Welcome to your own health and fitness. I'm health integrationist Laina Berman with Jeff
Hossett, Ph.D. We come to you weekly with a critical, independent voice on the politics
and practice of health. If you are a woman or man benefiting from the use of bioidentical
progesterone, you have today's guest to thank. I'm grateful to him for starting me on my
path after hearing him lecture at UCSF about early animal research on helplessness. That's
when I understood the importance of learning enough to be at the center of my own health
care and not at the mercy of a long-term treatment plan. That was about 30 years ago, and it's
formed my work this many years later. This radio program is designed to introduce you
to critical thinking about science and what promotes the capacity to live fully, embracing
a complexity of ideas that will challenge the current ecclesiastic convention in health
care. Challenging ideas is what you'll hear in this next hour with Dr. Raymond Peat. Stay
tuned as we discuss heart, brain, cancer, and hormones. First, a commentary about this
week's health news by Dr. Jeffrey Hossett.
Thank you, Lena. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has created
something called the Social and Behavioral Science Team. The team is intended to draw
upon these fields in order to make government policies more effective and efficient. The
approach is discussed in a New York Times article by a professor at the University of
Chicago who has advised the Obama administration and who also advised the villainous David
Cameron administration in Great Britain. Fox and other right-wing media were sent into
a fit with fears of Obama brainwashing. It's nothing of the kind, which doesn't mean that
the team's work is benign. I'll tell you why. The Times article mentions three issues that
are receiving the team's attention. At three years of age, poor children have a significantly
smaller vocabulary than well-off children. Much of this is attributed to how caregivers
and parents speak to and read to their children. Coaching and new technologies are cited that
could improve the performance of parents and caregivers. A second category concerns domestic
violence and the effectiveness of domestic violence hotlines. Women who call are too
often left on hold. The call is dropped and help is not received. Improved call handling
methods and technologies are cited, for example, communicating wait times so that callers are
kept on the line until they can get the help they need. The final category concerns the
failure of patients to follow a course of treatment, such as taking medications at the
prescribed times during the day or getting to appointments, changing medication design,
for example, from three times daily to once, and information technologies for mental crutches
are cited as ways to make compliance easier. Although only the last is called a health
issue, I believe that all three are health issues and serious ones. It's disappointing
that the solutions offered ignore the obvious political economy of each of these problems.
Yes, enabling parents to improve children's language skills is desirable, but that's not
the problem. The problem is they're poor. Providing those families with economic security
will do far more than coaching parents to read to their children. Yes, having better
communication techniques for victims of domestic violence is a good thing, but eliminating
the economic insecurity that is the soup from which domestic violence bubbles up is going
to be far more effective than telling a caller how long she has to wait before she can talk
to someone. And for that matter, why not spend money making sure that no one ever needs to
be put on hold? Yes, some people have trouble following a doctor's orders. How often is
the problem not three pills versus one, but choosing between the pill and the meal with
which you're supposed to take it? Oddly, the article opens this section by citing a study
that showed better compliance when the copayment for a treatment was eliminated. After concluding,
"For some highly effective treatments, there should be no copayment at all." The article
pats the idea on the head and moves on to redesigning pills. Why not eliminate all copayments
altogether? Characteristic of the Obama administration's disappointing performance in general, the
work of the social and behavioral science team will nibble at the edges of serious problems.
The ideas are not necessarily bad ones for what they are. They come from an academic
literature on what's called nudging, which means making small environmental changes that
have a significant effect on our health and well-being. An example that sticks in my head
concerns organ donorship. Both the US and France manage organ donation through their
driver's license system. Your driver's license designates you as a donor or not. You choose
when you get your license and can have it changed at any time. But there's a big difference
between the US and France. The percent of people who are donors in the US is very low,
while in France it's very high. The difference has nothing to do with altruism, but with
how the question is asked. In the US, you are asked to opt in, that is, you have to
check the box to be a donor. In France, you are asked to opt out, that is, you're a donor
unless you check the box. You might think it's too bad that the US has such a bad system,
one that prevents a noble life-saving act. However, the organ donation system is less
than a noble undertaking, and there is some evidence that many donations are made before
the donor has joined the choir invisible, both from the haste of the extraction team
and the questionable parameters used to decide when someone is dead. What I'm saying is that
making a policy work better using nudges is a smart thing, but we should make sure we're
signed up for the policy and understand the de facto effect of the policy. It seems to
be a de facto policy that children should live in poverty. It seems to be a de facto
policy that women should live in fear of domestic violence. It seems to be a de facto policy
that medical care should require financial sacrifice. It's those de facto policies that
the social and behavioral science team is nibbling at in the name of efficiency, producing
band-aids at best. The transcript of this comment is available at YourOwnHealthAndFitness.org.
