Andrew: Well, good evening and welcome to this Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name is Andrew Murray.
Sarah: And my name is Sarah Johannesson Murray.
Andrew: For those of you who perhaps never listen to our show, they run every month the third Friday of each month. My wife and I, Sarah and I, are both licensed medical herbalists. We graduated in England with a degree in herbal medicine and we run a clinic in Garberville where we consult with clients about a wide range of different conditions. And we manufacture......all our own certified organic herbal extracts, which are either grown on our CCOF certified herb farm or......which are sourced from other USA certified organic suppliers.
Andrew: So you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMUD, Garbleville 91.1 AFM. 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......unusual perhaps topic, all based around milk. If we get time, a little bit later on. There were certainly some questions that have been asked about the topic of cancer. But, surprise to say that I had a listener who has been tuning in regularly to the shows actually from Rio de Janeiro. So she's doing this on the web. And she had plenty of different questions about milk and milk consumption. And there was arguments for and against milk and a particular......seminar that was given by Pedro Bastos who was part of the Paleo, eat the Paleo diet and kind of, I don't want to say anti-milk perhaps but we'll come up with that a little bit later. Anyway, suffice to say that Dr Pete has been kind enough to join us again on the radio show this evening from 7.30 until 8pm. We take callers and are very happy to hear from you and those people that have......questions related or unrelated to the show can use that time wisely to ask Dr Pete his advice about many different things perhaps if it's not just around milk. Anyway, without further ado, Dr Pete, are you with us?
Ray Peat: Yes, hello.
Andrew: Hi, thank you for joining the show. Again, as usual, perhaps people that haven't listened to the show before, so would you just introduce yourself and give a rundown of your professional academic background?
Ray Peat: I studied......physiology in the Biology Department, University of Oregon, and I've been interested in endocrine biology and any other themes in biology since I was a little kid, but I didn't study it academically until 1968-72 because I had a bad opinion of American biology from......my experience with high school biology, for example, so I've been reading lots of other national traditions and such in biology, so I take a critical approach to most of the things that I read.
Andrew: Yeah, good job, too. Okay, well, so I think probably some of tonight's... the reason for tonight's show was perhaps some erroneous science that was thrown... er, as a kind of curveball, um, suggesting perhaps that there were inherent problems with, um, using milk, and or I know that the people, er, perhaps who are lacto-vegans or vegans, er, would certainly, um, perhaps benefit to hear, um, your opinions surrounding milk, and I've got lots of different questions, er, so far as points that were brought up in... a seminar given by Pedro Bastos, who's part of... who was presenting a talk on milk and had various different, quote-unquote, science surrounding, er, falls and against, er, some of which we'll get into. So, um, in terms of... I know that you're very, um, big on milk, you're an advocate of drinking milk, um, I've never consumed so much milk, I don't think, in my life, apart from when I was young. I've very much enjoyed drinking milk, um, but kind of grew out of it, as I think perhaps most people do, but inherently there's such a lot of positive benefit from drinking milk that the anti-dairy or the pro-soy groups will probably be just as well to listen and tune in to this month's show, because there's plenty of evidence to show that milk is actually very beneficial for you and it's perhaps in our best interests to make sure that we can... get back into drinking milk again if we don't, if we've for one ever reason or another we stop drinking it, so about some of the arguments against milk, I know that in Pedro Basto's article he mentioned that insulin growth factor was stimulated fairly strongly by milk, what do you have to say about IGF and or its... its stimulation from milk, how true is that?
Ray Peat: Well it has some of the features of insulin, but it and insulin are just two of our regulatory factors that when one of them is slightly distorted we have so many other regulatory systems that... nothing really changes much when one is a little off-centre.
Andrew: OK, so you're saying that there's no real significant effect from the stimulation of IGF by milk as opposed to the stimulation of IGF by other things that we would normally cope with?
Ray Peat: When you look at the functions in a given species, animals that... are very big for their species have a high level of IPF.
Andrew: Okay, like elephants and...
Ray Peat: Well, no, a big mice.
Andrew: Oh, okay, a big mice.
Ray Peat: And elephants have a very low level. Okay. So it's within a species, it has one kind of effect, but across the spectrum of possible animal species, it has a very different meaning. Okay. So it's just part of a system, and our whole system has long-range adaptive processes. And nutrition has hardly scratched the surface of how nutrition works in developmental biology. The most nutrition research is done... For the agricultural food industry, they want to know how to make big animals, not intelligent, long-life animals.
Andrew: Like the cows and increasing the yield from a cow both in milk and meat.
