Transcribed by moss 11 December 2014
Verified by Sheila 14 December 2014 (special thanks)
Memory, Cognition & Nutrition
KMUD - Ask Your Herb Doctor – (2014)
HD – Andrew Murray
RP – Ray Peat Ph.D
HD: Hi - Dr Peat - you with us?
RP: Hi.
HD: OK, I just want to begin tonight’s show, as always, just by asking you to give us a synopsis of your academic and professional background so that when people hear you, not only will they hear that you know what you are saying, but they will also know that you have had a long time doing what you do. So go ahead and just let us know what it is you have done for the last 40 years of life.
RP: Oh well, in the last 40 years, I have just been studying independently by myself. But before that, in 1968 to ‘72, I was a graduate student in biology at the University of Oregon, for a PhD in biology, specializing in physiology. Before that in the 50s - ‘56 to the end of the decade, I was working on a Masters degree at University of Oregon and during that time I took courses and lessons in philosophy and psychology among other things, and also from ‘59 to ‘60 I took some philosophy courses at Ohio State University. The phone is clicking. Is the line still there? Are you still there?
HD: Yes. I can hear you. We are here. So you basically started with philosophy, psychology and I know that your main interests - and there are many - but your main interests are hormones, physiology, reproductive biology, aging and that kind of subjects.
RP: Yeah. The reason I decided to study biology was that I didn’t think people were working on consciousness in the right way. I thought I could get at it biologically.
HD: (Laughs) OK, excellent. Well, I know this evening’s topic is going to be hopefully not too heavy and too unreachable. I think, hopefully, what I am hoping, is that it will stir the imagination of people listening to see that, as I’ve always tried to explain, the world is a lot more than we see with our eyes. And so the subject tonight of cognition, memory and nutrition that supports successful memory forming and recapitulation and memory retention is going to be tonight’s subject. Just want to mention that it seems strange but when I was looking at the people, the pioneers, of this subject in the last hundred years, there’s a lot of Russians involved in it. Dr. Peat, you mentioned a chap called Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and gave an anecdote about the piece of history you related to his change in his perception - his cognition -as a result of imprisonment. Perhaps if we can start by you recounting that might be enough to share?
RP: Yeah. In the biography written by Jim Rice, a professor at University of Oregon, he tells the story about his nervous problems, whatever they were, that Dostoevsky had improved while he was in prison in Siberia. And one of the odd things was that he began eating chopped meat because that was available in the prison. I guess in the winter they didn’t have vegetables available and so they had to hunt then to have meat available - and so his consciousness improved. So the professor thought there might have been a nutritional aspect to his change of consciousness at different times in his life.
HD: Okay - so, you are, we will get more into the subject in more detail but are you supporting the necessary protein requirement in the diet? I know that's something? I don't want to offend vegetarians.
RP: Oh yeah, if you are really seriously deficient in protein it absolutely affects your consciousness. A professor friend of mine in Mexico said when some of his students at the university couldn’t memorize things, he encouraged them to eat some protein and would invite them to dinner and feed them some protein. And when I was teaching language classes in Mexico City, some of my students absolutely couldn’t remember anything that we went over. And so I would start my classes with, I made some funny little cookies out of eggs, sugar and wheat germ and I would serve those with a cup of coffee at the start the class (laughs) and everyone was able to learn their lessons just with that little extra boost of protein, carbohydrate and coffee.
HD: Okay - so I know we are going to mention some of those dietary supplements/nutrients of which caffeine is one of them. Let’s go on to explore the philosophy behind the current thinking based on some of these pioneering characters like Dostoevsky, Chomsky and several others that we hopefully will get into a little bit later. In terms of the development of the understanding in which people remember things and the conscious vs. the unconscious in everyday life, as well as the subject of gestalt or the deja vu experience, how have you seen this development occur from a linguistic background?
RP: In the 19th century, what Dostoyevsky was reacting to - for example in his story “The Dream of a Strange Fellow” in which the hero of the story is suicidal because he sees the world as full of robots and people operating according to cause and effect and doing nothing other than what they are determined to do - and he was driven to suicide by that and then has a dream that interrupts his suicide plan and he comes back and becomes an advocate of the position of free will. At the time he was writing that Europe, including Russia, was being swept by the mechanistic idea. Huxley, a friend of Charles Darwin, advocated the idea that molecules in the brain selected by evolution are absolutely in control of our thoughts and our mind is simply a shadow of this determined mechanism and Darwin said that he appreciated having such a nice robot friend. Darwin didn’t approve of that mechanistic idea of consciousness but he sort of joked about Huxley’s mechanical belief. But that idea has persisted in my generation and subsequently. The outstanding figures have been Noam Chomsky with his idea that genes determine what he called rules, transformational rules, that limit or determine what language the form of language takes and that the reason we can speak is because our genes specify these rules. But, 30 years later, he said “Well, rules can’t explain anything” but lots of people didn’t notice that he had said it was all a mistake because in fact he was still sort of committed to all of that academic work, publication on genetic determinism and the so-called cognitive science and artificial intelligence are closely related to the Chomsky position, using the digital computer as a model for understanding human intelligence and since computers since the late 1940s have been digital computers rather than analogue computers that has led to a digitalization of their consciousness theories. But it’s definitely not something that grew out of biological understanding necessarily, except through that robot philosophy of Huxley and others.
HD: Now I just want to interrupt a little bit - when you say Huxley, I think of Aldous Huxley?
RP: No (laughs) I can’t think of his first name - the grandfather of Aldous.
HD: Oh, OK - he was related then, cause he was the gentleman that wrote The Doors of Perception.
RP: That was Aldous, the grandson.
HD: OK right, carry on. OK, so you are saying that Chomsky did have a position that was, I think you are trying to say that he didn’t have the position that was allied to the digital?
RP: Yeah. The rules were determined by genes so they were developed simultaneously with the modelling of the brain in terms of the digital analogue computer and the idea that the brain cells communicate according to an on/off, all or nothing signaling, was derived from that same kind of quantizing philosophy that the switch, the digital computer, each bit of information is just on or off and that was taken up by biology with the idea when [a] nerve fires and is active and then becomes quiet that's all the information that was sent - one impulse, one bit of information. But P K Anokhin in Russia who grew up with thinking such as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s, was critical of that idea and many other people have noticed that you can’t explain hearing and the full range of volume frequency and tonal quality and such transmitted on nerves which are only on or off switches and so P K Anokhin followed through many types of experiments and showed that it’s probably impossible to explain brain function on the analogy of a computer using binary digit types of information.
HD: Right, being either on or off. I think we probably all want to imagine, certainly with the greatest of hope, that the digital on/off is definitely not what we are as people and that there is so much more to biological living systems than what science would readily explain by the on/off. And that’s how these kind of breakthroughs in quantum physics are occurring and how Einstein’s theories are being challenged in terms of the latest thoughts on physics and how matter is interacting and space and time all interact to produce this other dimension. That I think we all like to imagine that we are living in a biological way, that we are influenced far more acutely by our environment and that there’s so much more to us than is going on, that could otherwise be explained by nerve firing. As you say, there's the example of electrical impulses being generated traveling down a nerve axon crossing the synapses cleft and reaching the receptor having an effect and then you know triggering a chemical impulse in the brain say, or a secretion of a hormone or neurotransmitter - there’s certainly is much more to thinking and cognition than just straight on/off.
