Sheila
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Sugar Myths Part 2
KMUD - Ask Your Herb Doctor – (2011)
http://uploadingit.com/file/3t8ttqb4nlg ... ritalk.mp3
HD – Andrew Murray
HD2 - Sarah Johannesen Murray
RP – Ray Peat Ph.D
Engineer – sound engineer in studio.
Caller – various people calling in with their questions.
HD Intro and closing end remarks not transcribed, starts at RP entrance.
Transcribed by Sheila, Verified by Moss 4/1/2015
_____________________________________________________________________
HD: ….It's becoming increasingly obvious, over the last few years, that if you really want to get the point across you cannot just mention it once or twice, but that remind people of the same subject and bring out the science and the proof, if you like, of what it is that is counterculture, is a good way to refresh people's memories, that often what they hear and what they see, is not always the way it is, and actually there’s more to it than meets the eye and that it’s up to us individually to take responsibility for our own actions and our own decisions by seeing the broader picture and finding the information that is out there, freely available, if only we would look. I often end the end of the show with the phrase “to those who have ears, let them hear”. Well, for those of us who have eyes and ears, let us see and hear what there is out there.
Again, the program will be - what’s the word - “spiced up”, and I can't say that in any other way, that we are very pleased to have Dr Raymond Peat with us here again for this month's show, and to bring his wisdom and his research to bear upon the subjects, that which, don't always seem to be the way that we would have been told the way they are. But, like I said, you repeat the question or repeat the solution more than once, and time and time again, it suddenly begins to become more of a reality and especially when it's backed up with science to counter the supposed science that wants to tell us the other way is the way it is. So, Dr Peat, thank you so much for joining us again.
RP: Hi.
HD: First of all, I think as always, there are people here who just have never heard of us before. Maybe they haven't heard of you either but I am not too sure about that. Would you just like to describe your academic and research background for the benefit of any new listeners?
RP: OK. Following on what you were just talking about, my academic career went from linguistics to biology, and there was a continuity of a sort from studying grammar and the structure of language to thinking about strictly biological questions. In linguistics, I was concentrating on how culture interacts with the structure of language; I was seeing the evolution, over hundreds and hundreds of years, of understanding in the culture as being what shaped the way the grammar itself of language works. And, for various reasons, I switched over to biology by thinking to understand the brain better - the brain as the organ that carries culture and language - and so when I got into biology and went from brain work to reproductive physiology, I was still interested in those questions of how the context interacts with the structure. The focus on language made me see that there is an identity - between the surrounding culture and the physical structure of the language - and then going from the brain to other aspects of physiology, I saw that the environment is a part of the organism. So that accounts for my orientation in biology that is really concentrating on the interaction, moment-by-moment, between the animal and the environment.
HD: I think, before we get started onto a continuation of last month's subject, which were surrounding sugars and the debunking of the cholesterol/heart disease myth - this month's show is going to be a continuation of last month's show, Dr Peat, on the sugars and how beneficial they are - just to highlight the particular sugars that we are going to be looking at that are beneficial without doubt, and there's plenty of research to back it up, is fructose, as a fruit sugar. But before we get into that, I think it would be useful - if for no other reason than for me to understand – that you've spent twenty, twenty-five years or thirty years researching the areas of academic science that you were involved in doing your PhD, which is around hormones, and their interactions, how often do you find...
HD2: I think it's more like 40 years, sorry.....
RP: 40, yeah.
HD: Oh I’m sorry....
HD: That's a compliment Dr Peat. He thinks you're younger than you are.
(laughter)
HD: OK, how often do you find that the mainstream science conflicts with the evidence that you find?
RP: Oh, well, that was a constant, almost daily experience in my attending lectures. I was really surprised any time a professor said anything I thought really related meaningfully to the biological facts. There was a book that was used as a text in genetics, it was called “Classical Papers in Genetics” and reading through that, I couldn't find any case in which the facts were honestly presented. It was really a “Little Hen” book of ideology. My experience with the academic science people was that they are very heavy on ideology, very light on facts. I almost never saw a science professor in the science library and I spent many years, every day, reading in the library. I think I saw maybe four professors, two of them I saw more than once.
HD: (Laughter). Alright, well let's get into the meat of this month continuing program on sugars, and again just to reiterate the fact that – gosh, the lies -I think it was Adolf Hitler said, that if you have to make a lie colossal enough, and repeat it often enough for people to really believe it as true. So it's not just small lies, but sometimes colossal lies, that are put out there that are certainly things that we have to watch out for when we hear whatever we hear. So, let's go on to sugars. For the benefit of our listeners you have a, I think, bi-monthly newsletter, isn’t it, that you produce? (RP: Yeah). OK, and the last newsletter -actually we've just received it - it was on sugars. And I know that your father had diabetes and that was a personal experience from which you were interacting. There was a statement in your newsletter towards the last part of it, that the addition of fructose to glucose during infusion, intra-portal infusion, increased the net glucose uptake, even when the insulin secretion was compromised as in a diabetic.
RP: Yeah, they referred to that as a catalytic property of fructose. It doesn't just increase the metabolism and uptake of glucose, but it increases the whole metabolism of the animal. In several types of experiments, they've seen a 50 % increase in the whole metabolic rate and that's basically why I am so interested in the effects of fructose, because the research I did at university had to do with aging and oxidative metabolism, and the perversion of oxidative energy production with aging and with various toxins (hormones and unsaturated fats and so on) and the thyroid hormone is what basically distinguishes humans from fungus and bacteria and such; the higher development of the brain goes, the more oxidative energy production is needed. And the development of a baby's brain prenatally is very closely tied to the amount of glucose it metabolizes. You restrict the glucose to the baby, and the brain is smaller; you feed it extra glucose and the brain is bigger.
HD2: Sorry to interrupt you there Dr Peat but, for our listeners, just go over a little bit of sugar science here. Everybody's familiar with white sugar and that’s sucrose, which is half fructose, cause you’ve mentioned fructose now and also half glucose, and then all fruits contain approximately the same ratio of fructose and glucose as white sugar: that's half fructose, half glucose. And then other sources of carbohydrates like grains, beans, starches, any other carbohydrate-like food - bread, pasta, potatoes, root vegetables - they are almost all glucose, so they’re devoid of the fructose. That's easy to remember fructose because it sounds kind of like fruit.
RP: Yeah, and the only place fructose slows down glucose is in the absorption from the intestine. The fructose itself is slow to be absorbed compared to glucose, and so if you eat starch, like white rice or white bread, you get a very sharp increase in the amount of glucose in the blood. That will stimulate insulin to handle that rising glucose, and that stimulates cortisol to prevent the reverse reaction from too much insulin and not enough sustained glucose. But when you eat sugar, the glucose half is broken off, and the fructose lags a little bit in being absorbed.
HD2: And that's why it's a safer sugar for diabetics - fructose or white sugars or fruits.
RP: Yeah, and so the glucose from the fructose gets absorbed, and then the smaller amount of fructose coming in accelerates the absorption of the glucose by various tissues, not just the liver, but the brain, kidney, heart and everything. And so, it’s fulfilling some of insulin’s responsibility without having to call on the insulin. But it actually, under some circumstances, can inhibit the release of insulin, so that it prevents the spiking of insulin and takes care of insulin's work in the relative absence of insulin.
HD2: And so again, to explain for our listeners, a diabetic's problem is that they have high sugar, a lot of sugar in their blood and they need their cells to pick that up. And when the fructose is combined with the glucose, the fructose is actually helping the cells pick up the glucose as well as the fructose. Is that what you're explaining, Dr Peat?
