Bioenergetic Nutrition Basics | " The Ray Peat Diet " | Appetite and Metabolism with Ray Peat
Host, Danny Roddy
Participants, Georgi Dinkov, Ray Peat
Host: We are live we were talking about I was asking Ray about Florida and Texas and so maybe we can step start there and then go into the question Georgie just asked because I think all this stuff is super important so Ray your take on Florida and Texas being these places in the US that are resistant to I don't know they're they're backing down from the COVID hysteria
Ray Peat: yeah yeah that's great and Texas has lots of places with really good climate up in the hills at a higher altitude very livable I don't know any place in Florida that I would consider livable because of the humidity and heat and
Host: do you think humans are just not like designed to live in a climate like that like what what's the exact problem like the you described
Ray Peat: You have to turn down your metabolic rate tremendously
Host: Because of the humidity specifically
Ray Peat: Yeah high temperature humidity
Georgi: Does that mean that people with low metabolism would feel better
Ray Peat: Oh yeah super hypothyroid people just love it it's making up entirely for their cold metabolism
Georgi: Is that one reason why all the retirees are moving to those places
Ray Peat: I think so
Host: But you're saying okay so you have a naturally high rate of metabolism and so going to Florida would be problematic because that would kind of be like a too high so you're saying
Ray Peat: yeah one of the things that happened to me even though I adjusted my heat production somewhat downward the humidity and my metabolism caused me to grow mold like a fungus sprouting out of me And when I got back to Oregon under moderate temperature and humidity they shriveled and fell off Wow
Host: And so okay, so if those places don't get Okay, and then George George, sorry to keep to redo this whole thing again, but what was your question?
Georgi: Well, I mean just based on what I've what I've seen over even over mainstream media It looks like even in the bastions of covered hysteria I think I think the measures are kind of falling apart. The population is not buying it There's this even CNN ran an article that there is now a plateau of vaccination about 38 percent have been vaccinated and now there's these huge surpluses of vaccines left unused because Apparently the other 60% just don't want to be vaccinated at least at this point.
Ray Peat: I Think that's that's a very natural sane reaction and the way the a cult climate change doctrine was promoting change gradually, but it had a time frame of something like 10 or 20 years. They jumped on the the pandemic idea and realized that the time frame for a complete takeover would be reduced to two or three years.
Ray Peat: With resistance there's talk that they're going to have a so-called cyber attack justifying a takeover by the governments of the banks to save everyone's money by confiscating it basically and turning turning to a cyber currency and rationing out your own money to you.
Host: Jake, Annika and I were theorizing about when something like that would happen and I think James Corbett just released a video and he said something like they would need, that would be an ideal situation to transition to the new digital currency. And so if you listen to them right now, aren't they saying that the digital currency is a little bit maybe a few years away or they don't want to be first? And so I know it's impossible to tell, but would you expect a cyber attack maybe later than, rather than sooner?
Ray Peat: I think it depends on how sane the population is, if half the population gets fully aware of the horrors planned for them, then the ruling class is going to have to do something desperate, like war or confiscation of the banks.
Georgi: I'm betting on war. I think that, you know, it's their favorite tool to start with, they're the most experienced with it, and it's, you know, if they start a major war like with Iran or God forbid China or Russia, even the same population will be kind of forced to get on board and support it because it'll be a matter of survival.
Ray Peat: Yeah, and they have a situation all set up, designed. To have no exit except a defeat of Russia in the development of what's happening in the Ukraine.
Ray Peat: Putin has made it clear that he isn't going to give up his sovereignty, and Biden, I think, is slightly backed off or postponed. The World War a little bit.
Host: So I have that article. I don't know if you saw it right. I sent it to is called Flashpoint Ukraine. Don't poke the bear and yeah. Can you explain that? Cause like a layman like myself like what? What? What would be in it for like isn't the war is like keeps the capitalist machine going. But if they want to do like societal change, what? What's the benefit of starting war with Russia? What's that going to do for them?
Ray Peat: Well, their goal is to. I have Russia and China completely subdued because Russia has such a tremendous area of natural resources, everyone wants to control their resources. And so the Russian government has been a nuisance now for hundreds and hundreds of years. And West is still. Trying to think of ways to take total control of their resources and meanwhile keeping a mild war hysteria going is necessary to keep the Western Europe and especially American economies running.
Host: And what's the deal? What are they trying to do right now? They're trying to make Russia go to war with the Ukraine. Is that right?
Ray Peat: Well, yeah, they're hoping that Putin will just give up if the England and the U.S., if they give the impression that they will totally back whatever the Ukraine does. Turkey is getting into it....training Ukrainian soldiers and urging them on to invade Crimea and eastern Ukraine, which has declared its independence. So the surface pressure looks like they're dedicated to having Ukraine start those invasions. And assuming that Putin is just going to let them take the Ukraine, Crimea and the east of the Ukraine under control of the Kiev neo-fascists, and Putin said he won't allow that and has already lots of land and craft available. And so, the Kiev government has withdrawn its forces from the Russian border, recognizing that Russia isn't going to invade the Ukraine and is putting them along the border.
Ray Peat: The boundary between East and West Ukraine, hoping that threatening to invade Crimea and Eastern Ukraine will get full support from the West and the battle force Putin to back down. But I think Biden realized that Putin isn't going to back down. And that's why he telephoned him and proposed a summit meeting somewhere, but with no definite date. So I think Biden just hopes to prolong it so he won't be embarrassed, but he doesn't want to see Russia exercise its existing potential. to totally knock out the Kiev government.
Host: It sounds kind of dark, but if we were to go to war or something, you'd almost hope that they won, right? That would be like a better situation for humanity?
Ray Peat: Yeah, because the present bunch in Kiev, they honor Bandera, who was the leader under the Nazi invasion, so they are literally neo-Nazis who are in control. And no one really wants them in control, it's only because they created the war threat.
Host: ... his understanding of Rothschild network and things like that?
Ray Peat: Yeah, under the Minsk agreements, part of the UN Security Council agreement, which the West signed on to, Putin has the power to enforce the Minsk agreements, and that could... involve protecting the Russian-speaking population of the East from the Kiev people who outlawed Russian-speaking. And so he could evacuate all four or five million population of the Eastern Ukraine, move them into Russia, and just leave that half of the Ukraine as a vacant territory as long as the... the Kiev people want to keep up their irstraps.
Host: Anything else here, Georgi or Ray? I was going to move on. Ray, I sent you a Notion document, and so if there's anything else left to say there, I was going to move on. But I remember, I think I emailed you in our first episode. I was like, oh man, I'd love to talk about something other than nutrition, maybe philosophy or history, but I think I've come full circle. And I was thinking if we could do an episode about anti-stress nutrition for 2021. So, you know, I've said it a few times, but I think you're getting more popular. And I think as you grow more popular, some people find your nutritional ideas like esoteric. And I don't think that's true. But I thought maybe we could try our hand at encapsulating some of the core ideas in an episode.
Georgi: So, I don't know where
Georgi: they found them. So, they plagiarized them and present them as their own.
Host: Yeah, that does.
Georgi: You'll be amazed just how many quote-unquote famous podcasters are essentially reading off of your website and never mentioning your name even once.
