayed, never finished erupting for 25 years roughly.
And within a couple of weeks of taking a small amount of DHEA,
they began rotating, and in just, I guess,
a total of about a month, they were perfectly oriented,
vertical rather than submerged and sideways.
That's really quite motivating and inspirational
to want to make people go and take a little bit of DHEA.
And you only recommend one to two milligrams a day,
which is infinitesimal, which is a tiny amount,
compared to most supplements that are 12 milligrams, 25, 50,
even go to 100.
Yeah, teenage boys only make about 12 milligrams per day at the maximum.
And so if you take 10 milligrams when you're only 30 or 40,
some of it is likely to be turned into estrogen.
So when people are buying these supplements,
because in America you could pretty much get DHEA over the counter,
not knowing all of this, and if they were to get 25 milligrams,
is it likely that they're actually not really getting the pharmaceutical grade,
that maybe they'd be best at getting 5 milligrams?
Well, I think they should just cut the tablet in fractions
and just go by what the label says,
but cut it down so that they're only taking about 2 to 5 milligrams per day.
When buying supplements or looking through supplements,
it's always important to see what the company stands for.
It's a kind of reliable measure.
And I think for me personally, if I look at other fillers
and things that shouldn't be there in some other formulas,
I probably tend not to go with that company.
And at the same time, there are very, very few
that really do use pharmaceutical grade that you can rely on.
Do you have any favorites that you can recommend?
And if you have patents, may I ask why you have not come up with your own formulas?
Well, I did sell some of the DHEA dissolved in vitamin E,
which makes it a very quick-acting and controllable form
that will circulate and distribute itself without affecting your liver.
If you take it in the crystalline powdered form,
your liver will get the first opportunity to metabolize it,
and that's when it most easily turns into estrogen.
But it is dissolved completely in oil.
If you don't mind eating extra olive oil or coconut oil or butter, for example,
you can meld a few milligrams in a spoonful of that.
But if you're taking just a plain DHEA capsule or tablet
as one would have from an everyday supplier,
if you're not taking it with some sort of oil such as olive oil or vitamin E,
then your liver will have to work really hard.
Is that what you're saying, Raymond?
If you take it with the oil, that helps to keep it from going into the liver.
Okay.
It helps to absorb it in the general circulation dissolved in the oil.
What if they just take pregnenolone and don't worry about the DHEA?
Would that do it?
That's best, I think.
Several years ago I stopped giving people any DHEA because they tended to feel so good
they would keep taking more and more of it until one person enlarged his liver
and had the estrogen level of a teenage girl.
And that effect can cause a lot of long-range problems.
I shifted to recommending that almost everyone use pregnenolone instead of DHEA
because in animal experiments rats were given a 10-gram dose of pure pregnenolone
and then their hormones were examined.
And it did nothing to the hormones of happy, healthy rats,
but if the rat was under stress it lowered the stress hormones.
So no matter how much you take,
that would be like about two cups of powdered pregnenolone for a human.
Even that much doesn't disturb your hormones.
And if you were under stress it will remove the stress hormones.
So is this such a thing as taking too much pregnenolone?
Well, for an experiment I ate a kilogram of pregnenolone spread over a year.
That averaged out to about 3,000 milligrams a day.
And I felt great all that year.
I could eat anything I wanted to
and my metabolism just was ideally regulated.
But the only reason I didn't keep it up was it's very expensive.
And where do you get your pregnenolone these days?
I haven't been using it.
I've been working on how to increase my own production of it by adjusting the foods.
That would be fascinating.
And how is progress?
Very good.
I use a small amount of a thyroid supplement such as Cytomel or Cenomel, a T3 supplement,
and then I emphasize sodium, calcium, and the sugary fruits in my diet
and try to get a lot of gelatin.
And by keeping the ratio of calcium to phosphorus very high
and having a slight excess of sodium either in the form of table salt or baking soda,
that helps to regulate all the other minerals
so that you don't have to worry so much about getting enough magnesium.
Many foods are very low in magnesium,
but if you eat extra sodium, your body retains almost all of the magnesium that you give it.
So coffee is very high in magnesium, is that correct?
Yes, that's my main source of magnesium.
So you drink coffee.
And I did read an interesting article about your perspective on caffeine
and how it actually helps with the brain function
and it inhibits adenosine, something to do with affecting other neurotransmitters.
