Andrew: Thank you. 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, they run every third Friday of the month from 7 till 8 p.m. and we're both licensed medical herbalists who train in England, graduating there with a degree in herbal medicine.
Andrew: So you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMUD Garbleville 91.1 FM and from 7.30 until the end of the show at eight o'clock you're invited to call in with any questions either related or unrelated to this month's topic of weight gain. The number here if you live in the area is 923 3911 or if you live outside the area the toll-free number is 1-800 KMUD RAD. We can also be reached toll-free on 1-888 WBM for further questions during normal business hours Monday through Friday. Once again, excuse me, we're very welcome to have Dr. Raymond Peat to share his expertise on the subject tonight. Again, one of those subjects related to something that he has a lot of experience with through his research into thyroid and progesterone, other related compounds that are essential, if you like, for healthy metabolism and for anti-stress, anti-aging effects. So thanks so much for joining us again this month, Dr. Peat.
Andrew: Okay, so I think, as usual, we want to give the benefit to those listeners perhaps who haven't heard of you or haven't tuned into this show before, the benefit of your past experience, so if you wouldn't mind just detailing your academic professional career to those people.
Ray Peat: After I had taught linguistics and English and such for a while, I decided to go to graduate school in biology at University of Oregon. Graduated there with my Ph.D. in 1972, specializing in physiology and biochemistry, especially reproductive physiology. Right after I left university, I worked for a while with a diet company, counseling people in weight loss.
Sarah: So that was 41 years ago.
Ray Peat: Yeah.
Andrew: OK, well, hopefully we're going to cover quite a lot of material here tonight, because I know that the subject surrounding tonight's topic of weight gain or how to avoid it and what causes it, et cetera, et cetera, will be pretty pertinent to a lot of people, even if they're not overtly overweight. So I think one of the main things just to let people know about, apart from anything else, is that you do actually have a pretty active Facebook fan page, Dr. P, whether you know it or not, I don't know. It's an active repeat Facebook fan page, for those of you who are familiar with Facebook and use it, that's something perhaps you might want to look at. There's a pretty lively debate and forum surrounding most of those topics that we've covered with Dr. P over the last few years. So I think one of those things that has come out of the forum, and I know it's something that we've noticed ourselves, but that's not to say that it's unavoidable. Because it certainly is, and that's going to be the discussion of tonight's show. I think one of those things that people are asking each other on the Facebook page is how people can adopt your diet and not expect any weight gain. I know the thing that most people have talked about is some extra weight around the abdomen in relation to your specifications for diet. So Sarah, what do you think?
Sarah: Well, I just think that, you know, that's quite a broad statement there. It is very broad. And basically, you can't say that when people adopt Dr. Pete's diet because, you know, if we say milk is good for you, and you go and you start drinking a half a gallon of whole milk a day, you know, you're going to put on weight unless you basically cut out all other calories.
Andrew: Right. Well, that's what we're going to get into.
Sarah: People get confused, like, well, how much milk should I drink? And should I, if I don't want to gain weight, should I drink whole milk or low-fat or, you know?
Ray Peat: The same with cheese, too. I advise eating cheese because of its high calcium and protein content, but you have to consider the calories because some cheese has practically no fat. Others are basically like soft butter. The fat content.
Sarah: Like Brie or Shev?
Ray Peat: Yeah.
Andrew: Well Dr. B, I guess what I wanted to start off with first then was asking you this, one of the main components to weight management then is a functional energy reserve coupled with a healthy metabolism and this is your expertise, so would you outline perhaps what constitutes a healthy metabolism in terms of what we know as glucose oxidation versus the opposite, the fatty acid metabolism? That occurs with stress, so our listeners can tell the difference.
Sarah: And before you answer that, Dr. B, just to say that you've told us before that if somebody has an unhealthy metabolism, they'll have a hard time burning 1,200, 1,000 calories a day.
Ray Peat: Yeah, there was a study about 30 or 40 years ago in which doctors used to follow the textbook standard but we didn't know the answer. To be able to monitor everyone's metabolism and metabolism, it is difficult and shocking for healthcare professionals, especially to be able to understand the board of review all the information that they have on eating, even when it's a never-before-seen development, people live in a virtual world. They spend hours day-to-day blogging about the data. They get too many comments from uns์ dated files. They have around 10 minutes. I can lose weight if they eat less than 1700 calories a day because that was a study done in the 20s or 30s on healthy people and so they put a group of women who claimed that they were gaining weight on a thousand calories, put them in a closed ward and actually counted how much food they were eating and some of them could maintain their weight on 700 calories a day. Especially women who have dieted a lot because several adaptations happen to chronic, poorly balanced dieting. The thyroid slows down and especially the muscle tissues atrophy from the stress of dieting. And if you think of the stress metabolism as being very similar to the diabetic metabolism. Basically, you shift over to burning fat rather than sugar.
