Ask Your Herb Doctor 161118 Vitamin D Episode Transcript
Host, Andrew
Guest, Dr. Ray Peat
Andrew: Well, welcome to this month's Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name is Andrew Murray and for this month Sarah won't be with us, but she will be back in December. For those of you who perhaps have never listened to the shows that 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 patients about a wide range of conditions, such as supplements and nutritional counselling.
Andrew: So you're listening to Ask Your Reb Doctor on KMED Galoisville 91.1 FM and from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o'clock you're invited to call in with any questions either related or unrelated to this month's subject of vitamin D. The number here if you live in the area 923 3911 or if you live outside the area the toll free numbers 1 800 568 3723. that's 1 800 km ud rad and we can be reached toll free on 1 888 wbm herb for consultations or further information monday through friday 9 to 5.
Andrew: well first things first we're very close towards the end of the pledge drive um there's lots of people here doing all the support that it takes to run a show like this and a radio station that can't emphasize enough is pretty unique in the States in terms of free speech radio. I know in England free speech radio was kind of maligned and pretty much kept in a very fringe area in broadcasting but not given any support other than local support and that's what keeps this shows alive.
Andrew: So thanks so much to all the people that are pledging money making donations supporting the radio show keeping it on the air to make this kind of program and all the other excellent programs that KMUD brings that are just filled with alternatives. So this is an alternative medicine show and the other alternatives are also valuable outside sources of information that you're not going to get from the mainstream. I think in this last political campaign without being politically cited I would say that more so than ever we have seen the mainstream or lame stream media completely completely eradicated disingenuous and completely false.
Andrew: So it's excellent to see alternative radios news sites and websites coming with the internet and the age of it. free information. I thought it's a very small piece I just wanted to say about the internet and it's the ICNN handover. It was under American governance for a long time but the present administration decided to pass that off but I'm not too sure whether this incoming administration will be able to do anything about that before the censorship carries on like it is in China for sure.
Andrew: Okay so this month's... Talk is on vitamin D. Most people will have recognized vitamin D probably from rickets in the early 1900s. I know in England and in many countries that are north of 37 degrees there is really very insufficient sunlight especially in the winter months to generate vitamin D and so rickets was a fairly common presenting condition and still is in some parts of the world.
Andrew: So we're once again very pleased to have Dr Raymond Peat with us. Who's a wealth of information and never seems to be any end to the things that he knows, the things that he's found, and his insights are, as always, outside the box. So thanks so much for joining us, Dr. Peat.
Ray Peat: Thank you.
Andrew: I guess first things first, would you just outline your professional and academic background for those people who perhaps have never listened to the show, and then I can get into the questioning and I'd like to run along the lines of the... Vitamin D subject.
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Ray Peat: Basically a PhD in biology, including reproductive physiology and biochemistry at the University of Oregon.
Andrew: I know you've got plenty more in terms of research background, and I know it's led you in very many different directions. Steroids and their production and their uses... etc. I know you're very interested in the anti-aging for one of the reasons of Pregnelin and or Progesterone and its anti-inflammatory and anti-aging effects. Vitamin D is actually a pro-hormone, it's not strictly speaking in a sense the word vitamin, is it?
Ray Peat: No.
Andrew: No. So in terms of the discovery... of vitamin D and its association with rickets, do you think there's adequate vitamin D in the general populations?
Ray Peat: For preventing rickets, they're pretty much all around the world. There's very little rickets left, but since the idea... of vitamin D as a rickets-preventing substance was established, that really cut off thinking and research about what vitamin D really is and what it's doing. And in the 1950s, there was a period when people started thinking about nutrition for themselves like... Adele Davis' books came out, and the medical establishment reacted to discourage the public from using their own therapy.
Ray Peat: For example, vitamin A, there were stories about how horribly toxic it was. It would destroy your brain and make your skin fall off. Very little. Evidence backing it up, you can poison rats and mice, giving them a million or so units of vitamin A. The same, there were some animal experiments with gigantic doses of vitamin D, and supposedly there was a case of a baby whose mother gave it a million or so units of vitamin D, or took it while she was pregnant. It supposedly caused the bones to thicken so much that there was no room for the brain to develop. And so the newspaper stories in the 50s were saying that vitamin D causes brain damage.
