diff --git a/assets/2009-08-01-you-are-what-you-eat-or-absorb.md b/assets/2009-08-01-you-are-what-you-eat-or-absorb.md index 06a3e23..62fe879 100644 --- a/assets/2009-08-01-you-are-what-you-eat-or-absorb.md +++ b/assets/2009-08-01-you-are-what-you-eat-or-absorb.md @@ -19,5 +19,5 @@ completion: timestamps: false ray-peat-rodeo: prev-paths: - - "/you-are-what-you-eat" + - /you-are-what-you-eat --- diff --git a/assets/2016-11-18-vitamin-d-with-ask-your-herb-doctor.md b/assets/2016-11-18-vitamin-d-with-ask-your-herb-doctor.md index e93b973..1b50bb6 100644 --- a/assets/2016-11-18-vitamin-d-with-ask-your-herb-doctor.md +++ b/assets/2016-11-18-vitamin-d-with-ask-your-herb-doctor.md @@ -21,7 +21,8 @@ completion: added: author: Marcus Whybrow date: "2024-04-21" -prev-filenames: - - 2016-11-18-vitamin-d.md +ray-peat-rodeo: + prev-paths: + - /vitamin-d --- [0:00] 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 your patients about a wide range of conditions, recommend herbs, supplements and nutritional counselling. So you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMU-D Garberville 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 9233911 or if you live outside the area that's hold free numbers 1-800-568-3723 that's 1-800-KM-UD-RAD and we can be reached toll free on 1-888-WBM-ERB [1:07] for consultations or further information Monday through Friday 9-5. Well first things first we're very close towards the end of the pledge drive. 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 emphasise 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. So thank you 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 [2:10] 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 sited I would say that more so than ever we have seen the mainstream or lame stream media completely eradicated disingenuous and completely false. So it's excellent to see alternative radios news sites and websites coming with the internet and the age of free information. I thought it's a very small piece I just wanted to say about the internet and it's the ICNN handover that was under American governance for a long time but the present administration decided to pass that off but [3:13] I'm not too sure whether this incoming administration will be able to do anything about that before a censorship carries on like it is in China for sure. Okay so this month's talk is on vitamin D. Most people will have recognized vitamin D probably from Ricketts in the early 1900s I know in England and in many countries that are north of 37 degrees there is really various insufficient sunlight especially in the winter months to generate vitamin D and so Ricketts was a fairly common presenting condition and still is in some parts of the so we're once again very pleased to have Dr Raymond Pete 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 Pete. I guess first things first would you just outline your professional and academic [4:14] 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. Basically a PhD in biology including reproductive physiology and biochemistry at the University of Oregon. I know you've 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 one of the reasons of prognolone and or progesterone in its anti-inflammatory and anti-aging effects. Now vitamin D is actually a pro hormone it's not strictly speaking in a sense the word vitamin is it? No. So in terms of the [5:19] discovery of vitamin D and its association with rickets do you think there's adequate vitamin D in this general populations? For preventing rickets they're pretty pretty much all around the world there is 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's books came out and the medical establishment [6:23] reacted to discourage the public from using their own therapies and for example vitamin A of the stories about how horribly toxic it was it would destroy your brain and make your skin fall off and 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 a baby whose mother gave it a million or so units of vitamin D and or took it while she was pregnant and that 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 [7:28] 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 taboo about anything more than two or three hundred units per day okay it's interesting you've said that rickets is relatively unknown in the world I know in England and since I've 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 rickets were starting to appear again it's kind of a little bit off the tonight's subject really but but the advent of fear mongering from cases of skin cancer melanoma the use of sunscreens [8:29] 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 would had never seen it before it was kind of the first times for 30 and 40 year old doctors so there is there is definitely a 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 bought it down from 4.5 to 3.5 highlighting the [9:36] fact that there are more and more people with hypothyroid type tendencies and so this figure's 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 those positive associations for 100 nanograms per mil blood levels of vitamin D what do you what do you think about that even in the absence of rickets that there is a tendency in the population to have low yeah several of the conditions that are well associated with vitamin D deficiency some of them have doubled and tripled uh in the last 20 30 years and it looks like it's because of that fear of the sunlight [10:42] 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 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 seven or eight and she per ml wow and within a week of taking just a moderate I think it was five five thousand units a day she could walk around and when you look at the the symptoms of people with 15 and she per ml 20 25 and so on you can see gradations of that weakness depression shrinking muscles of insensitivity [11:50] to insulin tendency to have high blood sugar all of all of the most common diseases of stress right and blood pressure is also associated positively isn't it with a lower level of vitamin D um yeah everything related to aging and degenerative and stress of atrial fibrillation enlargement of the ventricle calcification of the valves degeneration of of the valves in several different ways pardoning of the arteries calcification of the coronary arteries and even calcification to the extent of what they call a heart stone a huge mass of calcium well okay and we'll get in we'll get into plenty of the plenty of the different conditions for which there's been lots of peer-reviewed papers written [12:51] on uh 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 osteomalacia 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 process is producing inflammation and the sequelae of information and how how inflammatory processes in general are extremely destructive and counterproductive to energy production when you look at the the mechanism of just the outline that calcium helps to balance or vitamin D helps to balance the relation between calcium and phosphate [13:54] and to prevent the over accumulation of phosphate and to keep up the the right level of calcium when you look at at the relation of that balance to inflammation it turns out that it's really a serious problem in the population the amount of of phosphate relative to calcium and that's because people aren't eating enough dairy or green leaves leaves and and cheese and milk are really the the major good sources of of calcium and meat of nuts grains beans all of those have terrifically high phosphate contents right that the excess phosphate and the reaction of the parathyroid hormone to that high phosphate intake it's exactly the same as a deficiency of [15:00] vitamin D so too much phosphate too little vitamin D and you get what amounts to an early stage of chronic kidney degeneration parathyroid hormone and phosphate are called urinic toxins late stage kidney disease but people are are starting that process very early when they don't eat enough calcium and vitamin D well okay well i want to talk a little bit about the natural conversion in the skin the process by which sunlight activates the pre get 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 automatically [16:02] um weakened the process by which this pro pro hormone is converted into the active form so you're listening to ask Europe doctor on kmed now 91.1 FM from 7 30 until the end of the show eight o'clock you're invited to call him if any questions Dr. Ray Pete 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 uh sun and cancer how this is all playing into decreasing our levels and how there aren't that many foods that really produce uh have enough vitamin D in them to actually keep levels of vitamin D at good levels and how those levels have actually been raised uh in terms of the reference range for blood tests showing a positive association with increasing levels of vitamin D and decreasing disease so number here if you're in the area is 93 3 9 1 1 uh if you live outside the area there's a 800 number which is 1 800 5 6 8 3 7 2 3 or 1 800 KMUD rad so uh the lines will be open from 7 30 on so Dr. Pete i'm talking [17:08] about the conversion in the skin and again i wanted to also bring up the fact that uh i had heard and read that washing directly after sunbathing was actually counterproductive because you can wash uh the uh precursor metabolite off of the skin um don't know how you uh how you view that as true or that's just some bad science and then the conversion of the uh cholesterol type molecule in the skin into the uh 25 hydroxy form and how that is any further hydroxylated downstream by the kidneys to the active form um 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 pro hormone so that um the body actually stopped producing uh 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 i think that's only when you're um in the middle of the day at a moderate latitude [18:15] the um UVB is so low most of the year in the high latitudes that it takes a long time to get enough but um in like from 11 10 10 to 2 in the summer in high latitudes it only takes 15 or 20 minutes to get enough okay because there's a there's a definite um a decrease in UVB exposure with angle of the sun i