Ray Peat: No kidding. What do they call it?
Georgi: Oh, they actually verbatim pick up paragraphs from your website. And the way you can do it, you can check it out, is if you... I have to find the exact sentence, but you can search Google for a full sentence, you put it into quotation marks, and then it gives you all the websites that contain this exact sentence. You'll be surprised how many other websites are just directly copying your stuff. Not entire articles, but full paragraphs are routinely taken from your website and posted as their own.
Ray Peat: For years, I've been running across things that are obviously my sentences in strange places.
Georgi: Well, it's becoming mainstream. I mean, some of the more famous podcasters, some of them former low-carbers and paleo advocates are now fully getting on board of the metabolic diet and gaslighting their former clients by pretending that they're still low-carb, but writing about your ideas.
Host: I'd be a hypocrite if I if I criticize, but Ray isn't. You know, maybe for like a directionless young man or something like copying who what they want to be, isn't there some philosophical angle like copying before you can develop into a kind of the person that you I don't know that you're going to be rather than what you want to be?
Ray Peat: Like having models to to imitate to try out.
Host: Yeah, and I couldn't guess for you, but maybe like an Albert St. George or Heraclitus, like, uh. I'm sure you were your own person from the beginning, you know, but for a culture that tells people that there's no meaning or whatever, but, um, like, what I'm trying to say is if somebody copies something that I've written, I really try not to take it so personally, because I know that I did, one, I did it to you, and.
Ray Peat: Oh, yeah, it makes me feel good, actually, if someone likes my sentences.
Georgi: What is it, the plagiarism is the highest flattery, former flattery? Is that how the expression goes?
Ray Peat: Yeah. Yeah, it's nice to see someone liking the same phrases,
Host: but but maybe in the William Wilhelm Reich's Listen, Little Man, he says something towards the middle of that book. He says, like, if you just copy and you're not trying to add anything to it, that's when you're kind of kind of.
Ray Peat: Exactly. That's where I think we have direct empirical knowledge. Of continuous creation for the astronomers, it's the color of the galaxies and and such things, but in our own experience, it's the experience of communication as producing something new. Every time we talk, words don't directly transmit anything. A computer. A symbol does transmit anything, but no intelligence is transmitted in a computable sort of language, which isn't language. But natural language, each word is an ambiguity, and the receiver has to do a creative invention to understand it.
Ray Peat: So, every time......someone is talking and really understanding what the other person is saying, the receiver is doing a creative act, creating new structures that never existed before in the universe. And so talking is an example of continuous creation.
Host: And that's why when somebody passes away, speaking of using their phrases or the things you've learned from them, it's like you're... kind of keeping them... I don't know what's the right way of saying it. Like they're alive in the conversation or the act of creation, even when they're gone.
Ray Peat: Yeah. As soon as you understand what they're saying, you have given them existence abroad in the world.
Host: I love it. That was great. So tagging on that philosophical conversation. Um, you had quoted, I forgot where you said this, but it was, um, maybe like a high level view of nutrition. You know, I think in the diet world, it's like something like eating nutrition is like doing something you don't want to do. And you really want to go to McDonald's and eat that every day. But unfortunately, you know, to solve the problem, the person's having, you have to eat the carrot and drink orange juice or something. So, uh, there was that quote and I think I Karen first mentioned it to me, but, um, you were talking about Pavlov and.
Host: Eating is our closest interaction with the world, so maybe, I don't know, just your general view of, like, what is the meaning to the organism, uh, like, um, what is nutrition's meaning to the organism in that kind of way?
Ray Peat: Yeah, for many years, I've seen talking about food and understanding what food is doing as an extension of discussing philosophy and politics. It's a very powerful way of getting at the nature of existence and working on improving existence.
Host: Could expanding consciousness be another way for improving existence? Can you go into that a little bit more?
Ray Peat: Raising your body temperature makes it easier to create new levels of being. And when you have expanded your understanding, that makes everything you do easier. Things that you don't understand, like opening a door that's latched. If you don't understand the latch, you can't open the door. But once you understand it, then you can open all the doors with a similar latch.
Ray Peat: And so it makes your range of meaningful activity much, much greater every time you have a general increase in meaningful understanding.
Host: Well, that's one of the reasons I wanted to do this is I think you have another quote somewhere. It's like the things should make no sense until they make the right sense, you know, and like that hundred grams of protein is meaningless until it's the most important thing ever. You know, and so that's, I feel like I've come like, you know, talking to you and incorporating a lot of things that you've written about, I feel like I've come, I've maybe have a cyclical process of thinking something is not important until thinking it's the most important thing on the planet.
Host: So, so again, okay, so maybe, okay, we talked about the high level view of nutrition and, and maybe before we get into dietary things, we, you maybe could speak about appetite in general, because. I think the dietary things are almost useless in the face of somebody having a really suppressed appetite. So what is your general view of appetite?
Ray Peat: I think it comes down to the question of our relationship to ourselves and our molecules that make us up. And I think eventually we have to start thinking of ourselves. As having appetites and judgment and purpose. And that has been demonstrated in unicellular organisms all the way down to bacteria that they have a planning and judgment and purpose. And if we deny that to our own internal cells, that just seems silly when you can demonstrate it in free living.
Ray Peat: Single cells that don't have nervous systems, but our nervous systems are intimately connected to ourselves, and we get our motives essentially by listening to ourselves. The unconditioned reflexes, it's a message. It's sort of a voting of the intelligent population of cells that we listen to and then execute with things like appetite.
Georgi: Do you think appetite can be equated with desire for life, more or less? Basically the better your appetite, the more you want to live, more or less?
Ray Peat: Because you're in touch with and listening to your life process all the way down to molecules. Molecules.
Georgi: Right. And on a related note, let's say like you have a great appetite, but different days you desire different foods, you think there's something more than just beyond the organism sensing that they need certain nutrients, maybe certain foods create certain different meanings depending on what your mind and soul need?
Ray Peat: Yeah, I think so. Variety is a real thing you're wanting to discover more about. The nature of the universe and the desire for variety is I think part of that natural curiosity of ourselves.
Georgi: Are you familiar with the customs of the Native American Indians? They believe that you know whatever food you eat and they did eat a lot of animal protein it kind of gives you a piece of that animal spirit and they believe that eating the the meat of only one animal except for bison. What was not a very good practice because it sort of kind of crystallizes you and makes you very rigid then unable to fully explore life so they very much supported variety in their diet.
Ray Peat: Have you read the experiments of McConnell in the 1950s with the Worm Runners Digest was one version of his publication and he describes First training plenarians to respond in a certain way to light or dark and then shopping them the trained plenarian up and feeding it to an untrained plenarian and they gained the knowledge that was intended by the first plenarian.
Georgi: So basically memories that I remember study that came out about three. Three or four years ago, they said that the memories are actually stored throughout the entire organism. They're not located in the brain.
Ray Peat: Right. The different parts of the worm contain the energy. George Unger followed up McConnell's work with different organisms. And he found that the nucleic acid, especially RNA composition. of a catfish, for example, was changed according to what it was smelling in the water. And so the sensed material or the learned material causes molecular changes. And those molecular changes extracted from that organism can produce the same knowledge. And......patterned reactions to an ignorant organism that had been created in the first experiment.
