Ask Your Herb Doctor 111118 Energy Production Diabetes Saturated Fats Episode Transcript
Hosts, Andrew & Sarah
Guest, Dr. Ray Peat
Callers
Andrew: Good morning. Hi and welcome to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor, my name is Andrew Murray.
Sarah: My name is Sarah Johansson-Murray.
Andrew: For those of you who perhaps have never listened to our shows which run every third Friday of the month from 7 till 8pm, we're both licensed medical herbalists who trained in England and graduated there with a degree in herbal medicine. We run a clinic in Garbleville where we consult with clients about a wide range of conditions and we manufacture all our own certified organic herb extracts which are either grown on our CCUF certified herb farm. Or which are sourced from other USA certified organic suppliers.
Andrew: So you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMUD Galbaville 91.1 FM. And from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o'clock, you're invited to call in with any questions, either related or unrelated to this month's topic, of the misinformation concerning energy production, diabetes and saturated fats.
Andrew: The number here if you live in the area is 923 3911. Or if you live outside the area the toll free number is 1800 568 3723 that's 1800 km ud rad and we can also be reached toll free on 1888 wbm herb for further questions during normal business hours Monday through Friday.
Andrew: So once again we're very pleased to have Dr Raymond Peat with us an endocrinologist researcher. Many many years of experience under his belt to illuminate some of the misinformation that's so prevalent in the medical literature. So Dr Peake thank you for joining us again.
Andrew: As always people may have tuned in who perhaps have never listened to the show so it's always a very good idea to just give an overview of your background, your education and what you're bringing to the show this evening.
Ray Peat: I've studied a lot of different things but my... biological study was at the University of Oregon. I spent four years there working on a Ph.D. starting out thinking I was going to do nerve biology and brain biology and the people in that section were so dogmatic I looked around and found that the reproductive physiology and aging people were actually scientifically oriented so I shifted over and did my dissertation on the hormones and physiology and energy metabolism of aging and the reproductive system.
Andrew: Okay now I know that you're you're very interested in maintaining a good thyroid function I think that's one of the main things that we both have found is a key cornerstone to maintaining biological energy production and that's so important in fighting the negative effects of the environmental material that we've come into contact with that would lower our own metabolic energy. So I think the first reference to metabolic energy and the prevalence in the food chain of the material that is counterproductive to good health is the saturated fats versus the non-saturated, sorry, versus the polyunsaturated.
Andrew: So in your understanding, is that one of the main stumbling blocks for the misinformation of diabetes and triglycerides and general lipid health?
Ray Peat: Yeah, I think so. The people who created the idea of the essential fatty acids actually a few years later did an experiment with one of their lab people that I think really showed all of the important features of why people should not eat the essential so-called fatty acids. In 1929, when the Burrs published their claim that the polyunsaturated fats linoleic acid and linoleic acid, they said those are essential for life.
Ray Peat: Other biologists had shown that animals were healthier when they had no fat in their diet, had almost no cancer, and were spontaneously developing. But the Burrs simply ignored the evidence that the fats were harmful and other biologists ignored them pretty much for about 20 years because the evidence was so overwhelmingly against their claims. But in their faith that those fats were essential, one of their lab people......agreed to go on a fat-free diet for six months. And his health remarkably improved. His blood lipids changed somewhat. The cholesterol went down a little and the triglycerides went up a little. But the total lipids' quantities stayed about the same.
Ray Peat: He didn't get tired after a day's work, as he always had, and his life-long weekly migraine headaches disappeared forever. So, nothing really was assuring the support of their position until the seed oil industry wanted to market their liquid. Seed oil, cotton seed oil, linseed oil, soybean oil, and so on. And they brought the birds out of obscurity and said, since they have proven that the fatty acids, linoleic acid and linolenic, are essential for life, we'll get the public to eat them in huge quantities. and treat them as drugs rather than as simply a trace nutrient that, according to their somewhat unconvincing research, as trace nutrients they were supposedly doing something to make the skin healthier.
Ray Peat: But the counter evidence had included such things as... Many animal diseases, degenerative brain disease, atrophy of the gonads, infertility and so on, were connected with eating too much of the unsaturated fats. And vitamin E was found to protect against that. So it was all a marketing campaign to......sell the idea that not only are those fats essential, but they're good for you, and like a drug they'll prevent heart disease.
Ray Peat: But very soon people started producing evidence showing that in fact linoleic acid not only causes heart disease, but promotes cancer, immune problems, all kinds of......things similar to what they had seen in the animals.
Andrew: OK. Now, all of these poofers then are the fish oils, the hemp seed oil, canola, etc. So these are all the liquid oils that you're referring to that are so common in the food chain now.