mean i'm yeah so okay um given that you're perhaps i don't know down in san francisco um or that kind of latitude then from i know 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 um yeah and the color of your skin the natural color makes a tremendous difference and age makes a difference uh there is apparently less cholesterol metabolism and such in an old person [19:21] and just the uh degree of pigmentation uh influences the the amount of reaction you have to the ultraviolet right so that in mexico for example even women who are outside all day if they have dark skin and are only exposing their their face and hands they tend to be deficient in vitamin d even a high altitude and brilliant sunlight because i've read the association between our previous kind of agrarian lifestyle or at least labor based lifestyle where most people worked um for a living uh with manual labor i don't mean people don't work at computers or whatever these days but a manual labor they're outdoors and more uh associated with agrarian lifestyles farming um and just being outdoors [20:22] whether it's cutting wood or you know any other outdoor activity um those people obviously then were getting exposed to sun um but obviously with our modern lifestyles you know most people are kind of indoors and sedentary which brings its own other negative components to health but in terms of the um amount of sun that people get and using supplementation i think probably supplementation is one of the easiest way to go about getting adequate levels of vitamin d because i don't think but do you think people get enough vitamin d from the food that they eat no that's almost impossible yeah um if if you drink say two to four quarts of vitamin d supplemented milk right if it isn't whole legally it has to be supplemented with vitamin d but that's only uh i forget i don't know what the current amount is but um it i think has been around 300 units okay something like that okay per quart well and [21:31] then i think the modern uh modern levels that are advocated now up to two thousand and a two to four thousand iu per day um so if you're getting 300 iu from a quart of vitamin d four to five milk it's going to take a lot of milk to reach that and it it is in a few other uh foods things like oily fish but again i know you're not an advocate of oily fish from a poofa perspective um egg yokes is what i think we're 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 uh vitamin d rich foods oh well mushrooms mushrooms exposed to light have a lot but um interesting the um during the 40s and 50s the uh the main form of supplemental vitamin d was synthetic right by ultraviolet or radiation of fungus and uh uh the um research that changed the the popularity of that claimed that um it was responsible for [22:41] the hardening of the arteries of young people starting in the 40s and 50s and this hard sorry to interrupt but this hardening was because of calcium deposition aberrant calcium yeah which normally happens in a vitamin d deficiency but um there were publications arguing that the use of the synthetic uh vitamin d uh might have been contributing to abnormal calcium metabolism i i don't know if that's true but uh that came out around 1970 and uh milk uh adodides switched over to a vitamin d3 right after those articles came out so i think they were just being cautious so you said you said earlier that mushrooms exposed to light are a significant source of vitamin d do you know have any any uh figures in terms of per ounce or uh of mushrooms consumed what you what you'd get um no i don't know it depends on the the type of mushroom and the [23:45] intensity of the ultraviolet interesting because we always think about mushrooms is growing in the dark around in the woods or something so um they they would irradiate with uvb then mushrooms at some point in our in our our history um yeah and if they gather them outside just being exposed to daylight so for a few hours is enough there have been studies using mushroom powder as a vitamin d supplement and it only took a um i think it was less than an ounce of powdered mushroom to uh make a distinct rise it actually depressed the vitamin d3 and increased the vitamin d2 wow that's interesting i've never heard of that because this would be things like the common um uh field mushroom the white kind of um um the wiped agaric mushroom that's kind of common [24:49] culinary mushroom that'd be growing in the fields button mushrooms these these would be sources yeah if they've been exposed at all to sunlight yeah they probably account for why many people have measurable amount of of d2 in their serum interesting now the other thing is just want to read uh go back a little bit you've been an advocate of mushrooms uh specifically for something else something for um producing a soup of mushrooms and having this as a uh a dietary supplement um yeah for the anti-inflammatory anti-cancer functions mainly interesting okay so i guess getting on to specific uh diseases that have been characterized with low vitamin d and how the studies have shown uh in cohorts of people that they've tested um those with higher initial levels of vitamin d did better in the outcomes than those with low i know we i've always associated [25:55] vitamin d with bones because of rickets i think most people have i don't know how many people are actually aware of the uh cancer association with vitamin d how many people associate tb and multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis uh with vitamin d but um i'd like to bring out some of these things and um sketch your perspective on the inflammation that's happening and how you tie in the inflammatory process uh through parathyroid hormone which i know you've always said is inflammatory and how you know through using thyroid hormone uh and pregnenol and being being two anti-inflammatories which quell that inflammatory cascade cascade how they tie into how you see these inflammatory disorders that i've mentioned rheumatoid ms etc cancers so looking at um something that i haven't mentioned which is fibromyalgia i saw that there was a definite uh what it was a theoretical mechanism because they [26:57] haven't tested it any further but i know the uh fibromyalgia syndrome uh 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 uh spoken many times about the patella or the achilles tendon reflex and that's a direct response of the muscle not being able to repolarize quick enough and this lag phase that happens with the twitch how do you um do you see fibromyalgia in terms of vitamin d deficiency being relative to uh energy production and and repolarization or i i think it's um parallel almost identical to the hypothyroid condition all of the inflammations that you get with low thyroid function are structurally and functionally [27:59] similar to those you get from a vitamin d deficiency and the um 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 causes tissue to release the inflammatory cytokines interleukins and so on and how 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 [29:07] releasing histamine and serotonin increasing all of the cytokines tumor necrosis factor nitric oxide all of the things that promote degenerative inflammatory processes so functionally vitamin d and and thyroid are really parallel you can't quite separate them 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 are other lung type pathologies which were definitely seemed to improve and had or lower [30:12] morbidity associated with it with people that had higher vitamin d levels 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're to go out alive right okay good point so I think it's probably a no brainer if somebody's in there for many different I mean how many how many different illnesses are there that you can say don't have an inflammatory portion to them not too many right I think inflammation is one of those widespread systemic processes that happens in many pathologies and so I think just recognizing that vitamin d is implied in inflammation suppressing inflammation would make would make anybody want to supplement with vitamin d wouldn't it yeah and HIV AIDS malaria as well as tuberculosis are very widespread conditions that are known to [31:18] increase their morbidity and mortality in proportion to how low the vitamin d is yeah I've read an article about a compound called catholicidine and this was a antiviral defense that again was heightened by vitamin d in the body and that lower levels produced lower levels of this other 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 and yeah and I think the viral process is basically an energy process when when the cells are well energized they're resistant to infection and replication of viruses right and again now you're just saying that's from an energetic point of view to be able to withstand [32:22] the processes that cost energy to drive a system more positively than being overwhelmed as it were yeah and I think you can see the energy process in in the brain conditions that are associated with vitamin d deficiency brain injured patients have very low vitamin d and probably the injury itself is causing it to be lost in some way I did I read that Parkinson's was also they also implicated 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 and the prion diseases are probably influenced because vitamin d prevents the polymerization of the prion protein which is involved [33:25] in scraping mad cow disease Alzheimer's disease and probably several other of the degenerative brain diseases anxiety and depression are associated with very little vitamin d yeah interesting again that's an interesting thinking about things like from a perspective things like hypersin from st john's walk being a classic treatment for depression and how the alchemists classified st john's were way back before that before there was any quote unquote science although they were very very methodical and very scientific in their own right they classified is as a 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 were used as kind of hand in hand with the sun and its energizing effects if we want to get kind of holistic about the mechanism by which that works [34:30] okay well you're listening