I'm Jeffrey Fawcett. Take care of yourself.
Jeff Fawcett is a political economist, writer, health educator who produces the show with
me and is the primary author of our book together, Too Much Medicine, Not Enough Health. Now
to our topic, which is heart, brain, cancer and hormones, although I'm sure we'll move
into all sorts of other places as well, time permitting. Our guest, I'm very pleased to
introduce you to Dr. Raymond Peat, P-E-A-T. He has a PhD in biology from the University
of Oregon with a specialization in philosophy. He has taught at the University of Oregon
Urbana College, Montana State University, National College of Naturopathic Medicine,
Universidad Veracruzana, the Universidad Autonoma del Estado de México and Blake College. He
also conducts private nutritional counseling. Dr. Peat first started his work with progesterone
and related hormones in 1968. In papers in Physiology, Physiological, sorry, Chemistry
and Physics 1971-1972, in his dissertation at the University of Oregon in 1972, he outlined
his ideas regarding progesterone and the hormones closely related to it as protection of the
body's structure and energy against the harmful effects of estrogen, yes, I said estrogen,
radiation, stress and lack of oxygen. The key idea that underlies Dr. Peat's work is
that energy and structure are independent and interdependent, I'm sorry, interdependent,
not independent at every level. Boy, I made a hash of that. Welcome to you, Raymond.
Hello. Hi. His commentary got me thinking about how I happen to gravitate in the direction
of those hormones. I was in the 50s, you know, the political situation was totally desperate
but the beginning of democratic movements around 1960 coincided with changes in the
science and I hadn't considered going into science during the 50s because science was
so politicized and basically oriented towards militarism and psychiatrists were working
on things such as lobotomies and electroshock and torturing animals to see what happened
and in 1960 the opposite interest developed in which rats were put into an enriched environment
and they discovered that they became more intelligent and their brains even enlarged
and that enlargement was passed on to the next generations growing with each generation
and that got me interested in science and I thought science had some real possibilities
if it could be integrated with social stimulation, nutrition and so on. So I went to university
to thinking to study brain biology but I found that the brain biologists were totally doctrinaire
looking to the government grants for their approval basically of whether they should
go in a certain direction, a mechanical kind of thinking so I went over to the other end
reproduction and saw that stress and aging and radiation injury which had been an interest
of mine in the 1950s because of the bomb tests, I saw that all of these kinds of stress and
injury created the same situation which essentially was a brain shrinking process. The follow-up
of the 1960s studies at Berkeley in which freedom and enrichment enlarged the brain,
they tested different hormones during pregnancy and found that stress shrank the brain and
that overlapped with some of the torture experiments that had begun in the 50s but by the 1970s
when I had finished my dissertation and research on the aging effects of progesterone and estrogen,
body culture had shifted away from that and basically medicine and biology couldn't see
the connection between enriched growth of the brain and suffering causing shrinkage
of the brain and inability to help oneself, learned helplessness goes with shrinking of
the brain.
Can I say something? I was going to lead you into helplessness because you sent me those
three abstracts last night which bring up some interesting questions about serotonin
and things like that but to backtrack a little, the New York Times just published an article
about a new study about urban animals, rats, mice, bats, who are, their brains are growing,
they're getting smarter because they're living in urban environments. The explanation is,
you know, their conclusion is that it's because they're being forced to think harder about
where to find food and all this stuff. That can't quite be right because in fact...
It's more like being a wild animal. Wild animals have bigger brains than...
Well, what I was going to say is that they're reporting that these urban animals are suddenly
becoming smarter because they have to work so hard to get food and I'm thinking, you
know, in the 1700s in London they had to get food too. And, you know, they don't mention
the fact that urban environments will also give them shorter lives. So it was a very
selective piece of reporting that seemed to indicate that they believe that just putting
people in urban environments, which is the trend these days...