RP: Yeah, it stimulates the cells to take up glucose, very much the way insulin does and, in fact, you can't distinguish the effects on some of the crucial enzymes that handle the absorption and use of glucose. Fructose and the pyruvic acid that it turns into stimulate the enzymes that oxidise pyruvic acid, just the same way insulin stimulates the same enzyme. So, really, one replaces the other perfectly.
HD2: And if a diabetic eats whole grains, or beans, or any other starchy types of foods - then they don't have the same ability to use that sugar, because it's mainly in the form of glucose, and so then they end up with elevated sugar numbers.
RP: And elevated insulin to handle that.
HD2: ….Or not if they're insulin dependent. But the funny thing I think, just to go back to this counter-culture, is diabetics are told avoid orange juice, avoid sugar, white sugar and eat whole grains - and that's exactly the opposite of what I've seen work in our clinic with diabetics. Because, when diabetics avoid the grains and the starches, even if they’re whole grains and beans and root vegetables, and they eat the honeys, the white sugars and the fruits - their sugar numbers become much more manageable.
RP: Yeah, it was in 1874, that someone first published a paper on the fact that fructose is metabolised by diabetics, whereas glucose isn't. And at the same time, people were applying the use of sucrose therapeutically for diabetics - but after the publication of the paper showing that diabetics can metabolise fructose, it was fairly common for people to recommend the use of fructose or sucrose for diabetics, rather than plain glucose.
HD2: I think the other thing too that happens with sugary foods is, you don't often find a food that just has white sugar or honey in it. It's usually a sugar, a honey WITH a carbohydrate, and that's where I think the diabetics get into problem with eating so called “sweet foods”.
RP: And, worse than that, the polyunsaturated fats are very often combined as shortening in the bakery products for example.
HD2: Right OK. So that brings us to our good example, and our bad example, of sugar and fat because then of course the sugar needs to be eaten with the fat, as well as a protein, which one of our listeners asked me specifically to talk about tonight.
RP: The enzyme I mentioned before, pyruvate dehydrogenase, which is activated by insulin or by fructose to handle the oxidation of glucose, that happens to be activated also by saturated fatty acids but it’s inhibited by polyunsaturated fatty acids. And the big, overall diet change in the US over the last 40 years has been, contrary to what a lot of people are saying, it’s been a slight decrease in sugar, a slight increase in starch consumption, and a big 7% increase in added fats to foods. And most of those fats are unsaturated because of the fear of saturated fats. So...
HD2: And the cheapness, now it's the cheapness, isn't it? The corn oil, safflower oil, all those unsaturated fats, canola, every liquid vegetable oil apart from olive oil basically [HD: grown on mass, hectares and hectares]
RP: Already in the 1960s, the polyunsaturated fats were recognised to be the diabetogenic factors; they interfere with the ability to oxidise glucose. It's more recently that they've seen that they specifically inhibit the enzyme, which is activated by fructose and insulin.
HD2: And don't they also destroy the pancreatic beta cells that produce the insulin?
RP: Yeah, every place you look, the polyunsaturated fats contribute to diabetes and obesity.
HD: That's a good point in question there, Dr Peat. What's your opinion on the possibility of regenerating islet cells in the pancreas?
RP: Sugar itself, sucrose, is known to stimulate regeneration of beta cells. That was in my newsletter about a year ago, describing the early treatment of diabetes with glucose, and then looking at the new in vitro studies in which sugar stimulates the regeneration, and polyunsaturated fats kill the beta cells. And sugar often gets the blame for many other things that the polyunsaturated fats do, such as the glycation of haemoglobin of which, they measure [HD2: HbA1c] but most of the glycation, so called, is really the oxidative breakdown of fragments of the polyunsaturated fats.
HD: So a person's HbA1c then, for example, could be lowered if they avoided all polyunsaturated oils.
RP: Yeah.
HD2: Because then they would be able to use their sugars better. So we came up with a really bad example of a way to eat sugar, and that's a doughnut fried in canola oil, or sunflower oil, or corn oil.
HD: Hold that thought a minute, cause I just want to let you know you're listening to KMUD - and you're invited to call in with any questions related or unrelated to this month’s part two subject on sugar - and Dr Peat is our guest speaker.
HD2: [continues] So, a really bad example would be a doughnut made from white flour with also lots of fat in the doughnut, I think doughnut mixtures also have fat so probably would be shortening, which would be a corn oil, a hydrogenated corn oil or something and then fried in a liquid vegetable oil [laughter] so that you not only have pure glucose, but then you have pure polyunsaturated fatty acids that are blocking your cells using any of that pure glucose. And a good example Dr Peat said was ice cream with fruit, fresh fruit. There's the saturated fat and the fructose [HD: a practical application].
HD: OK. Another question, for you Dr Peat. Also, there is another part in your article that caught my attention and it was surrounding fat peroxidation. So oxidation of fats involved in the degenerative disease process, despite the fructose increasing the production of uric acid - and you mentioned that uric acid is endogenous -that is, we manufacture it ourselves - anti-inflammatory.
RP: It's considered to be our main anti-oxidant and most of the inflammatory signals come from oxidative breakdown products, and so it's our basic anti-oxidant and a major anti-inflammatory factor.
HD: But the breakdown of these polyunsaturates, or the oxidation of those has a very strong, inflammatory effect is that?....
RP: Yeah, but the fish oil type breaks down much faster than the seed oil and by the time it gets from your food into your blood stream, there is so much free radical activity, that it poisons some of your enzymes involved in immunity and it's the anti-immune suppressive effect that people see as an anti-inflammatory effect of the fish oil type of fats. The seed oil fats don't even have that temporary, toxic, apparent benefit. They're flat out inflammatory.
HD: And then, the last point that caught my attention, was that, and this is a specific piece of experimentation that conclusively showed this effect and that was, that people that were given a 300 calorie drink containing either glucose or fructose or OJ, (orange juice) separately, so 300 calories containing glucose, or fructose or orange juice - those that received the glucose, had a large increase in the oxidative inflammatory stress producing reactive oxygen species and a nuclear factor kappa beta (NF-kB) but, it was absent in those receiving the 300 calorie drink containing just fructose or with just OJ.
RP: Yeah, that has lots of ramifications including the immune system, which they were looking at some white blood cells. But Bone cells are very responsive to the difference in carbohydrate. And about 35 years ago, someone fed different groups of rats either a high starch diet or a high sugar diet, I think it was sucrose in that case, and gave 2 of the groups a Vitamin D-deficient diet and another group got the Vitamin D and a standard food ration. And after they had been on that diet for a while and they tested the strength of their bones, and the Vitamin D deficient diet that got starch had rickets-type bones, early calcified, weak and basically defective, as you would expect from a Vitamin D deficiency - but those on the high sucrose diet without Vitamin D had strong, well-calcified bones surprisingly. It apparently was the increased CO2 production, from the catalysed higher metabolic rate, and the carbon dioxide is largely responsible for proper calcification of bone.
HD: Does a higher CO2 content actually allow extracellular calcium to move into bone stores?
RP: Yeah, the first bone material laid down is calcium carbonate, even though later it turns to a phosphate compound. In vitro experiments showed, that you can have an acidic condition as long as it's based on CO2 as the acid and have strong bones and the same amount of lactic acid pH, will cause interruption and dissolution of the bones. So it’s the fact that starch tends to produce a shift towards lactic acid rather than CO2.
