Environmental Enrichment & The Brain – 2013
KMUD - Ask Your Herb Doctor
Please note: Transcript documents are attached at the bottom of this post, thanks.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/221 ... t_kmud_130 816_190000fritalkFPS.mp3
HD: Andrew Murray
RP: Ray Peat Ph.D
Transcribed by Moss
Verified by Sheila
HD: So once again, very welcomed to introduce, a seemingly permanent fixture to the show, thankfully, and for his wisdom, Dr Peat, thank you for joining us.
RP: Hi.
HD: As always, I’d like you to give an introduction to your academic background for perhaps those people who have just tuned into this show and never heard you before.
RP: In the 60s, I taught biology and literature and painting and various things, but then I went to graduate school, 1968‐72, studying biochemistry, reproductive ageing, physiology in general and since then I have been continuing some of the same projects that I started back in the late 60s.
HD: OK, and you’re are fairly prolific – I think that is the right word – in terms of producing newsletters that can be accessed by people wanting to make a subscription to your newsletters and also you’re pretty constant and avid researcher of topics both old and new – finding out the truth, if you like, about where the science is coming from. And that leads me onto a couple of articles I wanted to discuss, or wanted you to discuss, the bad science portion of the articles, because one of them caused a fair amount of stir, in as much as the topics that we have talked about in the past, things like salt being good for you and sugar being good for you and saturated fats being good for you.
The saturated fats seems to be working its way to the surface now with the medical establishment seemingly doing a U‐turn on the polyunsaturates, saying that the polyunsaturates were bad for you, now actually saturated fats are good for you, and hopefully in time here the same thing will happen with sugar. But recently there’s been an article published that seems to shoot down the benefits of sugar and it was done with mice and they were using two different groups of mice. The bottom line with the article was that it was calling sugar poisonous and it was saying that it had the same kind of effects in terms of the results as when they tested mouse groups that were inbred and that the same negative effects were present in the sugar group as were in the mouse groups that were inbred in terms of their ability to control territory and dominate others, as signs of their healthiness and their ability to find the best place to sleep and mate with the best females. So, you are familiar with that study done by the University of Utah, that said that sugar was bad for the mice and it caused an early death and all sorts of things.
RP: Ah, yeah, it just came out a couple of days ago and people have been contacting me about it because it basically says that the amount of sugar, fructose and sucrose in pre-sweetened drinks that Americans and a large part of the population average that many per day, that that amount given to mice causes extremely high mortality - next best thing to rat poison for a high rate of mortality in a period of I think it was 32 weeks or 36 weeks. 35% of the sugar-reared females died and only 17% of the so-called ‘stock diet’.
HD: That sounds bad on the face of it, doesn’t it? You explain the science behind the finding.
RP: Yeah, twice as many deaths in this fairly moderate period of time just from drinking the equivalent of three sodas and that was so weird and extreme, I looked up at what that group had been doing before the study and they were working on, as you mentioned, inbreeding and they found that the inbred mice had a high mortality and aggression was designed into their living arrangement so that they thought of it as accelerated evolution apparently in which the survival of the meanest would be evident in a very short time. And it happened that several years ago, just a year or two before they switched from their inbreeding studies to the sugar study, there were three or four papers published showing that a diet enriched in starch and polyunsaturated fats powerfully increased aggression and mouse killing in rats, so the connection between starch, polyunsaturated fats and aggression was clearly established and they had an environmental set-up that allowed aggression to kill off part of the population fairly quickly and so I don’t think it was just an objective study of the effects of sugar because the so-called ‘stock diet’ consisting of some grains and soy protein or soy flour had corn starch added, 25% corn starch. So the grains contained the polyunsaturated fats and it was a model of the aggression-promoting diet, but they didn't mention that in their publicity about the fact that so-called the ‘normal’ diet allowed higher survival in the females than the sugar rearing diet with the equivalent of three sodas per day. So, what they did was create an arrangement in which feeding the one groups of animals so that they became aggressive - the set up was such that they could take over the food supply, the nesting arrangement and generally bully the weaker animals until they died - so that extremely high mortality is not produced by drinking three sodas a day. It would be if you had to associate the sugar-reared population with the population living on starch and polyunsaturated fats, you would endanger the passive people.
HD: [laughs] Excellent. OK, good - so fairly bad science unfortunately turns into a mainstream article. So, unfortunately, another example of some skewed science to produce results in the direction that was favourable to the outcome, which was that sugar is bad for you when actually it was not modelled correctly and the actual findings weren’t realistic. OK, so that's the first thing and then there was another article from a study done in Italy, which referenced the intake of T4 -specifically Synthyroid - which is a fairly common prescription for thyroid deficiency and a link between Synthroid use and lung cancer so that caused again a little bit of a stir, given that quite a few people are using Synthroid for low thyroid function. In terms of Synthroid’s use and its activity as a compound, what did you find about that study that was erroneous?
RP: There were animal studies with lung cancer specifically that are very relevant to that, and they found that T3 as the active thyroid hormone inhibited the growth of the cancer cells, but that T4 increased their growth and increased the metastatic ability of them and that’s similar to some studies that started about 30 years ago published in JAMA. There was a study in, I think it was the late 80s, comparing, studying a group of 5 women who had been treated for hypothyroidism with T4‐ only such as Synthroid, comparing them to a group of women who weren’t given any thyroid supplements. So they had chosen a group of hypothyroid women and reported that the ones who received the T4 or Synthroid, had a higher rate of osteoporosis. But since low thyroid is compensated by high cortisone and high prolactin and other stress hormones, which cause bone problems including osteoporosis - what they were doing was looking at a population with the deficient thyroid problem treated insufficiently with something like 100mcg of T4 - and it has been known for decades that women are much less able to convert T4 or Synthroid into the active hormone – so it’s especially inappropriate for treating women with hypothyroidism to give only T4.
HD: OK, from a perspective of being [a] stimulant to turn up oxidative stress in terms of T4’s activity, I don’t think, you’re not really an advocate of just using T4 anyway, in terms of its physiological effects and its usefulness?
RP: In general, both of the thyroid hormones, if you can convert the thyroxin into T3, they both can have a very important anti-oxidative damage function by increasing the rate of useful oxidation, they keep electrons from escaping from the electron transport chain in the mitochondrion and prevent the random oxidative damage; just uncoupling the production of the energy so you’re wasting oxygen and fuel. With some drugs, for example, it used to be used for weight loss, which activated the oxidation the way thyroid does but without producing useful energy - even that kind of uncoupling is known to reduce oxidative damage so when you’re finding increased oxidative breakdown products, when you give T4, it shows that you’re not activating oxidative metabolism the way thyroid normally does, you’re interfering in some way with the respiratory system.
HD: OK, well thank you for that, those two articles as I said, caused a bit of a stir but obviously they’re not in the right context. OK, so you’re listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on [radio promotion blurb] OK, let’s move on to the main topic of tonight - the subject of environmental enrichment in terms of negating the effects, if you like, or staving off the effects of brain atrophy and also the reference to Alzheimer’s. So, seeing that this enrichment now is proposed as a new approach, if you like, to the treatment of Alzheimer’s - another neuro‐degenerative disease where lab findings show an association between Alzheimer’s and increased level of destructive inflammatory mediators, like nitric oxide and cortisol, as well as prostaglandins. What do you know about this topic of environmental enrichment and its perspective to energy and anti- inflammation?