RP: Yeah - in Anokhin’s view it would be more like picture travelling down each nerve but not necessarily travelling at the time of the impulse but that each nerve would be transmitting complex information not just a bit. And these quantum related ideas, the essential ideas there are resonance and coherence, the interrelatedness of things separated in space and time - and those were part of biology back when quantum, when gestalt psychology was current in the ‘30s, ‘40s, and even into the 50s, people were still arguing in favor of the gestalt as being an image having a space-filling function in the brain - in some way reflecting the spatial and temporal arrangement in the real world. And that was developed at the same time that the field concept in embryology was the mainline thinking and all of those ideas were replaced by a digitalization and a mechanization of biological causality between 1945 and 1950. And in that pre-computer time, quite a few people were talking about the resonance from sensory interactions. For example, in the nose it would be a molecule vibrating, stimulating some kind of an analogous vibration so that, in effect, the actual aroma of a molecule would be reproduced along the nerve and in the brain, so that the brain itself would contain the smell in effect. Or when an image, when light, is absorbed by a Vitamin A molecule in the retina, it would excite a resonance of a similar luminous quality that would travel down the nerve and be reproduced in the brain - so that, in the gestalt view, you would actually have something like a luminous event in the brain when you saw light in the world.
HD: What makes me think at this point in time, I am thinking of those -not for the sake that it was found to be a little bogus in the end - the Uri Geller type of effect. If someone was shown a picture or image of a star, and they were going to transmit this to Uri by thought - that kind of thing, I’m sure does exist and that is something that can be either learned or can be exercised in terms of thoughts traveling across space from one place to another being incorporated into the kind of growing brain if you like through exercise of that kind of behavior. Is that resonance or that coherence anything similar to that kind of model where bits of extrasensory perception is transmitted across space from one person to another without actually the other person seeing the object?
RP: Yeah. There are several experiments currently going on, The Noetic Institute I think has one going on with random number generators. On the Internet you can see several very interesting experiments. Michael Persinger, a neurologist, has some interesting publications and videos in which he is arguing for a resonance between everyone’s brain and the electromagnetic resonance frequencies of the earth’s environment and the earth resonating as a unit which can be sort of a medium through which individuals can resonate.
HD: Okay - let me just get to you to hold it there for a moment, Your listening to Ask your Herb Doctor KMUD Garberville 91.1FM 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 Cognition, Memory and Nutrition. Once again, we have guest speaker Dr Raymond Peat bringing his 40-plus years of study on top of his academic background to bear on the subject. We are going to get into the subject of brain nutrition in a while but just to let people know that from 7.30 on, calls are welcomed. Dr Peat, that reminds me of anxiety, and you mention the Noetic Institute so I was going to bring up the subject of the noosphere and that was proposed by a Russian, Vladimir Vernadsky, but this Noetic Institute is the same thing – is it an institute for the study of the noosphere perhaps, is it?
RP: Of consciousness?
HD: Yeah - didn’t you mention Michael Persinger and the Noetic Institute?
RP: Oh yeah. I don't know who’s in charge of the Noetic Institute right now.
HD: But there is an Institute that’s studying the world of the mind, as it were, the world of conscious thought?
RP: Yeah that's included. The priest Teilhard de Chardin followed Vernadsky’s idea of the world becoming more and more conscious, supporting the growth of more and more conscious organisms - specifically, people,
HD: Actually, you know what, we actually have a caller. Let’s take this first caller and see what direction we are going in. OK caller, you are on the air and where are you calling from?
Caller: Hi, I’m calling from Mendocino. This is Jeff Wright on the Mendocino coast - beautiful day in paradise as we say here - yeah and I have a question for you, Dr Peat, and always appreciate your brilliant enlightenment to us all here and taking the time to do this. I have heard of several cases where music is used for therapy so people who end up comatose and with spinal injuries and it has led me to make the statement about magical, mystical, medicinal, musical moments and those cumulatively can help people come back, and helps us on a daily basis by releasing endorphins which insurance companies haven’t figured out a way to get from us yet. Shhh! No suggestions allowed on that one. But good music you know always brings those spinal chills and good feelings to the body and in going with the resonance of the universe, since everything is vibrational including string theory, strings vibrate on musical instruments I’d just like to kind of put that out and I’ll leave the line and see how you respond to that, and thanks again for all you do, man.
HD: Okay thanks for you call - so Dr Peat how about music therapy?
RP: I think it is something much more subtle but more powerful than endorphins. I think the very structure of nerves is a kind of resonance and carries possibly like as a semi-conducting system, it carries a function that’s analogous to the objective music outside the body and so when you give the organism a chance to relax and begin to respond to the music, you are re-enforcing or enabling a process that is very basic to the life of the brain cells and all of the living organism. If you believed in the mechanistic cognitive science artificial intelligence interpretation of consciousness, you would see the present moment as an infinitesimally thin division between past and future that’s moving along like a line on the grass analogous to a certain measurement of depth, width and height, except moving along the timeline. But the unreality of that, the complete nonsensicalness of it, in fact, you can see when you whistle a tune or listen to music or see a performer who is doing in an intricately whole and organized way a song or other performance, a director who can organize everything in the orchestra to produce the desired effect is having to see where the particular moment is going and where it has been, the pace of the music and all of the qualities that are developing in each moment, depend on what you’re perceiving to come and has recently passed. And so the brain is like a musical composition. It doesn’t exist only in the present and the moment of consciousness spans time - so that you’re simultaneously present in an infinity of these infinitesimally thin presences.
HD: Interesting - and another thought process has gone off in my mind, of the buddhistic kind of teachings of stilling the mind as being a way to enlightenment and I wanted to bring up the other subject you mentioned that there was some test that was done and it took groups of people - some of who were lying down to perform the test and some of which were standing up to perfor the test - and how measurably better they did when lying down. How do you see that stilling the mind and releasing yourself from anxiety as a mechanism to which your brain would be more active and more effective?
RP: I think it is a matter of the breadth of time that you are conscious. When you are standing up, you are ready to react quickly but to a short-term influence. When you are lying down, you refer, your reference of meaning goes out farther in all directions, what you are going to do and what you’ve been doing come into the picture and that allows you to achieve a better product in whatever you are thinking about than if you are under the pressure of needing an immediate result. And when you are standing up you’re ready to move quickly and when you are lying down you are relaxed and your mind can go out in time and space.
HD: Probably some of the reason why psychologists want you lying on the couch (laughter) whilst they conduct their enquiry?
RP: Yeah - and when you are under stress, glucose is the immediate source of energy – well, electrons are probably the immediate source of carbon dioxide produced from the glucose - act to modify the electronic properties of your cell so that it can perform these resonant coherent interactions - but glucose is the material that keeps that conscious process possible. And if you are under stress and are using your glucose too fast or don't have enough of it available, then your nervous processes go into an emergency state where only the here and now, the immediate present and location, are relevant - and so anxiety associated with hypoglycemia or stress will flatten the way your consciousness works and it might give you quick reactions, but they aren’t necessarily going to be the most interesting reactions.
