Ask Your Herb Doctor 130517 Heart 1 Episode Transcript
Hosts, Andrew
Guest, Dr. Ray Peat
Callers
Andrew: Hi and welcome to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor. Well this month is a slightly different format. We had a baby last month and a beautiful baby girl and my wife who normally joins us on the show and who's my right hand right hand leader, male, she's not with me.
Andrew: So we're gonna run the show tonight with Dr. Pete and he's gonna share his wisdom on the subject of heart failure and hormones and other subjects surrounding that as usual people can and are invited to call in with any questions related or unrelated to this month's show on heart failure and hormones and as usual there's an ever-growing Ray Pete Facebook fan page and we get emails from all over the states from people that are following him and always very good to hear anecdotal evidence of people improving fairly drastically making the changes that he's been advocating for probably the last 20 something years. I know he's been studying and researching probably for 35 and nearly 40.
Andrew: So, okay, the thrust of the show, like I said, is heart failure, although there is going to be hopefully some time to look at new research surrounding the understanding of cancer and metastases in relation to solid tumors and... the way the body recruits collagen as part of the... part of the event that leads to a fairly poor prognosis with some cancer diagnosis.
Andrew: So for those who perhaps have never listened to our shows, which run every third Friday of the month from 7 to 8 pm, we're both licensed medical herbalists and trained in England there, graduating with a master's degree in herbal medicine, and we run a clinic in Garberville where we consult with clients. about a wide range of conditions and recommend herbal medicines and dietary advice.
Andrew: So you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMUD Garberville 91.1 FM and from 7.30 until the end of the show at eight o'clock you are invited to call in with any questions either related or unrelated to this month's subject of the heart and hormones. The number if you live in the area is 923 3911. Or if you live outside the area, there's a toll-free number you can reach us on and that's 1-800-KMUD-RAD. Incidentally, we can also be reached toll-free on 1-888-WBM-ERB for any further information or consultations after the show, basically during working hours, Monday through Friday.
Andrew: So anyway, welcome all of you who are listening and welcome to you, Dr. Pete.
Ray Peat: Hi.
Andrew: Okay, so as usual, we do get callers every month and indeed people emailing every month who perhaps have never heard of you and are very interested to hear what you have to say. I think a lot of the time people, new listeners, hear what you have to say. It seems to be fairly shocking in terms of it seems to go against the grain of everything we're told from the medical community and by doctors, if you like, to carte blanche cover them as a title. But I know you have some very different views and research that you've used and proven with your own approach, a very different treatment outline for people that have very wide-ranging conditions ranging from degenerative to endocrine and metabolic. So would you, for the benefit perhaps of people who've never heard of you and who've tuned in tonight, just give us an outline of your academic and professional career?
Ray Peat: From 1968 to 72, I was in graduate school at the University of Oregon and I did my dissertation on reproductive aging and how oxidative metabolism changes with age. And I found that the changes that happen are causing basically the menopause equivalent in animals. It is something that happens in every tissue in the body. It just happens that in the uterus is where I did my dissertation work. But I was interested in aging changes in the brain and ovums and so on. And it turns out that the same chemical and biological processes change through time in all of these tissues. And... In my dissertation, one of the aging theories that I talked about was the collagen theory of aging, that estrogen excess causes wastage of oxygen, basically suffocating tissues the way radiation would, for example, and destroying the... ability to use oxygen, and as a result of that, excess collagen is produced by the... fiber... collagen-producing cells, fibroblast, in the connective tissue. And with aging, the collagen becomes progressively denser and more cross-linked, creating an oxygen-deprived... environment.
Ray Peat: So, my emphasis at that time was on how estrogen produced by irritation or aging causes more collagen to be produced and to become more dense, creating further interference with oxygen consumption.
Andrew: Right. Okay, well, surrounding the talk for tonight and the recent article that you've written... that's fully referenced for people who might perhaps want to explore getting a copy of it, the situation concerning congestive heart failure that roughly 5.7 million people in the U.S. are suffering from congestive heart failure and its physiology is particularly relevant to tonight's show as it's a feature of a defective function of heart muscle itself. Would you explain? To our listeners the pathophysiology of congestive heart failure so that they can understand what it is the disease entails and then we'll get into some of the mechanisms by which that can be changed and how people can see a better way of treating their bodies and eating the right foods etc.
