Andrew: My name is Andrew Murray.
Sarah: My name is Sarah-Johanneson Murray.
Andrew: For those of you who perhaps have never listened to our shows, which run every third Friday of the month from seven to eight p.m., we're both licensed medical herbalists who trained in England and graduated there with a degree in herbal medicine. We run a clinic in Garbleville where we consult with clients about a wide range of conditions and we recommend herbal medicine and dietary advice. This month we wanted to continue exploring the positive role that sugar has to play in the diet and why good sugars are essential for good health. It seems that many things we're told are bad for us are actually beneficial and we need to see the facts and the research that's out there. So with an ever increasing worldwide prevalence of so-called diagnosed diabetes, what is it about sugar that we can defend? We're excited to have Dr. Ray Peat with us again this month and we'll be......hearing from him on scientific research-based facts. So you're listening to Ask Your Ep Doctor on KMUD Galvaville 91.1 FM and from 7.30 till 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 dietary sugars and the protection they offer. 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. So, Dr. P, thank you for joining us again.
Ray Peat: Hi.
OK, well, as always, I think there's new listeners, people that perhaps have never heard you speak, so would you please just introduce yourself and your academics slash professional background?
Ray Peat: Oh, I've been writing a newsletter on health issues for about 30 years and I started that about eight years after... finishing my PhD research at the University of Oregon. Part of the reason for starting my own newsletter was seeing that the journals, science journals, are very doctrinaire and influenced by industry. So, since doing my study at the University of Oregon, I've been reading lots and......experimenting some on my own.
Andrew: Okay, alright, thank you. I know that you've published many articles and your specialisms are hormones, pregnenolone, estrogen, protective hormones, the things that we normally would confer some protection to people from aging and free radical damage, etc. But your other specialties are thyroid and polyunsaturated fats and I know you've done a lot of research on that. The sugar issue again I know we were joined you joined us rather sorry last month and we got some of the way through expanding on why sugars are good for you because as you mentioned earlier in your introduction the common indoctrination is that sugars are bad for you just like salt is bad for you just like saturated fats are bad for you and that is the doctrine it seems that and I'm finding out as time goes by. For me, because I'm not, I'm not that old, that actually a lot of the things that I was taught when I studied at university are actually not true. Unfortunately, some of the basic facts that underlie the physiology were also in error. And that's I've had to kind of retrain my brain to think a new so for those people that are listening now and some of those people will be diagnosed as diabetic. Some of those people will be diagnosed as hypothyroid or hyperthyroid. So for those people that are listening, in terms of sugar and the way it's been bad pressed in the last 20 years or so, and they would have us eat less sugar.
Ray Peat: Well, that actually started about 200 years ago anyway.
Andrew: Okay, chip hunter, there you go. Okay, good. All right, well that's a good start.
Sarah: So what's the history behind why we started being told that sugar was bad for us 200 years ago?
Ray Peat: At that time, they had defined... diabetes as the sugar disease because they discovered glucose in the urine and the mechanically thinking doctors said that if you don't put glucose in, it can't come out, but in fact, the glucose was being produced by dissolving the protein in the person's body and it turned out that the worst thing you can do is to starve them first. Sugar, because that accelerates the breakdown of both protein and fat. Two doctors, at least, in the 19th century, went against that conventional opinion and started giving their patients the amount of sugar extra in their diet that they were losing in the urine, figuring that they would die more slowly from diabetes. They found that they actually recovered very quickly and that curative effect of large amounts of sugar have been fairly recently demonstrated in animal experiments and in vitro experiments in which sugar stimulates the regeneration of pancreatic insulin producing cells.
Andrew: OK, so a basic question then, do humans need sugar?
Ray Peat: And yes, monkeys for example, who normally live on fruit, they've found that when fruit is scarce, they develop very high cortisol levels and that is something that pretty much happens in any animal individually....has a mixed diet containing carbohydrates. Some animals like reptiles can get along nicely on a protein diet and we can turn protein into sugar too, sugar and fat, but it happens that one of the effects of the sugar is to inhibit the cortisol which turns... protein nd the sugar so we have a spare protein don't have to eat so much of it and that has some beneficial effect the cortisol has many side effects other than breaking down the tissue proteins at the same time that it helps to digest protein foods and it changes the whole arrangement of......the way that metabolism works, so it's better if we can minimize cortisol. And the sugars also inhibit the chronic release of free fatty acids from storage, so that our body, our brain in particular, and some tissues such as the red blood cells, strongly prefer sugars over fats. and function better, and when we get enough sugar, we inhibit the release of fats from storage and allow these tissues to have all the sugar they need.