And of course if our neurotransmitters are balanced, it's like we're more balanced.
And it's perfectly normal to have two or three cups of coffee a day, is that correct?
Yes. It doesn't hurt to drink 50 if that is what balances your metabolism,
but I think everyone should try to get from three to five cups a day.
There have been studies in which people who drank more than five cups
had lower incidences of various kinds of cancer and lower incidence of dementia too.
So brain protection and avoidance of cancer are probably the two most important things that coffee does,
but it's anti-inflammatory and anti-stress and has a very broad range of protective effects.
Except it does raise cortisol levels, so if one doesn't need the cortisol levels to be raised,
which is the real stress hormone,
they probably should limit their coffee one to two cups a day.
And how you can tell if your cortisol is high is that I read somewhere
if you're craving carbohydrates after you have a cup of coffee, you're probably having too much.
Yes, and by adjusting all of your nutrients, getting lots of calcium from milk and cheese, for example,
and plenty of sugar from fruits in particular, those things all help to hold down your cortisol.
And eating small amounts at a time will reduce your stress hormones too.
So if someone is vegetarian, like if they're really a strict vegan,
what would they need in terms of foundational hormones and how to increase them?
Well, vitamin A is the main problem for a vegetarian
because carotene can so easily get in the way of vitamin A functions.
I learned that by a young man who was extremely sick
and his doctors had found that he had practically no vitamin A in his blood,
but extremely high carotene, which was blocking all of his hormones.
And sometimes people get very orange hands if they actually have too much carotene.
And the carotene turns off your thyroid function very powerfully.
In his case, all it took was one dose of vitamin B12,
which is needed to convert carotene to vitamin A.
And within a week, his symptoms had gone and his vitamin A level was normal.
And he was able to convert the carotene to vitamin A easily.
Yes, a lot of vegetarian diets, unless they take vitamin B12 shots,
probably don't have enough B12 because it needs to be synthesized in the liver.
It needs to be synthesized actually in the stomach.
And people think if they take spirulina or spinach and they're getting vitamin B12,
it's actually nowhere near as effective as perhaps having egg yolks.
Yes, and any little source of vitamin B12 can keep a vegetarian in good health
as long as they avoid too many of the toxins.
Many plants put out defensive substances,
some of which are specifically designed to block our digestive enzymes.
Proteolytic enzymes, for example, are blocked by polyunsaturated fats.
And it happens that it's a proteolytic enzyme in the thyroid gland
that allows it to secrete hormone.
And so the same thing that plants put in their seeds
to prevent the seeds being digested by animals,
if that fat is absorbed and circulates in the bloodstream,
that's the secretion of thyroid hormone.
Yes, so that is a very interesting point.
I'd like to pause here because most people do consume
far more polyunsaturated fats in terms of nuts.
Most people think that protein is in nuts and if they're vegetarian
or they just think that if I have 50 grams of almonds or cashews,
I'm going to get some protein.
And that's actually not really the complete protein,
but it has a very high level of unsaturated fats,
which cause an underactive thyroid and cause estrogen dominance.
Is that correct?
Yes.
About 30 years ago I ran into a young woman who was wasting away
and she tried to eat eggs and liver and all kinds of protein,
but she couldn't digest any protein.
And she was down to 65 pounds and was a fairly tall person.
And I had been reading about research with some of the amino acid
equivalents that are found in potatoes.
Potato protein turns out to have a higher quality rank than egg yolk protein,
and it's because of these equivalent substances that aren't quite amino acids
all they need is ammonia.
And when this woman ate meat or eggs, she would burp ammonia
and something was causing the protein to be short-circuited
into an instant conversion to ammonia.
And knowing about the research on potato protein equivalents,
I juiced some potatoes for her, made about a cup of the raw potato juice
with all the starch removed and then cooked it like a scrambled egg.
And she could eat it without the ammonia burps because it's very low in ammonia.
But from that meal, that single meal on,
she went straight up to 130 pounds and right back to work.
And since then I've seen people who have just extreme problems
like inability to sleep for months at a time causing them to become demented.
And with one meal of the cooked potato juice,
one of these people went to sleep while eating the bowl of potato juice soup.
It works so fast to energize the brain and start protein synthesis and repair.
So if vegetarians will emphasize protein from potatoes
and not worry about the nuts that contain inhibitors,
you don't really assimilate any protein of value for many of the oily nuts and seeds.