Ray Peat: In congestive heart failure the heart muscle simply gets weaker. Less able to pump a full volume of blood with each stroke. And the diastolic phase which should be a relaxation phase is inadequate. The heart stays partly contracted and so it has a short stroke. It doesn't make up for the shortness of the stroke. It tends to pump faster and ordinarily when a heart muscle pumps faster it has a bigger stroke so that it doesn't have to simply increase the speed, it can increase the volume with each stroke. But with heart failure that's impossible so it tends to lead to a fast but weak heartbeat.
Andrew: Okay, and the actual muscle of the heart itself becomes more flabby and weak?
Ray Peat: Well, it becomes waterlogged, a higher concentration of water in the tissue. That's because it isn't relaxing fully and when it doesn't relax it's like when you work a muscle tremendously. You can actually make a muscle swell up in just 15 or 20 minutes of very intense contraction. Your muscle will gain weight because it doesn't relax fully and retains calcium and excess water. So a very fatigued biceps muscle, for example, is temporarily equivalent to... what's happening in a failing heart, and with that condition of retaining water and calcium, if that persists for a long time, because the heart isn't getting enough sugar or oxygen, whatever it needs to relax, or if it's being stimulated by estrogen, for example, that prevents the full relaxation, then... Chronically, it tends to produce more collagen, and that collagen tends to become hardened. So, at first, it's just a swollen condition, then it gradually becomes a fibrotic condition, and that can actually lead to the development of a bone in the heart, a calcification that actually contains crystal and calcium.
Andrew: I understood the basic mechanism of treatment at least 20 years ago to be things like diuretics. This would be in part the removal of excess water that you mentioned is a feature of congestive heart failure in the muscle. And then even plant derivatives like digoxin from the woolly foxglove as a strengthener of heart contraction that each contraction was more effective.
Ray Peat: Yeah, that steroid from the foxglove is similar in structure and function to progesterone.
Andrew: Wow, really?
Ray Peat: And St. George did experiments 50 or 60 years ago in which he showed that progesterone acts on the heart using a rabbit heart. It acts like......digitalis to increase the staircase effect of heart contraction in which a faster simulation increases the stroke and amount of blood pumped with each contraction. And that's because the progesterone or the digitalis is accelerating the ability to both contract and relax.
Andrew: OK, because it's as much in part the relaxation that's the important phase of muscle contraction for the next contraction to be important, for the next contraction to be functional.
Ray Peat: Yeah, that's why the failing heart has a very weak small beat because it isn't relaxed and it's becoming harder just by being filled up with water the way your muscles, when they swell up, they feel harder.
Andrew: OK. OK. And I'm very, yeah, I'm fatigued from that, from that swelling. OK, so you mentioned this staircase effect, and it's the first time I've come across that as a statement. Because I always believed that the increasing contractions of the heart were a kind of mechanism to compensate for the lack of blood volume being ejected with each contraction in the failing heart, at least in things like arrhythmia. And tachycardia, which are part of a congestive heart failure type picture, aren't they?
Ray Peat: When you're exercising, you will notice the beats per minute increase as you use your muscles and consume more oxygen. But at the same time that your healthy heart is beating faster, it's beating harder. So when it's going maybe 130 beats per minute, it will also be thumping very hard, and you can feel your pulse in your wrist or throat as a big bulging throb with each beat. That's the staircase effect. It's both going faster and having a bigger stroke with each contraction.
Andrew: Right, now that's efficient. That's an efficient contraction. Okay, all right.
Andrew: You're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMUD Garbleville 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 subject of the heart and hormones. We're joined by Dr. Raymond Peat, who has about 40 years of expertise in research into cell physiology, particularly with hormones. Number here if you live in the area is 923 3911. Or if you live outside the area the toll-free number is 1-800-KMUD-RAD.
Andrew: So I think the next question I wanted to ask was you're explaining the waterlogged effect of cardiac muscles and congestive heart failure. This has a relationship to growing pains doesn't it? I think you've got a very different way of looking at it. Growing pains or the treatment of growing pains?
Ray Peat: Yeah, it turns out that exactly the same things are happening in skeletal muscle and heart muscle. People have known it empirically. Doctors have seen the changes in their patients for 100 years and found that thyroid was correct. Those are problems of both the heart and the skeletal muscles, but now... fairly recently, with analysis of the genes and proteins, you can see that, in fact, exactly the same things are involved in the growing pains which come with somewhat low thyroid function around puberty, usually a couple of years before puberty. Estrogen is increasing blocking thyroid function. That makes the cell fatigue more easily so it retains water. The pain is associated with, usually in the late afternoon and evening, the muscles have progressively retained more water and calcium and are painful and swollen.
Ray Peat: If a person in middle age becomes a very hypothyroid... They start getting the same thing. Fibromyalgia is one of the variations on that.