Georgi: So this is similar to Rupert Sheldrake's morphogenic residence but applied to food?
Ray Peat: Yeah.
Host: Again, I'm not an expert on that idea. Isn't that the idea that the memories are stored like non-locally? And so aren't these ideas incompatible?
Ray Peat: No, since he was extracting in the brain, but the whole organism is affected by what happens in the brain, and you get similar metabolic changes in all parts of the organism.
Host: So when a person wakes up in the morning and— all the way till noon and they have no appetite for food, you're saying that it's like the cumulative cells vote maybe under the influence of serotonin or something to decrease the rate of metabolism, is that right?
Ray Peat: Yeah, yeah, but something is going wrong and they have to sit back. Like when bacteria, in James Shapiro's experiments, when he gives them an unmetabolizable— sugar—they just sit back and wait for two days, and then institute a gene change. They don't want to do anything prematurely that isn't necessary, so they sit back and judge the coming future before they change themselves.
Georgi: How do the cells achieve quorum? Is it done strictly through chemical signals or electromagnetic as well?
Ray Peat: I think both. One of the things that turned out with experiments by Beatrice Gelber for example in the 50s and 60s was that the plenarian can see what's happening. They have purposive behavior and looking at the source. They can do some things when light is present for interpreting chemical signals that they can't do in the dark, showing that they are looking around, taking things into account.
Ray Peat: The anatomy of a single celled organism for a long time has been known to include the equivalent of a focusing eyeball and brain. A professor of mine described meeting a specialist in amoebas who showed him some photographs, asked him to identify the organism he thought they came from and my professor judged a primitive chordate organism and said that's clearly a chordate eyeball and nerve fibers and so on and it turned out that his scale, a size scale, was off about a hundred fold and the pictures were actually of the photosensitive spot of an amoeba.
Ray Peat: Well, what people thought was just sort of a reflex reaction when light hit that spot. It was actually shining a light in the eyeball of the amoeba and the fibers from that. The eyeball connected to a coordination center was also grossly recognized. In the case of the planarian, they were studied for a long time to look at epigenetics or the inheritance of acquired learned characteristics. They were discarded as an experimental organism by about 1950 because it was too clear that they were totally knocking out all of the genetic doctrines and the idea that learning is nothing but an unconscious chemical reflex.
Ray Peat: Their purpose and judgment... and evaluation of the situation was becoming clear and the mechanistic idea of how a gene controls mechanistic reflexes just wouldn't work.
Georgi: Since we modern humans now are being bathed 24-7 in these electromagnetic frequencies... Are they capable, at least at some frequency, of interfering with the cells ability to form a quorum and have purposeful, meaningful development?
Ray Peat: Yeah, I've been thinking about the interactions of our normal internal infrared wavelength emissions with an infrared-sensitive camera you can see. Warm organisms as luminous areas in the dark. And that tremendous emission of energy in the more or less infrared wavelengths. Calculations and experiments have shown about three quarters of our metabolic energy is going out in that form of radiant energy. And the temperature maintained that makes that emission possible is also governing the rate of energy metabolism. And the whole signaling system is very responsive to... the emissions from other warm parts of the organism, so that, for example, if you grow a layer of fibroblasts, I think they were using, they tend to line up parallel to each other.
Ray Peat: And when the experimenter grew another on the opposite side of the glass... They plated another bunch of the same kind of cells and found that they tended to align themselves perpendicularly to what was on the other side of the cell of the glass. So they were receiving obvious signals transmitted through the glass that told them what the orientation that they should take would be. And that was the end of the experiment. The person doing this, Gunter Albrecht Buehler, did many things clearly showing that cells have, with regard to infrared energy at least, they have a directional eye equivalent that can see what direction the infrared.
Ray Peat: It is coming from, and this is just a simple component cell of an organism such as a fibroblast or an epithelial cell, something that cultures easily. And he showed that under the microscope, focusing a very narrow beam of infrared light, he could get these. Human cells to chase it, to move with reference to a spot of infrared emissions. So definitely the infrared spectrum is part of our internal maintenance of organization. And so you don't want to mess with beaming those frequencies. Through the organism, because they'll be taken as a signal for reorganization. And part of it involves decompacting the compacted nucleic acids of the nucleus. And increasing the expression of RNA and proteins. And so you can disrupt basically every level of cell organization and just with electromagnetic energy.
Georgi: So basically, since depending on the frequency, a specific electromagnetic radiation will probably randomly heat an organ whose cells are of the right size so that they start acting like an antenna. You don't want that because you're randomly heating up a portion of the body. And you don't know how those cells and the other cells that are communicated with them, how they would react to this random warming up that doesn't seem to be coming from a coherent activity inside of the organism.
Ray Peat: Right. When they were studying the damage done by radar beam exposure, t==hey had experienced a few sailors having their brains cooked when they walked in front of a certain wavelength of radar antenna==, but other wavelengths didn't mess up their brains, and so they experimented and found that the size of the organ resonates with the wavelength so that a monkey with a small brain could be killed by a higher frequency that wouldn't severely damage a human with a big brain.
Georgi: So the higher the frequency, not only we're getting closer to ionizing radiation, but there's a higher chance that some cells in the organism would be of the quote-unquote right size and then react negatively?
Ray Peat: A cell or part of the cell.
Georgi: Part of the cell, okay. So, well, if it's part of the cell, is it possible that even non-ionizing radiation, if it's of the right frequency, can cause DNA damage even though it's non-ionizing?
Ray Peat: Um... Yeah, blue light, for example, does damage DNA.
Georgi: Okay. Wow, so there's no safe electromagnetic frequency. I mean, long-term exposure. I guess it's not possible to completely avoid it, but it's certainly not a good idea to sit there for long periods of time.
Ray Peat: Yeah, daylight, I think, is perfectly safe if you don't overexpose the ultraviolet and the blue. Part of the spectrum.
Georgi: Okay. What do you think of I don't know if you've seen these papers which got immediately retracted They were published in around May of 2020 I think was a team of Italian researchers, which said that 5g is now of the right frequency to cause Holes inside of the cell and then the cell reacts by plugging these holes by producing endogenous viral particles that just happen to match almost perfectly the the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Do you think that there's any truth to that?
Ray Peat: Probably if they had the data that led them to submit it for publication, I would suspect that the editors just didn't like it.
Georgi: Yeah, it was sitting published for about a month, and then there was this huge outcry on social media. Of course, where else would it be coming from? The council culture. And then they forced the National Library of Medicine, the PubMed people, to retract it. It's still there, but it just has this big retraction notice written all over it.
Host: Well, speaking of EMF, isn't part of the problem, I mean, I've read this, you could correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it placing calcium where it's not supposed to be? It's loading the cell up with calcium, and so therefore, eating a high-calcium diet would be... And taking vitamin D would be two things to help mitigate the effects of our ultra-saturated environment with all these different types of EMF, is that right?
Ray Peat: Yeah, one of the things that vitamin D and calcium in the diet accomplish is to reduce parathyroid hormone, and parathyroid hormone under the influence of any kind of inflammation promoting signal. It turns down energy production, reduces oxidative phosphorylation, and so eating calcium and vitamin D will tend to restore mitochondrial energy production, helping the cell to keep calcium out of the cells.