HD: And this is why you say oxidative exercise like aerobics or jogging is bad for you because the stress that that causes is counter-productive to calcium being laid down?
RP: Yeah, exercise coaches, it's taken about 40 years for science to get to the trainers, but the East Europeans were the first ones to limit the training their athletes did and they won a lot of Olympic medals by under-training.
HD: Because the whole aerobic exercise puts too much stress on the body?
RP: Yeah, the testosterone goes down and the cortisol goes up and you lose tissue and speed and co-ordination.
HD2: So did they do some different type of other exercise for their athletes?
RP: Yeah, cutting the exercise short before the lactic acid rises is enough to poison the right hormones.
HD2: Which, I mean, isn't that long in aerobic exercise is it, it’s like a couple of minutes?
RP: Yeah, a minute or two is enough.
HD2: A minute or two at a high heart rate, then followed by a break to let the heart rate go back down, I mean is that?
RP: Yeah, and to get the lactic acid under control because it turns on the stress hormones that destroy your muscles and nerves and bones.
HD: The other downside of the aerobic exercises that you constantly bring up is that you deplete your own CO2 stores.
RP: Yeah.
HD: By taking too much oxygen. Which is another point: that oxygen is not always the good guy. I know we need it to live, to breathe etc, but it's not the thing we need to be striving for. I think most people that we see, and we look at labs, that most people's CO2 is fairly low.
RP: The typical, well-trained long distance runner has been found to have basically defective lung function, because the chronic elevation of the lactic acid causes a thickening of the air sacs, making the path of oxygen diffusion longer and so it poorly oxygenates the blood.
HD: Is it a type of fibrosis from inflammation or is it a different mechanism?
RP: No, just, I think, water-logging. Lactic acid does lead first to water-logging, inflammation and eventually the fibrosis.
HD: You're listening to KMUD....To carry on with sugars then. I think what we probably should probably bring out again is the brown sugar movement, the hip and trendy, replacement, [for] what was maligned early on was white sugar by many people. So it was a hip thing to produce brown sugar, raw sugar, molasses, etc. etc., and it was a health food replacement making a better replacement for the white sugar that we always had before. Say a little bit about brown sugar because brown sugar itself is not particularly good, is it?
RP: In an extreme situation of poverty, the crude brown foods: brown bread, brown rice, brown sugar, molasses, those are definitely important sources of nutrients - but when people start eating more fat and protein, they can stand to lose the nutrients in those and they're gaining some freedom from toxins and inflammation when they reduce those brown substances. In molasses, for example, it turns brown partly because the sugars are being caramelised, the minerals combined with heat and oxygen for dehydrating the juices, the minerals catalyse the oxidation and you get reactions combining sugar molecules and changing them and these become, to various degrees, toxic or pro-inflammatory, allergenic...
HD: And even potentially carcinogenic, that’s correct huh?
RP: Yeah.
HD2: I mean we've all heard about the carcinogenic effect of a burnt piece of toast or eating too many french fries that are really browned, and it's the same as with brown sugar. It's the caramelisation of the sugar that causes the allergenic and carcinogenic effect.
HD: OK, we've got our first caller on the air. So let's take our first caller.
Caller: Hi, I heard you talking about sugar, my son's 34 now and he drives me nuts about his sugar intake. Because I think sugar is really bad for you and when we go out like to have breakfast or something, he will pour the sugar holder into his coffee. And I said, “You know, don’t you know, it causes diabetes or affects diabetes, your teeth, your...”, and he's had kidney stones. But whatever I say isn't going to hit him and he, you know just keeps using sugar, so I don't understand, because I didn't raise him particularly on a sugar-heavy diet, I believed in natural foods and everything. And so is there any information or where I can get some, that you know, would influence him about the bad things about sugar?
RP: There's a natural tendency of people who have some hormone imbalance, especially hypothyroidism, which makes your liver unable to store glycogen effectively, it causes a natural craving for sugar.
HD: Glycogen, just so you know, is a storage form of sugar.
Caller: Aha?
HD: You take in dietary sugars and then that gets converted into glycogen, as to where the body stores it up for later on.
Caller: Aha.
RP: I was always extremely craving sugar, [HD: So was I!] and generally eating a lot until I took thyroid. I was probably about 40 years old when I first took thyroid and I suddenly had no more sugar cravings, I could go 8 hours without getting terribly hungry or shaky or thinking about sweet things.
Caller: Well, that's good to know. I'll just have to tell him he's got to ask his Dr, he says he's been tested for diabetes and he doesn't have it but you know, it's unhealthy what he's doing, pouring sugar into coffee and I don't know if that's to irritate me or you know, I don't know, but he doesn't care, and he thinks it's cool. And then still he's had kidney stones, aren't those influenced by sugar?
RP: Um, no I don't think so, only in the negative sense. When you aren't eating enough minerals and for example if you let the sugars displace sources of calcium and magnesium and protein, then you do tend to form stones. The parathyroid hormone and other inflammatory things tend to create mineralisation of soft tissues and formation of stones in the kidneys, bladder and gallbladder.
Caller: So what would be the test that would give him the information he needs?
RP: Well, a vitamin D serum test, for Vitamin D3, is one relevant thing.
Caller: Oh, I've had that and mine came out all normal and everything. So, I don't know, but anyway that's good information and I will pass it on to my son...
HD2: And the fact that he's adding that white sugar to his coffee is probably protective because coffee lowers your blood sugar and if you have just pure black coffee you actually end up lowering your blood sugar and if he's someone who's craving a lot of sugars, that's probably why he's – just like figured it out – that if he has coffee he'd better have sugar with it because it makes him feel better...
Caller: Yeah, I take my coffee black, so I don't know...it's really weird to me....
HD2: And it's going to be easier for his body to use white sugar than it will be a pile of pancakes. But as he probably just craves all types of sugar whether they come from starches or sugar.
HD: Is he quite lean?
Caller: No, and he works really, really hard. But he's stocky; he likes ice cream and stuff. But it’s mainly when I see him dump like a sugar shaker into coffee. We could be in an organic restaurant or whatever and eating healthy food and he's still got to have a sugar fix.
HD2: Well his body is obviously telling him something. He could get his thyroid checked and his vitamin D checked as a good place to start.
Caller: Thank you so much for your help. I really appreciate it, goodbye.
HD: OK, so there’s another caller on the line. Let’s take this one. You’re on the air.
Caller: Hello? Hi guys, this is Tasha, hello. Well firstly, I want to really tell you how much I appreciate you guys bringing this information to the airways. I want to encourage listeners to listen with an open heart and kind of put everything you've heard all your life in the background and just take in the information as it comes because this isn’t readily available information. To get back to that previous caller, you know, about the whole sugar with the coffee and whatnot, maybe you could expand a little bit more on the whole key of balance and how when you do consume sugar, and how it is important to have it with the proper amount of fat and protein to slow down the release of the sugar and vice versa; if you're going to have protein, you need the sugar to help the body to be able to utilise or be able to utilise and break down the protein. You know what I'm saying! [HD2: Exactly] So, anyway, I just wanted to encourage you guys to clarify that even more so that people really as they do tune in, even if they tune in into the middle of the show they hear all these great things about sugar, but to go back to the balance. And also I think it's great how you were explaining to add sugar in to the coffee to help boost up your blood sugar and all of that, anyway, I just want to thank you guys lots.
HD2: Thank you for your call Tasha. Dr Peat, can you explain why it's so important, when you have a protein, to have it with fruit or honey or sugar because of the blood sugar lowering effect of the protein.