Sarah: So it's basically a backup mechanism. When you don't eat sugar, your body will get the sugar from your protein, your muscles, your bones, your brain. Well, not only your... The cortisol is stimulated, dissolves, can dissolve various organs that will then release different free fatty acids and or proteins that the body will convert into sugar. So that's a less preferable backup mechanism. Is that what you're trying to describe, Dr. Pete?
Ray Peat: Yeah, and the famous Arctic explorer, I forget his name, Bill Yalmer. Something reported that people that he knew their ages approximately seemed to be many years older by appearance than they really were and he didn't exactly know what the cause of that was but they were eating a mostly fattened meat diet. Fattened people. I try to lose weight by fasting. What happens is for a day or so their cortisol is still high and their metabolic rate is fairly high and so what they're living on temporarily is a meat diet as they dissolve themselves their muscles and fat. The thymus gland is one of the first to be dissolved and since we would eat ourselves up in just two or three weeks if we kept eating at the same rate our metabolic rate slows down drastically under the influence of these free amino acids liberated from our tissues and those turn the thyroid hormone off. The falling blood sugar and the rising free amino acids and nd free fatty acids all of these turn our metabolic rate down and then we can get along on a very low calorie intake but it slows down reproductive function, brain function, everything.
Sarah: So basically fasting is the worst thing you can do if you're trying to lose weight.
Ray Peat: Yeah or pretty much anything because fasting turns off the liver's ability to detoxify things. So you're exposing yourself to increased toxins rather than decreased. The only thing that benefits is the intestine from not putting bad stuff into it.
Sarah: It gives the intestine a break but in the meantime you harm your liver and other organs.
Andrew: Okay, so in terms of sugar as a quantity to consume, I've heard that you've said I think before 170 to 250 grams of sugar per day, is that correct?
Ray Peat: Yeah, I think for a person of normal activity and eating mixed foods, that's...
Sarah: So, let's just discuss some of these sugars and which ones... are good sugars, and which ones are bad sugars?
Ray Peat: Lactose has a lot of special properties. So, it's a very good sugar. It's somewhat slowly absorbed, but it stimulates digestion. So, it's something that people often overlook as a sugar. It helps with the calcium metabolism, absorbing the other nutrients in milk. Sucrose consists of one unit of glucose and one of fructose. And that is fairly quickly broken into the components when we eat it. And the glucose stimulates insulin. And when they're eaten together, fructose, besides not itself stimulating insulin, it actually... slightly inhibits the release of insulin. So if you ate pure glucose, you would get a stronger insulin reaction. And in most situations, if you eat slightly faster than you're metabolizing, a surge of excess glucose is going to turn on your fat metabolism. And so when you take sucrose with a little bit of... the fructose component, it will moderate the secretion of insulin and the production of fat deposed.
Sarah: Okay, because if something stimulates insulin, if a sugar stimulates insulin production, then your liver is not happy and you store that sugar as fat. So we want to be eating the types of sugars that don't strongly stimulate insulin so we can use the sugar in our liver and stimulate metabolism.
Ray Peat: And surprisingly, the fructose, besides moderating the production of fat, which can lead to stress and so on, it does many other things. It raises your temperature by a variety of mechanisms, which all by itself will increase your metabolic rate and it increases your consumption conversion to energy. of carbohydrate by about 20% and it'll do that even in a fairly small amount but with sucrose you have a 50-50 ratio and it activates several components of the thyroid system better than glucose even. Glucose is pretty essential for keeping the thyroid functioning. Optimally, but fructose does some extra things that cause it to raise your temperature and metabolic rate more than glucose alone would.
Sarah: So the foods that these sugars are found in are fruits primarily?
Ray Peat: Mostly fruits. Mostly fruits and honey and white sugar also have a little bit of fructose in them as well.
Ray Peat: Yeah.
Sarah: So then when you're looking at the glycemic index, Dr. Pete, how would you describe this to people who are familiar diabetics looking at the glycemic indexes? How would you describe why they should eat fruits and honey and stay away from any kind of starchy carbohydrates like?