RP: That observation that Alzheimer’s people have drastically reduced living variety - they tend not to socialise as much as people who are resistant to Alzheimer’s - that started me thinking about the general range of stimulation and animal studies, beyond simple more or less voluntary isolation, that old people often develop the habit of just staying at home and watching television or something. Beyond that, animal studies did various things - isolation at different ages, separating the baby animals from their mothers right after weaning, giving them solitary confinement until they’re middle-aged and even tightening up their environment to the point of holding them so they can’t do anything at all. There’s a gradient all the way from living in a playground, basically with slides and wheels and various coloured objects, balls to push around and so on, all the way down to being rolled up in a blanket so you can’t move. But you see the same things happening, the worse the stress is, the smaller the brain gets. Depression is known to increase cortisol and cause atrophy of all of the tissues and that includes the brain so they see that after about 3 years of just being psychologically depressed, people show a smaller, a reduction of the brain volume. And animal studies starting in the 1960s at University of California Berkeley, they first found that animals given stimulation - a big playground to roam in during when they weren’t eating and sleeping - they found that they learned better, could solve problems better - and so they examined their brains to see what was happening and they found that the enzyme cholinesterase was increased in proportion to how much they were stimulated and how well they learned, and they kept that study going on generation after generation and found that it not only increased this enzyme that destroys acetylcholine, it involved enlargement of the whole brain especially the cortex, and each generation both the enzyme increased and the brain got larger but....
HD: So it was passed on?
RP: Yeah, in a physiological sort of inheritance which is getting some study now in the last 10 years. But at the time they were just interested in the fact that the environment could cause these major biological changes especially in the brain. But a lot of people said, “Well, if you are destroying acetylcholine at a higher rate and the brain gets bigger, that must mean you have more activity of the cholinergic nerves making acetylcholine”. But that isn’t what they found, they found that the enzyme that destroys it was increased as the brain got bigger, and that kind of reasoning without facts shifted over to thinking about the deterioration of the brain in Alzheimer’s disease. And they saw that there was less tissue in parts of the brain, especially in the cholinergic part, and no one suggested that maybe overexposure to acetylcholine might have something to do with why the nerves atrophied, because the various stress signals increase the various factors that cause brain shrinkage. So, they proposed poisoning the enzyme cholinesterase, which was associated in the animal studies with increased intelligence, memory and brain growth. They proposed doing just the opposite, poisoning that enzyme to increase the amount of acetylcholine in the brain.
The first drug that was proposed and used according to that theory was Tacrine, was the name of the chemical and several studies, by the late '90s, they were seeing that it did absolutely nothing for the Alzheimer’s dementia but it did cause a terrifically high incidence of liver disease. So in the '70s it happened that Parkinson’s disease was, they were looking around for other things than L-dopa to treat it with because that didn't work too well and some virus treatment investigations had found that a derivative of camphor or a similar compound that was used to cure Herpes and Influenza also had nerve protective actions and they thought “Why not use this Admantane or Adamantane-amine to treat Parkinson’s disease?” And they found that it did benefit Parkinson’s disease which involved, among other things, an excess of acetylcholine and this Amantadine was known right from the time of the virus studies, it was known to be an anti-cholinergic drug and it was recognised as an anti-‐cholinergic when it was being used to improve Parkinson’s patients. But the Alzheimer’s people seeing the success with Parkinson’s disease wanted to try it in their population, but since they were already treating with something that increased the cholinergic acetylcholine, they couldn’t very well switch right over to something absolutely the opposite to inhibit the cholinergic system - so they suddenly discovered that as well as being anti-cholinergic, Amantadine and the very similar Memantine, they found that they also inhibit the excitotoxins, the glutamate aspartate excitatory system - so suddenly this anti-cholinergic drug became an anti-excitatory drug and was fit to be used in Alzheimer’s patients in combination with Tacrine or the Galantamine or other drugs to poison the enzyme which this new drug was activating.
HD: Wow, do you know these two compounds that you mentioned...
RP: Tacrine and Galantamine?
HD: Amantadine and Memantine. Are they still prescribable drugs?
RP: Oh yeah, Memantine I think is now a standard Alzheimer’s treatment along with whatever toxins of the cholinesterase inhibiting...
HD: In terms of my physiology, studying herbal medicine, I was always taught that acetylcholine was a very important neurotransmitter, and it was mopped up in the synaptic cleft by acetycholinesterase and that prevented any over-‐stimulation firing. So from what you have just been discussing right now, you’re talking about a kind of excess situation, where there’s an excess?
RP: Yeah, in escapable stress, the stress hormones, rather than pushing higher and higher on the cortisol and adrenalin direction to excite things, run the heart at a faster rate, the body shifts when it sees futility, inability to escape, it can simply switch gears and turn off that system and turn on the acetylcholine cholinergic system. And the confinement, inescapable stress, which is the extreme of isolation, the extreme opposite from an enriched environment, this turns on the cholinergic dominant system, which lowers blood sugar, and in consequence of lowering the blood sugar, activates histamine release. Some of the acetylcholine nerves, such as the vagus nerve, amplify their influence by releasing histamines. It is very similar to its effect to acetylcholine, so you can think of this kind of inescapable stress as turning on the histamine type of cholinergic reaction.
HD: So, this is really a kind of death situation, this would be going towards death and away from life, biologically?
RP: Yes, in the ‘learned helplessness’ experiments of the 60s - Martin Seligman is the person who made that famous - he is now doing military research (HD: laughs), he found that if you almost drowned a rat but saved it, even the rats that saw it being saved, would swim on for days before they drowned and if you put the saved rat back in the experience of being saved would cause it to swim much longer than the average rat that might give up after a day.
HD: That sounds like the seed of hope to me.
RP: Yeah, if you simply held the rat in your hand until it got the idea that it was powerless, one experience of being unable to escape, you’d drop it in the water and it would basically drown in 30 minutes.
HD: Wow, far out.
RP: The state of the heart they found was in a turned off state, basically a cholinergic, anti-‐mobilisation of energy state.
HD: We do have a couple of callers Dr Peat. Thanks for that explanation. That’s pretty profound. So let’s take the first caller you’re on the air. Where are you calling from?
Caller: From Oregon House California, which is close to Nevada City. HD: OK, thank you.
Caller: Oh yeah, the first question has to do with toe fungus, Dr Peat, you mentioned in the past that sulphur was good for fungus and I was just wondering if it would work with toe fungus and if I should use some DMSO to get it in there. And the second, I was wondering about your thoughts about irradiation of food.
RP: There’s a 10% sulphur soap sold at drug stores. They may not stock it on the shelf because it’s too cheap, but it works very well for athlete’s foot anywhere on the body. Caller: This is a bit deeper than athlete’s foot; it’s actually in the nail bed.
RP: Yeah, once it gets into the nail, it’s very hard to get anything in there, but it’s possible but DMSO would help it penetrate through the nail, the fungus actually lives right inside the thick nail material.
Caller: I have been using [Adremal?], as much as I can bear, but I’ll try that too. So, about irradiation of food, do you have any thoughts about that?
RP: Yeah, it’s been known for a long time that it breaks down all of the fragile, easily oxidised nutrients, changes some of the amino acids, turns tryptophan into some toxins. The advocates of it – the radiation waste disposal industry - it's a good way to get rid of radioactive waste to put it in to factories. They do studies and claim that it almost doesn’t change the food at all.
Caller: It seems like the idea behind it, in part at least, is that they could drop, supposedly drop their sanitation standards to zero and then rely on the radiation to kill bacteria.
RP: Yeah, but it does change the flavour fairly drastically, it gives it a rancid flavour almost instantly but the public gets accustomed to degraded food.
HD: Yep. (laughs)
Caller: OK, well thanks very much.
HD: Thank you for that call, caller. We’ll take the next caller please.
Caller: Yeah. Hi, I’m calling from [?] I got a question about Kava, that you know it’s supposedly the most powerful anxiolytic there is and - am I on the air, hello?