HD: OK – so, once again, we’re touting glucose as positive, helpful, creative, energetic when constantly, I can't believe the amount of times I see adverts for low sugar this, low sugar that, and hear people talking about how bad sugar is, it does this and it does that and it causes cancer, and it’s completely the opposite. I don’t know how people can be so brainwashed.
RP: If a person has been under stress and not eating very well, besides protein, vitamin B1 is sometimes the thing that can make the biggest difference most quickly and when it’s absorbed, if you’ve been deficient in it, a great deficiency can cause psychosis and hallucinations and so on but a mild deficiency can just make you feel sluggish and depressed and not have a very good short-term memory, not able to remember what you want or function as acutely as you should. When you take that in a deficient condition, suddenly your whole mood and world seems to change.
HD: What kind of dose would you say physiologically is sufficient?
RP: I have experienced it with as little as 10 mg but if it’s just for an emergency, then 100mg is ok.
HD: We actually have another caller on the air so let’s before we lose the thread of that B1 deficiency, let’s take this next caller. You’re on the air and where are you from?
Caller: Hello is that me?
HD: Yeah you’re on the air, yeah where are you calling from?
Caller: Hi I’m from New Jersey
HD: New Jersey, hi
Caller: I’ve been on before and I thank you so much for what you do and this is a fascinating show. Dr Peat I was reading and I am so sorry this shows you where my sort of brain fog is, I deleted this beautiful quote about how neurogenesis can take place in the hippocampus but also in the olfactory bulb and it went on to describe, if I am remembering, the hippocampus could be stimulated by exercise - but I think we are hearing that from so many quarters that maybe we don’t need to explore that. I would like to explore the olfactory aspect. Can one go around and smelling things y’know and start firing neurons or creating new neurons?
RP: Ah, Luca Turin, a perfume specialist, has some very good videos on the internet and one on pharmacology, but he is talking about anti-depressants drugs in that case, but really his main interest is in olfaction and I think that along with Heraclitus who talked about the nose essences as being at the center of consciousness - really the olfactory system is very closely connected with our highest and best conceptual work.
Caller: Wow, pardon me, you said Luca Turin?
RP: Luca Turin.
Caller: And then you mentioned another individual, am I right? A different person?
RP: I don’t recall.
Caller: Okay - alright, I will listen to the archival version and would we have to, I mean, I guess what you are saying is, I am going to explore this, I am going to look into this but, in your understanding, would we perhaps would we have to surround ourselves with a particular kind of smell? I mean if you would know- would it have to be acrid or as opposed to sweet, or do you understand me?
RP: Oh no - just becoming conscious of the smells around you and each type of smell has its inclination to reinforce certain types of function. But the whole process of becoming conscious of odors in your environment, that’s very closely connected with the higher parts of the brain and conceptually you can use odors to stimulate memory. The way they connect to the rest of the brain - you can sometimes with a thought - you can associate the memory of a smell and sometimes the smell can bring back certain types of thought. And the stimulation of the hippocampus, any type of experience helps to stimulate that. For example, taxi drivers in a big city who have learned all the streets have a bigger hippocampus but stimulation works everywhere in the brain. Nerve cells are maintaining each other so that anything you do consciously is tending to enliven the rest of your brain. It just happens that vision and smell are among the very powerful things. Music has the function of extending us through the moment, expanding our moment that we feel present - but the mechanists proposed an idea of memory that was sort of like a computer, in which in one type of computer, you could say that memory was punching a hole in a piece of paper or putting a signal on a tape, some definite thing that you could find later and go back to that card or that tape and repeat that signal and so they said, “Well there’s some kind of a signaling process in the brain in which we might make a specific protein or an RNA molecule and sort of drop it in a certain location for later use”. But if you think about the type of process that you would have to go through to find the right memory molecule when you needed it, the process and apparatus with which you would find that molecule already explains that you know where it is, that you have the memory so you already have the memory in effect if you can go to find the molecule, otherwise molecules would just be jumping at you randomly and your memory would be like a computer that spews out things at random.
Caller: I know that I think you indicated I know sometimes I have smelled something and it has evoked memories that I thought were forgotten.
RP: Oh yeah. Oh - Heraclitus was the person I mentioned, the Greek philosopher.
Caller: Thank you.
RP: Put simply, many people have noticed that an odor can recall a whole situation that you’d thought you had forgotten.
Caller: Many thanks, much fun, and I am going to say bye-bye for now.
HD: Okay - thank you for your call, caller. Okay - so we have Dr Ray Peat on our show tonight and we are exploring Cognition, Memory and Nutritional factors that would support cognition and memory. The number if you live in the area is 923 3911 or if you are outside the area there’s a toll free number - it’s 1800 KMUD RAD. Okay, so to 8 o’clock, people are invited to call in. Dr Peat, getting back to nutrition, you talk about B1 deficiency as the cause of a poor cognition and using as little as 10mg and I know those foods typically people might associate with B1 would be things like sunflower seeds and bread. There are other things and I have heard that macadamia nuts have some B1 in them. Are there any other sources of B1 that you can say would, you know, would be good quality sources of B1?
RP: All of the animal foods – eggs, milk, cheese.
HD: Okay, alright - and I wanted to question you a little bit more about vitamin A and I know you linked this with anxiety where you’re very keen to stress that anxiety puts us in a very bad position to be able to remember things, to learn things, to have our brain working properly. And the whole anti-anxiety supplements that would reduce anxiety.
RP: Yeah, vitamin A besides being a matter of sensitivity to electronic excitations such as in the eye and acting as sort of as an antenna for interacting with electromagnetic energy - the other region of vitamin A activity is in activating the enzymes that makes steroids and especially brain steroids. So if your vitamin A is deficient, you not only have poor vision and skin problems and so on, but your ability to make pregnenolone, progesterone, DHEA and their derivatives is limited and the brain is the major steroid-forming organ, the skin, the gonads, the adrenals and the brain. The brain is probably the most powerful steroid forming organ when it’s working right and vitamin A is essential for making those.
HD: Okay - I got a thought about the misplaced belief that fish oils are good for you - although there is a lot of vitamin A in halibut liver oil - and I think in the past, when we’ve discussed vitamin A and its sources, that halibut oil has such a concentrated form of vitamin A and so little PUFA which is you know the whole point of avoiding the fish oils, that it’s relatively safe.
RP: Oh, yeah. That’s true.
HD: So what else would you say about the amount of vitamin A in the liver for example is a good nutritional food source vs. halibut liver oil.
RP: Well the halibut liver oil gives you a lot of vitamin A and some vitamin D and probably traces of vitamin E as well and not too much of the PUFAs - so it’s a good source.
HD: Okay.
RP: The liver itself, fish liver, or chicken liver, beef liver, any kind of livers are great sources of vitamin A.
HD: And then eggs I guess another?
RP: Yeah, and milk and cheese.
HD: Of course, dairy.