RP: The amino acids in the protein themselves are strong stimulants of the insulin secretion and when you don't take in sugar, the insulin to dispose of the protein will lower your blood sugar and to prevent the blood sugar going down you tend to produce either adrenalin or cortisol or both. And if your liver didn't have the glycogen stored to release glucose under the influence of adrenalin, then you depend on cortisol to keep your blood sugar steady and cortisol activates the conversion of protein to sugar and fat and so you've destroyed a big part of the protein that you've just eaten. I've seen people who were eating a couple of pounds of meat a day who were having signs of protein deficiency and getting fat. So to handle the protein efficiently you need the glucose to make sure that your insulin isn't lowering your blood sugar, you need either glucose or fructose to steady your blood sugar.
And the fat does several things. The saturated fat works with fructose and insulin to handle your oxidation of the glucose and the fat also slows the absorption so that you don't get a surge of glucose in your blood when you, say, have coffee with sugar. And the coffee, like the glucose, stimulates your metabolic rate and both of those, by increasing your metabolic rate, are going to increase your general nutritional requirements: minerals and all of the vitamins have to be adequate and if you don’t substitute the sugar for things like fruit, milk, cheese, shellfish, eggs and so on, then you will very likely become deficient in biotin and Vitamin B6 and pantothenic acid, selenium and copper are things that are among the first to become deficient if you try to run on too much coffee and sugar and not enough food.
HD: So yeah, as much as the fructose helps people’s cells pick up the sugar and there's all these anti-inflammatory effects from eating fructose, or fruit, or honey or sugar, everything has to be kept in a balance is, what I guess you're trying to say here, Dr Peat, with the correct nutritional balance of proteins and good saturated fats, coconut oil and butter, otherwise you will suffer a deficiency from either too much protein or too many sugars.
RP: Yes.
HD: OK just so people can get a list of some of the top fructose sources that also don't just have fructose but have fructose and glucose but they're things that you expect like dates, dates are 32% fructose, they contain B vitamins, potassium, calcium and iron – I know Dr Peat you're not too big on iron because iron is particularly inflammatory ion...
HD2: But when it's with the other minerals it does help protect you from over-loading on iron.
HD: But we're not taking about over-iron consumption. And then raisins, in the same kind of group as dates, 30% fructose, antioxidant rich and then agave – now what do you think about agave, as agave nectar has been touted as a very good replacement, and it actually contains about 43% fructose as well as the fructans, the polymers of fructose, and they're also found in asparagus and artichokes.
RP: Yeah, the fact that they mention the fructans, I think, probably means that it's being produced enzymatically from the core of the agave plant rather than from the juice...
HD: That's a waste product if you like, [RP: Yeah] of tequila production, they're using spent raw material.
HD2: And so Dr Peat, can you give us some examples of good food combining examples for protein, fats and a good sugar.
RP: Oh, fruit and cheese would be a basic thing for snacks as well as meals.
HD: Grapes and cheese, sounds good. Actually we have another caller on the air, so let's take this other caller. You're on the air.
Caller: Hi yeah, great show, and first I wanted to mention Dr Peat, whatever you did when that woman said she couldn't hear you, I haven't heard you better on this show than whatever you did with that, so keep doing it. I know Michael McCaskill [sound engineer] does everything he can to keep everyone's levels good, but I have a little trouble hearing to start with and sometimes it is hard to hear your wisdom and I really appreciate what you bring to the air. You know, it's come up in recent
news reports that it seems like, under constant attack are the natural substances on the earth, what with our awesome foods being attacked by the ‘fooderales’, and the Federal forces going in and dumping this raw milk and what's going on recently with medicinal marijuana here, after Obama told us it was going to be left alone if it was legal in the states where it was legal, and I understand Phoenix and states all along the west, in Colorado, and of course right here in our own backyard, have been attacked. And it always amazes me that people who put out chemical concoctions cooked up in a lab somewhere and call it Vioxx - and say it’s safe and can kill a bunch of people before it's taken off the market but nobody goes to jail - versus the people who are taken to jail because their food is inherently dangerous when it's natural. I don't get it, but you guys are on the front lines and I really, really appreciate you bringing it back to Mother Nature and bringing it home because this is provided for us and you are all explaining what it does as it’s been provided for us. So thank you.
And I wanted to ask specifically about dextrose. Dextrose from what I gather in my research is basically that spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down because I don't think dextrose mixed in with much of anything else much but medicine. And I'm curious as to the function and purpose of dextrose, what it's really all about. And also since Steve Jobs recently passed and pancreatic cancer was related to that, I understand he used to stay up for days at a time working on his inventions - a lot of coffee but he also ate a lot of health food - and maybe you could address the aspects again, cause I was having a little difficulty hearing this. What can help regenerate those pancreatic cells and what can adversely affect them as far as the benefits of coffee and keeping that in balance? So dextrose and pancreas, that's the basic question and thanks again for all that every one of you do, thank you.
HD2: Thank you for your call.
HD: What do you think of dextrose, Dr Peat?
RP: Well glucose, it's just the other word for glucose, and starch turns into that and it is great stuff in itself when it's in the right balance with other things including a little bit of fructose always, and saturated fat and minerals and vitamins. The dextrose or glucose itself is a factor in helping the pancreas to regenerate; it's the polyunsaturated fats, which misdirect the metabolism of glucose and fructose. And the polyunsaturated fats that are creating the epidemic of diabetes and obesity and later all of the degenerative diseases, cancer and Alzheimer's and so on.
Engineer: I have a question. Do they call it dextrose when it's being used industrially as a food or how do they call it dextrose instead of glucose?
RP: It has to do with the optical rotation of it. It's just a different chemical history of the way they name the molecules. Say Fructose was called levulose because it turns the light to the left.
HD2: OK, so basically dextrose just gets broken down into glucose.
HD/RP: It IS glucose.
HD2: OK. So there's another caller on the air, so let's take this next caller.
Caller: Hello is that me? Hi, I would like to ask the Dr, OK, I stopped eating meat, beef basically but I eat a little of lamb. I ate a little pork and I eat a lot of fish. I stopped drinking coffee, I stopped using mostly butter and I stopped using milk altogether and I'm curious about what is – because I have like this lower back condition – but I don't have the arthritis any more that I had, basically from beef, I think they call it uric acid. But I have a lower back condition and kind of a hip condition and I was curious and you know I take Vitamin D3 and I take soluble B12 which is good, but I'm kinda curious about what would be good. Cause you know I don't use sugar at all, I mean if I use anything I use a little bit of honey, anyway and I am going to go off....
HD: Wait can you stay on because Dr Peat may have some questions for you.
Caller: OK, but I can’t hear. Can you turn him up a little bit?
HD2: Ok, Dr Peat, can you try to talk especially loud for this next caller here?
RP: I'll see. Honey has all of the virtues of ordinary sucrose [HD2: white sugar] and it has some special benefits such as anti-septic materials that the bees collect from the flowers, but basically....
Caller: I also understand that there were some old Chinese Princesses that were preserved in honey that are still like OK and the honey is still edible!
RP: Ordinary white sugar has many of those same properties. They've done major surgery, like chest surgery where they didn't have antibiotics and they've just filled the hole with white, crystalline sugar and the person recovered and had fewer scars than would have happened if they'd used antibiotics...
Caller: Really? That's fascinating.
RP: Yeah, I've got some of the references in my diabetes and sugar newsletter.
Caller: Did you hear my questions?
RP: Yeah, I think you probably had a slight weakness of thyroid function. Meat eaters, often get, if they eat too much meat in relation to their thyroid function they'll often get symptoms including arthritis....