Ray peat: And some nutritional studies have found that your grandmother's nutritional level......affects the development of your brain and so on. And in animal studies you can see it going on for four to five generations. The way a diet and the development of one individual goes, you can see the influence generation after generation affecting the development of the whole animal. Focusing on the size of the brain, for example, you can't determine anything really just in one generation.
Andrew: Is this genetically passed on then, without actually being...
Ray Peat: Well, currently they're thinking that it's a methylation of the genes, but that's just the current variation on how genetic influences work. That's what I was in. Graduate school, I knew Carl Lindegren, who wrote the book Cold War in Biology, and he published a survey of experiments showing such things as a transgenerational influence or the influence of a plant's nutrition on the heredity and development of its offspring. That was in the United States. Barbara McClintock was showing that stress affects the genetics of a corn plant, but Carl Lindegren was reviewing older, much more radical stuff that shows that you can change the nature of a tomato plant's offspring by what you do to the tomato plant. Since genetic engineering became......a profitable business, Barbara McLintock was brought out of obscurity, given a Nobel Prize, a MacArthur grant, so that the Monsanto people would have someone saying, see, this happens in nature.
Sarah: So when Pedro Basto says, oh, milk is bad because it stimulates IGF...
Ray Peat: there's not really enough science to know what might turn out. Four or five generations from now, that it is either good or bad. For example, people who drink milk might have great-grandchildren who are much smarter than they are.
Sarah: Well, so basically this is a postulation or a theory that he's proposing and not really backed up by scientific evidence, especially when you look at cultures who do drink a lot of milk and they have less cancer. Because that's the whole thing with IGF is that it could, well, Pedro Bassas is saying it's a stimulator of cancer.
Ray Peat: But it's also a stimulator of healthy tissue growth.
Sarah: Okay, so it's out of context. He's taken it out of context.
Ray Peat: For example, a study of the radiation effects in Japan, they looked at all factors of life situation and diet and so on. And they saw that people who didn't drink milk had a much higher... risk of becoming demented in old age and a later study in the US saw the same thing that milk has anti-dementia properties.
Andrew: So is there any anti-inflammatory component to it or is it another mechanism?
Ray Peat: They don't really know that's just an association of big populations but it could involve something like the IGF but there are so many. factors in milk just the high ratio of calcium to phosphorus is one of the extremely beneficial qualities of milk.
Andrew: Yeah well I know you're very big on calcium and for many different reasons so perhaps that would be a good point for people to hear in terms of the calcium content of milk and how easily a bioavailable is compared to how you would get the sufficient calcium level from other foods that's probably quite an interesting
Ray Peat: Well, the next best food which people don't think about as food usually, but it's eggshell. I had a relative who cured his early youthful osteoporosis by having a tablespoon of powdered eggshell every day.
Sarah: Which would be about, what, 5,000 milligrams of calcium a day?
Ray Peat: Something like that, and that's in the neighborhood of what the Maasai people... get during their lifetime, 5,000 to 7,000.
Andrew: As an average?
Sarah: So one quarter milk has about 1,200 milligrams of calcium, right?
Ray Peat: And a whole eggshell is maybe 2,000 milligrams, and that is calcium carbonate, but the absorption of the calcium in milk is greatly improved by the presence of lactose in the milk when you compare the different sugars. Fructose is not as good as lactose, but it still is an important factor in helping to absorb calcium. Glucose or starch, starch breaks down into nothing but glucose. Starch has a very poor effect on calcium absorption. And when bone development was compared......in rats that were made deficient in vitamin D, one group was given starch as its carbohydrate, the other was given sucrose. And despite being deficient in vitamin D, the sucrose-fed rats had strong bones.
Sarah: So sugar doesn't weaken your bones like we're told.
Ray Peat: No, it actually works parallel to a thyroid and vitamin D for stimulating the metabolism. Calcium, a T3 component of the thyroid hormone, and fructose all have some overlapping effects activating respiratory metabolism.
Sarah: So people who drink lactose-free milk will not be absorbing as much calcium as people who drink normal milk.
Andrew: And what about people that would say, oh, I'm lactose intolerant? How would you answer that?
Ray Peat: Studies of, for example, in Chinatown in San Francisco, people who hadn't grown up drinking milk were compared to people who had the same family, same genes, but it's just a matter of what you grow up exposed to. And when you take someone who has grown up without it and have them drink maybe a glass and a half total. Milk in a day, about half a glass at a time, in just two or three weeks, they are inducing the enzymes in their intestine. And when you look at various factors responsible for losing the enzymes, a deficiency of progesterone and thyroid or a bacterial infection
Sarah: of the small intestine,
Ray Peat: yeah, will cause the loss of those enzymes.