RP: And vitamin B12 happens to be crucial for turning carotene into vitamin A.
HD: Okay, all right - so there’s 3 things there then that can be definitely be relegated to the brain food section - so vitamin A, B1 and then B12 because it helps convert beta-carotene into vitamin A. What kind of things would use up, apart from somebody not consuming enough vitamin A in their diet, there are definitely things that will consume vitamin A so that even if you do eat some of those vitamin A-containing foods, you may actually be deficient?
RP: Ultraviolet exposure destroys it very easily in your skin and that’s one of the things involved in sunburn. Vitamin A reacts with the ultraviolet and then spreads the damage to any unsaturated fats that are in your skin.
HD: Interesting. So in this sense then, sunlight exposure is not particularly good for you although you have to weigh up the pros and cons of that adequate vitamin D from sunlight and/or you know the other beneficial effects of red light and the electron quenching.
RP: And vitamin E protects against that breakdown and destruction of vitamin A.
HD: Is that right? Okay - so if you were to supplement with vitamin E and again the vitamin E supplementation would be coming from something like wheatgerm or any other…
RP: Liver, milk and butter all have some vitamin E.
HD: Okay - so there are other factors then that would increase someone’s ability to retain information and/or develop, for want of a better word, ‘new’ connections and energetically that’s an important consideration if you don’t have sufficient energy in the system to drive those things then it’s not going to be possible to work efficiently and I know that you would suggest thyroid and maybe pregnenolone or progesterone as anti-estrogen substances that would also work towards that.
RP: Yeah - and serotonin is when you are under stress or eating irritating foods your intestines get inflamed and releases extra serotonin which some of it can get to the brain and signal the stress system and then signaling the stress system can activate other serotonin-producing systems - so it can create a vicious circle.
HD: Would this be part of an endotoxin type scenario?
RP: Yeah, endotoxin triggers nitric oxide and serotonin and various types of stress and depression tend to slow nerve function in many ways and people experience it as a feeling of need to withdraw, being depressed or anxious and sometimes defensive and aggressive. If you feed rats beans, for example, containing the soluble fibres that can feed bacteria that create irritation and increase the serotonin, the rats become both anxious and aggressive, fearful but defensive, and quick to attack.
HD: Okay - so what I am getting from is that anxiety is probably one of the main things to avoid in terms of having, you know, a competent memory and a competent cognition - that the whole physiological effect of stress and anxiety are all working against having that kind of stillness that would enable one to recapitulate events or to remember even simple facts.
RP: And hyperventilation, for example, when you are feeling anxious, it’s common to breathe harder and deeper and lose carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide seems to be a nerve stabilizer and protects nerves against many types of stress and inflammation and as the carbon dioxide goes down your platelets released more serotonin and probably other inflammatory things. And so just hyperventilating is enough to trigger a process that tends to slow you down, make you retreat and not think very clearly. So interestingly, anything that will increases your ability to retain carbon dioxide tends to help you think calmly and clearly.
HD: And you say that thyroid does that - it helps you to retain CO2?
RP: Yeah - thyroid and progesterone and pregnenolone - all of the anti-stress things.
HD: And that reminds me about magnesium carbonate. I was thinking about that earlier - not as a laxative but definitely as a product which will produce a relatively smooth bowel movement and - not to joke too much about it – but, in itself, magnesium carbonate would liberate some CO2 in that sense, wouldn’t it?
RP: Yeah - and thyroid lets your cells retain the magnesium so magnesium carbonate is, in a way, a short-term thyroid supporter. And keeping your brain warm is another thing - just running at a higher temperature your brain produces more CO2 and generally will retain the magnesium more efficiently as if it is under the influence of thyroid.
HD: And so the thyroid hormone itself in a healthy individual with adequate thyroid function that would happen anyway so you would be running an adequately warm enough temperature for your brain to be doing that.
RP: Yeah - I have known many people who complained about memory problems and foggy consciousness and a sense of being in a fog and they often had a temperature, an oral temperature of 96, under 97 degrees and getting their brain temperature up towards 98 or 99 degrees Fahrenheit, their memory improves tremendously. I’ve noticed when I was in school if I neglected to study for a test, if I would take some vitamin B1 the night before and then read the book and take some just before the test. I mentioned that to a couple of other people and it has worked for everyone I know who has tried it, they always got perfect As on their test.
HD: Wow you’ve let your secret out (laughs). Okay - so let me just think okay, yeah, so I’d like to go back to sodium. I know that you have mentioned sodium itself and again, another controversial subject, but that’s what this show is all about I think, not so much controversy, but it’s actually the truth and it sounds so shocking that it seems to be controversial, but sodium in the form of regular table salt and I know that we have done lots of different shows or interjected shows with mentioning how good and positive and healthful and beneficial salt is for you, even though that that most of the advertising media wants to tell you how bad it is (just like sugar) but salt itself is very important in terms of retaining the magnesium that you are saying.
RP: Stress and aging tend to make it harder to retain the sodium. Hyponatremia is a big problem for sick, old people but occasionally it happens in hypothyroid younger people because the thyroid-making carbon dioxide is an important factor in retaining sodium so it doesn’t get lost in the urine and when your body is sensing too much loss of sodium, the adrenals produce aldosterone to save the sodium and aldosterone tells the kidneys to lose magnesium. And so if you take enough sodium to keep your adrenals from making aldosterone, your kidneys are going to save magnesium so in that situation eating extra salt is going to be equivalent to having more magnesium in your diet because you will lose it less quickly.
HD: I mean you’re an advocate of salting your foods and using salt in recipes.
RP: Yeah, salt, protein, progesterone and thyroid are the main things for keeping your brain temperature up and functioning well.
HD: Okay – well, unfortunately it is coming up for 3 minutes to 8 o’clock so, in order to let people know more about you, I’ll have to cut the show short there - but thank you so much for joining us again and sharing your wisdom with us.
RP: Okay, thank you.
HD: Thank you. Okay so for those people who have been listening, if you want to find out more about Dr Raymond Peat, you can visit his website and that website address is http://www.raypeat.com and there’s lots of articles there. He’s not selling anything. He’s just so into what he’s doing and that he's passionate enough about it to put it all on his website and it’s fully referenced so if you want to learn more about some of those things that you think are controversial that we’ve mentioned like salt is good for you or sugar is good for you, please take a look at his website and you will find out for those people that have any need to know the science behind it is the best place to go and for those people that are not so interested in the science but just want to understand it a little more, and it may seem a little heady, but it’s all fully referenced and his work is pioneering. I can’t say anything less than that and a lot of what he has said and espoused is certainly being taken up even by the mainstream and I know recently in these last 12 months at least polyunsaturated fats are now being looked at as the bad guys which is what he has always said and unsaturated liquid oils, the fish oils, it’s all the bad stuff and that salt and sugars are very beneficial for you and there are many different reasons why. Okay so - raypeat.com - and for those people who want to contact us Monday through Friday we can be reached at 188WBM HERBS so every third Friday of the month it’s Ask Your Herb Dr and June and we are in the middle of summer already -only a few weeks away from solstice -and so until June, we wish you all good night. Goodnight.