HD: Yeah you’re on the air. I can hear you.
Caller: OK, in all of the studies done, I went to herb school in the eastern part of the country, and that you know, it was my teacher’s favourite herb also, and it’s something that I use chronically - I got yeah, yeah anyway man - the thing I am curious about, I have heard a lot of the studies done say that it causes liver damage or done on one of the studies where they gave, like, the above ground parts rather than just the below parts and I am just curious about your thoughts and opinions on that and if you know anything about that study?
HD: Yeah, I do, the parts that are used anyway are the roots, and the study that showed this - another good example of skewed science - showed the hepatotoxic toxic effects of Kava were actually done with a hexane extract of Kava Kava and actually the hexane is probably more of a carcinogenic than anything else. In terms of its use in Fiji and parts of tropical Philippines where they grow Kava and use Kava and in Hawaii too ceremoniously, there’s no real recorded incidence of any liver toxic effects of it so you would think, I know there’s probably an aqueous extract, so I don't think they use ethanol to extract it which is typically extracted in a 45% or 60% ethanol.
Caller: I have definitely made fresh Kava tincture and it worked great.
HD: Yeah, well that was the main bit of science that came out was with the hexane extract and I believe it was animal in the animal studies, so I think it was rats or mouse study that showed liver damage and the liver damage almost exclusively was down to the hexane.
Caller: Well, do you see any long-term negative effects of using Kava tonically?
HD: I can’t say that I’ve witnessed any long-term effects myself. I know a lot of people use it for skeletal muscle relaxation, that's its main indication is to relax skeletal muscle, which is why it’s termed an anxiolytic. I think ceremoniously when it is used, it’s probably ingested in large amounts and so I think it does have a fairly profound relaxant activity - and if you were to use Kava Kava “in a therapeutic sense”, the dose would probably be nowhere near as much, and so you would probably experience some general anxiolytic action but not as profound perhaps as if you would if you were in a Kava ceremony.
Caller: Totally. I feel like the way it makes your mouth tingle - it makes your whole mind and body tingle. That’s how it works.
HD: Yeah, well that’s the hallmark of Kava. Caller: Well, thanks for your input.
HD: You’re very welcome.
Caller: Have a good one.
HD: Yeah, thank you for calling. OK, we have another caller on the line. Yes, you’re on the air.
Caller: Yes. I want to ask something in regard to the thyroid. Now my situation is my thyroid is a bit low and they have me on 88mcg of something I think they call, Levothyroxine?
HD: Levothyroxine
Caller: Is that the same as the Synthroid? HD: Yeah, that’s T4.
Caller: OK, it’s T4; alright, now sometimes I get the 3 and the 4 mixed up, and I asked the doctor and the endocrinologist do I need to take the T3 as well as the T4 and he said that we convert T4 into T3 automatically.
HD: Yeah.
Caller: Is that true? HD: Dr Peat!
RP: The reason women have five to 10 times the number of thyroid problems of all sorts than men do, is that their liver is relatively unable to convert T4 to the active T3 free hormone efficiently. In the 1940s when T4 was synthesised and brought out as a product, it was tested on male medical students and it worked in them just the same as Armour thyroid extract, but they didn’t bother testing it on the female population.
Caller: Well, you know I have been having tests fairly regularly to see how it’s doing and they keep telling me my thyroid is now normal.
RP: Oh, well the old normal concentration in the blood of T4 and T3 when the gland was producing it and the liver was activating it or when a person was using Armour thyroid as a supplement, the ratio....
Caller: Well I’m not using that so I mean is this working for me? Is there a reason for me to take the Armour instead or what?
RP: Well, if you have any symptoms of hypothyroidism remaining then that would mean that your liver isn’t activating the T4.
Caller: Well, when they do the blood test and they say that my thyroid is at a normal level.....
RP: They changed the normal level. Previous to the use of pure thyroxin there was a very slight difference, like a 4:1 or 10:1 ratio of thyroxin to T3 in the blood, but now they consider 50:1 to be normal.
Caller: So are you saying that test, the blood test, isn’t reliable for me to know?
RP: The blood test has been standardised on a population of people who have been using only thyroxin, rather than the natural thyroid or people who have no thyroid problem at all.
Caller: Well, now if I took the Armour that has the T3 also, does that mean that I am going to, you know, make better use of it?
RP: Well, it’s exactly the proportion that your own gland secretes and then the liver, if your liver is responding to the active T3 secreted by the gland, the liver will go ahead and converts the rest of the T4 to T3. But if you take Armour thyroid and metabolise it perfectly, your blood test is going to show excess above normal T3 because they’ve standardised the test to say that ‘normal’ is what is produced by taking thyroxin.
Caller: Well, if it’s going to help me, I might try it. How long will it take to show before the test shows differently?
RP: Well, if your TSH is in the low normal range and if your temperature and pulse rate are good and if you don’t have any symptoms, then you are handling it properly.
Caller: What are the symptoms of having a low thyroid?
RP: Cold hands and feet are very common, low blood sugar, anxiety, fatigue, depression, dry skin, oedema inability to go very long without getting hungry, craving sweets.
Caller: Ahhh, I don’t think I have too much of that. What happened is I had atrial fibrillation and they discovered I have an over-active thyroid, which I never had before. I don’t know what caused it, it came on and the only symptom I had was the heart beat, irregular heartbeat, so they told me basically I could take something called Methimazole which lowers the thyroid but it would make me very susceptible to bad infections and had lots of difficult side effects. And the other thing I could do was have my thyroid basically most of it destroyed by taking a radioactive iodine treatment and that sounds drastic but it seemed like well, if I shrink my thyroid down below normal with this, then that’s it and all I have to do is take thyroid and that’s not going to have the side effects of the Methimazole. So I chose to do that and then, you know, gradually the thyroid started to shrink and seems to have stabilised where I need to add 88mcg and then I am OK. What do you think about doing that if you have hyperthyroid....?
RP: There was a study of people with hyperthyroidism treated by three different kinds of doctors. One did surgery, one did the radioactive iodine to kill the thyroid and the third group got just the thyroid suppressing chemical - and the patients on the chemical, most of them after six months recovered and the portion, about 30%, that didn’t recover in 6 months, it was another 6 months they recovered just with the suppressing chemical and then they went on to have a functioning thyroid afterwards rather than...
Caller: Well, don’t tell it to me – I already had it but it didn’t totally destroy it. They calibrated it so that it would just be a little bit below normal and I would still make some thyroid but I’d have to add some. I just didn’t want to take a chance on the chemical because there were so many side effects whereas once you lower it with the radioactive then it’s done. You’re no longer radioactive. They say it goes straight to the thyroid gland and shrinks it and it doesn’t go anywhere else in your body, so that’s what’s going on ‐ so now I have to add the thyroid. So you are saying, if I don’t have symptoms of hypothyroidism, then I should just stick with what I am doing and I don’t need the Armour?
RP: Yeah, the temperature, the pulse rate and symptoms are good indicators.
Caller: Yeah I don’t have cold hands and feet, and you know I think everything is normal. Sometimes I get fatigued but I think it might be a result of going through the intense heart thing you know because it took awhile for that to get balanced, so now everything seems to be getting better. Well. thank you, I want to give somebody else a chance, thank you very much.
HD: Thank you for your call. Alright. We do have a couple of other callers, Dr Peat, so let’s take this next call. You are on the air.
Caller: This is David from Missouri.
