Andrew: Welcome to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name is Andrew Murray.
Sarah: My name is Sarah Johannesson-Murray.
Andrew 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 where we consult with clients about a wide range of conditions and we manufacture... all our own certified organic herb extracts which are either grown on our CCUF certified herb farm or which are sourced from other USA Organics certified organic suppliers. So you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor, KMU de Garberville 91.1 FM and from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o'clock you're all invited to call in with any questions either related or unrelated to this month's topic, a mixed topic of endotoxin, stress and depression. And how the body is affected physiologically. And we're very pleased to have Dr. Raymond Peat join us on the show this evening. And like I said, from 7.30, or in fact, if people want to call a little earlier than that, if they have pressing questions, yeah, please do phone up. And Dr. Peat's available with his collective wisdom to answer questions on many different subjects, maybe not just pertinent to this evening's discussion on endotoxin and stress. So, Dr. Peaked, thank you for joining us again this evening. Yeah, hi. As always, there's people I'm sure who've just tuned in now who've maybe never heard the show and never heard you, so would you be able to let people know your specific interests and your professional academic background?
Ray Peat: Yeah, I studied biology at the University of Oregon, and my dissertation was on aging of the oxidative... processes in relation to reproduction and how the hormones change with aging and affect the efficiency of oxidative metabolism. And the main hormones that I've studied over the years have related directly to estrogen progesterone. And thyroid and the nutritional and environmental factors that influence those and how all of the minor hormones and signaling substances in the body are interrelated between the environment and those hormones and the respiratory energy production. Okay, thank you for that. So, if people want to call in, the number here is KMUD9233911, the area code 707, and so from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o'clock, people are welcome to call in.
Andrew: Now Dr. P, I know that you have a rather unique view of physiology and biology, which is different somewhat to the scientific, we'll call it the regular scientific because I know you're... Your methodology is very scientific, but the regular biological community and the way that they've done their research or their research has been funded by various organizations has led them to be a little bit inaccurate in their perceptions of how cellular or biological systems are operating. In terms of the body, I think probably what we want to try and go through this evening. Just to reiterate some of the problems associated with the modern diet, modern nutrition, how we've been misled into believing that certain things are good for us, and I know we're going to talk about serotonin this evening. But in terms of what you've been researching, what you found out, what you've applied, will you tell us a little bit about serotonin's effects? I think most people would associate serotonin with something positive and I know that it's not.
Ray Peat: Since about the Second World War, biology has been heavily influenced by several factors. The agricultural industry is interested in promoting certain ideas towards foods. The pharmaceutical industry is promoting a very mechanical reductionist interpretation of health in general based on the idea of receptors and genetic interaction with specific hormones and receptors and drugs. And then there's the government and the military....orientation that has its commitment to certain kinds of psychology and science, promoting, again, the reductionist, anti-holistic, anti-pattern-oriented kind of science.
Sarah: So that's why our agricultural USDA-recommended daily intake of refined carbohydrates or... You know, breads and pastas and those types of foods, it was six to seven servings per day, and that was the bottom of the triangle.
Ray Peat: And you can see that they are actually having their effect. In the last 35 years, the consumption of flour and cereals, pasta and so on, has increased by 3% just as the agriculture department put in their triangle. It should be a fat bottom on the triangle.
Sarah: So the agriculture area has influenced the government's recommended daily intake where if you look at diets from 80 to 100 years ago, the grains were not such a major part of the diet.
Ray Peat: Yeah. And in these last 35 years, cereals and fats have increased. Cereals are up 3%. Fats are up 7%. During that time, meat, eggs and dairy have decreased 3% and added sugar has even decreased 1% in these 35 years. Many people think that nutrition research should be exploratory, looking for new ways that foods interact with the newly discovered. Biological possibilities, the financing is heavily towards industrial food products as nutrients rather than exploring, for example, the thousands of fruits and vegetables that grow in the tropics.
Sarah: Our country doesn't grow those, so therefore we shouldn't eat them.
Ray Peat: Yes, that happens with the coconut oil industry. It was used widely in products, Oreo cookies and fried foods and so on, from about the 1850s on. When the soy oil got tired of competition, they put out tremendous propaganda, starting 20 years ago, saying that the tropical oils were poisonous. What they did was increase the consumption of their unsaturated fats.