End.
Verified by Sheila 14 December 2014 (special thanks)
Memory, Cognition & Nutrition
KMUD - Ask Your Herb Doctor – (2014)
HD – Andrew Murray
RP – Ray Peat Ph.D
HD: Hi - Dr Peat - you with us?
RP: Hi.
HD: OK, I just want to begin tonight’s show, as always, just by asking you to give us a synopsis of your academic and professional background so that when people hear you, not only will they hear that you know what you are saying, but they will also know that you have had a long time doing what you do. So go ahead and just let us know what it is you have done for the last 40 years of life.
RP: Oh well, in the last 40 years, I have just been studying independently by myself. But before that, in 1968 to ‘72, I was a graduate student in biology at the University of Oregon, for a PhD in biology, specializing in physiology. Before that in the 50s - ‘56 to the end of the decade, I was working on a Masters degree at University of Oregon and during that time I took courses and lessons in philosophy and psychology among other things, and also from ‘59 to ‘60 I took some philosophy courses at Ohio State University. The phone is clicking. Is the line still there? Are you still there?
HD: Yes. I can hear you. We are here. So you basically started with philosophy, psychology and I know that your main interests - and there are many - but your main interests are hormones, physiology, reproductive biology, aging and that kind of subjects.
RP: Yeah. The reason I decided to study biology was that I didn’t think people were working on consciousness in the right way. I thought I could get at it biologically.
HD: (Laughs) OK, excellent. Well, I know this evening’s topic is going to be hopefully not too heavy and too unreachable. I think, hopefully, what I am hoping, is that it will stir the imagination of people listening to see that, as I’ve always tried to explain, the world is a lot more than we see with our eyes. And so the subject tonight of cognition, memory and nutrition that supports successful memory forming and recapitulation and memory retention is going to be tonight’s subject. Just want to mention that it seems strange but when I was looking at the people, the pioneers, of this subject in the last hundred years, there’s a lot of Russians involved in it. Dr. Peat, you mentioned a chap called Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and gave an anecdote about the piece of history you related to his change in his perception - his cognition -as a result of imprisonment. Perhaps if we can start by you recounting that might be enough to share?
RP: Yeah. In the biography written by Jim Rice, a professor at University of Oregon, he tells the story about his nervous problems, whatever they were, that Dostoevsky had improved while he was in prison in Siberia. And one of the odd things was that he began eating chopped meat because that was available in the prison. I guess in the winter they didn’t have vegetables available and so they had to hunt then to have meat available - and so his consciousness improved. So the professor thought there might have been a nutritional aspect to his change of consciousness at different times in his life.
HD: Okay - so, you are, we will get more into the subject in more detail but are you supporting the necessary protein requirement in the diet? I know that's something? I don't want to offend vegetarians.
RP: Oh yeah, if you are really seriously deficient in protein it absolutely affects your consciousness. A professor friend of mine in Mexico said when some of his students at the university couldn’t memorize things, he encouraged them to eat some protein and would invite them to dinner and feed them some protein. And when I was teaching language classes in Mexico City, some of my students absolutely couldn’t remember anything that we went over. And so I would start my classes with, I made some funny little cookies out of eggs, sugar and wheat germ and I would serve those with a cup of coffee at the start the class (laughs) and everyone was able to learn their lessons just with that little extra boost of protein, carbohydrate and coffee.
HD: Okay - so I know we are going to mention some of those dietary supplements/nutrients of which caffeine is one of them. Let’s go on to explore the philosophy behind the current thinking based on some of these pioneering characters like Dostoevsky, Chomsky and several others that we hopefully will get into a little bit later. In terms of the development of the understanding in which people remember things and the conscious vs. the unconscious in everyday life, as well as the subject of gestalt or the deja vu experience, how have you seen this development occur from a linguistic background?
RP: In the 19th century, what Dostoyevsky was reacting to - for example in his story “The Dream of a Strange Fellow” in which the hero of the story is suicidal because he sees the world as full of robots and people operating according to cause and effect and doing nothing other than what they are determined to do - and he was driven to suicide by that and then has a dream that interrupts his suicide plan and he comes back and becomes an advocate of the position of free will. At the time he was writing that Europe, including Russia, was being swept by the mechanistic idea. Huxley, a friend of Charles Darwin, advocated the idea that molecules in the brain selected by evolution are absolutely in control of our thoughts and our mind is simply a shadow of this determined mechanism and Darwin said that he appreciated having such a nice robot friend. Darwin didn’t approve of that mechanistic idea of consciousness but he sort of joked about Huxley’s mechanical belief. But that idea has persisted in my generation and subsequently. The outstanding figures have been Noam Chomsky with his idea that genes determine what he called rules, transformational rules, that limit or determine what language the form of language takes and that the reason we can speak is because our genes specify these rules. But, 30 years later, he said “Well, rules can’t explain anything” but lots of people didn’t notice that he had said it was all a mistake because in fact he was still sort of committed to all of that academic work, publication on genetic determinism and the so-called cognitive science and artificial intelligence are closely related to the Chomsky position, using the digital computer as a model for understanding human intelligence and since computers since the late 1940s have been digital computers rather than analogue computers that has led to a digitalization of their consciousness theories. But it’s definitely not something that grew out of biological understanding necessarily, except through that robot philosophy of Huxley and others.
HD: Now I just want to interrupt a little bit - when you say Huxley, I think of Aldous Huxley?
RP: No (laughs) I can’t think of his first name - the grandfather of Aldous.
HD: Oh, OK - he was related then, cause he was the gentleman that wrote The Doors of Perception.
RP: That was Aldous, the grandson.
HD: OK right, carry on. OK, so you are saying that Chomsky did have a position that was, I think you are trying to say that he didn’t have the position that was allied to the digital?
RP: Yeah. The rules were determined by genes so they were developed simultaneously with the modelling of the brain in terms of the digital analogue computer and the idea that the brain cells communicate according to an on/off, all or nothing signaling, was derived from that same kind of quantizing philosophy that the switch, the digital computer, each bit of information is just on or off and that was taken up by biology with the idea when [a] nerve fires and is active and then becomes quiet that's all the information that was sent - one impulse, one bit of information. But P K Anokhin in Russia who grew up with thinking such as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s, was critical of that idea and many other people have noticed that you can’t explain hearing and the full range of volume frequency and tonal quality and such transmitted on nerves which are only on or off switches and so P K Anokhin followed through many types of experiments and showed that it’s probably impossible to explain brain function on the analogy of a computer using binary digit types of information.
HD: Right, being either on or off. I think we probably all want to imagine, certainly with the greatest of hope, that the digital on/off is definitely not what we are as people and that there is so much more to biological living systems than what science would readily explain by the on/off. And that’s how these kind of breakthroughs in quantum physics are occurring and how Einstein’s theories are being challenged in terms of the latest thoughts on physics and how matter is interacting and space and time all interact to produce this other dimension. That I think we all like to imagine that we are living in a biological way, that we are influenced far more acutely by our environment and that there’s so much more to us than is going on, that could otherwise be explained by nerve firing. As you say, there's the example of electrical impulses being generated traveling down a nerve axon crossing the synapses cleft and reaching the receptor having an effect and then you know triggering a chemical impulse in the brain say, or a secretion of a hormone or neurotransmitter - there’s certainly is much more to thinking and cognition than just straight on/off.