Host: So let me, okay, so this is kind of my... Please correct me at any point, if you do not agree with this. But these are some of the points that I thought I've gathered from listening to you and reading you over the years. And so if some basic requirements for a human living in 2021, obviously gathering pulse and temperature, it's a loss without those things. Like if you don't know where you're going, if you don't know where you are, I think that's a quote from you.
Host: And then you've said many times, maybe a hundred grams of protein and... quoted military studies. And then maybe two to three times the amount of carbohydrate, obviously favoring sugars over starches, 1500 to 2000 milligrams or more of calcium, and obviously favoring calcium over phosphorus. And it's very easy to get an abundance of phosphorus, which like you just talked about will turn on the parathyroid hormone among other things. I don't know specifically your thoughts on fat, and so maybe we could... dive like a fat gram amount per se for again a basic requirements for a person living in 2021?
Ray Peat: If we had a source of pure palmitic and stearic acid, especially stearic acid, or higher saturated fats, I think they would be safe. We could produce our own M-minus-9. Polyunsaturated fats, which are the ones normally produced extensively in the brain and are substituted through time and eating by the M-minus-6 and M-minus-3 unstable polyunsaturated fats. So with oleic acid, palmitic, and stearic acid, the M-minus-9 and M-minus-6, which are the ones normally produced extensively in the brain and eating by the M-minus-6 and M-minus-3 unstable polyunsaturated fats, are substituted through time and eating by the M-minus-6 and fats, are pretty safe and a compact form of energy availability and storage.
Ray Peat: And some experiments show that, like Hans Selye showed, that cocoa butter rich in stearic acid protected hearts against the damage caused by linoleic dietary PUFA. Just adding the extra stearic acid had a protective anti-heart necrosis action. And more recent experiments show that the visceral fat percentage can be reduced by increasing stearic acid in the diet. And to some extent, an excess of... stearic acid tends to support subcutaneous fat, which is the appearance that a very healthy child has, for example, giving their skin smoothness and shapeliness and so on.
Georgi: It's the gaunt look of the older, very sick people. Due to the fact that they're rapidly losing subcutaneous fat, but but gaining visceral one
Ray Peat: Decreases under the skin of work as actual purpose Insulation and Elasticity and so on and and that creates the organ defending the internal abdominal sort of fat.
Host: Assuming you could get a good source of saturated fat, would you feel comfortable putting a gram number or a range that you felt comfortable maybe for a hypometabolic person or is it purely based on experimentation?
Ray Peat: Yeah it would just be since I've never had the opportunity to to have a pleasant tasting pure saturated fat. I would guess you could eat a lot of it.
Host: What about in the case that you could not get that? Like, is there is OK, so maybe I'll rephrase this question. What about non activating the Randall cycle or being as efficient with your energy as possible? Like, what would you would you feel comfortable making a suggestion for that?
Ray Peat: Yeah, sugar is my current understanding of what is most protective. Stress tends to increase your circulating free fatty acids, activating the the Randall effect, blocking the ability to use sugar for energy and increasing the sugar in your diet tends to lower the lipolytic activity, keeps the fat. Where it belongs, and prevents the Randall shift to fat oxidation, and so it maximizes your carbon dioxide production, which keeps your stress-producing lactic acid inhibited.
Host: Those vegan and vegetarian authors for diabetes, sometimes they'll say, you know, if your blood sugar is out of control or something, you're eating too much fat. And then they'll recommend ridiculously low amounts, like 10 or 20 grams. Obviously they're probably onto something with that. But do you think there's a middle ground for longevity and taste in general? Maybe around, I don't know, sub 100 or something? Would you feel comfortable with that?
Ray Peat: With how much?
Host: Like sub 100 grams or so?
Ray Peat: Yeah, if you include oleic acid and stearic and palmitic, I think something around an ounce would probably be ideal, but I don't think there would be any harm up to. Even a thousand calories per day.
Host: Okay, last do you have something to
Georgi: correct me if I'm wrong, right? But isn't the problem with most type 2 diabetics and obese people in general. It's not the amount of fat they consume after already getting obese, but the fact that they're under chronically elevated lipolytic state under the influence of cortisol and estrogen and in that case eating more saturated fat would actually help because it will increase the ratio of the. Saturated fat to pufa in the bloodstream and will mitigate a lot of these effects of lipolysis, which mostly Liberates pufa from the stores, right?
Ray Peat: Yeah And the pufa Is a promoter of estrogenic effects in many different ways It activates the estrogen process
Georgi: Quick question about androgens, and as you probably know, bodybuilders are notoriously averse to dieting or the various caloric restriction, and they abuse steroids in order to sort of like lose weight and gain lean mass. Considering the fact that both testosterone and DHT and progesterone are anti-lipolytic, under what mechanism do you think they are capable of causing rapid fat loss without really like increasing fat? Fat burning and fat oxidation, there must be some other mechanism going on there.
Ray Peat: The liver, when it's well nourished and activated by thyroid rather than estrogen effects, the liver can harmlessly excrete PUFA, any PUFA that appears in your bloodstream. It can be recognized by the liver as a toxin and inactivated by attaching glucuronic acid to it, for example, and causing it to be excreted in urine.
Georgi: So the androgens are basically protecting the liver and allowing it to be able to excrete more and more PUFA.
Ray Peat: Yeah, and the thyroid and the progesterone. And aspirin, such things, worked in that direction.
Georgi: ________
Ray Peat: ____ Seems reasonable. I've known a couple of people who, one, had a very big valley that his doctor said was ________________. A totally cirrhotic hard liver from 50 years of using heroin and alcohol constantly every day and a period of about 5 or 6 months of using T3 and progesterone every day in fairly large amounts. His doctor said he couldn't find any sign of cirrhosis. At the end of about five or six months,
Georgi: _________
Ray Peat: he came to my house on Christmas Eve and brought a few quarts of wine and beer with him in case we didn't have enough. So he finished that by bedtime as he went to bed. I gave him a bottle of progesterone and told him to use whatever felt right. And in the morning I came out, he was already in the kitchen, sitting at the table smiling. He said he never came off a drunk without a hangover in 50 years or 40 years of being addicted.
Georgi: Wow, do you know how much he used on average on a daily basis?
Ray Peat: Half a bottle the first time.
Georgi: Oh, half a bottle the first time.
Host: And
Ray Peat: he went on using about two bottles a week during that period of a few months. And I asked him if he wasn't having any suppressive effects on his libido and he said, no, none at all.
Host: Didn't you say he was also using maybe 50 micrograms of T3 in the morning and then again at night? So he was using progesterone and T3?
Ray Peat: Yeah, and he was also having his doctor inject magnesium.
Host: That's the biological addiction imbalance newsletter. I remember that so well because I think, so I don't want to go in a rat hole here. Were you going to say something, Jordi?
Georgi: No, I was going to ask about the polycosinose because I've seen some similar studies that's showing that. They can completely prevent the obesity from a high fat diet where the calories from fat were basically 60 to 70 percent. It was almost all of it tufa and they fed the animals the human equivalent of about half a gram, which is pretty high of polycosinose. And those animals actually got leaner than even the ones eating the regular food. And I was wondering what the mechanism might be, but I suspect it's probably again, it's protecting the liver from peroxidation.