And not to mention the whole polyunsaturated oils and canola oil and sunflower oil
which is so prevalent in anything that we buy these days.
And the good fat, the only fat that's really recommended is the coconut oil,
the coconut fat, the saturated fat that most people are too scared to even try
because in naturopathic community, alternative complementary medicine community,
mainstream doctors always mention to stay away from saturated fats, especially coconut.
And yet it's unique. It's so unique and it's underrated.
And you write a lot about coconut oil, especially supporting the thyroid.
One of the first studies I saw about it, they had fed I think there were 15 experimental groups of rats
which got a low-fat diet, an average fat or a high-fat diet.
And each of the diets consisted of either coconut oil or corn oil or a mixture.
And it turned out that at the end of a normal lifespan,
the fattest rats were the ones who had the unsaturated fats,
either in the low-fat or high-fat diet, it didn't matter.
It was the ratio of unsaturated to saturated that created the obesity.
And the leanest animals were the ones getting the coconut oil.
Even in the high-fat diet, they were still the leanest.
Well, I certainly get a buzz every time I have coconut oil.
It's like an instant energy.
And in winter when it's really, really cold, that's when it's most noticeable.
So I do find that that particular fat is used instantly for fuel
whereas other fats like lard and beef tallow, probably not.
And fat is an energy.
I guess the more fat we have in the diet that we can use, the more energy we have, the more heat.
Yeah, for quick, intense energy production,
the shorter fats, as in coconut oil, are most effective.
But even the very long-chain saturated fats have specific protective biological functions.
Liver researchers are finding that alcoholics with hepatitis and cirrhosis can be cured
if they completely eliminate the polyunsaturated fats such as fish oil
and replace them with absolutely saturated fat such as stearic acid and coconut oil.
Yes, and of course, most of the time they're not advised that.
So it's like really taking the basic chemistry 101 in fats.
And Mary Enoch wrote a fantastic book. She actually did a PhD
where she explained the breakdown and the carbon bonds in all the fats.
And coconut fat was unique. It's like a genre of its own.
In fact, I think it says that it doesn't even require to be emulsified.
It goes straight into the bloodstream and used for fuel.
Yeah, the mitochondria can use it directly as if it were sugar for ease of producing energy.
And it's really so nice. Coconut oil and coconut cream is just one of the yummiest foods.
I think they're out there. And it's such a shame that they're given a bad name
because they grouped into a saturated fat.
And then saturated fat is actually quite a healthy thing.
I mean, 50% of your heart is made of saturated fat.
So why would we need 50% of it around the heart?
Well, there were studies about 30 years ago in which pregnant mice were fed
either corn oil or coconut oil.
And the babies that were exposed prenatally to corn oil had smaller brains and weren't very smart.
And the babies that were exposed prenatally to coconut oil had actually bigger brains
and were more intelligent.
And similar experiments have been done on dogs and other animals.
It actually increases the brain size relative to the body size to have plenty of saturated fats.
They really are the essential fatty acids.
It's a shame that these experiments have not been done on people because--
Well, just recently a prenatal study was done on the trainability of the fetal heart rate.
They found that the fetus responds to conditions and there is both a short-term and a long-term learning
that can be demonstrated simulating the fetus at different ages before birth.
And they compared the intelligence of the fetus, the ability to learn,
with the amount of fish oil in the diet and in the mother's tissues.
And they found that the only two things that corresponded to better short-term and long-term memory
was the absence of the common essential so-called fatty acids
and of the long-chain fish oil type fatty acids.
So a deficiency of those prenatally was just recently demonstrated to make the human fetus learn better.
Is that being interpreted into no fish oil?
In other words, fish oil is not as good as we've been made out to believe it is?
Yes.
There are many studies that people aren't being told about in which fish oil increases metastatic cancer,
has very serious immune suppressive effects that possibly relate to the fact that the cancer becomes more metastatic.
And is it because probably the fish oil is not really good quality
and if it doesn't have vitamin E it oxidizes, goes rancid very quickly in our body?
Would that be part of it?
Some experimenters found that the beneficial so-called effects of fish oil,
which the anti-inflammatory effect is what most people are recommending it for,
but they found that that anti-inflammatory action only exists after the oil has been oxidized
and it oxidizes very spontaneously so that by the time you swallow it and it gets in your bloodstream,
it's almost always oxidized.