Andrew: Okay, so the bacterial infection, that can directly cause a lack of enzyme production then?
Ray Peat: Yeah, and that usually develops in the upper part of the small intestine in people who are thyroid deficient.
Sarah: And then those people when they drank milk would have terrible gas because the bacteria would be digesting the lactose instead of the lactase from that should be normally produced from the small intestine.
Andrew: Yeah, but even those people can regain the enzyme then?
Ray Peat: Yeah.
Andrew: Yeah. Okay, because I mean, I do come across as Sarah, you come across people who just point blank refuse to drink milk, they say, I can't drink it gives me cramps, digestion, bloating, etc. And but those people can retrain, retrain themselves in every train themselves, they can actually start to express that, that an enzyme,
Sarah: I found that once they get their overall nutrition in a better state, it becomes easier and easier for them to digest the milk, or is it if like Dr. Pete said, they're quite low thyroid to begin with. And they have a lot of gaseous issues and intestinal dysbiosis or bacterial overgrowth, then it is very, it's harder for them if they aren't willing to change other aspects of their diet.
Ray Peat: And starch tends to support the bacterial overgrowth more than fruit sugar. Okay.
Andrew: And if someone if someone could be given that you said progesterone is very helpful and thyroid and in being able to digest milk and or produce the enzymes, why would somebody, as a question, why would somebody want to drink milk? Why would somebody want to be able if they, you know, want to use the argument that I can't digest it? I don't, it doesn't do me any good. What, what, how can we convince people that milk really is beneficial?
Sarah: Well, can we go back to calcium, Dr. Pete, can you tell us the, all the beneficial anti-inflammatory effects of the calcium? Alone has that's present in very absorbable quantities in milk and the different health benefits because when we think of calcium we think of, oh, it's just good for your bones, I don't need to worry about that till I turn 70 or whatever, you know.
Ray Peat: Yeah, Adele Davis talked about that in the 1950s that people think of calcifying kidneys and arteries and such, and are afraid of the calcium in milk, but she already......pointed out the research showing that the people who drink the least milk or have the least calcium in their diet have the most kidney stones and the most calcified arteries, and that's because of the anti-inflammatory effect of calcium. It suppresses the tendency of your kidneys and arteries and other soft tissues.
Sarah: And is that extra calcium that's getting deposited in the arteries and causing calcification of the arteries and kidney damage? That's coming from people's bones, right, in response to a deficiency?
Ray Peat: Yeah, the calcium in your diet by having the anti-inflammatory and pro-thyroid effect is tending to direct the deposition of calcium as calcium carbonate into your bones and keeping the production of carbon dioxide by stimulating cell metabolism. The same carbon dioxide that deposits into the bones prevents calcium from depositing in arteries and kidneys by keeping it in a soluble state.
Sarah: So if you take enough in your diet, then it moves in the right direction and goes from the milk to the bone. If you don't, then it goes from the bone to your arteries. Yeah.
Sarah: The wrong way.
Andrew: Unfortunately, I think a lot of people have an incorrect association with it. I know one person in particular who we were working with a couple of months back had I think extremely bad osteoporosis and was so anti-milk because they thought oh I can't cope with any more calcium, I can't cope with the calcium.
Ray Peat: One of the factors in osteoporosis is if not high cortisol then high prolactin and both of those are caused by high serotonin and all of those... Serotonin, prolactin and cortisol are anti-bone formation and calcium suppresses all of those. Calcium in your diet suppresses prolactin, cortisol and serotonin, allowing the other bone building factors to be dominant.
Sarah: So let's talk about the sugar in milk and how that... That helps your liver function better and then your liver can manufacture more carbon dioxide. The engineer just had a question about ways to increase carbon dioxide.
Ray Peat: Any sugar, if you eat sucrose, it's similar to lactose, not quite as effective for absorbing calcium as the lactose is, but the sucrose in fruit or honey or just plain sugar is 50 percent. Fructose is 50 percent glucose and it just takes a little fructose to catalyze the more energetic burning of glucose producing carbon dioxide. So you don't have to eat a pure sugar carbohydrate diet to have optimal carbon dioxide production but it's okay to avoid starch entirely.
Andrew: Okay, yeah, so in terms of keeping your CO2 up, not engaging too much in aerobic exercises is certainly part of someone's goal, I think, to maintain high CO2. I know you've mentioned bag breathing before now, to re-inspire expired air as a way of increasing your CO2, and... I know we've touched on other things, like high altitude, high altitude being very beneficial, because that is also going to increase the person's CO2.
Ray Peat: Something as simple as baking soda stimulates bone formation.