Ray Peat: Yeah, I think it's the same effect as the stearic acid, only more concentrated, super saturated, a longer chain, super saturated, long chain alcohol in that case, which is converted to a fatty acid.
Georgi: Yep. You just answered my other question. There's an older study from the 50s, which didn't directly say that, but hinted that fully saturated fats, the longer the chain. The more potent they are, so instead of eating, say, 50 grams of stearic acid, you could probably get similar effects from, like, I don't know, 50 milligrams of polycosinol.
Host: What about, isn't hypothyroidism associated with a gallbladder disease? What if somebody has a bad gallbladder? They should probably eat less fat, right?
Ray Peat: Taking thyroid clears it up very quickly and predictably.
Host: And that's, you would know that if you were passing kind of lightly clay-colored stool, is that right? Would that indicate a specific problem with the gallbladder?
Ray Peat: Yeah, a very serious, deep problem which goes with high estrogen very often. But getting liver back to metabolizing properly the gallbladder. It responds quickly and you can, within just a few days, you can start tolerating fats in your diet and lose all of the gallbladder symptoms.
Host: Interesting. Okay, so fat, this would obviously take a lot of experimentation. Something maybe you are more suggestive of, or I don't know what the right phrasing would be, the 100 grams of protein. So what happens, you've said a few times that... Eating less than that makes the liver think you're starving, is that right? So what have you figured out, or what is your hypothesis of the significance of around that number for liver health?
Ray Peat: It probably depends on the balance of amino acids. But when your body senses a protein deficiency, it turns on the proteolytic. So that it takes down your thymus gland, lymph nodes, muscles, skin, all of the expandable, momentarily expandable proteins are converted to the essential amino acids which your brain and essential organs, lung and heart, need to... keep working, so the sensed protein deficiency is essentially a proteolytic state which takes your whole body down.
Georgi: Doesn't the liver also need dietary proteins specifically to produce sufficient amounts of albumin?
Ray Peat: Oh, sure, but combined with thyroid function.
Georgi: Right, right, because some people would say like, hey, well, what's the problem with not eating enough protein? Obviously, you know, you can, because you have protein on yourself, the body can use it to, you know, shred it and then, and then converting to albumin. But human studies have shown that if you that in starving people, despite their blood levels of amino acids going really high from the high cortisol, cortisol actually suppresses the synthesis of albumin. So all of this, all these amino acids end up getting oxidized as fuel, which is really bad because it generates all this ammonia.
Ray Peat: Yeah and estrogen is another suppressor of albumin. It goes with high cortisol.
Host: What do you revise this up upwards or do you feel still feel comfortable with a hundred? Is that like a good base amount or or what do you think?
Ray Peat: Well that in the military study that was for even little people working at a desk job that was Required for efficiency and they didn't say what a better That was just a minimum for work efficiency
Georgi: Wouldn't depend on weight though like a bulkier heavier person with more muscle mass.
Ray Peat: They probably wouldn't
Georgi: okay Yeah,
Host: and maybe age too, right? I think in old newsletter with Lita Lee's you said maybe 120 150 was even more appropriate for an older person
Ray Peat: Yeah, I think so 100 was was just the minimum for efficiency.
Georgi: Is there a point at which this dietary protein can cause kidney issues in a hypothyroid person?
Ray Peat: Bruno Barnes experimented eating a lot more meat in this diet. He found he had to double his thyroid dose. So it's very easy to overdo the protein displacing. Carbohydrate, I imagine, is what was happening and liberating the thyroid suppressing tryptophan, cysteine, and methionine. So as far as I know, experiments using natural gelatin as a protein slashing those anti-thyroid amino acids, they could tolerate a fairly... higher dose of protein.
Georgi: So speaking of the gelatin, since it's deficient on those inflammatory amino acids, is there like a ratio of the gelatin to the rest of the protein as part of the total that you think is more... let's say 70% of the protein may come from gelatin, and then the other 30 from a complete protein that contains all of the essential amino acids?
Ray Peat: Probably, and I think that changes with age and activity level. A young person who is growing in a very high metabolic rate needs more of the messianine cysteine tryptophan type protein.
Georgi: So for an adult, is there any role physiologically needed for tryptophan aside from producing niacin which people can take as a supplement?
Ray Peat: A little bit for tissue replacement.
Georgi: So there is a minimum amount of tryptophan that everybody needs?
Ray Peat: Yeah, making hair and skin and gut cells that have to be shed.
Georgi: Okay. For methionine, the human studies found out that most people don't need more than two milligrams per kilogram of body weight daily. Of course, we all ingest a lot more than that, which shows you that we can do a lot better. Is there any guideline you can do for tryptophan? Have you seen any studies on that?
Ray Peat: Yeah. It's pretty much the same. When you reduce any of those three amino acids to a minimum, life expectancy in the animal experiments goes up tremendously.
Georgi: Is there any way for somebody to gauge if they're becoming too deficient on tryptophan? Let's say they're abusing the gelatin and they're eating too much of it.
Ray Peat: Well, digestion is. Usually the first thing to go wrong. They'll start getting gas or some digestive symptom, which could be that they're not replacing the lining of the intestine fast enough to make digestion work smoothly.
Host: Gelatin abuse.
Georgi: Gelatin junkie.
Host: So moving on from protein. I don't know where I got this number from, you know, correct me if this is not even something you've ever said before, but maybe maybe you talked about the 250 in the the monkey experiments where their cortisol would increase. And so again, I know this is painting a huge, a huge broad statement from thousands of different people experience different intensities of stress, having different generational backgrounds and transgenerational histories of stress and things. But is there maybe a base amount of carbohydrate you think a person needs to function, again, living in our PUFA-laden, stress-laden, EMF-laden culture?
Ray Peat: I've experimented on people with a 100 gram carbohydrate diet and I don't think that was even close to a good health level. It helped them lose weight but it was partly protein weight. I think it's probably around that range of 200 or 300 that's minimum.
Host: What does it mean when a person needs way more than that, like 400 or 500? Does that mean their liver isn't efficient at storing glycogen or they're under chronic stress or what?
Ray Peat: Or they just have a very intense metabolic rate. If you're consuming oxygen at twice the rate of normal, then it would be reasonable to expect that you need closer to a pound of carbohydrate per day.
Host: And then similar to protein, would you expect, so say, say somebody's as healthy as they possibly could be in our current situation, say like moving forward, would you expect them to increase the carbohydrate content getting into older age, or do you expect them to decrease the carbohydrate content.
Ray Peat: I think increasing it is helpful.
Host: Interesting. Okay, is it any specific carbohydrate or sugar questions.
Georgi: Yes, yes, I do. What is your view of the some of the sugar alcohols that are present in some some fruits that are being used as a relief from constipation? Let's say prune juice and I think it contains sorbitol. Is there any problem with people using that for relieving occasional constipation instead of or on top of the carrot salad?
Ray Peat: If it works as a laxative, you're going to absorb very little of it. But it does have some potential harm effects ..... just the cellulose fibers.