RP: Yeah - in Anokhin’s view it would be more like picture travelling down each nerve but not necessarily travelling at the time of the impulse but that each nerve would be transmitting complex information not just a bit. And these quantum related ideas, the essential ideas there are resonance and coherence, the interrelatedness of things separated in space and time - and those were part of biology back when quantum, when gestalt psychology was current in the ‘30s, ‘40s, and even into the 50s, people were still arguing in favor of the gestalt as being an image having a space-filling function in the brain - in some way reflecting the spatial and temporal arrangement in the real world. And that was developed at the same time that the field concept in embryology was the mainline thinking and all of those ideas were replaced by a digitalization and a mechanization of biological causality between 1945 and 1950. And in that pre-computer time, quite a few people were talking about the resonance from sensory interactions. For example, in the nose it would be a molecule vibrating, stimulating some kind of an analogous vibration so that, in effect, the actual aroma of a molecule would be reproduced along the nerve and in the brain, so that the brain itself would contain the smell in effect. Or when an image, when light, is absorbed by a Vitamin A molecule in the retina, it would excite a resonance of a similar luminous quality that would travel down the nerve and be reproduced in the brain - so that, in the gestalt view, you would actually have something like a luminous event in the brain when you saw light in the world.
HD: What makes me think at this point in time, I am thinking of those -not for the sake that it was found to be a little bogus in the end - the Uri Geller type of effect. If someone was shown a picture or image of a star, and they were going to transmit this to Uri by thought - that kind of thing, I’m sure does exist and that is something that can be either learned or can be exercised in terms of thoughts traveling across space from one place to another being incorporated into the kind of growing brain if you like through exercise of that kind of behavior. Is that resonance or that coherence anything similar to that kind of model where bits of extrasensory perception is transmitted across space from one person to another without actually the other person seeing the object?
RP: Yeah. There are several experiments currently going on, The Noetic Institute I think has one going on with random number generators. On the Internet you can see several very interesting experiments. Michael Persinger, a neurologist, has some interesting publications and videos in which he is arguing for a resonance between everyone’s brain and the electromagnetic resonance frequencies of the earth’s environment and the earth resonating as a unit which can be sort of a medium through which individuals can resonate.
HD: Okay - let me just get to you to hold it there for a moment, Your listening to Ask your Herb Doctor KMUD Garberville 91.1FM 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 Cognition, Memory and Nutrition. Once again, we have guest speaker Dr Raymond Peat bringing his 40-plus years of study on top of his academic background to bear on the subject. We are going to get into the subject of brain nutrition in a while but just to let people know that from 7.30 on, calls are welcomed. Dr Peat, that reminds me of anxiety, and you mention the Noetic Institute so I was going to bring up the subject of the noosphere and that was proposed by a Russian, Vladimir Vernadsky, but this Noetic Institute is the same thing – is it an institute for the study of the noosphere perhaps, is it?
RP: Of consciousness?
HD: Yeah - didn’t you mention Michael Persinger and the Noetic Institute?
RP: Oh yeah. I don't know who’s in charge of the Noetic Institute right now.
HD: But there is an Institute that’s studying the world of the mind, as it were, the world of conscious thought?
RP: Yeah that's included. The priest Teilhard de Chardin followed Vernadsky’s idea of the world becoming more and more conscious, supporting the growth of more and more conscious organisms - specifically, people,
HD: Actually, you know what, we actually have a caller. Let’s take this first caller and see what direction we are going in. OK caller, you are on the air and where are you calling from?
Caller: Hi, I’m calling from Mendocino. This is Jeff Wright on the Mendocino coast - beautiful day in paradise as we say here - yeah and I have a question for you, Dr Peat, and always appreciate your brilliant enlightenment to us all here and taking the time to do this. I have heard of several cases where music is used for therapy so people who end up comatose and with spinal injuries and it has led me to make the statement about magical, mystical, medicinal, musical moments and those cumulatively can help people come back, and helps us on a daily basis by releasing endorphins which insurance companies haven’t figured out a way to get from us yet. Shhh! No suggestions allowed on that one. But good music you know always brings those spinal chills and good feelings to the body and in going with the resonance of the universe, since everything is vibrational including string theory, strings vibrate on musical instruments I’d just like to kind of put that out and I’ll leave the line and see how you respond to that, and thanks again for all you do, man.
HD: Okay thanks for you call - so Dr Peat how about music therapy?
RP: I think it is something much more subtle but more powerful than endorphins. I think the very structure of nerves is a kind of resonance and carries possibly like as a semi-conducting system, it carries a function that’s analogous to the objective music outside the body and so when you give the organism a chance to relax and begin to respond to the music, you are re-enforcing or enabling a process that is very basic to the life of the brain cells and all of the living organism. If you believed in the mechanistic cognitive science artificial intelligence interpretation of consciousness, you would see the present moment as an infinitesimally thin division between past and future that’s moving along like a line on the grass analogous to a certain measurement of depth, width and height, except moving along the timeline. But the unreality of that, the complete nonsensicalness of it, in fact, you can see when you whistle a tune or listen to music or see a performer who is doing in an intricately whole and organized way a song or other performance, a director who can organize everything in the orchestra to produce the desired effect is having to see where the particular moment is going and where it has been, the pace of the music and all of the qualities that are developing in each moment, depend on what you’re perceiving to come and has recently passed. And so the brain is like a musical composition. It doesn’t exist only in the present and the moment of consciousness spans time - so that you’re simultaneously present in an infinity of these infinitesimally thin presences.
HD: Interesting - and another thought process has gone off in my mind, of the buddhistic kind of teachings of stilling the mind as being a way to enlightenment and I wanted to bring up the other subject you mentioned that there was some test that was done and it took groups of people - some of who were lying down to perform the test and some of which were standing up to perfor the test - and how measurably better they did when lying down. How do you see that stilling the mind and releasing yourself from anxiety as a mechanism to which your brain would be more active and more effective?
RP: I think it is a matter of the breadth of time that you are conscious. When you are standing up, you are ready to react quickly but to a short-term influence. When you are lying down, you refer, your reference of meaning goes out farther in all directions, what you are going to do and what you’ve been doing come into the picture and that allows you to achieve a better product in whatever you are thinking about than if you are under the pressure of needing an immediate result. And when you are standing up you’re ready to move quickly and when you are lying down you are relaxed and your mind can go out in time and space.
HD: Probably some of the reason why psychologists want you lying on the couch (laughter) whilst they conduct their enquiry?
RP: Yeah - and when you are under stress, glucose is the immediate source of energy – well, electrons are probably the immediate source of carbon dioxide produced from the glucose - act to modify the electronic properties of your cell so that it can perform these resonant coherent interactions - but glucose is the material that keeps that conscious process possible. And if you are under stress and are using your glucose too fast or don't have enough of it available, then your nervous processes go into an emergency state where only the here and now, the immediate present and location, are relevant - and so anxiety associated with hypoglycemia or stress will flatten the way your consciousness works and it might give you quick reactions, but they aren’t necessarily going to be the most interesting reactions.