Andrew: And what's the mechanism for that?
Ray Peat: The carbon dioxide.
Andrew: Okay, just the carbon dioxide.
Sarah: And that's why for broken bone treatments, CO2 treatment as an infusing gas that you... basically put your broken limb into a bag that's filled with carbon dioxide.
Ray Peat: Yeah, the body has such an affinity for carbon dioxide that even though there's a very high concentration inside your body compared to the atmosphere, if you put your arm or leg into a bag of carbon dioxide that'll flow into your body, same with carbonated hot springs, you absorb carbon dioxide. Out of the water, up the gradient into your body because your body basically has an affinity for it. And when you move into a high altitude or happen to live in a submarine for two or three months, your bones, even after months of the body having a higher CO2 concentration, the bones are still......incorporating some of the CO2 out of your blood.
Sarah: That's why I feel so good when I go to the local hot springs, carbonated hot springs, Vichy and Ukiah, Vichy hot springs, because it's carbonated, it's water that's high in CO2.
Andrew: Okay, that brings out another point, I think, just to keep reiterating it, because I know that your own research has showed this to be a self-evident, as well as a scientifically evident truth, is that people... really need to start looking at oxygen, unfortunately, looking at oxygen as a poison, a metabolic poison, if you like, and looking at CO2 actually in a better light than we normally associate CO2 with. I would always have thought CO2, you know, if you breathe it out, it's bad, you don't live on CO2, but actually it's very beneficial for us as organisms to have a higher concentration of CO2 than we do.
Ray Peat: And people living at a very high altitude. Once they've adapted, if they go up gradually, the blood coming out of their lungs is more completely oxygenated because of the various things. The effect of carbon dioxide seems to improve the diffusion of the gas from the air into your blood capillaries in the lungs.
Sarah: So it helps them absorb more oxygen is what you're saying and then the cell will work more efficiently?
Ray Peat: Mm-hmm.
Andrew: Okay you're listening to Ask UROB Doctor on KMU DeGarberville 91.1 FM from 7 to 30 until the end of the show at 8 o'clock you're invited to call in Dr. Ray Peat is joining us again on the show and this month's topic is pretty much surrounded milk and the benefits of milk trying to refute some of the arguments of the paleo. evolutionists and i probably think that's a better another question dr p people um i know have said in the past well it's you know as a human race depending on what you where your viewpoint is as a human race we've been around for millions of years and only very recently if we started drinking milk um what would you uh what would you say about that
Ray Peat: um well so the first thing is that um a lot of people have their imaginary uh... history of the human race uh... conrad lorenz and uh... a couple of his followers uh... uh... ardre and morris described the uh... evolution of the killer ape where we came from that uh... a carnivorous ape made the uh... transition into humankind So meat was the basis of human evolution and other people are currently saying that Africans who lived along lakes or sea coasts ate fish and the brain is made of fish oil and so they needed to eat fish to evolve a big brain. But all of that is really reading backwards in the history from whatever people believe in the present.
Andrew: OK, because talking about the early civilisation when perhaps we would have been moving out of the caves and becoming domesticators of animals and growing crops, grains also would have been a fairly recent
Ray Peat: Yeah, that's pretty well documented that for the last 10 or 20 thousand years, civilizations have been knowing how to domesticate grains of different kinds and that is, I think, the good basis for starting to think about the paleo diet, that definitely grain eating hasn't done anything. Great for the human brain or for general health. So as far as the caveman diet takes people away from a grain based diet, I think it's starting off in the right direction. But there's just not enough science yet to know what the long range effects of a given diet are going to be for sure. One of the things we can see in a fairly short range is that one of the bad features of the grains and nuts diet is a high phosphate content, a high phosphate calcium ratio.
Sarah: And even a high meat diet has a high phosphate.
Ray Peat: Yeah, and the high meat diet has that same drawback unless you eat eggshells when you eat the eggs. And maybe chew on the bones. Some people eat chicken bones.
Sarah: So that brings up grass-fed milk versus grain-fed milk. Then the milk that from cows that are being fed alfalfa and grain then would be less desirable than grass-fed milk, correct?
Ray Peat: Yeah, the fresh grass has a high ratio of vitamin E to fatty acids and the grains. Especially if they've been stored for a while, the vitamin E is fairly quickly depleted and cows need vitamin E in proportion to the fatty acids because the bacteria which destroys the polyunsaturated fats in any plant material like grain or leaves. Bacteria hydrogenate those polyunsaturated fats in the cow's rumen so that 98% of the polyunsaturated fat is destroyed by the cow's bacteria if they have enough vitamin E.
