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It's just better. Block Talk Radio You're listening to Holistic Living, brought to you by EastWest Healing and Performance. And now, here are your hosts, Josh and Jeanne Rubin. Alrighty, welcome guys back to a great show with Ray P. Today, we're going to give you a question and answer. I know a lot of you guys are really, uh, have been awaiting this type of show. Um, Jeanne's not going to be on the call today, she's going to be me. Um, once again, like we always do, I'm going to introduce ourselves and then Ray,
and then we'll get to it, because I know a lot of people have been emailing me with tons of questions. Um, don't forget you can call in this time. I'm going to try to take as many callers as I can. Be patient. Um, but be, uh, pay attention to yourself on the phone, so when I call you in, you can ask your question or two. Uh, the number to call in is 347-426-3546. 347-426-3546. Don't forget to check out our website at eastwesthealing.com. It's being completely overhauled right now, and it's really looking great.
The new site's not up, it'll be up in another month or two, but it's looking great. Uh, but just stay tuned, there's a lot of great stuff on our site, from articles to YouTubes to our blog, our Facebook, all that great stuff. So take a look at that, look us up, and feel free to give us a call if you want to set up a free consultation. Uh, we consult with people all over the world. So enough about that. Let's get back to Ray P.
He's, uh, been very nice this year in joining our show every month, and, um, I know a lot of people have greatly appreciated it, including myself and my wife. Um, you know, Ray, uh, basically has a PhD in biology from the University of Oregon, with a specialization in physiology. He's taught at many schools from the University of Oregon to Montana State University, to other naturopathic schools, um, and other schools in Mexico. You can take a look at his website at raypeat.com, r-a-y-p-e-a-t.com, to learn more about him and his background.
He started his work with progesterone and related hormones in 1968, so he's been doing this for a long time. Um, and if you look at his website, he's got umpteen amounts of articles. You could probably spend the next 20 years reading them, and another 20 years re-reading them, to really get the gist of what's going on. But, um, really love his work. It's cutting edge, things outside the box, and, um, I know a lot of you guys feel the same way. So check out his website. I know Ray's on the call. You're there, right? Yes.
I think the first question, everyone keeps emailing me and wants to know, do you have a timeline when you're going to start releasing or taking new subscribers to the newsletter? Yeah, we, I think we changed that notice, and they're available now. Okay. There you go, everybody. So you can stop emailing me. He will start taking new subscribers to his newsletter. Um, definitely, you know, if you want to sign up, go to his website, RayP.com. You can sign up for the newsletter, send him your information to check,
and you can sign up by mailing in your information. Um, we have some callers on the line I'm going to take, but we can get right to it. I have some questions from, uh, people that email me. Um, I'm just going to ask one of them to start, if you don't mind, before I take some callers. Um, the first one is, a lot of people out there are so gung-ho crazy about probiotics. I mean, that's all you hear. People love gas, take probiotics. You know, anything wrong, take probiotics.
And you don't really talk too much about probiotics. Can you elaborate for the listeners on your thoughts about it and maybe some of the pros and cons of taking it? Um, specifically, are you thinking about the, um, Bifido -- Yeah. -- or the Lactobacillus or Bifidobacter? Or Lactobacillus and Bifidobacter separately or a combination type of probiotic? Um, they are probably okay to try. Um, one thing that has made me skeptical about them was an article published in Nature about, I think, probably 35 or 40 years ago showed that there are antigenic regions on these Lactobacilli
that are exactly matching for proteins that are associated with female reproductive action so that from puberty to menopause, roughly, there's the risk of having an autoimmune or immunological interaction between intestinal bacteria and body tissues. And there hasn't been much follow-up on that, but that is the period when autoimmune-type problems show up in women, and estrogen is probably the main factor that is involved in that, but it just happens that there is this antigen parallel between the bacteria and the person. And the bacteria do have a direct anti-inflammatory effect on the membranes of the intestine,
but one problem is that they do produce lactic acid, and so if you provide them with enough fuel, they can produce lactic acid, which is a potential toxin. It stimulates inflammation and formation of fiber collagen stimulation. Right. I think that's the biggest thing for everyone to understand is that Lactolobacillus, they're lactate-producing, so if you take it and you don't need it, you're actually causing more of a problem than helping yourself, so think about that. Another question from a caller -- I kind of know the answer to this because you talk about this a lot,
but, you know, taking questions -- so she wanted to know, from a health perspective, is there any time you ever would recommend fasting in regards to helping someone with their health? There have been studies in which rheumatoid arthritis and similar things just are completely relieved during a week-long fast, and then it would come back as soon as the person eats again, and that's partly because your cortisol increases tremendously when you're not eating, and what the cortisol is doing is converting your muscle tissue mostly into fuel to live on,
and at the same time it's having an anti-inflammatory effect, and the bowel is really the basic cause of most of the degenerative inflammatory diseases, and so there's a tremendous good reason for thinking that fasting is therapeutic, and we've seen animals with huge tumors that just refuse to eat, and if their owners just let them sit around not eating, they would recover and live for years. So the lack of appetite during sickness is a natural opportunity to fast, and sometimes it has a therapeutic effect,
but since the reason the bowel is so connected to the inflammatory diseases is that the -- well, besides the bacteria that produce things such as lactic acid and endotoxin, each of which has its range of harmful toxic effects, the intestine itself produces a tremendous amount of serotonin, and the serotonin, if it isn't detoxified right away, it has -- promotes not only fibrosis and inflammation, but multiplication of cells in the blood vessels, thickening them and promoting tumor growth and just about every degenerative condition you can think of.
So if you can lighten the inflammation load in the intestine, you can achieve the same thing as fasting, even though you can still keep absorbing nutrients if you just do it in a way that you don't either produce endotoxin, lactic acid, or serotonin excess. And partly that means using a very easily digested diet, avoiding the undercooked vegetable matter, for example, that can't be digested by human enzymes and provides good food for bacteria, and having other easily digested or slightly antimicrobial foods, raw carrots or boiled bamboo shoots, for example, have germicides that prevent bacterial growth.
So I hope that answers the questions for -- I think it was Judy -- in regards to fasting. I'm going to take one of the callers. Someone's been on hold for about 10 minutes. I'm going to take a caller from Aricode 360. Aricode 360, you are on the air. Hello. Hello. Hi. Oh, I'm sorry. I wasn't sure if you had me. Hi. Hi, Dr. Peat, Josh. Thank you so much for bringing us these shows. They're really, truly informative. I've listened to all of them like 10 times a piece.
So I actually use the power of Facebook to collect a couple of questions from a couple of different people. So if I'm allowed to throw a couple of questions at you, that would be great. Go. It's up to him, not me. Go for it. Okay. Okay. So my first question is it's really popular these days to approach eating and dieting, sort of restricting certain foods and advocating the use of other foods based on what we evolve to eat, things like the blood type diet and the paleo diet and those things.