HD: OK – so, once again, we’re touting glucose as positive, helpful, creative, energetic when constantly, I can't believe the amount of times I see adverts for low sugar this, low sugar that, and hear people talking about how bad sugar is, it does this and it does that and it causes cancer, and it’s completely the opposite. I don’t know how people can be so brainwashed.
RP: If a person has been under stress and not eating very well, besides protein, vitamin B1 is sometimes the thing that can make the biggest difference most quickly and when it’s absorbed, if you’ve been deficient in it, a great deficiency can cause psychosis and hallucinations and so on but a mild deficiency can just make you feel sluggish and depressed and not have a very good short-term memory, not able to remember what you want or function as acutely as you should. When you take that in a deficient condition, suddenly your whole mood and world seems to change.
HD: What kind of dose would you say physiologically is sufficient?
RP: I have experienced it with as little as 10 mg but if it’s just for an emergency, then 100mg is ok.
HD: We actually have another caller on the air so let’s before we lose the thread of that B1 deficiency, let’s take this next caller. You’re on the air and where are you from?
Caller: Hello is that me?
HD: Yeah you’re on the air, yeah where are you calling from?
Caller: Hi I’m from New Jersey
HD: New Jersey, hi
Caller: I’ve been on before and I thank you so much for what you do and this is a fascinating show. Dr Peat I was reading and I am so sorry this shows you where my sort of brain fog is, I deleted this beautiful quote about how neurogenesis can take place in the hippocampus but also in the olfactory bulb and it went on to describe, if I am remembering, the hippocampus could be stimulated by exercise - but I think we are hearing that from so many quarters that maybe we don’t need to explore that. I would like to explore the olfactory aspect. Can one go around and smelling things y’know and start firing neurons or creating new neurons?
RP: Ah, Luca Turin, a perfume specialist, has some very good videos on the internet and one on pharmacology, but he is talking about anti-depressants drugs in that case, but really his main interest is in olfaction and I think that along with Heraclitus who talked about the nose essences as being at the center of consciousness - really the olfactory system is very closely connected with our highest and best conceptual work.
Caller: Wow, pardon me, you said Luca Turin?
RP: Luca Turin.
Caller: And then you mentioned another individual, am I right? A different person?
RP: I don’t recall.
Caller: Okay - alright, I will listen to the archival version and would we have to, I mean, I guess what you are saying is, I am going to explore this, I am going to look into this but, in your understanding, would we perhaps would we have to surround ourselves with a particular kind of smell? I mean if you would know- would it have to be acrid or as opposed to sweet, or do you understand me?
RP: Oh no - just becoming conscious of the smells around you and each type of smell has its inclination to reinforce certain types of function. But the whole process of becoming conscious of odors in your environment, that’s very closely connected with the higher parts of the brain and conceptually you can use odors to stimulate memory. The way they connect to the rest of the brain - you can sometimes with a thought - you can associate the memory of a smell and sometimes the smell can bring back certain types of thought. And the stimulation of the hippocampus, any type of experience helps to stimulate that. For example, taxi drivers in a big city who have learned all the streets have a bigger hippocampus but stimulation works everywhere in the brain. Nerve cells are maintaining each other so that anything you do consciously is tending to enliven the rest of your brain. It just happens that vision and smell are among the very powerful things. Music has the function of extending us through the moment, expanding our moment that we feel present - but the mechanists proposed an idea of memory that was sort of like a computer, in which in one type of computer, you could say that memory was punching a hole in a piece of paper or putting a signal on a tape, some definite thing that you could find later and go back to that card or that tape and repeat that signal and so they said, “Well there’s some kind of a signaling process in the brain in which we might make a specific protein or an RNA molecule and sort of drop it in a certain location for later use”. But if you think about the type of process that you would have to go through to find the right memory molecule when you needed it, the process and apparatus with which you would find that molecule already explains that you know where it is, that you have the memory so you already have the memory in effect if you can go to find the molecule, otherwise molecules would just be jumping at you randomly and your memory would be like a computer that spews out things at random.
Caller: I know that I think you indicated I know sometimes I have smelled something and it has evoked memories that I thought were forgotten.
RP: Oh yeah. Oh - Heraclitus was the person I mentioned, the Greek philosopher.
Caller: Thank you.
RP: Put simply, many people have noticed that an odor can recall a whole situation that you’d thought you had forgotten.
Caller: Many thanks, much fun, and I am going to say bye-bye for now.
HD: Okay - thank you for your call, caller. Okay - so we have Dr Ray Peat on our show tonight and we are exploring Cognition, Memory and Nutritional factors that would support cognition and memory. The number if you live in the area is 923 3911 or if you are outside the area there’s a toll free number - it’s 1800 KMUD RAD. Okay, so to 8 o’clock, people are invited to call in. Dr Peat, getting back to nutrition, you talk about B1 deficiency as the cause of a poor cognition and using as little as 10mg and I know those foods typically people might associate with B1 would be things like sunflower seeds and bread. There are other things and I have heard that macadamia nuts have some B1 in them. Are there any other sources of B1 that you can say would, you know, would be good quality sources of B1?
RP: All of the animal foods – eggs, milk, cheese.
HD: Okay, alright - and I wanted to question you a little bit more about vitamin A and I know you linked this with anxiety where you’re very keen to stress that anxiety puts us in a very bad position to be able to remember things, to learn things, to have our brain working properly. And the whole anti-anxiety supplements that would reduce anxiety.
RP: Yeah, vitamin A besides being a matter of sensitivity to electronic excitations such as in the eye and acting as sort of as an antenna for interacting with electromagnetic energy - the other region of vitamin A activity is in activating the enzymes that makes steroids and especially brain steroids. So if your vitamin A is deficient, you not only have poor vision and skin problems and so on, but your ability to make pregnenolone, progesterone, DHEA and their derivatives is limited and the brain is the major steroid-forming organ, the skin, the gonads, the adrenals and the brain. The brain is probably the most powerful steroid forming organ when it’s working right and vitamin A is essential for making those.
HD: Okay - I got a thought about the misplaced belief that fish oils are good for you - although there is a lot of vitamin A in halibut liver oil - and I think in the past, when we’ve discussed vitamin A and its sources, that halibut oil has such a concentrated form of vitamin A and so little PUFA which is you know the whole point of avoiding the fish oils, that it’s relatively safe.
RP: Oh, yeah. That’s true.
HD: So what else would you say about the amount of vitamin A in the liver for example is a good nutritional food source vs. halibut liver oil.
RP: Well the halibut liver oil gives you a lot of vitamin A and some vitamin D and probably traces of vitamin E as well and not too much of the PUFAs - so it’s a good source.
HD: Okay.
RP: The liver itself, fish liver, or chicken liver, beef liver, any kind of livers are great sources of vitamin A.
HD: And then eggs I guess another?
RP: Yeah, and milk and cheese.
HD: Of course, dairy.