Ray Peat: And I had been reading Adele Davis in the 50s, but despite that, I was sort of directed away from vitamin D because there was such a... a taboo about anything more than two or three hundred units per day.
Andrew: Okay, it's interesting you've said that Ricketts is relatively unknown in the world. I know in England, and since I've lived here for 15 years now, but I know I kind of keep in touch with some of the news that comes from time to time that's worth looking at, and I know in England, especially in northern England... They were saying that Ricketts was starting to appear again, it's kind of a little bit off the tonight's subject really, but the advent of fear mongering from cases of skin cancer, melanoma, the use of sunscreens, the inherent phobia about being in the sun, all of this was actually implicated in the British Medical Journal as being causative for the... rise in rickets. It was being seen again by doctors and some people had never seen it before. It was kind of the first time for 30 and 40 year old doctors.
Andrew: So there is definitely an amount of rickets that seems to be in the populations that are at northern latitudes. But in terms of the vitamin D levels measured on blood tests... I know I've seen people with very low vitamin D and I know just like TSH as a measure of the call the body's call for thyroid hormone has been down revised by the endocrinological association of the USA they brought it down from 4.5 to 3.5 highlighting the fact that there are more and more people with hypothyroid type tendencies and so this figure has been down regulated I know the levels with vitamin D the beneficial levels have been raised so that the lower limit I think was 20 nanograms per mil now they've raised that to 30 and a lot of people and places are advocating levels of 50 to 70 nanograms in fact for athletes I think they've even come up with studies that show there's positive associations for 100 nanograms per mil blood levels of vitamin D.
Andrew: What do you think about that even in the absence of rickets that there is a tendency in the population to have low?
Ray Peat: Yeah several of the conditions that are well associated with vitamin D deficiency and some of them have doubled and tripled in the last 20-30 years. And it looks like it's because of that fear of the sunlight, using sunscreen and such. I've talked to a few people who had 10 or below nanograms per milliliter or 15 or 20 and their condition really corresponded to how low they were, like one woman in her 60s. I said she was so weak she could hardly walk, her muscles were simply very, very weak and shrunken and she had, I think it was 7 or 8 mg per ml and within a week of taking just a moderate, I think it was 5,000 units a day, she could walk around and when you look at the symptoms of the people with... 15 mg per ml, 20, 25 and so on, you can see gradations of that weakness, depression, shrinking muscles, insensitivity to insulin, tendency to have high blood sugar, all of the most common... diseases of stress.
Andrew: Right, blood pressure is also associated positively isn't it with a lower level of vitamin D.
Ray Peat: Yeah, everything related to aging and degenerative and stress of atrial fibrillation, enlargement of the ventricle, calcification of the valves, degeneration of the valves in several different ways. Hardening of the arteries, calcification of the... ordinary arteries and even calcification to the extent of what they call a heart stone, a huge mass of calcium.
Andrew: Okay, we'll get into plenty of the plenty of the different conditions for which there's been lots of peer-reviewed papers written on processes that I actually wasn't that aware of. I was, I think, probably like most people have just... associated vitamin D with calcium and phosphorus metabolism, weak bones, osteo, malacia, and, you know, degenerative skeletal type situations. But there's a very clear and positive link to energy production and inflammation. And I know the last few shows that we've done with you, you've been looking a lot at inflammation and the processes producing inflammation and the sequelae of inflammation. How inflammatory processes in general are extremely destructive and counterproductive to energy production.
Ray Peat: When you look at the mechanism of just the outline that calcium helps to balance, vitamin D helps to balance the relation between calcium and phosphate to prevent the over-accumulation of phosphate and to keep up the right level of calcium. When you look at the relation of that balance to inflammation, it turns out that it's really a serious problem in the population, the amount of phosphate relative to calcium.
Andrew: And that's because people aren't eating enough dairy?