to ask you a doctor k me decalable 91.1 fm from now until the end of the show eight o'clock you're invited to call in with any questions related or unrelated to this month's subject of vitamin d its metabolism and the effects that it has on the body looks like sounds like someone's coming into the show to do some plug-in for the pleasure so let's bring him in now come on thank you so much so we're stealing the airwaves go ahead we walk ahead there's a reason a reason we're here is because people contribute and they pay for it and they support it and it wouldn't happen otherwise right and we need the community support and there's a reason we have you know the why you're on the air and why we have these talk shows is for the community to communicate with each other and it's a really important aspect of k mud and thank you so much yeah for being here my name's ruby voice and ether by the way and i'm and i'm rob and uh when i especially when i started listening to the station when i moved out here i [35:35] always thought of the talk shows as sort of the community sitting around the campfire you know exchanging stories and ideas and uh i don't think that's too far off from what actually happens so how far are we from reaching the uh oh we're close yeah we saw that actually and we're at 91 146 dollars so thank you so much callers for calling in to 93 3911 and we only need another 3500 uh no yeah 91,000 if you said 91 something this is 90,000 eight we're so close so please yeah call in and uh pledge and donate and give we're not far away so it's very important that we keep this station fully funded i mean over and above the 90,000 95 as a goal but obviously any more over and above that is totally works towards supporting the show uh keeping the radio on the extra funds that's right it always disappears at least as fast as it comes in that's one of the sad realities well we um where are we at with that thousand dollar [36:38] we're really close we um we made about a third of it but we still need a little bit more and we're trying to reach that before eight and so um let's call in 93 3911 and um yeah so the way a challenge works is somebody anties up a thousand dollars but we don't get that money until other people match that challenge so like i said we have a little over 600 dollars to go until we meet the challenge so 93 3911 1800 k mud rad we've got a whole half hour to do it but don't waste time folks 93 3911 let you get back to it thank you no problem yeah you're welcome all right probably okay now i will get right back to the uh topic of vitamin d and uh its association with various pathologies here that i think some of which i hadn't realized until i started looking at this [37:38] information earlier on today um 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 1800 k mud rad for those people either listening to the internet or in a different state we often have people from the uh middle of the country and the east coast calling so so dr p i said at the the beginning when i started uh introducing uh this subject for this evening that i found a very interesting parallel um but i again i'm always very cautious how far down the rabbit hole to go knowing that there's such a lot of uh misinformation especially in science i mean talk about talk about a uh reverent of revolutionary 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 [38:42] conspiracy um it's everywhere and i don't believe that it's not in medical journals or in especially in pharmaceutical press releases so getting to the getting to the subject of the conversion of vitamin d first in the liver and then in the kidneys before it becomes active 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 um i think the um low level of vitamin d and calcium is probably the cause of the sick liver and kidneys interesting go on and uh rather than being a product and so supplementing just with calcium and and vitamin d i think in many cases will [39:48] correct the whatever the liver and kidney problem is and it isn't a matter of curing the 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 and maybe you don't need to think about the disease of the kidney and liver is having some other mysterious cause such as a virus okay because i i read one particular abstract that um seem to show that the uh okay 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 um a little bit like [40:55] the uh 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 its ubiquity in the body um is it reasonable um 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 uh the the pickup of vitamin d um the um receptor is um the problem of some of the stress conditions make the receptor disappear make them disappear yeah yeah i think the um getting enough calcium and vitamin d and good nutrition generally [42:02] is necessary to um make sure that you aren't suppressing the receptors and some of the receptor repression is is done by over methylation okay and that can be uh something that your mother uh would for example was was deficient in vitamin d or calcium that sets up a methylation pattern uh in subsequent offspring that can affect their sensitivity to vitamin d by methylating the receptor or or other interacting do you know um how long lived these um uh receptors are then if you talk about a kind of transcriptional event that occurs uh in the dna to produce all these different things of one of which is of vitamin d receptor which is so important because it has such an [43:03] implication in so many different inflammatory processes and not just degenerative bone disease but down to cancers how um how long these uh vitamin d receptors last once they've been produced and therefore if you're talking about the over methylation uh being negatively associated with these uh vitamin d receptors disappearing or not being produced 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 right so the cells can remain adaptable uh usually just two or three days and and as much of the receptor has been recycled okay we do have a caller on the air so let's take this first caller caller you're on the air where you from hello hi you're on the air where you from so i'll fit so hi um yeah i um a while back was uh had a vitamin t test and i was [44:06] kind of low and they said um uh 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 five thousand units a day so i was taking five thousand 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 um i noticed that the uh multivitamin had three thousand units in it so that meant if i was taking um both every day i'd be getting eight thousand a day is that too much well i would i would i would wonder first how uh how quantitative the uh the amount was actually in the tablet if it said three thousand how bioavailable it was over a liquid form if that was uh it was a liquid capsule that's the five thousand uh okay yeah the liquid capsule was a five thousand but what the three thousand one that was in the multivitamin that was in a big pill yeah like so dr p eight eight [45:10] thousand are you if she got eight thousand yeah if you figure that being in a bathing suit in the sun for twenty or thirty minutes enough to just start turning pink that can make ten or fifteen thousand units oh okay five or ten thousand units is never going to be harmful so that's not going to be harmful so if i take uh because i was starting to take a five thousand one every other day because i take the other one every day but you think i should go back to taking the five thousand every day with the uh multi yeah i've never heard of ten thousand a day being harmful all right and this is only eight uh did you say that you need added calcium uh for the vitamin d to work better um you need a good ratio of calcium to phosphate and uh i think it's it's really protective to take in well over a thousand i try to get about twenty five hundred milligrams of calcium per day i see and what are the good what are the foods that are good for that milk cheese and leafy greens [46:14] that are well cooked on the water they cook in they have to be cooked because i ate a lot of salad but those aren't cooked so they're you know yeah we can't digest raw leaves so most of the calcium is is not being assimilated from salad greens 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 oh um one or two big servings of uh kale or um charred would give you 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 well i can't possibly drink a quarter day of milk i eat a little cheese you know and uh sometimes full sour cream just for example um can i just ask you this how much [47:17] how much do you weigh i'm not going to tell you that no you should come on you don't ask a lady who ate her weight no no it's important i need to ask you you need to tell me i ain't gonna tell you okay well dr p thanks thanks for your call i wanted to uh what what what does it have to do with my weight oh it has a huge amount um so if you like i'm a bit on the heavy side let's say that yeah well it's been very very very positive associations with a inability to absorb vitamin d uh and i'm not saying you're obese but in obese people so the body fat has a direct uh yeah a suppressing effect on vitamin d absorption so dr p how about that you you understand that well vitamin d and calcium both have a direct suppressive effect on fat formation of the um fatty liver for example is in animal studies it's corrected by both vitamin d and calcium so that that suppresses fat that will help you not get so fat if you eat vitamin d and calcium and the high calcium intake [48:21] by itself just with a normal amount of vitamin d is very effective at preventing overweight oh that's good to know and what did you say would happen to the kidneys that was something bad would happen to the kidneys from not having enough calcium or not enough calcium and vitamin d 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 uh well i actually had a um an overactive thyroid um that i had developed a few years ago i hadn't had it before and that led to atrial fibrillation problems and i had a radioactive iodine uh to shrink the thyroid so now i take uh 88 milligrams [49:22] a day of thyroid to keep it up to the normal level so i assume i'm getting the normal level thyroid