HD: Hi David
Caller: Dr Peat, I wanted to ask about what I am starting to gather from reading most of your nutritional philosophy and then also looking at the East West Healing Cookbook that you wrote the forward for, and I’ve noticed that on a lot of the food preparations that they will take the seeds out of like cucumbers, tomatoes and you know you always skin the potatoes and I think I understand why, but I just wanted to understand this a little bit better. I know that we don’t want seeds because they have polyunsaturated fats, but you would think a lot of those seeds would just pass through - but is it because a lot of these things will lodge in the crooks and crannies of the intestine and possibly just sit there and just become an irritant or possibly the bacteria will feed off of that because...
RP: No, some seeds do pass through harmlessly, like cactus pear seeds. They are so tough that they pass through without being an irritant - but tomato seeds are so tender that if they get crushed by chewing they release fairly toxic materials, protein oxidising -and seeds in general are protected for the plant’s benefit by toxins that are aimed at whatever predator threatens them. So many seeds contain toxins that are intended to prevent mammalian enzymes from digesting them.
Caller: Aha, so like a blackberry seed, blackberries, I mean they seem so good but those seeds they seem like they are just going to get stuck in the intestine somewhere cause they are so hard. Is that a possibility or are they going to pass through or are they going to create that toxic effect?
RP: No, they pass right through unless you chew them and have an allergic reaction. Caller: OK and so like the potato skin, obviously that is not digestible so that’s gonna probably sit in the intestine and feed bacteria or is that going to pass through too?
RP: No, cellulose is a very harmless fiber because bacteria generally can't break it down. Only a few types of bacteria can attack cellulose so it passes through just as bulky fibre. But the potato family, like the tomatoes, the whole family includes chemicals that are highly allergenic, so if you are allergic to tomatoes you are likely to have some reaction to chillies, eggplants and potatoes too.
Caller: So are you saying the whole potato in general or the skin itself. RP: The skin has the most allergens.
Caller: OK, so it is a good idea to peel that then, more than likely?
RP: Yeah.
Caller: OK, then the other thing is you know I’ve noticed that you recommend, it seems like, you don’t say for sure on this, but you usually will say just plain white sugar rather than you know like in the health food store now they are always prompting these cane organic sugars that aren’t refined so that they are not white, they are brownish colour. I guess the problem with these things that are not more purified is that they have allergens in them or possibly things from the processing of the substances, is that it?
RP: Ah, yeah. If you have ever tasted black strap molasses, sometimes you can taste smoke in it and they used to burn the cane fields to make them easier to harvest and so they would be smoky and then they would boil it down and the molasses would collect minerals, a lot of nutritious stuff, but also the junk and the smoky material and even with very clean material like maple syrup or the Maguary[??] juice, those come out very clean and when they’re cooked, the high temperature, if it’s browning the sugar, that’s breaking down the sugar itself and producing some highly irritating, possibly toxic, materials.
Caller: So if these different sugars were produced properly they would be great, but we’re kind of playing it safe by just getting white sugar cause it’s probably the purest form of glucose and fructose, right?
RP: Yeah. If they could for example could be concentrated in a vacuum with a moderate temperature maybe something like pasteurization temperature that would be a very safe way to make sugar without having to wash the brown stuff out of it.
Caller: So, like the fructose that you can buy in the health food store you had mentioned to me in an email one time, you know, you just got to make sure that you don’t have a reaction to it. I guess what you were indicating there is how they produce it again is essentially a problem. Is that correct?
RP: Yeah, I think it’s all made from cornstarch industrially and you have to just test it yourself: some people have a fairly intense and quick reaction allergically to it, other people do beautifully on it and I’m not sure if it is the person’s difference or the product’s difference.
Caller: And if you did find a fructose that worked best for you, and that you didn’t have an allergic reaction to that would be the ideal sugar, right?
RP: Yeah, but fruit is really ideal because you get so many other nutrients with the sugar.
Caller: OK - just one more question. Since you brought up fruit like eating grapes that are seedless grapes, is that skin a problem on a grape? Wouldn’t it stick in the intestine and then feed bacteria or is it broken down pretty quickly?
RP: One problem with grapes is that if you don’t wash them fairly carefully is that the white bloom on the skin if you rub it and polish it that comes off – it’s because yeast grow on the waxy surface of the skin.
Caller: I’ve wondered about that cause you can almost see it.
RP: Ah, yeah and so the fungus growing on the skin always has its normal amount of oestrogen in it which could be a drawback.
Caller: So, even if you just chewed it really, really well, it probably still wouldn’t help in that aspect, would it?
RP: Yeah, but a moderate amount of grapes, I don’t think that amount of irritation is going to worry most people.
Caller: OK, well, thank you.
HD: Thank you for your call. OK, we have 2 or 3 more people but we are definitely going to have time for one more and depending on how quick the caller is with their question or their questions, we might get to a few more, but let’s take this next caller.
RE: A very quick addendum to the last call is - does cooking deactivate the enzymes in the tomato seeds? -‐ and then we will get to our next caller.
RP: Yes, it deactivates the enzymes but it doesn’t destroy the allergens.
HD: OK, next caller you are on the air.
Caller: Oh hello.
HD: Hi
Caller: Hi I’m Yvonne from McKinleyville and one of my questions was already answered regarding his on position on sugar so we can skip that one, and I wondered what his position on salts and fats is, each one.
RP: Salt and fats? What kind of fats are you asking about?
Caller: At the beginning of the program you said something about his positions on sugar, salt and fats, I can’t remember what you said about that?
HD: We were talking in relation to saturated and polyunsaturated. Dr Peat is very much a pro-‐advocate of saturated fats and he is very much behind using salt and getting adequate salt in your diet, so there you are.
Caller: And does he talk about what kind of salt?
HD: Well I know, Dr Peat do you want to answer that question?
RP: Ah, yes. Clean white salt, like sea salt without additives, is good.
Caller: Yeah, OK. Alright, that’s the end of me so maybe somebody else can have a turn. Thank you.
HD: Thank you for your call, we do have one more caller and if the caller wants to keep it short we should be able to squeeze you in, go ahead.
Caller: Hi I’m calling from [?]. I have a question but I also want to say to the other callers - what’s been recognised about Alzheimer’s is that it can come with iron deposits in the brain and this traditional herb from India, Turmeric, has being recognized as being able to chelate that iron, like you have cucumanoid receptors throughout your body, curcumin is the active chemical component of Turmeric, so you can consume Turmeric for Alzheimers it can help chelate those iron deposits. Then it also helps to rebuild the collagen, remove the other deposits from the joints too like, so it helps with arthritis. And as for the toe fungus, Neem is the traditional medicine to use. Neem oil, you can use topically or you can take internally, also potentially activated charcoal because it’s likely you would have a bacterial problem in his body, you can consume activated charcoal but you can use the Neem oil directly on the fungus also and so to facilitate the liver you can consume Dandelion root it's an excellent liver tonic.
HD: Dr Peat what do you think about the iron deposits? I know you’ve always mentioned iron as a very dangerous reactive element.
RP: Yeah, that fits right into what we have been talking about, the stress hormones that lead to Alzheimer’s disease, iron is sort of the end point of all of these changes. Nitric oxide and prostaglandins activate enzymes which release and deposit iron in the brain where it then continues amplifying the destructive reactions.
HD: OK, I’m afraid it is almost 8 o'clock, so I want to make sure that I give out Dr Peat’s contact details to people who want to find out more about him and we will just spend these last couple of minutes thanking Dr Peat for his time. Thank you Dr Peat very much for joining us.
RP: OK, thank you.
HD: So, the web address for Dr Peat is http://www.raypeat.com. He has lots of articles that he’s published and are all fully referenced and scientific journal articles. So go to his website. He’s got a big resource there information not just on tonight’s topic, lots of information on thyroid, hormones, good fats vs. bad fats, salt, sugar, etc. [Final radio promo blurb]
End.