RP: And vitamin B12 happens to be crucial for turning carotene into vitamin A.
HD: Okay, all right - so there’s 3 things there then that can be definitely be relegated to the brain food section - so vitamin A, B1 and then B12 because it helps convert beta-carotene into vitamin A. What kind of things would use up, apart from somebody not consuming enough vitamin A in their diet, there are definitely things that will consume vitamin A so that even if you do eat some of those vitamin A-containing foods, you may actually be deficient?
RP: Ultraviolet exposure destroys it very easily in your skin and that’s one of the things involved in sunburn. Vitamin A reacts with the ultraviolet and then spreads the damage to any unsaturated fats that are in your skin.
HD: Interesting. So in this sense then, sunlight exposure is not particularly good for you although you have to weigh up the pros and cons of that adequate vitamin D from sunlight and/or you know the other beneficial effects of red light and the electron quenching.
RP: And vitamin E protects against that breakdown and destruction of vitamin A.
HD: Is that right? Okay - so if you were to supplement with vitamin E and again the vitamin E supplementation would be coming from something like wheatgerm or any other…
RP: Liver, milk and butter all have some vitamin E.
HD: Okay - so there are other factors then that would increase someone’s ability to retain information and/or develop, for want of a better word, ‘new’ connections and energetically that’s an important consideration if you don’t have sufficient energy in the system to drive those things then it’s not going to be possible to work efficiently and I know that you would suggest thyroid and maybe pregnenolone or progesterone as anti-estrogen substances that would also work towards that.
RP: Yeah - and serotonin is when you are under stress or eating irritating foods your intestines get inflamed and releases extra serotonin which some of it can get to the brain and signal the stress system and then signaling the stress system can activate other serotonin-producing systems - so it can create a vicious circle.
HD: Would this be part of an endotoxin type scenario?
RP: Yeah, endotoxin triggers nitric oxide and serotonin and various types of stress and depression tend to slow nerve function in many ways and people experience it as a feeling of need to withdraw, being depressed or anxious and sometimes defensive and aggressive. If you feed rats beans, for example, containing the soluble fibres that can feed bacteria that create irritation and increase the serotonin, the rats become both anxious and aggressive, fearful but defensive, and quick to attack.
HD: Okay - so what I am getting from is that anxiety is probably one of the main things to avoid in terms of having, you know, a competent memory and a competent cognition - that the whole physiological effect of stress and anxiety are all working against having that kind of stillness that would enable one to recapitulate events or to remember even simple facts.
RP: And hyperventilation, for example, when you are feeling anxious, it’s common to breathe harder and deeper and lose carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide seems to be a nerve stabilizer and protects nerves against many types of stress and inflammation and as the carbon dioxide goes down your platelets released more serotonin and probably other inflammatory things. And so just hyperventilating is enough to trigger a process that tends to slow you down, make you retreat and not think very clearly. So interestingly, anything that will increases your ability to retain carbon dioxide tends to help you think calmly and clearly.
HD: And you say that thyroid does that - it helps you to retain CO2?
RP: Yeah - thyroid and progesterone and pregnenolone - all of the anti-stress things.
HD: And that reminds me about magnesium carbonate. I was thinking about that earlier - not as a laxative but definitely as a product which will produce a relatively smooth bowel movement and - not to joke too much about it – but, in itself, magnesium carbonate would liberate some CO2 in that sense, wouldn’t it?
RP: Yeah - and thyroid lets your cells retain the magnesium so magnesium carbonate is, in a way, a short-term thyroid supporter. And keeping your brain warm is another thing - just running at a higher temperature your brain produces more CO2 and generally will retain the magnesium more efficiently as if it is under the influence of thyroid.
HD: And so the thyroid hormone itself in a healthy individual with adequate thyroid function that would happen anyway so you would be running an adequately warm enough temperature for your brain to be doing that.
RP: Yeah - I have known many people who complained about memory problems and foggy consciousness and a sense of being in a fog and they often had a temperature, an oral temperature of 96, under 97 degrees and getting their brain temperature up towards 98 or 99 degrees Fahrenheit, their memory improves tremendously. I’ve noticed when I was in school if I neglected to study for a test, if I would take some vitamin B1 the night before and then read the book and take some just before the test. I mentioned that to a couple of other people and it has worked for everyone I know who has tried it, they always got perfect As on their test.
HD: Wow you’ve let your secret out (laughs). Okay - so let me just think okay, yeah, so I’d like to go back to sodium. I know that you have mentioned sodium itself and again, another controversial subject, but that’s what this show is all about I think, not so much controversy, but it’s actually the truth and it sounds so shocking that it seems to be controversial, but sodium in the form of regular table salt and I know that we have done lots of different shows or interjected shows with mentioning how good and positive and healthful and beneficial salt is for you, even though that that most of the advertising media wants to tell you how bad it is (just like sugar) but salt itself is very important in terms of retaining the magnesium that you are saying.
RP: Stress and aging tend to make it harder to retain the sodium. Hyponatremia is a big problem for sick, old people but occasionally it happens in hypothyroid younger people because the thyroid-making carbon dioxide is an important factor in retaining sodium so it doesn’t get lost in the urine and when your body is sensing too much loss of sodium, the adrenals produce aldosterone to save the sodium and aldosterone tells the kidneys to lose magnesium. And so if you take enough sodium to keep your adrenals from making aldosterone, your kidneys are going to save magnesium so in that situation eating extra salt is going to be equivalent to having more magnesium in your diet because you will lose it less quickly.
HD: I mean you’re an advocate of salting your foods and using salt in recipes.
RP: Yeah, salt, protein, progesterone and thyroid are the main things for keeping your brain temperature up and functioning well.
HD: Okay – well, unfortunately it is coming up for 3 minutes to 8 o’clock so, in order to let people know more about you, I’ll have to cut the show short there - but thank you so much for joining us again and sharing your wisdom with us.
RP: Okay, thank you.
HD: Thank you. Okay so for those people who have been listening, if you want to find out more about Dr Raymond Peat, you can visit his website and that website address is http://www.raypeat.com and there’s lots of articles there. He’s not selling anything. He’s just so into what he’s doing and that he's passionate enough about it to put it all on his website and it’s fully referenced so if you want to learn more about some of those things that you think are controversial that we’ve mentioned like salt is good for you or sugar is good for you, please take a look at his website and you will find out for those people that have any need to know the science behind it is the best place to go and for those people that are not so interested in the science but just want to understand it a little more, and it may seem a little heady, but it’s all fully referenced and his work is pioneering. I can’t say anything less than that and a lot of what he has said and espoused is certainly being taken up even by the mainstream and I know recently in these last 12 months at least polyunsaturated fats are now being looked at as the bad guys which is what he has always said and unsaturated liquid oils, the fish oils, it’s all the bad stuff and that salt and sugars are very beneficial for you and there are many different reasons why. Okay so - raypeat.com - and for those people who want to contact us Monday through Friday we can be reached at 188WBM HERBS so every third Friday of the month it’s Ask Your Herb Dr and June and we are in the middle of summer already -only a few weeks away from solstice -and so until June, we wish you all good night. Goodnight.
End.