Well, I imagine the rats in New York are eating better than they have at other times when...
Could be.
...living was harder.
Yeah, could be. Anyway, let me just say again because we're going to get into a break thing
here that this is your own health and fitness and I'm on the phone today with Ray Peat,
P-E-A-T, PhD. And you will find as you listen to the show that he is a very provocative
and very interesting biology professor and researcher. So, you know, conventional medicine
as you just said is only interested in prevention as early intervention and doing invasive things
of various sorts to prevent people from dying of heart disease and cancer. But the rates
of these diseases, as you point out in your papers and your newsletters, are climbing
and they tend to be somewhat lower in people in the third world who are not getting treated
as much, which is ironic. You have a different way of thinking about what makes people vulnerable
and the helplessness stuff, which really caught my attention, really got my attention and
got me thinking 30 something years ago when I heard you speak. You just sent some abstracts
about helplessness. It's very interesting. Everybody's heard me talk about the research,
which is that they threw rats into vats of water to see whether they would keep swimming
if they were held long enough for them to give up. If they were held for a while and
put back in, they'd swim to save their lives for any length of time. If they were held
beyond that point, they would give up.
Yeah, but the naive rats typically would swim for three or four days before giving up. But
if they had been held in someone's fist until they gave up or were shocked and couldn't
get away from the shock, they would usually drown after six or seven minutes.
More animal cruelty.
Yeah. Several of the experimenters observed that when they died, their hearts were in
a relaxed state. They were actively turned off. That's where this relates very directly
to what was seen in the very first 1960s experiments with enriched rats. The insight that increased
along with intelligence was cholinesterase, which destroys acetylcholine, which is thought
of as the agent of the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the relaxed and sleep and
regeneration associated nerves, where the adrenaline side is associated with fight or
flight. So the acetylcholine along with the parasympathetic nervous system are given this
ideology sort of like serotonin. It's all sweet and positive. But the stress can go
in either direction of excess. Too much adrenaline and cortisol, which tend to break down your
tissues or too much of the turning off mobilization, too much acetylcholine. And that turns on
all kinds of inflammatory, cancerous, degenerative processes.
So that's a shock response?
That's what...
Is it sort of a shock response?
Yeah. When you give up, going into shock and giving up is biologically involves things
such as too much nitric oxide, too much serotonin, and too much acetylcholine. So it's too much
of the relax and be serene. It goes over the edge into quick death.
Okay. So let me just stop you there because that's really interesting. I mean, that's
what I thought I read here. So that the way that too much serotonin works is it literally
kind of puts you out in a certain way. I mean, it's because I thought acetylcholine was excitatory.
Yeah. It's excitatory to muscles and it has some inhibiting functions, but it is one of
the three basic excitatory toxins that is known to kill brain cells. Cysteine, the amino
acid works with glutamic acid and aspartic acid that got famous with MSG.
Right. And aspartame.
Yeah. And acetylcholine has just been given the assumption that it's all a pleasant and
relaxing, but in fact, it's one of the excitotoxins. It excites nerves and if they don't have enough
sugar basically and oxygen to support that excitation or if they have too much cortisol
interfering with their ability to use both glucose and oxygen, then the acetylcholine
stimulation kills them just as much as the glutamic acid would.
This has really interesting implications for not only long-term treatment in general, which
increases helplessness and that's what you were talking about at UCSF and that was really
interesting because I was in treatment for chemical sensitivity. I was being treated
for what was called back then environmental allergies and stuff. If people are given serotonin
reuptake medications and their serotonin gets too high, they become manic and they feel
like they're on speed. So not only are we treating, not us personally, not only is the
medical institution treating people by overdosing them with serotonin when they're depressed,
but you're, you know, so in every way, this is dangerous is what I'm trying to say.
Yeah, and because of this ignoring the dark side of stress, the cholinergic side of stress
or the giving up side, the medical business has used it the same way they've used the
serotonin drugs building on a myth to sell drugs that in fact are doing exactly what
they should be undoing. Progesterone happens to activate the cholinesterase enzyme the
same way that enriched environment activates it. So it protects the brain against this
excitotoxic so the brain can become excited and active without killing itself. But if
you're deficient in progesterone, you run the risk of over exciting the brain and any
injury and it doesn't have to be a behavioral stress, but just a physical knock on the head
that excites the nerves and if you get enough progesterone soon enough, the brain recovers
with great ability. Just being low in progesterone, any little stress becomes a dangerous injury.