Ray Peat: Or green leaves. ==Green leaves and cheese and milk are really the major good sources of calcium and meat, nuts, grains, beans, all of those have terrifically high phosphate content.== The excess phosphate and the reaction of the parathyroid hormone to that high phosphate intake. It's exactly the same as the deficiency of vitamin D. So too much phosphate, too little vitamin D, and you get what amounts to an early stage of chronic kidney degeneration.
Ray Peat: Parathyroid hormone and phosphate are called urinic toxins late stage of kidney disease. People are starting that process very early when they don't use enough calcium and vitamin D.
Andrew: Okay well I want to talk a little bit about the natural conversion in the skin, the process by which sunlight activates the pre-cholesterol precursor and then how those metabolites are changed in the liver first and then in the kidney and how they become active and how this could play out. In people with liver disease as well as kidney disease and how this could negatively impact them because they've all automatically weakened the process by which this pro hormone is converted into the active form.
Andrew: So you're listening to Ask Europe Doctor on KMED 91.1 FM from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o'clock. If you're invited to call in with any questions Dr Ray Peat is joining us once again and we're discussing the widespread use of vitamin D and how important it is and I think the lack of sunlight and the phobia surrounding sun and cancer, how this is all playing into decreasing our levels and how there aren't that many foods that really produce have enough vitamin D in them to actually keep levels of vitamin D at good levels and how those levels have actually been raised in terms of the reference range for blood tests, showing a positive association with increasing levels of vitamin D and decreasing disease.
Andrew: Number here if you're in the area is 923-3911. If you live outside the area there's a 800 number which is 1-800-568-3723 or 1-800-KMUT-RAD, so lines will be open from 7.30 on.
Andrew: Dr. P, I'm talking about the conversion in the skin and again I wanted to also bring up the fact that I had heard and read that washing directly after sunbathing was actually counterproductive because you can wash. The precursor metabolite off of the skin, I don't know how you view that as true or that's just some bad science and then the conversion of the cholesterol type molecule in the skin into the 25 hydroxy form and how that is then further hydroxylated downstream by the kidneys to the active form.
Andrew: What do you think first about washing if you're sunbathing and I think I've read only 20 minutes was necessary to produce. Peak amounts of the prohormone so that the body actually stopped producing more after about 20 minutes so it wasn't necessary to lie out in the sun all day to get adequate vitamin D from sun exposure from UVB mainly.
Ray Peat: I think that's only when you're in the middle of the day at a moderate latitude. The UVB is so low most of the year. In the high latitudes that it takes a long time to get enough but in like from 11 or 10 to 2 in the summer in high latitudes it only takes 15 or 20 minutes to get enough.
Andrew: Okay because there's a there's a definite decrease in UVB exposure with angle of the sun I mean I'm yeah so okay given that you're perhaps only down in San Francisco. Or that kind of latitude then from and they're probably September through till April May you're probably not again getting exposed to enough sunlight and if you are you probably need to be out in the sun probably for an hour or two then rather than 20 minutes.
Ray Peat: Yeah and the color of your skin, the natural color, makes a tremendous difference and age makes a difference. There is apparently less cholesterol....metabolism and such in an old person and just the degree of pigmentation influences the amount of reaction you have to the ultraviolet so that in Mexico, for example, even women who are outside all day, if they have dark skin and are only exposing their face and hands, they... tend to be deficient in vitamin D, even at high altitude and a brilliant sunlight.
Andrew: Because I read the association between our previous kind of agrarian lifestyle, or at least labour-based lifestyle, where most people worked for a living with manual labour. I don't mean people don't work at computers or whatever these days, but manual labour, they're outdoors and more. Associated with agrarian lifestyles, farming, and just being outdoors, whether it's cutting wood or any other outdoor activity.
Andrew: Those people obviously then were getting exposed to sun, but obviously with our modern lifestyles, most people are kind of indoors and sedentary, which brings its own other negative components to health, but in terms of the amount of sun that people get, and dormancy, and the other negative aspects. In the Davos Academy ofjลฤ, we found out that we could're starting to be self-employed for more than 20 years Using supplementation, I think probably supplementation is one of the easiest ways to go about getting adequate levels of vitamin D, because I don't think, do you think people get enough vitamin D from the food that they eat?