Ray Peat: Yeah, and in the 1950s they were feeding a lot of fish to mink...
Andrew: OK....
Ray Peat: in the main farms, and they were producing......what was called the yellow fat disease, which apparently was related to the age pigment lipofusco, which is a brown pigment that develops from the breakdown of the polyunsaturated fats. So the fish oils were, right along with the deep oils, were seen to be toxic in the 50s and 60s.
Ray Peat: But by the 1970s, linoleic acid was......being recognized as a major cause of heart disease and cancer. And so they had sold the public on the idea of essential fatty acids. So they just changed the story and said, well, fish oils or linseed oil are a different kind of fat. They aren't the omega minus six oils like the deadly linoleic acid. After the omega minus three, but those had already themselves been incriminated with the yellow fat and lipofuscin disease.
Andrew: So they just switched tactics to the N3s and tried to sell those, huh?
Ray Peat: Yeah, and that's where we are now with the oil craze.
Sarah: Well, what I find is quite interesting is with our clients' blood work, when we say, oh, you know, have you had some blood work done? Why don't you bring it in and let's look at it. So a lot of clients have elevated liver enzymes. And when they start eating coconut oil, those enzymes come down.
Ray Peat: Yeah, a research on hepatitis and cirrhosis, a non-G, for years has been showing that the polyunsaturated fats injure the liver. I think it started with... an Indian researcher noticing that in the butter regions of India, alcoholics didn't develop hepatitis or cirrhosis in the liver. And so he tested his observation on rats and found that if he fed them unsaturated oils, alcohol caused cirrhosis and hepatitis. If he fed them saturated fats, it didn't. And so Nanji tried that on his patients and found that their liver condition improved if he gave them a lot of saturated fats and got worse if he fed them fish oils or seed oils.
Andrew: So why do you think it is so prevalent in the literature that we're bombarded from every seeming angle from the newspapers to the televisions to the radios? and all the media outlets that are purporting the liquid oils to be the beneficial things because it doesn't matter where you look you find cardiovascular research for this or for that associating the fish oils with lower incidence of cholesterol improved heart health and actually the picture from research is actually showing a very different story i wonder why it is
Ray Peat: There aren't many palm trees producing coconut oil in the united states of canada
Sarah: well didn't you um say dr pete that that when people take fish oils and they have high cholesterol that the cholesterol moves out of the blood and into the tissues as a stress response so if someone had a blood test to look at their cholesterol before and after using fish oils it looks better after using fish oils but it's not actually gotten out of the body it's just gotten stored in the tissues
Ray Peat: Yeah and cholesterol is one of our most important protective antioxidants generally protective anti-toxin and for the unsaturated fats to lower that in the total production of it and the level in the blood it is part of why they're something to avoid the liver nodes to increase retain any cholesterol it can because it's needed for cell division to go on, for cell function to go on. All of the internal cellular processes rely on both cholesterol and saturated fatty acids. And if you overdose on the polyunsaturated, all of these intracellular mechanisms are deranged.
Ray Peat: By interfering with the cholesterol and saturated fat functions, the chromosomes, the spindles that helps the cell divide, separates the chromosomes and so on. All of these are stabilized and require cholesterol and saturated fats to function. And so you get deranged expression of genes. Deranged cell division if you have too much polyunsaturated fats.
Sarah: And just excuse me I had to pop out for a moment so I'm not sure if you covered all the different types of oils that fall into the category of the unsaturated versus the saturated.
Andrew: Yeah go ahead again.
Sarah: But humans have been eating saturated fats for forever for thousands and thousands of years. And they didn't make seed oils, they didn't make oil out of corn. I mean, well then, but that's mostly, that's very little polyunsaturated, it's mostly monounsaturated.
Ray Peat: Yeah, the safe oils are butter, chocolate fat, which is mostly stearic acid, coconut oil, palm kernel oil, beef fat, lamb fat, and olive oil.
Sarah: People think of pork fat and chicken fat as being bad fats, and they actually are bad fats because of what they feed the pigs and the chickens. So unlike beef fat or butter or cream and milk and lamb fat and any other ruminant animal that has multiple stomachs, the chicken fat and the pork fat are just as bad as the corn oil because basically the pigs and the chickens are eating corn.
Ray Peat: Yeah, and... They're now farming fish and feeding them some of the same foods that they feed chickens and pigs. And interestingly, the things we think of as fish oil, the fish that live in the cold oceans get their fats from plankton. If they eat small fish, the small fish eat the plankton. And the plankton fat is... made by algae, and the algae is where the N-3 fats come from, and the fish modify them a little.