Sarah: And now heart disease and high cholesterol
Ray Peat: and obesity related to high blood pressure, cancer and dementia.
Sarah: And diabetes have all been on the increase.
Ray Peat: Yeah, and these are known to be increased by unsaturated fats and cereals and starches. Exactly the things the government has promoted.
Sarah: Well, hopefully a lot of our listeners don't listen to what the government promotes around here anyways.
Andrew I think they don't. Okay, well, getting back to serotonin, Dr. P, like I said, I think most people think mistakenly that serotonin is good for you and they said people that constantly in the past asked us about serotonin and that it could be good for sleep and good for this and good for that and what's the truth behind serotonin so people can realize what they've been doing or what they need to stop?
Ray Peat: Well, an example of how confused the......promotion has been is that one of the major antidepressants that's called a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor that supposedly acts by increasing serotonin, they knew that it was a good effective treatment for vicious dogs and they said that that's because it increases their serotonin, but people studying the dogs after a month of treatment with this... SSRI found that, in fact, they were less vicious and their serotonin had gone down significantly.
Sarah: So it didn't increase their serotonin, it actually decreased their serotonin.
Ray Peat: Yeah, I think the antidepressants that work are actually, in the long run, shifting the balance away from serotonin.
Sarah: But it doesn't matter now because the perception is out that serotonin is the good guy and you take these antidepressants and it increases the good guy. And you feel better.
Ray Peat: Yeah. Over the last 40 years there have been many papers published showing that starting back with the LSD research they saw that LSD counteracted the effects of serotonin on smooth muscle and then finally they showed an antagonistic effect of where it inhibits the serotonin. Nerves in the brain, so every place that they checked its function as an actual antidote to serotonin, it was opposing serotonin and was improving functions such as learning ability, many physical symptoms, anti-tumor and anti-inflammatory, many good health functions. Because of the government campaign against LSD-type drugs, the drug companies came out with some modified forms of lysergic acid such as bromocriptine and lysuride and some anti-serotonin drugs that were known to lower serotonin, but they advertised them as pro-dopamine....drugs rather than anti-serotonin or even anti-histamine in the case of one, which was really primarily an anti-serotonin drug, but they took advantage of the government campaign against the anti-serotonin drugs to say that the psychedelic drugs made people insane and......so that they started promoting the idea that their drugs would make people sane and happy by increasing serotonin.
Sarah: So that's how it began.
Andrew I know you've mentioned, and if you could just explain a little bit again to our listeners, I know you've mentioned the fact that serotonin primarily is produced in the bowel.
Ray Peat: Yeah, it's a defensive chemical everywhere. It's one of the primitives. Protective reactions, for example, in the bowel, it causes spasms that clean out the bowel when you eat something poisonous. And so it causes diarrhea and that's protective. But in the process, if it keeps up too long, it increases the serotonin, 95% of it being produced in the bowel. 3, 4, 5% in other organs such as the brain. If the irritation of the bowel keeps up very long, the circulation in the bloodstream becomes a problem systemically and it will cause vascular spasms, vascular leakiness, inflammation. For example, when you have... prolonged irritation of the intestine, tumors begin to promote serotonin release, starting mainly in the appendix. Lower part of the bowel is where it's most likely to be overproduced and that systemic effect hits the right side of the heart primarily and then the reason it is worse... for the right side of the heart it is that the lungs have the enzymes that destroy serotonin so the platelets pick it up from the intestine in the bloodstream and carry it to the lungs where if they're working they can pretty much destroy all of the serotonin arriving in the lungs
Andrew okay but the right side not
Ray Peat: yeah if the lungs fail to detoxify it then the the whole body can be affected but the right side is where it goes first and it's pumped from the right side into the lungs so the right side gets it in its crude form and then the rest of the body if your lungs are are efficient the rest of the body has a much lower level
Sarah: so what symptoms would somebody experience if they do have elevated serotonin leaking from their intestines and then going and acting on the right side of the heart before the lungs inactivated it.
Ray Peat: Fibrous deterioration of the valves on the right side of the lungs and ultimately pulmonary artery hypertension and surprisingly the lung has some processes that seem... the opposite of what we usually think of for antioxidants. Peroxide formed in the lungs by basically what seems to be a toxic oxygen reaction. Peroxide helps to destroy the serotonin in the lungs, so it has a very specific use of free radicals. And that seems to be how... Negatively ionized air helps to relieve asthma and many physiological problems and improves mood because it helps to destroy serotonin in the lungs.