Caller: Oh.
RP: And the low back symptoms are very common in thyroid problems. So you want to check your temperature and pulse rate and maybe have your thyroid function checked but sometimes just a daily raw carrot, will help make up for the thyroid deficiency by reducing the bacterial toxins that poison your liver and interfere with thyroid function.
Caller: OK and what about kidney?
RP: Same thing. The endotoxin absorbed from poorly-digested plant material is the main thing. The endotoxin interferes with glucose or sugar oxidation and prevents the activation of the thyroid hormone and then that leads to all of the inflammatory things and especially cartilage, the discs between vertebrae tend to swell or become soft when you're thyroid deficient and having endotoxin.
Caller: What I was saying was that I stopped taking any basic dairy, I do do a little butter and a little bit of yoghurt, but I don't do any milk, I don't do any beef...
RP: What about eggs?
Caller: No, I eat eggs maybe twice a week.
RP: You want to try to get at least 80g of good protein every day.
Caller: Oh yeah, no, no I understand the protein, I eat lamb and a lot of fish and stuff but I stopped doing milk, coffee, sugar you know, white sugar and beef basically.
RP: What about fruit like orange juice?
Caller: I'm not into orange juice, I mean I can use it, but it tends to make me rather phlegmy in my throat...
RP: Well what about dates, and grapes, raisins.
Caller: I love ALL that stuff. And I eat them a lot.
RP: Calcium would be the main thing to concentrate on if you're eating enough fish and lamb and eggs, you should maybe try powdering eggshells...
HD: You know what, I'm sorry, to have to break here we've only got two minutes left, we need to wrap up the show. We need to thank Dr Peat for his generous time and his wisdom. Thank you Dr Peat so much for joining us.
RP: OK.
www.raypeat.com for more information.
KMUD - Ask Your Herb Doctor – (2011)
http://uploadingit.com/file/3t8ttqb4nlg ... ritalk.mp3
HD – Andrew Murray
HD2 - Sarah Johannesen Murray
RP – Ray Peat Ph.D
Engineer – sound engineer in studio.
Caller – various people calling in with their questions.
HD Intro and closing end remarks not transcribed, starts at RP entrance.
Transcribed by Sheila, Verified by Moss 4/1/2015
_____________________________________________________________________
HD: ….It's becoming increasingly obvious, over the last few years, that if you really want to get the point across you cannot just mention it once or twice, but that remind people of the same subject and bring out the science and the proof, if you like, of what it is that is counterculture, is a good way to refresh people's memories, that often what they hear and what they see, is not always the way it is, and actually there’s more to it than meets the eye and that it’s up to us individually to take responsibility for our own actions and our own decisions by seeing the broader picture and finding the information that is out there, freely available, if only we would look. I often end the end of the show with the phrase “to those who have ears, let them hear”. Well, for those of us who have eyes and ears, let us see and hear what there is out there.
Again, the program will be - what’s the word - “spiced up”, and I can't say that in any other way, that we are very pleased to have Dr Raymond Peat with us here again for this month's show, and to bring his wisdom and his research to bear upon the subjects, that which, don't always seem to be the way that we would have been told the way they are. But, like I said, you repeat the question or repeat the solution more than once, and time and time again, it suddenly begins to become more of a reality and especially when it's backed up with science to counter the supposed science that wants to tell us the other way is the way it is. So, Dr Peat, thank you so much for joining us again.
RP: Hi.
HD: First of all, I think as always, there are people here who just have never heard of us before. Maybe they haven't heard of you either but I am not too sure about that. Would you just like to describe your academic and research background for the benefit of any new listeners?
RP: OK. Following on what you were just talking about, my academic career went from linguistics to biology, and there was a continuity of a sort from studying grammar and the structure of language to thinking about strictly biological questions. In linguistics, I was concentrating on how culture interacts with the structure of language; I was seeing the evolution, over hundreds and hundreds of years, of understanding in the culture as being what shaped the way the grammar itself of language works. And, for various reasons, I switched over to biology by thinking to understand the brain better - the brain as the organ that carries culture and language - and so when I got into biology and went from brain work to reproductive physiology, I was still interested in those questions of how the context interacts with the structure. The focus on language made me see that there is an identity - between the surrounding culture and the physical structure of the language - and then going from the brain to other aspects of physiology, I saw that the environment is a part of the organism. So that accounts for my orientation in biology that is really concentrating on the interaction, moment-by-moment, between the animal and the environment.
HD: I think, before we get started onto a continuation of last month's subject, which were surrounding sugars and the debunking of the cholesterol/heart disease myth - this month's show is going to be a continuation of last month's show, Dr Peat, on the sugars and how beneficial they are - just to highlight the particular sugars that we are going to be looking at that are beneficial without doubt, and there's plenty of research to back it up, is fructose, as a fruit sugar. But before we get into that, I think it would be useful - if for no other reason than for me to understand – that you've spent twenty, twenty-five years or thirty years researching the areas of academic science that you were involved in doing your PhD, which is around hormones, and their interactions, how often do you find...
HD2: I think it's more like 40 years, sorry.....
RP: 40, yeah.
HD: Oh I’m sorry....
HD: That's a compliment Dr Peat. He thinks you're younger than you are.
(laughter)
HD: OK, how often do you find that the mainstream science conflicts with the evidence that you find?
RP: Oh, well, that was a constant, almost daily experience in my attending lectures. I was really surprised any time a professor said anything I thought really related meaningfully to the biological facts. There was a book that was used as a text in genetics, it was called “Classical Papers in Genetics” and reading through that, I couldn't find any case in which the facts were honestly presented. It was really a “Little Hen” book of ideology. My experience with the academic science people was that they are very heavy on ideology, very light on facts. I almost never saw a science professor in the science library and I spent many years, every day, reading in the library. I think I saw maybe four professors, two of them I saw more than once.
HD: (Laughter). Alright, well let's get into the meat of this month continuing program on sugars, and again just to reiterate the fact that – gosh, the lies -I think it was Adolf Hitler said, that if you have to make a lie colossal enough, and repeat it often enough for people to really believe it as true. So it's not just small lies, but sometimes colossal lies, that are put out there that are certainly things that we have to watch out for when we hear whatever we hear. So, let's go on to sugars. For the benefit of our listeners you have a, I think, bi-monthly newsletter, isn’t it, that you produce? (RP: Yeah). OK, and the last newsletter -actually we've just received it - it was on sugars. And I know that your father had diabetes and that was a personal experience from which you were interacting. There was a statement in your newsletter towards the last part of it, that the addition of fructose to glucose during infusion, intra-portal infusion, increased the net glucose uptake, even when the insulin secretion was compromised as in a diabetic.
RP: Yeah, they referred to that as a catalytic property of fructose. It doesn't just increase the metabolism and uptake of glucose, but it increases the whole metabolism of the animal. In several types of experiments, they've seen a 50 % increase in the whole metabolic rate and that's basically why I am so interested in the effects of fructose, because the research I did at university had to do with aging and oxidative metabolism, and the perversion of oxidative energy production with aging and with various toxins (hormones and unsaturated fats and so on) and the thyroid hormone is what basically distinguishes humans from fungus and bacteria and such; the higher development of the brain goes, the more oxidative energy production is needed. And the development of a baby's brain prenatally is very closely tied to the amount of glucose it metabolizes. You restrict the glucose to the baby, and the brain is smaller; you feed it extra glucose and the brain is bigger.