And so a couple of people and I were wondering what you, Dr. Peat, think about this approach to eating. Well, that whole approach assumes that we really know what the species ate while evolving. And there are a lot of fantasy theories that whatever people enjoy eating, they tend to read into the history of people and the essential evolution from ape-like animals to human-like animals. No one is really sure what people were eating. I'm inclined to think that there's direct, present experimental evidence that supports it,
I think, better than some of the currently popular ideas such as Canaan's about fish eating and so on. I think fruit eating was a good candidate for supporting evolution to be more human than ape-like, supporting a big brain and the kind of digestive system we have. Great. Thank you so much. And so my next question real quick is actually feeds into that one really nicely, even though it's not that they weren't related, but personally I've noticed in some people that I know who are sort of really cerebral or creative
or have jobs that they kind of have to use their brains a lot. I've noticed that these folks sometimes have a little bit of a lower sort of tolerance for stress, in particular if they're, say, really active or exercising or God forbid, doing some sort of low-carb regimen. So do you have any thoughts about people who sort of place a lot of demands on themselves mentally? Do they have more or different nutritional needs than, I don't want to say average people, but just people who maybe don't have as many demands in that way?
Yes. Some people have commented that the brain of the average person might weigh 2% of their body weight, but it uses 40% or 50% of their metabolic energy. And if that's the average and a person, say, has a bigger than average brain, and human brains vary tremendously in size and in metabolic requirements, and if they spend a great amount of mental energy compared to the average, then you can see what a tremendous metabolic difference that can make.
Great. Truly. And then real quickly, and even so, despite everything maybe that you might say about sort of exercising, especially exercising intensely, it's really popular now for people to exercise or to recommend exercising in such a way that is high-intensity intervals, that sort of thing, maybe really heavy weight lifting, definitely inducing some sort of a lactate threshold type of thing. Are there ways in which you might see that one could, even if they still insisted on exercising in this way, could maybe attenuate some of the ill effects of that exercise?
There was an experiment 30 years ago in which they had people walk on a treadmill, and they didn't let their heart rate go over 120 beats per minute, and they measured their active thyroid hormone, T3, at the beginning and then after 40 minutes, and the average person's T3 had gone to zero in just 40 minutes of just very moderate exercise. And normally, as soon as you have some sugar, if your liver had a lot of glycogen, it would replenish the sugar and T3 quickly,
or the next meal that you have some sugar and replenish your glycogen, your T3 would snap right back. But the longer the stress is and the more inhibitors there are in your tissues or in your diet or surroundings, for example, if your body is loaded up on polyunsaturated fats or if you have bad bacteria in your intestine, those things will tend to delay the recovery of your liver and T3 production. And so with some people in some settings, it just takes a little extra stress, and it sticks you down in that low T3 condition.
And there were other studies in which a person or a group of people with low thyroid were given just sort of a tentative trial dose of a thyroid supplement, and a lot of them, with just two or three days of a supplement, I think, would snap back and recover normal thyroid function, meaning that they had just been temporarily stuck in that stress condition. And with a little extra thyroid, they could break out of it and their own gland would take over. Wow. Great.
And this is my final question, and it might seem a little off the wall, but I am particularly fond of comedy and funny things to sort of attenuate stresses in life. And so I had a friend of mine who was curious about what perhaps your favorite joke might be. And if you can't think of one, barring that, I was wondering if you could tell us what you ate yesterday. What I ate yesterday would be easier than remembering a joke. I never remember jokes.
Steak, by chance, happened to be rib steak day, and eggs and lots of milk and coffee, orange juice and Coke. Nice. I love you, Ray. Great stuff, man. Thank you very much. I really appreciate you guys. Thank you. Thank you for the call. You know, Ray, when you're this popular on the Web and everyone's interested, it's amazing the questions people want to know. But I appreciate your honesty, because not a lot of people would say what you just said. So that's great stuff there.
I'm going to take another caller. I'm going to take a caller from Erico 201. 201, you're on the air. Hello? Hello? Do you have a question for Ray? Hi, Josh Rubin. Hi, Dr. Peat. Hello? Can you hear me? Yes, hello. Go ahead. Hi, Josh. Hi, Dr. Peat. It's Sandy Soto. Oh, hi. How are you? Good. I'm calling to know your thoughts on the connection between schizophrenia and hypothyroidism, as well as nutritional deficiencies like niacin and copper. And also I wanted to know how much gluten intolerance has to do with that as well.
Oh, gluten intolerance is -- since the intestine is involved in everything, gluten is one of the basic things that will cause problems once you get sensitized to it. High estrogen is one of the things that sensitizes the intestine and system to gluten. And the transglutaminase enzyme that is activated by estrogen and activates the immune reactions that can cause celiac disease to cause psoriasis and arthritis, it is now known to be involved in causing cancer and brain conditions, including schizophrenia. So the ramifications of intestinal irritation, gluten intolerance,
go off in all directions from scaly skin and sore joints to craziness and senile dementia and so on. And stopping the inflammatory process is the basic thing. And I think that was behind the orthomolecular approach to treating schizophrenia. The niacin approach I think was basically working on protecting cells energetically and against inflammation. And so I'm not specifically a follower of Hopper's treatment, but I think he was opening up a whole area of science that's valid, that you can treat schizophrenia metabolically. And I think it has just ramifications off in every direction.
For example, one of the basic effects of niacin is to inhibit the release of free fatty acids from our tissue stores. And free fatty acids poison our energy apparatus. And niacin is not only immediately involved in energy processes, but you've probably noticed how schizophrenics almost always are heavy smokers. And nicotine happens to have an actual brain protective and therapeutic effect against a lot of the degenerative inflammatory diseases. But I think that's because it's overlapping with the niacin pathways that are natural energy producers and anti-inflammatory nerve protective systems.
I don't have any particular therapeutic ideas for schizophrenia, but keeping the thyroid function up so that the energy is supported and keeping the toxins down, avoiding the polyunsaturated fats and anything irritating to the intestines such as gluten and indigestible starches and fibers and so on. I think all those will help. Wonderful. Thank you. Would you say that hypothyroidism will be the greatest factor in schizophrenia? Yeah, I would guess that the conditions under which it comes on, puberty is a major time for schizophrenia. That's when the rising hormones very often interfere with thyroid function.
That's when they get diagnosed mostly, right? Is like late teens, early 20s? Yeah. Great. Thank you, Dr. Peat. It was nice finally speaking with you. Thanks, Jenny. All right, bye. Bye. I'm going to give another caller. I'm going to take them in a whole 15 minutes. I want to get to them. Harry, code 917. Hi, Doug. How's it going? Good. How are you? Thank you so much for this Q&A show. I'm learning a ton. Great. I have two questions for Dr. Peat. The first one being, what about coconut sugar from the coconut tree?
Is that an okay sugar? Oh, I've never tried it, but if it's extracted from the sap or the core of the tree -- Yes, yeah, from the sap. Well, I think some of it might just be made from the starch chemically, and I would have to know what the chemical process is if they convert it from starch, but if it's made from the sap, there are lots of palm products that are very sugary, and I think in general if it starts with a natural sugar extract, then it's going to be fine.
But if it's processed heavily, heat and chemical catalysts can leave irritating residues in the sugar, so I would want to know just how they make it. Okay. Maybe I'll have to send you a little can of coconut sugar. I also was wondering about parasites and parasite overgrowth and what your approach would be to somebody who might have them. It depends on the kind, but the old timers 100 years ago, it was very common to use a spoonful of flowers of sulfur maybe once a year,
and a huge dose of sulfur like that will pretty much clean out any kind of parasite, but I've experimented a lot with very small amounts of flowers of sulfur, and it has a fungicidal effect, so if there's just a mild yeast infection in two or three days, a pinch a day of flowers of sulfur will clear that out, and sometimes that is enough to discourage amoebas and worms, but flowers of sulfur is very safe to people in small amounts like that, but it can get a very wide range of nuisances.