Andrew: I was just going to ask.
Ray Peat: The muscle disease of hypothyroidism or hypothyroid myopathy, it involves leakage of enzymes from the skeletal muscles. That has been the assumption. That's, in fact, the part. It's also leaking those proteins, you can identify proteins coming from both the heart muscle and the skeletal muscles in the hypothyroidism or in heart failure.
Andrew: So you can pick these up in the blood then?
Ray Peat: Yeah, and urine.
Andrew: And the urine, interesting. Okay, so somebody, perhaps if they were suspecting from having a lot of fatigue in their arms and legs. And or their back muscles just from standing erect, might suppose they got a diagnosis of, gosh, words gone completely out of my head, the fibromyalgia, sorry, so that could that be tested in a lab if they were to give a urine sample or a blood sample, would they be able to find myoglobin, for example, in from the heart?
Ray Peat: Yeah, creatine kinase is the first thing to look for if you're suspecting. A thyroid-related pain problem.
Andrew: Creatine kinase, okay. All right. So it's a hypothyroidism, because the two, I think the two terms get interchangeably confused, both with patients and doctors, that some people would say they have hypothyroidism and they actually may have the opposite and vice versa, so people who say they have. The hyperthyroid made us have very high adrenaline states and actually be low thyroid, so how do you understand the myopathy, the muscle weakness in hyperthyroidism again?
Ray Peat: In hyperthyroidism, you can see it in an electrocardiogram or if you kneel and have someone thump your Achilles tendon, so your toes twitch. Away from your body, the relaxation, if your thyroid function is good, the relaxation will be instantaneous and your foot will relax with a floppy instantaneous complete relaxation. If your thyroid is low, it will come back slowly to exactly where it started and the heart is doing the same thing with a prolongation of the QT interval. T-wave represents repolarization or relaxation. So you can see it in either your Achilles tendon or looking at the electrocardiogram. And when that is slow, that means the cell is retaining water and calcium. And in that swollen state, it is permeable, it absorbs things that it shouldn't and it leaks. Some of the enzymes that shouldn't leak, so you can see those in the blood during fatigue or hypothyroidism.
Andrew: Okay. Is this related perhaps to, and it's a little bit off the beaten track here with where we were going, but the reflexes, someone's reflexes in general, if somebody has very quick reflexes and they seem to be very alert and sharp, is that reflex down to being able to also relax? The muscle that's spasming or producing that reflex quickly, is that a sign of a fairly well-functioning thyroid?
Ray Peat: Yeah, the conduction and time, the race of nervous conduction is slowed in hypothyroidism. And so there are different things involved in ordinary functioning. A hypothyroid person will tend to react......10 milliseconds or 20 milliseconds slower than a person with a good thyroid function. I've seen when someone popped a firecracker on the 4th of July, I saw people around the room. There was sort of a wave of jumping. You could tell who the hypothyroid was by how fast they jumped.
Andrew: Okay, interesting. I think it'd be interesting for people that are listening just to go over again the Achilles tendon reflex, because it's not something... When we were studying, it was always a patella reflex. You'd sit on a stool with your legs swinging like, you know, you were an eight-year-old or whatever on a grown-up chair. So your legs were swinging, and then it would hit your patella with a little rubber patella hammer and... Your reflex would initiate in however far your leg swung out and returned to normal.
Ray Peat: That shows the extent of the reflex ability but it doesn't show the speed of relaxation because your lower leg is so heavy it'll swing back if your leg is only, if your muscle is only partly relaxed. But when you kneel, the calf muscle is... very big in relation to the small weight of your toes. And when that muscle contracts, it's the muscle that makes you able to stand on your toes, so it's a very strong muscle. But when you're kneeling, all it has to do is make your foot twitch a little bit. And so the return from the twitch is a very small burden on the muscle. And so it won't drag a half-contracted muscle back to resting position, it comes back exactly as the muscle reaches full relaxation.