HD2: Sorry to interrupt you there Dr Peat but, for our listeners, just go over a little bit of sugar science here. Everybody's familiar with white sugar and that’s sucrose, which is half fructose, cause you’ve mentioned fructose now and also half glucose, and then all fruits contain approximately the same ratio of fructose and glucose as white sugar: that's half fructose, half glucose. And then other sources of carbohydrates like grains, beans, starches, any other carbohydrate-like food - bread, pasta, potatoes, root vegetables - they are almost all glucose, so they’re devoid of the fructose. That's easy to remember fructose because it sounds kind of like fruit.
RP: Yeah, and the only place fructose slows down glucose is in the absorption from the intestine. The fructose itself is slow to be absorbed compared to glucose, and so if you eat starch, like white rice or white bread, you get a very sharp increase in the amount of glucose in the blood. That will stimulate insulin to handle that rising glucose, and that stimulates cortisol to prevent the reverse reaction from too much insulin and not enough sustained glucose. But when you eat sugar, the glucose half is broken off, and the fructose lags a little bit in being absorbed.
HD2: And that's why it's a safer sugar for diabetics - fructose or white sugars or fruits.
RP: Yeah, and so the glucose from the fructose gets absorbed, and then the smaller amount of fructose coming in accelerates the absorption of the glucose by various tissues, not just the liver, but the brain, kidney, heart and everything. And so, it’s fulfilling some of insulin’s responsibility without having to call on the insulin. But it actually, under some circumstances, can inhibit the release of insulin, so that it prevents the spiking of insulin and takes care of insulin's work in the relative absence of insulin.
HD2: And so again, to explain for our listeners, a diabetic's problem is that they have high sugar, a lot of sugar in their blood and they need their cells to pick that up. And when the fructose is combined with the glucose, the fructose is actually helping the cells pick up the glucose as well as the fructose. Is that what you're explaining, Dr Peat?
RP: Yeah, it stimulates the cells to take up glucose, very much the way insulin does and, in fact, you can't distinguish the effects on some of the crucial enzymes that handle the absorption and use of glucose. Fructose and the pyruvic acid that it turns into stimulate the enzymes that oxidise pyruvic acid, just the same way insulin stimulates the same enzyme. So, really, one replaces the other perfectly.
HD2: And if a diabetic eats whole grains, or beans, or any other starchy types of foods - then they don't have the same ability to use that sugar, because it's mainly in the form of glucose, and so then they end up with elevated sugar numbers.
RP: And elevated insulin to handle that.
HD2: ….Or not if they're insulin dependent. But the funny thing I think, just to go back to this counter-culture, is diabetics are told avoid orange juice, avoid sugar, white sugar and eat whole grains - and that's exactly the opposite of what I've seen work in our clinic with diabetics. Because, when diabetics avoid the grains and the starches, even if they’re whole grains and beans and root vegetables, and they eat the honeys, the white sugars and the fruits - their sugar numbers become much more manageable.
RP: Yeah, it was in 1874, that someone first published a paper on the fact that fructose is metabolised by diabetics, whereas glucose isn't. And at the same time, people were applying the use of sucrose therapeutically for diabetics - but after the publication of the paper showing that diabetics can metabolise fructose, it was fairly common for people to recommend the use of fructose or sucrose for diabetics, rather than plain glucose.
HD2: I think the other thing too that happens with sugary foods is, you don't often find a food that just has white sugar or honey in it. It's usually a sugar, a honey WITH a carbohydrate, and that's where I think the diabetics get into problem with eating so called “sweet foods”.
RP: And, worse than that, the polyunsaturated fats are very often combined as shortening in the bakery products for example.
HD2: Right OK. So that brings us to our good example, and our bad example, of sugar and fat because then of course the sugar needs to be eaten with the fat, as well as a protein, which one of our listeners asked me specifically to talk about tonight.
RP: The enzyme I mentioned before, pyruvate dehydrogenase, which is activated by insulin or by fructose to handle the oxidation of glucose, that happens to be activated also by saturated fatty acids but it’s inhibited by polyunsaturated fatty acids. And the big, overall diet change in the US over the last 40 years has been, contrary to what a lot of people are saying, it’s been a slight decrease in sugar, a slight increase in starch consumption, and a big 7% increase in added fats to foods. And most of those fats are unsaturated because of the fear of saturated fats. So...
HD2: And the cheapness, now it's the cheapness, isn't it? The corn oil, safflower oil, all those unsaturated fats, canola, every liquid vegetable oil apart from olive oil basically [HD: grown on mass, hectares and hectares]
RP: Already in the 1960s, the polyunsaturated fats were recognised to be the diabetogenic factors; they interfere with the ability to oxidise glucose. It's more recently that they've seen that they specifically inhibit the enzyme, which is activated by fructose and insulin.
HD2: And don't they also destroy the pancreatic beta cells that produce the insulin?
RP: Yeah, every place you look, the polyunsaturated fats contribute to diabetes and obesity.
HD: That's a good point in question there, Dr Peat. What's your opinion on the possibility of regenerating islet cells in the pancreas?
RP: Sugar itself, sucrose, is known to stimulate regeneration of beta cells. That was in my newsletter about a year ago, describing the early treatment of diabetes with glucose, and then looking at the new in vitro studies in which sugar stimulates the regeneration, and polyunsaturated fats kill the beta cells. And sugar often gets the blame for many other things that the polyunsaturated fats do, such as the glycation of haemoglobin of which, they measure [HD2: HbA1c] but most of the glycation, so called, is really the oxidative breakdown of fragments of the polyunsaturated fats.
HD: So a person's HbA1c then, for example, could be lowered if they avoided all polyunsaturated oils.
RP: Yeah.
HD2: Because then they would be able to use their sugars better. So we came up with a really bad example of a way to eat sugar, and that's a doughnut fried in canola oil, or sunflower oil, or corn oil.
HD: Hold that thought a minute, cause I just want to let you know you're listening to KMUD - and you're invited to call in with any questions related or unrelated to this month’s part two subject on sugar - and Dr Peat is our guest speaker.
HD2: [continues] So, a really bad example would be a doughnut made from white flour with also lots of fat in the doughnut, I think doughnut mixtures also have fat so probably would be shortening, which would be a corn oil, a hydrogenated corn oil or something and then fried in a liquid vegetable oil [laughter] so that you not only have pure glucose, but then you have pure polyunsaturated fatty acids that are blocking your cells using any of that pure glucose. And a good example Dr Peat said was ice cream with fruit, fresh fruit. There's the saturated fat and the fructose [HD: a practical application].
HD: OK. Another question, for you Dr Peat. Also, there is another part in your article that caught my attention and it was surrounding fat peroxidation. So oxidation of fats involved in the degenerative disease process, despite the fructose increasing the production of uric acid - and you mentioned that uric acid is endogenous -that is, we manufacture it ourselves - anti-inflammatory.
RP: It's considered to be our main anti-oxidant and most of the inflammatory signals come from oxidative breakdown products, and so it's our basic anti-oxidant and a major anti-inflammatory factor.
HD: But the breakdown of these polyunsaturates, or the oxidation of those has a very strong, inflammatory effect is that?....
RP: Yeah, but the fish oil type breaks down much faster than the seed oil and by the time it gets from your food into your blood stream, there is so much free radical activity, that it poisons some of your enzymes involved in immunity and it's the anti-immune suppressive effect that people see as an anti-inflammatory effect of the fish oil type of fats. The seed oil fats don't even have that temporary, toxic, apparent benefit. They're flat out inflammatory.