Ray Peat: Basically, what we call fish fat is algae fat. And in experiments, they have given either warm-blooded animals extra fish oil, or they give the fish a diet containing less......unsaturated fat, like grains of cereal fat and so on, or chicken fat, I think was one they used, or anchovy oil, the highly unsaturated oil of a small fish that a salmon would maybe eat. And they tested their endurance. The rats getting the fish oil had less endurance. Even the salmon. A pure fish oil diet had less endurance than when they were getting chicken fat or some other less polyunsaturated fat. So, fish oil isn't even so great for fish.
Sarah: That's hilarious. I've never heard that before. So, what about the farmed shrimp? Because there's so many shrimp. Do you think farmed shrimp even have the minerals in them? Why it's good to eat shellfish?
Ray Peat: No, that's the good thing about it. Anything growing in the ocean is that it has access to selenium, iodine and other trace minerals where things grown inland depend on whatever is in the soil, so they're often deficient in selenium and copper.
Sarah: So farmed salmon, any kind of farmed fish or farmed shellfish, apart from oysters, they have to farm those in the ocean, I think. But they'll all be... They'll all be deficient, then, and there's actually no point eating them.
Ray Peat: Yeah, unless people know exactly what you feed them, and they probably don't.
Sarah: Then they're giving them vitamins, and then you're eating vitamins, recycled vitamins.
Andrew: Now, Dr. Pete, what you explain is the problems in the food chain with those things that either poison the cells directly or interfere with thyroid function, all... hinge on the fact that as organisms we need an excess of metabolic energy to cope with the insults of the foods that we're exposed to, the drugs that we might take or environmental toxins etc.
Ray Peat: Yeah and diabetes is a good model of the energy-deprived state and they're starting to see several years ago... Someone suggested that Alzheimer's disease was diabetes of the brain and people are seeing the effects of inflammation in all of the degenerative diseases and inflammation involves a failure of energy and a shift to the, basically, the diabetic metabolism in which all you can do with glucose is make lactic acid.
Andrew: Right, which poisons you again, right?
Ray Peat: Yeah, the lactic acid is pro-inflammatory and doesn't produce enough energy for normal function. And the essence of diabetes was pointed out by Randall in 1963 or 64, when he observed that if you increase the free fatty acids in the blood very quickly... make the cells unable to use glucose.
Andrew: Right, does it shift their metabolism from glucose directly?
Ray Peat: Yeah, it's now been worked out that there are two very clear points where the free fatty acids inhibit the use of glucose. Pyruvic dehydrogenase, that's the one you need to burn the glucose, and then... They stimulate glucagon, which happens to turn on the synthesis of glucose at the expense of protein.
Andrew: OK, they stimulate glucagon?
Ray Peat: Yeah, and glucagon then, in turn, stimulates the release of more fatty acids.
Andrew: Oh, wow. OK.
Ray Peat: And there are several points like that where the free fatty acids activate, for example, adrenaline. ACTH, cortisone, hyotropic hormone, and glucagon, all of which increase the release of free fatty acids from your fat cell storage. And that seems very illogical of the body to create those vicious circles in which, once you start having an energy failure, you turn on exactly what caused it.
Ray Peat: It turns out that it's only the polyunsaturated fatty acids that have those terrible anti-energy effects. If you look at a comparison of stearic acid and linoleic acid, for example.
Sarah: Which is like butter versus corn oil.
Ray Peat: Yeah, the butter turns off adrenaline and ______. ACTH and cortisone.
Andrew: Which are the bad guys.
Ray Peat: Yeah, and the corn oil turns them on. And the excitotoxic system in the brain that wears out and can kill brain cells, those are activated by the polyunsaturated fats, pretty much in proportion to the number of double bonds they have.
Andrew: Right, so these could be the... So these promote Alzheimer's, then, or other neurological or degenerative...
Ray Peat: Yeah, and they're common by stearic acid.
Andrew: Right, which is beef fat, isn't it? Stearic from steers or stearate?
Sarah: Maybe it's in modern... Or not?
Ray Peat: Basically, it's a Greek word meaning fat.
Sarah: Okay. But yeah, that's what we were taught. That it meant from steers because of stearic acid.
Sarah: Okay, so you're saying that these bad oils... can cause diabetes, block your use of sugar so that the blood sugar remains high, and also Alzheimer's. Right,
Andrew: they block your energy production.
Ray Peat: Yeah, and if you look up the saturation index, I googled it and saw that all except one of the studies found that people with cancer had......much more polyunsaturated fat in the tumor and in their bodies than healthy people. For example, twice as much in one study was polyunsaturated, where healthy people had equal amounts. And putting rodents on a diet of high saturated fat delayed......their development of breast cancer, fitting in with the saturation index being a matter of protection against cancer.