And the Steins group in the last 10 years has made great progress in treating traffic
accident victims of concussion and brain injury with progesterone.
But it's stuff that was already being demonstrated in the 1960s with the brain expanding effects.
Marian Diamond, for example, wrote a book showing that stress changes the shape of the
face and thins the cortex making rats look mean and stupid and actually being stupid
and prenatal stress. But giving them extra sugar and progesterone to nourish the brain
prenatally gave them a sort of baby face look like a puppy with a big head and a good disposition
and higher intelligence.
Let's roll this back for some perspective for people. John Lee is now long dead, Dr.
John Lee. For people who have been listening to my show for the length of time it's been
on which is getting close to 20 years, they will have heard many shows with John Lee when
he was alive. And John Lee learned about progesterone from you. And I knew about progesterone from
you because I started using it after hearing you speak and getting to know you. So I started
using progesterone in my 30s and it was very helpful to me. John Lee, who was a physician
in Mill Valley for 30 years, used it in his practice and never had any case of breast
cancer or any kind of cancer in his practice. And he also was able to cure infertility problems
in women by giving them progesterone. And I, in my own practice, have made those suggestions
to people and have also observed that as women move into menopause, their progesterone drops
off precipitously and the estrogen is still present, but they can't use the estrogen because
there's no progesterone. Plus, estrogen being excitatory, they're basically jumping out
of their skin during that period. So the progesterone is remarkable. But progesterone is also remarkable
in very, very small doses for men. Right? Right. It works for arthritis and epilepsy
in men just as well as in women. And it hasn't been used as much for treating cancer. Alexander
Lipschutz in the 1940s showed that progesterone would stop the cancerization of basically
every tissue, starting with the uterus, breast, then lungs, kidney, brain.
And prostate.
Yeah. But that was picked up by a few medical doctors to treat uterine cancer, breast cancer,
and kidney cancer. But all of his implications weren't followed up and it just dropped out
of consciousness about 1955 when more chemicals were coming on the market for treating cancer.
Yeah, which makes more money. You can't patent a natural substance. So then we have, obviously,
Provera, which is synthetic progesterone, which really causes cancer fast and doesn't
do anything protective. The one thing to be mindful of with progesterone in my own experience
and my experience with at least my clients and in men is that hormones like to be in
a milieu that's balanced. And the balance should always favor progesterone, but an overdose
of progesterone is sedative. So it will basically put you out. It will make you sleepy and you
feel kind of loggy and blue. So one problem, I think, is that sometimes women hear that
it's good and they slather this stuff on and then they feel awful. So it's good to remember
that. Well, what do you think a good replacement dose of progesterone is in the two genders?
Well, for my own experience, I've taken as much as 1,000 milligrams of progesterone.
And stayed awake? No, I couldn't tell where my hands and feet were.
You and Oliver Sacks like to do stuff like that. Yeah.
Taking about 10 milligrams had a very soothing effect, but if I kept it up, I'd be in a
coma. But if I kept it up for about a week, it was like I was constantly getting out of
a cold shower. It had a definite antagonistic effect to testosterone.
Yes, it reduces your test. I think a good dose for men is 5 to 8 milligrams, which is
a really small dose. And in women, what do you like to see? It's going to vary, obviously.
It's variable. Some women can take 400 milligrams. I know some women who couldn't feel it at
all because their estrogen was so high. It has to reach a ratio of 5 or 10 times at least
higher than estrogen. And if your bloodstream is full of estrogen, you just can't get there.
You've got to get the estrogen under control. Then 30 to 100 milligrams is fine.
I rarely see women who can tolerate 100, but I have had clients who are quite obese and
can't use a transdermal method because progesterone likes to soak into the fat cells and hang
out slowly, releasing itself. So with those cases, I gave it to them under the tongue,
which is still transdermal, but it absorbs faster.
You can just add it to food and swallow it. It absorbs all the way down.
I would probably depend on the method. I like to put it on my skin.
Several men have used it transdermally, but putting some olive oil on their skin first
and then rubbing in hundreds of milligrams. A friend of mine, for example, had a rheumatic
arthritic knee that looked like a football. It had been going on for many weeks. One application
that way, 500 milligrams, but oiling from his thigh to his ankle, it cleared up in about
two hours.