Ray Peat: Thirty or forty years ago there was quite a bit of publishing activity relating to the high diabetes effects of... fructose because exactly of that stimulating effect on the metabolism but something is happening currently the last three or four years besides forgetting all of that they are inventing a lot of new stuff to direct people away from the anti-diabetic effect of fructose. Supposedly some of the motivation of that is the popularity of what they call the high fructose corn syrup or corn sweeteners. And those are more fattening than sugar, but it isn't because they are actually high in fructose. They have slightly more fructose than glucose, but a group in Los Angeles a few weeks ago... measured the amounts in some soft drinks and found that they accurately reported the content of fructose and glucose. But when they hydrolyzed the material, they found that there was much more carbohydrate in the drink than just the fructose and glucose. That's the reason. About four to five times as much caloric value in some kind of carbohydrate present in the drink that was not glucose or fructose, so if you have four or five times more food in your soda pop than you were thinking, you're going to be more likely to get fat, not because fructose is fattening, but… Just because you're getting a huge amount of pretty much the equivalent of eating flour.
Sarah: So a huge amount of starch that strongly stimulates insulin, and insulin stores that starchy sugar as fat. Whereas if it was actually sucrose from white sugar, then it would be much easier for your body to store as glycogen in the liver.Ray Peat: Yeah.
Sarah: So there's lots of other reasons why I know corn syrup is a little bit of a hot topic right now, but there's also been reports that high fructose corn syrup is quite high in heavy metals, various heavy metals. Have you heard any of this research Dr. Pete?
Ray Peat: Yeah, a few years ago some samples were analyzed and then the government decided to drop it as soon as they saw that. They were full of mercury, and then the industry supposedly corrected itself, but the government isn't keeping up on it.
Sarah: I've noticed that a couple different soda pops now are being advertised that have sugar rather than the corn syrup, the Pepsi, the honeydew, and the Mexican Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola needs to make a new Coca-Cola for America.
Ray Peat: Yeah, I heard that. The Coke company was suing the Mexican branch to make them stop using sugar because so many Americans were importing it.
Andrew: Sugar's fighting back.
Sarah: And I spoke to the late chemist that tests products in Mexico and she said that the Mexican Coca-Cola in Mexico, now I don't know if that's the same stuff that gets imported here, but the Mexican Coca-Cola in Mexico will have sugar sometimes and corn syrup other times, so. It's not. If you're drinking Coca-Cola in Mexico, you're not guaranteed that it is sugar. Or it's made with sugar.
Sarah: Anyhow, so...
Andrew: I just wanted to just cover very briefly the amounts, the amount of sugar in grams or in ounces. We can do that conversion pretty quickly. It's probably eight ounces of sugar a day.
Sarah: Well, yeah. Two hundred and fifty grams. Five to six ounces. Isn't that what you... Would say, Dr. P that...
Ray Peat: Yeah, some people can eat a lot more, but your appetite is a fairly good guide. If you are eating more than you're going to need in the long run, once your liver has enough glycogen, it tends to turn off your appetite.
Sarah: For everything or just sugar?
Ray Peat: No, just for sugar.
Sarah: Right.
Andrew: OK, because I know last month... You outlined about eight hours for the glycogen stores in the liver to be depleted and that was a fairly rough average that you would get from the stores. So in terms of someone's diet, in order to keep up with their sugar consumption so that the liver is adequately primed with glycogen. maybe sarah i know because you uh you look at look at the weights and measures of foods well
Sarah: one glass of orange juice has contains 25 grams of sugar one glass of milk contains 12 grams of sugar and um one tablespoon of sugar only contains four grams of sugar one tablespoon of honey contains about 17 grams of sugar so if you're just looking at you know Sugar actual sugar. It's easier to get a lot more sugar in fruit than it is actually in sugar white sugar
Ray Peat: And when you're eating fruit the potassium and other minerals in the fruit Really bypass the whole issue of Glycemic effect because of the potassium itself has an insulin like action that Helps you turn sugar into glycogen And if you ate too much it would also produce fat except that the presence of the potassium with your sugar means that it's going to not produce an excess of blood sugar. It's going to keep your blood sugar pretty level compared to eating the starches.