KMUD - Ask Your Herb Doctor
Please note: Transcript documents are attached at the bottom of this post, thanks.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/221 ... t_kmud_130 816_190000fritalkFPS.mp3
HD: Andrew Murray
RP: Ray Peat Ph.D
Transcribed by Moss
Verified by Sheila
HD: So once again, very welcomed to introduce, a seemingly permanent fixture to the show, thankfully, and for his wisdom, Dr Peat, thank you for joining us.
RP: Hi.
HD: As always, I’d like you to give an introduction to your academic background for perhaps those people who have just tuned into this show and never heard you before.
RP: In the 60s, I taught biology and literature and painting and various things, but then I went to graduate school, 1968‐72, studying biochemistry, reproductive ageing, physiology in general and since then I have been continuing some of the same projects that I started back in the late 60s.
HD: OK, and you’re are fairly prolific – I think that is the right word – in terms of producing newsletters that can be accessed by people wanting to make a subscription to your newsletters and also you’re pretty constant and avid researcher of topics both old and new – finding out the truth, if you like, about where the science is coming from. And that leads me onto a couple of articles I wanted to discuss, or wanted you to discuss, the bad science portion of the articles, because one of them caused a fair amount of stir, in as much as the topics that we have talked about in the past, things like salt being good for you and sugar being good for you and saturated fats being good for you.
The saturated fats seems to be working its way to the surface now with the medical establishment seemingly doing a U‐turn on the polyunsaturates, saying that the polyunsaturates were bad for you, now actually saturated fats are good for you, and hopefully in time here the same thing will happen with sugar. But recently there’s been an article published that seems to shoot down the benefits of sugar and it was done with mice and they were using two different groups of mice. The bottom line with the article was that it was calling sugar poisonous and it was saying that it had the same kind of effects in terms of the results as when they tested mouse groups that were inbred and that the same negative effects were present in the sugar group as were in the mouse groups that were inbred in terms of their ability to control territory and dominate others, as signs of their healthiness and their ability to find the best place to sleep and mate with the best females. So, you are familiar with that study done by the University of Utah, that said that sugar was bad for the mice and it caused an early death and all sorts of things.
RP: Ah, yeah, it just came out a couple of days ago and people have been contacting me about it because it basically says that the amount of sugar, fructose and sucrose in pre-sweetened drinks that Americans and a large part of the population average that many per day, that that amount given to mice causes extremely high mortality - next best thing to rat poison for a high rate of mortality in a period of I think it was 32 weeks or 36 weeks. 35% of the sugar-reared females died and only 17% of the so-called ‘stock diet’.
HD: That sounds bad on the face of it, doesn’t it? You explain the science behind the finding.
RP: Yeah, twice as many deaths in this fairly moderate period of time just from drinking the equivalent of three sodas and that was so weird and extreme, I looked up at what that group had been doing before the study and they were working on, as you mentioned, inbreeding and they found that the inbred mice had a high mortality and aggression was designed into their living arrangement so that they thought of it as accelerated evolution apparently in which the survival of the meanest would be evident in a very short time. And it happened that several years ago, just a year or two before they switched from their inbreeding studies to the sugar study, there were three or four papers published showing that a diet enriched in starch and polyunsaturated fats powerfully increased aggression and mouse killing in rats, so the connection between starch, polyunsaturated fats and aggression was clearly established and they had an environmental set-up that allowed aggression to kill off part of the population fairly quickly and so I don’t think it was just an objective study of the effects of sugar because the so-called ‘stock diet’ consisting of some grains and soy protein or soy flour had corn starch added, 25% corn starch. So the grains contained the polyunsaturated fats and it was a model of the aggression-promoting diet, but they didn't mention that in their publicity about the fact that so-called the ‘normal’ diet allowed higher survival in the females than the sugar rearing diet with the equivalent of three sodas per day. So, what they did was create an arrangement in which feeding the one groups of animals so that they became aggressive - the set up was such that they could take over the food supply, the nesting arrangement and generally bully the weaker animals until they died - so that extremely high mortality is not produced by drinking three sodas a day. It would be if you had to associate the sugar-reared population with the population living on starch and polyunsaturated fats, you would endanger the passive people.
HD: [laughs] Excellent. OK, good - so fairly bad science unfortunately turns into a mainstream article. So, unfortunately, another example of some skewed science to produce results in the direction that was favourable to the outcome, which was that sugar is bad for you when actually it was not modelled correctly and the actual findings weren’t realistic. OK, so that's the first thing and then there was another article from a study done in Italy, which referenced the intake of T4 -specifically Synthyroid - which is a fairly common prescription for thyroid deficiency and a link between Synthroid use and lung cancer so that caused again a little bit of a stir, given that quite a few people are using Synthroid for low thyroid function. In terms of Synthroid’s use and its activity as a compound, what did you find about that study that was erroneous?
RP: There were animal studies with lung cancer specifically that are very relevant to that, and they found that T3 as the active thyroid hormone inhibited the growth of the cancer cells, but that T4 increased their growth and increased the metastatic ability of them and that’s similar to some studies that started about 30 years ago published in JAMA. There was a study in, I think it was the late 80s, comparing, studying a group of 5 women who had been treated for hypothyroidism with T4‐ only such as Synthroid, comparing them to a group of women who weren’t given any thyroid supplements. So they had chosen a group of hypothyroid women and reported that the ones who received the T4 or Synthroid, had a higher rate of osteoporosis. But since low thyroid is compensated by high cortisone and high prolactin and other stress hormones, which cause bone problems including osteoporosis - what they were doing was looking at a population with the deficient thyroid problem treated insufficiently with something like 100mcg of T4 - and it has been known for decades that women are much less able to convert T4 or Synthroid into the active hormone – so it’s especially inappropriate for treating women with hypothyroidism to give only T4.
HD: OK, from a perspective of being [a] stimulant to turn up oxidative stress in terms of T4’s activity, I don’t think, you’re not really an advocate of just using T4 anyway, in terms of its physiological effects and its usefulness?
RP: In general, both of the thyroid hormones, if you can convert the thyroxin into T3, they both can have a very important anti-oxidative damage function by increasing the rate of useful oxidation, they keep electrons from escaping from the electron transport chain in the mitochondrion and prevent the random oxidative damage; just uncoupling the production of the energy so you’re wasting oxygen and fuel. With some drugs, for example, it used to be used for weight loss, which activated the oxidation the way thyroid does but without producing useful energy - even that kind of uncoupling is known to reduce oxidative damage so when you’re finding increased oxidative breakdown products, when you give T4, it shows that you’re not activating oxidative metabolism the way thyroid normally does, you’re interfering in some way with the respiratory system.
HD: OK, well thank you for that, those two articles as I said, caused a bit of a stir but obviously they’re not in the right context. OK, so you’re listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on [radio promotion blurb] OK, let’s move on to the main topic of tonight - the subject of environmental enrichment in terms of negating the effects, if you like, or staving off the effects of brain atrophy and also the reference to Alzheimer’s. So, seeing that this enrichment now is proposed as a new approach, if you like, to the treatment of Alzheimer’s - another neuro‐degenerative disease where lab findings show an association between Alzheimer’s and increased level of destructive inflammatory mediators, like nitric oxide and cortisol, as well as prostaglandins. What do you know about this topic of environmental enrichment and its perspective to energy and anti- inflammation?