that i need uh yeah thyroid works in many ways uh similarly to vitamin d and regulates calcium and magnesium in particular well i'm taking both so i guess uh that's a good thing okay well thank you thank you thank you for cool uh we do have another caller so let's get this call and the lights are flashing again so let's take this call away from what's your question i am calling you from finland in scandinavia thank you and finland okay i was wondering if um if uh yourself for dr pete could enlighten me about uh sediment in the urine is this a good thing is it normal um any observation about sediment in the u-ring yeah okay well do you first of all do you know is this sediment is it a solid sediment or are you talking about a an amorphous kind of [50:28] sediment that's actually part of the fluid makeup i mean is it crystalline yeah like a like a dust like cloudy if you if you let it um let's say if you would urinate in a jar and and let it sit it would it would help it will make a cloud kind of a have you um have you ever had any investigations for any kind of kidney stones or any type of uh uh calculate that you know of or is it um i i've never had an issue with that um i actually uh started investigating that when i heard claims from um uh people eating mostly fruit that uh this might be a sign of good uh assimilation of or good function of the kidneys but um i'm not sure about the um the scientific claims okay dr pete what do you uh what do you think um if you have a fairly high protein intake and your [51:33] urine is on the acid side down around ph5 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 uh evaporates and that can precipitate crystals so it other things being equal it isn't necessarily harmful to to have a precipitation in in the urine okay did you get that very much yeah you're welcome thank thank you for your call okay okay just quickly switching to uh urine as a kind of [52:33] urinalysis and do you do you think that people that have clear urine are uh for one of the better word healthy compared to those people that have not cloudy through pigmentation but you know uh less than see-through opaque type urines do you know if there's any association with that because i'm sure people have wide-ranging presentations from both color and opacity i think the clarity is largely from the amount of fluid you're drinking and uh if the urine is acidic i don't think some cloudiness is going to hurt but there can be bad causes of cloudiness uh infection for example and i think the uh the yellow color of urine is considered to indicate uh cell turnover so sometimes the the morning urine will be yellow and the afternoon urine clear because during the night uh when the high stress [53:41] hormones a lot of cells are breaking down and the uh the fragments of the nucleic acids turning over i think can produce some of the yellow pigment okay well i'm 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 um i wanted to mention that the clotho protein that we talked about a few months right okay is the anti-aging protein yeah um it's very similar to vitamin d in some of its functions that vitamin d deficiency produces the degenerative changes that a mutation or deficiency of the clotho protein can produce interesting well i really wanted to talk more to you about um the vitamin d receptor um and how that could be enhanced because i think vitamin d uh is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the process of inflammation and all the [54:44] diseases associated with maybe next month we can pick up uh 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 so thanks so much for your time dr. peat the calcium metabolism and sugar oxidation is another subject all right excellent good i've got some notes here thanks thanks very much okay thank you okay so for those people that have listened to the show this evening uh thanks for either calling in or listening i can only hope that there are 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 uh we do need your financial support so hopefully the uh phone will ring off the hook once eight o'clock comes around here and people will start pledging uh for those of you who've listened to the show uh thanks so much the truth is out there there's lots of information on the internet uh don't believe the media the media is dying uh in fact the media is [55:47] virtually dead i think it's got a six percent trust rating at this point in time so uh thanks for listening and until december uh next month good night diff --git a/assets/2016-12-16-cellular-energy-inflammation-autoimmunity-and-estrogen.md b/assets/2016-12-16-cellular-energy-inflammation-autoimmunity-and-estrogen.md index 0a7d280..692ca7d 100644 --- a/assets/2016-12-16-cellular-energy-inflammation-autoimmunity-and-estrogen.md +++ b/assets/2016-12-16-cellular-energy-inflammation-autoimmunity-and-estrogen.md @@ -21,7 +21,8 @@ completion: added: author: Marcus Whybrow date: "2024-04-21" -prev-filenames: - - 2016-12-16-food.md +ray-peat-rodeo: + prev-paths: + - /food --- [0:00] Well, welcome to tonight's Ask Europe Doctor. My name is Andrew Murray. And my name's Sarah Johanneson Murray. For those of you who perhaps never listen to the shows, they run every third Friday of the month from 7 to 8 p.m. We're both licensed medical herbalists who graduated in England with a master's degree in herbal medicine. We provide a wide range of medicinal herb extracts from our own CCF certified herb farm. And we consult with clients all over the states on wide ranging subjects, many of which we've discussed on the show even. So once again, very pleased to have Dr. Ray Pete with us to share his wisdom. Just got his latest newsletter. He does produce pretty prodigious amounts of written work. And I know some people sign up for his newsletters and I know there's been a bit of a shortage with his newsletters in terms of reaching the production that's necessary to fill people's desires. So that's good news, but bad news in some ways. So Dr. Pete, are you on the line with us? [1:01] Yes. Okay, great. What I think I want to do is just let people know that the show does run 8 to 8 o'clock. It's a live program. And I just want to let people know that normally we open the lines from 7.30 to 8 o'clock. But just like to bring that point open now where if people want to call in, because I've got some questions here from previous shows that people haven't been able to get on air to ask the questions and they've written them to me, emailed them to me. So I've compiled several of them and there are others I know that are out there that perhaps if they listen to the show now they might want to call in any time. So the number if you want to call in, if you live in the area, there's a 7.07 number. That's our area code 707-923-3911. And for those people, and I was written to by a gentleman in Australia earlier on today, said he's had trouble getting through to the internet line. But there is an 800 number. It's 1-800-568-3723. [2:05] Although international callers would want to use the 707-923-3911 number. That's correct. Or if I'm not too sure what people do with internet-based calls to the show. I'm not too sure if that's... What happened? People call in on Skype numbers? No. Okay. So there's the 800 number, 800-568-3723 or a local number 707-923-3911. Okay. So for tonight's show, we're going to open up parts of previous shows based on inflammation and Dr. Pete's current work looking at autoimmunity, linking that to estrogen, linking that to inflammation, and how the whole concept of cell energy is something that he's constantly advocating with thyroid hormone as one of the pillars, not forgetting things like progesterone, pregnalone, vitamin D, obviously there's plenty of other supplements and nutraceuticals [3:06] that we're going to be mentioning as we go on. But Dr. Pete, would you just in case people that tune in, get them fairly consistently, they've heard the show for the first time, or they heard the podcast for the first time, they've heard a view for the first time, and I was speaking or rather was written to by a lady who first discovered your works in 1990 and has been following your advice ever since. So there's a wide spectrum of people. Would you just outline your background, your professional and academic background? I'm a PhD study at the University of Oregon at 1968 to 72. Before that I had been a graduate student and teacher in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, English Lit, among other things. And I see one of your questions from last month, I think was about the trophoblast theory of cancer. [4:08] And just when I was starting in my biology study in 1968, I had known a famous old cancer genetics researcher, Leonel Strong. And he was studying the curability of cancer, memory cancer in the strains of my city developed by different types of liver extract. And in thinking about that I realized that there might be an overlap with the work he was doing with the old John Beard trophoblast theory of cancer, which was behind the late trial treatment. Oh, from almond seeds, OK. And the late trial activates a process that its proponents saw just as a poison [5:17] for the cancer cells. But since it involved activation by the enzyme beta glucuronidase, which happens to be an enzyme that activates estrogen, I saw a link with Leonel Strong's work in which the cancer-prone animals inherited from their mother's prenatal gestational conditions. They inherited a tendency to have high estrogen. And when he used a liver extract, the animals that he treated with a liver extract not only didn't get cancer themselves, but their offspring for several generations didn't get cancer. And was that because of the vitamin B6 in the liver helping their... He believed it was one of the nucleotide fractions [6:18] that has analogs in the mainline cancer chemotherapy, but he believed it was stabilizing the DNA. But my impression was that there were anti-estrogenic substances in the liver, and some of them were also the nucleotides that Leonel Strong was talking about. But anyway, the trophoblast theory, even though I think it's wrong in its details, it's extremely rich in its overlap with the actual facts of how cancer develops. So the estrogen factor