Ray Peat: And similar for heart disease, there was a study in which adding the polyunsaturated fats shortened the lives of the animals with a tendency to heart disease.
Ray Peat: The saturated fat, very high saturated fat diet. Greatly extended their lives.
Sarah: Didn't Mr. Mazzola, didn't he die of a heart attack after he had been saying, oh corn oil is great, like he was trying to sell everybody on corn oil because everybody was used to eating a saturated lard or butter or coconut oil and he wanted people to buy his corn oil so he said you can drink this stuff it's great for you it's great for your heart and then didn't he die at a young age of a heart attack isn't that true Dr. B?
Ray Peat: I don't know about him but I know about you. I read that. Are people famous for selling unsaturated fats dying of cancers that are known to be associated with an excess of PUFA?
Sarah: PUFA is our abbreviated version for polyunsaturated fatty acid and that is every other fat apart from what we've listed like palm oil, coconut oil, butter, beef fat, olive oil, I missed any others, cocoa, we've mentioned cocoa butter. Any other solid fat?
Ray Peat: In recent years, people are seeing that the level of free fatty acids, which in our population means mostly unsaturated fats, because those are the ones which are most easily liberated from the fat storage. There's an extremely close connection between free fatty acids in the blood and......your likelihood of dying from just about anything. Shock, ageing, cancer, heart disease and infection.
Andrew: All associated with high levels of free fatty acids.
Sarah: And isn't this something that is good for a diabetic to test? Because it could be showing that they're not using their sugar because their free fatty acids are so high?
Ray Peat: Yeah, and that's actually... It's recognized for years that niacin is effective for not only heart disease but diabetes, simply because it lowers the free fatty acids. But that isn't catching on because it's so cheap.
Sarah: So food sources... Does chocolate... I know coffee has a lot of niacinamide and what about chocolate? Doesn't chocolate have niacin?
Ray Peat: I don't know about chocolate.
Sarah: But also... A beef, I guess, room in animal livers, beef liver?
Ray Peat: Yeah, yeah.
Sarah: What other food sources are high in niacinamide?
Ray Peat: All of the animal foods have a reasonable amount. Liver, milk, eggs.
Andrew: OK. You're... I'll start again. You are tuning to KMUD, Garbleville 91.1 FM. And from any time now until the end of the show, you are invited to call in with any questions related or unrelated to this month's show of energy production, diabetes and saturated fats just to explore the myths that are surrounding us and pervading our culture and media and the number here if you live in the area is 923 3911 or if you live outside the number is 1800 KMUD Rad. Help look out as one caller or question or...
Engineer: We have a caller, but first I'll tell you it's 730 and 42 degrees outside, and here's our caller.
Caller 1: Hi, yes, I'm calling from Port Bragg, where it's supposed to get down to 32 later tonight, so make sure you stay warm and get your animals in, just a suggestion there. And Dr. Pete, last show... I'm a little older, I just had a birthday this weekend, so again, older, and I have a little bit of difficulty hearing you sometimes, and during the last show you did something where I could hear you very well and I wanted to ask if maybe whatever that was, you could do that again, because I really don't like to miss anything of what you have to say. I appreciate your wisdom and you have great information. And before I ask my question of you, Dr. Pete, I wanted to ask, is that Sarah tonight?
Sarah: Yes, it is Sarah. I'm Sarah and Andrew here. I'm Sarah.
Caller 1: I just wanted to ask if I could borrow your brilliant play on words about how fish that are farmed are deficient when describing the difference between the nutrients in farmed fish being deficient compared to those that are out in the ocean. I thought that was really clever and my compliments to you on that.
Sarah: Thank you.
Caller 1: And thank you for the wonderful concept.
Sarah: That's my question.
Caller 1: Okay, my question for Dr. Pete is based on a conversation I had with a friend who said that he has difficulty digesting fats because of hereditary gallbladder difficulties. So I hope this is in line with the topic in that the question that I have for you is are there any available enzymes, supplements, herbs that would help in the digestion of fats where somebody has... apparently a difficulty in properly digesting those, something that would aid in that digestion and better metabolize the fats, basically has difficulty in eating meat, red meats, pork, etc., not so much with fish or poultry, but still a bit of a difficulty in anything in that realm.
Ray Peat: There's a great tendency of hypothyroid people to have gallbladder disease and trouble... digesting fats and the best thing to do for gallbladder disease is to improve your thyroid function and avoiding unsaturated fats in all forms is very important for the thyroid function. The myth tells us that the only difference between the unsaturated and saturated fatty acids is their shape. And they claim that that has to do with the mobility of the fat in membranes and so on.