Andrew: Yeah, excellent. OK, so those people that are listening then, if they ever wanted to do it themselves to purely test their own reflexes and their thyroid state, what Dr. Peat is talking about is if you were to kneel, kneel on a chair, facing the back of the chair so your legs are off the chair. and basically have your leg just nice and relaxed and floppy then someone behind you gets a like a rolling pin or something like that kind of nature and just gently taps with a quick tap your Achilles tendon which runs from your heel up into your calf and tapping that tendon then will elicit a reflex your foot will swing out away from you and it's how quickly it returns to its resting state where the toes are pointing down. to the down to the floor again it's that resting repolarization that's the important marker of uh how well your thyroid's working if your if your uh toes now they swing out but they take a long time to return they kind of gently swing back down to perpendicular then that's not a very good sign and if they swing out and back down again quickly that's actually the good sign you're looking for okay so maybe somebody can help you out there you know if you want to try this yourself at home
Andrew: okay you're listening to ask your own doctor on kmu d garville 91.1 fm and from 7 30 which is coming up here in five minutes or so until the end of the show eight o'clock you're invited to call him with any questions either related or unrelated to this month's subject of the heart and hormones number here if you live in the area is 3911 or if you live outside the area the toll free number is 1 800 kmu d rad and we're very pleased to welcome dr raymond p onto the show once again to share his wisdom with us
Ray Peat: Another way of looking at that reflex system is insomnia. Many doctors think that thyroid is a stimulant that will make you stay awake but when you think of the brain as having exactly the same process of excitation and relaxation as your heart muscle or your leg muscle, when the brain is fatigued If it's somewhat hypothyroid, it gets the equivalent of a growing pain or a cramp and it can't relax fully and that amounts to insomnia and so if you can energize the brain cells, you can get sleep to come on quickly and the active thyroid hormone and magnesium and sugar are the things that most quickly will restore energy to your brain or your muscles heart and so on
Andrew: right okay did you have a question
Opearator: i thought maybe you were yeah somebody already wanted to know the best foods for the heart the best diet
Andrew: yeah dr p
Ray Peat: Um well fruit is extremely important and avoiding polyunsaturated fats uh because the uh the heart is much more efficient using oxygen when it's burning sugar rather than fat and having plenty of all of the minerals calcium, magnesium, sodium, and potassium. Those interact very closely. People think of calcium as the exciting ion which it is when the cell is excited and can't get rid of it.
Ray Peat: Calcium happens to inhibit some of the hormones that maintain inflammation and excitation. So if you are well saturated with all of these minerals, the alkaline minerals, that will help the heart to relax more quickly and then contract more quickly.
Andrew: Okay, you said calcium, potassium, magnesium.
Ray Peat: And sodium.
Andrew: Okay, so things like egg shells from the calcium, or milk obviously is another very good source of calcium, and then potassium and magnesium, and these are fairly rich in green leafy vegetables.
Ray Peat: And fruits, orange juice and watermelon, for example, are good for the sodium and potassium.
Andrew: Yeah, there you go. And obviously table salt, I know we've done several. Several shows on salt and how good it is for you, but I think we need to keep reminding ourselves again that there's absolutely no truth in the fact that salt is harmful. It's actually very very beneficial for you and actually lack of salt is more harmful. I'm pretty surprised the last couple of months I look at the news, the BBC news pretty much probably because I'm British of descent, and tend to think of the BBC as a kind of......non-biased, non-corporate news entity, and it doesn't really have any funding one way or the other from parties and corporations, etc. But found some very interesting health articles that have come out of there that have really corroborated what you've been talking about, and I was almost going to point out several of these towards the end of the show, but... Okay, so it's 7.30, and I don't know if... Go ahead.
Ray Peat: One point about the sodium is that if you restrict sodium... you increase your aldosterone and one of the current interests in heart drug treatment is to find an aldosterone inhibitor but the eating enough sodium is the simplest way to inhibit excess aldosterone.
Andrew: It's too cheap and they can't patent it. I found the same thing about one of the BBC articles was just showing it's a complete reversal with the last 20 years or so of......doctrine from the medical profession, if you like, on skin cancer and melanomas and exposure to sun. And now in England they're actually promoting people to go out and get more sun because they're saying that the vitamin D deficiency causing rickets is actually on the rise and actually there's very little evidence now to suggest that sun exposure causes melanoma and it's actually related to many other things, most of which are probably polyunsaturates in the diet.
Ray Peat: There have been a couple of studies in which they found, in fact, that the.....incidents of melanoma decreased with the altitude at which a person lives, and so it's inversely related to ultraviolet light exposure.
Andrew: Ok, we've got a caller on the line, so let's take this next caller. Hello, you're on the air? Hello, you're on the air?
Caller 1: Hi. Hi, I have a question exactly about the heart,
Andrew: but can I first stop by asking you where you're from where you're calling from?
Caller 1: I am living in Philipsville. Okay Spoken over the phone.