RP: That observation that Alzheimer’s people have drastically reduced living variety - they tend not to socialise as much as people who are resistant to Alzheimer’s - that started me thinking about the general range of stimulation and animal studies, beyond simple more or less voluntary isolation, that old people often develop the habit of just staying at home and watching television or something. Beyond that, animal studies did various things - isolation at different ages, separating the baby animals from their mothers right after weaning, giving them solitary confinement until they’re middle-aged and even tightening up their environment to the point of holding them so they can’t do anything at all. There’s a gradient all the way from living in a playground, basically with slides and wheels and various coloured objects, balls to push around and so on, all the way down to being rolled up in a blanket so you can’t move. But you see the same things happening, the worse the stress is, the smaller the brain gets. Depression is known to increase cortisol and cause atrophy of all of the tissues and that includes the brain so they see that after about 3 years of just being psychologically depressed, people show a smaller, a reduction of the brain volume. And animal studies starting in the 1960s at University of California Berkeley, they first found that animals given stimulation - a big playground to roam in during when they weren’t eating and sleeping - they found that they learned better, could solve problems better - and so they examined their brains to see what was happening and they found that the enzyme cholinesterase was increased in proportion to how much they were stimulated and how well they learned, and they kept that study going on generation after generation and found that it not only increased this enzyme that destroys acetylcholine, it involved enlargement of the whole brain especially the cortex, and each generation both the enzyme increased and the brain got larger but....
HD: So it was passed on?
RP: Yeah, in a physiological sort of inheritance which is getting some study now in the last 10 years. But at the time they were just interested in the fact that the environment could cause these major biological changes especially in the brain. But a lot of people said, “Well, if you are destroying acetylcholine at a higher rate and the brain gets bigger, that must mean you have more activity of the cholinergic nerves making acetylcholine”. But that isn’t what they found, they found that the enzyme that destroys it was increased as the brain got bigger, and that kind of reasoning without facts shifted over to thinking about the deterioration of the brain in Alzheimer’s disease. And they saw that there was less tissue in parts of the brain, especially in the cholinergic part, and no one suggested that maybe overexposure to acetylcholine might have something to do with why the nerves atrophied, because the various stress signals increase the various factors that cause brain shrinkage. So, they proposed poisoning the enzyme cholinesterase, which was associated in the animal studies with increased intelligence, memory and brain growth. They proposed doing just the opposite, poisoning that enzyme to increase the amount of acetylcholine in the brain.
The first drug that was proposed and used according to that theory was Tacrine, was the name of the chemical and several studies, by the late '90s, they were seeing that it did absolutely nothing for the Alzheimer’s dementia but it did cause a terrifically high incidence of liver disease. So in the '70s it happened that Parkinson’s disease was, they were looking around for other things than L-dopa to treat it with because that didn't work too well and some virus treatment investigations had found that a derivative of camphor or a similar compound that was used to cure Herpes and Influenza also had nerve protective actions and they thought “Why not use this Admantane or Adamantane-amine to treat Parkinson’s disease?” And they found that it did benefit Parkinson’s disease which involved, among other things, an excess of acetylcholine and this Amantadine was known right from the time of the virus studies, it was known to be an anti-cholinergic drug and it was recognised as an anti-‐cholinergic when it was being used to improve Parkinson’s patients. But the Alzheimer’s people seeing the success with Parkinson’s disease wanted to try it in their population, but since they were already treating with something that increased the cholinergic acetylcholine, they couldn’t very well switch right over to something absolutely the opposite to inhibit the cholinergic system - so they suddenly discovered that as well as being anti-cholinergic, Amantadine and the very similar Memantine, they found that they also inhibit the excitotoxins, the glutamate aspartate excitatory system - so suddenly this anti-cholinergic drug became an anti-excitatory drug and was fit to be used in Alzheimer’s patients in combination with Tacrine or the Galantamine or other drugs to poison the enzyme which this new drug was activating.
HD: Wow, do you know these two compounds that you mentioned...
RP: Tacrine and Galantamine?
HD: Amantadine and Memantine. Are they still prescribable drugs?
RP: Oh yeah, Memantine I think is now a standard Alzheimer’s treatment along with whatever toxins of the cholinesterase inhibiting...
HD: In terms of my physiology, studying herbal medicine, I was always taught that acetylcholine was a very important neurotransmitter, and it was mopped up in the synaptic cleft by acetycholinesterase and that prevented any over-‐stimulation firing. So from what you have just been discussing right now, you’re talking about a kind of excess situation, where there’s an excess?
RP: Yeah, in escapable stress, the stress hormones, rather than pushing higher and higher on the cortisol and adrenalin direction to excite things, run the heart at a faster rate, the body shifts when it sees futility, inability to escape, it can simply switch gears and turn off that system and turn on the acetylcholine cholinergic system. And the confinement, inescapable stress, which is the extreme of isolation, the extreme opposite from an enriched environment, this turns on the cholinergic dominant system, which lowers blood sugar, and in consequence of lowering the blood sugar, activates histamine release. Some of the acetylcholine nerves, such as the vagus nerve, amplify their influence by releasing histamines. It is very similar to its effect to acetylcholine, so you can think of this kind of inescapable stress as turning on the histamine type of cholinergic reaction.
HD: So, this is really a kind of death situation, this would be going towards death and away from life, biologically?
RP: Yes, in the ‘learned helplessness’ experiments of the 60s - Martin Seligman is the person who made that famous - he is now doing military research (HD: laughs), he found that if you almost drowned a rat but saved it, even the rats that saw it being saved, would swim on for days before they drowned and if you put the saved rat back in the experience of being saved would cause it to swim much longer than the average rat that might give up after a day.
HD: That sounds like the seed of hope to me.
RP: Yeah, if you simply held the rat in your hand until it got the idea that it was powerless, one experience of being unable to escape, you’d drop it in the water and it would basically drown in 30 minutes.
HD: Wow, far out.
RP: The state of the heart they found was in a turned off state, basically a cholinergic, anti-‐mobilisation of energy state.
HD: We do have a couple of callers Dr Peat. Thanks for that explanation. That’s pretty profound. So let’s take the first caller you’re on the air. Where are you calling from?
Caller: From Oregon House California, which is close to Nevada City. HD: OK, thank you.
Caller: Oh yeah, the first question has to do with toe fungus, Dr Peat, you mentioned in the past that sulphur was good for fungus and I was just wondering if it would work with toe fungus and if I should use some DMSO to get it in there. And the second, I was wondering about your thoughts about irradiation of food.
RP: There’s a 10% sulphur soap sold at drug stores. They may not stock it on the shelf because it’s too cheap, but it works very well for athlete’s foot anywhere on the body. Caller: This is a bit deeper than athlete’s foot; it’s actually in the nail bed.
RP: Yeah, once it gets into the nail, it’s very hard to get anything in there, but it’s possible but DMSO would help it penetrate through the nail, the fungus actually lives right inside the thick nail material.
Caller: I have been using [Adremal?], as much as I can bear, but I’ll try that too. So, about irradiation of food, do you have any thoughts about that?
RP: Yeah, it’s been known for a long time that it breaks down all of the fragile, easily oxidised nutrients, changes some of the amino acids, turns tryptophan into some toxins. The advocates of it – the radiation waste disposal industry - it's a good way to get rid of radioactive waste to put it in to factories. They do studies and claim that it almost doesn’t change the food at all.
Caller: It seems like the idea behind it, in part at least, is that they could drop, supposedly drop their sanitation standards to zero and then rely on the radiation to kill bacteria.
RP: Yeah, but it does change the flavour fairly drastically, it gives it a rancid flavour almost instantly but the public gets accustomed to degraded food.
HD: Yep. (laughs)
Caller: OK, well thanks very much.
HD: Thank you for that call, caller. We’ll take the next caller please.
Caller: Yeah. Hi, I’m calling from [?] I got a question about Kava, that you know it’s supposedly the most powerful anxiolytic there is and - am I on the air, hello?