Some of the organisms have exoenzymes that act on the sulfur in their environment, causing it to oxidize to sulfuric acid, and it's just the pH change that eliminates them. Interesting. Is it possible too that parasites could contribute to some sort of autoimmune functions in our bodies? Yeah, some people think they even have a beneficial effect on the immune system, and some people advocate catching worms once in a while to prevent autoimmune diseases, but I'm not very convinced of that. Yeah, there's a guy, I forget his name, he uses helmet therapy for MS,
and he actually uses worms. I'll put it on his website if you get the website, but he actually uses worms to treat MS. I'm inclined in the direction that since our immune system probably isn't what it has been thought of following the German tradition of immune theory, I'm on the Metchnikoff side, which is seeing cells as the central activity and seeing it as a developmental process rather than a specific chemotherapy of our bodies against organisms from the environment.
If you think of it as chemotherapy, then anything that activates your immune system is potentially good for you, but I think of it as developmental, and every time we affect our developmental system, we're taking our whole self off in a different direction. I think in Africa, for example, a lot of the so-called AIDS is really just from being exposed to too many stimulants of our immune system. Interesting. Thank you so much. Thank you. We have a question from someone that just emailed me, and they want to know,
of course it could be being in a catabolic state, but what could it mean if someone is just sweating all the time, even from an early age? Sometimes it's a developmental overbalance of the parasympathetic nervous system or sympathetic. Either way can activate your sweat glands, and sometimes people can remedy it with just an herbal thing that influences the balance of the sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous systems. Sometimes hypothyroid people compensate with extremely high adrenaline production, and that can cause sweating even when they're not hot. Interesting. Cool.
I'm going to take another caller, and then I'll hold for 15 minutes. Aricode 301, you're on the air. Hi. Thank you for taking my call. I believe that I picked up parasites about in 2006. I was swimming and kayaking in a river, and I got a bug bite on my arm that gave me a raised rash that kind of returned for the next couple years and has finally subsided, but it was about -- I had a lot of symptoms that were very similar to low thyroid,
and in fact I tested positive for Hashimoto's and low thyroid, but I had never had those troubles before the swimming incident, and four years after swimming I finally did a warm water enema just to move some gas out, and there was a two-foot tapeworm in the toilet bowl. So I probably had had parasites for that whole time without being diagnosed or tested for them, and even now a year and a half later I'm still having a lot of digestion and energy problems. I've put on 45 pounds.
Life is really tough, and I can't seem to get myself balanced. What kind of climate do you live in? I live in the Washington, D.C. area. There are a lot of tropical parasites that you can catch by bites, but have you had tests specifically looking for various parasites? Well, I would be very interested in what kind of tests I should have run. None of my doctors initially were looking for parasites at all, so they tested and treated me for a whole lot of things that didn't have any impact.
The first tapeworm, round of tapeworm tests that I did all came back negative, even though I was putting segments of worms in the stool samples. So I would be very interested in what kind of testing should I pursue. There are doctors that specialize in that. I don't know who in your area would be best, but I'm sure there are parasite specialists in all of these, especially the coastal tropical areas in the United States. There are doctors who see parasite cases. I would recommend -- I mean, I like to test for metametrics. Just call the GIFX.
You can call them, or you can work through -- just call them, and you can probably get hooked up with a physician there. Okay. I'm sorry. Is it G-A-F-X? G-I-F-X for metametrics. G-I-F-X. Great. Yes. Okay. Anything to look at restoring digestive function if I do get rid of the parasites? Oh, the diet to keep your immune system so-called and your metabolic rate up where it should be, and if necessary, a thyroid supplement if your metabolic rate is low. You'll tend to -- for example, fungal infections really tend to specialize in hypothyroid people,
and I think it's the same with a lot of intestinal parasites that -- for example, the IGA antibodies on membranes and intestine are deficient in people who are low thyroid, and so all the membranes are susceptible to attack. Oh, I had not heard that before. Thank you. Interesting. Thank you very much. Thank you for calling in. Thank you. Have a great day. You too. Ray, I got a question for you. A lot of people ask, you know, and I explain it to them, but I know a lot of listeners probably want to know this.
So much in our industry about fungal infections, and you got Doug Coffin promoting the fungal diet, and you got people just diagnosing themselves left and right because they have dandruff or bloating, and, you know, a lot of people think it's about, you know, because Doug Coffin says mycotoxins feed on sugar, so take out sugar and you starve the mycotoxins. I know you have a different view on this. Can you elaborate a little bit on -- you just did a little bit -- maybe why you get the overgrowth in the GI system
and why we actually -- we have Candida in our GI system? Yeah. I used to read periodically in the newspapers about someone -- I think the first one that was reported around the world was a Japanese man who everyone thought he was a drunk, but when doctors examined him carefully, they found that when he ate sugar, he would start emitting alcohol fumes, and they found that yeast were growing in his stomach even. His digestive enzymes were so weak that the organisms weren't killed by stomach acid and enzymes.
And usually on average, there's one case or so somewhere in the world actually getting drunk when they eat sugar from so many yeasts living high up in their intestine. But getting drunk is really the only major harm done by that. The real problem is that their digestion is so poor from being low thyroid that probably all they need is to take some thyroid and activate their digestive enzymes. That would probably spontaneously get rid of the yeast and bacteria problem.
But I think it was Rene Dubose who did some experiments showing that with a given yeast in the intestine, when it's starved for the sugar that it needs to thrive, it sends out -- I think they're called pseudohyphae filaments -- several times their diameter in length, but long enough to reach through the intestine wall where they can get sugar from the bloodstream. And so they actually become invasive when they're starved for sugar. But if you feed them sugar, they don't put out those adhesive invasive filaments, and they just are happy living on sugar.
So a sugarless diet is really a dangerous thing for someone to do if they have a yeast problem. And besides its direct effect on the yeast, when you avoid sugar, you're having the risk of not giving your liver the sugar it needs to activate the thyroid hormone, and so you're tending to make the hypothyroid problem worse, especially if you eat foods that are rich in the polyunsaturated fats. It happens that fungus loves unsaturated fat but can be killed by saturated fats. Right. Great.
I know a lot of people wanted to know the gist of that, and I know a lot of people out there promote -- I mean, we get tons of people that come to us and say, "Oh, I've done the fungal diet for a year and been supplementing and I'm still suffering." So it's good to get this information out there. I've got another caller I want to take. He's been on hold, or she, for almost 17 minutes. Caller from area code 516, you're on the air. How are you doing, guys? I'm doing great.
I think we're all doing great. Great to hear. So I've got a couple of questions that I wanted to sort of ask. What is your feeling on things like liver flush and general cleansing that is sort of popular now in certain circles? There were experiments on cattle that were being sent in for slaughter. They measured their blood and urine and found that I think it was 30 to 35 percent of them showed chemical toxins that they had been exposed to either in their feed or insecticides sprayed on them and such.
