Andrew: Well, welcome to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name is Andrew Murray.
Sarah: My name is Sarah Johannesson Murray.
Andrew: Okay, we're in 2011. Happy New Year to you all. It's the first show of the year. For those of you who perhaps have never listened to our shows, which run every third Friday of the month from 7 to 8pm, we're both licensed medical herbalists who trained in England and graduated there with a degree in herbal medicine. We run a clinic in Garberville, locally, where we consult with clients about a wide range of conditions and we recommend herbal medicines and dietary advice. It's become increasingly obvious over the last few years, at least, that if you really want to get a point across, you cannot just mention it once or twice, but that a varied topics encompassing the same root subject will result in a coherent view of the matter in question. And association is after all an excellent tool for improving the memory. We get a lot of very positive feedback concerning Dr. Ray Peat who's joined us on many of our shows now. And again he's joining us tonight and we'll discuss the role of inflammation in the disease process and reiterate some root causes and ways to avoid generating inflammation generally. Okay, so... Good evening, Dr. Pete, and thank you so much for joining us again. Happy New Year.
Ray Peat: Oh, yeah, hi.
Sarah: Hi, Dr. Pete. Sorry to interrupt you, Andrew, but... Go on. We need to say... What are you trying to say? Basically, there's a disclaimer. Oh, okay. The views and opinions expressed throughout this broadcast are our views and opinions, and they do not reflect the station's thoughts and ideas. Absolutely. Not necessarily. They might agree, they might not.
Andrew: Well, absolutely they don't.
Sarah: Time will be made for other viewpoints. Thank you for joining us.
Andrew: Very good. OK, so 2011 kicks off with a good old disclaimer.
Andrew: OK, so to get back to Dr Pete, thanks so much for joining us. As always, for folks who've not listened to our show before, let alone perhaps heard you on the shows, would you perhaps just go over your academic and professional career?
Ray Peat: Um, I was, um... a student and teacher in the humanities for, um, about 10 or 15 years before I, uh, studied in graduate school of biology, uh, basically, um, nerve biology and reproductive biology. And, um, I've taught, uh, a few courses in, oh, uh, biochemistry and immunology, uh, and other things.
Andrew: Okay, um, I know you've, uh, extensively written, uh, papers, uh, fully referenced papers on many different topics, and, um, I know that a lot of, uh, a lot of the programmes that you've joined us on, uh, have really been a broad range of separate subjects, but it's interrelated in, in many different ways, and I know the, uh, topic for tonight's discussion is the... the role of inflammation on the human body, what inflammation does, how is it generated, how can you do something about it? Um, but perhaps people that are listening, would you, um, just briefly discuss what you think we all understand when we hear the word inflammation, and then go, then we'll go over the, uh, the broad view, uh, of inflammation in a newer thinking, it's actually, the thinking is actually fairly old, but... It's been, uh, been, been brought up by contemporary doctors. So, what do you think people first understand when they hear inflammation? How do we understand it?
Ray Peat: About 50 years ago or so, when I was in school, uh, they were, uh, teaching that inflammation is part of the curative healing process, so we needed to, uh, kill germs and, uh, heal. Okay. But, um, in the last 10 or 20 years, the... change has been, uh, seeing it occurring in all of the degenerative diseases. Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, heart disease, arthritis, and so on. So the, uh, it's pretty abrupt in the 20th century that there was this sudden change to seeing inflammation as... at least not all good, maybe all bad.
Andrew: OK. Do you know that from... from... I was reading a little bit about Plato and Aristotelian views of medicine and I know from an inflammatory point of view they definitely had a different metaphor for understanding it. Given that the doctor Ilya Metchnikov and Ilya Kadyrov have been supporting their Later on, Raymo, was it? Gosh, you can describe the doctor, Jamie. Jamie, that's it. With the view of inflammation that both Ilya Metchnikov and the later doctor have brought around, would you describe the difference between it and how fundamentally it makes such a big difference to the way we should understand? What it is that causes it and how to help ourselves?