Ray Peat: At rest, your brain and red blood cells need sugar, and they'll keep burning it regardless of where they have to get it. If you don't eat enough of the necessary nutrients, your body will convert your muscles....to sugar to keep feeding your brain what it needs. And if you are eating enough sugar or things which can be turned into sugar, then your body doesn't have to break down its own tissues to make the necessary glucose for your blood cells and brain. And in that condition, your muscles, at rest, don't require... practically any glucose. They can do fine on a pure fat diet. But that's the resting muscle.
Ray Peat: If your muscles are under stress, very intense exercise, the muscles will begin burning almost pure sugar. So it's the massive muscle at rest which will burn fat calories and... leaves the protein for your functioning tissues and sugar to sustain your essential brain and immune system and such.
Sarah: So this is why you're an advocate of muscle building because then it helps convert your fat into... well, it helps your body to burn the fat for fuel rather than just using the sugar.
Ray Peat: And when the muscle is stressed, it... begins actually producing estrogen. When you're building muscle in a safe way, the muscle begins producing testosterone actually right in the muscle, which helps the rest of the body. The heart is one of the main targets of testosterone. So well-developed skeletal muscles are actually... sustaining the heart muscle as well as the brain and the lungs which need the stabilizing anti-inflammatory steroids.
Sarah: So is this why they find that when there's muscly people that they have longer lifespans? One of the reasons, you think?
Ray Peat: Well, yeah, everything that tends to kill you shrinks your muscles. The frailty is the basic thing that associates with aging, bones and muscles. Go away at about the same rate of aging.
Andrew: Okay, so getting back to what you've started to outline under what would be regular metabolism for the body to burn glucose preferentially rather than liberating free fatty acids to produce energy the dietary diet starvation type model would then force your body into utilizing stored fats for energy, is that correct?
Ray Peat: Except when it does that it also needs to make some sugar for your brain and so it breaks down the tissues. The first to go is your thymus, which in just a few hours they used to think that adults didn't have a significant amount of thymus tissue because they looked at people who had died. After being sick, and even if you die slowly after a traumatic accident, your thymus is gone. It just takes a few hours of intense stress for the thymus to be dissolved. And so a long fast will just completely devastate your thymus tissues. It turns into sugar very quickly.
Sarah: And that's important for your immune system, right?
Ray Peat: Yeah, and the skin is... relatively dispensable too in the long run. So your skin atrophies very quickly with the fast or even a low-calorie diet. And then the muscles go... you can live months on your muscles providing sugar for your brain if necessary, if you have big muscles. But lots of the women that I used to see who were there for a weight-loss diet. You couldn't find a bicep muscle or a calf muscle. They would try to tighten their muscle and they couldn't feel or find anything either in their upper arm or lower leg. The muscle was maybe the size of a person's index finger. So when they would first start eating a good diet, the first thing that would happen would be......pounds of water loss. Their tissue would suddenly come out of the stress condition and get rid of some of the stored water. Then the muscle would start growing. The first week they might lose 10 or 15 pounds of water. Then for about a month they would start putting on weight as their muscles began growing.
Andrew: Okay, because obviously muscle is denser than fat, right, and so a slender person with a well-defined muscular structure would weigh more than a larger person that seemed large through fat.
Ray Peat: Yeah, we would have people measure their waists and thighs and hips and each week they would get smaller as they gained weight.
Andrew: Okay, so they started leaning and toning up. They shrunk in volume but they increased in mass.
Sarah: Okay, so what about athletes and you know like long distance runners, people that are very thin and lean, how healthy would you say their metabolism is?
Ray Peat: There was a study of using radioactive testosterone and they not only saw that the runners' muscles were... atrophied, but comparing them to weightlifters who had developed huge skeletal muscles, with these isotopes they could make a picture of their heart, lungs and brain and so on. All of their tissues had atrophied so that the lean, long-distance runners also had lean, lean, slabby hearts, very thin hearts involved.
Sarah: It's a heart healthy form of exercise. It's a stereotypical picture of health, that kind of Kenyan long distance marathon runner.
Ray Peat: You know, a lot of things happen. Fertility is often reduced because the testosterone goes down and the very immediate thing that you can see in even fairly low intensity exercise is that the lungs lose some of their ability to diffuse. Oxygen in and carbon dioxide out, the actual substance of the lung air sac thickens with just a fairly moderate amount of continued exercise.
Andrew: Is that an inflammatory process that's causing that?