Andrew Okay, so pulmonary artery hypertension, that's one of the side effects then of increased serotonin.
Ray Peat: Yeah, that's where it got its name is from toning up. The circulatory system.
Andrew Yeah. Huh. Okay.
Sarah: Well, we want to talk about different foods and things you can do to try to decrease the bowel's production of serotonin, but... Okay.
Andrew Well, you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMUD Galvaville 91.1 FM. And from any time really from now until the end of the show at eight o'clock, people are encouraged to call him. Any questions they may have, Dr. Raymond Peets is with us today and he's talking about serotonin. Dietary changes, endotoxin production and stress and how the medical establishment perhaps have had research done that's skewed, if you like, to mention the word skewed in the direction of the funding party. So the number here if you live in the area is 923 3911 or if you live outside the number here it's 1800 KMUD RAD.
Okay so Dr. P you were mentioning the effects of serotonin and specifically you mentioned the pulmonary artery hypertension. So uh once one okay so if a patient had asthma or client had asthma and constipation say or um or diarrhea or rather
Ray Peat: your durable notable bowel syndrome is a typical high estrogen high serotonin problem.
Andrew Have there been any uh any conditions associated with uh the pulmonary side that would normally not be present in a healthy what's a healthy person but somebody who had a good oxidative metabolism and their lungs were deactivating serotonin would would there are any pulmonary changes that might happen in patients?
Ray Peat: Yeah the best established are the asthma symptoms and the pulmonary artery hypertension but I think uh probably the emphysema category. Where you get thickening of the diffusion pathway between the membrane cells on the surface between the lung sacs and the capillaries. Lactic acid and serotonin are closely connected. One increases the other. And it's known that high lactic acid from too much exercise causes... Many athletes to chronically have an increased pathway for diffusion so that their blood leaves the lungs less perfectly oxygenated than a person with lower serotonin and lactate.
Sarah: So and also with asthmatics, it's very common that if they can remove the food that they're allergic to or that's irritating their intestine......then their asthma goes away.
Ray Peat: Yeah, yeah, that's the direct effect of the serotonin on the contraction of the smooth muscles in the bronchial tubes. That seems to be where the negatively ionized air can immediately help by destroying the serotonin faster.
Andrew I read in an article here that in the olden days... bring the question up a little bit about purgatives because that's always been something in herbal medicine. ...From the very beginning of herbal medicine in Greece, the administration of purgatives was very important and so to basically unstop people with constipation was looked at as a prime importance in treating inflammatory disorders. I know that you've quoted that the inflammation of the bowel used to be a pretty well recorded and quite frequently as a cause of death in older people but it's seldom referred to now if it if at all um and so in terms of serotonin that would have that would have a bearing with that inflammatory bowel uh situation on autopsy or
Ray Peat: oh yeah um when i worked in the hamster lab we saw that the old animals practically always when they seem to be dying of old age we're having a bowel inflammation and i looked up a lot of 19th century cases and it was a very popular diagnosis of death at that time right
Sarah: well and it's also interesting in our herbal pharmacopoeias you know i'd say definitely over 50 percent of the herbs that have been traditionally used and you know passed down and the information on what conditions use them for are Either laxatives or purgatives or collagogs that work on the liver Or just herbs that help to restore normal bowel function a lot of the herbs that are in the pharmacopoeias are purgatives are Directed at the bowel and treating that and that was you know Traditionally a very very important place because that's where we interact with our environment
Andrew So how important do you see bowel health to general systemic health?