Ray Peat: But really the absolute difference between saturated and unsaturated is the way they bind to proteins. And since the basic framework of the cell is protein, the saturated fats bind properly. to the proteins and the unsaturated fats don't bind the same and bind to other proteins that they shouldn't bind to. And the protein that transports the thyroid hormone happens to, it has sites that associate with the double bonds in the thyroid hormone molecule.
Ray Peat: And the unsaturated fats bind to those same......sites on the transport protein so that the protein can't carry thyroid. It carries unsaturated fats instead. And so the...
Caller 1: Well, that's interesting to know. Maybe what I could suggest to him is that he'd look into what might be a cascading difficulty that originates in the thyroid and maybe prevents the... Am I understanding correctly that it prevents the... gallbladder from maybe properly producing enzymes necessary in that metabolism of fats?
Ray Peat: Right.
Caller 1: Okay, well, hey, and I can hear you a lot better, so whatever you did, keep doing it, man, and y'all stay warm and appreciate all the information that you bring to the air, all of you.
Sarah: And I wanted to say as well, until he can get that sorted out, or while he's working on getting that sorted out, there are lots of liver herbs that can help improve bile flow and help improve his digestion of fats. Ginshin, tinctures of ginshin, burdock root, dandelion root, those are very bitter herbs that can really help stimulate that flow of bile and help in the meantime until he can get his system working on its own.
Caller 1: Cool, and ginshing, is that sometimes pronounced ginsing?
Sarah: No, ginshin. Swedish bitters, I don't know if you've ever heard of Swedish bitters, it's a traditional European tonic. That has all those types of bitter herbs in there.
Caller 1: Okay, yeah, and sometimes we who aren't experts, a little clarification on that, can you spell ginshin for me just for clarification also?
Sarah: Yes, it's g for George, e-n-t-i-a-n.
Caller 1: Yeah, okay, so it sounds completely, or it's spelled completely different from ginseng, it's like ginshin, t-i-a-n. Okay, very good, thanks for all your information, and have a good holiday. Thanksgiving coming up and I'm sure he'll be happy to hear this for that big turkey dinner next week.
Sarah: Well, turkeys are like chickens, they're full of the poofas.
Andrew: Don't eat the skin.
Sarah: And don't eat the stuffing that's inside the bird.
Caller 1: I'm sure he'll help me do his holiday better, so thanks again. Okay, thank you for your call.
Sarah: Thank you for your call.
Andrew: So Dr Pete, let's get back to the energy balance and the disruptive effects on energy. of the polyunsaturates versus the saturated fats as a way of staying healthy by keeping and maintaining a high metabolic energy.
Andrew: Dr Pete, you still there?
Ray Peat: Yeah, it was quiet for a while.
Andrew: Yeah, it did too. Did you actually hear the question or not?
Ray Peat: No, I didn't hear anything.
Andrew: Okay, listen, I just wanted to get back to the concept of the energy balance in the organism. And the negative effects that pufer, the polyunsaturated liquid oils, seed oils, fish oil, etc. can have, how they impact the organism's ability to be metabolically active enough to have extra energy currency, as it were, to pay off the debt of inflammation and other things that the organism might come into contact with.
Ray Peat: Um, the one enzyme that I mentioned, the pyruvic dehydrogenase, is......is the one that feeds glucose into the oxidative system, but then the mitochondrial oxidative system itself is basically destroyed in proportion to the polyunsaturated fat exposure.
Andrew: Right, this is the system within every cell, the mitochondria, the little factories that work in the cell.
Ray Peat: Yeah, it produces something like 35 times more energy per molecule of... sugar than the diabetic pathway can produce.
Andrew: Wow, because the diabetics have forced, for want of a better word, into a fat burning mode rather than glucose burning.
Ray Peat: Yeah, and if it was purely saturated fat, that would be okay. When we're at rest, our cells can burn saturated fat. They prefer that. The fat cells have been found to burn at rest. I mean, they're always at rest, where the heart or skeletal muscles, only in a relatively quiet state, will burn saturated fat. But the fat cells, being always at rest, slowly energize themselves by burning saturated fat. And that's why it was aged. Our tissues become more and more concentrated with polyunsaturated fats because the fat cells themselves are using the good stuff.
Ray Peat: And so with age, it's seen all the way from birth to old age, there's a progressive increase of polyunsaturated fats in all our tissues.
Andrew: Right, from our diets.