When they were slaughtered, they found that that same proportion, 30, 35 percent, had muscle and fat evidence of those same poisons, but only 6 or 7 percent of them had any of those toxins in their liver. The liver has the equipment for gradually excreting the toxins that are stored in the fat and muscles, and so the liver is the cleanest organ of the animal. If you slow down the liver's activity, which happens in a fast, for example,
then your brain and other organs are going to be exposed to the chemicals that otherwise would have been excreted in the urine as they're diffusing out of your fat and muscles. I think the best cleansing diet is one that increases your liver's action. Just tasty food is one of the things that will stimulate your liver's action. Sugar and thyroid are the other main things that activate the liver. When you say sugar, do you mean any kind of sugar, or are you talking about some natural sugar, honey, agave, as opposed to high fructose corn syrup,
when you say sugar, or it doesn't matter? Well, the manufactured sugars such as made from cornstarch, the risk is that they have undeclared substances in them. For example, high fructose corn syrup, a group in California analyzed it, and they saw that it contained the amount of fructose and glucose the label said, but they found that about 80% of its calories consisted of other stuff, sort of intermediate between sugar and starch, which really can be very harmful and calorie rich compared to the sugars.
And with a very highly cooked sugar such as maple sugar or agave sugar, you have to watch out that it didn't reach a temperature that produced irritants and allergens. But otherwise, all the natural sugars, white sugar isn't chemically changed, it's just it has the products of extracting and heating pretty much washed out of it. So as far as allergens go, the white sugar is safe, but nutritionally fruit is the best way to get sugar because it's not only unprocessed,
but it comes with a lot of the minerals needed to process the sugar such as potassium and magnesium. So when I say sugar, I'm thinking mostly of fruit. Okay. And two more questions if I can be so bold. Swollen feet, you know, and a relatively young person, if they're working hard at a desk most of the day, their diet is pretty okay, but they tend to have a problem with swollen feet. Yeah, they probably will also tend to have puffy eyelids and faces when they wake up as the water redistributes.
And that's from excess permeability of their blood vessels. The water just leaks out of their blood into the tissues. And sometimes all it takes is eating enough salt to make your albumin function to bind water and keep it back in your blood vessels. Wow. People on a low salt diet are very susceptible to that movement of water out of their blood vessels. And especially in pregnancy or premenstrually, there were studies of women with toxemia or preeclampsia during pregnancy who were having high blood pressure. And what happens is that the high estrogen and especially low thyroid,
high serotonin balance during pregnancy makes the blood vessels permeable and the albumin can't retain enough sodium of the low thyroid, high estrogen. And so the albumin is unable to hold the water in the blood vessels. And they gave these people in one experiment, I think they gave some what, over 20 grams of salt extra per day and almost immediately cured their toxemia symptoms. Wow. So it may be too less salt as opposed to too much salt and not enough water. Wow.
Man, this definitely turns a lot of things around and it definitely answers a lot of questions. And I appreciate you guys. Tom Brewer, he and his wife Gail wrote some books on nutrition for pregnant women. And they cited some of the research that was collected in another book on prenatal nutrition, maternal nutrition and prenatal health by Shanklin and Hoden. And they have a tremendous amount of information that's relevant to everyone, but premenstrual women with a high estrogen balance are next in line after women with toxemia of pregnancy
to benefit from increased protein and salt in their diet. And old people in general often have the same difficulty retaining enough sodium. The sicker an old person is, the more likely they are to have an inappropriate loss of sodium from their blood. Right. Wow. FYI, the book he goes over a lot of that in is called "What Every Pregnant Woman Should Know." And he talks about a little bit more with studies in metabolic toxemia of late pregnancy. Just for the listeners. That's great. I hope you guys someday soon come out.
I know it's such a personable thing. I think that's what I'm learning mostly from you guys is that, you know, if some of the conventional things are not working for you, there may be some very, you know, things that are going on that the average person just does not know. Because it seems like most diets want to hit -- you know, they want to make a, you know -- everything, you know, it sells better if people think that all their needs will be met with one thing, you know.
Yeah. Well, I appreciate you calling in and tuning in to Ray. Thanks, man. Thank you. Thanks, Ray. Ray, I got a question from someone on fructose. You know, there's a lot of bad hype out there on fructose and how it's processed by the liver and turned into fat and triglycerides and on and on and on. And they wanted to know, because you recommend utilizing a lot of fruits and tropical fruits, and, you know, how come you recommend really utilizing fruits when a lot of people are saying that
fructose in excess is actually a little bit dangerous? Yeah. The ideal amount of fructose seems to be maybe a third as much as glucose. And so a person can eat a fair amount of starch if they have glucose along with it. But what the glucose -- what the fructose does in the cell is to raise the metabolic rate, increase the production of carbon dioxide, among other things, and catalyze the ability to burn glucose wherever the glucose came from, sucrose or starch. And so it's a catalyst that increases cell activity in very constructive ways.
And, for example, there have been experiments. One of them compared either sugar or a Coke-type drink -- Coca-Cola, I think, was what they used -- found that it improved calcium assimilation, increased their metabolic rate, decreased obesity. I think it was something like a 50 percent increase in their ability to burn calories when they had a sucrose-based diet rather than a starch-based diet. And a couple of other experiments showed that the calcium assimilation and retention was better. And in a vitamin D-deficient experiment,
animals on a starch-based diet had very weak bones that you would expect from the vitamin D-deficient diet. But the ones which had sucrose, despite the vitamin D deficiency, they built strong bones because of that effect on calcium assimilation. And that calcium-sparing effect of sucrose or fructose is that metabolic stimulating effect which imitates the active thyroid hormone, which produces carbon dioxide. And carbon dioxide is involved in the way we handle calcium and sodium both in the kidneys and in the cell,
keeping calcium out of the cells where it shouldn't be and putting it in the bones where it should be. So you reduce your need for vitamin D, which is a very important nutrient in all kinds of systems, but you decrease your dependency on that if you shift your calories away from starch to some extent, at least towards sucrose and/or fructose. But it's very hard to find a natural source of fructose. It's almost always in balance with glucose. Right. Great. Thanks for that. I'm going to take another call. I'm going to hold for a little bit.
Eric Code, 308, you're on the air. Hello, Josh and Dr. Peat. How are you guys doing? Hi. I'm doing great. I've got a few questions that are not really related with each other, but first I wanted to ask Dr. Peat, in one of your articles you write about how the majority of the tryptophan is actually converted to niacin if the person is healthy. And I was just wondering if a person that's healthy and has a proper working thyroid, if they would be able to tolerate eating more muscle meat,
or if there are other components in the muscle meat that inhibit the thyroid function. Well, the high phosphorus content is probably just about as important for the average person. The ratio of calcium to phosphorus should be very high. If you're under stress, the phosphate becomes more of a problem and adds to the stress, and meat and whole grains are major sources of phosphates. So you have to be more concerned with your calcium intake if you have a meat or grain-based diet. Tryptophan can be handled pretty well if you otherwise have a good diet,
because, for example, women are much more susceptible to getting pellagra than men, because estrogen, partly because it makes you waste your vitamin B6, estrogen greatly decreases the production of tryptophan and sends the tryptophan -- the production of niacin and sends the tryptophan down the pathway into serotonin. So is that probably one of your reasons -- I guess it's assumed that that's one of your reasons why you recommend milk, because even though it has a pretty high tryptophan content, because of its high calcium to phosphate ratio,
most of the tryptophan will be converted to niacin in the body then? Yes. Okay. Another question, Dr. Peat. I was hoping to get your opinion on some spices, like if there's some spices that you don't recommend, because either they're estrogenic-promoting or maybe they inhibit the thyroid. And more specifically, also, my girlfriend's been craving garlic, and I was just wondering what your opinion is also on garlic and just in general spices, I guess. Well, I think the main problem with onion and garlic is if you're allergic to them,
people -- low thyroid people very often have symptoms like gallbladder spasms when they're -- especially if the garlic and onion are cooked, something happens to the active ingredients that make them more of a trigger to problems. I'm not sure if that's low thyroid people, but as just foods, garlic and onions are fine. Are there any spices that you'd completely recommend to stay away from in terms of how they affect the thyroid or anything, or are they all person-dependent on how they -- if they have like some kind of allergic response to them?
