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Hi everyone, I'm Gary Null. Nice to have you with us today talking about health and nutrition issues. We're going to continue with our series on alternative healing. We're going to look at your thyroid gland to begin with. Now you're going to learn more about that thyroid gland and the process of the thyroid when it's not functioning properly and how that may be contributing to a whole series of illnesses. Illnesses that the normal process of medical examination would miss altogether. We're also going to show you the thyroid gland and aging.
So that coming up right after the opening new segments. Recently people have been looking, more people than ever have been looking actually, for how to regain a sense of health and using alternative therapies. Well one of the therapies is the whole area of phytochemicals or using plants. Now in the plant family there are a lot of conditions that are very specific for different conditions. For example, plants for irritable bowel syndrome. Now irritable bowel is, well it's not a very pleasant condition to have and people
end up with abdominal cramps and they can end up with constipation or diarrhea. And so you look around and say what works that's non-toxic? Well one of the things that they've been using in Europe for a long time is peppermint oil from Mintha Pipertea and it's used on a regular basis to aid in digestion and as a carminative. And we don't know all about its beneficial effects but we do know that it's shown to act as an antispasmodic to intestinal muscle. Also we found that it also has some strong anti-antimutagenic activity. Also when
looking at some of the things that make a difference, intermittent claudication. Now intermittent claudication is painful calves and sometimes it's so painful that just sitting is uncomfortable, walking for any distance is uncomfortable. So what do you do? Well with intermittent claudication some people have tried chelation therapy and they have claimed that chelation therapy has really made a difference. It's helped them. However in a recent study that was published in a prestigious journal and reported and I believe it was the, what was it? I saw it originally in Clinical Pearls and it was circulation, September
1994 and it was by Dr. André Van Riech and associate. And what they showed is they took two groups of people. Both groups had pretty similar intermittent claudication and they were over the age of 45. And they were able to determine the intermittent claudication by peripheral atherosclerotic vascular disease arteriography. Meaning they measured it and what they gave them was 500 ml infusion of 3,000 milligrams of EDTA plus some magnesium chloride. And the other group got 500 milligrams infusion of saline and inert solution.
And then they watched them and then after a period of time, about three months, they remeasured and they found that the chelation group had a 60% improvement in walking distance. But the control group, the placebo group, had a 59% improvement. Therefore they said that there was no difference between chelation group and the placebo group. Well there's a problem. I got the actual study and here's what it says. That the usual response is 30%. Well to go from the usual 30% response with drugs and other therapies to 60% is a 100%
improvement. So right off the bat there's a big improvement. But I could see having a 60% improvement in the chelation group. But how could you also have a 60% improvement in the placebo group? That makes no sense. But then ah, they tell us. They tell us right in the heart of the article that both groups received oral supplements daily. Now the oral supplements they received on a daily basis and a fairly good amount actually have oral vitamin chelating properties. Now what this tells me is that it was not so much the EDTA
that made the improvement but rather the oral chelators like vitamin C and zinc and selenium. These are oral chelators. So if you want to know why you've had clearer arteries and better circulation and less intermittent claudication, it's because of the proper supplementation. Now of course they didn't mention this in the article. They didn't mention that the average response is 30% and hence the placebo and the control group or the active group got 100% improvement. And they didn't tell people in the conclusions that gee whiz it was
probably the vitamin supplements that made a difference in the placebo group. A faulty study, misinterpreted, and one that slants a bias against chelation therapy. Unfortunately we still haven't seen the really ideal study to validate chelation in the Orthodox mind. I'm Gary Naul and I'd like to welcome you to our program. As you may know if you listen with any frequency we talk about health issues. In this segment we're going to talk about something that affects everyone from children to senior citizens, then to the overweight and that
is the thyroid gland. To share insights on the thyroid gland I've invited Dr. Ray Peat. Dr. Peat has a background in biology from the University of Oregon and he is specialized in hormone related oxidative changes. He's taught biochemistry, endocrinology, and nutrition at several universities. And he's authored several very good books including Nutrition for Women, Progesterone in Orthomolecular Medicine, and Generative Energy in Mind and Tissue. So let's go to our conference call and welcome him on board. Nice to have you with us Dr. Peat. Thanks. Could I comment on intermittent