Ray Peat: Metchnikov had worked primarily as an embryologist, understanding the organization of developing primitive organisms and more complex. And when he saw the phagocyte process, when he put a splinter in an organism and saw the cells gathering around it, he... interpreted that in the context of what he knew best, which was how the organisms create and maintain their body structure. And it was partly the fact that the Nobel Prize went simultaneously to him with that very biological view of immunity, and to Erlich. Who was working with chemical poisons, and the idea of immunity as killing bad organisms took over throughout the United States and most of the world for most of the 20th century. And that as Americans started studying the white blood cells. And the thymus gland and things that we think of as part of the immune system. They were influenced by the drug industry. Ehrlich's looking for the bullets to kill the evil organisms. And that passed over to thinking about antibodies and cells as aimed primarily at... organisms that are trying to take over.
Sarah: It reminds me of how you've described the progression of hepatitis C being... well, we're told that it's this nasty bug, but maybe it's just the body's trying to rearrange something and... there's an inflammation and a process that's going on that is from damage.
Ray Peat: Yeah, the... The retroviruses in general, we've got lots of them, and they seem to be as much part of us as anything, and they don't do anything that for sure is harmful, and if you mess up an organ like poison the liver, you get a bunch of these retroviruses which... Why they call them retro is that normally DNA makes RNA and RNA makes protein, but there are enzymes which will turn RNA into DNA, and that was first observed in 1979, but at that time, Trocin and Plamarc, they had been totally weeded out. In the late 1940s, with the Cold War, all of Plamarc's followers were fired from all of the teaching positions in the U.S., and so in 1979, when the idea that information could go from RNA to DNA was demonstrated, my professors unanimously said it's impossible. That's my mark and I'm not permitted.
Andrew: Just so that people listening understand, the DNA is a thing in our cells that codes for the manufacture of proteins and many, many things that are necessary. The RNA is the messenger, the transcription factor for producing the DNAs. If the retroviruses then......can actually manufacture DNA, that DNA then can get into our mitochondria and or affect a change in its own right, because it's DNA.
Ray Peat: And some of the people inclined in the direction of Lamarck, Barbara McClintock and Lisenko, they had proposed that you can get genetic change. Eventually, Barbara McClintock got the Nobel Prize for it, but about 40 years too late, demonstrating that they believe that information can flow from the environment into the DNA. And some of these people were actually saying that there should be enzymes such as are seen in retroviruses, enzymes that can. Create new DNA in response to environmental experience.
Sarah: Well, that reminds me about that test. I think you said it was in Egypt, Dr. Pate?
Ray Peat: Well, yeah, in many countries there was a schistosomiasis epidemic. It was pretty chronic and a very high percentage of... Egyptians had it, and they were treated for that with some chemicals that injured their liver. And now they say that it was caused by spreading a virus, but other experiments suggest that just the chemical treatment that was aimed at killing this parasite could have been enough to... cause the livers to express retroviruses, one of which is now called hepatitis C.
Sarah: So it's looking at the disease as a damaged particle rather than an infectious organism. Yeah, I think this is what Peter Duesberg is suggesting when he says that the retrovirus of HIV, for example, isn't... known to be a cause of immunodeficiency that he suggests that it's the result of chemical poisoning.
Andrew: And I remember reading about five years ago an article from Dr. Stefan Lanker who was also putting down the HIV hypothesis for... or the viral hypothesis for HIV.
Andrew: OK, so back to inflammation. In terms of the inflammatory process then, and how we, or I understood it from school and from university, studying physiology, how does the newer view or the older view, explained in a newer way, describe inflammation and how does it differ?
Ray Peat: Well, if you look at the injury of the fetus, it heals without... inflammation and it doesn't produce a scar and basically it's perfect healing. At a very early stage you can split the embryo and each part of the embryo will grow into a complete animal, but later in development you can cut or otherwise injure a part of the fetus and it simply......zips itself shut, makes new cells and doesn't leave a scar or inflammation and it's after being born that inflammation as we know it occurs.
Sarah: We need to all crawl back into our mother's womb.