It used to be used for varnishes because it oxidizes and hardens so spontaneously and thoroughly.
So the so-called beneficial effects really are associated with the breakdown products of it.
To summarize that, should we be taking fish oil with vitamin E
or should we just not worry about it and stick to salmon and sardines?
I even avoid salmon and sardines because of those toxic effects of the oils.
Just in the last two or three years, the effects of certain breakdown products in the brain,
they're highly associated with Alzheimer's type dementia.
And these, they're called neural prostates and isoprostates
and their origin can be traced directly to the essential fatty acids
and the DHA and EPA of fish oils.
And those have some very special involvement in producing Alzheimer's dementia.
So if you look at the prenatal effect and the Alzheimer's effect,
both ends are now incriminating the fish oil as a toxin.
And in between, what's most clearly established is that it's immunosuppressive.
Well, that definitely defies the world of economics
and all the wonderful mission statements that supplement companies make.
So it's almost like we all really need to read widely and deeply
to get to the bottom line of cellular energy.
And speaking of energy, we're all advised to exercise.
Doing aerobic exercise is one of the best ways to release energy, feel energetic.
And yet, a lot of the time, it's actually kind of productive.
Exercising for 40 or 50 minutes every day, doing cardio,
will actually shut down the thyroid or reduce the thyroid gland.
Can you explain that in depth?
Well, when you reach the threshold at which lactic acid rises,
that's when you start feeling out of breath.
The lactic acid has a pro-inflammatory effect, and that goes with a falling blood sugar.
The blood sugar is being suddenly consumed at a higher rate
because lactic acid production is much less efficient than aerobic oxidation.
So when the lactic acid appears, the sugar is low,
and you can't make your active thyroid hormone.
And if you're in very good health, your liver will be able to --
when you rest, your liver will get rid of the lactic acid.
Your blood sugar will hopefully come back, and your thyroid will be okay.
But if your nutritional level isn't ideal,
sometimes just one episode of lactic acid-producing exercise
is enough to knock you down into a lower metabolic state.
So the difference between exercise that people define in high intensity, endurance,
or even six-minute exercise where you just basically run uphill for 45 seconds,
you rest for 10 minutes, and you repeat that,
and that seems to build an enormous amount of lean muscle tissue
and kind of keep the lungs and the heart expanded.
And it's all a lot of debate.
And in my personal experience, I've seen as a nutritionist and a kinesiologist,
I see people that are fatigued, they're exhausted,
and they're actually putting on weight.
And they can't lose weight because they're exercising too much.
And they're convinced that they need to do something with their diet
as opposed to cut down on exercise and change their form of exercise
to suit the stress level because, after all, exercise is stress.
Too much is stress.
Some of the Eastern European exercise physiologists long ago
discovered that they could improve performance
by making their athletes stop exercising.
And one of the things that happens is when you stop exercising soon enough,
your testosterone and pregnenolone and DHEA levels rise.
And so they were accused of doping them.
If you just stop exercise early enough, the muscle activity,
for example, lifting a dumbbell just a few times,
will cause your muscles to produce testosterone and other androgens such as DHEA.
So the muscle becomes a steroidogenic gland when it's properly stimulated
and not forced to the point where it starts making lactic acid.
So high intensity, say two sets of dumbbells to failure
and then resting for three days would probably be more effective
than doing cardio for four or five times a week.
And since the mitochondrion is the source of steroid production,
you have to take good care of the mitochondria,
which in the type of exercise you do,
ideally it should be mostly concentric exercise,
meaning load while shortening and no load while relaxing and lengthening the muscle.
And that would mean running upstairs and sliding down the banister
or riding a bicycle uphill and coasting down
so that you get the loaded contracting muscle and the unloaded relaxing muscle.
In the gym, if they were just doing weights,
that would look like bicep curls, tricep extensions?
It would be lifting the weight and dropping it, which isn't polite.
They have machines designed to basically let you drop the weight after lifting it.
There are some people who actually do that at the gym
and I thought that was just that they were just fed up with the exercise
and now realize it's part of the concentric force.
Some exercise physiologists found that old people who seem to have deteriorated,
basically non-functioning mitochondria in their muscles,
after a few weeks of doing only concentric exercise,
they had brand new mitochondria.
So the bottom line is to do less.
When it comes to intense exercise, less is more.