claudication and how it relates to thyroid? Sure. It's very common for pre-puberty people to have leg pains that they call groin pains and those people are typically a little bit low thyroid and the textbooks used to show little kids with horribly swollen calf muscles. They looked like they were muscle bound but it was the accumulation of mucopolysaccharides swelling the muscle up causing great pain cramping and so on. And in old people who are hypothyroid something very similar happens but it includes degeneration of the blood
vessels to some extent. And you mentioned the chelation plus magnesium. When you take thyroid it energizes your cells to make ATP and it happens that ATP binds magnesium so you don't really take up magnesium into the cell very efficiently unless you have adequate thyroid. And when you are low in thyroid you tend to lose magnesium during stress and chronically that leads to a crampy inefficient condition where you waste oxygen producing your energy but you can't retain it because of the lack of magnesium. So in many situations
magnesium imitates thyroid function but the two together really are simply energizing the tissue and you can go from crampy legs or many old people get jumpy legs a funny sensation that makes their legs kick when they try to go to sleep. You can go from that hyper activity of the legs to many other conditions including heart rhythm problems, insomnia, muscle pains in general, many states that are considered degenerative diseases but they are simply low thyroid low magnesium states that prevent efficient energy production.
Good. Dr. Peat why don't we begin by you telling us about how we have a correlation between an underactive or low thyroid function in the aging process and then maybe include information in lay language about insomnia and arthritis and cholesterol all these things that we don't assume are associated with the thyroid gland but indeed are. Okay when a person is under stress the thyroid adaptively goes down it's like a hibernation process. That's one adaptation that works if an animal is starving for
example in the winter if its metabolism slows down its heart rate slows and its body temperature drops it can last through the winter without eating up its fat too fast or if it's in a famine situation or a migration if the thyroid slows down during starvation or prolonged activity as in migrating you can go farther on a given amount of stored energy. When people go on extreme diets trying to lose weight they lose maybe a pound or so the first day but then they stop losing weight if they're eating much less than a thousand
calories or on a total fast they will lose nothing but muscle after the first day and that's because after about 12 to 24 hours your liver has depleted its sugar stores and at that point it starts turning your muscles and other tissues to sugar and that would destroy your body very quickly so the thyroid adapts down under stress and so the worse the stress is or the more prolonged the lower your thyroid gets and that means that with aging you tend to have accumulated so many stresses that your thyroid gets chronically depressed and
unless you give it the right signals to bring it back it just stays there and gets lower and lower. When your thyroid is low you don't store sugar efficiently and so you are very efficient about burning up your body slowly but you aren't efficient at repairing it and all you're doing is decaying at a slower rate when your thyroid is down so what you want to do is stop the decay process and begin the repair process. People have looked at patients in hospitals and they
have found that the ones with the same diseases but with a low body temperature are the ones who are less likely to survive and go home and it's because the low thyroid which is an adaptation to many stresses and sicknesses at a certain point the low thyroid stops being protective and starts interfering with the healing process and when you have been in that low thyroid state too long you are living on adrenaline and cortisone which are destroying all of your essential tissues. I've seen many low thyroid people who in a day produced
30 or 40 times more adrenaline than normal and adrenaline tends to lead immediately to cortisone production depending on how efficient your adrenals are and this high adrenaline state creates a terrible amount of confusion among doctors and patients both because as an adaptation it makes people feel like they're on speed sometimes to have this adaptive extreme overproduction of adrenaline and at night it's normal for adrenaline and cortisone to rise even in young people because it's a sort of a fasting state and they're not eating and
so they maintain these sugar producing hormones during the night but in old age these are higher in general because of the low thyroid so that if your thyroid is low or you're old and have low thyroid as a more or less natural thing nighttime with the rising adrenaline and cortisone becomes more and more stressful and insomnia becomes more and more common it's very usual for people in their 70s and 80s to wake up after five or six hours of sleep and just get