Ray Peat: Yeah, it's a kind of edema, mild inflammation, and sports anemia is a recognized thing. It's a combination of all of those. little stresses and shift away from the anabolic testosterone to the females are always relatively anemic because of the influence of the balance of estrogen relative to the androgens and sports anemia is somewhat like the feminizing effect of estrogen on the blood system.
Sarah: So the long distance runner has an deformed heart and deformed lungs basically compared to the bodybuilder.
Andrew: Yeah. Okay well let's hold it there for a second. You're listening to Ask Europe Doctor on KMUV Garbleville 91.1 FM and from 7.30 until the end of the show at eight o'clock you're invited to call in with any questions either related or unrelated to this month's subject of weight loss. Our guest speaker here is Dr. Raymond Peat and from 7.30 to 8.00 we'll be open for questions. Dr. Peat, moving on a little bit then in a tangent direction, are some people more predisposed to this kind of inefficient glucose oxidation from other courses like, I know you mentioned PUFA a lot or cortisol dominant type pictures?
Ray Peat: Yeah, lots of things can interfere with your......high rate of metabolism. Things that suppress your thyroid are the basic most common thing, but anything that can increase your cortisol or even your glucagon can interfere with your metabolism, slow down your metabolic rate. Serotonin, estrogen, for example, both lower your body temperature. And many stresses can increase those, and those tend to increase the glucagon, shift you away from being able to oxidize the glucose and instead depend on fatty acid oxidation.
Sarah: So sluggish digestion could increase estrogen and serotonin, and radiation could increase estrogen and serotonin.
Ray Peat: One of the ways to get rid of unneeded estrogen by way of the liver excreting it and if your bowel is sluggish you reabsorb it and if your bowel is irritated and sluggish it secretes much more serotonin than needed which affects your whole hormonal system bringing up the stress hormones and contributing to lower temperature.
Sarah: So eating carrots. With vinegar or lemon juice or just carrots and taking liver herbs like cascara and dandelion root, milk thistle can help with sluggish bowels.
Ray Peat: Yeah, and just eating what you consider to be the most delicious food can greatly help the intestine secrete more juices so things digest faster and move along more smoothly.
Sarah: So enjoy your food. Yeah. Hopefully we can enjoy our food and and hopefully it's not enjoying pufas which is fried whatever as long as it's not fried in coconut as long as it's not fried in coconut oil then it's bad for you.
Andrew: Okay so let's let's get let's get back to where we were at the beginning in terms of people mentioning that they can't help but gain a bit of extra mid-weight and I think what we're coming coming around to is that exercise and muscle building. However small or however gentle however gradual is one of the most important things when adopting a typical diet that would certainly replace all the nutrition that a person needs. I know your diet does that. So in terms of gentle muscle building, how do you advocate that to happen say in a sedentary 60 year old lady perhaps?
Ray Peat: I'm just doing an occasional knee bend. Squatting and standing up again and maybe getting some five pound dumbbells and lifting those in different motions. Just a few lifts, two or three times a day and when you're doing that maybe squat once or twice.
Andrew: Right, because it really is about being actively involved in generating muscle. However gently or however lightly the weight or the exercise would involve. Okay, because you're saying essentially that muscle in its own right effectively burns glucose and the very presence of muscle with the increase in testosterone will actually improve the metabolic rate. Yeah, okay. Now another another another direction then you've mentioned in the I know you mentioned this earlier on that you said and this is for the guys I think preferentially because they probably have more of a chance to see this but you mentioned foaming urine as being an indicator of an excess excretion of steroid hormone precursors and and being a sign of stress
Ray Peat: well yeah in the morning you have generally been exposed to several hours of darkness and the darkness is very stressful just staying indoors too much gives you chronic stress from the absence of light but everyone in the morning is at their peak of being exposed to stress hormones from the darkness and during stress Like starvation, the hormones first try to mobilize energy production and that during the night involves increased pre-fatty acids, sort of like doing a little marathon during the night as far as the shift to fatty acids goes.
Ray Peat: And your liver, if it's well nourished and supplied with thyroid hormones, will......process steroids such as estrogen and cortisol, which reach it, the liver will attach either sulfate or a sugar, glucuronic acid, to make it water-soluble so that then it can leave in the bloodstream to the kidneys and be excreted, and in that attached to either the sulfate or the sugar... It's like a soap. It's oily at one end and water-soluble at the other, and so it makes foam, and during the night, the fatty acids can be processed in the same way, and the liver especially recognizes the unsaturated fatty acids, but whatever arrives during the night is likely to contribute to that morning foam.
