A Curriculum For Self-education In Biological Nutrition

[CellularIconoclast]

I've decided to educate myself in the history of biology and nutrition, by reading literature from the people who first discovered these important phenomena. I've seen too many examples of where modern textbooks misunderstand original works, and omit the most important details. I intend to read in chronological order so I can better understand how these ideas have evolved over time, and I am hoping to include research by those scientists recommended by Dr. Peat. I also want to emphasize books over journal articles as journals often censor or edit out details the authors consider important.

Does anyone have any authors, books or journal articles they would recommend? I intend to update this post over time with suggestions from other people. I intend to focus on technical work instead of books intended for a lay audience. If you know of a more technical work than the ones I mention please reply.

Here is the curriculum I am planning so far:

1763: An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances by Thomas Bayes
(Note: this may seem out of place and extremely technical, but in my opinion it should not be omitted as it lays the practical and philosophical foundation for science itself. See also: Homo artefaciens by Ladislav Kováč for modern context)

1809: Zoological Philosophy by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

1859: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life by Charles Darwin

1871: The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex by Charles Darwin

1927: Conditioned Reflexes by I.P. Pavlov

1939: Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price

1944: What Is Life? by Erwin Schrödinger

1950: Biology of Human Starvation (2 volumes) by Ancel Keys et. al

1956: The stress of life by Hans Seyle

1957: Bioenergetics by Albert Szent-Györgyi

1965: Cybernetics, Second Edition: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine by Norbert Wiener

1966: Problems of Cell Permeability by A.S. Troshin

1976: Hypothyroidism: The Unsuspected Illness by Broda Otto Barnes

1994: Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers by Robert M. Sapolsky

2001: Life at the Cell and Below-Cell Level: The Hidden History of a Fundamental. Revolution in Biology by Gilbert Ling

2001: Cells, gels and the engines of life by Gerald Pollack

Links are provided to texts freely available online. Please respond to this post if you find a broken link, or have a link to something not yet linked.

 

[Such_Saturation]

I recently managed to buy "Krebiozen: key to cancer?". It is more of a journalistic investigation though. I also have this feeling I got put on some kind of watchlist for buying it.

 

[CellularIconoclast]

Such_Saturation, I don't think you have cause to fear from reading these books except social rejection if you try to talk about them with the wrong people.

In dystopian fiction, a picture of the future is painted where books and free thinking are punishable crimes. These writers misunderstand authoritarianism: it's not oppression from the top, but a cultural and biological phenomena that exists within individuals. Any thinking that contradicts with established dogma is regarded as either mental illness, or a dishonest political attack (ulterior motives). There's no reason to control media when people already censor their own thoughts.

Free thinkers and unusual ideas are no threat to authoritarian society, because they can't cause change without followers, and authoritarians will never follow them.

Ray Peat's work isn't considered dangerous itself, because an authoritarian will view it through a very different narrative. His work is an important warning, a monument to the dangers of independent thought. For example, he dared to question the harmfulness of LSD, and fried his mind. This brain damage led to a life of writing incoherent nonsense. If he is somehow sane, then he's dishonest: he intentionally misrepresents science in order to gain political power and followers.

 

[Such_Saturation]

I very much share your insights regarding the self-regulating mechanism which is in place. However this book I've never seen in more than two shops at any given moment on Amazon. This is also the only place to get it. One shop also told me it was water damaged and cancelled the order. The sands of time have clearly been given free access to this tome. You know, a doctor in 1969 supposedly said <<We can cure almost every cancer right now. Information is on file in the Rockefeller Institute, if it's ever decided that it should be released>>.

 

[CellularIconoclast]

Some other reading lists I found:

Ray Peat Reading List by kettlebell

Ray Peat reading list - Authors mentioned by Ray Peat by Kranum

 

[jyb]

I recently managed to buy "Krebiozen: key to cancer?". It is more of a journalistic investigation though. I also have this feeling I got put on some kind of watchlist for buying it.

Just for curiosity or because you had reasons to think there was something legit behind Krebiozen?