up early because they know they aren't going to be able to get back to sleep but this also happens in very young people who have low thyroid and when it gets to an extreme it can lead to a hyperactive state with loss of attention or extreme irritability and depression and a lot of strange symptoms that if you can get your cortisone and adrenaline under control by normalizing your thyroid and blood sugar these strange symptoms of high tension just disappear one of the common stereotypes about low thyroid people is that they
are just lethargic and sluggish but a very large group of low thyroid people become hyperactive because of this very high adrenaline compensating for the low blood sugar Broda Barnes who was one of the best thyroid researchers in the 30s and 40s wrote a book called hypoglycemia it's your liver not your mind because he found that almost all hypoglycemics were low thyroid and that the liver simply wasn't able to store enough glycogen to keep their blood sugar steady the high cholesterol that develops in most people as they age is another thing that in the
30s and 40s many researchers recognized that high thyroid high cholesterol was nothing but an indicator of low thyroid the same way low blood sugar was mostly an indicator of low thyroid there were published studies in the middle 1930s which showed that when you took out someone's thyroid gland immediately the cholesterol went up and when you gave them a thyroid supplement immediately the cholesterol goes down that's because thyroid is needed to produce products that the cholesterol turns into such as bile acids progesterone and pregnenolone
which are youth associated hormones vitamin A and cholesterol are used up by thyroid in producing these essential hormones and bile materials I've seen people just like the published studies 60 years ago I've seen people consistently in one case the cholesterol went down almost a hundred points a day with very frequent big doses of quick-acting thyroid but usually you can see it go down 50 points a week with very careful thyroid supplementation the things that are happening to the national diet are mostly created creating worse problems for cholesterol metabolism and thyroid function a couple
weeks ago in the news there was a story about hypothyroidism in China at least a hundred million Chinese are hypothyroid and 25 million are retarded and actually have cretinism from congenital low thyroid it's been known most of this century that in areas where they eat beans as a staple of the diet such as in China many types of beans including soybeans but in the Andes region just ordinary beans are the major cause of hypothyroidism because of various antithyroid factors in beans lentils and certain nuts peanuts for example in
Eastern Europe the cabbage and turnip staple diets were major causes of cretinism and chronic goiter and myxedema myxedema is the name for one type of hypothyroidism that develops in adults in which mucusy material forms in the tissues makes the tongue thicken the skin gets coarse and inelastic but variations of myxedema can cause a lot of strange diseases that are put down to genetic causes more often than hypothyroidism but you can cure them in sometimes a week or two with the right dose of thyroid for example certain
types of mitral valve prolapses are just from a an accumulation of a mucus like material in the valve making it thick and inefficient glaucoma in low thyroid involves a swelling and overproduction and increased thickness of the fluids in the eyeball some types of Graves disease which most doctors think of as hyperthyroidism but hypothyroidism which causes the pituitary to become overactive hypothyroidism very predictably tends to cause bulging eyes because the thyroid stimulating hormone from the pituitary causes a mucusy material to form in the area behind the eyeball causing a protrusion of the
eyeball the mucusy materials that are overproduced also can cause blood vessel inefficiency and rigidity and contributes to things like varicose veins and when this material gets in the joints it causes cartilage deformities the old textbooks used to show teenagers with deformed joints that caused the same deviation of the bones at the elbow joint especially and the knee joint especially with knock knees for example but in old people you see the fingers deviating to one side because the cartilage is getting deformed the right balance of thyroid and the youth associated hormones progesterone and
pregnenolone and to some extent DHEA will rebalance the production of these mucus like molecules the glycoproteins and mucopolysaccharides they're called and in just a week or two you can often correct the deformity in a permanent way so that the joint functions without pain or distortion all of the chronic diseases to the extent that they involve this false adaptation in which the thyroid tries to put you into a sort of hibernation state all of the chronic diseases tend to benefit from the right supplement of these youth associated