Ray Peat: Um Probably it's the central thing that everyone should think about more because it the connection can be traced pretty directly to Alzheimer's disease and other dementias and liver disease heart disease arthritis they've known for many years that various types of arthritis are alleviated by prolonged fasting because of the relief of the inflammation in the intestine when a person just stops eating for a while. But the laxatives and purgatives are really the more practical ongoing way to prevent that chronic inflammation. Starches and indigestible fibers have been tested on various animals from horses to... to rats and the practically all of the fibers that are used as food additives carotene and guar gum various other gums oat bran and even some of the semi-synthetic things metamucil and agar and psyllium all have been identified as carcinogens for the intestine and possibly other organs and getting those out quickly before they support bacterial growth
Sarah: and ferment
Ray Peat: yeah the fermented bacteria are known to increase the serotonin and lactic acid production
Sarah: and endotoxin that
Ray Peat: yeah we mentioned there's a back-and-forth increase of endotoxin by the serotonin and vice versa
Sarah: and just for our listeners endotoxin is something that bacteria produce in response to digesting these indigestible fermentable starches
Ray Peat: yeah and all of these both serotonin and endotoxin increase other factors such as carbon monoxide surprisingly that's another of our short-term primitive defensive systems is the oxidation of the heme molecule and that releases carbon monoxide that is protective in some ways in the short term but in the long range it's known to be closely associated with Alzheimer's disease, cancer, brain injury, many kinds of tissue injury and it activates the conversion of polyunsaturated fats to the inflammatory prostaglandins and all of these tend to release more of the pre-fatty acid so it becomes a vicious circle of starch, serotonin, endotoxin and so on.
Andrew What would you have to say about the, oh gosh, people talk about dietary fiber, what's your... what's your take on dietary fiber and what is important?
Ray Peat: um, the two that I have run across in the literature and experimentation are raw carrots and cooked bamboo shoots.
Andrew okay, and these don't support bad bacteria, because it's all about bad bacteria?
Ray Peat: yeah, they are antiseptic or antibiotic in themselves, they, you can store them. For a surprisingly long time, more other vegetables tend to rot if you store them in a wet condition, but carrots are used to living in moist soil and so they can kill the fungus and bacteria.
Sarah: And just as a side note, with hand towels, you know, in the kitchen that you dry your hands on, they make these bamboo fiber towels. Everybody knows that if you have a cotton towel after one day of it getting used pretty much all day long, it doesn't smell too nice by the next day. I guess it's because it's supporting bacterial growth, but the bamboo towels, it's amazing. They don't tend to smell as bad the next day.
Ray Peat: Yeah, I don't think all of the chemicals have been identified. It's partly that their cellulose is... very resistant to bacterial breakdown in itself, but it doesn't have things like pectin, which pectin does support some of the bad bacterial growth and fermentation, and the so-called soluble fibers in beans and other legumes support bacterial and toxin production.
Andrew ...Both the medical industry and the agricultural industry has been so keen to push dietary fiber down the necks of people, in terms of all those dietary fibers that we talk about that we're telling people that really they should be avoiding.
Sarah: When traditionally we ate a very low fiber diet from, I mean a low fiber diet from grains, I mean we would have eaten our fruits and vegetables, but...
Ray Peat: The fibers like the acacia and guar gum and... These things are very convenient for food processing. Carrageenan is now very widely used. They can increase the weight of meat by as much as 30% by injecting this water-retaining gum. And it's used instead of cream for making ice cream. So it has a very long shelf life for if you used a good... cream or coconut oil, you could get a very fine texture that would last a long time. But it's just a matter of the cheapness of carotene and these other gums.
Sarah: So just to cover some of the other starches, traditionally we would have eaten potatoes and South America ate a lot of masa, which has been partially digested. So what can we do, Dr. Pete, with... the grains are, if thinking about trout tradition, has eaten starches and coped with it.
Ray Peat: Dennis Burkett, who sort of started the fiber fad about 30 years ago, when he discovered that Africans didn't have a very high incidence of bowel and liver cancer, and that they tended to have three bowel movements per day, where Americans are more likely to have one or fewer. And he said that he thought fiber prevented the retention of the carcinogenic toxins. But he was talking primarily about potatoes. And when he came to the U.S. and saw that people were interpreting it as oat fiber, oat bran, and various other grain fibers, a few people outside the U.S. did research showing that, in fact, those increased cancer incidence.
Sarah: So if someone were to eat, you know, root vegetables and boil them very, very well, this helps to break down the starch so it doesn't provide very much food for the bacteria. And saturated fats such as coconut oil and butter put on the starches helps to inhibit the growth of the bacteria. So mashed potatoes with lots of coconut oil and some butter for flavor or if you need to gain weight, lots of butter.