that Leonel Strong was working on and the role of enzymes such as beta glucuronidase, the lateral theory was based on overlap with the trophoblast theory. [7:24] And the main treatment that people used going by the beard trophoblast theory, the pancreatic enzyme or extract of the pancreas were the main part of that therapy. Okay, so I have a couple of questions that I wanted to ask you about. What you just said is your statement. You mentioned now the product lateral that some people listening might recognize as the seed kernel extract from almonds. Not apricots. Apricots, sorry. Apricots. Okay, so wasn't the rationale for that that it would break down the sugar linkage and release cyanide? And that's how it was kind of a... Yeah, that was the KREBS idea that it was poisoning. Right, right. His theory was very nice, except there was a theory for the lateral that he defined [8:29] as the glucuronide, the molecule that he published had the glucuronic acid on it, which would be specifically released by cancer cells, well, by any inflamed cell, but would be poisonous only to cancer cells because they lack the ability to detoxify cyanide. Right, right. Now isn't beta-glucuronidase an enzyme that breaks down the beta-linkages, sugar-linkages? Yeah, and the glucuronic acid happens to be how toxic substances are detoxified for excretion by the liver through the kidneys. Estrogen glucuronide is the excreted, one of the main excreted forms. It can be sulfate or glucuronide, mainly. Okay. [9:30] And I have a great liver mushroom pate recipe. People want to make that for the holidays. And the mushrooms have anti-estrogen compounds in them, too, if you boil them down really well before you cook the liver with it. Yeah, we mentioned the, or you've mentioned in the past here, the button mushroom extract, which has been used as an aromatase inhibitor. So that's another interesting point. We wanted to get in later on tying these things together because there are lots of different herbs that have compounds in them that show anti-aromatase activity. And that's very interesting in the concept of treating cancers. There are plenty of literature out there from Native American cultures to cultures from other countries that use different herbs for carcinomas in situ, for skin cancers, for, you know, solid cancers, abdominal, et cetera, organ-based cancers. And it seems like quite a few of the instances that there is an aromatase inhibiting activity within that herb, [10:35] that's probably, probably would best explain by your understanding and what you've written, and that would be a estrogen suppressing effect. I guess we'll get into that a little bit later on, but I just want to run these questions by you from people who have tried to call in previous shows. And the number again, if you live in the area 707-923-3911, the 800 number is 800-568-3723. Dr. Ray Pete's joining us once more. And if you want to email me for the liver pate recipe, it's Sarah. S-A-R-A-H at westernbotanicalmedicine.com. All right. So I had a couple of questions based on sugars. And one of them was, does dextrinization and protein coagulation change complex carbs into simple sugars? Do you know much about this dextrinization? Yeah, it is a process that has been used for about 200 years. [11:40] The first form of it was basically what they used to make carousel syrup, corn syrup, boiling corn starch with sulfuric acid. It makes a pale, almost clear syrup, but the longer you cook it and the harsher the acidic or basic conditions are, the browner it gets. And the, written early, when you talk about a browning reaction, molasses, they know that the brown stuff in molasses is mutagenic. Just like any charred carbohydrate is, right, or charred starch or sugar? Yeah. And generally, when you sort out the corn starch from the germ, [12:43] you're still getting enzymes and there are amino groups spread throughout the starch, part of the grain, and those amino groups participate in the classical browning reaction that makes these mutagenic carcinogens which have a brown color. So the dextrinization produces some dextrose, some simple sugars, but that's a matter of how sweet and liquid it is or how viscous and gummy it is, depending on how far you carry the breakdown reaction. So on average, dextrons are considered to have mainly groups of glucose molecules that are around 10 molecules long, about 5 to 10 or 15. [13:52] All right. So this is a process in that could change complex carbs into relatively simple sugars, but not so simple because the simple sugars, obviously, are things like glucose, fructose, sucrose, et cetera, just single unit subunits or two. The gumminess of it corresponds to the amount of starch left in it, broken up starch, turns the solid starch into a semi-liquid gummy material. Got it. So like cane juice, if anyone has ever had cane sugar juice, fresh juice, it's very thin, very, very thin. There's basically zero starch in that, right? The refined cane sugar? Oh, no, just if you have like fresh cane juice. Sugar cane, yeah. Or you just, they juice the sugar cane and they give you a little... Yeah, the sugar... It's very thin. It contains sucrose itself, so you don't need to process that. [14:54] Right, but I'm just saying that's why cane juice is so thin, whereas corn syrup is so thick because it still has a starch in it. Yeah. All right. And just to recap there, anything really to do with temperature and starches involving caramelization is, it can definitely be termed as carcinogenic in terms of the makeup of the caramelized products. Yeah, at least as far as the combination with amino groups and amino acids and proteins, those are the best known. The burnt toast? Yeah, acrylamide turns up and every time you heat a natural carbohydrate that contains traces of amino acids or proteins. And in the absence of the amino acids instead of acrylamide, you probably get small amounts of acrylion, [15:56] which is another very toxic carcinogenic material. And what about protein like meat and eggs when they brown? Is that also carcinogenic? There are traces of sugar in those, and so you do get some of the same compound. All right, well, another question was, do amylase or amylopsin help change complex carbs into sugars? I know amylase, but I'm not too familiar with amylopsin. Yeah, that's just a pancreatic amylase. All right, so this is that amylase would be like a salivary amylase. Yeah. Okay, all right, so that was those two questions. I had some other questions from another person based on diet and recommendations for diet. They've been a long-time listener, and they were also quite aware of your favourites in terms of foods [16:59] from basic orange juice to your constant advocation of carrots, grated carrots, and coffee for B vitamins. In terms of general nutrition, I just wanted to recap for those people that maybe haven't listened too much before, but in terms of calories for a female, what would you rate as being generally acceptable calories for relatively sedentary type work just so we can understand those people that perhaps they look at their food, caloric intake, they'll probably recognise they're getting far too many calories and what is actually realistic to burn in somebody's healthy metabolism versus the calories they're getting from food. So what do you think is caloric intake for a female? Oh, 2,000 is a ballpark. Okay. You can be very sedentary and still burn close to 3,000, and some people can be moderately active and get along on 1,700, [18:03] and lots of people now are hypothyroid enough that they can move around with extraordinary daily activity and still gain weight on 700 or 800 calories. So you really have to look at your metabolic rate. And also if you're pregnant or breastfeeding, I know when I was full-time breastfeeding, I think I probably ate 3,000 a day. And didn't gain weight? No, maintained weight. Okay, how about proteins in terms of someone's intake for a female, for example? The military did a big study on people mostly of military age in their 20s. Both men and women of all the different sizes that are in the military and found that to do just ordinary work, office work or whatever, [19:05] both men and women needed at least 100 grams of good protein every day. But you see lots of people getting by on 25 or 30 grams. I've known people always with pretty serious symptoms who were getting only 20 or even less grams per day. Right. Now, do you expect things like tissue repair to be poor, muscle mass, obviously not to be in evidence, and difficulty maintaining skin, nails, hair, that kind of thing with low protein intake? Yeah. And it's hard if you're a meat eater, you could say, oh, it's easy, but then you don't want to eat that much meat. You don't want to be eating meat three times a day. It's too much meat intake. So then you really have to rely on eggs, which you can't eat any more than two eggs a day because they contain some poofa. And so then you're left with dairy. So really, I think dairy is the primary source of protein that's healthy for people to be getting. [20:08] Yeah. Well, I know you advocate gelatin a lot in terms of protein content and broths. But that's not going to make up to 100 grams of protein when one 8-ounce glass of milk has 8 grams. Okay. And then what do you recommend for sugars? It really depends on your digestion, your intestinal health. When I was in Mexico, I saw a lot of nutritionists trying to justify a bean and rice-based diet. And there are lots of reasons that you can't get along very well even though the amino acids seem to be equivalent to protein. It turns out that potatoes are infinitely better than beans as a source of protein. But that requires, either of those, require that your intestine be in fairly good health [21:10] because the complex carbohydrates of either of those can support bacterial growth if you have a sluggish digestion. Now, hang on. Are we talking about juicing potatoes and cooking it? No. Yeah, if people were going to eat potatoes as a source of protein, they better have a pretty strong intestinal wall. Otherwise, all that starch will irritate them. Yeah, because I know you advocate potato juice and use that in a double boiler to make it kind of scramble. That's actually