hormones and the history of medical thyroid treatment is necessary before a person can understand what the doctor is doing with the tests typically a doctor will diagnose normal thyroid function on the basis of a test of the thyroxine in the blood and sometimes backs that up with the normal range TSH or thyroid stimulating hormone the TSH usually is somewhere in the range between 0.5 and 6 units and a person will be called normal when it's anywhere in that range but when it's above one unit in other words when it's just anywhere above the
lowest normal range the TSH is already causing excess production of the mucopolysaccharides that tend to load up the various tissues but still a person will be considered normal in terms of the blood thyroid tests because the thyroxine is defined as the thyroid hormone itself on the basis of some studies that were done 50 years ago the thyroxine is said to be normal in a range of for example from 4 to 12 units if you took any other biological indicator and and gave it such a wide range 4 to 12 in the case of thyroxine
or 0.5 to 6.0 in the case of TSH you would have for example blood sugar ranging from the level at which it causes convulsions and death up into the low diabetic range and you would call all of those normal or cholesterol ranging from the range of the low cholesterol that is associated with cancer and strokes up into the very high like three or four hundred milligrams of cholesterol so it's a very strange thing that thyroid is given such a definition that makes almost everything get called normal what happened was in the 1940s
forty percent of the American population was known to benefit from thyroid supplement and they had a low oxygen consumption but a drug company came out with a blood test that was called the protein bound iodine test and it seemed like a rational scientific thing to say that if a person had plenty of protein bound iodine in their blood their thyroid would be okay because people knew that an iodine deficiency caused hypothyroidism at that time so the blood test found that 95% of Americans had plenty of protein bound iodine and when
I was in school all of my fat friends with the traditional symptoms of low thyroid had been taught to say no I don't have a glandular problem I'm just lazy and gluttonous that was passed through the whole culture in the late 1940s and early 50s then in the 60s it turned out that the protein bound iodine test had essentially no relationship to thyroid function and now it's a standard textbook point that high doses of iodine can be used to suppress a highly active thyroid when it turned out that the protein bound iodine test was proven
invalid it goes up when your estrogen is high for example knocking out your thyroid function new tests were brought to the market actually measuring thyroxine and what happened was they kept the standard idea that only 5% of the population was hypothyroid even though the test used to establish that concept was proven completely meaningless so what we have kept is this doctrine that 95% of the population don't need thyroid and no matter what kind of test we use we have to stretch the test to fit the doctrine that only
5% can get thyroid. Dr. Peat we're coming up to our halfway mark in this segment of our program we're going to take a 60 second station identification break and when we return let's get into some of the other conditions that a low thyroid can affect our cholesterol level arthritis like symptoms has melatonin being found to inhibit progesterone and stimulate estradiol secretion and how do we help the thyroid I'm Gary Noll back in 60 seconds. I'm Gary Noll and I'd like to welcome you to our program. In this segment of our program we're going to be
continuing with a discussion in part about our thyroid and I've invited a very articulate he's soft-spoken but he is you can see the professor in him and the educator because he's being very methodical he's giving us the larger context he's giving us the cause and effect and so we're learning an enormous amount about conditions that we didn't know were related to the thyroid gland in all ages and all body types. So let's continue with Dr. Ray Peat P-E-A-T and Dr. Peat let's continue with our discussion. Okay you mentioned the
hormones estrogen and how it relates to melatonin with increasing age people have made the big thing of the fact that melatonin which peaks about 3 a.m. in everyone that this peak is a little bit smaller in old age but it happens that thyroid is being increased with aging as the thyroid decreases the melatonin decreases because when thyroid is active your melatonin comes up as an antioxidant defense against the high metabolic rate that thyroid can stimulate so when your thyroid is low your melatonin is low when your thyroid
is high the melatonin is high in an illogical adaptation because it is an antioxidant but the function of melatonin all by itself when it isn't surrounded by the appropriate other conditions melatonin in studies done in pig tissue by a man named siratkin pigs are relatively close to humans in having daytime habits nighttime sleep and so on which is very important for melatonin because it's a nighttime dominant hormone in pigs he found that melatonin suppresses progesterone and raises estrogen and this happens to be the same