Sarah: And you're saying that fresh grass has more vitamin E than the grain and the alfalfa.
Andrew: How about, um...
Sarah: That's why milk tastes good from damp, wet, rainy countries.
Andrew: Lots of lush grass. I know in South Africa, when I spent a year there, the milk tasted terrible. I don't know if I ever saw any green grass the whole time I was there. Same in Israel. I remember the milk in Israel was pretty bad. Okay, so how about, um, people... I know we're very strong advocates of eating organically, wherever the organic alternative is available. I know the same would be true for milk, correct?
Ray Peat: Oh yeah. Mentioning Israel, they, up until they did this study, I think it was in the 1960s, they had the highest or one of the world's highest rates of breast cancer, and they noticed that their dairies were using, I think it was lindane.
Andrew: Oh my goodness. They love their pesticides, don't they?
Ray Peat: As soon as they banned the use of that around their cows as it had been banned previously in the U.S., their breast cancer rate came down to about the European and U.S. level.
Andrew: Wow. Yeah, unfortunately they do enjoy their petrochemicals. I know in agriculture is, their agriculture 20, 25 years ago was pretty reliant on lots of different sprays for their crops. I think it was just fairly normal for them to do that. Okay, it's 7.30 now, if any listeners listening have any questions for Dr. P. about the subject of milk, the number here is 9233911, while there's an 800 number which is 1800kmudrad, which is 800-568-3723. So, talking about hormones and or estrogenic type effects. What's the truth in the presence of estrogens in milk? And that would be some people's argument for not wanting to consume it.
Sarah: And that's the biggest prefaces with estrogen being a known carcinogen or cancer promoter.
Ray Peat: The amount in milk is maybe something up to as much as one microgram per quart. But, uh... For men, estrogen really is as much a male hormone as female. And the natural estrogen is processed in both men and women and detoxified fairly quickly. And about, I think it's 85% of the estrogen in milk, even though it's a very small amount to start with. A birth control pill, for example, has 30 micrograms. No one drinks 30 litres of milk in a day, but the bulk of the estrogen in the milk is attached to either sulphate or glucuronic acid, which prepares it to be excreted in the kidneys.
Andrew: We do actually have a caller on the air, so let's take this caller.
Engineer: Actually, they just dropped, although now a different line is ringing here, but it's an office line. I'm not sure. Call back caller, and somebody also asked, what about homogenization?
Andrew: Yeah, that's another cool question.
Sarah: I was waiting for that question.
Andrew: So homogenization versus pasteurization versus, I mean, how about raw milk? Let's start with homogenization and then go on to raw milk.
Ray Peat: The process breaks the particle of fat up into such a small size. But it doesn't separate by itself and that presumably is going to make any of the unstable fats in it oxidize faster. It has a small harmful effect but considering the alternatives if you go into a grocery store that has only homogenized pasteurized milk. What are the other foods that you'll find in the supermarket as alternatives? They're all going to be much more dangerous as oxidants or pro-oxidants.
Sarah: So the theory, or I've heard this theory, that, oh, it breaks the fat molecule up so tiny that then it goes in and blocks your arteries, so that's complete rubbish then?
Ray Peat: Yeah. If the fat particle gets in your artery directly, it will... When we secrete bile, the soapy material in the bile breaks up all of the fats that we eat anyway into particles of about that same size which do get directly into the bloodstream.
Sarah: So we have our own natural homogenization process with our bile that our liver makes to help us digest the fats.
Ray Peat: system is it's a margin I think.
Sarah: Okay that's a brilliant answer I like that one. So then raw milk you would consider raw milk increased in nutritional value over the pasteurized and ultra-pasteurized and all the other treatments?
Ray Peat: Definitely it's nutritionally better but that doesn't mean that you should eat soybeans or or bread or something if you can't get milk can't get raw milk.
Sarah: Right because you're weighing up the... the pros and the cons. And also too of course it depends what the cows are eating. Like we talked before about grain fed versus grass fed milk.
Ray Peat: Yeah that's that makes a big difference if you are getting milk from a dairy that has only one or two or three cows. What the cow ate the preceding day is going to have a big effect on the taste of the milk, the allergenicity. How well it keeps and so on. But if you have a thousand cows' milk being pooled together, it becomes a standardized product that is pretty invariable.
Sarah: And sometimes people find that... I've had a client who said that they didn't like to drink... they didn't digest Holstein milk as well as they did Jersey milk. And when they drank the Jersey milk, they have absolutely no problems and they can drink as much as they like. So I mean that depends too and from dairy to dairy, every dairy is feeding their cows maybe slightly different food or maybe cows are eating slightly different grass or other weeds or there's lots of different things that can affect the milk.