Andrew: Okay, very good
Caller 1: My father actually died of a heart attack and I am Like because he had psoriasis of a phone out to I'm and since I learned from dr. Pete that estrogen can cause heart attacks. I kind of feel like that's what happened with him What happens with me is that I have a grand mal seizure like once a month and it's what's known as catamenial epilepsy because of this out of whack ratio between estrogen and progesterone. I am slightly derailing you but I'm taking this opportunity to actually speak to Dr. Pete.
Andrew: Please do. Go ahead, what was your question?
Caller 1: Well, I'm wondering, like... What can I do to balance my hormones?
Ray Peat: Keeping your cholesterol level up, fruit is one of the best ways to help the liver make enough cholesterol. And then, if your cholesterol production is good, thyroid and vitamin A are the main things for turning cholesterol into progesterone. Which not only has anti-seizure effects, but it has heart protective effects, steadying the heart rhythm the way Digitalis does, and blocking albasterone, preventing fibrosis of the heart, and so on. So, keeping your cholesterol production up, but having the factors that convert it to progesterone.
Caller 1: Is that how you think it's operative in the gut, like eating the raw carrot? Is it vitamin A?
Ray Peat: The effect of having a raw carrot every day, or bamboo shoots, these are antiseptic fibers which can't be easily broken down by microorganisms. And so, they don't stimulate bacterial growth.... tend to sterilize the intestine and at the same time, the fiber binds the estrogen which your liver is producing and excreting all the time in the bile and prevents it from being reabsorbed. So immediately, you can see a decrease in your estrogen level a day or two after eating a raw carrot.
Ray Peat: And that's a good thing. Reduction of absorption of bacterial products and estrogen very quickly reduces your stress and cortisol production, and that allows your progesterone to increase.
Caller 1: So you're talking about these things that are like the good and bad bacteria in the guts, and I wonder if even two of you know about the GAP diet.
Ray Peat: Yeah, the simplest thing is to avoid starches and polyunsaturated fat, because those are the things that promote...
Caller 1: Do you have olive oil then, like, as something to avoid?
Ray Peat: Well, the olive oil is saturated enough that it helps the carrot with the germicidal action. Coconut oil, butter, and olive oil are especially associated with the fiber of carrot....help to suppress microorganisms.
Andrew: Okay, I think we better leave it for other callers. I appreciate your calling in and I better take the next caller.
Caller 1: Thank you.
Andrew: You're welcome. Hi, you're on the air?
Caller 2: Hello? Yes, hi.
Andrew: And where are you from?
Caller 2: Um, this is... I'm sorry, what was that?
Andrew: Where are you from? Where are you calling from?
Caller 2: Oh, I'm calling in from Minnesota.
Andrew: Okay, I'm just trying to make a habit of......calling people and asking them where they're from, just to get an idea of the demographics of the radio show's reach.
Caller 2: Oh, gotcha. Thank you for calling. What's your question?
Caller 2: Yeah. Well, this is probably sort of off topic, but I was wondering Dr. Peet's opinion on what can a person do to recover from getting off of SSRIs?
Ray Peat: Oh, I hear that a lot, and... Basically, it's doing everything you can to restore a good, intense metabolic rate, restore the energy level of cells so that they don't go into the stress state. The high serotonin trains the nervous system. To stay in a stress state because serotonin activates the pituitary ACTH and adrenal system. And ultimately the way to break that pattern is to increase your cellular energy production, lower stress, keep your thyroid function up, and keep the estrogen down.
Caller 2: Okay. Well, thank you very much. I guess it sounds somewhat easy, but I'm sure it's pretty tough for someone who's been on SSRIs for so long. And is it something that takes quite a long time to recover from, in your opinion?
Ray Peat: Yeah, people seem to take about a year to feel. Fairly normal again, even doing everything right.
Caller 2: Okay, well thank you very much.
Ray Peat: Yeah, the serotonin itself creates an inflammatory state in the nerves and body in general. So they affect your whole metabolism tend to increase fat production. And stress. And so you want to concentrate on keeping your whole body in an unstressed condition. Eating frequently is probably one of the helpful things. Not forcing yourself to go on adrenaline.
Caller 2: Okay.
Andrew: All right. Thank you. We've got it. Thank you, Vicko. I do appreciate you calling in and your interaction. We've got a couple of more callers, so let's just make sure everyone gets a chance to pose some questions to Dr. Pete. So, next caller, you're on the air. Where are you from?
Caller 3: This is David from Missouri.
Andrew: Hi, David. Welcome to the show.
Caller 3: And congratulations on your baby.
Andrew: Oh, thank you.