Georgi: So I'm actually asking specifically as a laxative. Some people are saying it's very convenient to carry around, you know, a bottle of prune juice and you can find in almost any store. You know, if you're traveling or something like that, and most of the sorbital is not getting absorbed is from what I understand. So would there be a problem using that as a natural laxative remedy?
Ray Peat: Yeah, as long as it's having the effect of emptying your bowel, that means it's mostly not being absorbed. But if it doesn't work as a laxative, then it would tend to get pushed into your tissues.
Georgi: Okay, so using it as a laxative, do you see any problem with that?
Ray Peat: No.
Georgi: Okay. Do you know of any other fruits that may have this laxative effect but not being due to the fiber? Maybe by decreasing inflammation or something similar?
Ray Peat: None that I am aware of, but it's a definite possibility.
Georgi: Okay. So, I guess things like cascara are known because they contain the emollients. I read something about rhubarb juice from rhubarb root may be able to do the same.
Ray Peat: I think the main activity is an emollient-like substance.
Georgi: That it also contains. Is that why it's red? Because it maybe contains emollient?
Ray Peat: Probably. I'm not sure what the main red pigment is, but it could be that the emollient is part of the color. The root which contains a lot of emollient-like chemical. I don't know what the color is.
Georgi: Okay. And another question about potential antibacterial effects of some of the sugar alcohols like xylitol. Since it's not absorbed, people are using it as a mouthwash to kill the oral bacteria. Would there be a potential beneficial effect on using it as an, I don't know, over-the-counter antibiotic? Because it does seem to kill pretty broads. spectrum of bacteria.
Ray Peat: Some people react badly to it, and I don't know whether it's the xylitol itself or impurities from its manufacturing origin.
Host: Say, Ray, you can't get sweet oranges. What are the other carbohydrate sources that you can eat in abundance that you feel comfortable with?
Ray Peat: Mixed amalized corn is my favorite safe starch or carbohydrate equivalent because the lime process or lime treatment degrades so many of the toxic factors.
Georgi: What about frying the starchy foods in oil? Saturated fat like butter or coconut oil, would that decrease their propensity to cause issues?
Ray Peat: Yeah, the uncooked or undercooked starch grains, persorption is one of the risks and having it with fat decreases the ability of it to cross the lining of the intestine.
Host: What about the status of orange juice concentrate, do you think that's safe to consume right now?
Ray Peat: Yeah, especially if it's from sweet oranges.
Host: Yeah, okay, so I've never seen that here in Mexico, did you ever see it when you were here?
Ray Peat: No, there's many good oranges that would be silly.
Host: Well, it's hard to find, maybe it's just seeing the go, but right now all the oranges are just super sour. And so I'm hoping in June and July things change up, but again it could be gringo central San Miguel where that's happening.
Ray Peat: Yeah, maybe they think sour oranges are preferred by gringos.
Georgi: Or gringos are the only ones not smart enough to buy them.
Host: Very possible, very possible.
Ray Peat: I've been thinking about the meaning of ingesting. Citric acid, we make it ourselves but it stays within the mitochondrion but when you eat it as a chelator it can drag all sorts of toxic metals into your bloodstream and all the way through your cells and then being oxidized in the mitochondrion it would be leaving behind. Whatever junk it dragged in with it.
Host: I'm really glad you mentioned that. So the sour orange juice is higher in citric acid and that is why it causes irritation? Is that why?
Ray Peat: Yeah.
Host: Okay,
Ray Peat: And... People say that we produce citric acid normally but it's a compartment thing. It's very, very isolated and in the wrong place. It has very bad effects.
Host: And I hate to be redundant, but maybe we can emphasize how critical that is, maybe especially for somebody with bad digestion, you know, I think people kind of laugh at that idea that it's, it's that important but some of those, some of the emails you know that I get that are like oh my god this changed my life are not drinking sour or tart orange juice. And so, maybe, I don't know your thoughts on if that's important to emphasize or not.
Ray Peat: I don't know, more study would bring out more dangers of eating it, but many of the medical calcium supplements were taken in the form of calcium citrate and I think those were doing more harm than good even though they were getting extra calcium.
Host: Thank you. Oh, you know what, one last question, random, but related to sugars. Do you know if they changed the Mexican Coke recipe? Somebody asked that and I thought I didn't think so, and then somebody else who lives here told me that they thought they had. And then upon tasting it now, it kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and so now I kind of think they did. Do you know anything about that?
Ray Peat: Nope, I haven't heard anything about it.
Georgi: So I noticed something similar in the United States, there's a local Latin American store and they're the only ones that are carrying, now actually CVS also carries the Mexican Coke, but it's very short on supply, but this local Latin American store has it in cases and I would go there and buy several cases and then I think I was the only one buying it because after a few weeks they ran out and then they replaced it with Guatemalan Coke, which had these like paper labels in English, Pasted on top of the original label and in that coke tastes horrifically It tastes like there's some kind of a metal it leaves a very strong metallic taste Even though the ingredients listed on the label are the same. Is it a possibility? It has like a heavy metal contamination.
Ray Peat: Oh, sure The for years the corn syrup was made with a metal catalyst that was Some of it was left in the syrup
Georgi: .... and so people were being similar to what you said about citric acid because those are also metabolized in the mitochondria.
Ray Peat: Yeah, the ones that have two or three... acid groups, citric acid is the most effective chelator, but the double acid molecules can have a chelating action, succinic, for example. But acetic acid is toxic in its own right in excess.
Georgi: So there's the succinic acid. Are some countries using it as a drug? I think former Soviet countries sell it as an anti-hangover remedy or something like that.
Ray Peat: Anti-what?
Georgi: Anti-hangover remedy for being able to basically increase the speed of the Krebs cycle.
Ray Peat: Oh, I hadn't heard about that, but I've often seen people promoting it for one reason or another. It is a potentially disruptive, toxic, short-chain saturated fatty acid.
Host: Yeah, to finish that thought, the Coke tastes more effervescent and there's less of a botanical bite to it. So like what I loved about Coke doesn't seem to be there anymore. So it's a huge loss.
Ray Peat: 1939 or 40, when I first tasted Coke, the impression was very herbal and that was decreased sometime in the late 40s, I think.
Georgi: Do you think some of the colas, which many other brands are now promoting, and they're trying to mimic the taste and probably even the formula of Coke, because let's face it, rich companies can do a full analysis of the Coke product and probably can come up with a counterfeit product close enough with a bootleg version of it. Do you know of any other drink that has similar tastes slash effects to the Mexican Coke that could be obtained from a store?
Ray Peat: No, I haven't tried any of the alternatives.
Host: Okay, so moving on a little bit to wrap up this dietary stuff. Thank you so much for watching. Maybe another part of your, I don't know, I don't, nutrition philosophy. I don't know if you, what do we want to call it? But is like regular consumption of, I'm using air quotes here, but like supplemental foods like liver, oysters, and eggs. And the general idea being when you increase the rate of metabolism, not only that, would that, could that solve nutritional deficiencies, but also you might, you need more nutrition. Is that, is that right?
Ray Peat: Certain things you do need. More. But the higher energy metabolism makes you need less if anything. For example, when your thyroid level is proper and your vitamin D, your cells are able to hang on to magnesium. So a low thyroid person, even supplementing large amounts of magnesium. They will quickly, in a week or so, become deficient in magnesium on a normal, average diet. But when your thyroid is up, your cells need very little replenishment of magnesium because it's stuck in the cells.