Andrew: Okay, I think the other thing that is a fairly popular misconception, Dr. P, is that people whenever it's brought up, whether it's people that we're consulting with or just people, you know, friends and whatever, I think the general argument is that they defend avoiding sugar by saying, well, you know, sugar in the diet will make you fat and it's bad for you, it'll increase your weight. But I think probably what's important to bring across from what you said is that the sugar will help you lose weight. increase your metabolic rate and that in its own right will speed your metabolism up.
Ray Peat: Yeah a 20% increase in your metabolic rate makes a tremendous difference in how much you can eat without getting fat.
Andrew: Right and again to stress the point that sugar is important so that you can, well the right sugar is the ones we've outlined especially fructose, sucrose and to some extent glucose then. It's important that those should be taken into account. Sugars be consumed rather than the sugars that are essentially in the most American diets found in the starchy carbohydrates, the pastas, the pastries, the you know, all those kind of things, the high fructose corn syrup, that it's important to get the right kind of sugars so that your liver has got an adequate store of glycogen and that your sugar consumption doesn't actually turn on your fat storage mechanism by stimulating cortisol like the carbohydrates do.
Ray Peat: One of the things that fructose does is to protect against the fat deposition effect of insulin. It not only restricts the secretion of insulin itself but it sort of makes insulin less harmful by blocking in some way its tendency to produce obesity. A publication that has been cited,...frequently to say that fructose is dangerous because it has an anti-insulin effect. That was the conclusion of this group of five researchers. They gave a five-week diet only to rats, and they said at the end of the five weeks, those who ate a gigantic amount of fructose were insulin resistant. when given glucose they maintained a higher level of both glucose and insulin in their blood and the implication was see in just five weeks we have made these animals diabetic but the thing that doesn't get often cited is that those animals during five weeks gained tremendously different amounts of weight. If you had continued that same diet for the rest of the year, the ones eating the starch-based diet would have weighed twice as much as the ones eating the sucrose diet.
Andrew: Continuing topic of dietary sugars and the protection and benefits that sugars, those good dietary sugars, offer you. Or you can ask other questions. I'm very pleased to have Dr. Ray Peat, a renowned expert in many ways, on the subject of saturated versus polyunsaturated oils, the hormones, especially the longevity hormones. And many, many other topics, so just to name a few, we're talking about sugars now, but obviously an expert in thyroid and other metabolic situations. So, from 7.30 on, people are encouraged to call him if any questions, take advantage of his expert knowledge. It's KMUDRAD, for those familiar with the popular number, or the regular numbers 9233911. That's 1-800-KMUDRAD.
Andrew: Sorry.
Sarah: We had a lot of callers last month. Didn't get a chance to have their calls answered so if you same people are listening tonight please call in starting from 7 30.
Andrew: Okay so interesting fact and it's something that you've I think it's been brought out in one of your papers. Why do diabetic women have smarter larger babies?
Ray Peat: I don't know whether last time I mentioned the Zamenhof's experiments in eggs developing chicks. I don't think so, no. He noticed that their brains stopped growing before they were ready to hatch, two or three days and he saw that the glucose that was in the egg originally was depleted before they hatched. The whole body of the chick had finished maturing and he saw that the brain stopped just at the time that the glucose was depleted and he knew from studies on mammals in the 1950s and 60s that if you give a pregnant animal either estrogen or insulin which will lower the supply of glucose that their brain stops growing. As long as the glucose is below a certain limit so he added made a little chip in the egg shell and injected some glucose right at the stage where the brain had stopped growing and found that that caused the brain to keep growing and the chicken hatched with a brain bigger than chickens had ever normally had.
Andrew: Okay, smart chickens huh?
Ray Peat: Yeah. That's a general thing that the in humans they see that about at six months gestation the brain has many more cells than it will have at birth so during that from six to nine months cells are dying rather than being created and diabetic women are able to do so-called diabetic. Women are able to deliver more glucose during that time and prevent the death of this huge number of brain cells.
Sarah: How do you feel when they give women who have supposedly gestational diabetes and they want them to restrict their sugars?