Ray Peat: Yeah, and it happens that phosphate which you get in the grains, this might really be a part of why the fiber is carcinogenic from grains because seeds and grains and nuts are so rich in phosphorus and phosphate stimulates the breakdown of these....soluble or indigestible fibers by bacteria and calcium blocks that phospholysis of the fibers by bacteria and so a high calcium, low phosphate diet goes with saturated fats in suppressing the toxic effects of the starches.
Sarah: And what about fermenting grains, you know, like traditional sour bread, sourdough bread?
Ray Peat: Yeah, that digests, the longer it digests, the more it turns into a sprout. And the sprout is basically a little sugar and mostly proteins and water where the starch is mostly indigestible proteins and starches with a high phosphate content.
Andrew While we're talking about phosphorus and calcium, I was looking on the web today, doing a little bit of preparation for today and I couldn't believe an article written by a research, no not a research professor, they were a medical doctor but they were specialising in a certain area and they seemed to have an air of credibility about them but they were really putting down the need for calcium and also reducing the need or the international units for vitamin D. I think they were only quoting about 400 IU or 400 to 600 IU for vitamin D when I know we've heard and you've mentioned 2 to 4 to 6,000 IUs of vitamin D and the calcium intake they were trying to say that actually more is not better when I think most people's intake of calcium is fairly low given the traditional sources and I know that you would defend. The increase in dietary calcium is being very pro or anti-inflammatory being very very quelling.
Ray Peat: Yeah I was thinking about the diet traditionally of the Maasai and related tribes in the high altitudes of Africa and they at least for half the year when the cows are producing milk often drink oh five to ten. liters of milk a day it isn't exceptional and so they're getting 5,000 milligrams of calcium and more very often and they don't suffer from usual degenerative diseases.
Andrew I think this doctor sorry to interrupt me I think this doctor was talking about all the problems of calcification of you know it's higher when you have a high calcium diet and then the chances of getting calcified. You know arteries etc.
Ray Peat: Well that's something way back in 1940s and 50s. Adele Davis reviewed it in her books that doctors consistently get it wrong. They think mechanically that if you eat more calcium you're going to calcify your kidneys and arteries and it's been known very consistently for 60 years roughly that. When you're low in calcium and or vitamin D or vitamin K your parathyroid hormone increases and it helps to increase it from any food calcium that's in your intestine but when that isn't adequate the parathyroid hormone it's increased by high phosphate but it takes calcium out of the bones to balance the phosphate. And puts it into the arteries and kidneys and so the surest way to guarantee calcification of your brain and heart and arteries and kidneys is to have a high phosphate, low calcium, low vitamin K and vitamin D diet.
Sarah: Perhaps that study was funded by the producers of Fosamax. Those other guys, because they know that if people aren't getting their calcium and vitamin D adequate levels, that they will have more bone disease and heart disease.
Andrew And some of the biggest, we have a caller on the line, but very quickly, some of the biggest source of dietary phosphorus is beans, legumes, isn't it? Beans and peas? Yeah.
Andrew Yeah. Okay, so we have a caller on the line, so you're on the air?
Caller: Hi, yes, and for just that reason, I've always just chosen beans. Intake in moderation because what kills you one week is the fountain of youth the next week it seems from these studies, so it seems that Having a little bit of everything and not too much to anything There's probably the best answer and of course food pyramids I've never eaten one the closest thing to that maybe is a tortilla chip with that shape that I always chewed it up first Because that shapes hard to swallow My questions are about serotonin. I always learn a lot from you. Dr. Pete I was always under the impression that serotonin was mainly a brain chemical, but since you mentioned its effect on the digestive system, I'm wondering what the interaction of melatonin would be in comparison to serotonin. Also, is alcohol considered an endotoxin, and what foods may actually cause alcohol to be created within the gut? I've heard that people can actually- get somewhat intoxicated from alcohol by eating certain foods which ferment within the gut. Especially good to know since there's a DUI checkpoint in Humboldt County somewhere this weekend. And I'll take your response off the air. Thanks for the program.
Andrew Thank you, Phil. Cool. Okay, so what part of the question do you want to go for?
Ray Peat: If a person has very sluggish digestion, it's- Only happens occasionally, but yeast can grow so freely if the intestine is sluggish and the membrane cells are weak that the overgrowth of yeast can turn sugars into alcohol and some people stay drunk all the time when they have yeast that- are able to live in the upper part of the intestine or even in the stomach.