Yes, I think the main thing is that so many of them are allergens. Okay. I have a couple more questions, if that's okay, Josh or Dr. Peat. I was just wondering, in one of your interviews with Kim Greenhouse from "It's Rainmaking Time," Dr. Peat, you talked about the proper way to take Cytomel and Thyroxin, but it was -- I don't know. I didn't really completely understand it, so I was hoping maybe you could elaborate a little bit more on the dosage,
because it seemed like you were talking about like if you're going to take 10 micrograms of Cytomel to split it throughout the day, or did you mean take 10 micrograms in the morning and at lunch or to actually split the dosage? Well, sometimes if you're just in a temporary stress state, sometimes 10 micrograms will break the whole stress. But if you're not that lucky and are going to need it for a longer time, then the body normally, ideally, should make four or five micrograms per hour of T3.
And if you take all at once, very much more than 10 micrograms, your liver activates enzymes for destroying it or excreting it. And so it goes away quickly when you skip taking it. I experimented on myself taking 25 micrograms at a time, and after two or three weeks of doing that, 12 hours later, if I didn't take another dose, I would go into a very intense hypothyroid state with my heart stopping every six seconds or so. And that would, 30 seconds after I took more T3, that would get regular again.
But if you take your 10 micrograms with a meal, the food is going to delay its absorption, so you get maybe two or three micrograms each hour. And so 10 with each meal is a pretty smooth way to take it. And does it always have to be taken along with thyroxine, or is it better to just take Cytomel by itself? Just occasionally a person has some peculiar need where they want to quickly, in just a week or so, get to complete normal functioning. For example, people who had cholesterol levels of 450 or 500 or so
wanted to get their cholesterol down in a week. And the only way you can do that is with frequent five-microgram doses of Cytomel to get your thyroid function up to full normal very quickly. But for example, someone who has had a heart attack and doesn't want to put a lot of workload on their heart by energizing their system suddenly, they don't want to take more than one microgram at a time. And when you take a big typical dose of, say, 50 or 100 micrograms of thyroxine, which is a typical tablet size for the thyroxine,
that depends on your liver for activating it. And so it's sort of unpredictable what's going to happen when you take a big dose of thyroxine. But the one you have to be very careful about taking in small amounts is the T3 if you aren't backing it up with the T4. The T4 is preferred by most doctors because your liver will seldom make more than it needs. The trouble with relying on thyroxine is that in women, very often the estrogen keeps the liver from making as much T3 as you need from the thyroxine.
So lots of women go around taking fully normal doses of thyroxine while not having enough active thyroid function. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. I just got one final question since I don't want to take over your whole show, Josh. I would like your opinion, Dr. Peat, on raw versus cooked foods in terms of, like, digestion and absorption and which a general opinion is on, yeah, just raw versus cooked food. With all kinds of animal products, the main issue is whether there are microorganisms or parasites in them.
So the reason for cooking meat or oysters or fish or whatever is to make sure that you've killed the parasites and microorganisms. There's no nutritional benefit at all from cooking them. But with, say, an apple, the typical apple that people buy is likely to be unripened or partly ripened and to contain a huge amount of pectin with a little bit of sugar and some minerals mixed in with this large amount of pectin. And the pectin isn't digestible by the person, but it is digestible by bacteria.
And so typically when you eat a fruit such as an apple or a pear or a poorly ripened peach, for example, what you're doing is to a great extent feeding bacteria. And so if you have nice bacteria, you won't have trouble, but those foods can cause great problems if you have the wrong bacteria. So there's really not that much of a loss of, like, nutrients and minerals in cooking certain fruits or meats? No, there was an experiment in the 1940s when nutritionists worried about that, saw that so many people were eating mostly canned foods.
They put one batch of rats on a diet of purely canned vegetables, and another batch they took identical vegetables but fed them raw. And the animals eating the canned vegetables thrived, and the ones eating the raw vegetables didn't. Yeah, that's very interesting. Because the major thing in a lot of the raw food circles is they talk about the proteolytic enzymes in like a papaya or a pineapple. And the whole theory is that if you eat those types of fruits, your body doesn't have to go through the stress of producing the digestive enzymes,
and it's because you're getting it from the fruit, supposedly. And I was just wondering what you thought about all that, and if it was just hogwash or if there's something... Well, those enzymes are biologically active, and you can buy the enzymes as products. For example, the pineapple enzyme actually can be absorbed into the bloodstream where it has a systemic anti-inflammatory effect. I think it was -- I'm not sure whether it was approved by the FDA 30 or 40 years ago for --
I think it was accepted for use in horses because it was so effective at curing lameness. But the production of pancreatic digestive enzymes isn't a stress. It's just one of our natural functions. So I don't think there's any benefit in -- as far as the pancreas goes to supplementing extra enzymes. Okay, so basically I guess if you're a healthy person that's producing proper oxidative energy, the pancreas is probably able to produce all those enzymes without necessarily having to get them from the food, then I guess it's kind of like what I'm understanding.
Yeah, and when you haven't been eating a particular kind of food, like if you're avoiding starches, when you do start eating that food, your intestine takes a few days to adapt to it. So changing radically from one type of food to another will cause gas or diarrhea or something for the first couple of days if you do it too suddenly because your intestine has to sense what it's getting instead of just producing the right enzymes for the right food. Okay, well thank you very much, Dr. T, for all your work and training.
Thank you for calling in. Josh, for having the show. Thank you. Bye. I'm going to take another call. He's been on hold for a while, so I wanted to get him on here. Eerie Code 626, you're on the air. Oh, they're on hold for a long time. Here we go, 626, are you there? Yes, I'm here. Can you hear me? Okay. Yeah, go ahead. Okay. Okay, I wanted to get your input in regards to a low carbon dioxide level for a 4-year-old. He had leukemia and AML, so he went through the whole treatment.
And we're about two years out, and his doctors are pretty concerned at this point, and they said they wanted to put him on a bicarbonate supplement to see if it would help him to bring him up to, I guess, normal levels. Yeah, I've seen a lot of adults with very low levels of bicarbonate supplement. A lot of adults with very low CO2, sometimes as a result of taking drugs. And the bicarbonate baking soda is very helpful in a lot of ways. Diabetics and people with other problems can see really quick benefits sometimes from it,
sometimes even digestive problems. The bicarbonate helps to adjust the acid production in the digestive system and so on, and it helps to regulate the balance of minerals in the bloodstream, and it can, to some extent, bring up the systemic CO2. But I think the most effective thing is to check the thyroid function that's in control of producing the CO2. Do you know if his lactate is high or whether some other organic acid is above average? Let me check. I don't think so. No, I don't see that on here.