Andrew: Okay, so I know you mentioned the liver's ability in storing glucose for the nighttime diet or fast, if you like, for the eight hours that we don't eat. So given that a person's consuming adequate sugars during the daytime to stock their liver for the nighttime fast, or given that the person would, as we recommend, and I know that you've been an advocate and suggestion of this, that they're eating a small amount of ice cream at night time before bed or they're taking a glass of orange juice to bed with them to sip on whenever they wake up to get a little bit of sugar so that their adrenaline is kept down and their night time stress response doesn't occur. Do you think that, is that still possible for somebody to have a foaming morning urine in the presence of sugars during the night time?
Ray Peat: Um, yeah, the, um, uh... Stress always occurs, but if you're sleeping soundly and deeply, there is less intense damage from the stress. So if you stayed awake in the dark, you would probably have super-foamy urine in the morning.
Andrew: OK. And this is something else, perhaps during the daytime, if some of the guys notice. What's happening with them during the day. This again would be another indicator of insufficient sugars to block adrenaline and other stress hormones and that their system was reasonably stressed.
Ray Peat: Yeah, I think so.
Andrew: Yeah.
Sarah: And what about for females?
Ray Peat: Same thing.
Sarah: This is not as obvious.
Andrew: I'm only saying it because of how obvious it is. OK, so yeah. OK, so going on to going on to the the shift. The shift in fat content or fat make up that you advocate from are the recommendations that our listeners have heard over the last few years in terms of increased saturated fats switching to butter, coconut, palm oil excluding all the liquid oils as sources of PUFA. Excuse me. I know you've mentioned in the past that the The need to avoid pufa is pretty paramount if you really want to make a change in your physiology But I think you've also said that it's it's very difficult to avoid it totally because you're naturally going to produce some
Ray Peat: well the natural foods milk beef lamb Coconut oil and so on these all have two or three percent unsaturated polyunsaturated fats and If you eat just a tiny bit more than you're going to burn right away Some of it gets stored in your fat tissue and what is stored is preferentially polyunsaturated fats your body recognizes that the good stuff to burn right away is the saturated fat right after the sugars and And so it selectively doesn't burn all the unsaturated fat quickly, and so it's the most likely to be stored. But then your fat is the same way fat cells prefer to burn saturated fat. And so whatever you've stored in your fat by eating more than you needed, over time your fat cells use up a percentage of the stored saturated fat.
Ray Peat: And increase the percentage of the stored polyunsaturated fat so that as you get older and fatter or even if you don't get fatter as you get older, your fat tissue becomes more polyunsaturated so that each time you get hungry or stressed and draw on your fat stores for energy, it is more anti-thyroid and more pro-estrogenic because of its increasing polyunsaturation with time.
Sarah: So with a common recommendation of this is a common recommendation I make is include three tablespoons of coconut oil in your diet a day. But of course if we are talking about someone who only burns 700 calories a day, would you still make that same recommendation to do three tablespoons of coconut oil?
Ray Peat: No, more like a small teaspoon three times a day.
Sarah: Right so I think basically. Well we are listeners and we have to keep in mind is that everybody's metabolism is at a different rate and if Someone's eating a 1200 calorie a day diet and it's like perfect and they say I can hardly eat anything Well, that's probably because they're only burning 700 and they're they just keep gaining weight on 1200
Andrew: Okay, all right, so um Is is there any way then perhaps for those people who probably uh, we're talking about right now to be able to Assess their metabolic rate given that that is what is driving how well they do or don't lose weight um,
Ray Peat: one way is just to look everything up in a food analysis chart and measure the amount of calories you're eating every day, but another way is to calculate or take note of the fluid that you drink, milk, juice, coffee, total volume of fluid intake in a day and measure the total volume of urine output in the same period of time and the difference is what's evaporated and in an average level of activity and average relative humidity, a person will generally evaporate a liter per thousand calories burned so if you have only a missing liter of fluid in the day you know you're only burning a thousand calories
Sarah: so if someone gets a half a gallon of fluid a day and they only pee out say a couple cups then you know that they're very their system is very very low thyroid
Ray Peat: well yeah
Sarah: i mean i'm sorry very very high thyroid
Ray Peat: put a pint out of two liters that's a 1500 calorie burning so that's not very much either
Sarah: right but if somebody drinks a half a gallon and they practically pee you know
Ray Peat: a quarter and a half that's a very bad
Sarah: bad ratio
Engineer: yeah and a half a gallon that would be about two liters
Ray Peat: yeah
Sarah: there's four liters to a gallon
Engineer: I just thought we might want to remind listeners that it is 730 and the phone lines are open if people want to call in and have any questions about the subject tonight yeah or if any other subject that they're interested in relating to the okay all right
Sarah: thank you Jordan
Andrew: okay so excuse me I know you you also are very keen that females and males do everything they can to limit their exposure to estrogen for all its negative effects estrogen dominant females this is something else that you've brought out that it's not you don't always take it for granted that estrogen dominated dominant females would be overweight with those what we typically imagine as estrogen tendencies but actually you could get a slender slender woman based on the same the same conditions with estrogen
Ray Peat: in in the animal studies they've seen that estrogen excites some of the metabolic processes while slowing others down and it can make the animals hyperactive but very slender and in people if there are cases where it can do that same thing it can make a woman tense, very hyperactive and oversensitive and very skinny but it can do the other, it can turn on the stress metabolism while it slows the metabolism lowering the body temperature for example and that can lead to excess fat storage
Sarah: And that's the same in men as well. Excess estrogen can make some men very thin and excess estrogen can make some men overweight.