Sarah: So then would those people if they drank alcohol would they feel even more drunk more quickly?
Ray Peat: Yeah.
Sarah: Do they already have a baseline level?
Ray Peat: Yeah and that tends to increase the carbon monoxide that's the the toxic part of it the alcohol itself in those small amounts chronically they might be mildly drunk but that isn't. Probably as harmful as the fact that carbon monoxide is increased by the alcohol. That's one of the problems with drinking any sort of alcohol chronically. It tends to push up carbon monoxide production. One of the problems with carbon monoxide besides blocking oxidative metabolism just like when you're poisoned by external carbon monoxide. The enzyme that makes the carbon monoxide releases iron and iron deposits in the brain and liver and other places with a toxic effect.
Sarah: And arteries.
Andrew Yeah. So how about the connection between serotonin and melatonin? I know you asked that as his first question.
Ray Peat: It's clear for a long time that the pineal gland is converting serotonin....to melatonin and it's activated by adrenaline during stress and so it's generally seen to have this reaction to adrenaline and it has opposite effects from serotonin so I think of it even in the brain as a detoxifying system against serotonin and......people studying rheumatoid arthritis and heart disease see the same and I think breast cancer was another area where you see the enzyme that is able to convert serotonin into melatonin so it's probably defensive against these inflammatory......carcinogenic and degenerative effects of serotonin.
Andrew Yeah, would you consider that it would be useful to supplement with melatonin?
Ray Peat: Um, I think it has its anti-inflammatory effects but I think it's much better to work at the other end. Yeah. Especially......unnecessary by reducing your cryptophane intake, for example, and reducing the starches and......inflammation producing things.
Andrew Okay, good.
Sarah: And anything that irritates the intestine is going to cause the intestine to produce more serotonin as well.
Caller: Yeah, including unsaturated fatty acids. Which are all the vegetable oils. I know we have another two colors on the line, so...
Engineer: Actually, one of them was me. I was going to ask, when you get your stomach all in knots from either love or fear or stress or whatever, is there serotonin being released or what's the biochemical basis of that if you knew?
Ray Peat: In what?
Sarah: Our programmer here said that when you're in love or you're really stressed and your stomach gets tied in knots, is serotonin involved in tying your stomach in knots or is it adrenaline?
Ray Peat: Under some conditions, yeah. It's the thing that causes stress ulcers. The main thing, I think, that causes stress ulcers like the immobilized rats. Experimentally, we'll quickly get intestinal bleeding and stomach ulcers. And if they're allowed to defend themselves in some way, even though they're still restrained, they can block that stress reaction and lower the serotonin.
Sarah: And the way they were able to defend themselves was biting on a stick.
Andrew Interesting experiment, because it's a very good illustration of that ability to defend yourself.
Ray Peat: I think of that as analogous to the two types of muscle exercise, the concentric so-called exercise where you're basically walking uphill and shortening the muscles under force, and eccentric where your muscles are stretching against the attempt to contract them, like walking downhill that makes your muscles sore. And I think of the... ability to bite the stick as the same as doing concentric exercise. They've shown that old people with very damaged mitochondria in their muscles have two or three weeks of doing concentric exercises, only shortening the muscles under resistance, that they can repair or create new functional mitochondria in their muscles. And I think that same sort of thing happens in the nervous system when you can do something protective or constructive.
Andrew Now, I wonder, just on a side note, would the anabolic exercise of perhaps curling dumbbells, I mean, that would be a concentric...
Ray Peat: Yeah, yeah, mostly.
Andrew Yeah, so other weight lifting exercises when you're stationary.
Ray Peat: Yeah the machines that they have machines that will let you put force while shortening your muscles and then let you relax as the arm or leg goes back into position.
Andrew Yeah because these don't destroy the muscle fibers so much as the eccentric. Okay there's I think there's two more callers on the line so let's take the next caller.
Caller: Oh hello is that me? Yes John yeah. Hello.
Andrew Hello.
Caller: Hi is that me?
Sarah: Yes you're on the air.