Ray Peat: But other things, the turnover of carbohydrate and protein, have to go up directly with your metabolic rate.
Host: And so liver, you know, a rundown of that is like the vitamin A, the selenium, the copper, the B vitamins, and then oysters is the zinc, the selenium, the copper, and together those foods fortify a person's nutrition, ameliorating possibly many different dietary deficiencies in two foods. Is that right?
Ray Peat: Yeah, the idea basically is that it's too complicated. Calculate in terms of individual things, it's very satisfying and sort of spectacular when you can bring someone out of a dying state with one nutritional supplement, but most of the time that can't be. You don't have that much luck, so the shotgun effect of eggs and liver and... shellfish. It's very important to fill in what you don't know.
Host: I want to talk about liver a little bit more, but is there something about oysters or liver that make them more difficult to digest? Maybe it's the iron content, or do you think that's even true?
Ray Peat: Yeah, I think it's the low-fat content of the liver especially, the high-protein... It gives you strong signals and requires a lot of extra sugar and preferably some saturated fat to go with it to slow down the absorption and make the digestion happen without stress.
Host: In a random question, would you consider liver without gelatin to be risky or is that you think that's relatively safe?
Ray Peat: I just make sure to have lots of butter or other fat and sugar, ice cream, for example, after eating some liver. Otherwise, I've noticed it disturbs my sleep with hypoglycemia or something.
Georgi: In terms of oysters, what do you think is a good... rule of thumb, for how often and how much does a person need to get sufficient amounts of copper, copper and maybe selenium?
Ray Peat: For copper and selenium once a week is enough.
Georgi: And how much would you eat, like a dozen?
Ray Peat: Just probably two or three ounces once a week is enough for those.
Georgi: Okay.
Host: So maybe that's a little bit less than, that's a downward revision, maybe two or three ounces?
Ray Peat: Well, it wouldn't hurt to have a big bowl of them, but that's the minimal.
Georgi: Is there any risk to eating once a week, like having like a full meal of nothing but oysters and I don't know, excluding the carbs, would it be a problem to have like most of your protein at a dinner meal coming from oysters?
Ray Peat: No, considering that the iron content is also very high. You just have to take that into account.
Georgi: So oysters are high on iron too?
Ray Peat: Mm-hmm.
Host: Okay. Super random question, but do you use the Crown Prince ones in olive oil for your oysters?
Ray Peat: Yeah, that's what I'm eating the last two or three years.
Host: How do you or do you get rid of the olive oil in those?
Ray Peat: I just open the can of crack and drain it thoroughly.
Host: And then super random, but do you have some preparation that you enjoy with the oysters?
Ray Peat: Oh, just having it with cheese. Cheese and orange juice makes a really nice meal.
Host: Do you heat them up or do you just kind of eat them out of the can?
Ray Peat: Out of the can, cold.
Host: Would heating them actually be a bad idea because of the olive oil?
Ray Peat: No.
Host: Good to know.
Host: Okay, just wrapping up a bunch of boats.
Georgi: I do mine. I use the same brand. I use the same brand. drench the I mean I drain the olive oil the same way Ray does but I basically throw a spoon tablespoon of salt on top of them and then fill up the can with uh with vinegar and I just eat them like a salad
Ray Peat: oh oh very nice yeah I tend to salt mine or eat them with extremely salty cheese
Georgi: yeah I found out that if I eat a lot of oysters without enough salt for some reason just like for you Ray the liver gave you insomnia same thing happened to me with the oysters but if I put enough salt that doesn't happen, I sleep deeply.
Ray Peat: Mm-hmm.
Host: So, uh, just a, uh, go ahead Ray.
Ray Peat: Uh, uh, salt and, and, uh, gelatin, uh, are both very, uh, helpful for good sleep.
Host: Do you have a, uh, keeping with the theme of the show, do you have a, uh, amount of salt that you think is maybe necessary for minimal functioning of a person?
Ray Peat: Uh, no. Uh, you can adapt, you can adapt very well. Uh, uh. When I worked in the woods, our cook was obsessed with the fact that sweating people needed extra salt because of what they lost, and so he put a heaping spoonful in our porridge every morning and then wouldn't give us our ham and eggs and pancakes if we didn't finish our porridge. And that was, I found that I was, had so much salt in my sweat. That it was crystallizing on my glasses, abjuring my vision and making my arm hairs crystalline and white. And that seemed, besides the awful taste, I decided over one weekend to tell him that my doctor had put me on a low salt diet.
Laughing together
Ray Peat: So after that, I was the only one who got good porridge in the morning. And immediately just over the weekend, I had been having to eat salt tablets in the afternoon. After pouring out such concentrated salt water, I would start feigning if I didn't eat salt tablets. And just over the weekend, I didn't need salt tablets in the afternoon. And my sweat was like distilled water.
Host: In 2021, Bill Gates is going to give you vaccines in your porridge instead of the salt. Okay, so wrapping up a few other things here.
Georgi: One question about salt. There's some recent human studies that claim that anything less than 5 grams of elemental sodium daily activates chronically the Iranian angiotensin aldosterone system. Would you agree with that?
Ray Peat: Oh, for sure. A tiny amount brings up your anxiety and inflammation. So salt is definitely anxiolytic and anti-inflammatory. And a population in Mongolia, for example, the people don't have any problem with hypertension and they eat an average of about 30 grams of salt per day.
Host: Is one teaspoon four grams? So is that right?
Ray Peat: Four or five.
Host: Okay, okay. So at least one teaspoon, um, basic. So the, what I said earlier about the 1500 to 2000 milligrams, uh, I know you think even more would be good. Like what, what do you think? I don't know for a specific health problem or the general aging process or anti-stress in 2021. What would you think there's, um, I don't know, 2,500 or 3,000. Is that even better?
Ray Peat: Yeah, I always get at least. 2500 and sometimes 5000 of calcium.
Host: So like three courts of
Georgi: Messiah warrior, Messiah warrior.
Ray Peat: Right. They often get more than that.
Host: That'd be what, a gallon of milk and then some cheese as well.
Ray Peat: Yeah.
Host: And the benefit of getting even more, not only suppressing parathyroid hormone, prolactin, aldosterone, etc., but is what is it activating those uncoupling mitochondrial proteins?
Ray Peat: Yeah, it works with sodium to do that.
Host: Good stuff. Okay, just scanning through to...
Georgi: Speaking of sodium, because I told Danny I'm going to ask you this question, since all of these electrolytes can sort of partially fill in for each other, do you think lithium can do a lot of these things at much lower amounts that sodium and calcium can do?
Ray Peat: I used to call it super sodium from some of its effects that the body... senses a smaller amount of that as a larger amount of sodium, but its effects on serotonin, I think, are a drawback to having much of it in your diet.
Georgi: Does it decrease the uptake of serotonin or does it increase its production?
Ray Peat: It's effect, I think, partly from affecting the retention of it in... platelets.
Georgi: Okay.