Ray Peat: Yeah, and there are two things that happen when we're born. One is our carbon dioxide exposure goes way down. And the oxygen availability increases greatly. Sort of shift away from carbon dioxide, which is anti-inflammatory. And at the same time, when we're no longer protected by the uterus and placenta, which act as a filter, they let very little polyunsaturated fat in. Practically all newborns are considered deficient in the essential fatty acids, so called. But these begin building up during childhood from practically any diet that we're exposed to. And that combined with the reduced availability of carbon dioxide, you can account for... basically all of the features of inflammation and degeneration that are distinct from the prenatal healing process. We still have some of the features of prenatal healing, and they can be recovered to some extent. For example, if you pack a wound with sugar, you can recover it practically. It heals without a scar and that's partly because it's not exactly approaching prenatal conditions but it's giving an extremely generous supply of sugar which can be used to make carbon dioxide.
Andrew: This is behind the Greeks using honey in deep wounds.
Ray Peat: But sugar... makes it unnecessary for the cells to metabolize any of the fatty acids so that even if the organism has been eating them and integrating them into the tissues, the presence of sugar makes it possible to energize and repair cells without drawing down more of these unsaturated fats which produce all of the features that we know of as inflammation as distinct from healing.
Sarah: Just to summarize for some of our listeners in case you haven't heard of polyunsaturated fat, these are liquid vegetable oils that are present in almost everybody's diet and you can avoid them to some extent by avoiding any liquid vegetable oil apart from olive oil. And eating coconut oil and butter in place.
Andrew: Okay, for those listeners who've just joined, you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMED, Garbifilm 91.1 FM, and from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o'clock, you're invited to call in with any questions, either related or unrelated to this month's topic of inflammation. The number here if you live in the area is 923 3911. Or if you live outside the area the toll free number is 1800 KMUD RAD.
Andrew: Okay so those two things then the decrease in carbon dioxide and the increase in polyunsaturated fatty acids. If people if people started to increase their carbon dioxide content I know we've mentioned in the past bag breathing as a very simple way to do that and or living at elevation. If that's possible, a higher elevation and cutting out polyunsaturated fatty acids. What else could be done in a person to lessen their chance of the inflammation that may otherwise be generated?
Ray Peat: Another of the very basic things promoting inflammation rather than healing is the endotoxin. From bacteria that can be absorbed into the bloodstream and if your liver is well nourished and well energized it can cut out practically 100% of the endotoxin. But if the intestine is stressed in any way which can be nervous stress, increasing the adrenaline. It cuts down the blood supply. The reduced blood supply does things like release histamine and serotonin which make the intestine more permeable, letting more of the endotoxin get into the bloodstream. And the endotoxin does the same thing throughout the body. It increases the permeability, lowers the energy. Increases the inefficiency that shows up as inflammation in its various things such as swelling, turning red, local heating because of the high blood supply.
Sarah: So, basically, stress is a big killer along with other things that promote inflammation. I know for our listeners, I've just been thinking, while Dr. Pate's been talking about stress, that there's lots of herbs that can help to de-stress you. I know thyroid is also something that can help your body work better and not run on so much adrenaline and stress hormones. And a lot of people who get extremely stressed are often... running on adrenaline to keep their metabolism up, rather than running on an adequate amount of thyroid. So, Dr. Feet, do you have anything else to add to how we can help men with stress?
Ray Peat: Keeping the intestine as clean as possible, moving stuff along. Raw carrots or bamboo shoots happen to be antiseptic vegetable material that......doesn't feed the bacteria and tends to suppress the bacterial growth so that it doesn't come too far up the intestine, and they also bind the endotoxin and other chemicals that should be eliminated. If the intestine is sluggish, what the liver has excreted into the bile trying to get rid of... will be reabsorbed farther down the intestine and come back to poison the liver. And if you keep a stream of good, clean material moving through, you can lower the toxins that should be excreted, and that would include unwanted hormones, including estrogen, which the liver should be able to 100% eliminate. As they reach the liver, it will reduce the endotoxin and shift the serotonin and histamine such that it will also lower the cortisol production and that total pattern will increase the good hormone progesterone.
Ray Peat: Testosterone, for example.
Sarah: And for those who might like a nice recipe, Dr. Pietz suggested that if you add apple cider vinegar or lemon or lime juice to raw grated carrots with some salt and coconut oil or olive oil, that it's even more antimicrobial, antiviral, antibacterial, as well as antifungal with the apple cider vinegar.
Andrew: Dr. P, what do you think about using anti-inflammatories as another means to lower inflammation in addition to what we've talked about briefly for foods and avoiding foods?