Caller: Okay I was driving so I couldn't call when you were talking about wheat and people you know having so much refined grains and so on. I'm an old guy and I was on the farm in the 30s and 40s and the wheat that were grown then well the wheat that's grown now by big agribusiness. Since World War II, particularly in the 70s, 80s and 90s, has almost 90% more gluten, which is a lectin, and that's one of the problems because you go to the restaurants and stores and they got gluten-free this and gluten-free that, you know, for bread and all, but the reason is, back in Grandpa's day, we didn't have so much problem with gluten because the grains, they've been breeding to have more gluten in the grains. At one point, I worked for General Mills in Minneapolis and I learned a lot about it from that point of view. It makes the breads and the pizza dough and all that stick together better, but I think the doctor knows what I mean when I'm talking about the lectins or lectins. Which are a plant protein, which protect the plant, the seed of the plant. They're a sticky protein and make up part of the plant's natural immune system. But when you have a high amount of these lectins, and they're in a lot of the foods, not just wheat, but all sorts of stuff, beans, dairy, eggs, and when you eat these lectin-containing foods, your body can't digest or eliminate those proteins. You see, in the plant world, they protect these lectins to protect the plant from harm. For instance, a pumpkin seed is surrounded by these sticky proteins, these lectins, and they fight off enemy invaders, mold, parasites, and so on. But when they get in your body, they don't know they're in your body, and they travel through your digestive tract, get into your bloodstream, and they're looking for a fight. Because by nature, they're designed to attach themselves to sugar molecules.
Sarah: That's plant-defensive.
Caller: They were former plant protectors and now they're in your body and they're raising a lot of problems. Because you've got sugar molecules that are healthy in yourself and your digestive tract and everything and they're attacking that. And that's why there's so much problem with people having digestive problems and they're allergic to the modern agribusiness wheat.
Ray Peat: And the plants are forested by agricultural chemicals and...
Caller: Well, there's that too and stuff, unless you can get some organic grains. But anyway, these... there is a way, there are... you can... I'm taking something which contains sacrificial sugars, which are decoys that attach to the lictants. And so you're cellular sugars are protected and that's working out for me. I just came onto that this last year and I don't, I'm not having the inflammation and problems in my digestive system that I used to have. I wondered if the doctor could address that a little more articulately than I can.
Ray Peat: Yeah, there are a lot of defensive chemicals, many different kinds. For example, bananas are extremely allergenic, probably because of their intensive production in poor soils that they're overproducing according to the plant's own preference, and so the plant produces more defensive chemicals, and even the polyunsaturated fats in seeds are known to have a specific effect against digestive enzymes, and add to the absorption of the lectins and more specific immune-disrupting chemicals. But ordinary sugars, sucrose, for example, has a tremendously protective effect in resisting all of these. Inflammation-producing factors, from polyunsaturated fats to the allergens and gluten-type chemicals, the fructose catalyzes the ability to use glucose efficiently, and so sucrose is better than even well-cooked starch at protecting the immune system from these. irritants and toxins.
Sarah: So, are you still there, Caller? Okay, so I hope that answered his question. I think he's taking a supplement of some type of sugar that is sacrificial sugar, isn't it? Yeah, that's helping to block the lectin, so I guess that explains that.
Engineer: And we did have a caller who called in to say that swing sets for adults were their their health tip for the evening.
Sarah: Yes, it was stressed going back to
Andrew yeah, that's a good point the stress of
Sarah: a way to block stress and how that affects your health So positively
Andrew was at the end of the callers. Okay fine. Talk to Pete stress That's another that's probably a good point to pick up on in terms of what stress does to people Physiologically, would you would you let people know how it's affecting them badly people always talk about stress being bad for you But there's a very good reason
Ray Peat: Yeah, the only mistake that I think Hans Selye made in all of his work on stress, he in some places talked about a limited ability to adapt to stress because we are born with a certain amount of adaptive energy or stress resistant energy but I don't think there is such a thing as adaptive energy, I think it's such things as... sugar, sucrose and fructose which let us deal with these menacing things such as serotonin, starches, indigestible fibers, various plant irritants. The sugars are directly oxidized to energy and inhibit the interfering substances such as oxidizing....unsaturated fats and I think what the equivalent of a lack of adaptive energy that Cellyi proposed, I think what it is is that we have such a bad environment to adapt to that we get worse as we adapt to bad things such as polyunsaturated fats and chronic excess of... serotonin defending us against those chronic irritants, so I think these immediate adaptive substances that in the short range protect us when we have to keep adapting with these short range measures that, for example, serotonin increases collagen production. Leads progressively to fibrosis of blood vessels, liver, kidneys, even the brain develops collagen under excessive stress and serotonin and so the too much adaptation to a bad environment I think is what causes aging and degeneration rather than the lack of this hypothetical adaptive energy.