starch-free, isn't it? Yeah, that's for people who have a digestive problem but still need a very high-quality protein. Okay, so just to recap, in terms of the amount of grams of sugar for somebody in a day to be... These studies that I've written about in the late 1800s, they found that diabetics were putting out about 12 ounces of sugar in extreme terminal diabetics. [22:13] They had about 12 ounces of sugar in their urine every day as glucose. And so they reasoned that they would die less quickly if they replaced that amount of sugar that they were losing. And so they gave them a regular diet plus 10 or 12 ounces of plain white sugar and found that instead of dying more slowly, they got well. And so it depends on what stress your system is under. Huge amounts of sugar like that can be curative if you're under stress and need something to compensate for the stress. But if your digestive system is very healthy, you can get along just with starch instead of sugar. But you still need a few hundred grams of carbohydrate [23:14] either at starch or sugar every day. Yeah. So like I... We had a client who had broken his knee and ankle and had very extensive surgery. And he was needing, I think, up to 400... I think a pound of sugar a day in various forms. Marshmallows and homemade marshmallows. Sugar in the milk in order to sleep to lower the amount of stress as he was recovering when he got out of the hospital. That was what he needed to sleep. And of course he weaned himself off of that when he got better. But initially that was very curative for his sleep and his healing. I've seen similar things in people with cancer or just extreme old age insomnia when they drank a little syrup-like concentrate of sugar in milk or ate a bowl of ice cream during the middle of the night, they could get back to sleep. Yeah. He went from not sleeping at all like waking every hour [24:15] and just completely restless and in pain to sleeping all through the night just from increasing his sugar. Okay. So in terms of a daily diet, and I get this question pretty often in terms of it's new to people and so they think initially the diet is pretty restrictive. We've kind of produced a three-page what they're about breakdown of foods that we know from you and what you've researched that is healthy, thyroid supportive, anti-inflammatory foods and those kind of foods that are definitely to be avoided. Obviously, the polyunsaturates which really kicked off this entire thing with you with us seven years ago. In terms of, I even ask you personally, what kind of foods that you would typically eat just to throw that out there and then we'll break down some of the foods here that may be not obvious that people probably don't eat too much of that. [25:19] They don't know they can because it probably sounds like it's either fattening or sugary or too problematic from another perspective. But what kind of foods do you typically gravitate towards that keep you going? Two or three quarts of milk up to a gallon of milk per day, usually one percent. And usually one big egg fried in butter typically and orange juice as much as is available if it's good. At least a pint, preferably more good sweet orange juice. And typically about once a week, some oysters or some liver, almost every day some kind of gelatinous soup, [26:21] pale soup or sometimes chicken soup with all the fat skimmed off. Okay, all right. That's kind of key ingredients. So Sarah, I mean, because the person asked, they said they were very aware from listening to you and having, they came across you in the early 90s, they said, and they've been paying attention to you ever since in terms of your books and newsletters. But what they were asking for, which was kind of, in some ways it was a little strange because they thought by now they would have recognized all the kind of foods that you do gravitate towards. But we've produced a pretty extensive list of those foods that are thyroid suppressive that people don't always recognize, whether it's beans, nuts, seeds, you know, and kind of typical polyunsaturated rich foods that would have a thyroid suppressing effect. But I know Sarah's a very good cook and you do make some excellent food and so I'm very, very lucky to have that. [27:22] So I don't ever find there's any shortage of variation. I mean, every now and again, obviously, we eat lots of different cheeses. We drink a lot of milk and ice juice. We eat milk powder pancakes every morning that I make ahead of time, so I don't have to make them every day. And that's a pretty easy recipe if you can find some good, organic, non-fat milk powder. How often do you eat the milk powder pancakes, Dr. Pete? Oh, every day when we have the powder supply then we run out of it and don't eat them for a few months. Now I know what to get you for Christmas, Dr. Pete. So, yeah, we usually have one meal. I try to tell my clients that if you split your meals up into proteins, you're going to have your liver or your oysters or your meat or your broth because it doesn't have to be heavy on the protein side. Then you want to have that with one meal. You want to have your dairy, like whether it's cottage cheese or homemade ricotta cheese, [28:24] which is really easy to make, or your milk powder pancakes, and you can make them savory too and grill them with melted cheese on top. Also, you can do Greek yogurts. There's some good, organic Greek yogurts that are very, very high protein and not sour. And then you have your egg meal. And I tend to like eggs for lunch rather than breakfast because of the blood sugar-lowering effect of the eggs. I feel it's nicer to have something sweeter like a pancake for breakfast with coffee rather than having eggs with coffee because both of those things lower your blood sugar. And then all the bone broths and the types of meats that are certainly good for you in terms of not being purely muscle meats like brisket has an excellent saturated fat layer on it. And then lamb shanks are nice to roast. Oxtail, like Dr. Pete talked about, that's very gelatinous. Otherwise, if you have ground meat, I just sprinkle a little extra gelatin in there [29:26] and maybe some leftover drippings from a roast I made to moisten it up and to give a little extra gelatin. Okay, anyway, but that was one of the questions asked by somebody. And incidentally, if people want to contact us any time Monday through Friday, you can either write, best thing to do actually is probably write an email to either Andrew or Sarah at westernmetanicalmedicine.com and we do have a pretty extensive sheet that we've produced, about three pages or so. And it's pretty much based around thyroid supporting and thyroid suppressive food, so it gives a pretty good overview. And for sugars, I mentioned the proteins for sugars. I like to use honey. We have our own bees and that's great to get a good raw honey. Otherwise, there's lots of honey available. And sugar and milk or orange juice, honey or sugar and milk, orange juice, ice cream, fruit when it's in season. Right now, we're getting some really good little tangerines and satsumas. We have a bunch of apples from our tree [30:28] that are really ripe. It's just important when you eat fruit that it's from an organic source and it's a ripe source. I know, Dr. Pete, you talk about how a ripe apple can be okay, but an unripe apple that was picked unripe can be very disturbing to the intestines. Lots of the fruit in supermarkets aren't properly ripened. Even plums are sometimes hard to digest and allergenic. And things like dried prunes, so you have to experiment with them because a lot of them will give you gas. Dried fruit will give you gas and it's just something's wrong. I don't know what goes on with dried fruit. What do they do wrong? They use unripe fruit before they dry it, Dr. Pete? I think so. When the polymers haven't broken down, they will feed bacteria rather than the person. So you'll know whether it's easy to digest because if it isn't and it's not good for you, you'll be getting gas. Isn't that a pretty good rule of thumb, Dr. Pete? Yep. Okay, we're getting on to another question. [31:29] One more thing I just want to mention is milk. It's a very good source of high quality sugar lactose. So, you know, one glass of milk has 12 grams of sugar. One glass of orange juice has 25. So you can add extra sugar to your milk to make up your quota. And I basically say 150 grams a day is like a diet level. Wouldn't you say so, Dr. Pete? Yeah. Well, for an active person, for someone sedentary, maybe that's the right amount to maintain. Yeah, and the lactose in milk is famous for helping to absorb the calcium, but some studies indicate that fructose or sucrose can serve the same purpose. And spare the calcium in your diet so you can be deficient slightly in calcium and make it up by having enough sugar to keep the stress down so you don't waste your calcium. And also, Dr. Pete, you said that people who think that their lactose intolerant, because when they drink milk, [32:30] they get terrible gas. And in digestion, you can re... not re... almost retrain your digestion, but basically remanufactured lactase so you can break down the lactose. It's just if you're not drinking milk, your body will stop producing the enzyme to break it down. It's as simple as that, just science. And especially if a person is hypothyroid in the intestine, it has trouble producing enough enzymes. And also has trouble producing enough stomach acid and all sorts of digestive problems you'll develop with hypothyroidism. So if you just take a tablespoon a day and if you're really sensitive, you can start with, like, a half a teaspoon or a teaspoon. And every day increase it. Within a month, you'll have a full spectrum of enzymes because that's what it takes. If you've studied pharmacology, you'll learn that it takes a month to fully manufacture the amount of enzymes. But, Dr. Pete, you were saying that it might only take two weeks. Yeah, especially if your thyroid is good, you can change your enzymes more quickly. [33:32] And then the more you drink, the more enzyme you'll make and you'll be able to adjust to it. So it's not like you can't ever eat dairy or eat cheese or drink milk again. I just had another question here