Ray Peat: Well, I've met some women, one who had... I think he was four or five years old at the time, but her doctor had told her to restrict her sugar when she was pregnant again. And I asked about the development of the older boy, and she said that he had taught himself to read when he was, I think, two years old, and that at the age of four he was wearing an adult-sized hat. I was a very well-behaved and precocious kid and I had heard many stories like that from old obstetricians who associated with the so-called diabetes but that caused me to look up where the idea of gestational diabetes came from and it was in the 60s they were promoting the idea. A glucose tolerance test to diagnose diabetes very early and it was out of those situations expanding the definition of diabetes that they started noticing that most pregnant women, healthy pregnant women tend to have about 130 blood glucose....quite a bit above the non-pregnant normal and that simply was redefined as something that is off the scale of normal un-pregnant people and so they started thinking of pregnancy in terms of diabetes.
Sarah: But that's just the body's natural response when you're pregnant is to raise the sugar so the baby has more sugar?
Ray Peat: Yeah, one of the things that Zamenhof did besides adding glucose to the eggs or glycine was another thing it turns into glucose. He added progesterone and found that that also keeps the brain growing and it helps to stabilize, make more efficient use....of glucose and that glucose and progesterone work together, women with low progesterone tend to have unstable low blood sugar and many more problems with, all through the pregnancy, mostly related to ups and downs of blood sugar.
Andrew: Okay, we've actually got a caller on the line, Dr. P. So sorry to cut you short. We'll get back to Zamenhof and what you were talking about after we take this call. Are you on the air?
Caller: Hello? Hi, you're on the air. Oh, good. This is not a question about my house because I'm kind of an organic fruit and vegetable gardener. Great. But I've got a lady friend who is overweight and... I knew her when she wasn't overweight, and I suspect that she needs to kick up her thyroid a bit, to kick up her metabolism so that she can burn that fat, and you're saying, the doctor, the guest, is saying certain sugars would do that? She's pretty cool. She knows to eat a lot of fruits and vegetables and stay away from too much carbohydrates and all that, but I must have missed something. I came in late. What's the relationship between the sugars and the thyroid being stimulated to kick up the metabolism? I'll take the answer off the air. Understand that relationship.
Sarah: Okay, thank you. Dr. Pete, would you like to answer that question?
Ray Peat: Yeah, if your diet isn't providing either glucose or the mixture of glucose and fructose, your liver can't activate the thyroid hormone as fully. If you're living on a high protein diet and fad, your liver... will slow your whole body metabolism down and that's just as effective as if your thyroid gland had shut down.
Andrew: Now you're saying this because the liver converts T4, which is the inactive hormone, into T3.
Ray Peat: Yeah, the liver makes about 60 or 70 percent of the active hormone and once your liver slows down, if you try to boost it just with the... thyroxin T4, that will tend to turn your own thyroid hormone production down, so if you're going to supplement it has to be a balanced T3 and T4, but often just by avoiding the things that inhibit the conversion of thyroxin to the active form, avoiding too much of the muscle meat. Avoiding the polyunsaturated fats and getting enough of the pro-thyroid nutrients and chemicals. Sucrose and lactose are both effective at maintaining your production of thyroid active hormones.
Sarah: So to summarize that, that would be... Limiting the amount of muscle meat means the steaks and burger and those types of meat.
Ray Peat: Eating lots of... That includes fish too.
Sarah: And fish and chicken. Limiting those to a small portion per day or, I mean, what would you recommend for a overweight person? How much meat a day or a week should they eat?
Ray Peat: Well, if a person really wants to concentrate on... on losing weight, using milk as their main protein, milk and gelatin, are the most favorable for weight loss, partly because the milk comes with such a generous supply of calcium, and calcium powerfully stimulates the metabolic rate. And having enough salt in your food is another thing. The salt and the calcium interact. To stimulate your metabolic rate, the sugar in itself, the fructose in particular, activates the whole range of cells independently even, but it activates the production of the active thyroid hormone. Apart from that, these things activate cells even if you're deficient in thyroid hormones. You can keep the activity going to a great extent with time. Sucrose, salt, and calcium.