Ray Peat: No, that's almost impossible. If you drink, say, two to four quarts of vitamin D supplemented milk, if it isn't whole, legally it has to be supplemented with vitamin D. That's only, I forget, I don't know what the current amount is, but it, I think, has been around 300 units per quart, something like that.
Andrew: Okay, per quart. Wow. And I think the modern levels that are advocated now are up to 2,000, I mean 2,000 to 4,000 IU per day. So if you're getting 300 IU from a quart of vitamin D fortified milk. It's going to take a lot of milk to reach that. And it is in a few other foods, things like oily fish, but again, I know you're not an advocate of oily fish from a PUFA perspective, egg yolks is what I think, I think 20 IU per egg yolk. So you're not going to get a lot of vitamin D from eggs either. Is there any other forms of vitamin D rich foods?
Ray Peat: Oh, well, mushrooms have been exposed to light. During the 40s and 50s, the main form of supplemental vitamin D was synthetic by ultraviolet radiation of fungus and the research that changed the popularity of that claimed that it was responsible for the hardening of the arteries of young people starting in the 40s and 50s and
Andrew: this hard sorry to interrupt but this hardening was because of calcium deposition, aberrant calcium.
Ray Peat: Yeah, which normally happens in a vitamin D deficiency but there were publications arguing that the use of the synthetic vitamin D might have been contributing to abnormal calcium metabolism. I don't know if that's true but that's came out around 1970 and milk additives switched over to a vitamin D3 right after those articles came out so I think they were just being cautious.
Andrew: So you said it said earlier that mushrooms exposed to light are a significant source of vitamin D. Did you know any figures in terms of per ounce or of mushrooms consumed what you'd get?
Ray Peat: No, I don't know. It depends on the type of mushroom and the intensity of the ultraviolet.
Andrew: Interesting, because we always think about mushrooms growing in the dark or under the woods or something. So they would irradiate with UVB then, mushrooms, at some point in our history.
Ray Peat: Yeah, and if they gather them outside, just being exposed to daylight for a few hours is enough. There have been studies using mushroom powder as a vitamin D supplement. It only took, I think it was less than an ounce of powdered mushroom to make a distinct rise. It actually depressed the vitamin D3 and increased the vitamin D2.
Andrew: That's interesting, I've never heard of that. So this would be things like the common field mushroom, the white kind of, the white agaric mushroom that's kind of common culinary mushroom that would be growing in the fields, button mushrooms. These would be sources?
Ray Peat: Yeah, if they've been exposed at all to sunlight, they probably account for why many people have a measurable amount of... D2 in their serum.
Andrew: Interesting. Now the other thing I just want to re... go back a little bit, you've been an advocate of mushrooms specifically for something else, certainly for producing a soup of mushrooms and having this as a dietary supplement.
Ray Peat: Yeah, for the anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer functions mainly.
Andrew: Interesting. Okay, so... I guess getting on to specific diseases that have been characterized with low vitamin D and how the studies have shown in cohorts of people that they've tested, those with higher initial levels of vitamin D did better in the outcomes than those with low. I know I've always associated vitamin D with bones because of rickets, I think most people have. I don't know how many people are actually aware of the cancer association. With vitamin D, how many people associate TB and multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis with vitamin D, but I'd like to bring out some of these things and get your perspective on the inflammation that's happening and how you tie in the inflammatory process through parathyroid hormone, which I know you've always said is inflammatory and how, you know, through using thyroid hormone. And being two anti-inflammatories which quell that inflammatory cascade, how they tie into how you see these inflammatory disorders that I've mentioned, rheumatoid, MS, et cetera, cancers.
Andrew: So looking at something that I haven't mentioned, which is fibromyalgia, I saw that there was a definite, well, it was a theoretical mechanism because they haven't tested it any further. But I know the... Fibromyalgia syndrome, where people have very tired aching muscles and they feel muscle bound and they just can't move because their muscles are functioning. I know you'd probably associate that more with hypothyroidism and low thyroid state because you've clearly spoken many times about the patella or the Achilles tendon reflex and that's a direct response of the muscle not being able to repolarise quick enough. And this lag phase that happens with the twitch, how do you do you see fibromyalgia in terms of vitamin D deficiency being relative to energy production and repolarisation?