I'm not sure if they didn't test it or it was just within normal range. But I can definitely ask them about testing his thyroid. How low was the CO2? I'm not a loster. Still there, 66? Sorry, yes, I'm here. I'm sorry. He runs anywhere between 16 and 19. That's too low, but it's not as low as some people I've seen who within a couple of months got it up to 29 or so. Oh, wow. Okay. It's good to check his thyroid and read some articles on alternative views of how to interpret the thyroid.
For example, the AACE, I think it's the American Academy of Clinical Endocrinologists, has a range of TSH from 0.3 to 3.0, which is quite a bit lower than most doctors currently are going by. But I think the ideal number is towards the low end of that, 0.3 or 4, I think is probably the best for most functions. Okay. Have you seen Mary Shulman's thyroid site on the Internet? No, I have not. There's a lot of good information on thyroid on there. My next question would be -- it's also about my son.
He has chronic diarrhea, and it's been going on for like the past three or four months, and he's been through all the testing, even allergy testing, and everything keeps coming up negative. What does he eat? Well, we try to feed him just clean food all the time, and we try to cut out all the junk food or any juices, so we're not sure. We've tried every kind of thing out there. We've gone gluten-free. Again, we tried cutting out juices, even eggs, meat, but it seems to just come back regardless of what we give him.
And we try the diet, like we'll change it up every three weeks to four weeks, and it just keeps coming back. We're at the point now where the doctors are just like, "Well, it's probably just the way he -- that's just the way he works." What kind of vegetables does he eat? We give him squash, spinach. We try to stay away from the broccoli and those kind of things, but we do try to give him the green leafy vegetables. Are all of the vegetables very well cooked? Yes. Salads are a problem for lots of people.
They'll cause either diarrhea or constipation in quite a few people. That sounds good. We'll definitely try and follow that then. I think that was it for my questions. Thank you so much. Thanks for calling in. Bye-bye. Bye. Got some good questions. I got another caller. Caller from area code 760. You're on the air. Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello, you're on the air. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Okay, great. Well, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis about eight years ago, and I do get -- well, right now, as a matter of fact,
what I think is probably fungal infections. My throat is full of little white spots, and I thought I had a UTI. I did go to the doctor. They tell me they find zero bacteria as far as a strep throat or UTI, so I mean the only other thing is I must have a yeast infection somewhere all over my body. I do get itchy skin often, and I just -- you know, my eyes itch, and it's just really ugly feeling. So I'm thinking that's -- you know what, I must have a problem, you know, fungal. Hello?
What were the symptoms of the sclerosis? My symptoms -- I was constantly getting sick. I was constantly having -- my throat was either infected or my ears, you know, I did have -- at one point I had lost peripheral vision, and that was pretty much, you know, the start of it. Did they check your hormones at that time? They did, and I did start gaining a lot of weight at that time. I don't recall what the hormone level were. I really don't.
Right now they tell me everything's in range is what, you know, I've been told. What happened with the peripheral vision change? Did that come back? It came back within three weeks. I had it back. The reason I ask is that most of the -- I think it was the first five or six people that I saw who had a diagnosis of MS recovered instantly when they took thyroid, and one of the common symptoms of low thyroid is enlargement of the pituitary because of a prolactin-secreting tumor, and that can cause pressure on the optic nerve,
and it's often misdiagnosed as a brain disease. So it's good to check your prolactin and thyroid, and it happens that those can often go with the other symptoms. The low thyroid makes you susceptible to urinary tract infections. I wrote Barnes' books on the thyroid. I tell many stories about chronic urinary and oral infections that clear up as soon as they take thyroid, and the -- I do recall initially way back then they did check that. They did do like ultrasounds of the pituitary glands.
They wanted to check everything to do with my adrenal glands, all of that stuff, and I think it kept coming back at a normal range, and then until the two years afterwards I was able to get the diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, but still having to every so often deal with what I think is fungal infections, if it's not a bacterial infection that they do the lab works on, and it comes back as negative. I don't know where to go now. I want to try the holistic way of healing versus taking antibiotics and all that stuff.
I think it's good to keep investigating because so many things are called MS that aren't really. There was a study in which people had their heads x-rayed, and many of the people diagnosed as MS had visible plaques in their brains, but when they used a group of healthy medical students as controls, just as many had plaques in their heads. Even finding the plaques doesn't absolutely confirm the diagnosis, so it's good to keep your eyes open for other explanations. Right. Right.
So as far as holistic way, I mean, what can I do to check if I have a higher elevation right now of the bad bacteria versus my good bacteria in my body? Where can I go to check that out? What do I do? Well, you can get doctors to do it, but just in case there's something in your diet, you might try eating a raw carrot every day. For example, shredding a carrot and putting some olive oil, vinegar, and salt on it to make it tasty. That has a germicidal action and stimulates the intestine.
Oh, wow. In the well-diagnosed multiple sclerosis, they know that endotoxin is a very important factor in causing blood vessels in the head to be too permeable, letting stuff leak out of the bloodstream into the brain. And endotoxin can be drastically reduced just by eating a good-sized raw carrot every day. You know, it's funny that you're telling me this, because I've been craving carrot today is what I woke up craving, was a carrot. And I bought myself some organic carrot juice, Evolution, and that's what I've been drinking. It tastes so good and it's so refreshing.
My body is talking to me. Getting enough protein is very important, too. Milk, cheese, and eggs, shellfish, you should try to get around 80 grams of protein at least. I've known probably maybe 30 or 40 people over the years who were convinced that they had MS, who just basically had an intestinal problem. And as soon as they cleared out their intestinal problem, all of their very strange visual and auditory and tactile symptoms disappeared. Well, that's what I'm looking forward to. I hope that's what my case will turn out to be,
because really in these past eight years there is no other medication that can give me, because either my liver didn't tolerate it or I was allergic. And the new stuff they're coming up with, I am not willing to try. The side effects are too risky for me. So, yeah. I think I've got some articles on MS on my website. I'm not sure if they're all there, but if there aren't, you can e-mail me from the website and I'll send you some more articles on MS. Oh, that'll be great. What is your website? Raypeat.com. Okay.
My friend that was on earlier actually called me to tell me you were online. So the 626 person you just talked to earlier got me hooked right now. So that's good. That's really good. Check out his website. I will do. Okay. Thank you so much. Thank you for calling in. Okay. Bye-bye. Bye. Ray, I got an e-mail from someone wondering about kind of starting a pro-thyroid-like diet in regards to kind of what you recommend. And just a couple questions in relation to that. Does the body go through a detox when you begin that?
And what does it look like? Would you see increased cholesterol? No, if a person has low cholesterol, they shouldn't start a thyroid supplement at full force because the thyroid is going to make you convert cholesterol into the liver bile acids and progesterone, pregnenolone, DHEA, and so on. So very low cholesterol has to be fixed before you take very much thyroid. And the fruit is the best way to raise your cholesterol up to normal. But if a person has at least normal cholesterol, then they tolerate a thyroid supplement very well.