Sarah: So that's white sugar, salt, and calcium. And also, the polyunsaturates, just in case there's some listeners that haven't heard our shows and Dr. Pete's discussion on polyunsaturated fatty acids, those are powerfully thyroid toxic oils, and they are found practically everywhere. They're corn oil, soy oil, canola, safflower, sunflower, hemp. Flax seed, fish oil, cotton seed, rapeseed, well that's British jelly, but it's canola in this country. All those different vegetable liquid oils, no canola is not corn oil. All those liquid vegetable oils are very very powerfully thyroid toxic and they block the thyroid hormone in many different locations. Dr. Pate, weren't you talking about a French study? Didn't you mention to me a French study that showed... that these liquid vegetable oils block your thyroid hormone in like five different places?
Ray Peat: Yeah, that was a whole series of studies that showed that they inhibit the secretion from the gland by blocking the digestive proteolytic enzymes and they block the transport in the bloodstream and several different places in the cells. One of the... protein or enzymes that binds and reacts to the thyroid hormone happens to be a key enzyme in the response to fructose. It's activated both by thyroid and fructose. And the key of respiratory enzyme, cytochrome oxidase, is activated both by thyroid and fructose. And the polyunsaturated fats block these intracellular places as well as the transport and production.
Sarah: So for your friend, for the last caller for your friend, just to summarize, avoiding the polyunsaturated fats and replacing those with coconut, butter, and a little bit of olive oil is more fattening than butter and coconut oil. But coconut oil specifically is going to be helping. Your friend with weight loss along with lots of fruits, lots of milk and some cheese for protein and a little bit of muscle meat.
Ray Peat: Yeah.
Sarah: Do you have any other suggestions for the caller Dr. Pete?
Ray Peat: Oh I'm keeping the intestine happy, not eating too many raw indigestible foods. If you have the wrong bacteria. Even supposedly good fiber like grain fiber bran that can support the production of toxic chemicals in your intestine under the action of bacteria.
Andrew: Okay. Alright, well we do have another caller on the line, Dr. B. So caller, you're on the air?
Caller: Yes. Thanks for the show. I have a friend who swears by a diabetes cure of sorts. He doesn't call it a complete cure, but it's 400 international units of vitamin E and 1200 milligrams of glyphosate. Hello? Hi, you're on the air. Did you get my question? Yes. Okay, I'll listen off the air and I wonder what comments you'd have on that. Thank you.
Andrew: Okay, thank you.
Ray Peat: Lecithin generally is made from soybeans, it could be extracted from eggs and that would affect the composition if the eggs ate good food. But generally lecithin is essentially the same as the polyunsaturated fats in corn oil or sunflower oil and so out of. A gram or so isn't going to make a big difference, but it does have a slightly toxic effect. So I don't think it's safe, it's not very dangerous, but it's not the safest way to approach diabetes.
Andrew: OK. All right, well, we've got another caller on the air, so let's take the next caller. You on the air?
Caller: Good evening. Hi. Along with your polyunsaturate list, you mentioned butter. Could ghee be included as well?
Sarah: Actually, ghee and butter are saturated fats, so they are not thyroid toxic and they are very liver supportive. And they would not be amongst that list of corn, canola, soy, cottonseed, sunflower, safflower.
Ray Peat: In fact, these saturated fats, they're being researched as cures for liver disease because they're so protective to cells that are under attack from the polyunsaturated fats. Alcoholic liver disease is being treated with the highly saturated fats such as butter and waxes from palm trees and cane and so on.
Sarah: Didn't you tell me about a study that's being done in India right now for alcoholic hepatitis with butter?
Ray Peat: Northwestern University is the last I heard about it, but it started in India. It's a man named Nanji, who I think is from India, who is doing most research. But there have been studies in the U.S. earlier showing that fructose... protects various organs against alcohol in pretty much the same way that it protects against diabetes. They've found that you can stimulate the removal of a toxic amount of ethyl alcohol from the body by giving the person some fructose.
Sarah: So if someone's going to drink, then they want to have a vodka and orange juice, right?
Ray Peat: Yeah, the fructose actually detoxifies the alcohol better than ordinary glucose.
Andrew: We've actually got two more callers on the line, Dr. Pete, so perhaps we'll take the next caller.
Caller: Thank you. My name is Mike, and I'm interested in finding out about dairy. And... Dr. Peaker was talking about sugar and protein and he mentioned different types of proteins. And my question is, eggs... I've heard or did some reading that fertilized eggs are supposed to be better for you than non-fertilized eggs. And I'd like to get......anybody's opinion there, Dr. Peet's included, or Andrew, or the other person, and I'll take my quick answer off the air, thank you.
