Ritchie
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- Nov 22, 2015
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No, not strictly... You seem to be implying that Peat advocates a high meat diet? I used to think that as well, but now i realise I was influenced by the biases I brought over to a Peat way of thinking from my Paleo days. I started out with Peat, consuming lots of meat and liver. However, I have been at this for 5 years now and done a lot of experimentation and reading of Peat in this time. If you have read Peat and conclude he advocates a high meat diet, perhaps you may want to revisit his writings. He speaks extensively of the dangers of iron (and tryptophan etc) of which liver and meat in general is extremely high.. And these dangers are weighted very heavily, probably on a par with PUFA:
Taken from Ray Peat's article, Iron's dangers. Found on his website.
Q: You believe iron is a deadly substance. Why?
Iron is a potentially toxic heavy metal. In excess, it can cause cancer, heart disease, and other illnesses.
Q: Could you tell us about some of these studies?
In the 1960s the World Health Organization found that when iron supplements were given to anemic people in Africa, there was a great increase in the death rate from infectious diseases, especially malaria. Around the same time, research began to show that the regulation of iron is a central function of the immune system, and that this seems to have evolved because iron is a basic requirement for the survival and growth of cells of all types, including bacteria, parasites, and cancer. The pioneer researcher in the role of iron in immunity believed that an excess of dietary iron contributed to the development of leukemia and lymphatic cancers. Just like lead, mercury, cadmium, nickel and other heavy metals, stored iron produces destructive free radicals. The harmful effects of iron-produced free radicals are practically indistinguishable from those caused by exposure to X-rays and gamma rays; both accelerate the accumulation of age-pigment and other signs of aging. Excess iron is a crucial element in the transformation of stress into tissue damage by free radicals.
For about 50 years, it has been known that blood transfusions damage immunity, and excess iron has been suspected to be one of the causes for this. People who regularly donate blood, on the other hand, have often been found to be healthier than non-donors, and healthier than they were before they began donating.
In one of Hans Selye's pioneering studies, he found that he could experimentally produce a form of scleroderma (hardening of the skin) in animals by administering large doses of iron, followed by a minor stress. He could prevent the development of the condition by giving the animals large doses of vitamin E, suggesting that the condition was produced by iron's oxidative actions.
Excess iron's role in infectious diseases is now well established, and many recent studies show that it is involved in degenerative brain diseases, such as Parkinson's, ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), Huntington's chorea, and Alzheimer's disease. Iron is now believed to have a role in skin aging, atherosclerosis, and cataracts of the lenses of the eyes, largely through its formation of the "age pigment."
Q: How does excess iron accelerate our aging process?
During aging, our tissues tend to store an excess of iron. There is a remarkably close association between the amount of iron stored in our tissues and the risk of death from cancer, heart disease, or from all causes. This relationship between iron and death rate exists even during childhood, but the curve is downward until the age of 12, and then it rises steadily until death. The shape of this curve, representing the iron burden, is amazingly similar to the curves representing the rate of death in general, and the rate of death from cancer. There is no other relationship in biology that I know of that has this peculiar shape, with its minimum at the age of 12, and its maximum in old age at the time of death.
One of the major lines of aging research, going back to the early part of this century, was based on the accumulation of a brown material in the tissues known as "age-pigment." The technical name for this material, "lipofuscin," means "fatty brown stuff." In the 1960s, the "free radical theory" of aging was introduced by Denham Harman, and this theory has converged with the age-pigment theory, since we now know that the age-pigment is an oxidized mass of unsaturated fat and iron, formed by uncontrolled free radicals. Until a few years ago, these ideas were accepted by only a few researchers, but now practically every doctor in the country accepts that free radicals are important in the aging process. A nutrition researcher in San Diego suspected that the life-extending effects of calorie restriction might be the result of a decreased intake of toxins. He removed the toxic heavy metals from foods, and found that the animals which ate a normal amount of food lived as long as the semi-starved animals. Recently, the iron content of food has been identified as the major life-shortening factor, rather than the calories. [Choi and Yu, Age vol. 17, page 93, 1994.]
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