That's remarkable.
Thirty years later, he hadn't had a recurrence after that one application. That's an extreme
case, but several others have done the same thing.
I remember that, again, we're talking about a single application, because keep in mind
that a very, very large dose of progesterone in either gender has the potential to knock
you out, literally to put you out, to put you to sleep, because it is very sedative.
If you prolonged the application of lots of it, you will feel low-key, and some people
feel depressed as a result.
You have to monitor. Also, another thing that can happen in women, I discovered this the
hard way, literally, is that if you use too much progesterone, your breasts will think
that you're lactating. So you'll end up with these very attractive, very large, buoyant
breasts that no one can touch because they're so painful. That's one way to tell that you've
overdone it.
Your breasts are really... But it's not dangerous. Again, the synthetic, the patented, altered,
particularly altered versions of this are very, very toxic, birth control pills and
Provera and things like that, but the natural forms are extremely benign. And like I said,
the worst thing that will happen is you'll feel blue or tired or you'll go to sleep.
I need to take a very brief musical break. When we come back, we'll continue this discussion
about hormones and progesterone and hopefully talk about heart and brain and cancer. Raymond
Peat is my guest today. Hang in and come back for more. You're going to really enjoy this
interview. So stay tuned. I'll be right back.
[music]
Welcome back. This is Your Own Health and Fitness. I'm Lena Berman. Visit our website,
yourownhealthandfitness.org, all spelled out, for access to over 500, it's actually more
like 600 now, archive shows with our library card feature. Find out about our practice
for free stream of this week's show, our book, Too Much Medicine, Not Enough Health, and
lots more at yourownhealthandfitness.org. You can email us if you'd like to reach us.
It's admin, A-D-M-I-N, at yourownhealthandfitness.org. Ray, you have a website with articles and
all sorts of stuff?
Yes, raypeat.com.
I love that. Let me just... Okay. So, the music choice today was because both Dr. Peata
and I have a fondness for Dvorak's, the pieces that he did that were folkloric. So, did I
get it right?
I don't know.
Was it folkloric enough for you?
It was fine, yeah.
Okay. All right. Now, since we're talking about progesterone, it really does beg to
go ahead and talk about both heart disease and cancer, because in both cases, you know,
there's been press about how... There are studies that show estrogen to be heart protective.
So, I'm not going to... Estrogen is mostly excitatory. If there's an imbalance in the
body, which most women have, and men too, because men pick up estrogen as they age,
particularly if they get heavy, it's going to contest and lower testosterone in both
genders, which is heart protective and cancer protective, I think. So, I'm going to just
let you kind of go.
Albert Szent-Györgyi was who got me interested in the effect of estrogen and progesterone
on the heart. And he showed in rabbit hearts that progesterone basically strengthens the
heartbeat as the heart has more demand put on it. Progesterone lets it respond to the
demand, where too much estrogen keeps it in the basically small stroke, but having to
speed up faster and faster because it can't make a bigger stroke. And in some ways, that's
analogous to what happens in other tissues. Progesterone facilitates the ability to gather
resources by relaxing. Its basic effect is to prevent excess stimulation and response
until it has the resources to respond fully and correctly. So, in the heart, it quiets
the heart while increasing the amount of blood it can pump in each stroke. And in the brain,
it does the same thing where too much stimulation fatigues cells and can kill them. Progesterone
activates a whole system that will tend to calm the brain. The uterus is another dimension
like the heart. It has to function according to whether it can relax or contract. To give
birth, it has to contract strongly, but during pregnancy, it definitely doesn't want to contract.
Progesterone has to be dominant all through right up until the time of birth. And one
of the ways that progesterone is doing that is the same way it does in the brain to keep
the brain able to be stimulated but grow. It allows the uterus to destroy acetylcholine
even when it's receiving irritation and stimulation. It activates enzymes that prevent inappropriate
stimulation. So, it lets the uterus keep growing and resisting that unnecessary stimulation.
And in an overdose in the brain, that's what you see as the sedation and basically anesthesia.
You can create a complete anesthesia with adequate progesterone, but with the injected
kind, for example, the type that Katharina Dalton had such great results with all through
the 40s and 50s, she was using an oil-alcohol injectable form in which the alcohol counteracted
the effects of progesterone to a great extent, but still she was getting terrific results.