thing that low thyroid does so if the melatonin rises in proportion to your thyroid it doesn't matter that it is having these pro-estrogen anti progesterone effects because the thyroid is doing exactly the opposite to those hormones and is taking care of the situation because thyroid gets rid of the excess estrogen while producing being totally responsible for producing progesterone but if you take melatonin out of context as he did in the pig study you're going to get exactly an anti thyroid effect deranging those
hormones in the direction of stress and aging some of the current publicity that is used to promote the fact that melatonin makes you go to sleep it happens to be also and a thing that goes up during hibernation and its function is to lower the body temperature and remember the hospitalized patients who the ones who had the lowest temperatures were the least likely to survive because as the the thyroid goes down and your body temperature falls you lose a lot of your immune functions and tissue repair capacity so lowering your body
temperature does make you hibernate and it does make you sleep but you don't want to use something out of context to force that the studies that have been used to advocate melatonin possibly anti-aging effect were done on mice and rats and that it turns out that they are very opposite to human beings and pigs because they work at night in general and sleep in the daytime and so melatonin for them has exactly the opposite meaning that it does for people and pigs and for example in in humans and rats melatonin raises prolactin but
in humans prolactin knocks out progesterone production and causes infertility and stress and osteoporosis for example but in rats it happens and mice it happens that melatonin raising prolactin for them prolactin raises their progesterone and progesterone has the pro-life anti-aging effect so melatonin has been confused by a lot of this rodent based research which is opposite in many ways to what it does in people and pigs the effect of thyroid on the liver is to not only make it store energy to keep up the blood sugar and
prevent the stress cortisol and adrenaline reactions but it is to activate the liver so that it can destroy a hundred percent of the estrogen arriving at the liver the liver when it has adequate protein and thyroid is just absolutely efficient at getting rid of the estrogen so when you lower the thyroid function you raise the estrogen that is allowed to circulate in the organism that happens not only from low thyroid or high melatonin but from malnutrition especially protein deficiency doesn't let the liver have
this detoxifying function so low protein amounts to low thyroid in many ways and leads to excess estrogen abnormal risk of blood clotting stroke and heart disease and so on if you look at the ovaries when in a dog or a cow for example they have removed the animal's thyroid the ovaries develop a polycystic condition instead of just one dominant egg follicle preparing for ovulation the ovaries fill up with a lot of these fluid filled chambers and ovulation is abnormal and they develop the tendency to produce an excess of estrogen so at
many levels low thyroid leads to an excess influence persistence and overproduction of estrogen and it's interesting that the accumulation of fluid it's one of these mucopolysaccharides again that swells up fills up these many cystic follicles in the ovaries it's the same sort of material that fills up the eyeball in glaucoma which is also promoted by low thyroid and high pituitary hormones the there are these integrating factors that in some ways the it's like an all-or-nothing function for the body the direction of estrogen dominance or the direction of thyroid and progesterone
dominance and low protein used to be just sort of a laboratory experiment but in the last three or four years books have come out advocating almost a protein-free diet and so I've had the chance to see many people who have absolutely low thyroid symptoms with high estrogen simply because they're not eating adequate protein it it probably should be something like at least 50 grams of the highest quality protein available and one thing that happens in the vegetable diet heavily based on cabbage family or beans lentils and nuts
these proteins in quality rank about 15 times lower than the highest quality proteins and so even though a person might think they're eating nothing but protein-rich foods beans and nuts the quality is so low that their their liver simply can't respond to the thyroid besides that the beans and nuts have many anti thyroid factors the some of these are being promoted in for different effects that they achieve the bio flavonoids the essential so-called essential fatty acids or the unsaturated fats these are among other things
pro-estrogen and anti thyroid so it's a combination of low protein and a whole lot of thyroid inhibiting chemicals that the population is being exposed to that is increasing the incidence of a lot of these degenerative diseases the unsaturated fats show up first in animals after weaning in in some experiments when the pregnant animal is given a certain amount of these bean oils soybean oil for example or corn oil the mother's body protects the fetus from absorbing these and the little bit that gets into the fetus tends to be