Ray Peat: Yeah, everything in the cow's environment affects the nature of the milk. The hormone content varies according to the cow's stress level. They talk about that very tiny amount of... estrogen as a concern but most milk has at least 20 times as much progesterone as estrogen and so if you did get some active estrogen in your milk the amount of progesterone is more than enough to counteract its effect.
Andrew: Excellent. Okay there is a caller on the line so let's just take this next caller. Hello, you're on the air.
Caller: Hi, I would like to address the question of the nutritional value of goat milk and fresh goat cheese. I understand that it's, I feel like it's less mucus forming and I'd like to ask your speaker to address this question. Just talk to us about goat products. I'll take my answer off air. Thank you.
Andrew: Thank you.
Ray Peat: The composition is definitely different, but again it depends a lot on what the goat was eating. When I was a little kid, one of our neighbors came back from the war with malaria and they had goats. As soon as he was able to drink his daily goat milk, he didn't have any malaria attacks. But periodically he had to go to the veterans hospital for a checkup and once when he was there he had a malaria attack and they wouldn't let him get his goat milk and he died from the attack.
Sarah: So I've heard that the goat milk protein is a smaller, more easily digestible like the sheep's milk protein compared to the cow's milk protein. Do you find that... In your experience, Dr. P, that people... you've known other people who have an easier time digesting goat milk versus cow's milk?
Ray Peat: Yeah, I've heard that quite a bit.
Sarah: And do you think that the size of the protein strand is what it's down to?
Ray Peat: I doubt it. I think that there are so many chemical differences that I wouldn't guess what was most important.
Sarah: I know that sheep's milk, when you look at the nutritional profile, it's very different to cow or goat's milk. It has a lot more fat and a lot more protein, but when you compare just if you're just looking at the protein and the fat and the goat's milk, it's pretty similar. But I guess again that depends on what they're eating and which cow's milk and goat's milk they tested.
Andrew: Okay, so going back to milk's calcium content and how physiologically important calcium is to us as organisms. And you've mentioned eggshells as being another excellent source of calcium. Is there anything else? If people refuse to drink milk and they refuse to take powdered eggshell caps to get their calcium, what else do they have to do and how much in order to satisfy the nutritional needs for calcium as its anti-inflammatory effects?
Ray Peat: If you eat most of your carbohydrate as fruit and avoid the grains so you aren't getting excess. Then probably an eggshell a day will give you all the calcium you need.
Andrew: But where else could you get that amount of calcium if you refused to use calcium as an eggshell supplement?
Ray Peat: Oh, I suppose just a leaf based diet would. Eventually get enough calcium. No, just dark green leafy veg. But you probably have to make a fair amount of it to get the same. Yeah, and if it's well cooked you get more of the nutrients. Right. The experiment where they gave rats a vegetable diet of fresh vegetables another group had exactly the same vegetables that had been canned. And the ones getting the canned vegetables lived perfectly well and the others wasted away. Couldn't assimilate the nutrients.
Andrew: Okay, I think we have another caller on the air, so let's see if we can take that caller now.
Caller: Hey, thank you very much. Question was regarding evaporated milk and the thickening agents commonly put in there like... carrageenan, or maybe vancine gum, or something like that. That's what I wanted Dr. Peet to comment on, and I'm thinking he'll take my answer off the air.
Andrew: Okay, thank you for your call. Dr. Peet?
Ray Peat: Yeah, the gums, in particular carrageenan, I've got an article on my website about carrageenan. A few years ago, probably three years ago, one of the organic cream......producers, most of the grocery stores, stock. I started getting sick on their cream and saw that they were using carrageenan in their thick whipping cream. And the same thing happened with some of the ice creams I had been eating for years. They made me sick and I looked at the label and saw they were adding gums. And the... Many of the cheeses are adding those as carriers for the flavoring agents, culture, microorganisms and such to make it easier to produce the cheese. And the dairy often doesn't realize that the culture organisms may be suspended in alginate or carotene. And one researcher has demonstrated in many animal experiments that carotene is carcinogenic. But the FDA and various agencies allow it to be used in food because they say it's only the degraded carotene which is carcinogenic. And when bacteria in your intestine act on it, they degrade it. But when it goes in your mouth, it's, according to the FDA, not carcinogenic.
Sarah: And what about evaporated milk? Does that just become more oxidized and broken down?
Ray Peat: Oh, sure. And contact with a can is another possible source of contamination. But the reason it tastes so bad is that it's heavily oxidized.
Andrew: OK, all right, we do have another caller, so let's take this next caller. Are you on the air?