I wanted to get by. It's pretty quick. It won't take too long. I'm not too sure where they were going with it. But red LEDs, I know we've done shows on red light. They wanted to know if red LEDs would be sufficient for red lights as opposed to the 250-watt heat lamps that normally we're recommending. Probably. At least some of the wavelengths are enough to reactivate the respiratory enzyme. And that's one of the best-known but crucial effects of sunlight, incandescent light, and some of the LEDs. The respiratory enzyme copper atom in the darkness, [34:36] it tends to be displaced from the enzyme, causing failure of the respiratory system. And the red light has just the right amount of energy to move the copper back into its proper oxidizing position. Okay, cool. So red LEDs will work. And then if people have them, that's all well and good. Otherwise, red light from a good source 250-watt heat lamp. Okay, we have our first caller here. So let's take this next call and see where you're from calling. What's the question? Hello, you're on the air. We can hear your TV, so we know you're there. Hello? Yeah, hi, you're on the air. Hi. Okay, I want to know what you think about being a vegan. Vegan eating? Go ahead, yeah. I'll let Dr. Pete answer the question. You know, it's very popular now. [35:37] Being a vegan means you don't eat anything from an animal. Is there any way you can eat that way and be healthy and get enough protein and vitamin B and all that? Yeah, let's let Dr. Pete answer it. I've got personal experience with this, but I know Dr. Pete's got a lot more. The closest you can come to it would be eating potatoes and mushrooms. Mushrooms are very similar to animal protein, and your intestine can make vitamin B12, which is sometimes deficient in a vegan diet. And so with the trace minerals of mushrooms and the high-quality proteins and vitamins of potatoes, you can do pretty well, but most vegans don't do very well. What do you think they're really deficient in, Dr. Pete, in terms of... Oh, calcium. Yeah, there you go. [36:39] They break bones too easily once they get to be 60 or 70. Well, what is the advantage to being a vegan? I think it's usually an ethical thing. They don't like to bother their animal neighbors by eating them. There you go. It's mainly an ethical consideration. Oh, yeah, they don't want to eat killed animals from big agribusiness and that sort of thing, but living in a country, you can have your own goats and chickens and that sort of thing. And raise everything you want. Other than that, from a health point of view, it doesn't seem very healthy at all. And I want to say that there was no natural, indigenous cultures, let's say, that were vegan. There were some that are vegetarian in very hot countries where I guess it's hard to preserve meat and there's lots of fruit available and there'd be a different balance if it's really a hot country. [37:43] But there's no place where you're going to find a vegan diet among indigenous people, is that true? Some people have studied the Fulani people of Africa and found that they were pretty close to vegan, but very sick, lots of heart disease. So you mean from the atheroma, from some kind of polyunsaturated damage? Probably because of the calcium deficiency. Calcium is good for your heart? Very, very important for your heart. How much calcium do you need a day? 2000 milligrams a day, which is basically two quarts of milk, so you can break that down if you wanted to do yogurt, cottage cheese. I take additional eggshell powder from my own eggs, ground up in a coffee grinder as fine as you can get them. One quarter teaspoon is about 600 milligrams. Coffee has calcium? No, sorry, I grind the eggshell in a coffee grinder to make powder. [38:47] But coffee has some minerals in it. Yeah, you say that coffee is good. I drink a cup of coffee every morning. Good, I think three or four would be better, but not in the morning. But anyway, thanks for your call. Thank you. Okay, we have another call on the air. Let's take this call away from and watch the question. Spiroch, I was wondering about the correlation of a high dairy allergy, and I'm also a vegan. So what will I do for calcium and protein besides the potato every day? What about eggshells? Oh. I was just talking, would you do eggshells or not because that's from an animal? Yeah. Oyster shell wise, another animal I guess. Hard to swallow, isn't it? But you can put it in capsules. I just swallow it down with a little water. It kind of forms a little bolus and it's easy to swallow it once. You can't get it from vegetables. Well, you can boil greens. Leafy greens, if you cook them thoroughly and save the water, are a good source of calcium and magnesium. [39:48] How much do you think you would have to eat? If you're strictly vegan and this is how you're going to get your calcium. About a pound, I think. Okay. You'd have to boil a pound down a day and then drink all that water? I think so. And another way to help get the minerals out of the greens, especially those with oxalic acid, but even with kale, is put baking soda in it. Okay. And that helps neutralize oxalic acid because oxalic acid that's in spinach and charred blocks your absorption of the calcium. Okay. And you'll notice they cook much quicker. The liquid goes very dark colored because of the minerals that are leaching out of the cellulose leaf into the... What about the protein intake? The protein, I mean, the fruit does have some protein, the potatoes. How many pounds of potatoes would you have to eat a day, Dr. Pete, to get? Would you say five pounds? Five pounds. Yeah, there you go. So you could eat five pounds of potatoes or you could juice those potatoes better still if you didn't want to physically eat the bulk of five pounds of potatoes. [40:50] And are a lot of nuts bad for you? Say that again? Nuts. Nuts bad for you? No. Well, yeah, nuts have a lot of polyunsaturated fatty acids that are very estrogenic. So a lot of nuts is not good. That's correct. And better to have more seeds. Seeds and nuts are both very high in polyunsaturated fatty acid. They're not a great source of protein. I mean, what do you think about the protein and nuts compared to the protein and beans and legumes, Dr. Pete? Well, some of them are slightly better. But the only nuts that I know of that are fairly safe for the fats would be the macadamias. They're pretty saturated fat. Macadamias are the better ones? Yes. I don't know what the protein content of macadamia nuts are, though. Yeah, it isn't very high. Okay. Well, thank you for your call, Paula. Thank you. [41:51] Okay. And just a side note about that potato juice. I have made it. Have you made it, Dr. Pete, too? Were you scrambled the potato juice? What was that? Were you juice the potatoes and then you separate it from the starch and you scramble it? Yeah. It's pretty tasty. Oh, yeah. It tastes pretty much like mashed potatoes when you put butter on it. Right. And if you let the potato juice, I noticed I had to let it settle. So all the starch went to the bottom and you can tell. Like, you know, if you put cornstarch with water, the starch falls to the bottom and you can feel it. It's starchy. So with potato juice, it's the same way. The starch falls to the bottom and you have this juice on top and you just pour that juice that's on the top. But you have to let it settle. Don't use it right away. And it's almost, it's all protein, isn't it, pretty much? Well, once the water's gone. Yeah, yeah. But the slimy part of the juice is it should be sort of like egg white depending on the type of potato. Some of it is very gelatinous and cooks easily. [42:53] The others are kind of watery and you get a mushy mashed potato effect. So it's probably the waxy versus the flowery potato. Okay. We have another caller here. Let's take this next caller. A caller where are you from? And what's your question? Bob and Willis. Willis. Hi. What's your question? Yeah. We got, we got involved with fermented vegetables, cabbage and all kinds of fermented vegetables. We're doing it ourselves and it's just terrific. And it, it really strings up the floor in your, in your gut and throws your whole digestive tract. Yeah. What do you think about fermented vegetables? And I'll take the answer off the air. Okay. Thanks for your call. Dr. Pete, did you hear that caller's question? Not most of it. Fermented what? Vegetables. He said he's been getting into making his own fermented vegetables. And what do you think about that? Oh, some of them taste very nice like sauerkraut. But I don't think there is a much nutritional value in them. [43:58] And there's a risk of getting bad fungus contamination in them. In, in Asia where fermented vegetables are very popular, they've seen a lot of stomach and throat cancer that they think comes from the fungal contamination of fermented vegetables. And what about the lactic acid content? Lactic acid puts a burden on your liver to turn back into glucose. It takes more energy than you, you get out of the glucose. So you think it's more nutritious to boil the vegetables rather than ferment them? Yeah. And what about the pro, the caller also mentioned about the gut bacteria, the probiotics. The small intestine I think is best when it's cleanest. A very vigorous people with, with good digestion and high thyroid function have almost a sterile [45:02] small intestine from the, from their mouth to their appendix. Basically, there's nothing growing. So they get a chance to absorb all of the nutrients without competing with bacteria. Then in the healthy person, the bacteria grow just in the colon. So you don't want to support bacterial growth higher up in your intestine. The H. pylori, pylori is an example of much too high in the digestive system for bacteria to live. I just had a throat swab done and it was a, they couldn't find anything in my throat swab. So the doctor said there's something wrong because your mouth is sterile. Anyway, we have another caller. I just wanted to put out the number again for those people that listen to the show. It's seven to eight o'clock here. Dr. Ray Pete's very kindly joining us again. [46:03] Okay. Number is 707-923-3911 or 800 number for those folks in different parts of the states. 