Ray Peat: I think it's parallel almost identical to the hypothyroid condition. All of the inflammations that you get with low thyroid function are... Structurally and functionally similar to those you get from a vitamin D deficiency and the thyroid stimulating hormone is an agent of those inflammatory processes Actually more than the the direct effect of thyroxin which lowers TSH the TSH itself directly activates. And that causes tissue to release the inflammatory cytokines, interleukins and so on and parathyroid hormone does that and just by taking vitamin D or increasing your calcium intake or decreasing your phosphate relative to the calcium, all of these changes in your diet will lower both TSH. And parathyroid hormone. And both of these hormones are directly involved in things such as mast cell activation, releasing histamine and serotonin, increasing all of the cytokines, tumor necrosis factor, nitric oxide, all of the things that promote degenerative inflammatory processes.
Ray Peat: Functionally, vitamin D and thyroid are really parallel. You can't quite separate them.
Andrew: Okay. And then looking at the response, the immune system mounts to infection or cancer or inflammatory responses. There are lots of papers published for... And again, this is a little bit of a divergence. I know tuberculosis as a lung disease. There were other lung type pathologies which were definitely seemed to improve and had or lower morbidity associated with it with people that had higher vitamin D levels.
Ray Peat: Just looking at people, their vitamin D level when they're brought into hospital. The higher the vitamin D when they come in, the more likely they are to go out alive.
Andrew: ... I think just recognizing that vitamin D is implied in suppressing inflammation would make anybody want to supplement with vitamin D, wouldn't it?
Ray Peat: Yeah, and HIV, AIDS, malaria, as well as tuberculosis are very widespread conditions that are known to increase their... morbidity and mortality in proportion to how low the vitamin D is.
Andrew: Yeah. I read an article about a compound called cathelicidin, and this was an antiviral defense that, again, was heightened by vitamin D in the body, and that lower levels produced lower levels of this compound, and also decreased natural interferon production. So these would... tend to implicate viral conditions to be positively associated or the outcomes of viral conditions to be positively associated with increased vitamin D?
Ray Peat: Yeah, and I think the viral process is basically an energy process. When the cells are well energized, they're resistant to infection and replication of viruses.
Andrew: And again, you're just saying that's from an energetic point of view to be able to withstand the processes that cost energy to drive a system more positively than being overwhelmed as it were.
Ray Peat: Yeah, and I think you can see the energy process in the brain conditions that are associated with vitamin D deficiency. Brain-injured patients have very low vitamin D. Probably the injury itself is causing it to be lost in some way.
Andrew: I read that Parkinson's was also implicated in low levels of vitamin D in some Parkinson's patients showing that that was a kind of interference either with dopaminergic type interference or another neural signaling interference that vitamin D positively influences.
Ray Peat: And the prion diseases are probably......influenced because vitamin D prevents the polymerization of the prion protein, which is involved in scrapie, mad cow disease, Alzheimer's disease, and probably several other of the degenerative brain diseases. And anxiety and depression are associated with very little vitamin D.
Andrew: Yeah, interesting. Again, that's an interesting thinking about things like, from an herb perspective, things like hypericin from St. John's Wort, being a classic treatment for depression and how the alchemists classified St. John's Wort way back, before there was any quote-unquote science, although they were very methodical and very scientific in their own right. They classified it as heating and drying in the... third degree, saying that it was a solar rule by the sun. And so that, again, anxiety and depression with St John's wort uses kind of hand-in-hand with the sun and its energizing effects.
Andrew: If we want to get kind of holistic about the mechanism by which that works. Okay, we are listening to ask you, Dr. Kami De Galvo, 91.1 FM. From now until the end of the show at eight o'clock, you're invited to call in with any questions related or unrelated to this month's subject of vitamin D and its metabolism. And the effects that it has on the body.
Andrew: Looks like, sounds like someone's coming into the show to do some plug-in for the pleasure drive, so let's bring them in now. Come on. Thank you so much.