Andrew: Is there any surefire way of differentiating the one condition in the two separate physical pictures?
Ray Peat: No, nothing that I'm sure of.
Andrew: Do you know what the biological preference is? for driving, driving it in one or the other direction?
Ray Peat: No.
Andrew: Okay. All right. I had to ask, but I'm sure there's something more that you'll bring out in a bit. We've got two callers on the line, Dr. Pete, so let's take the first of the two callers. You're on the air?
Caller: This is David. Hello.
Andrew: Hi, David.
Sarah: Where are you calling from tonight, David?
Andrew: Yeah, I think that's the other thing I want to make. Bring everyone's attention. Let's find out where everyone's from.
Caller: I am from Missouri.
Andrew: Missouri.
Caller: And I've actually talked to Sarah a few times and emailed Dr. Pete. I really appreciate this show, by the way. I've listened to these podcasts. I've downloaded every podcast that you've done. You're very welcome. And that's what I listen to when I drive. And I just great. Sometimes I've listened to several of these over several times. And there's a lot in there. It takes a while. Oh yeah. No, it's just amazing how it seems like each week that goes by, I just understand this more and more at a deeper level. And I just, I love it.
Sarah: Well, iPods are useful then.
Caller: Absolutely.
Andrew: And we're very grateful for Dr. Pete.
Caller: I've got two different sets of questions that still pertained to everything you talked about tonight. One is, I have a fairly weak left knee. And so I've been kind of experimenting with using a rebounder. I've got two different types, a more soft one and then a one that's a little bit firmer. And I kind of go back and forth between the two. I do very light, you know, just bouncing. And then also running in place or jogging. And I usually try to do that, you know, like three to five minutes. And I do that several times through the day if I'm at home working. I'm just curious what you think of that.
Ray Peat: I don't know if there's much benefit to the bouncing. It does strengthen your bones, I guess, the compression and concussion, but something that builds more massive muscles, stress, even though it isn't fatiguing, just resistance training in little bursts, I think. It would help to raise your androgens and strengthen the connective tissues.
Caller: And that was one of the questions I was going to ask you, Dr. P. So just using like different weights and not doing too much stress, but trying to do a certain amount of repetitions where you're just strengthening the muscles, that is a good thing to do?
Ray Peat: Yeah, make the muscle know that it's been active. Warm it up a little, but not enough to make you get out of breath or anything.
Caller: And then what do you feel about just doing basic yoga, you know, like doing different postures and holding those postures where you're actually holding the muscles in a semi-stressed state, but then relaxing it?
Ray Peat: Yeah, that kind of stress is good for the muscles.
Caller: Okay. And then the other thing I wanted to ask you about, you know, I've been using the 250-watt bulbs that you had recommended. And I've got three of those, and I use those in different places around the house. Because I'm a photographer, I have light stands, so it makes it kind of easy to move them around. But I'm curious, you know, because you've talked about the stress of darkness before you, you know, after the sun goes down and as you go into the evening before you go to bed, do you think it's useful to use those right before going to bed, like say for 15 minutes to a half hour, and then maybe... When you arise in the morning, maybe doing it for a half hour, like while you're drinking your coffee, or what do you think of that?
Ray Peat: I think so, and I'm basing that on some studies that were done on plant tissues about 30 or 40 years ago. They found that any kind of tissue put in sunlight or ultraviolet light got some excited free radicals or excited electrons. End. Shining red light on those would just immediately quench those that had been excited, but if you keep living tissue in the dark it starts building up more of those excited electrons over a period of 30 minutes or so you can see an increase in them.
Caller: Wow, that's bright. Okay. And then just one last question. Is dreaming a sign that you're having a certain degree of stress through the night rather than being in a deep sleep where you're not remembering your dreams when you wake up in the morning? When you wake up in the middle of the night?