Caller 3: You know, I don't know if you've seen this, but I see this quite often, where somebody will put a cell phone in their pocket right over their heart. And I've heard that each organ in the body has a specific frequency, and I know that they all pretty much fall within the same frequency, but that they do have a frequency that helps that system to operate normally. What do you think the ramifications are of having that competing frequency next to the heart?
Ray Peat: It's pretty well established that you......damage the tissue, create stress in the brain. The cancer rate increases when your head is exposed to the microwave frequencies.
Caller 3: Isn't it amazing that all of these mainstream media outlets, they never talk about things like that. You would think they would be warning people about putting a cell phone over their heart. But anyway... The other thing, I've been exploring eating bamboo sprouts. I grow several different types of bamboo. So this spring, I've been trying different things. I was just curious about the different techniques I've been using. You know, I've been steaming them like in a steamer basket, and then I've also just been boiling them in water. And I've noticed that how I peel that bamboo, I can leave more...... fibers that obviously are not digestible, but then it seems like the more tender parts inside are really soft, almost like a really well-cooked potato. Do you think there's a benefit in maybe not cooking them too much?
Ray Peat: No, they still have good fiber, even if they're soft.
Caller 3: And then I've also been drinking the water that I boil them in. Do you think there's actually some antibiotic material still in that water?
Ray Peat: I think so. The Japanese and Chinese have some drugs that they make from extracts of the bamboo plant and I think they get the strongest ones from the leaves but I think there is the same antiseptic and probably anti-cancer material in the shoots.
Caller 3: Wow. I'm going to harvest extra and then freeze them. I'm assuming that's not going to hurt it at all.
Ray Peat: I don't think it's hurt them.
Caller 3: What?
Ray Peat: I don't think it's harmed them to freeze.
Caller 3: Okay. I don't want to hog the questions here, but I do have one more question, unless you think we should go on. I know we're running out of time.
Andrew: Go ahead. No, go ahead.
Caller 3: You know, the orange juice thing. I live in Missouri, and through the winter, I can get fresh oranges. It's very difficult to get organic oranges. But... All through the winter I was, you know, juicing fresh oranges and they were just regular oranges. It seems like, I've heard that, you know, even though they're not organic, most oranges, because of that heavy peel, they're probably not too bad as far as pesticides. But as I'm going into summer, it's almost impossible for me to get fresh oranges, so I've been, you know, like buying Tropicana orange juice, and I've been trying different organic frozen orange juices, and I did a bunch of research on... how all these frozen orange juices and things like Tropicana are made, and it seems like all of them are doing the same thing, where they create these big vats, and they take all the moisture out, and then they add the oil from the peel back in. Are you aware of that?
Ray Peat: Yeah, and I think there's a worse process that all the companies, all the big companies are using the last five or ten years, which is to use enzymes to......break up the pulp so that they have less waste and more volume in the juice. The stuff that used to be pretty solid material that had to be discarded has now been...
Caller 3: I heard you mention that before, and I've been calling these companies and trying to find one that, you know, it's really hard to find somebody to talk to that actually knows what's going on in these different companies, but I have made an effort to do that. You know, like Tropicana says they do not do that in their non-pulp orange juice and I've called two of the organic ones like Cascadia and then, I forgot the other one, but they both say they're not doing that. So do you think that there is a benefit from drinking these processed orange juices?
Ray Peat: Oh yeah.
Caller 3: Okay, so the fresh is definitely better, but drinking the processed ones are still going to be better than not doing it, right?
Ray Peat: Yeah, for example, people with heart pains, even with frozen orange juice concentrate, you can see a very quick relief from mild heart pains just by drinking a pint of orange juice per day.
Caller 3: Yeah, I'm addicted to orange juice now. It's amazing. It's a great addiction.
Operator: I have a question for you since you're in Missouri. Is there a march against Monsanto going in their home state?
Caller 3: There is. Yeah, I'm going to it. I live close to a town called Springfield and there's going to be a lot of people there. There's one in St. Louis, which is where Monsanto is, and there's one in Columbia, which is where the University of Missouri is, and there's one in Kansas City. So yeah, we're all wanting to make a stand on that for sure.
Operator: Awesome, thank you.
Andrew: All right, thanks for your caller. Thanks for your call caller and let's move on to the next one of two or however many.
Caller 3: Just one more thing, thank you Dr. Pete for everything you do and thank you Andrew for the show.
Andrew: Yeah, you're very welcome. Yeah, thanks for the call.
Operator: Okay, and I'll comment saying it's great what a wide-ranging people. I think I get more calls from farther away on this show than any other and I did get a late local call.
Andrew: It's all because of Dr. Pete.