Ray Peat: Some of them are very helpful. I mentioned that cleaning the intestine will lower the production of cortisol and raise the pregnenolone, testosterone and progesterone. She's heard. Our natural most powerful anti-inflammatory thing is to stabilize the fetus is exposed to an extremely high concentration of progesterone until it's born and so keeping our production of progesterone as high as possible can make a big difference in susceptibility, inflammation and degeneration. But aspirin and related things, a lot of fruit chemicals are similar to aspirin and have a protective effect.
Sarah: What particular fruit chemicals?
Ray Peat: I'm specifically thinking of an orange and an orange and then oranges.
Andrew: Okay, is that in grapefruits as well?
Ray Peat: Well, there's another one in grapefruit that happens to poison an enzyme system in the liver, letting estrogen accumulate tremendously.
Sarah: And this is such a well-known medical fact that in Fortuna Maternity Ward they say, we no longer serve grapefruit juice to our pregnant mothers because it interferes with the hormones. They didn't specify that it blocked the P450 enzyme....helps the liver excrete excessively high, or all of the excess estrogen.
Andrew: OK, so, Naringenin, and then, was there anything else that you think of?
Ray Peat: Uh, no.
Andrew: OK. Do you know, have you heard, or have they done in the past, I can't imagine they haven't, but animal experiments modelling after keeping the CO2 concentration high, keeping all the......inflammatory products that would normally be associated with an animal's diet or their environment out and measuring different things to see how they performed or how longer they lived or how...
Ray Peat: Oh, yeah. About 70 years ago people were noticing that food restriction could increase lifespan 30 or 40 percent. Then it has gone through phases in which they saw that... This could happen in... even adult animals could live longer and healthier by reducing the food intake. But then they started trying different specific foods. And it happens that the foods which are eliminated are those which produce inflammation in various ways. For example, the polyunsaturated fats and the... amino acids that contribute to inflammation such as tryptophan and methionine. Just eliminating one of these will increase longevity about 30 or 40 percent in animal studies.
Andrew: Okay.
Sarah: Wow, that's a lot, 30 to 40 percent. So these Indians that live to 120 years of age live in the Himalayas. I mean, Andy, sorry, excuse me, are they just not eating any polyunsaturated oils and do you know anything about that?
Ray Peat: At high altitudes, all of these long-lived cultures in South America and the Caucasus and Nepal, they all lived at fairly high altitudes and were surrounded by glaciers in most of the cases, so that they're... They were drinking water that was fairly recently high-altitude snow, which happens to be isotopically different from sea-level water. It's been refined by a repeated distillation as it rains out going to higher and higher altitudes. It becomes a metabolically stimulating light water. Where average water contains some of the metabolic, flowing, heavy water. But at the same time, the atmosphere at high altitudes is very low in oxygen, and so people retain more carbon dioxide in their tissues. That's another resemblance of the prenatal condition. And... Generally, they are sheep farmers, sheep can live at relatively high altitudes, and so they tend to either eat vegetables, fruits, or cheese, lots of cheese and milk-related dishes.
Sarah: That's very interesting. It's almost...
Andrew: Yeah, I know. The thing about the rainwater, that's pretty interesting. I know from an alchemical perspective, the first prerequisite is to distill water seven times to be used in experiments because the alchemists always believe that each successive distillation raise the energy of the water. And I've read an article about... They also use storm water, water that was only collected during electrical storms. But I did read an article about water, because I... Many, many years ago I never thought there was any difference between regular water, tap water or whatever, it was all water to me, it was all H2O, but it's actually very different and a lot of papers have been written on the subject of water and how different energetically they are and how different they make, what difference they make in the body and how available the water is to the body and to the cell.
Ray Peat: In the 1930s when they first made isotopic clay. Heavy water with deuterium replacing hydrogen they found that it slowed biological processes, the daily rhythm, nerve conduction and in 1950 they showed in mouse experiments that it tremendously accelerated the aging process. All of the features of aging, slowing metabolism and dying prematurely were produced but it took about... 50 years after that before people started experimenting with the light water from which the heavy water had been removed and they found that for example they were experimenting with it in Russian space vehicles and they found that the condensed sweat had been filtered and it was a very light water resembling glacier water.