Andrew: Okay, thank you. Dr. Peet, do you have any...
Ray Peat: Yeah, I think there actually could be a difference because when chickens are kept in tiny boxes where the eggs won't get fertilized, they're... under extreme stress, and the stress is undoubtedly reflected in the egg, and so if they have the freedom of movement that would be necessary for fertilization, I think the eggs are going to be healthier. Yeah.
Andrew: Okay. Stance the reason? Yes, that does. Okay, good. We've got another caller on the line, so let's take this other caller.
Caller: Yes, hello? Hi, you're on the air. Yeah, I want to ask, this is, okay, about cholesterol. Okay. Now, I know Lipitor is, like, really being pushed around quite a bit, and I've always, I've heard that it's, like, not good for your liver, and it seems like that's just crazy to put your own Lipitor if your cholesterol is too high. And my daughter recently was told by her doctor that her doctor is not happy with her cholesterol level. She's tried to lower it with diet and it's not like super high but she thinks her doctor thinks it's too high and says if it isn't lower in six months I'm going to put you on Lipitor. And I really have my trepidations about this Lipitor and also I've heard some controversy of things about cholesterol anyway that... Maybe, you know, just the level of cholesterol is not necessarily related to, you know, you're going to get heart disease because your cholesterol is a little high, necessarily. So I'd like to know what you think, you know, about the cholesterol issue in itself and how much it really does relate to heart disease. And what do you think about Lipitor? Is it dangerous to take? You know, do you think people should run out and take this medicine to lower their cholesterol so they won't get a heart attack?
Andrew: Can I just ask you what your daughter's cholesterol was? Do you remember? I can't remember exactly.
Sarah: How old is your daughter?
Caller: She's about 38.
Andrew: Okay.
Ray Peat: There have been several studies showing that lowering cholesterol by any drug means has... pretty serious side effects. That's because cholesterol is next to glucose. It's probably our single most important protective all-purpose molecule. The reason it rises during stress in a fairly healthy person is that it's our defensive molecule and it's the precursor to the antistress hormones. It's used massively in making the steroids, such as pregnenolone, DHEA, and progesterone. And if you artificially lower the supply of cholesterol in the blood, you're going to just proportionally push down the amount of progesterone you can make. And that seems to be why it causes so many disastrous effects. is increasing the general mortality in people who are using drugs to push down the cholesterol.
Caller: Can you tell me what some of these bad effects are of Lipitor?
Ray Peat: That particular drug, I don't know.
Caller: It's probably the most popular one for lowering cholesterol.
Ray Peat: Well, one of the things that has turned up a lot in recent years is breakdown of muscle, skeletal muscle. First, pains and then sometimes a seepage of enzymes and myoglobin into the blood damaging the kidneys.
Sarah: Well, the Lipitor is a statin drug, I believe. So aren't statins really hard on your liver, Dr. Pete?
Ray Peat: Yeah. And it's through that effect, I think, that they affect the muscles. The muscles are destabilized. If they aren't getting enough cholesterol, all of your organs, including the brain, suffer when your liver isn't supplying enough cholesterol, even though other cells can make it.
Caller: Why are they so upset about your cholesterol being a little on the high side? I'm not talking about really super high, but above the level it's supposed to be healthy. Why are they so concerned about that as if that's going to kill you when it sounds like the medicine's worse for you?
Ray Peat: There was a study a few years ago of older people in nursing homes, for example, looking at their cholesterol as they aged and seeing what the life expectancy was in relation to cholesterol. The longest-lived people, I think, were up around 280 milligrams of cholesterol.
Caller: So if it's not above 300 or so, then it's probably safer to have a little high cholesterol than to take these medicines that would compromise your liver, kidneys and muscles.
Ray Peat: Yeah, a Framingham study about 20 years ago saw that after the age of 50, people who have below 200 cholesterol are more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease. It's a very protective substance.
Caller: So what do you think? Okay, so it protects a lot of things, but why do they think it's so bad that it's going to give you a heart attack?
Ray Peat: There are some good articles. Chris Masterjohn has one. I think I have one on my website.
Caller: Well, I don't have a computer. I don't do the internet. If you could just quickly say something about it.