But when that form has been injected, for example, for treating uterine cancer, they
could inject around a thousand milligrams into a person and they weren't sedated at
all, showing that the infected form was very poorly assimilated into the whole body. So,
the body has to deliver progesterone in the appropriate way to keep things relaxed.
So in terms of what sorts of mechanisms are occurring when cells lose individuation and
start to be recruited as cancer cells, how does progesterone help? Well, I think all
hormones, to some extent, protect the cells from losing. In other words, if you look at
a cancer cell from the breast, you can't tell where it came from, it's just a cancer cell,
it doesn't look like a breast cell anymore.
Yeah, cells react to stress either by growing too fast or by dying the same way as the whole
organism, either goes into a fight or flight state or gives up. And the cancer is basically
the fight or flight state that cells try to get out of the bad situation, multiplying
faster and moving, getting away from whatever is causing the stress. And progesterone keeps
cells from experiencing that kind of stress in the first place. But it's one of the factors
that can, if a cell has started down a stem cell pathway, basically, progesterone helps
to guide it in the right direction.
One pathway, when a stem cell invades the heart, for example, if it finds a slightly
injured heart, it can mature into a functioning muscle cell. But once the heart is under great
stress, not enough progesterone to keep it quiet periodically, the stem cells moving
into the heart are either killed or, in the case of the heart, they become a fiber-producing
cell, produce collagen and make the heart progressively harder. And that's one of the
things that happens in just about every cancer. The cells which don't die, a few of them become
multiplying cancer cells, others become fiber-producing cells in an attempt to wall off whatever the
irritant is. For example, the polycyclic hydrocarbons, the famous carcinogens from smoke, when these
are painted on an animal's skin, it usually produces cancer. But in the process, if the
animal is able to resist the cancerization, it will produce a walled-off, collagenous
lump that protects the cells and the animal by closing in the irritant.
So, the defensive process of a hardening heart or a thickening, stiffening tumor, it's the
same defense reaction, just in a different context.
Let me try saying that in another way to see, tell me if I'm saying it right, just to sort
of unpack it for listeners. I think what you're saying is that when the heart, either from
stress or from the stress of something in the environment, because radiation of all
forms, including microwave, wireless radiation, which is non-ionizing, ionizing radiation,
pollution, toxins, all of this is stress, in really horrible food and toxins that are
ingested, and your social, psychological, it's all environmental. So, environmental
irritants can cause the body to create, to encapsulate damaged tissue, to go to an area
of inflammation, of chronic inflammation, and encapsulate it, and that's a tumor. And
this can happen, this fibrolytic action can happen both in terms of just tissues in the
body trying to encapsulate an irritant and forming a cancer, or in the heart as it becomes
more fibrolytic and more stiff and almost scarred from a number of other kinds of assaults.
Yeah, and every stressed or irritated tissue is constantly open to receiving cells coming
in from the bone marrow or nearby tissues. These fairly undifferentiated stem-like cells
are constantly available. Anytime a cell or a tissue needs help, these cells tend to come
in and fill in whatever is needed. But as a person, usually it starts over the age of
50, as the whole system starts getting congested with all kinds of stresses and poisons and
failure to eliminate toxins. Many of these areas accumulate half walled off, half controlled.
And a person who has had cancer removed, for example, there have been studies following
up on populations of these people who had no signs of cancer, but a large proportion
of them had constantly circulating cells identifiable as cancer cells going around in their blood
but not causing any harm because their body was just able to use them as repair cells
maybe or just close them up in little collagen package and forget about them.
Now, the next part of this, which is very important, is that I've always felt that if
possible, you don't have surgery with a cancer if you can avoid it. I mean, unless you've
got this huge thing hanging, you know, unless it's really interfering, it's certainly better
not to do things like the stereostatic, you know, needle, so-called needle biopsy. This
is really a gun with a thing that they shoot into. But these disturb the cells and I've
never understood what the mechanism was and I read it in your newsletter. Why is it bad
to cut into cancers?