expelled into the fetuses intestine showing that the developing embryo and fetus act as if they don't want to absorb unsaturated fats the nursing baby also is highly protected so that if you look at the respiratory enzymes in their mitochondria in all of their organs especially the brain during embryonic and fetal development and even during nursing these are extremely deficient in unsaturated fatty acids that are called essential fatty acids and in some experiments they found that the brain didn't develop properly if the baby if the developing fetus didn't have saturated fats in sufficient quantity
and if an extreme amount of unsaturated fats were fed to the pregnant animals the baby's brain was inhibited and this is being reviewed in the last few months people are pointing out again that an excess or even a high normal amount of the unsaturated fats causes retarded brain growth in late fetal development or during the nursing stage even though the the fetus in the mother's body or receiving only maternal milk even though it is protected against the unsaturated fats at some point the young animal begins eating food from the environment
and when you analyze the mitochondrial oxygen using enzymes you see that at this point they start absorbing the unsaturated so-called essential fatty acids and as they absorb the unsaturated fats such as linoleic acid their activity declines the respiratory enzymes themselves begin to act more slowly and when you look at the whole chain involved in oxygen consumption which is essential for the high metabolic activity of young animals the whole chain from the respiratory oxygen using enzyme all the way back to the production of thyroid hormone and the transport of the thyroid hormone at
every stage conceivable the unsaturated fatty acids linoleic and linoleic and it's worse in proportion to the number of double bonds so that linoleic is about half again as inhibiting as linoleic acid to the thyroid and to the respiratory enzymes so the newborn or newly weaned animal has an extremely high respiratory rate and its brain is growing at a very fast rate but as it absorbs these environmental vegetable synthesized fats its metabolic rate slows down its thyroid function slows down and you get a curve of slowing
activity from weaning bending sharply at puberty and leveling off in the 20s and then going downhill this curve is very closely similar to the curve of loading up of the tissues with the unsaturated fatty acids and you can restore the activity of the respiratory enzymes simply by changing the dietary fats but a complete change since since the fat layers the adipose tissue since it stores what the animal has been eating it takes typically four years for a complete exchange of fat even after you've made a complete change in your
diet but momentarily if you for example take half an ounce of coconut oil you get a burst of thyroid like activity and your cells respire more intensely for about an hour until that fat is burned up but after about two years of a changed diet you've burned up roughly half of your stored inhibiting unsaturated fats and your metabolism stabilizes at a much higher level so it to to correct the age-associated decline of thyroid function and of respiratory energy production you could take a thyroid supplement or you could simply
change your diet away from the inhibitors the fatty acids are one type of metabolic inhibitor there are a few others for example the age pigment is something that is constructed inside our cells every time we're under stress and don't get enough oxygen in effect iron is released from storage put into an activated state in which it can attack the unsaturated fats that happen to be in the cell at the time and the combination of the unsaturated fat and the iron and the stress turns these unsaturated fats into age pigment or
lipofuscin which accumulates in all of the tissues it's found as the main material in cataracts in the lens of the eye in the atheroma in the wall of blood vessels that are deteriorating from age and stress in the heart that is aging and susceptible to all kinds of malfunction in the Alzheimer's brain and so on the age pigment accumulates and it in itself gets an enzyme function which bypasses the good energy producing system so after a certain point even changing your diet away from the the toxic inhibiting fats won't do the job
of restoring your thyroid function if you have accumulated so much of this age pigment because it is going to waste any oxygen that your cells can receive the at this point a whole system of degenerative conditions sets in in which the mucoproteins increase because of the stress conditions which are basically the same as the low thyroid conditions all of these lead to accumulating mucoid materials accumulating the blood vessels are lined with this material the white the red blood cells can't pick up oxygen as efficiently because of this
mucopolysaccharide layer the lung sacs get expanded and thickened so that the air doesn't diffuse through them efficiently and that increases the susceptibility of the aging animal to stress a smaller stress makes them more acutely oxygen deficient and that produces the age pigment at an even higher rate the several people are working on ways to remove the age pigment you can take brain cells in culture which have age pigment in them and one experimenter added vitamin e to the cultured brain cells and found that