Ray Peat: The metabolism has these cycles. The 24-hour cycle is the basic thing, but it is subdivided into roughly 90-minute cycles of ups and downs for the blood sugar and the adrenaline. Everything is mobilized a little bit and if your liver is running short on fuel, the cycles become more intense and the dream cycles go with drops in the blood sugar and surges of the nerve chemicals such as adrenaline.
Caller: So if you were having a really great dream that was exhilarating and you felt really good about when you woke up, would that still be the case because it's actually causing you to awaken?
Ray Peat: Yeah, except that's probably that your whole system recognizes that it has been rested and it's time to get up and eat something.
Sarah: And that's often why you have dreams. In the early hours of the morning because that's when you've run out of sugar at that point.
Caller: But yeah that makes sense, I'll be darned. Okay.
Andrew: What are you going to say Dr. P?
Ray Peat: If your body is well rested from six or eight hours of sleep then the dreams are likely to have a very pleasant quality getting ready to go out and do something.
Sarah: Yeah it's preparing you to wake up.
Andrew: Yeah as opposed to them.
Caller: That's pretty cool.
Andrew: As opposed to the nightmares.
Sarah: Yeah as opposed to the 1 a.m. nightmares.
Caller: Right exactly so that means that your body is really stressed out and it's yeah not getting what it needs all right
Andrew: well thank you so much for your call
Caller: hey thank you
Andrew: okay we've got two more callers so let's take the next caller hi and where are you from
Caller: yeah hi i'm calling from piercy okay just down the road okay yeah um i turned the radio on just in the midst of uh the subject about urinating and taking in fluid um what my question is if you take in a half gallon of fluid a day and you pee out most of that is that healthy or is that unhealthy
Ray Peat: it shows that you're not evaporating very much so in an extremely humid climate that wouldn't be so bad but in a if you're indoors and Have a relative humidity of about 50, then it means that your metabolism is slow and not producing much heat
Caller: I See okay, so you want a certain amount of evaporation When the atmosphere is in fact dry
Ray Peat: Yeah very healthy like 12 to 15 year old people I burn fuel very wastefully but that's when people are the least likely to die is when they're wasting fuel like crazy
Sarah: so basically
Caller: when you said least likely to what to die
Ray Peat: to die around 12 to 15 people are are the healthiest and most resistant to stress
Sarah: so dr p
Caller: that's not based on they're wasting fuel though is it or
Ray Peat: yeah it looks like a waste to eat thousands of calories a day when you're not doing anything but it's good for you
Caller: i see i see so a fast metabolism is that what you're saying is a healthier metabolism
Ray Peat: yeah the wasteful energy metabolism
Caller: gotcha
Sarah: and so just to answer another question um caller if you burn or evaporate half of what you drink so you pee out the other half that's pretty much normal in our climate wouldn't you agree dr pete
Ray Peat: if you um drink maybe three quarts of liquid
Sarah: and you pee out a quart and a half
Ray Peat: yeah
Andrew: okay good
Caller: in this in this i see that would be that's about an average norm right because
Sarah: we we don't have that high humidity like they do in the south
Caller: okay so the you say that we don't have the high oh okay gotcha gotcha especially during the summer time obviously
Sarah: even drier yes
Caller: all right real good thank you
Andrew: all right
Sarah: thank you for your call all right
Andrew: let's take the next call hello you're on the air
Caller: hello dr pete uh i'm reading oh this is a fascinating show thank you so much where are you from caller uh i'm southern humboldt okay um i'm reading that one side effect of anti-anxiety and antidepressant drugs is weight gain Do you know how this works or do you know how these drugs work at all?
Ray Peat: If they increase your exposure to serotonin or decrease your adrenaline, they'll slow your metabolic rate and make it harder to burn calories.
Caller: Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, thank you so much. Just how, you know, I'm reading also that they don't really, there's no conclusive studies as to relating a low serotonin level with any mental state. So anyway,
Sarah: yeah, they're not even sure how those SSRIs work anyways. Now they're saying that it really doesn't have much to do with serotonin.
Caller: Yeah, and they don't have a very good... way of describing the topography of the receptors and all of that kind of stuff. So if you have... you can elucidate any on that, I would appreciate it. And I'll just hang up now and listen. Thanks.
Sarah: Thank you for your call. So Dr. Pete, I guess the last question was, how are these antidepressants making people feel better if it's not... If they are. If they are, if it's... It has nothing to do with serotonin increasing or decreasing or anything at all with serotonin.
Ray Peat: Oh, they all work in slightly different ways. So you have to think about each one individually. Maybe we should have a special time to go over some of those specific chemicals.
Sarah: Okay, that sounds great.