1-800-568-3723. So we have another caller on the air caller. What's your question away from? Yes. Colorado. Colorado. Welcome. How would I find out if my methylation is interfering with my vitamin D absorption? I tried a therapeutic dose, a higher therapeutic dose of 12,000 I use for a couple of months and I did bring the level up to 73, but my symptoms persisted that I'm trying to figure out what to, what to do. I went from 30 to 73. Okay. Trouble. So Dr. Pete, did you hear that? The line's not that great. I'm sorry. That's okay. Methylation. Yeah. [47:04] How would I know my methylation is working? Dr. Pete. Methylation in general? I think she's in relation to B, B vitamin. No, D. I'm sorry. D is in dog. Oh, D. Yes. Thank you. Pardon. Okay. What B vitamin? Yeah. Okay. It's D. D, vitamin D. Have you had your vitamin D blood level checked? Yes, I did. It's 73. Yeah. Oh, that sounds plenty enough. That's pretty good. So what, in terms of methylation, you were saying, because I thought we were dealing with methylating vitamin B12 and being an issue. Right. The receptor sites of vitamin D may recede if your methylation is not correct. Dr. Pete. I would guess that any symptoms you have that are related to vitamin D might be from not having enough calcium and magnesium or maybe having too much phosphate in your diet. [48:10] Okay. It's important to have more, on a molar basis, more calcium than phosphate in the diet. And Americans often have five or six times too much phosphate relative to calcium. Because of the high meat intake. Right. And the high starch intake and the high bean and grain intake. I drink about nine months without any, one meal of some meat a day. And what about calcium? I drink about two or three quarts of milk a day. Well, that should be adequate for calcium. Yeah. What are the symptoms you associate with the vitamin D? I get a headache in the middle of the night. What about sugars? How much sugars are you getting a day? I get lots of sugar. I drink milk all night long with sugar and honey. What? [49:11] And I eat marshmallows. It used to be coffee that would take the headache away, but now I've found marshmallows help better. A gelatin? Do you eat any antiseptic fibrous food like raw carrots? Yes. Every day. Every day. What about your thyroid function? Have you tested your temperatures and pulses? Yes. I can only keep it up to about 98. I can't get higher than that. Well, that could be a big problem because if you're below 98, your immune system is at like half power. It's only 50%!f(MISSING)unction. Exactly. And so I think I have some kind of mycoplasma. I've been taking the tetracycline low dose for about six months now. And it has not changed it. And so I was thinking I was going to have to... Did they identify what mycoplasma it was? Not yet. I think I'll do a nasal swab and try to find out because it seems to be connected to my trigeminal nerve, neuralgia. [50:18] What about your liver function? Liver function has come back to a normal function because I've been on this diet. Yeah, that's definitely diets in a month. Have you tried aspirin? I do. I'm up to three aspirin three times a day. I take every six hours. You taking vitamin K? With vitamin K, yes. What do you think about the thyroid function helping the... How much thyroid do I take a day now? I'm up to... 1.75, yeah. I'm up to one grain, 1.75. Can I take the G3 also with meals and between meals? How it works with thyroid is some people need like two micrograms. Some people need 200. It depends on your body. And the best way to tell is with your ankle reflex and also with your temperatures and pulses. [51:22] If you can't get your temperature up above 98, then you don't have enough thyroid, basically. Unless I have a bad stress day and then it'll go up. Yeah. Well, then that's just adrenaline raising it, but you'll notice it will fall after meals. Exactly. Sometimes a mysterious headache can be traced to a single supplement or a single food that you might have only once a week causing an allergic irritation. Yes. I think I found that the microbial enzymes in cheeses and I try to find the very best I can find. I'm going to eliminate that and see if that doesn't make a big difference. Because you can definitely find cheeses. It's not so much a plug, but it's just a fact that Costco do actually sell some very good European cheeses made with animal rennet and not microbial enzymes. Thank you very much for that. And the two cheeses that we know are made with animal rennet are the Parmigiano Reggiano. [52:25] Right. The very hard Italian Parmesan. And then also the sheep and that's cow's milk and then they have a sheep's milk Pecorino Romano. Those are both very traditionally made cheeses and people that have sensitivity to cheese don't find any problems with those two. Very good. Thank you for that suggestion. I'll keep on going, but I appreciate all the help you've given me. You're welcome. I really appreciate it. You're welcome. Thank you for your call. Okay. Well, it looks like we do actually have another caller who's calling in now. So I didn't get a chance to really ask you any questions, Dr. Pete, about this month's subject. But that's not a problem. I'm glad people have got their answers to their questions. And there's one more person here who their call is being fielded to see if they actually want to pose a question or they just have comments. Yeah, it does. Okay. This next caller. Call away from, what's your question? Hi, it's Scott from Ontario, Canada. Ontario, Canada. My question I'd have to just click one, hopefully. When raising calcium and getting heartburn, it will be the cause and secondly, what to do for oily skin. [53:29] Okay. Wait a minute. You said when you increase your calcium intake, you get heartburn? Yeah. Yeah. So if I'm drinking two quarts of milk a day and having lots of cottage cheese and then trying to use extra eggshell or calcium carbonate and then getting like a heartburn reaction. Do you know if you get it specifically just to the eggshell when you take that in isolation or without food though? Are you aware of that or do you? Or the cottage cheese if it's very acidic. Yeah. I think that the only one I add in like the extra like the supplement of calcium carbonate or eggshell. How much eggshell are you taking? About half a teaspoon. Half a teaspoon. At a time or during the day? At a time. That might be too much. I take like an eighth of a teaspoon at a time, but then I drink a lot of milk. So if people don't drink milk, then you'd need to take like a quarter teaspoon at each meal with the food, after the food. And yeah, you definitely want to take it with food. I have, yeah, I've noticed people. Quite a lot of people talk about upsets. But it's usually more loose. [54:30] It causes their stools to be loose or hard. But Dr. Pete, what would you think is contributing to this gentleman's heartburn? Oh, lots of people get stomach irritation from calcium supplements and magnesium supplements. Anything manufactured or in an excessively pure form of the eggshell is almost a pure calcium carbonate. And your stomach and intestine have trouble with pure chemistry. The more mixed substance is like milk is extremely complex. And so it's very soothing to the digestive membranes. But any pure chemical, it sounds like a good rationale against pharmaceuticals. Okay, so the question about the heartburn, what do you think of that? And then oily skin, I think, was the other part of the question. In general, oily skin is very good. [55:34] It ages very slowly. If you have oily skin when you're 25 or 30, you'll probably have young looking skin when you're 60. Just because it's metabolically so active in general. So it signifies a good thyroid function in terms of the turnover? Usually, yeah. Okay, so did you have any other comments about the heartburn, though, from that caller regarding the calcium? Is the collar still on the air? I'm still here. Did you take that egg shell on an empty stomach or after food? No, I take it with food. Okay, well, maybe it's just too much at once. What do you think, Dr. Pete? Half a teaspoon at a time is maybe a little intense? Yeah, I would just skip it for a week and see what happens. I mean, if you're getting two quarts of milk plus some cottage cheese, you're probably good. Yeah, I think I am good at just trying to really push that calcium phosphate ratio. Well, how much meat are you eating a day? I'm not doing any meat right now at all. [56:35] I'm doing basically all dairy and cooked fruit. Well, that's of diet very low in phosphate. Dairy is not high in phosphates. He's trying to increase the calcium to phosphate ratio by bringing his phosphate consumption down. How much are you taking vitamin D at all? Yeah, I do take vitamin D, vitamin A, E and K. Yeah, especially up there in Canada. Don't take too much A. Sometimes vitamin A can be irritating to the intestine. I had to stop using it orally several years ago and use it only on my skin. There you go, because it's fat soluble. And it's thyroid suppressive. How much A were you using a day? Are you using a day? It depends. I try to do it orally or transdermally. So usually maybe 5 to 10 every couple of days, about 10K. That might be a little bit too much for your thyroid function, because if you ate four ounces of beef liver, it typically has on average about 10,000 units. And you would want to eat four ounces of beef liver once a week. So that might be a little bit too much A. [57:37] Okay. Okay, well thank you for your call anyway. We're right to the top of the hour now, so it's kind of coming to the close of the show. Appreciate your time. You're welcome. Dr. Pete. Are you still there, Dr. Pete? Yep. Thank you very much for joining us again. The last show of 2016. We'll look and see. Gee, I think by the third Friday of next month, we might have a new president and we might have got through the ups and downs of the contentious, ongoing electoral results with the college. Yes, to cast their final vote on the 19th year. And it has been eight years. Dr. Pete, first join us on the show in 2008. I thought it was seven, but yeah, okay. You said it has only been seven years. Yeah, it was more than that. It was 2008. Dr. Pete, thank you very much for your time.