Sarah: So what water do you recommend people drink, Dr. Beat? Do you have one?
Ray Peat: No, you have to go to Beaton or a glacier.
Sarah: But you have to go, okay, so you have to go 15,000 feet then, right?
Andrew: This is probably why they bottle glacial water, right?
Sarah: Yeah, if it really is that.
Ray Peat: It happens that some plants will absorb the water at high altitudes and concentrate it even more. Sugar beets, for example, intrinsically eliminate deuterons and so they have white hydrogen incorporated into their tissues and if they grow in Colorado at a high altitude where they're getting already refined water then the beet sugar contains the equivalent of glyphosate.
Andrew: I wonder what kind of altitude beet stops growing at though because I don't know that it's that cold, it's not that cold hardy is it so?
Ray Peat: Yeah they're fairly cold hardy but I don't know the altitude limit.
Andrew: Okay okay well you're listening to Ask Europe Doctor from now until the end of the show and you're invited to call in with any questions either related or unrelated to this month's topic of inflammation and our guest speaker is Dr Raymond Peat. Okay so until people start calling. The cell communication thing is quite interesting to me in terms of, I think, when we were taught physiology we were taught about phagocytic activity, engulfing cells and cell drinking activities and I understand that these descriptions are not that accurate. The language with which it's been described is pretty erroneous, if you like, to use a better word. What do you think about, in the context of what you understand, cell communication, cell-to-cell communication?
Ray Peat: I think it works on many different levels, but I think the important one has been sketched out by starting with people like Albert Szent-Györgyi who demonstrated that... Cells, muscle systems and secretory systems and such are tuned electronically to the properties of the molecule that are... They talk about them as quantum chemical features but it's just the way the electrons resonate in the... particular molecules and that's because the the whole cell is tuned to resonate to certain substances. There's a recent lecture by I think his name is Luca Turin, a Google lecture on pharmacology but it is showing the current vitality of that idea of Albert Szent-Györgyi which... Another person, May Wan Ho, has a website talking about the coherence of an organism and her website has a picture of a worm made through a polarizing microscope showing that there is coherence on the atomic level all the way through the little worm. I think that kind of coherence, electronic or chemical and electrical interaction is at the basis of such things as cell recognition. There are the lock and key processes, enzyme substrate and antibody, antigen recognition, but the important things for communicating between cells. I think are a whole step beyond the lock and key.
Andrew: Okay, before we go any further with that, I know there's a couple of callers on the line, at least there's one on the line for sure.
Andrew: Paula, you on the air? Hi.
Caller: Hi, good evening. I have two questions. One is if you and Sarah could give a phone number to contact you. My other question is for Dr. Pete. I've been doing the carrot thing and I'm really, this is very interesting to me, I'm just fascinated with it, but I have an unrelated question. And that is, I've been getting off of Prozac that I took for many years, and I'm having all of what they call discontinuation syndrome, which I would call drug withdrawal, but you know like education and sweating and so on, and I was wondering are there herbs that one can take to... help alleviate that discomfort while it's going on?
Sarah: Yes, yes there are herbs that you can take to help alleviate the discomfort of withdrawing from Prozac.
Caller: I was doing it partly because I'm worried about the influence of the serotonin uptake inhibitors on my bone structure.
Sarah: I remember you called before and Dr. Peay had said it. Right
Caller: right. So I'm well into it and I'm surviving, but I was just wondering.
Sarah: Well done. Dr. Peay, do you have any recommendations?
Ray Peat: Yeah, the good effect of those serotonin uptake inhibitors, I think it's really other things, not at all serotonin. I think it's in spite of the serotonin. If you look at the history of... serotonin you see that in the 1950s it was discovered to be what makes the carcinoid syndrome or the carcinoid tumor so bad and the tumor itself instead of turning almost all of our dietary cryptophane into niacin, these tumors turn the bulk of it. more than half of it into serotonin and so they flood us they're worse than Prozac and the features well-defined for this massive overdosing of serotonin are a good insight into what's going on with the drug industry the people flushed became depressed anxious and aggressive under the influence of serotonin developed arthritic pains a whole range of inflammatory degenerative symptoms the skin would eventually thicken heart valves would become fibrotic and these are things that are now being seen associated with the uptake inhibitors osteoporosis Heart disease breast cancer obesity and
Sarah: : here serotonin is the suppose a good guy And it's just another mediator of inflammatory responses.