Caller: Yes, my question was about sprouted grain breads and sourdough breads.
Sarah: Whoops, we lost you there.
Andrew: Are you on the air still? Engineer, is he still there?
Engineer: I think so. Are you still there, caller? Well, the line's still open. Well, Dr. Pete, what about sprouted grains and sourdough? Does the pre-fermentation help?
Ray Peat: Well, yeah, just the soaking process, activating the enzymes in the dough, even if it's ground and can't sprout, 8 to 12 hours of being moistened allows the enzymes to activate the same process that would happen in sprouting. And so the phytic acid, for example, is broken down into inacidol and phosphate. And gluten is partly broken down, so that if you soak the bread too long, you don't get a light, spongy loaf, you get sort of a crumbly...
Sarah: Cornbread loaf.
Engineer: And our caller, our question and answerer is back. Did you hear the answer to that caller?
Caller: I did not, I'm sorry, but my question was...
Andrew: Oh gosh, we lost him again.
Engineer: I think it's his cell phone, he said he had lost it. I'm sorry, try one more time caller and the lines are open otherwise.
Sarah: So if the caller is listening, Dr. Pete said yes, sprouting and or soaking, specifically soaking the grain for 8 to 12 hours in like a sourdough starter or soaking the grain with the flour with the sourdough starter will help to break down a lot of indigestible toxic plant compounds.
Andrew: OK, well we're probably going to get him calling back and maybe if he was on the cell phone he's not in such good reception.
Ray Peat: And the protein quantity actually increases because the gluten carries so many nitrogen rich amino acids which happen to make it more allergenic. But when the enzymes release the nitrogen from the gluten those nitrogens can be used to make new. Completely different proteins, so you get two to three times more protein substance.
Sarah: So people who are trying to avoid the heavy protein, anti-inflammatory diet, and they're actually getting a lot of grains in their diet, they're getting a lot of phosphorus, like you said, and the same thing as if people eat just a lot of meat and not very many grains, they're getting a lot of phosphorus, so both of those diet spectrums are out of balance as far as calcium and...
Ray Peat: Yeah, and the body can, at least in the short range, it can handle quite an imbalance. Lots of Americans have been growing up on a 7 to 1 phosphate to calcium ratio, where milk is 1.3 to 1 in the other direction. And probably the long range optimum is something like that in milk. Somewhere between a ratio of 1 to 1 up to maybe even 2 to 1 in favor of calcium dephosphate.
Andrew: Okay, good. We have another caller on the line, so let's take this next caller. You're on the air?
Caller: Yes, this is someone else. And since you've brought up raw milk and the FDA, I want to put this out. Recently, a company called Rossum Foods in Southern California......was busted by the FBI and the FDA, and I call them the Fooder Alley. And the concern that I have is that basically, as opposed to bioavailability, the retail availability of getting some of these products that we would like to get, as you indicated, raw milk does have more neutral value to it. I'm curious as to... what we might be able to do to preserve some of our access to these without governmental interference. In fact, I am aware that there is a website dealing with these issues called Farm Food Freedom, and that's F-A-R-M as opposed to the pharmacy version that's sometimes shortened. So it's F-A-R-M Food Freedom. And lately I've been leaving the P off of pharmacy, by the way. F-A-R-M is in profit and pharmacy is in wealth....what they seem to do best, so any response to that I'd appreciate and it kind of speaks for itself but if you want to address that I would appreciate it and thanks for all that you do in making these things known, better understood and available to us.
Andrew: Alright, thank you for your call. Dr. P, so far as the availability of raw milk is concerned, what perhaps would you like to see?
Ray Peat: Oh, well, everyone should have a cow next door.
Andrew: There you go. Okay, but for people in the city...
Ray Peat: Then a goat if you're in the city.
Andrew: A goat on the rooftop.
Ray Peat: My father built a barn when we lived in southern Oregon that looked like a little cottage. The cow lived, ate, got milked in this little house and... It made the neighborhood look more like a residential,
Andrew: not a farm.
Sarah: You were mentioning to us earlier about the pro-pastorization people and what they support is actually coming from the National Institutes of Health and the SAIC, I can't remember what that acronym stands for.
Ray Peat: Well, you have one of the articles warning about... The dangerous estrogen metabolites in milk was done by this partnership of national institutes for health with the Science Applications International Corporation, I think it's called, and they are also effectively a branch of the Homeland Security Agency and......military defense project, internet technology, surveillance technology, and so on.
Engineer: They just featured in a book I'm reading right now by Peter Dale Scott about the politics of heroin smuggling in Southeast Asia, and they're very involved.