Andrew: Okay, but thanks. Thanks for the callers that have been. Okay, so the lines are open from now until 8 o'clock. If you live in the area, the number is 1-800-KMUD-RAD. If you live outside the area, the number is 1-800-KMUD-RAD. If you're in the area, it's 923-3911. Okay, so Dr. P, just carrying on with the topic of the ideal The ideal diet that I know you've suggested before which I know Sarah's deals with quite a lot of people with this and you're mentioning the quart of OJ. Would you want to make do you want to mention the what you would normally be recommending?
Sarah: Well I mean if you were if Dr. Pete was would recommend something like a quart of orange juice a quart of milk a day and you wanted to lose weight I mean you wouldn't have much room for anything else if you only burn 700 calories a day.
Ray Peat: Well, if you use 1% butterfat milk, that's only 400 calories per quart, where whole milk would be almost twice that much. And one of the tricks of orange juice is that there are some good chemicals in it which are anti-astrogenic and some other fruits. Tropical fruits are some of the anti-estrogens are very important for the metabolism as well as the minerals and type of sugar and such.
Andrew: So there's compounds you're saying in OJ even that are anti-estrogenic?
Ray Peat: Yeah, and with milk it isn't just the protein but the calcium. It's very important as an anti-inflammatory, anti-stress, anti-depressant and so on. People who eat the same number of calories without milk are much more likely to be fat than the people who are regular milk drinkers.
Sarah: I know, why don't you tell us about your experience when you were in... Finland, I think it was, Finland and Russia?
Ray Peat: Well, in Russia and the Slavic countries in general, I found that there was really no reliably good milk in the cities. And the people all had bad teeth and were fat. Food was very cheap, but milk was scarce. Probably proteins in general weren't as cheap as the average food. But crossing over the border into Finland, it was very impressive to see how many stores had displays of cheese in the window. And the people were all healthy looking and slender compared to the other side of the border.
Sarah: Well, we noticed the same thing in France. You go to France and they, everywhere, they all eat cheese. And they're most, for the most part, they're all very slender. So I guess what you're saying is that 400 calories from orange juice is not comparative to 400 calories from baked potatoes and rice.
Ray Peat: Definitely not. It stimulates your metabolism and suppresses the stress hormones. Whereas 400 calories from baked potato and rice would......increase your stress hormones and suppress your metabolism.
Ray Peat: Yeah, and then there's the matter of the starch particles that if you don't have some saturated fat with them, the starch particles can set up a whole pattern of stress and injury by entering your bloodstream, which people taking supplements should... Be very careful to avoid anything with particles such as titanium dioxide or silica.
Sarah: Those are very allergenic particles that are in all supplements, practically. Yeah, and those things getting into the bloodstream trigger the stress hormones, and obesity is the least of the things they contribute to.
Andrew: OK, we've got a few more callers on the line, Dr Pete, so let's take this first caller. You're on the air, where are you from?
Caller: Hello?
Andrew: Hello, you're on the air, where are you from?
Caller: Hi, I've been trying to lose some weight and I've been weighing myself periodically at night time as well in the morning and it seems to me that I lose about five pounds of weight sleeping. Some nights I've noticed I've urinated, sometimes I haven't urinated and it seems always about the same, about five pounds. And I'm wondering where this five pounds goes, if it's with heat, and if there's a relationship between being cold at night and warm at night, whether you lose more weight in cooler climates than you would in warmer, even though warmer climate people seem to be thinner than cooler climate people.
Ray Peat: It depends on how you respond to the cold. Some people... steam up the windows of the bedroom so the window runs water down and collects at the bottom of the window sill in the morning. Those are people who lose a lot of weight by evaporation during the night. You can see the water collecting on the cool surfaces.
Sarah: And people in warmer climates are warmer so their metabolism stay up during the night. And they probably are thinner because of that, right, Dr. B?
Ray Peat: Yeah. When your body temperature drops in the night, because you're slowing it down to resist the stress, but if you reach a certain temperature, you turn on the inflammatory stress-producing hormones and so you get not only the darkness but the cold extremities causing stress.
Caller: So it's better to be comfortable if you're actually trying to shed weight is better to be comfortable at night, correct?
Ray Peat: Yeah.
Andrew: Okay, so that's reaching the low temperatures you mean with Dr. P?
Ray Peat: Yeah, if your feet reach 90 degrees Fahrenheit they're producing toxic stress inducing substances.
Sarah: So don't run around barefoot with cold feet.
Andrew: We were telling our nieces that always make sure to get the socks on. I know my grandma's always an advocate for keeping your feet warm when you get out of bed.
Caller: Cold head.
Andrew: Yeah well cold head and cold feet.
Ray Peat: Some people taking a warm foot bath at bedtime and then putting on warm socks and a wool cap sleep a lot better.