Host: I'm reading the comments here on this episode right now, and somebody's asking about magnesium and the suppression of parathyro- or I'm actually kind of adding on to their question, but magnesium suppressing the parathyroid hormone versus calcium. And so isn't the magnesium is the basic calcium channel blocker. So maybe the calcium going into the cell is part of turning on the parathyroid hormone, but just eating more calcium would be maybe the more... straightforward way of lowering parathyroid hormone?
Ray Peat: Yeah, that's what has been studied most, calcium in the diet tending to offset the effect of phosphate and magnesium. It has very parallel effects. I think the combination of a moderate amount of magnesium with calcium, assuming your thyroid is responding properly, is the most effective.
Host: But you wouldn't consider magnesium as like the par excellence PTH inhibitor, would you?
Ray Peat: It could be, but I haven't seen enough evidence of that.
Georgi: But it's also the question of absorption and retention right? It's calcium that even in a hypothyroid person can be easily absorbed and retained and used to lower PTH while if you're hypothyroid you may load up on magnesium all you want but other than getting diarrhea you're not going to achieve much, right?
Ray Peat: Yeah, and you lose it. Whatever gets into your cells stays there a very short time and is lost quickly.
Host: So there's a reason so many different dietary camps are. All agree on supplementing calcium they're probably hypometabolic they're supplementing calcium and they're just losing it and they just have to continuously supplement it.
Georgi: You mean magnesium?
Host: Magnesium yeah I'm sorry.
Ray Peat: Yeah and to some extent calcium goes out as your stress hormones go up.
Georgi: So some people have reported especially you know on various online places that their the blood calcium is at there at the upper end of the normal range. Or slightly above and their doctor is basically telling them, oh, it's nothing. We don't know what it's causing it if it's too high. The doctor starts worrying that it's that it's some kind of a tumor. But if it's like slightly elevated, the doctor says, I don't know what's causing it, but I wouldn't worry about it. What's your take on that?
Ray Peat: That you should worry about it
Georgi: And you should worry about it laughing
Ray Peat: because it's probably decreasing in your bones and increasing in your brain and arteries.
Georgi: So what did you maybe cause in this mild? Hypercholesterolemia
Ray Peat: And not enough calcium and vitamin D in your diet was ...
Georgi: Okay, what about high estrogen and cortisol since they shed the bone as well.
Ray Peat: Mm-hmm
Georgi: And prolactin probably too, right?
Ray Peat: Yeah
Host: Okay, we'll wrap this up really soon unless Georgia you have something other talk about I just wanted to just quickly reference this I was Reading one of your references, right? I can't read the title. It's like too small on my page It's but that's the paper talking about inflammation And anyways, I thought this was like kind of like a breakdown like a really easy to understand breakdown of all the things We talked about you say in one of your newsletters the weak oxide metabolism and hypothyroidism makes it easy To enter a state of reductive stress with a shift towards a higher concentration of la NADH and lactate Dot dot dot and prostaglandins cytokines estrogen and nitric oxide are produced in coordinated ways and cellular behavior behaviors are changed defensively and I looked that out up after reading this paper because the whole point of the paper was saying that um oh man can I even remember what it was about like the the cytokines I think you've called them a secondary immune system but the the weak oxidative metabolism the shift towards NADH and lactate and the production of the cytokines in response this paper was arguing that those are the things that are chronically activating the the hypothalamus pituitary adrenals and then you have the endotoxin is another thing activator um but that maybe that was I I thought that was great because it kind of clarified things in my brain of how inflammation and stress are the synonymous concepts and the cytokines are basically activating the the stress centers
Ray Peat: Uh yeah but but the basic thing is the failure of energy or the shift from oxidative to glycolytic energy and that predisposes you to all of the cytokine problems.
Host: And those are just messengers, like the TNF alpha and the NFKB, what is it called?
Georgi: Nuclear factor kappa B.
Host: Yeah, I know there's like a thousand of them, but what's your interpretation? They're just sending signals?
Ray Peat: Yeah, they're like an amplifying system.
Host: It's saying that the cells are in a bad state.
Ray Peat: Yeah, and evoking. Emergency majors.
Host: Awesome, OK, wait, Ray. We'll let you go in a second here. What are you working on right now?
Ray Peat: I'm still still working on the adaptation based on cell learning epigenetics as learning, not as a. A euphemism for a non genetic. But epigenetics is a continuous process of learning and adaptation and following that I think it's going to be how the estrogen system works especially in breast and prostate cancer and so what can be done to intervene in. In those deteriorating inflammatory estrogenic processes.
Host: Man, what that was such a good conversation. I'm embarrassed. I never I didn't mention Progesti by Keenogen. So so email Catherine to purchase Progesti Keenogen at gmail.com each bottle contains Progesti contains 3,400 milligrams of progesterone and Usually Ray, I ask you about a story of progesterone, but I have one this week.
Host: So somebody I've talked to for a long period of time. That's tried many, many, many, many different things. They on their own started taking and they're a male, obviously they they start taking 200 milligrams of progesterone. And and I talked to them and they said one of the things that was chronically haunting them was their milk allergy. And then it went away when they were taking the 200 milligrams of progesterone. And so obviously you've mentioned that before. And so I thought that was that was that was in like miracle territory because I've because this person has tried so many different things.
Ray Peat: Hmm. Very good day here.
Host: Well, the progesterone is inducing the lactase enzyme. Is that right?
Ray Peat: It does what?
Host: It's inducing the lactase among other things. i
Ray Peat: Yeah, like thyroid. It helps to bring up the digestive enzymes.
Host: Awesome. And then you can email Ray Pete's newsletter at gmail.com to get Ray's books that I have here. And then you can also email Ray Pete's newsletter. At gmail.com for twenty eight dollars for a bi monthly newsletter by Ray. And so with that, let me read these donations, which I will send directly to Ray. And let me just try to. Mess with my screen here. This is a chronic problem every single time. OK, the first donation I can't read. This is embarrassing.
Host: OK, Kyle Mamounis for one ninety nine. Thank you so much, Kyle. Michelle for fifty dollars. Thank you so much, Michelle. I think there are more donations. This is very embarrassing, guys. I can't read the donations. Anyways, I guess we'll have to read them next time. So with that, George, any parting words?
Georgi: Not really. Like I said, unplug and live your life. The the system depends entirely on your computer to manipulate you.
Host: Ray, same with you. Parting words.
Ray Peat: You know, start learning Spanish. We'll have more fun.
Host: But just to touch on that for a second, didn't you say something like you could go work out or you could go learn a language and that would activate a different part of the nervous system. And so that was something constructive a person could do.
Ray Peat: Yeah, I think it's more constructive to learn another language.
Host: Awesome. Ray, thank you so much. These are always really fun to do. Georgi Dinkov, thank you for being my partner in crime. Sincerely appreciate it. And thank you everybody watching this. Thank you for watching in the future. We're on Odyssey. BitChute, Spotify, for as long as those venues will have us. And so subscribe to those other ones or the Telegram or whatever. Thank you, Ray Pete. Thank you, Georgi Dinkov. Thank you to our great audience. We'll see you guys next week.
Host: I think, Georgi, I haven't even told you, but we're going to do a show next week, I think. Take care. Have a safe weekend. We'll talk to you guys soon. Bye, everybody.
Ray Peat: Thanks.
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