Caller: Well. I don't think it's that good because getting off of it is really awful It must have been doing something else besides making me feel a little better
Ray Peat: there are good Ways to get off. I think pregnenolone thyroid and and coffee are very helpful
Caller: Coffee?
Ray Peat: Yeah, you have to adjust to the coffee but it goes with thyroid, sugar, progesterone and so on as part of an anti-inflammatory system. When we were talking about the anti-inflammatory substances I should have mentioned caffeine as one of them.
Sarah: And also too with caffeine. If you're already running on a lot of adrenaline and you get very low blood sugar, if you drink caffeine that can worsen the symptoms. But if you restock your liver's glycogen stores through eating sugars that are lower glycemic index, but more importantly non-starchy sugars, then your body will not respond to the adrenaline like it would if... You have very low blood sugar, so that's a process of adapting.
Caller: Great. And now could you give me a contact number for you and Andrew?
Sarah: Yes, are you within the 707 area code?
Caller: Yes, I am. I'm in Laytonville, so I'm not that far away.
Sarah: So it's 986-9506. Extension 2 to ask questions, Extension 3 to set up a consultation.
Caller: Oh, okay. And you're in Garberville, right?
Sarah: Yes, our clinic is located in Garberville.
Caller: Okay. I just couldn't find you in the phone book, so I thought, this month I'm going to get your phone number. Thank you so much, and thank you, Dr. Peete. I'm reading things on your website. It's so informative. Thank you.
Sarah: Thank you for your call.
Andrew: Thank you. Okay, I think, is there another caller?
Engineer: Well, someone had a question. About arnica, how it works, and how to use it.
Sarah: Okay. Arnica is a very anti-inflammatory flower, and you really need to have an oil made from arnica. You'd want to make a macerated oil, and this is how we make it, and then we don't actually sell it to stores for retail like we do.
Engineer: Does it grow around here?
Sarah: Herbal tinctures. No, it grows at high elevations. I mean, I imagine it grows... European Alps. Well, and also in Montana. It's Arnica, Montana is the Latin name. But it doesn't grow around here. I don't know if you could get it to grow around here because it is such a high elevation plant.
Andrew: The strict sense of the word Montana is mountain. I thought it did grow in the US. Maybe up in Montana. There's lots of mountains up there. So it's definitely not...
Sarah: I thought it did grow in the mountainous United States. Anyways, we can check on that and see if I'm right or wrong here on the... Montana, but you want to make a heat maceration in order to extract the anti-inflammatory compounds and you don't want to take it internally. I definitely don't recommend you take it internally, but it can really help to alleviate bruises and tendon sprains and tears just by rubbing the oil on the affected area immediately after the injury.
Andrew: It works really, really well. I've seen lots of evidence for it myself. It's one of these... How does it do that?
Sarah: How does it stop the inflammation?
Andrew: Maybe Dr. P understands the physiological effects of... of arnica, I don't know.
Ray Peat: No.
Andrew: You don't? Okay. Alright. Um, okay, so that... that's that one. There's no more corners.
Sarah: Okay, so... Um, Dr. P, I wanted to ask you about the, um, cells' communication from one cell to another. You were talking how they can communicate to each other, and I think there is also a study that you mentioned to me about cells communicating even through, uh, like... A piece of plastic, which...
Ray Peat: Yeah, that was, um... The gervishes in the 1920s and 30s were demonstrating that if you used, um, quartz that passes certain frequencies of ultraviolet, they demonstrated that cells could stimulate cell division across the thin sheet of quartz, and, uh, that is being taken up again in the last ten years. Uh, more people demonstrating, uh, coherence, uh, uh, there are, um, variations on that. Uh, one person is arguing and, and demonstrating that, that cells sense and respond to infrared frequencies, but, uh, the most of the work is, uh, in the, uh, ultraviolet frequency of communication.
Andrew: Okay. Thank you. Excuse me. You mentioned, um, May Wan Ho and then the other person was Albert Sin... Sin Gents. Could you spell his name, please?
Ray Peat: St. George. S-Z-E-N-T hyphen G-Y-O-R-G-Y-I. Okay. St. George. Okay. Good. Okay.