Ray Peat: It was basically developed as a way to sell drugs. And products and it never since the 1930s it's been known that hypothyroid people are susceptible to many diseases including heart disease and that hypothyroidism is the basic cause of increased cholesterol because cholesterol has to be converted to progesterone under the influence. of thyroid hormones so if you're low in thyroid hormone your body increases cholesterol to keep the progesterone production going.
Caller: Well my daughter actually takes thyroid. She apparently has thyroid.
Sarah: Well maybe she needs to take a T3 T4 drug called thyrolar. She's probably only taking synthroid or or lavoxil.
Ray Peat: The metabolic rate is a mirror image. of the blood cholesterol level so that when your metabolic rate is below normal your cholesterol will defensively rise above normal and as you increase your metabolic rate your cholesterol will come down as a mirror image but doctors have disregarded the effect on the metabolic rate and they prescribe only high. The inactive part of the thyroid hormone and very often people stay hypometabolic despite taking thyroid.
Caller: Okay, one more quick question about the sugar thing. Now, are you saying that sugar, even white sugar, I know that high-fructose corn syrup isn't so good, fruit sugars from food and fruit juice and even white sugar is okay. But the bad thing is like white flour, white rice, white pasta, white carbohydrates, what they call the simple carbohydrates, you say that's the real what is more bad for you. So let's say if you eat sugar in let's say a good ice cream, that's a better way if you can eat sugar than in let's say a pastry or something with flour in it.
Sarah: Voila.
Ray Peat: Definitely.
Caller: It's not necessarily sugars that people should cut out, but it's the refined carbohydrates that they need to lower, to lose weight.
Ray Peat: The starches and the polyunsaturated fats are the main culprits in fatness.
Caller: Okay, thank you very much.
Sarah: And another thing I wanted to mention about the cholesterol is think of the cholesterol as a bandage. Because Dr. B, you told me about a study that the Japanese came out with showing that actual arteries are blocked up by polyunsaturated fats, all these vegetable oils, and the body bandages it over with a cholesterol plaque.
Ray Peat: Yeah, the unsaturated fats are very reactive with oxygen, and the bloodstream is where there's the most oxygen for them to react with. The unsaturated fats that we make in the liver. If we eat too much sugar and are low thyroid and have high estrogen and high cortisol and such, we might have high triglycerides. But these made in the liver are saturated and they happen to be protective to the heart. So the thing is to avoid the things that cause the distorted blood lipids not to try to lower them. The lipids themselves, but to remove the cause.
Sarah: Right. So look, if someone has high cholesterol, try to find out what's causing that. If it's low thyroid, get that treated. We can talk to you more about that maybe on the next show. But I do have, the engineer has a question, Dr. Pete. She wants to know what you think of Splenda and all the artificial sweeteners.
Ray Peat: Well, that Splenda I think is the one that has chlorine in the molecule. And that. Exposed to bacteria, the bacteria can break down the molecule and liberate things in the family of organic chlorine compounds like chloroform related toxic substances so I wouldn't want my intestine exposed to Splenda.
Andrew: How about stevia?
Ray Peat: It's pretty safe.
Andrew: Yeah, because I hear they're actually wanting to take it off the market in America. I think it's maybe getting too much of a foothold as a safe alternative. And I saw some press release about the FDA and some controls. They want to basically crack down on it. I couldn't quite understand it. It seemed a bit too bizarre. But okay, well, there we are. Sarah, do you have anything else?
Sarah: No, I think that's it. So basically all those... Sorry, all those artificial sweeteners, Dr. Pete, you'd recommend to our listeners that they avoid those?
Ray Peat: Yeah, our sugar is so much more nourishing, protective.
Sarah: Thank you, Dr. Pete.
Andrew: Okay, well thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Pete. I just want to let people that are listening know how they can reach you or how they can read more about your research. We've been joined by Dr. Ray Pete. Endocrinologist and research scientist. He has a website. It's www.raypeat.org.
Sarah: Oh gosh, dot com.
Andrew: Oh gosh, I keep saying that. I'm sorry. I need more thyroid. Okay, raypeat.com. And there are lots of articles on his homepage and all reference scientific articles.
Sarah: And that's spelled R-A-Y-P-E-A-T.
Andrew: Dot com.
Sarah: Dot com. Okay.
Andrew: So yeah, once again, thank you so much for joining us.
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