HD: And then, the last point that caught my attention, was that, and this is a specific piece of experimentation that conclusively showed this effect and that was, that people that were given a 300 calorie drink containing either glucose or fructose or OJ, (orange juice) separately, so 300 calories containing glucose, or fructose or orange juice - those that received the glucose, had a large increase in the oxidative inflammatory stress producing reactive oxygen species and a nuclear factor kappa beta (NF-kB) but, it was absent in those receiving the 300 calorie drink containing just fructose or with just OJ.
RP: Yeah, that has lots of ramifications including the immune system, which they were looking at some white blood cells. But Bone cells are very responsive to the difference in carbohydrate. And about 35 years ago, someone fed different groups of rats either a high starch diet or a high sugar diet, I think it was sucrose in that case, and gave 2 of the groups a Vitamin D-deficient diet and another group got the Vitamin D and a standard food ration. And after they had been on that diet for a while and they tested the strength of their bones, and the Vitamin D deficient diet that got starch had rickets-type bones, early calcified, weak and basically defective, as you would expect from a Vitamin D deficiency - but those on the high sucrose diet without Vitamin D had strong, well-calcified bones surprisingly. It apparently was the increased CO2 production, from the catalysed higher metabolic rate, and the carbon dioxide is largely responsible for proper calcification of bone.
HD: Does a higher CO2 content actually allow extracellular calcium to move into bone stores?
RP: Yeah, the first bone material laid down is calcium carbonate, even though later it turns to a phosphate compound. In vitro experiments showed, that you can have an acidic condition as long as it's based on CO2 as the acid and have strong bones and the same amount of lactic acid pH, will cause interruption and dissolution of the bones. So it’s the fact that starch tends to produce a shift towards lactic acid rather than CO2.
HD: And this is why you say oxidative exercise like aerobics or jogging is bad for you because the stress that that causes is counter-productive to calcium being laid down?
RP: Yeah, exercise coaches, it's taken about 40 years for science to get to the trainers, but the East Europeans were the first ones to limit the training their athletes did and they won a lot of Olympic medals by under-training.
HD: Because the whole aerobic exercise puts too much stress on the body?
RP: Yeah, the testosterone goes down and the cortisol goes up and you lose tissue and speed and co-ordination.
HD2: So did they do some different type of other exercise for their athletes?
RP: Yeah, cutting the exercise short before the lactic acid rises is enough to poison the right hormones.
HD2: Which, I mean, isn't that long in aerobic exercise is it, it’s like a couple of minutes?
RP: Yeah, a minute or two is enough.
HD2: A minute or two at a high heart rate, then followed by a break to let the heart rate go back down, I mean is that?
RP: Yeah, and to get the lactic acid under control because it turns on the stress hormones that destroy your muscles and nerves and bones.
HD: The other downside of the aerobic exercises that you constantly bring up is that you deplete your own CO2 stores.
RP: Yeah.
HD: By taking too much oxygen. Which is another point: that oxygen is not always the good guy. I know we need it to live, to breathe etc, but it's not the thing we need to be striving for. I think most people that we see, and we look at labs, that most people's CO2 is fairly low.
RP: The typical, well-trained long distance runner has been found to have basically defective lung function, because the chronic elevation of the lactic acid causes a thickening of the air sacs, making the path of oxygen diffusion longer and so it poorly oxygenates the blood.
HD: Is it a type of fibrosis from inflammation or is it a different mechanism?
RP: No, just, I think, water-logging. Lactic acid does lead first to water-logging, inflammation and eventually the fibrosis.
HD: You're listening to KMUD....To carry on with sugars then. I think what we probably should probably bring out again is the brown sugar movement, the hip and trendy, replacement, [for] what was maligned early on was white sugar by many people. So it was a hip thing to produce brown sugar, raw sugar, molasses, etc. etc., and it was a health food replacement making a better replacement for the white sugar that we always had before. Say a little bit about brown sugar because brown sugar itself is not particularly good, is it?
RP: In an extreme situation of poverty, the crude brown foods: brown bread, brown rice, brown sugar, molasses, those are definitely important sources of nutrients - but when people start eating more fat and protein, they can stand to lose the nutrients in those and they're gaining some freedom from toxins and inflammation when they reduce those brown substances. In molasses, for example, it turns brown partly because the sugars are being caramelised, the minerals combined with heat and oxygen for dehydrating the juices, the minerals catalyse the oxidation and you get reactions combining sugar molecules and changing them and these become, to various degrees, toxic or pro-inflammatory, allergenic...
HD: And even potentially carcinogenic, that’s correct huh?
RP: Yeah.
HD2: I mean we've all heard about the carcinogenic effect of a burnt piece of toast or eating too many french fries that are really browned, and it's the same as with brown sugar. It's the caramelisation of the sugar that causes the allergenic and carcinogenic effect.
HD: OK, we've got our first caller on the air. So let's take our first caller.
Caller: Hi, I heard you talking about sugar, my son's 34 now and he drives me nuts about his sugar intake. Because I think sugar is really bad for you and when we go out like to have breakfast or something, he will pour the sugar holder into his coffee. And I said, “You know, don’t you know, it causes diabetes or affects diabetes, your teeth, your...”, and he's had kidney stones. But whatever I say isn't going to hit him and he, you know just keeps using sugar, so I don't understand, because I didn't raise him particularly on a sugar-heavy diet, I believed in natural foods and everything. And so is there any information or where I can get some, that you know, would influence him about the bad things about sugar?
RP: There's a natural tendency of people who have some hormone imbalance, especially hypothyroidism, which makes your liver unable to store glycogen effectively, it causes a natural craving for sugar.
HD: Glycogen, just so you know, is a storage form of sugar.
Caller: Aha?
HD: You take in dietary sugars and then that gets converted into glycogen, as to where the body stores it up for later on.
Caller: Aha.
RP: I was always extremely craving sugar, [HD: So was I!] and generally eating a lot until I took thyroid. I was probably about 40 years old when I first took thyroid and I suddenly had no more sugar cravings, I could go 8 hours without getting terribly hungry or shaky or thinking about sweet things.
Caller: Well, that's good to know. I'll just have to tell him he's got to ask his Dr, he says he's been tested for diabetes and he doesn't have it but you know, it's unhealthy what he's doing, pouring sugar into coffee and I don't know if that's to irritate me or you know, I don't know, but he doesn't care, and he thinks it's cool. And then still he's had kidney stones, aren't those influenced by sugar?
RP: Um, no I don't think so, only in the negative sense. When you aren't eating enough minerals and for example if you let the sugars displace sources of calcium and magnesium and protein, then you do tend to form stones. The parathyroid hormone and other inflammatory things tend to create mineralisation of soft tissues and formation of stones in the kidneys, bladder and gallbladder.
Caller: So what would be the test that would give him the information he needs?
RP: Well, a vitamin D serum test, for Vitamin D3, is one relevant thing.
Caller: Oh, I've had that and mine came out all normal and everything. So, I don't know, but anyway that's good information and I will pass it on to my son...
HD2: And the fact that he's adding that white sugar to his coffee is probably protective because coffee lowers your blood sugar and if you have just pure black coffee you actually end up lowering your blood sugar and if he's someone who's craving a lot of sugars, that's probably why he's – just like figured it out – that if he has coffee he'd better have sugar with it because it makes him feel better...
Caller: Yeah, I take my coffee black, so I don't know...it's really weird to me....
HD2: And it's going to be easier for his body to use white sugar than it will be a pile of pancakes. But as he probably just craves all types of sugar whether they come from starches or sugar.