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all right okay now I will get right back to the topic of vitamin D and its association with various pathologies here that I think some of which I hadn't realized until I started looking at this information earlier on today okay so if you're in the area and or on the internet and you have any questions again 93 3911 I know people are going to call in and pledge that's what we want so let's see the lights lighten up and see who's calling there is a 800 number which is 1 800 km ud rad for those people either listening to the internet or in a different state we often have people from the middle of the country and the east coast calling so
Andrew: So Dr P um i said at the beginning when i started uh introducing uh this subject for this evening that i found a very interesting parallel um but again i'm always very cautious how far down the rabbit hole to go knowing that there's such a lot of uh misinformation and especially in science i mean talk about talk about a uh rever- revelationary uh electoral cycle uh what we've seen from the mainstream media what we've seen uh all the stunts they've pulled all the lies all the cover-ups all the conspiracy um it's everywhere and i i don't believe that it's not in medical journals or in uh in especially in pharmaceutical uh press releases um so getting to the getting to the subject of uh the conversion of vitamin d first in the liver and then in the kidneys before it becomes active
Andrew: Are you are you aware of anything that would bypass the necessity for healthy livers and healthy kidneys in order to have adequate vitamin D. If not, that I think is a main stumbling block that people need to know about and hear about.
Ray Peat: I think the low level of vitamin D and calcium is probably the cause of the sick liver and kidneys. Interesting, go on. And rather than being a product, and so supplementing... Just with calcium and vitamin D, I think in many cases will correct whatever the liver and kidney problem is, and that it isn't a matter of curing the disease so that they can make or activate vitamin D. It's a matter of getting the vitamin D and calcium into the system and maybe... You don't need to think about the disease of the kidney and the liver is having some other mysterious cause, such as a virus.
Andrew: OK, because I read one particular abstract that seemed to show that the... OK, this was the other subject, vitamin D receptors. Now, given that, I think you have said that there are many. different places where the tissues in many different organs and other tissues, including nerve, presumably, where vitamin D receptors are located. So they are ubiquitous, a little bit like the sites that are binding sites for various different molecules or hormones or drugs or other things that the body produces. But in terms of the what they call the vitamin D receptor. And it's ubiquity in the body is it reasonable if you know but is it reasonable to increase the amount of vitamin D receptors that your genotype would express in order to overcome any short fall in the absorption of vitamin D or the you know the pickup of vitamin D.
Ray Peat: Receptor is the problem of some of the stress conditions make the receptor disappear. Make them disappear? Yeah. So that I think the getting enough calcium and vitamin D and good nutrition generally is necessary to make sure that you aren't suppressing the receptors. Some of the receptor repression is done by over-methylation and that can be something that your mother, for example, was deficient in vitamin D or calcium. That sets up a methylation pattern in subsequent offspring that can affect their sensitivity to vitamin D. By methylating the receptor or other interacting.
Andrew: Do you know how long-lived these receptors are then? If you talk about a kind of transcriptional event that occurs in the DNA to produce all these different things, one of which is the vitamin D receptor which is so important because it has such an implication in so many different inflammatory processes, and not just. Degenerative bone disease but down to cancers. How long these vitamin D receptors last once they've been produced and therefore if you're talking about the over methylation being negatively associated with these vitamin D receptors disappearing or not being produced.
Ray Peat: That would be the rate at which they're replaced and I don't know specifically how long they last but other receptors are typically turning over. Very fast, so the cells can remain adaptable, usually just two or three days and much of the receptor has been recycled.
Andrew: Okay, we do have a caller on the air, so let's take this first caller. Caller, you're on the air, where are you from?
Caller 1: Hello?
Andrew: Hi, you're on the air, where are you from?
Caller 1: Phil, it's Phil.
Andrew: Oh, Phil, hi. What's your question?
Caller 1: I, a while back, had a vitamin T test and I was kind of low. And they said, you know, to take more and then I think I was checked a while later and they said I was on the low end of normal but I still needed to up it and they suggested I take 5,000 units a day so I was taking 5,000 units a day but I also take a multivitamin, kind of a strong multivitamin mineral. I'm a little older so I want to make sure I get everything I need and... I noticed that the multivitamin had 3,000 units in it so that meant if I was taking both every day I'd be getting 8,000 a day. Is that too much?