Yes, or more of the right kind than none of the wrong kind of activity.
Exactly.
So you studied linguistics, which was your first priority to do your PhD?
Yes, I got as far as working on my dissertation.
It was closely related to the Forfian hypothesis
that language limits the way we think.
It was comparing the structures and ways people used Chinese and German and English
and showing that people could think more efficiently about certain subjects
in Chinese and English than in German or Hindi.
The decisive thing that made me shift to first brain biology
and then reproductive biology was I submitted a paper to a journal
and the editor said they accepted it,
but they wanted a clarification of a little remark I made about Noam Chomsky's linguistics.
When I expanded the paragraph, it was clear that I was criticizing Chomsky's view of language,
which is genetic and sort of absolute,
that there's no alternative except to think in language.
The editor said, "Oh, but you've criticized Chomsky. We can't publish that."
I saw that the linguistics culture was really just a cult
in which at that time Chomsky's linguistics happened to be--
he was the pope of linguistic theory.
Then when I began studying brain biology,
I found that the brain biologists had a similar authoritarian hierarchy
in which you had to think in terms of tape recording,
circuitry, and membrane all or nothing, cell function, and so on,
certain stereotype dogmas.
If you didn't do that, you couldn't be a brain biologist.
At that point, I looked around and decided to become a reproductive physiologist
because they were the least dogmatic of the biology community.
How was your thesis received at the time on progesterone in '72?
Oh, well, I don't think professors usually devote much time
to thinking about their students' work.
In my master's thesis on William Blake, for example,
it circulated among my committee for around six or seven months,
and I found when I got it back approved
that the typist had left out paragraphs that no one had noticed.
In my PhD dissertation, there was really only one criticism
out of the whole committee, and that was something that I just explained repeatedly,
and the professor finally understood my point.
No one really paid attention to the basic thesis very much.
In your experience, and you've obviously had lots of them and vast research,
is there such a thing, Raymond, as a scientific fact?
And if there is, what would it be?
Well, people mean different things when they say "fact,"
but I think there is such a thing as a fact, which is the experience,
the actual substance that is perceived.
But then we live in a world of meaning, and those perceptions,
it's sort of like the Gestalt psychology illustrations.
They have pictures of ambiguous figures, profiles, and a vase,
or a young girl and an old hag, in which some people will see one figure
and others will see the other.
And that's the process of imposing meaning on those experiential facts.
You can have an absolutely clear experience, an event that happens,
and then different people will interpret it and impose their meaning on it differently.
And that's where science becomes very much the same situation.
And as I said, in linguistics, we live in a universe of meaning,
which for most people is nothing but the culture and the language that they grew up knowing.
And so an ant and I can experience a situation,
and I'll tend to agree with the ant more than I'll agree with a biologist or a physicist.
So the more languages we speak, or the more concepts we understand,
the more ways we see the world, the more meaning we have.
Yeah, there have been studies comparing the intelligent behavior of polylingual kids
to that of bilingual kids, really are more intelligent than monolingual kids,
because they somewhat get out of the rigid way of perceiving the world that one language gives.
And by the age of three, people are already getting into that authoritarian,
habituated frame of mind, so that monkeys at the same age as a three-year-old kid
will behave more intelligently at solving some kinds of problems than the child,
because the child is already using linguistic preconceived ideas.
Or the monkey or the ant or whatever animal that doesn't have language
will look at the situation freshly.
Yes, and the whole world and understanding of linguistics and seeing the world
through the description of the language we speak deserves at least another hour.
So, Raymond, is there a question I have not asked you that you would have liked to answer?
Oh, nothing occurs to me.
Okay, then it was a very thorough, engaging conversation we had.
I certainly could have asked you a lot more questions,
and I'll find that your knowledge is so in-depth that I do probably need to read your articles
twice or three times, and I often recommend people to visit your website
and to equate themselves with the bottom-line information
to cipher through a lot of irrelevancies that we find in the world of information or infoglut,
and your website is www.raypeat.com.
That's Ray Peat with P-E-A-T.
Ray, it's been really a pleasure talking to you,
and you were put on the hot seat, and you've done a marvelous job,
and I'd like to thank you, and have a great day.
Okay, thank you.
Okay, bye for now.
And I'd like to thank Monica Brown for her wonderful contribution from Amayah's Production,
and until next time, in wellness, to your health.