Ray Peat: Yes, and so then when we're under stress and don't get enough sugar, then we have to burn the bad stuff, and that does many things to the mitochondria, including sometimes sudden death, but the chronic effect is known to destroy the genes, the genetic material inside the mitochondrion, where saturated fat doesn't harm the...
Andrew: Would this give rise to cancers then as a result of damaged DNA?
Ray Peat: Yeah.
Andrew: So you're saying that this doesn't really occur only in the presence of polyunsaturated destructive changes?
Ray Peat: Yeah, the saturated fats are just quietly oxidised.
Andrew: Wow, because they're relatively stable?
Ray Peat: Yeah, they don't break down into the isoprostanes and neuroprostanes are equivalent to the prostaglandins. Okay. But they're made randomly under stress and oxidation.
Andrew: Right, and they're very inflammatory.
Ray Peat: Yeah, and several of the fragment molecules that are made from the N-6 or N-3 molecule, hydroxynonenal and hydroxyhexenal, these attach to hemoglobin, genetic material, enzymes. Signaling molecules.
Andrew: Is this a glycation?
Ray Peat: Yeah, most of the things that are called glycation are really fat breakdown products.
Sarah: Okay, so basically if you're a diabetic, then most likely you're going to be breaking down these bad fats in your tissues and you can get a blood test that shows that you have high lactic acid from this. This inefficient metabolism where you burn this fat that's really a bad fat, it's not a saturated fat?
Ray Peat: Yes.
Sarah: And what would happen if a diabetic only ate saturated fats?
Ray Peat: Well, it takes a long time to use up the... depends on how old and how fat you are. A thin person can change very quickly, but it isn't just the storage fats that become... very highly polyunsaturated with age. But every tissue contains phospholipids and other very complex molecules containing the fatty acids.
Sarah: So what would be like the maximum time if someone who had cancer or diabetes or Alzheimer's, how long would it take if they stopped eating all of these unsaturated, polyunsaturated fatty acids? All these bad oils and just started eating butter and coconut.
Ray Peat: Well, they've looked at people moving from Holland to England, for example, or rats or chickens that are put on a different diet. And the complete changeover takes years, about four years. But you can, if you eat frequently and thoroughly, avoid the stress-causing foods. And don't let yourself get hungry enough that you call on the stress hormones to liberate fat. You can very quickly shift over to the efficient metabolism. Frequent eating, but always with sugar and always with absolutely no PUFA.
Ray Peat: Your, uh, allows the... the slow disposition of the unsaturated toxic fats. And our liver treats the PUFA like it treats other toxins. It, uh, if it has the energy, it attaches them to a sugar and prepares them to be excreted in the urine, just like chloroform or dioxin or whatever.
Andrew: And the other toxin.
Sarah: So that's also why women will go on these weight loss programs and they lose say 60 to 70 pounds in a year that their liver enzymes go up and their liver shows signs of stress and that's because they burn too many of these polyunsaturates at once.
Ray Peat: If your liver stays energized with frequent feedings and good nutrition, it can slowly eliminate those fats without running them through the mitochondria. When you're under stress, you not only damage all of your blood vessels and nerve cells and so on, but they very specifically knock out the exact enzymes which are needed to detoxify things.
Sarah: So lots of snacks of fruit and cheese or fruit and milk, things like that to keep your your energy metabolism going well will help prevent these. Bad fats from coming into circulation too quickly at once and I think we have a caller on the line.
Caller 2: Hi, I'm really enjoying your show. In fact, you're reinforcing what my mom always told me.
Sarah: What was that?
Caller 2: Oh, you know, eat more veggies, eat more fruit, you know, that kind of stuff. She also wanted me to eat milk and drink milk, but that's another story.
Sarah: Well, I'd recommend the same thing, sir.
Caller 2: Okay, thank you. Well, I'm allergic to milk, so I'm not sure about that one, but I've got a question for you.
Sarah: I'm sure you could sort that out. Given enough time, I could help you out with that, too. But anyway, what's your question?
Caller 2: You know, there was this, I guess you'd call it a diet, a way to eat that was talked about. You know how these diet things go. They're kind of a sad thing. They come into people's... awareness and they're the going thing for a while. But it was called the Eat Right for Your Blood Type.
Sarah: Oh, right. Yes, I've heard of that.
Caller 2: And what I, you know, I don't usually subscribe to most of those things, but I did notice with that, you know, I looked it up and said, well, what's it say? And it said for my blood type, which is O positive, it said, you know, beef is really good and pork's not so good and this and that. And what I've noticed is that, you know, when I find myself in a stressful position or tired... something like that, I get this yearning for, you know, to go have a hamburger or go have some meat or something. And after I eat it, I feel really satisfied. And I wondered what you all think with your experience and studies about the relationship between certain types of foods or maybe specifically meat products and, you know, blood types, any of that kind of information.