Andrew: So, the main thing, the main thing in... in our bodies is that everything communicates properly. It's when things don't communicate properly that the problems occur. So, in terms of... I know you've mentioned before, from an energetic point of view, the use of thyroid hormone or improving your diet to improve your own hormone thyroid function. That communication is benefited by a higher energy and that's the function of thyroid.
Ray Peat: Yes, the carbon dioxide is one of the sort of a hormone of metabolism, it acts like a universal hormone keeping everything in the optimal condition. For example, it holds histamine and serotonin in a bound position, it holds calcium in a bound position. If you just hyperventilate and lower your CO2 within a minute, your platelets for example, which carry most of the serotonin in your blood in a harmless state, just a minute of hyperventilation will cause the platelets to release the serotonin and immediately cause capillaries to become permeable, leaking....fluid out into your lungs so you can create pulmonary edema with a minute of hyperventilation just because you've messed up the carbon dioxide concentration.
Andrew: Okay. Wow. Okay. Pretty dangerous. Okay. Back to retroviruses a little bit. Because this again is something that I've not been familiar with at all. I think the way that we we're indoctrinated with... that the way things are supposed to be is that all these little things of viruses they exist and they're all different and they'll cause different uh different problems from are you are you saying that ultimately we we coexist with a wide range of retroviruses none of which normally give us any problem until some other insult
Ray Peat: yeah i think uh dusberg said we all contain hundreds of them hmm and uh we do when when there's an injury to the tissue we do form antibodies and and some people will say that's evidence that they're an alien thing but uh many years ago someone did an experiment i think was rabbit cartilage um they removed a piece of cartilage and they would replace the untampered with cartilage in one group of rabbits and it would just didn't produce any reaction but if they twisted the cartilage just enough to damage the structure just as you would if you fell and twisted your knee or something. When they put that one back in the same rabbit it produced the rabbit produced antibodies to it like it was an alien thing but what that means about antibodies in the case of our antibodies to retroviruses or whatever is that they're a part of a cleanup process something is is disturbed the antibodies are part of preparing the situation for our and our phagocytes to go in and remove the damaged material.
Sarah: So we're looking at the immune system instead of this killer attack system that just kills and attacks all these different bugs. Perhaps it's just a rearranging and a house cleaner just goes in there and it just cleans and mops up this little bit of damage here from the milk that's spilt on the floor.
Ray Peat: Just fairly recently someone showed that in a traumatic brain injury of the present. of antibodies to the injured tissue corresponds to the healing the absence of the antibodies lets the tissue deteriorate so it's it's pretty well established that it's a cleanup process and in the thyroid people think about autoimmune antibodies as causing the problem but just an excess of thyroid stimulating hormone Because something is blocking the function, the pituitary increases its drive against the thyroid gland and that overstimulation causes something like inflammation and the body is cleaning up the damaged or stressed thyroid cells when it produces antibodies and so if you keep the thyroid stimulating hormone low enough the cleanup will proceed and the antibodies will disappear
Andrew: well it's very different to current under current thinking and what we're all told is is the way it is so that i guess drug companies can sell their drugs it's probably i don't mean to be uh cynical but there's probably some truth in it for sure okay for those of you who are listening uh you're listening to ask your doctor on kmu d guvville 91.1 fm and from now until the end of the show at eight o'clock the next oh at least seven minutes uh people are invited to call in many questions we do have dr raymond pete here he's a very well published scientist and researcher and i'm very very pleased to have him on the show uh we've been talking about inflammation and the role of inflammation and all the things that can cause inflammation and how to how to help yourself uh getting back to uh in case we get any we don't get any calls oh look out we have a caller i think Are you on the air? Hello?
Caller: Hi.
Andrew: Hi, you're on the air.
Caller: Thanks. I'm sorry, I tuned in about midway through, I'm not sure if you've covered this, but I'm interested in your thoughts on eczema and relationship to leaky gut and digestive stuff. Okay, Dr. P, what's your view on eczema?
Ray Peat: Say it again, I didn't hear.
Andrew: The lady was asking about eczema in relation to leaky gut and all.