And if you're just starting out with a diet change, the improvement of your thyroid function is going to be very gradual usually. And the first thing is to lower the production of toxins in your intestine, for example, cutting out undercooked starches, salad leaves and such that can't be digested, and maybe using a fiber such as bamboo shoots or carrots that will have a germicidal action, and then avoiding all kinds of polyunsaturated fats because at every stage of thyroid function, the polyunsaturated fats block the production of the thyroid hormone,
transport and stimulation of the energy production inside cells. And in a short period such as two or three hours after you eat saturated fat or coconut oil, or sugar can do it sometimes, you can get a momentary activation of your thyroid that fades away as soon as you start drawing out the unsaturated fats from your tissues. But to have a complete conversion from a thyroid-suppressed state to a completely normal state can take two or three years if you've got a lot of fat stored in your tissues.
And thin people can get their thyroid going much more quickly just with a diet. If they start to diet and they see their cholesterol go up, will it eventually go down, or does that mean they have a deficiency in like selenium, glucose or T3? Well, the rising cholesterol usually means that their liver is getting enough energy to make it. The toxins have gone down. And the cholesterol is a protective, adaptive substance that is making up for deficient pregnenolone, progesterone and DHEA.
If your thyroid is low, you won't be converting it, and so it will adaptively protect you by being high. There were studies -- a Framingham study found that people over 50 who had cholesterol under 200 were more likely to have dementia than people with higher cholesterol. And in a nursing home study, they found that the longest-lived people averaged up around 270 or 280 cholesterol. And all kinds of animal experiments show that you protect cells, brain cells, all kinds of cells, by having plenty of cholesterol. It's really a protective factor against all kinds of disease.
Great. Great. I'm going to take another call. We've got one more caller on here. This is Dr. Code 847. You're on the air. Oh, hello. Dr. Peata, I wanted to ask you -- I had read your article on language and was kind of interested to see someone else who found Chomsky's ideas a little bit unintelligible. But what I really wanted to ask you is if you had any advice as far as someone trying to learn a second language, and particularly a language that has a basis with English,
something that's less about the visual, about learning new characters and everything, just how you'd go about this. Are there any things you can take to help, like such as pregnant alone? Oh, yeah. Vitamin B1 and coffee can make a tremendous difference in -- like if you just want to sit down and memorize -- the way I learned French to pass my graduate school exam, I did it over a weekend with just plenty of coffee and a few hundred milligrams of vitamin B1. I just sat down and memorized 4,000 words, I think it was.
And also you had this idea of children learning language in a way where they might have a limited vocabulary, but they can still be very fluent. How would you approach this to start out with vocabulary and memorization? No, I think if you want to speak it, you should memorize the paradigms of the verb forms and pronouns especially. And just get maybe 600 words you can memorize. If you get a list of the words, you can find cognates, and then just -- if there aren't cognates,
you can just sit and memorize until you have 600 or 800 words, and then you can make your own sentences if you have the paradigms and that basic vocabulary. If you have to learn to read it in a hurry, then you want to take a vocabulary list of 4,000 or 5,000 words and cover that quickly so that you recognize a good portion of the words you run across. And a kid, typically by first grade, a kid will have several thousand words of vocabulary.
And do you particularly know what the B1 is doing when you take it, or is it enhancing specifically your memory? It makes you produce energy faster, more carbon dioxide that increases circulation to your brain. Oh, sorry. I never thought of that. One other quick question was in regards to how much I should worry about these small amounts of these plant estrogens. I drink a lot of tea rather than coffee, but I've even heard coffee has some of these compounds, and also maybe like the hops in beer. Are these things to worry about?
Well, yeah, the hops in beer are estrogenic. There are a lot of good things in coffee more than in tea. Coffee is a major dietary source of niacin and magnesium, and a couple of studies in England showed that the average English person gets, I think it was 20 percent, of six or eight nutrients from coffee or tea. So they are a major part of the diet for people who use them. Okay. Well, thank you. Thanks for calling in. You're welcome. Goodbye. Bye.
We're out of callers, but I have an email question from someone, Ray, if you don't mind answering it. Okay. He wanted to know two things. What do you recommend is the upper limit of eating raw liver per day or per week, you know, and also what your take is on eating raw eggs in regards to, you know, what's in them in regards to proteins and fats feeding up the precursors to our steroidal hormone pathway? If it's healthy to eat them raw, should we cook them? Things like that.
It's just you're less likely to catch some fairly uncommon infection if they're cooked, but they should be lightly cooked. Just the exposure to oxygen is going to break down the polyunsaturated fats the hotter they are. Eating them raw doesn't really protect you because once you've assimilated polyunsaturated fats, they're going to eventually cause free radical damage in your tissues, but they're a little better if they're not overcooked. And the same with liver. The less cooking the better, but even moderately well-cooked is still very -- liver is still very nutritious.
Now, how much would you say you recommend eating? I know you recommend eating liver once a week, right? Yeah, six ounces is enough. Okay. And I guess at the same time, it could be person-specific, just like you recommend taking in gelatin and the amount of gelatin that someone's going to take in is person-specific. Because I've had people actually who -- the most common side effect that I get from it with people is more bloating and gas or even diarrhea. If you eat it undissolved, it's very likely to do that because it takes time to dissolve
and become accessible to digestion, and that means that it's going to feed bacteria and cause gas if it isn't completely dissolved. So same thing with the liver. It's just all person-specific because some people might be able to -- go ahead. If I eat six or eight ounces of liver and just ordinary other foods, I often will wake up with low blood sugar or some symptom during the night, and so I've learned to cook it in a very large amount of butter and/or coconut oil. There's something about the absence of fat in liver.
It's so high in protein that it tends to disturb your blood sugar if you don't have a lot of both fat and sugar with it. Good stuff. And then, you know, it's been a great show. We've got about 25 minutes left, but, you know, we can end early. I just got one last email from someone, and I know you wrote a newsletter on this, and some of this stuff is a little bit over my head, but he wanted to know what you think about the therapeutic potential of tryptamine drugs like psilocybin and LSD.
He's read a lot of research from the '60s and then come across a trial that used LSD in sub-hallucinogenic doses. Yeah. But you indicated in the past that you consider hallucinogen doses. You can elaborate on it. He wants to know just your take on it. Okay. In the early studies, one of the first things they found -- I think it was Groff, the psychiatrist, some of his patients reported that besides the thing he was thinking about, they reported that their headaches had disappeared.
People with chronic migraines just stopped having them after a couple of sessions of LSD. In the late '50s and early '60s, migraines were pretty well identified as an excess serotonin problem, and LSD turned out to be counteracting the serotonin and curing the headaches. Because of the ideology, the government demonizing the hallucinogens, which were identified as anti-serotonin drugs, the pharmacy interests in antidepressants, for example, started to emphasize that they were not going in the direction of the hallucinogenic drugs. So they emphasized that serotonin was a beneficial thing psychologically
and people went crazy because they were destroying their brain serotonin by taking the hallucinogenic drugs. They pretty much fabricated an alternative explanation for the hallucinogens for their own drugs and submerged the therapeutic uses, such as curing headaches. They were being used experimentally against breast cancer and several very serious diseases lost their funding and they couldn't get the materials anymore to experiment with because of the demonizing of the drugs. But the mechanism seems to be that the LSD-type drug does, in a few situations, imitate serotonin.