It's just one more stress. It calls on the body to mobilize the healing process and if
the body has a lot of it, if it's young and healthy, it can stand being cut up and recover
perfectly. But the sicker the individual is, the more likely the stress is to either reactivate
the cancer in the same place or activate a completely new cancer somewhere else. And
it doesn't have to be just surgery, but chemical poisoning and radiation all activate the carcinogenic
process either in the place that's being treated or elsewhere. So it's just a matter of the
total stress and the body's ability to respond to it.
Yeah, what you say in your newsletter is it is now clear that normal cells are attracted
to an irradiated area and you're quoting Klopp et al. in 2007 and Kidd et al. in 2009 that
it's a recognition of a "bystander effect" in which radiation for other... Anyway, the
point is that it causes injury and the cell injuries cause nearby cells with signals to
go to the injured... Anyway, just what you said. So, I mean, my mouth kind of hung open
when I read this because it seemed so obvious to me and yet you said it very succinctly.
Yeah, the people like... I think her name is Carmen Mothersill.
Yeah, you quote her here.
They've demonstrated that cells send out SOS signals, including serotonin, to recruit their
neighbors to come and help repair the damage. And at a certain point, instead of repairing
the damage, the local situation is so bad that they pervert the recruits and let them
cause more damage.
Well, you know, again, I should mention this is your own Health and Fitness. I'm Melina
Berman on the phone with Dr. Ray or Raymond Peat, P-E-A-T. He's a biologist. He's a researcher.
He has been a professor for many years. He has a newsletter and articles that you...
Well, the newsletter is a prescription, I think, a subscription, should be a prescription,
subscription. Is that through your website? It's raypeat.net?
No, dot com.
It is dot com, raypeat.com. That's too easy. Raypeat.com, but articles are there and whatnot.
And those are, I believe, paintings that you did?
Yeah.
Remarkable, really. Lovely.
I was going to be a painter until I thought I saw a possibility to work in biology.
Yeah, kind of me too. Although I haven't painted in years. So people are terrified of cancer
and heart disease, terrified. And when they have, they find something or there's a diagnosis,
there's this train that starts coming at them. And it's very hard for people to resist. I
have had some very interesting clients who did resist. I had a woman come to see me who
had a remarkably large breast tumor that she was just living with and doing all these alternative
things with. And it was just there and she's still around. So, you know, I don't want to
advocate on the air that people should not treat things because I would get sued for
doing that. So I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that people should be very considerate
about when they go and get screened for things, because if they find even something tiny that
your body might mop up on its own, the doctors are going to push you toward having surgery,
which may make the situation worse, or they may give you radiation, which they're still
doing, which definitely causes more cancer. John Goff's five-year research that shows
all medical interventions with radiation cause other cancers over time, especially if you're
young. Anyway, go ahead.
About 40 years ago, three different doctors diagnosed, told me that I should have a biopsy
on three different things. And since I had already been studying what doctors do and
know about cancer, I ignored them and increased my thyroid and used a little nutritional addition
like extra vitamin A and folic acid.
Methylation.
I put some progesterone and DHEA on the area.
Vitamin D.
And so far, that's 40 years ago, and none of them have persisted.
Okay, but I have known very smart people who did all kinds of really good things and held
things off, and then things metastasized and weird stuff happened, which might come under
the category of you've got to die of something. But we also do know about things like young
people getting a melanoma and ignoring it, letting it go, and then it metastasizes.
I don't think you should ignore things. You should try to figure out what signals are
occurring in your body. The things that produce learned helplessness, I think, are sometimes
after a certain age at least, there are signals from inside the body telling your nervous
system to do something. And if your resources don't tell you what to do, then you can get
pushed by symptoms into a more helpless state in which the medical signals to control you
and make you more helpless, they just add to the internal stresses. So it's important
to try to do something, but to figure out what the best thing to do is.
I would be remiss if I didn't get you to talk a little bit. You've talked a lot in all of
your literature about radiation. And I think when we talked, you confessed to also being
very concerned about the proliferation of microwave wireless radiation everywhere. I
have interviewed lots of people all over the globe about this stuff and read a lot of research.
And part of the mechanisms here is that it causes, as you have always been concerned
about, a shock and stress reaction in the body. It causes heat shock proteins to go
up. It causes granulation in the mast cells. This is Olli Johansson in Sweden. So people
get eczema, they get skin cancers in places where the sun doesn't shine. And people are
getting a lot of heart symptoms, lots and lots of heart symptoms because of the hyperarousal
this causes. So if you can spend a little time talking about, because I am getting,
I'd like to hear you talk a little more about the heart and heart symptoms and stomach,
your intestinal symptoms are big.