 

[Such_Saturation]

How could they forget Barbara McClintock? Ray Peat has mentioned her extensively. There is a book about her if you would be interested.

 

[Such_Saturation]

I recently managed to buy "Krebiozen: key to cancer?". It is more of a journalistic investigation though. I also have this feeling I got put on some kind of watchlist for buying it.

Just for curiosity or because you had reasons to think there was something legit behind Krebiozen?

It seemed like a recurrent story brought up by Ray Peat, so I thought it could be worth reading. I must finish Pollack's book first, though. I am slow with texts, I am used to hypertexts :).

 

[narouz]

Carl Lindegren's The Cold War in Biology (1966)

Gilbert Ling's books.

The Israeli guy...(forget his name...starts with a z I think)

This is a good topic.
We should try to get a full listing
of the books Peat has recommended.

Also...forget his name...
Romanian or Czech maybe...won a Nobel prize...
Peat has called him his hero.

Also: Broda Barnes.

And: Is it Constance Martin...?

 

[Such_Saturation]

Spinoza was Jewish! Is the other one Otto Warburg?

 

[narouz]

The Israeli guy is pretty contemporary.
Can't think of the name now.

Spinoza...
I don't think so.
But there was a contempory of Blake's,
known largely as a Romantic/Pre-Romantic writer,
who was also a scientist.
Can't think of his name either.
But Peat has mentioned his work.
Seems like his name did start with an "s"...

And Peat has said he realized Blake "knew something about the structure of the brain,"
and Peat wrote his master's thesis on Blake.

Ivan Illich

 

[CellularIconoclast]

Ivan Illich

Good suggestion, I just picked up two of his books at the library today and they seem really interesting.

 

[4peatssake]

Here's a few more books/authors/thinkers/scientists who have influenced Ray Peat.

William Blake

Thomas H. McGavack's 1951 book, "The Thyroid"

"The Creative Process," Brewster Ghiselin (1952)

"Synectics", W. J. J. Gordon, Harper & Row, 1961
(Note: Peat has said that after reading Synetics, he considered that Pyotr Kuzmich Anokhin had a greater understanding of brain function that P.K.'s mentor Ivan Pavlov.)

“Possibility of experimental study of properties of time,” N. A. Kozyrev, Russian, September 1967, English, 1971

Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology, and Academic Science, H. Arp, 1998

Emanuel Swedenborg (published advanced biological research in the middle of the 18th century)

I happened to read Swedenborg's scientific work just as I was getting interested in concentrating on becoming a biologist, and I realized that it was his scientific knowledge that shows up in Blake's imagery, far more than his theology, which Blake obviously despised. By chance, just after I finished my master's thesis on Blake, I got a job at a Swedenborgian college (Urbana University), where I saw in traditional form the small minded theologism that Blake had seen in Swedenborg. As a result of those experiences, I greatly appreciated the book, The Heaven and Hell of William Blake, by Gholam-Reza Sabri-Tabrizi, which apparently hasn't been very well received academically.

@narouz, could be Swedenborg you're thinking of?

Speaking of Ivan Illich, he has been as influential as William Blake, as Ray has said he has similar goals in mind with respect to the impact of his work.

7. What impact would you like to see your research make on society? Reaching the largest amount of people? or a certain type of person? Or are you completely detached from the outcome?

I’d like to see it lead to the disestablishment of medicine. The same general outcomes Ivan Illich worked for.

 

[BingDing]

That's a noble effort, I wish I had the background to evaluate the source material.

FWIW, Ancel Keys is the godfather of the lipid theory and, IMHO, the driving force behind 60 years of drivel about saturated fats being bad for you and PUFAs being good. According to Gary Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories" (and this is my recollection of the book, I haven't double checked it) Keys pretty much settled on a preconceived idea of his theory and set out to prove it. In 1957 the American Heart Association published an editorial saying there was no science to say that sat fats were bad for you. In 1961, after Keys was put on the Board of Directors, the AHA published an editorial saying sat fats were bad for you. There were no scientific studies published in those 4 years that supported the change.