Operator: It's Dr. Pete, yes. I got a local call someone with information from for the earlier person about SSRI. There's a website called drugawareness.com and she had wanted to tell this to you and Sarah as well. Her name is Anne Blake Tracy and she has a phone number 800 number 800-280-0730 and there's a lot of information about getting off SSRIs. And we have one more caller.
Caller 4: Calling all the way from Miranda in Humboldt County.
Andrew: You're not too far away, okay. Welcome to the show.
Caller 4: I hope my question won't be redundant. I missed part of the program driving home without a radio in my car. The question is, I have chronic sinusitis that I've had for the last ten years. And I am completely feeling like it might be straining my heart. And I wondered if, you know, I've heard like you could have a minor chronic infection like, say, an abscessed tooth or something like that.
Ray Peat: I think there is a definite relation between sinus or tooth infections in the heart, but I don't think it goes from the sinus or tooth to the heart. But I think it's endotoxin from chronic intestinal inflammation. Sometimes bacteria enter the bloodstream along with the endotoxin but just the endotoxin alone is enough to cause sinusitis and inflamed periodontal tissues and at the same time it's causing those changes in the heart, calcium retention, water retention, easy fatigability.
Caller 4: Yeah well I get regular exercise and I have a vegan diet and I've been off gluten pretty strictly, very strictly for a couple of years now which is very helpful but I can't seem to get ahead of the sinusitis. Anything that might pop up that I should.
Ray Peat: When the simple foods and the fibers to disinfect your intestine, when those aren't enough then the drugs that are most helpful in my experience are aspirin and the antihistamines. Benadryl for example if you could get the pure chemical that's better than prepared tablets and ciproheptadine which is an antiserotonin. Antihistamine and then antibiotics.
Caller 4: Yeah, I haven't responded to the antibiotics and I don't use them very often. But what about colloidal silver? Wondering about that. I tried that once but I have the ability to make my own.
Ray Peat: One other thing that helps the general immune system. Avoidance of inflammation is vitamin D. Have you had a blood test for vitamin D?
Caller 4: I haven't, but I take 10,000 units a day of vitamin D. I take 10 of them and it's supposed to come out to 10,000 units. Does that seem like a reasonable dosage?
Ray Peat: Yeah, if it's vitamin D3.
Caller 4: Yes, it is.
Ray Peat: It is vitamin D3. And do you get sun? Sunlight exposure?
Caller 4: Yeah, my wife and I walk every day, and it hasn't been raining very much in Humboldt County, unfortunately. I don't... Sunday, though, or whatever. Well, thank you. I think I should get off and leave room for anyone behind me.
Andrew: OK, no problem. All right, well, thanks for your call. Appreciate you calling in. Whilst we were on the topic, before the callers started coming in, let me just give people who are listening again an opportunity to know how to get in contact with us. We can be reached here at 1-800-KMUD-RAD or the toll-free, the 923 number, 923-3911.
Andrew: We were discussing cholesterol, you know, at the beginning of the call in questions, we were talking about the relationship of cholesterol and how this is relevant. The harmful effects perhaps rather of lowering cholesterol and its relevance to heart failure.
Ray Peat: Yeah, the drugs that lower cholesterol, one of the accepted side effects of both of the main categories of cholesterol-lowering drugs is to cause occasional muscle breakdown, a rhabdomyolysis. Muscle dissolves itself and one of the known things is the interference with the production of coenzyme Q10, but that isn't the sole reason for the muscle breakdown. The simple lack of cholesterol, cholesterol is a cell stabilizing substance with hormone like action, which in the absence of......progesterone and the other protective steroids, it actually has a cell protective effect in the skeletal muscles and in the heart. The same process that causes rhabdomyolysis of the skeletal muscles can happen in the heart. Cholesterol deficiency is tending to kill heart cells.
Andrew: There we go, see. Dr Pete, you recommend... Yeah, I recommend to have a cholesterol of 200, but you don't have any problem with someone reporting a cholesterol of 200, especially if they're 50 or more, do you?
Ray Peat: Yeah, the Framingham study found that people over 50 who had at least 200 cholesterol or higher had a much lower risk of Alzheimer's disease because it's brain protective as well as heart protective.
Andrew: Okay we've actually got a couple of callers on the line so let's take the next caller. Hi caller you're on the air?
Caller 5: Hello.
Andrew: Hi and where are you calling from?
Caller 5: You're calling from Arcada well actually Trinidad.
Andrew: Okay well welcome to the show.