Andrew: The SAIC?
Engineer: SAIC, Security, something international consultants, and there's one more caller, and I unfortunately missed how that came up.
Sarah: So basically, Dr. Pete, let me just finish up this subject here. You're saying that these organizations are pro-pastorization because they don't want to see people have their own cow in their backyard?
Ray Peat: I think the motivation is very complex, but I think it's the new wave of what, in the 1930s, was a big campaign nationally against breastfeeding babies. And advocating early feeding of beans and bread and so on. And that is coming back in the ghettos first. They're telling women, if they're Mexican of origin, to wean their babies very early on beans. I think it's motivated by a kind of a class war. Make it cheaper if they're going to keep having food stamps, they don't want people buying fancy food like milk and meat and eggs.
Sarah: Oh my goodness, okay we do have another caller who's been waiting a while here and it's 7 54 so we'll take this last caller. Hello caller you're on the air.
Caller: Hi yes I just had, I just had one brief question. What does phosphorus and calcium affect? On our physiology be more wholesome if the milk were taken in the form of yogurt? I'll take my answer off air.
Ray Peat: You're about the types of yogurt and Sarah mentioned what would you call it?
Sarah: There's a, I've been looking into this yogurt thing because yogurt is essentially the same as milk in the quantities of protein but it has a much much higher lactic acid content which is hard in your liver. And so there's this yogurt called faye yogurt.
Andrew: F-A-G-E.
Sarah: F-A-G-E, fudge or whatever but it says on there Greek strained yogurt and when you make cheese you strain the whey out and out goes the lactic acid and when you make yogurt you retain the lactic acid rich whey normally. Normal American yogurt retains the lactic acid rich whey. So this faye yogurt has 23 grams of protein per cup which means they have to strain out the whey in order to concentrate the casein and the cheese-like protein in the yogurt because they don't have any thickeners in it. And so that's a yogurt that's not tart because most of the whey the lactic acid rich whey has been strained out which makes it tart and actually it's not good to have a tart yogurt and to replace milk with the yogurt. Because of the harmful effect on the liver.
Ray Peat: The lactic acid besides burdening your liver causing a tendency to hypoglycemia from not storing enough glycogen, lactic acid also produces fibrosis, inflammation and even contributes to the cancer metabolism.
Andrew: Okay there's one last caller, see if we can squeeze him in ever so quickly without going over time.
Caller: Okay. Hello? Yeah, you had mentioned serotonin and you usually say it like that the serotonin is bad and I've always heard that serotonin was good because it's like a feel-good hormone and it makes you not depressed. So what is wrong with serotonin?
Ray Peat: Well, if you look at studies of aggression in dogs they treat them with these SSRI drugs and they find that... After a few weeks when their aggression has subsided, their serotonin has gone down. So the drugs that are sold supposedly to raise serotonin, when they work, they might actually be lowering your serotonin. And serotonin is a hormone of withdrawal, anxiety, and suppressing metabolism, lowering your demands. It's kind of an emergency anti-stress hormone that is necessary in context, but when you're chronically stressed, it's what causes stomach ulcers, contributes to fibrosis of every system, scleroderma, for example, hardening of the arteries, osteoporosis, the last couple of years. It's recognized as probably the main immediate contributor to osteoporosis, which is associated with depression and many other conditions, which are actually high serotonin conditions.
Andrew: So we would advise people not to use serotonin.
Sarah: And not to use whey protein powder because it's highly oxidized and the amino acids in whey are mainly tripped fan, which is the precursor. amino acid to make serotonin. Okay. But one other thing I just want to say is the serotonin is, we've just been brainwashed to believe that serotonin is a feel-good hormone because the drug companies wanted to sell us the SSRIs, which don't actually, they don't appear to be raising the serotonin, they appear to be lowering it.
Ray Peat: And those patents are expiring so they'll be coming out with a new kind of antidepressant and so we'll stop hearing so much about this and then we'll have to research that.
Andrew: Thank you so much for joining us again Dr. Pete. I know people really enjoy what it is you have to say and it is an education where many things that we hear we have to hear and re-hear before we recognize that what we're hearing is actually the truth and start changing our habits and our lifestyles. Well for those people who have heard Dr. Pete this time around and who have asked him on the show time and time again asking questions and shooting him questions personally his website is www. raypeat.com plenty of articles scholarly articles referenced as lots of information there that you'd be doing good to look at and take on board okay so until the third Friday of next month you can reach us toll-free on 1-888-WBM-ERB for further questions during normal business hours Monday through Friday until the Harvest Moon month Next month good night to you all
Sarah: good night, thank you for all listening.
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