Ray Peat: Oh, well, the celiac disease is one of the causes of both skin disease and arthritis. The celiac disease, among other things, will allow endotoxin into your circulation. Right. And low thyroid is probably the most common. The thing associated with just ordinary eczema, and that's because when your thyroid is low, the circulation to your intestine is poor, the serotonin is high, and this combination of endotoxin and serotonin, for example, will cause the skin to have abnormal growth patterns.
Caller: Would psoriasis then be in the same category?
Ray Peat: I think so.
Caller: That's so interesting.
Sarah: And that's why when people who have eczema and psoriasis take liver herbs like dandelion and burdock, that they notice an improvement. It's generally not enough to cure them, but they do notice an improvement. The curative effect has to be more of a combination of looking at the whole system like the thyroid and the diet and how that influences an overall inflammation. But working on the digestive tract definitely makes a big difference with eczema and psoriasis.
Caller: Thank you. And can I ask one more question in relationship to the celiac disease? Do you think the tests that test you for gluten allergies are good? Are accurate? Yeah, accurate.
Sarah: Dr. Pete, did you hear that question?
Ray Peat: Well, they're... They can very clearly demonstrate the enzymes involved in it, but I think gluten is toxic in itself to anyone. It's just that some people are more resistant to it. It has an overlap with the transglutaminase enzyme, and there's a lot of it in the skin. and in the intestine and it happens to be an enzyme that's activated by estrogen and I think that's why women have more of the problem with it but it isn't that it's some particular disease it's that gluten is just absolutely not intended as a food. The seeds create the protein gluten as a storage form but also as a by-product it discourages animals from eating it because it contains these amino acids that contribute to inflammation. So the seed intends it to cause inflammation in your intestine and a very tough person. Can withstand it for a long time but it's not a good idea for anyone to eat it.
Sarah: And traditionally Europeans ate bread but it was always soured and the actual souring process does change the gluten into a less allergenic form although some people are still react adversely to it.
Ray Peat: And soaking it for 12 hours or so increases the protein value tremendously while destroying the gluten.
Sarah: So soaking your grains before making the bread and then also souring them for 12 hours. You know, sourdough bread is risen in 3 or 4 hours, if that, maybe even 1 or 2.
Ray Peat: I asked a baker and he said 20 minutes. And that's not enough time for the cultures in the starter to actually break down the gluten and change it into a much less allergenic form.
Sarah: So traditionally we never ate bread products like we do today and in fact a lot of the European cake recipes Don't even call for flour because flour was this highly prized Possession to have in Europe and most of the cakes and desserts were made with eggs and milk and sugar and not flour And now statement rules have switched, but I know we're running out of time now I mean sorry values have switched and flour is cheap and butter and eggs are expensive.
Andrew: Well we are coming to the end of the show now we've only got a couple of minutes left and I don't want to rush the information that we'd like you to know about Dr. Pete's website so thank you so much again for joining us Dr. Pete and sharing all of your knowledge with us.
Ray Peat: Okay.
Andrew: Okay so for all of those people that have listened Dr. Raymond Pete's got a very good website with a pretty extensive list of referenced material on many different subjects from thyroid to progesterone and other related hormones to the fish oil experiments and many many other things so do take a look his website is www.raypeat.com and that's r-a-y-p-e-a-t and guess what he's not selling anything okay very good information well researched um yeah can't say enough good things about him and in a lot of very positive situations turn around using his advice so thank you very much
Engineer: and we did have one last caller who wanted to caution people that i i assume from her own experience that soaking the wheat does not take care of her allergy allergy issues okay yeah be warned
Sarah: yeah no it definitely um a lot of people still have um difficulty eating grain products not just wheat and gluten containing grains but a lot of different uh grain products even with soaking because they the probably the main reason is because they the effects they have on the intestines maybe we can cover that the next show but we can be reached under and uh... myself sarah can be reached uh... like i get my number out before seven oh seven nine eight six nine five zero six or toll free eight eight eight nine two six four three seven two and that the acronym for that is wbm herb western botanical medicine wbm herb h e r b for further consultations or more information thank you
Andrew: and thank you and goodnight now happy new year to you it's 2011 hopefully it's uh yeah hopefully it's going to go on for a bit longer well you could talk about that later too okay have a good night thank you thank you for listening
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