HD: Yeah you’re on the air. I can hear you.
Caller: OK, in all of the studies done, I went to herb school in the eastern part of the country, and that you know, it was my teacher’s favourite herb also, and it’s something that I use chronically - I got yeah, yeah anyway man - the thing I am curious about, I have heard a lot of the studies done say that it causes liver damage or done on one of the studies where they gave, like, the above ground parts rather than just the below parts and I am just curious about your thoughts and opinions on that and if you know anything about that study?
HD: Yeah, I do, the parts that are used anyway are the roots, and the study that showed this - another good example of skewed science - showed the hepatotoxic toxic effects of Kava were actually done with a hexane extract of Kava Kava and actually the hexane is probably more of a carcinogenic than anything else. In terms of its use in Fiji and parts of tropical Philippines where they grow Kava and use Kava and in Hawaii too ceremoniously, there’s no real recorded incidence of any liver toxic effects of it so you would think, I know there’s probably an aqueous extract, so I don't think they use ethanol to extract it which is typically extracted in a 45% or 60% ethanol.
Caller: I have definitely made fresh Kava tincture and it worked great.
HD: Yeah, well that was the main bit of science that came out was with the hexane extract and I believe it was animal in the animal studies, so I think it was rats or mouse study that showed liver damage and the liver damage almost exclusively was down to the hexane.
Caller: Well, do you see any long-term negative effects of using Kava tonically?
HD: I can’t say that I’ve witnessed any long-term effects myself. I know a lot of people use it for skeletal muscle relaxation, that's its main indication is to relax skeletal muscle, which is why it’s termed an anxiolytic. I think ceremoniously when it is used, it’s probably ingested in large amounts and so I think it does have a fairly profound relaxant activity - and if you were to use Kava Kava “in a therapeutic sense”, the dose would probably be nowhere near as much, and so you would probably experience some general anxiolytic action but not as profound perhaps as if you would if you were in a Kava ceremony.
Caller: Totally. I feel like the way it makes your mouth tingle - it makes your whole mind and body tingle. That’s how it works.
HD: Yeah, well that’s the hallmark of Kava. Caller: Well, thanks for your input.
HD: You’re very welcome.
Caller: Have a good one.
HD: Yeah, thank you for calling. OK, we have another caller on the line. Yes, you’re on the air.
Caller: Yes. I want to ask something in regard to the thyroid. Now my situation is my thyroid is a bit low and they have me on 88mcg of something I think they call, Levothyroxine?
HD: Levothyroxine
Caller: Is that the same as the Synthroid? HD: Yeah, that’s T4.
Caller: OK, it’s T4; alright, now sometimes I get the 3 and the 4 mixed up, and I asked the doctor and the endocrinologist do I need to take the T3 as well as the T4 and he said that we convert T4 into T3 automatically.
HD: Yeah.
Caller: Is that true? HD: Dr Peat!
RP: The reason women have five to 10 times the number of thyroid problems of all sorts than men do, is that their liver is relatively unable to convert T4 to the active T3 free hormone efficiently. In the 1940s when T4 was synthesised and brought out as a product, it was tested on male medical students and it worked in them just the same as Armour thyroid extract, but they didn’t bother testing it on the female population.
Caller: Well, you know I have been having tests fairly regularly to see how it’s doing and they keep telling me my thyroid is now normal.
RP: Oh, well the old normal concentration in the blood of T4 and T3 when the gland was producing it and the liver was activating it or when a person was using Armour thyroid as a supplement, the ratio....
Caller: Well I’m not using that so I mean is this working for me? Is there a reason for me to take the Armour instead or what?
RP: Well, if you have any symptoms of hypothyroidism remaining then that would mean that your liver isn’t activating the T4.
Caller: Well, when they do the blood test and they say that my thyroid is at a normal level.....
RP: They changed the normal level. Previous to the use of pure thyroxin there was a very slight difference, like a 4:1 or 10:1 ratio of thyroxin to T3 in the blood, but now they consider 50:1 to be normal.
Caller: So are you saying that test, the blood test, isn’t reliable for me to know?
RP: The blood test has been standardised on a population of people who have been using only thyroxin, rather than the natural thyroid or people who have no thyroid problem at all.
Caller: Well, now if I took the Armour that has the T3 also, does that mean that I am going to, you know, make better use of it?
RP: Well, it’s exactly the proportion that your own gland secretes and then the liver, if your liver is responding to the active T3 secreted by the gland, the liver will go ahead and converts the rest of the T4 to T3. But if you take Armour thyroid and metabolise it perfectly, your blood test is going to show excess above normal T3 because they’ve standardised the test to say that ‘normal’ is what is produced by taking thyroxin.
Caller: Well, if it’s going to help me, I might try it. How long will it take to show before the test shows differently?
RP: Well, if your TSH is in the low normal range and if your temperature and pulse rate are good and if you don’t have any symptoms, then you are handling it properly.
Caller: What are the symptoms of having a low thyroid?
RP: Cold hands and feet are very common, low blood sugar, anxiety, fatigue, depression, dry skin, oedema inability to go very long without getting hungry, craving sweets.
Caller: Ahhh, I don’t think I have too much of that. What happened is I had atrial fibrillation and they discovered I have an over-active thyroid, which I never had before. I don’t know what caused it, it came on and the only symptom I had was the heart beat, irregular heartbeat, so they told me basically I could take something called Methimazole which lowers the thyroid but it would make me very susceptible to bad infections and had lots of difficult side effects. And the other thing I could do was have my thyroid basically most of it destroyed by taking a radioactive iodine treatment and that sounds drastic but it seemed like well, if I shrink my thyroid down below normal with this, then that’s it and all I have to do is take thyroid and that’s not going to have the side effects of the Methimazole. So I chose to do that and then, you know, gradually the thyroid started to shrink and seems to have stabilised where I need to add 88mcg and then I am OK. What do you think about doing that if you have hyperthyroid....?
RP: There was a study of people with hyperthyroidism treated by three different kinds of doctors. One did surgery, one did the radioactive iodine to kill the thyroid and the third group got just the thyroid suppressing chemical - and the patients on the chemical, most of them after six months recovered and the portion, about 30%, that didn’t recover in 6 months, it was another 6 months they recovered just with the suppressing chemical and then they went on to have a functioning thyroid afterwards rather than...
Caller: Well, don’t tell it to me – I already had it but it didn’t totally destroy it. They calibrated it so that it would just be a little bit below normal and I would still make some thyroid but I’d have to add some. I just didn’t want to take a chance on the chemical because there were so many side effects whereas once you lower it with the radioactive then it’s done. You’re no longer radioactive. They say it goes straight to the thyroid gland and shrinks it and it doesn’t go anywhere else in your body, so that’s what’s going on ‐ so now I have to add the thyroid. So you are saying, if I don’t have symptoms of hypothyroidism, then I should just stick with what I am doing and I don’t need the Armour?
RP: Yeah, the temperature, the pulse rate and symptoms are good indicators.
Caller: Yeah I don’t have cold hands and feet, and you know I think everything is normal. Sometimes I get fatigued but I think it might be a result of going through the intense heart thing you know because it took awhile for that to get balanced, so now everything seems to be getting better. Well. thank you, I want to give somebody else a chance, thank you very much.
HD: Thank you for your call. Alright. We do have a couple of other callers, Dr Peat, so let’s take this next call. You are on the air.
Caller: This is David from Missouri.