Sarah: So the immediate response of serotonin to give somebody when they're stressed, either constipation or diarrhea, well, that's one way of short term possibly helping if it's helping clean out the bowel with diarrhea. But in the long range, a constant exposure to the stress is what causes all these degenerative diseases you just mentioned.
Ray Peat: Yeah, and a high calcium diet and plenty of sugar. And reducing those things that support bacterial growth will keep your thyroid working and keep your carbon dioxide up. Carbon dioxide keeps the serotonin bound and out of trouble. And so when you're stressed and make lactic acid, that displaces the carbon dioxide and activates the release of serotonin.
Sarah: And when you're stressed, you hyperventilate more easily and then you blow off more CO2 so you even have less protection.
Andrew: Okay, I know, I know, I don't mean to cut you short, Dr. P. I know there's one more caller who wants to get his question in. And I know we've got six, five and a half minutes here before we're off the air and I want to make sure that I get enough time to let people know where they can find out more information about you. So let's take the next caller and let's try to keep this down to about three and a half. Minutes or four minutes at the most. You're on the air?
Caller: Hello. Yeah, you know, I've uh... my first depression hit in nineteen sixty four and uh... I didn't know anything about depression back then. They put me on Helleville which didn't do a thing. And then we tried mega vitamin therapy and that did nothing either. And this happened six months after I took some very potent Sandus LSD. And a lot of it was just the shock of realizing that everything in my life was false. And subsequently I went through a divorce and terminated my employment, split up with my family. A lot of trauma. And if people haven't experienced a major depression, they just can't understand. I'm balanced now. I'm taking the vaccine. And that presents problems because I have prostatitis....takes the prostate, so I'm also taking, oh, I think it's an alpha blocker that helps deal with that. The biggest, I'm going to try to make it fast, the biggest problem dealing with depression is the whole stigma of it. It's like, I've noticed not very many people have called up and expressed what they're going through with depression and it's got to change because it is just rampant. It's, it's, a lot of it's stress induced. So I know that mine... used to be called chemical depression, and now it's called reactive depression. And all the chemists, chemicals you're talking about, you know, I deal with those. One of the things I really wanted to throw out there was childhood, early childhood trauma. And one of the things I went through was, I took these, they're called gas treatments. You probably haven't heard of them. And they need to be brought back again. And what you do, you'll get the value of it. But it starts off breathing some nitrous oxide enough to put you into a bit of a hypnotic state, and I don't think the doctor realized the full implications of what was going on. But then they'd switch it to a mixture of oxygen and carbon dioxide. So that would kick off the medulla thinking you're suffocating and you would hyperventilate. You would not only hyperventilate a lot of carbon dioxide, but a lot of oxygen. And I gotta tell you, it would take you out there. It was a real trip, a trip to hell for me.
Andrew: You need to bring your question to a very closed point, because we need to..
Caller: Okay, okay. Yeah, well, balance is everything. And I think that a lot of that comes through sharing. And I've been in therapy for years, and I'm very happy with myself. So I'm just going to hang up and listen to what... I've had a heart attack, you have to put yours right into it. And...
Andrew: OK, we're going to have to leave it there, I'm afraid, because we just don't have enough time. It's 7.57. We've got a couple of minutes to hear from Dr Pete and also to give out his information. So, Dr Pete, thank you again very much for joining us this evening. I don't think we've even got time to ask you for your views on that last caller. I'm afraid that was probably a little bit too broad a subject to wrap up in a couple of minutes. But for those people that have been listening to Dr. Pete this evening, he can be found at www.raypete.com. On his website there's a lot of research information and articles. And that's spelled r-a-y-p-e-a-t.com. Dot com. And you can also contact us during business hours Monday through Friday at 1888 WBM Europe. We can be reached and obviously can consult via Dr. Pete. So, Dr. Pete, thank you so much for joining us again.
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