Serotonin has a feedback system in the brain in which it turns off the nerves that make serotonin. This is the serotonin-like action of the hallucinogens. They turn off the serotonin-producing drugs in the brain. And so even though they do act on that serotonin receptor, imitating serotonin in that case, their basic function is still anti-serotonergic. Just as in 1953 they were found to act as antagonists to the muscle-tightening effect on blood vessels or uterine tissues and so on, they were identified as antagonistic to serotonin. And because of the pharmaceutical industry wanting to avoid any association
with the anti-serotonin hallucinogens, they created the myth that serotonin is something you want to increase, that it's the happy drug, but actually it's pretty much the misery drug. Any excess of it produces nausea, diarrhea, high blood pressure, tumor growth, fibrosis, arthritis, dementia, and so on. So the scope for new research using these drugs is extremely broad. Just recently both a bromo-LSD and psilocybin studies came out showing treatment of either cluster headaches or other organic-type diseases. So it looks like research might be starting up again.
One of the early LSD-like drugs was called lizuride, which is called the non-hallucinogenic equivalent of LSD, but it's just less in ordinary doses. It's not hallucinogenic, so it's just a weaker form of LSD. It's been used against diabetes and cancer and all of the serious degenerative diseases. And bromocriptine is another ergot-derived drug that cures pituitary tumors. And there's a family treating Cushing's disease and other pituitary-related problems. So I think the research, after skipping 40 years, I think it's about to get back where it was in the 1960s,
recognizing that these antiserotonin drugs are in fact antiserotonin and that that's how they produce their beneficial effects. There you go. You got time for one more question? Ray? Did I lose him? Hello? What? Hello? Oh, I thought I lost you. Hello? Yeah, I'm here. I wonder if we're still on the air. I can't tell. I don't think we lost people. Do you have time for one more question? Sure. Call her from the 308. You're on the air. All right. Hi, Dr. Peat. Hi, Josh. Thank you for taking this call.
I have three questions, if that's okay. Yeah, we've got about 15 minutes. I might have to cut you off just because it's timed. I'll let you know. Okay. First, I have a question. I was wondering if, Dr. Peat, could you give your perspective on sunscreens and how so many doctors tell people to avoid being in the sun without it because they say it can cause skin cancer? Would you say that that's accurate or have you found -- sunlight usually? Sunblocks, you have to put sunscreen.
Sunblocks, yeah, they are -- some of them at least are directly carcinogenic in contact with the skin. And there's a big phobia about ultraviolet. It will age your skin, but it's best to get plenty of sunlight but avoid the sunburn. You can do that. There were experiments on rabbits a long time ago in which they put rabbits on a saturated fat diet or an unsaturated fat diet, and then they shaved them and exposed them to sunlight. And the animals on the unsaturated fat diet got wrinkly, sun-damaged skin.
The animals on the saturated fat diet weren't hurt by the sunlight. The polyunsaturated fats in your skin are the target for the ultraviolet light producing damage. There are other targets, but if, for example, vitamin B2 is locally destroyed by ultraviolet light, if the cells contain a lot of polyunsaturated fats, they act like an amplifier for the damage and cause the damage that accumulates with fibrosis and shrinkage of the skin and such. And other things, you can apply coconut oil to your skin and get some protection
because it absorbs and interrupts that amplification effect from the fats in your skin. And caffeine and aspirin are other things that are antioxidants and stop the free radical effects. So you can spread a solution of aspirin on your skin without the dangers of some of the chemicals that are sold as sunblockers. Okay, so that answers my question. Thank you. I was also wondering, because I've been told that you recommend Great Lakes gelatin if you're going to buy gelatin, I was wondering how you take that gelatin if you use that.
Because I know you do your oxtail broth and everything, so I was wondering how you use that gelatin. Yeah, mostly I make oxtail soup or lamb shank soup, but when I'm using the pure gelatin powder, one way is to mix some sugar with it and moisten it and then heat it in the microwave until it gets clear and then add something like orange juice concentrate or lime juice and make sort of gummy bear candies out of it as snacks. It makes a chewy, sweet snack that is, since it's been melted,
it's more digestible than taking the powder in a plain form. Or I use it for adding to recipes to make things like mousses and cheesecake equivalents. Or sometimes just add it to other foods as long as it's dissolved until there are no particles visible and it's digestible. Marshmallows are another way to get some. Okay. All right, and one last question, because my boyfriend was very curious about this. He was wondering if wireless internet is a source of small-dose radiation. Of what kind of radiation? Small-dose radiation. I can't understand what that word is. What kind?
If wireless internet is a source of small-dose radiation. Oh, small. No, not that I know of. I don't use the wireless things. I have wire connections for everything because you can get a field meter and find that some of the appliances have a pretty intense field a couple feet away from them. And cell phones, for example, are a serious dose of radiation that definitely does affect your nerve function and probably increases the brain cancer incidence. And that's why I avoid any of the wireless devices that I can.
Okay. So I think that answers all my questions. Thank you very much. Okay. Thanks for calling in. Yep. Thanks. Bye. Bye. All right, guys. Well, I think that just about does it. Unless you have anything else you want to add in there, Ray? Nope. We had a lot of good questions. I knew a lot of people wanted to ask you a lot of personal questions and scientific questions. I'm glad we did this. And anything else you want to add in there? Anything new going on that you want to kind of let everyone know about?
Had we talked about Luca Turin's lectures on the Internet about the way molecules and cells interact? If we did, I don't remember. My recent email talks about some of the biological processes that have been excluded from science. And a few people are starting up on some of these old approaches to how a cell works, that they're along the same lines of Gilbert Ling and Albert Sant'Giorgi, a researcher at the University of Washington, Gerald Pollack, has some lectures on the Internet describing his work with water, the structure of water.
And Luca Turin has lectures on the basic ways that drugs or other chemicals interact with cell systems. It's bringing connection to stuff that was pretty much suppressed after the 1950s in favor of molecular biology. In the 1950s and early '60s, they were calling it quantum biology, but it doesn't necessarily involve the whole metaphysical thing of quantum physics. But it's just the idea that the interactions of hormones and drugs and cells can be understood on the electronic level rather than the lock and key mechanical conception that is current the last 40 years.
This is a newsletter article. My July newsletter is talking about the history of the structure of water. But on the Internet, you can see these two people have good lectures. Awesome. Looking forward to it. Well, I think that was a great show. I know, as I said before, in Omer, Norwegian, your shows get a lot of live listeners, a lot of archive listeners, a lot of questions. And your work is really getting people to think outside the box. For you, it's probably maybe a little simple.
For a lot of people, it's very enlightening, and it's changing a lot of people's lives. So I know everyone appreciates you taking the time out. We appreciate you taking the time out. So thanks. Okay. Thank you. You have a good day. Okay. Bye. Bye. But there you go, guys. Great show. Questions and answers, I know, is long awaited. We'll probably be doing another show in August, doing the Endotoxin Serotonin Show. Stay tuned to our Facebook. You can look me up at Josh Rubin, California. Check out our website, eastwesthealing.com, our blog, Twitter account, all that fun,
social networking, OCD, turning people into droids, all that stuff is on our website. So check it out. So thanks for tuning in. I'll check you guys later. [END]