Caller 5: Yeah I am dealing with a tooth infection that I've had for a number of years now and I have um been treating it with tea tree oil and it seems to be helping some but still hanging in there it seems like it. Very hard to really get to because I guess it's anaerobic so it's I don't know it's really been a challenge to treat. I'm wondering if Dr. Pete has any suggestions about how to go about it.
Ray Peat: What kind of infection is it?
Andrew: A tooth infection.
Caller 5: A tooth infection yeah and it's pretty nasty sometimes some of the discharge I get from it.
Ray Peat: I know a dentist who cured a chronic. Dental problems like periodontal disease with simply giving his patients a laxative and he would talk at dental conferences and say he was a good surgeon but he found there was no need at all to do periodontal surgery if he gave the patients laxatives but the idea didn't catch on among the dentists.
Andrew: Do you have any constipation as long standing at all?
Caller 5: Not really. Not that I know of. I'm pretty regular. Although I would say that my digestion hasn't been hip-hop. I'm 57 so it's gotten a little bit sluggish but it hasn't been anything I would call constipation.
Ray Peat: Sometimes just avoiding starchy. Especially raw vegetables and raw fibrous fruits. Apples are easier on the intestine if they're well cooked and vegetables ought to be cooked about 40 minutes to be protective to the intestine.
Caller 5: Wow. So avoid raw vegetables.
Ray Peat: Yeah, often if you keep a... the vegetables that you've been eating, put them in a plastic bag where they don't get oxygen and then keep them at 98 degrees for a few days and you'll basically see what happens to them because we don't have enzymes for breaking up the cellulose of vegetable material and so the bacteria are favored by the warm moist conditions....and the bacteria can thrive on raw vegetables.
Caller 5: Wow, that's just so counter to what everybody else has said, so interesting to me.
Andrew: Well, I know Dr. Pete's always advocating making sure that the transit time through the gut is as quick as possible so that......prevents the, well, especially with the right kind of foods, prevents the overgrowth of any bad bacteria is because of an endotoxin point of view. It's the endotoxin that gets into the system that can cause inflammation and other disruptions and I know tooth infections, supposedly notoriously difficult to treat because they don't have a particularly good blood supply. But I think the seat of... Most people's conditions when it only comes down to changing the diets in people and then hearing back of the great amount of changes that are going on in them in their life that the gut is the most important aspect of humans is what you put into your gut and how well it moves through. It's probably the single most important factor in good health.
Ray Peat: Raw carrots are the exception among vegetables because being a root vegetable they happen to be. Very germicidal bacteria won't touch them in the transit time.
Caller 5: So I should even avoid salads?
Ray Peat: Yeah, green salads or other vegetables other than raw carrots.
Caller 5: Uh-huh. Okay. Wow. And do you know, Dr. Peter, anything about the light therapies that are out there these days? I've been treating it also with a friend of mine who does... light therapy and she's got a little box that gives red rays off. I'm just curious if you know anything about light therapy.
Ray Peat: Yeah, sunlight is the best in general and if you're going to be exposed to full sunlight very long then you have to worry about sunburn and so avoiding sunburn is the only caution but......many hours a day of brilliant light, white light, incandescent light or sunlight. It has many effects, balancing the hormones, increasing your defensive hormones such as progesterone and testosterone. And just a year or so ago, an American researcher trained... rats and found that just shining red light on their heads, because red light penetrates through the tissues, found that their learning was improved just by exposure to light.
Caller 5: Wow. So that could be helpful in the tooth infection.
Ray Peat: Yeah. It helps your whole system, lowers the stress and probably lowers the tendency to absorb endotoxin through your intestine.
Caller 5: Thank you very much, Dr. Pete, and thank you, Andrew.
Andrew: You're very welcome. OK, well, thanks to everyone who's called in. I appreciate your feedback and your comments. Let's just cut the callers for now. It's three minutes to. I just want to make sure that everyone gets to hear how to contact Dr. Pete and read the articles that he writes freely. Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Pete. Really appreciate your time.
Ray Peat: Thank you. OK, so.
Andrew: For those who are interested in learning more about what Dr. Pete has to offer in terms of his approach to sickness and good health, www.raypeat.com. He's got lots of scholarly articles fully referenced. Most of the reference material is very current, so check it out. There's lots of new stuff that he's writing continually. So he's a... a great source of inspiration to us all. For those of you, this time next month, the third Friday of next month, we'll be at the Summer Solstice, so can you believe it? We've only got about four and a half weeks, and then the daylight starts getting shorter and we start going back the other way. But anyway, we haven't quite got there yet, and thanks for listening, everyone. Goodnight.
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