Sarah: Or even cravings. That would be an interesting question for you, Dr. Pete, as far as... A person's craving for, like, when they really want that steak or they really want... Well, I've been having cravings for watermelon. I really want some watermelon. So what is the brain trying to tell us that?
Ray Peat: There have been animal studies and some studies in kids showing that we have very specific nerve systems that tell us what we're deficient in, except for the quality of......protein. There are only a few of the amino acids that our systems detect as deficiencies, and I forget which those are, but we do crave protein when we're deficient in protein, if the food is a balanced type of protein, and we crave sugar and salt very specifically if we need those in hypothyroid people. generally crave sugar and salty food and vitamin C is something that causes a craving for sour, tangy foods, fruits for example.
Sarah: Okay, so I guess, Collar, are you still on the air?
Caller 2: Yes.
Sarah: So did that answer your question? Well,
Caller 2: I mean, it does to a degree. I wonder, you know, the factor is... that I've noticed again, and I mentioned, was there's a certain level of stress that I've noticed that brings out some of that. Well, I can notice when I'm tired, I get more cravings for sugar things, but also stress will bring on, you know, if I get really stressed, and let's say I'm working, I really want that doughnut, which I don't... doughnuts are one thing that I just try to avoid, you know, but I find that there is some that or, you know, as I said, the meat thing. So I'm wondering because... Because I do find I eat a fair amount of beef and I try to buy the lowest fat content beef I can and I'm hearing all your cautionary information regarding eating animal fats and I'm just trying to find a balance there between what my body seems to be craving and what I'm hearing from you and from your educated point of view.
Sarah: Right, well as far as the beef fat is concerned that isn't that is not a dangerous fat. Of course now with industrial beef raising, cow raising, cattle raising, sorry What they're feeding the cows if they're heavily if they're I mean if they're giving the animals hormones Those will get stored in the fat all the toxins do get stored in the fat but if it's a grass-fed organic animal, then the fat should be fairly clean and And that if you're if you're craving You didn't say you're craving fat, but Basically, I don't think beef fat is a super dangerous fat It's the chicken fat and the pork fat and the turkey fat and the fish fat those fats are the ones that are that are have been shown in these studies that we've been talking about tonight to be Dangerous and blocking your use of sugar and slowing down cells metabolism and altering the genetics and all of that sort of thing
Caller 2: And and and your references earlier that I heard were at least with the the of a swine and chickens were along the lines of that it's really the feed that that's causing that would it would that be the same With fish are you are you referencing only farmed fish, or are you saying all fish?
Ray Peat: well, they've seen change of diet affecting even farmed salmon and It's the fish really have just as almost an absolute a reflection of their diet in their fat. Fish in the Amazon contain fat that's as saturated as butter because of the temperature of the water.
Caller 2: Huh? So the old story of the Eskimo and you know why the Eskimos don't get heart disease because they eat a lot of fish.
Sarah: It's because they eat whale blubber which is very saturated. They live off of whale blubber.
Caller 2: I don't know if I'll go that far in my diet.
Sarah: No, I know. But we have butter. We have grass-fed butter. Right. I mean grass-fed butter. Grass-fed beef. Grass-fed beef. And butter. And milk that's from grass-fed cows. One thing I do want to point out is that when cows eat the bad food, just like the chickens and the pigs, all the corn and all the soy that's in it, the cows, because they have forced stomachs, they can transfer that bad fat from the corn into a saturated fat. So it's not dangerous like if you ate the fat of the chicken or the pig or the turkey.
Caller 2: Yeah, that's really interesting. I hadn't known that before.
Ray Peat: The cows' bacteria use vitamin E to saturate the fat, basically detoxifying the unsaturated fats.
Andrew: Okay we've lost you Dr. Pete.
Ray Peat: Yeah there was a noise.
Andrew: Just say that again, you were talking about the...
Sarah: Vitamin E.
Ray Peat: Right. Yeah and vitamin E even in humans will cause some of that in the intestine if there are bacteria present with the fat, vitamin E lets bacteria saturate and detoxify some of the Pufa. So one of the... Small effects of vitamin E is to destroy the polyunsaturated fat rather than just protecting against its after-effects.
Sarah: So if someone were to eat french fries, God forbid, no, then they could take up some vitamin E with it to help prevent some of the damage?
Ray Peat: Yeah, or make the french fries in coconut oil.
Andrew: Okay, now that last caller who mentioned the when they get stressed... they want to gravitate towards, I think he was gravitating towards meat, but he did mention that donuts would be something else that he would consume, perhaps under stress. Do you understand that stress perhaps as being the need for blood sugar?