Andrew: Yeah okay we have two more callers so thanks thanks for your caller caller Hi next caller you're on the air?
Caller: I'm here.
Andrew: Hello?
Caller: Hello I'm here.
Andrew: Hi where are you calling from?
Caller: Oh is that me?
Andrew: Yes it's you where are you calling from?
Caller: Oh I'm calling from Philipsville.
Andrew: Philipsville okay that's 15 miles off the road okay go ahead.
Caller: Well there's a couple of questions I had um one I'm curious in the beginning you said something about eating food that tastes delicious to you was good for you but you didn't say what foods those were
Ray Peat: it varies with the person but you should try to avoid the things that affect your metabolism harmfully like starches and polyunsaturated fats or and some some plant materials are toxic like but otherwise just want to appeal
Caller: to eat whole grains like brown rice and millet
Ray Peat: uh no there's almost nothing of value in those
Caller: even if it's if it's not processed i don't mean like white rice
Ray Peat: uh well uh the white rice is relatively free of irritants and toxins but it has very little of food value in that
Caller: a lot of vitamins and fiber and things that were good for you
Sarah: not compared to like say orange juice
Caller: Okay, now when it comes to how about ice cream, you know a good ice cream that doesn't have chemicals in it like Hagen Dazs or something That good for you or not? I mean, it's got a high calories
Sarah: but yeah, I mean if you're trying to lose weight and I wouldn't recommend you eat ice cream, but if you're You're not trying to lose weight. You're happy with your weight and you're having trouble sleeping. It can help a lot of people Go to milk
Engineer: milk and sugar is a bad food combination Combination
Caller: I know
Sarah: I wouldn't agree with that at all Jordan
Ray Peat:: if you had like some cheese or small glass of milk or something that there's something in that that helps you sleep um yeah milk contains a good balance all in itself because it has some some fat some protein and some sugar
Caller: well I don't drink milk but I do put half and half in my coffee in the morning does that count well no that's mostly cream well and that's not good I mean it's half cream half milk
Ray Peat: well it's okay if it goes with other food such as protein and sugars
Caller: but now you mentioned orange juice a lot but what are the other fruit juices I tend to really enjoy other fruit juices like berry juice and peach juice and carrot juice and cherry juice and all kinds of different juices you know they don't have sugar in them and I tend to drink them like half diluted with water so they're not so strong but I've had people tell me that it's not good for me because it has too much sugar in it and too many calories so what do you think about juices other than orange
Ray Peat: or many juices are are good it's the minerals and antioxidants as well as the sugar that are important but grapefruit juice for example has a chemical that causes your liver to increase estrogen in the body.
Caller: Oh no, I don't mean grapefruit juice. I'm thinking of apricot juice, peach juice, berry juice, grape juice, those kinds.
Ray Peat: Grape juice is very good as long as you consider the calories. It has more concentrated calories than orange juice. Some tropical fruits... are very good. Guava, for example.
Caller: Uh-huh. Mango?
Ray Peat: Uh, carrot juice is another one that should be avoided except in small amounts because of the high carotene content.
Sarah: It's very metabolically suppressive.
Caller: Oh, it is.
Caller: It antagonizes both thyroid and progesterone.
Ray Peat: What's good for thyroid? You know, what's good for like, generating your metabolism so that you... You know, you burn calories quicker, but you know, you won't have an overactive thyroid. Milk, cheese, and some of the fruit juices are the best things.
Sarah: Right, so 400 calories from fruit juice isn't going to be the same as eating 400 calories of brown rice. The 400 calories of brown rice is going to be much more metabolically suppressive than the 400 calories from fruit juice.
Andrew: Yeah, thank you for your call, but it is a couple of minutes to the top of the hour, and I want to make sure that listeners who are... tuned in get to know Dr. Raymond Pete's contact details. So, unfortunately, we've come to the end of this show, Dr. Pete. Thanks so much for your input and your wisdom.
Sarah: And I'm sorry we couldn't get to you at the callers.
Andrew: I'm sorry that we had two more callers on the line, but I'm afraid we couldn't get to you.
Sarah: Join us next month, March 15th.
Andrew: So, those people that have listened to us, and Dr. Raymond Pete most especially, his contact details are www.raypeat.com, www.raypeat.com, or www.raypeat.com. That's what we would call scientific articles, folks, so not just hearsay, not just things that he's come up with, but a lot of his articles are fully referenced, so there's plenty of science behind it. And that's r-a-y-p-e-a-t.com. Okay, so lots of articles there for people to read, and even the subject we've mentioned this evening, there's plenty of information there.
Thanks for reads, hope you enjoyed it, sharing this article on your favorite social media network would be highly appreciated ๐! Sawernya juga boleh