in just two weeks the age pigment had been consumed or eliminated from the cells but in that experiment they administered the vitamin e dissolved in ethyl alcohol and they had to do a control experiment giving just that amount of ethyl alcohol it turned out to be almost as effective as the vitamin e so it's been known to be in a free radical quencher it breaks the chain of lipid peroxide production and so that suggests that there are probably many antioxidants that would help to eliminate age pigment but the first
problem is simply to slow or stop the production of it by avoiding overloading on the things which are known to produce it such as soy oil corn oil excess iron and so on even chronic heavy meat eating tends to make American men overload their tissues with iron and it happens that the immune system works better in people who by national standards are deficient in iron in other words our standards seem to be too high on what they recommend for adequate iron it would be
a little bit better to eat less iron so Dr. Peat we only have about six minutes to go in our program yeah I think it'd be good if you took that six minutes to explain how to build up a healthy thyroid gland to help overcome these conditions okay the first thing is to make sure you're eating adequate protein such as milk cheese eggs I'm naming them in order of declining iron content milk is designed to allow the newborn baby to escape or grow into the
overcharge of iron it's it's born with so milk is a way of helping to unload the body from iron milk milk and cheese are actually deficient in iron and then eggs and shellfish ocean grown fish and particularly shellfish are beneficial because shellfish use copper as their blood instead of iron or ordinary fish use iron and so you can avoid iron by occasionally substituting oysters lobster shrimp or crab for fish chicken or meat vegetables are in general moderate to high sources of iron but bread and pasta products have iron
supplemented in this country and that in itself I think is reason to totally give up bread and pasta because you are actually seeing a serious increase in iron overload diseases in this country after assuring that you have a good high protein intake then getting your calories in a safe and non-toxic way is the next thing and since the unsaturated fats are produced according to the coldness at which the organism grows because our bodies live at 98 or 99 degrees Fahrenheit their fats any organism that lives at that temperature
such as palm trees in the tropics these fats have to be stable at high temperatures but at refrigerator temperature they harden and so organisms like fish that live in cold water or soybeans or or grains that live in cold climates have to have unsaturated oils in proportion to the coldness of the environment otherwise the cells couldn't metabolize the oils would harden and in those cold temperatures the unsaturated oils don't get rancid very quickly as soon as you eat an oil from a cold living organism it starts turning to
peroxide varnish structure. Okay now remember don't get don't get too technical we only have two minutes to go and you got to summarize. Okay the ideal calorie source I think is tropical fruits and tropical oils especially coconut oil and any tropical fruit that lives at a high temperature papayas the custard apple family pineapples anything that that is full of carbohydrates is likely to be reasonably low in iron and high in all of the other vitamins and reasonable for minerals and they are important as a source of magnesium meat
and shellfish and fish and so on give you quite a bit of magnesium but the fruits are a major source of magnesium without overloading us on iron and the toxic substances because fruits in general from the tropics have small amounts of the thyroid inhibiting substances. Seeds in general have the thyroid inhibiting substances for a variety of reasons namely the worst of them is that plants evolve poisons to prevent their seeds being eaten because they wouldn't have a next generation if animals found the seeds palatable and
safe to eat so the worst poisons plants have are put in the seeds and they turn out to be metabolic inhibitors enzyme inhibitors but the fruit generally is evolved to serve to distribute the seeds so it's evolved to be safe to the animals. Potatoes are the only vegetable protein which is of quality equal to egg yolk it's actually a little higher in quality because it contains precursors to the essential amino acids it has more protein in effect than it actually has in substance and people misjudge potatoes because they're given as two to
four percent because wet potatoes are measured where beans are measured in the dry state and have 40% protein but that you have to divide the bean protein by 10 to make it equivalent to potatoes. So you're saying potatoes are good. Dr. Peat we're out of time I want to thank you very much for being with us a very informed guest very educational. Dr. Ray Peat author of good books including Nutrition for Women, Progesterone and Orthomolecular Medicine and Generative Energy. I'm Gary and all of you want a copy of today's show call
212-799-1246 and ask for the program on thyroid. See you tomorrow.