Ray Peat: Yeah, there are these specific needs, a protein deficient person or animal will gravitate towards a higher protein in the food, but the most intense......connection between need and appetite is between sugar and salt.
Andrew: OK, so sugar and salt are the good guys, as we've heard before many times, it's kind of another misinformation, folks, so... I know there's people that have tuned in this evening and probably heard things that they may not have heard before and some people that have tuned in have heard it and they want to keep hearing more, which is all good, so we'll just reiterate the fact that the misinformation that's out there in the media......is portraying the liquid oils as good, as soy as good, sugar as bad and salt as bad, and when actually salt and sugar are both very important for you, anti-stress compounds for lowering adrenaline, and the saturated fats are actually very good in supporting a healthy metabolism.
Andrew: What do you think about the free fatty acids in...
Sarah: Sorry, I just want to say... I'm just saying, but it's... You want foods in balance, you can't just eat salt on its own, you can't just eat sugar just on its own, you want to balance it with a good protein and a good fat, so you want to balance the sugar and the salt with a good protein and a good fat, so you keep it all in balance.
Andrew: Maybe we have time for you just to explain what the Randall Hypothesis proposed 30 years ago or thereabouts that science wants to ignore now, or I see some people actually digging up that. old research and starting to re-examine it.
Ray Peat: Yeah, some people call it the Randall Cycle, but there's no cycle involved, it's just a competition. When you raise your free fatty acids, you inhibit the ability to oxidise glucose, and stress increases the free fatty acids, and oxidising glucose is what you need to overcome. The stress and so it's sort of a counterproductive reaction but the reason it's counterproductive is that our systems are designed not to eat PUFA and it's a PUFA which very systematically it's just an amazing black and white almost difference the way the PUFA turn on the very stress hormones that.
Ray Peat: Interfere with the energy making it the body need more stress hormones and Blocking the energy so that we need more turning on the the very things that cause the problem
Sarah: Why does the body you want to do that? I mean what
Ray Peat: the body is designed apparently from how? completely systematic it is to respond to saturated fat right because saturated fat block the stress reaction.
Ray Peat: So the properly functioning body would be logical. The stress reaction would provide energy in the absence of food, would provide the saturated fats from the storage, and at the same time it would inhibit the stress hormones and allow the cycle to be broken.
Sarah: So it's just that we happen to be living in a time since the 1920s when they make poisonous fats and our body is used to eating saturated fat for thousands and thousands of years and it's not responding to the unsaturated fats like it does to the saturated. So we're just getting poisoned basically. It's not the body's fault.
Ray Peat: If science had simply been looking to understand the situation since 1930 things would have been very clear. The very systematic differences between saturated and unsaturated fats would have become perfectly apparent in just a few years of open discussion. But advertising just totally swamped the whole cultural situation. Even the scientists and doctors dealing with the situation.
Ray Peat: They don't see the picture of how clearly polarized the types of fat are in their effects on the physiology.
Sarah: It's just become a big snowball effect.
Andrew: Okay, well we've only got four minutes to go, so I'm sure there's no more time for callers. And I think for the people that are listening, thank you for those who've tuned in this evening. Dr. Raymond Peat has a wealth of information that I think you should all visit at least once. If you haven't done it yet, please do go to his website. It's www.raypeat.com and there's plenty of scholarly referenced articles that will highlight everything that we've talked about tonight and plenty more. So, do take a look at the website. And I'll see you later. We can always be contacted Monday through Friday, normal business hours if people want to communicate any questions with us. And do you have anything else you want to add, Sarah?
Sarah: No, I'm done for the evening.
Sarah: Dr. Pete, I wanted to make sure that there wasn't anything else you wanted to say or is there any parting words you have for our listeners?
Ray Peat: Nope.
Andrew: Nope? Okay.
Sarah: Eat good fats and keep your energy working. Lots of snacks.
Andrew: Thank you so much for sharing your time with us again. We do really appreciate it. Okay thank you. Thank you. Okay so all those people that have listened out there there is always there's always an alternative so don't ever think you're stuck and don't especially think that you're stuck having to do something that the medical establishment tell you is the only way to go about treating a certain situation so whilst the misinformation that's out there concerning everything we've talked about is so prevalent don't believe that there's not another alternative because there is it's just you just have to open your eyes and open your ears. And for those of you who have ears, let them hear. Thank you and good night, we'll see you in December.
Sarah: Talk to you in December.
Andrew: Sorry, we will talk to you, that's right, we don't see you. Unfortunately. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.
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