Andrew: Well I would wonder first how quantitative the amount was actually in the tablet if it said 3,000 and how bioavailable it was over a liquid form if that was...
Caller 1: It was a liquid capsule. That's a 5,000. Yeah, the liquid capsule was a 5,000 but what the 3,000 one that was in the multivitamin... Yeah, that was in a big pill. Yeah, like, so Dr. P, 8,000 are you, if she got 8,000?
Ray Peat: Yeah, if you figure that being in a bathing suit in the sun for 20 or 30 minutes enough to just start turning pink, that can make 10 or 15,000 units.
Caller 1: Oh, okay.
Ray Peat: 5,000 or 10,000 units. It's never going to be harmful.
Caller 1: So that's not going to be harmful. So if I take, because I was starting to take the 5,000 one every other day because I take the other one every day. But you think I should go back to taking the 5,000 every day with the multi?
Ray Peat: Yeah, I've never heard of even 10,000 a day being harmful.
Caller 1: All right, and this is only eight. Did you say that you need added calcium for the vitamin D to work better?
Ray Peat: You need a good ratio of calcium to phosphate. 10,000. I think it's really protective to take in well over 1,000. I try to get about 2,500 milligrams of calcium per day.
Caller 1: I see. And what are the foods that are good for that?
Ray Peat: Milk, cheese, and the leafy greens that are well cooked, and the water they cook in.
Caller 1: They have to be cooked, because I ate a lot of salad, but those aren't cooked.
Ray Peat: Yeah, we can't digest raw leaves. Most of the calcium is not being assimilated from salad greens.
Caller 1: So I should eat like cooked broccoli or something like that? Yeah, yeah. Okay, how much? Anything green, like green beans, anything that's green has the calcium?
Ray Peat: Oh, one or two big serpents of kale or chard would give you a... A good part of your day's requirement, but I think the best way is to have more than a quarter day of low-fat milk.
Caller 1: Well, I can't possibly drink a quarter day of milk. I eat a little cheese, you know, and sometimes a little sour cream.
Andrew: Just for example, can I just ask you this? How much do you weigh?
Caller 1: Ah! I'm not gonna tell you that.
Andrew: No, you should, come on.
Caller 1: You don't ask a lady her age or her weight.
Andrew: No, no, it's important. I need to ask you, you need to tell me.
Caller 1: I ain't gonna tell you.
Andrew: Okay, well, Dr. P, thanks for your call.
Caller 1: I wanted to do a... Well, what does it have to do with my weight?
Andrew: Oh, it has a huge amount. So if you like...
Caller 1: I'm a bit on the heavy side, let's say that.
Andrew: Yeah, well, it's been very, very, very positive associations with a inability to absorb vitamin D, and I'm not saying you're obese, but in obese people, so the body fat... has a direct, yeah, a suppressing effect on vitamin D absorption. So Dr. P, how about that? You understand that?
Ray Peat: Well, vitamin D and calcium both have a direct suppressive effect on fat formation. The fatty liver, for example, in animal studies it's corrected by both vitamin D and calcium.
Caller 1: So that suppresses fat. That will help you not get so fat if you eat vitamin D and calcium.
Ray Peat: And a high calcium intake by itself just with a normal amount of vitamin D is very effective at preventing overweight.
Caller 1: Oh, that's good to know. And what did you say would happen to the kidneys? Something bad would happen to the kidneys from not having enough calcium or not enough calcium and vitamin D?
Ray Peat: Not enough calcium and vitamin D. Or too much phosphate that the combination, any of those will cause your parathyroid hormone to increase and elevated phosphate and elevated parathyroid hormone are very toxic to the kidneys.
Caller 1: Well, I actually had an overactive thyroid that I had developed a few years ago. I hadn't had it before. It led to atrial fibrillation problems and I had a radioactive iodine to shrink the thyroid. So now I take 88 micrograms a day of thyroid to keep it up to the normal level. So I assume I'm getting the normal level of thyroid that I need.
Ray Peat: Yeah, thyroid works in many ways similarly to vitamin D and regulates calcium and magnesium.