My take is that Big Ag and Big Pharma got on top of this in the 1950s. They saw that Keys' theory supported their agenda so they supported him. I would not be surprised if the AHA has received significant funding from the Bigs over the years.

Also, in Robert Lustig's famous anti-sugar video he says that Keys' paper "The Seven Countries Study" was flawed because he didn't do the regression analysis right. Keys only did it with the variables set to support his theory, when he should have switched the variables around to see if the data showed anything else. If true, he was a crappy scientist, indeed.

 

[CellularIconoclast]

FWIW, Ancel Keys is the godfather of the lipid theory and, IMHO, the driving force behind 60 years of drivel about saturated fats being bad for you and PUFAs being good.

Ancel Keys was a brilliant scientist who did a lot of important basic research, but he was wrong about the diet heart hypothesis. Still, I think he had good reason to believe in it given the little information he had at the time. Being wrong about one thing doesn't make you a bad scientist, as long as you're wrong for good reasons and it doesn't make your other work any less important. I wasn't planning to study his work on dietary lipids, but his earlier work on human starvation, which is important for understanding how our metabolism interacts with diet. His research was first to demonstrate that low calorie intake reduces the metabolic rate, and causes problems with nearly every system in the body. He also found that these problems couldn't be reversed by normalizing calorie intake, but only by consuming very large quantities of food.

Both Lustig and Taubes fundamentally mis-represent and misunderstand Ancel Keys work to support their own agenda. Here are some interesting blog posts on this topic:

The Truth About Ancel Keys: We’ve All Got It Wrong by Denise Minger

FAT IN THE DIET AND MORTALITY FROM HEART DISEASE: A PLAGIARISTIC NOTE by Seth

Edit: also look at this discussion yesterday on this forum
http://www.raypeatforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=4028&start=30

 

[Wilfrid]

Interoceptors by V.N. Chernigovskiy.

The body Electric by Robert O. Becker.

Health and Light by John Ott.

Enriching Heredity by Marian Diamond.

Books written by Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose

All the books that I quoted here are not related to nutrition however " Interoceptors" and "Enriching Heredity" are fabulous!

 

[BingDing]

Thanks for the reply, and the links, CI. Tara's thread was enlightening, and Keys is obviously well known.

I meant to remark that his earlier starvation study is different from the dietary lipid work but didn't fit it in; my error.

Lustig certainly has his own agenda, not so sure about Taubes. I'll withdraw my comment on Keys being a crappy scientist, if he was a brilliant scientist then I'll acknowledge it and say that that his early work is worth studying. But the enormous damage he perpetrated with his flawed later work, and his relentless promotion of it, has had devastating effects on millions of people.

Sorry if this became a rant, just pissed 'cause so many people I know are sick because of Ancel Keys, the brilliant scientist.

 

[tara]

FWIW, Ancel Keys is the godfather of the lipid theory and, IMHO, the driving force behind 60 years of drivel about saturated fats being bad for you and PUFAs being good. According to Gary Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories" (and this is my recollection of the book, I haven't double checked it) Keys pretty much settled on a preconceived idea of his theory and set out to prove it. In 1957 the American Heart Association published an editorial saying there was no science to say that sat fats were bad for you. In 1961, after Keys was put on the Board of Directors, the AHA published an editorial saying sat fats were bad for you. There were no scientific studies published in those 4 years that supported the change.

Didn't he pick the 7 countries in Europe that fitted his graph supporting his lipid hypothesis, and simply omit all the ones that messed it up/contradicted it?
I agree with those that say this poor work doesn't invalidate other work that he did properly.

 

[j.]

His research was first to demonstrate that low calorie intake reduces the metabolic rate

Not sure if this is true if the fats in the diet are saturated. In those experiments with rats where they avoided PUFAs, their metabolism didn't slow down, or didn't slow down enough to avoid nutritional deficiencies that the rats fed PUFAs weren't developing.

 

[CellularIconoclast]

In those experiments with rats where they avoided PUFAs, their metabolism didn't slow down

Rodents don't reduce metabolic rate in response to calorie restriction but primates do.