Yeah, the intestine really is where people should be paying more attention because any
kind of stress or shock reduces circulation to your intestine. And that makes it more
permeable or leaky. And aspirin, incidentally, is now being studied as possibly the best
defense against a leaky intestine, even though there's a tremendous amount of Tylenol type
propaganda saying don't use aspirin, it makes your intestine leak. But in fact, it prevents
endotoxin and bacterial movement from your intestine into your bloodstream.
I'm sorry to interrupt you. You must be saying that if people use aspirin, to use real, honest
to God, just aspirin, and to take it with food.
Yeah, to dissolve it, preferably in water and take it with a good amount of food so
it doesn't form a pocket of concentrated acid.
Right, exactly. Yeah, it's a cool, bitter, basically.
Yeah, and what happens in following up the initial phase of shock where you have released
too much histamine, acetylcholine, and serotonin are the main chemical factors, but the leaky
intestine allows endotoxin from the bacteria to be absorbed systemically, and that activates
things like nitric oxide.
Yes, and do you know about Marty Paul's work? He wrote a book called The No-Oh-No Cycle.
Oh, no.
Yeah, we should get him to send you a copy. Anyway, what he's saying is that the cycle
gets, it just goes crazy and it starts overproducing.
Yeah, the nitric oxide in some organs like the brain makes iron more toxic. The endotoxin
makes you absorb too much iron if it's present in your food, and the series endotoxin, iron,
nitric oxide has one further step. Nitric oxide activates heme oxygenase, which produces
carbon monoxide and releases free iron from the heme complex, which is kept as under control.
So iron participates, once it gets loose, participates in a series of activation that
increases the local production of free iron, and that has been traced to dementia, Parkinson's
disease, heart disease, diabetes, organ failure of a great variety. And, for example, just
studying the stressed brain, the traumatized brain, for example, blocking nitric oxide
can, nitric oxide synthase can have tremendously protective effects.
Yes, and we neglected, but you did mention it, that one of the things on the list here
was to talk about iron and its toxic effects in the brain and its contribution to Alzheimer's.
So, yeah.
The ratio of copper to iron is one of the characteristics. It decreases in relation
to the iron content of the brain in Alzheimer's, and copper is used in the superoxide dismutase
that is an antioxidant, and in the respiratory enzyme that produces the energy which is lacking
in all of the stress conditions.
And one of the important issues here is that I learned long ago that when women were really
high, or men, in estrogen, estradiol, they tended to bioaccumulate copper and be low
in zinc. So I found myself suggesting people avoid copper. Now I understand that most people
are bioaccumulating iron as well because of the diets, unless they're strict vegetarians.
In a comparison of female animals to male animals, especially the pregnant female, nine
times as much iron from a given dose was absorbed by the female under the influence of high
estrogen.
That's right, and even though it increases your cerula protein, anyway, but the point
is that iron status is very important. It's something that should be checked, and it's
very important to take copper because of its relationship to iron, and if your iron is
high, there are lots of tricks. We actually did a show on iron overload with Richard Cunyon
in our library, but we're running down on time. It's clear that we're going to have
to have you on again and again and again.
So, if people want to read your articles, if they want to subscribe to your newsletter,
they can go to raypeat.com. Do you want to say any last thing about wireless?
Oh, well, one of my recent newsletters mentioned that working at a sewing machine in the factory
for years had enough electromagnetic field just from the sewing machine in order to increase
the risk of dementia.
So, just imagine if you're using a wireless router in your house and a cell phone and
all the rest of it, because that's radio frequency versus, but they're all part of the spectrum.
Okay. What can I tell you? You're a wonderful interview, Raymond. I really appreciate you
taking the time to go over this stuff with us. I hope that if people have questions,
they will go to your website, raypeat.com, and read some of your articles, and we will
plan on having you back soon.
Okay. Any time.
Thank you so much, Ray Peat. Thank you again.
Okay. Bye.
I want to thank you all for listening. I'm Laina Berman. Visit our website, yourownhealthandfitness.org,
for access to our over 600 archive shows with our library card feature. Find out about our
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