HD: Hi David
Caller: Dr Peat, I wanted to ask about what I am starting to gather from reading most of your nutritional philosophy and then also looking at the East West Healing Cookbook that you wrote the forward for, and I’ve noticed that on a lot of the food preparations that they will take the seeds out of like cucumbers, tomatoes and you know you always skin the potatoes and I think I understand why, but I just wanted to understand this a little bit better. I know that we don’t want seeds because they have polyunsaturated fats, but you would think a lot of those seeds would just pass through - but is it because a lot of these things will lodge in the crooks and crannies of the intestine and possibly just sit there and just become an irritant or possibly the bacteria will feed off of that because...
RP: No, some seeds do pass through harmlessly, like cactus pear seeds. They are so tough that they pass through without being an irritant - but tomato seeds are so tender that if they get crushed by chewing they release fairly toxic materials, protein oxidising -and seeds in general are protected for the plant’s benefit by toxins that are aimed at whatever predator threatens them. So many seeds contain toxins that are intended to prevent mammalian enzymes from digesting them.
Caller: Aha, so like a blackberry seed, blackberries, I mean they seem so good but those seeds they seem like they are just going to get stuck in the intestine somewhere cause they are so hard. Is that a possibility or are they going to pass through or are they going to create that toxic effect?
RP: No, they pass right through unless you chew them and have an allergic reaction. Caller: OK and so like the potato skin, obviously that is not digestible so that’s gonna probably sit in the intestine and feed bacteria or is that going to pass through too?
RP: No, cellulose is a very harmless fiber because bacteria generally can't break it down. Only a few types of bacteria can attack cellulose so it passes through just as bulky fibre. But the potato family, like the tomatoes, the whole family includes chemicals that are highly allergenic, so if you are allergic to tomatoes you are likely to have some reaction to chillies, eggplants and potatoes too.
Caller: So are you saying the whole potato in general or the skin itself. RP: The skin has the most allergens.
Caller: OK, so it is a good idea to peel that then, more than likely?
RP: Yeah.
Caller: OK, then the other thing is you know I’ve noticed that you recommend, it seems like, you don’t say for sure on this, but you usually will say just plain white sugar rather than you know like in the health food store now they are always prompting these cane organic sugars that aren’t refined so that they are not white, they are brownish colour. I guess the problem with these things that are not more purified is that they have allergens in them or possibly things from the processing of the substances, is that it?
RP: Ah, yeah. If you have ever tasted black strap molasses, sometimes you can taste smoke in it and they used to burn the cane fields to make them easier to harvest and so they would be smoky and then they would boil it down and the molasses would collect minerals, a lot of nutritious stuff, but also the junk and the smoky material and even with very clean material like maple syrup or the Maguary[??] juice, those come out very clean and when they’re cooked, the high temperature, if it’s browning the sugar, that’s breaking down the sugar itself and producing some highly irritating, possibly toxic, materials.
Caller: So if these different sugars were produced properly they would be great, but we’re kind of playing it safe by just getting white sugar cause it’s probably the purest form of glucose and fructose, right?
RP: Yeah. If they could for example could be concentrated in a vacuum with a moderate temperature maybe something like pasteurization temperature that would be a very safe way to make sugar without having to wash the brown stuff out of it.
Caller: So, like the fructose that you can buy in the health food store you had mentioned to me in an email one time, you know, you just got to make sure that you don’t have a reaction to it. I guess what you were indicating there is how they produce it again is essentially a problem. Is that correct?
RP: Yeah, I think it’s all made from cornstarch industrially and you have to just test it yourself: some people have a fairly intense and quick reaction allergically to it, other people do beautifully on it and I’m not sure if it is the person’s difference or the product’s difference.
Caller: And if you did find a fructose that worked best for you, and that you didn’t have an allergic reaction to that would be the ideal sugar, right?
RP: Yeah, but fruit is really ideal because you get so many other nutrients with the sugar.
Caller: OK - just one more question. Since you brought up fruit like eating grapes that are seedless grapes, is that skin a problem on a grape? Wouldn’t it stick in the intestine and then feed bacteria or is it broken down pretty quickly?
RP: One problem with grapes is that if you don’t wash them fairly carefully is that the white bloom on the skin if you rub it and polish it that comes off – it’s because yeast grow on the waxy surface of the skin.
Caller: I’ve wondered about that cause you can almost see it.
RP: Ah, yeah and so the fungus growing on the skin always has its normal amount of oestrogen in it which could be a drawback.
Caller: So, even if you just chewed it really, really well, it probably still wouldn’t help in that aspect, would it?
RP: Yeah, but a moderate amount of grapes, I don’t think that amount of irritation is going to worry most people.
Caller: OK, well, thank you.
HD: Thank you for your call. OK, we have 2 or 3 more people but we are definitely going to have time for one more and depending on how quick the caller is with their question or their questions, we might get to a few more, but let’s take this next caller.
RE: A very quick addendum to the last call is - does cooking deactivate the enzymes in the tomato seeds? -‐ and then we will get to our next caller.
RP: Yes, it deactivates the enzymes but it doesn’t destroy the allergens.
HD: OK, next caller you are on the air.
Caller: Oh hello.
HD: Hi
Caller: Hi I’m Yvonne from McKinleyville and one of my questions was already answered regarding his on position on sugar so we can skip that one, and I wondered what his position on salts and fats is, each one.
RP: Salt and fats? What kind of fats are you asking about?
Caller: At the beginning of the program you said something about his positions on sugar, salt and fats, I can’t remember what you said about that?
HD: We were talking in relation to saturated and polyunsaturated. Dr Peat is very much a pro-‐advocate of saturated fats and he is very much behind using salt and getting adequate salt in your diet, so there you are.
Caller: And does he talk about what kind of salt?
HD: Well I know, Dr Peat do you want to answer that question?
RP: Ah, yes. Clean white salt, like sea salt without additives, is good.
Caller: Yeah, OK. Alright, that’s the end of me so maybe somebody else can have a turn. Thank you.
HD: Thank you for your call, we do have one more caller and if the caller wants to keep it short we should be able to squeeze you in, go ahead.
Caller: Hi I’m calling from [?]. I have a question but I also want to say to the other callers - what’s been recognised about Alzheimer’s is that it can come with iron deposits in the brain and this traditional herb from India, Turmeric, has being recognized as being able to chelate that iron, like you have cucumanoid receptors throughout your body, curcumin is the active chemical component of Turmeric, so you can consume Turmeric for Alzheimers it can help chelate those iron deposits. Then it also helps to rebuild the collagen, remove the other deposits from the joints too like, so it helps with arthritis. And as for the toe fungus, Neem is the traditional medicine to use. Neem oil, you can use topically or you can take internally, also potentially activated charcoal because it’s likely you would have a bacterial problem in his body, you can consume activated charcoal but you can use the Neem oil directly on the fungus also and so to facilitate the liver you can consume Dandelion root it's an excellent liver tonic.
HD: Dr Peat what do you think about the iron deposits? I know you’ve always mentioned iron as a very dangerous reactive element.
RP: Yeah, that fits right into what we have been talking about, the stress hormones that lead to Alzheimer’s disease, iron is sort of the end point of all of these changes. Nitric oxide and prostaglandins activate enzymes which release and deposit iron in the brain where it then continues amplifying the destructive reactions.
HD: OK, I’m afraid it is almost 8 o'clock, so I want to make sure that I give out Dr Peat’s contact details to people who want to find out more about him and we will just spend these last couple of minutes thanking Dr Peat for his time. Thank you Dr Peat very much for joining us.
RP: OK, thank you.
HD: So, the web address for Dr Peat is http://www.raypeat.com. He has lots of articles that he’s published and are all fully referenced and scientific journal articles. So go to his website. He’s got a big resource there information not just on tonight’s topic, lots of information on thyroid, hormones, good fats vs. bad fats, salt, sugar, etc. [Final radio promo blurb]
End.