Caller 1: Well, I'm taking both, so I guess that's a good thing. Okay, well, thank you. Thank you for your call. We do have another caller, so let's get this call and the lights are flashing again, so let's take this call. Caller, where are you from? What's your question?
Caller 2:: I am calling you from Finland in Scandinavia.
Andrew: Thank you. Finland, okay.
Caller 2:: I was wondering if if yourself or Dr. Pete could enlighten me about... sediment in the urine. Is this a good thing? Is it normal? Any observation about sediment in the urine?
Andrew: Yeah, okay. Well, do you... first of all, do you know... is this sediment... is it a solid sediment? Or are you talking about an amorphous kind of sediment that's actually part of the fluid makeup? I mean, is it crystalline?
Caller 2:: Yeah, like a dust, like cloudy... if you let it... Let's say if you would urinate in a jar and let it sit, it would make a cloud, kind of a...
Andrew: Have you ever had any investigations for any kind of kidney stones or any type of calculi that you know of?
Caller 2:: I've never had an issue with that. I actually started investigating that when I heard claims from... People eating mostly fruit that this might be a sign of good assimilation or good function of the kidneys. But I'm not sure about the scientific claims concerning that.
Andrew: Okay, Dr. Peake, what do you think?
Ray Peat: If you have a fairly high protein intake and your urine is... on the acid side, down around pH 5, and you have a very high calcium intake, say from the equivalent of two liters of milk per day, you'll have a lot of calcium appearing in the urine. And if the urine is acidic, it isn't likely to form stones, but when it stands, the pH can rise. And as the carbon dioxide evaporates, that can precipitate crystals. So other things being equal, it isn't necessarily harmful to have a precipitation in the urine.
Andrew: OK, did you get that?
Caller 2:: Thank you very much.
Andrew: You're welcome, thank you for your call. Okay, let's quickly switch into urine as a kind of urinalysis. Do you think that people that have clear urine are, for want of a better word, healthy compared to those people that have not cloudy through pigmentation but, you know, less than see-through, opaque type urines? Do you know if there's any association with that? Because I'm sure people have a wide ranging. Presentations from both colour and opacity.
Ray Peat: I think the clarity is largely from the amount of fluid you're drinking. And if the urine is acidic, I don't think some cloudiness is going to hurt. But there can be bad causes of cloudiness. Infection, for example. And I think the yellow colour of urine is considered too... indicate cell turnover. So sometimes the morning urine will be yellow and the afternoon urine clear. Because during the night, with the high stress hormones, a lot of cells are breaking down and the fragments of the nucleic acids turning over, I think, can produce some of the yellow pigment.
Andrew: Okay, well, I'm afraid that is all we've got time for because we're coming up close to two minutes to eight. Thank you very much for your time, Dr. Peat.
Ray Peat: I wanted to mention that the clothoprotein that we talked about a few months ago is the anti-aging protein. It's very similar to vitamin D in some of its functions. It produces a vitamin D deficiency, produces the... degenerative changes that a mutation or deficiency of the plothoprotein can produce.
Andrew: Interesting. Well, I really wanted to talk more to you about the vitamin D receptor and how that could be enhanced because I think vitamin D is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the process of inflammation and all the diseases associated with it. Maybe next month we can pick up just the last part of what I......wanted to look at with vitamin D and maybe bring the vitamin D receptor into more light and help people understand how important vitamin D is to get, especially now we're going into the darker times of the year.
Andrew: So thanks so much for your time, Dr. Peat.
Ray Peat: The calcium metabolism and sugar oxidation is another subject... All right, excellent.
Andrew: Good, I've got some notes here. Thanks very much. Okay, thank you. Okay, so for those people that have listened to the show this evening, thanks for... Either calling in or listening, I can only hope that there's lots of people out there who listened and didn't call, but I would also stress the point that this is a funded radio station. We do need your financial support.
Andrew: So hopefully the phone will ring off the hook once eight o'clock comes around here and people will start pledging. For those of you who've listened to the show, thanks so much. The truth is out there. There's lots of information on the internet.
Andrew: Don't believe the media. The media is dying. In fact, the media is virtually dead. I think it's got a 6% trust rating at this point in time. So thanks for listening and until December next month. Good night.
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