HD: Is he quite lean?
Caller: No, and he works really, really hard. But he's stocky; he likes ice cream and stuff. But it’s mainly when I see him dump like a sugar shaker into coffee. We could be in an organic restaurant or whatever and eating healthy food and he's still got to have a sugar fix.
HD2: Well his body is obviously telling him something. He could get his thyroid checked and his vitamin D checked as a good place to start.
Caller: Thank you so much for your help. I really appreciate it, goodbye.
HD: OK, so there’s another caller on the line. Let’s take this one. You’re on the air.
Caller: Hello? Hi guys, this is Tasha, hello. Well firstly, I want to really tell you how much I appreciate you guys bringing this information to the airways. I want to encourage listeners to listen with an open heart and kind of put everything you've heard all your life in the background and just take in the information as it comes because this isn’t readily available information. To get back to that previous caller, you know, about the whole sugar with the coffee and whatnot, maybe you could expand a little bit more on the whole key of balance and how when you do consume sugar, and how it is important to have it with the proper amount of fat and protein to slow down the release of the sugar and vice versa; if you're going to have protein, you need the sugar to help the body to be able to utilise or be able to utilise and break down the protein. You know what I'm saying! [HD2: Exactly] So, anyway, I just wanted to encourage you guys to clarify that even more so that people really as they do tune in, even if they tune in into the middle of the show they hear all these great things about sugar, but to go back to the balance. And also I think it's great how you were explaining to add sugar in to the coffee to help boost up your blood sugar and all of that, anyway, I just want to thank you guys lots.
HD2: Thank you for your call Tasha. Dr Peat, can you explain why it's so important, when you have a protein, to have it with fruit or honey or sugar because of the blood sugar lowering effect of the protein.
RP: The amino acids in the protein themselves are strong stimulants of the insulin secretion and when you don't take in sugar, the insulin to dispose of the protein will lower your blood sugar and to prevent the blood sugar going down you tend to produce either adrenalin or cortisol or both. And if your liver didn't have the glycogen stored to release glucose under the influence of adrenalin, then you depend on cortisol to keep your blood sugar steady and cortisol activates the conversion of protein to sugar and fat and so you've destroyed a big part of the protein that you've just eaten. I've seen people who were eating a couple of pounds of meat a day who were having signs of protein deficiency and getting fat. So to handle the protein efficiently you need the glucose to make sure that your insulin isn't lowering your blood sugar, you need either glucose or fructose to steady your blood sugar.
And the fat does several things. The saturated fat works with fructose and insulin to handle your oxidation of the glucose and the fat also slows the absorption so that you don't get a surge of glucose in your blood when you, say, have coffee with sugar. And the coffee, like the glucose, stimulates your metabolic rate and both of those, by increasing your metabolic rate, are going to increase your general nutritional requirements: minerals and all of the vitamins have to be adequate and if you don’t substitute the sugar for things like fruit, milk, cheese, shellfish, eggs and so on, then you will very likely become deficient in biotin and Vitamin B6 and pantothenic acid, selenium and copper are things that are among the first to become deficient if you try to run on too much coffee and sugar and not enough food.
HD: So yeah, as much as the fructose helps people’s cells pick up the sugar and there's all these anti-inflammatory effects from eating fructose, or fruit, or honey or sugar, everything has to be kept in a balance is, what I guess you're trying to say here, Dr Peat, with the correct nutritional balance of proteins and good saturated fats, coconut oil and butter, otherwise you will suffer a deficiency from either too much protein or too many sugars.
RP: Yes.
HD: OK just so people can get a list of some of the top fructose sources that also don't just have fructose but have fructose and glucose but they're things that you expect like dates, dates are 32% fructose, they contain B vitamins, potassium, calcium and iron – I know Dr Peat you're not too big on iron because iron is particularly inflammatory ion...
HD2: But when it's with the other minerals it does help protect you from over-loading on iron.
HD: But we're not taking about over-iron consumption. And then raisins, in the same kind of group as dates, 30% fructose, antioxidant rich and then agave – now what do you think about agave, as agave nectar has been touted as a very good replacement, and it actually contains about 43% fructose as well as the fructans, the polymers of fructose, and they're also found in asparagus and artichokes.
RP: Yeah, the fact that they mention the fructans, I think, probably means that it's being produced enzymatically from the core of the agave plant rather than from the juice...
HD: That's a waste product if you like, [RP: Yeah] of tequila production, they're using spent raw material.
HD2: And so Dr Peat, can you give us some examples of good food combining examples for protein, fats and a good sugar.
RP: Oh, fruit and cheese would be a basic thing for snacks as well as meals.
HD: Grapes and cheese, sounds good. Actually we have another caller on the air, so let's take this other caller. You're on the air.
Caller: Hi yeah, great show, and first I wanted to mention Dr Peat, whatever you did when that woman said she couldn't hear you, I haven't heard you better on this show than whatever you did with that, so keep doing it. I know Michael McCaskill [sound engineer] does everything he can to keep everyone's levels good, but I have a little trouble hearing to start with and sometimes it is hard to hear your wisdom and I really appreciate what you bring to the air. You know, it's come up in recent
news reports that it seems like, under constant attack are the natural substances on the earth, what with our awesome foods being attacked by the ‘fooderales’, and the Federal forces going in and dumping this raw milk and what's going on recently with medicinal marijuana here, after Obama told us it was going to be left alone if it was legal in the states where it was legal, and I understand Phoenix and states all along the west, in Colorado, and of course right here in our own backyard, have been attacked. And it always amazes me that people who put out chemical concoctions cooked up in a lab somewhere and call it Vioxx - and say it’s safe and can kill a bunch of people before it's taken off the market but nobody goes to jail - versus the people who are taken to jail because their food is inherently dangerous when it's natural. I don't get it, but you guys are on the front lines and I really, really appreciate you bringing it back to Mother Nature and bringing it home because this is provided for us and you are all explaining what it does as it’s been provided for us. So thank you.
And I wanted to ask specifically about dextrose. Dextrose from what I gather in my research is basically that spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down because I don't think dextrose mixed in with much of anything else much but medicine. And I'm curious as to the function and purpose of dextrose, what it's really all about. And also since Steve Jobs recently passed and pancreatic cancer was related to that, I understand he used to stay up for days at a time working on his inventions - a lot of coffee but he also ate a lot of health food - and maybe you could address the aspects again, cause I was having a little difficulty hearing this. What can help regenerate those pancreatic cells and what can adversely affect them as far as the benefits of coffee and keeping that in balance? So dextrose and pancreas, that's the basic question and thanks again for all that every one of you do, thank you.
HD2: Thank you for your call.
HD: What do you think of dextrose, Dr Peat?
RP: Well glucose, it's just the other word for glucose, and starch turns into that and it is great stuff in itself when it's in the right balance with other things including a little bit of fructose always, and saturated fat and minerals and vitamins. The dextrose or glucose itself is a factor in helping the pancreas to regenerate; it's the polyunsaturated fats, which misdirect the metabolism of glucose and fructose. And the polyunsaturated fats that are creating the epidemic of diabetes and obesity and later all of the degenerative diseases, cancer and Alzheimer's and so on.
Engineer: I have a question. Do they call it dextrose when it's being used industrially as a food or how do they call it dextrose instead of glucose?
RP: It has to do with the optical rotation of it. It's just a different chemical history of the way they name the molecules. Say Fructose was called levulose because it turns the light to the left.
HD2: OK, so basically dextrose just gets broken down into glucose.
HD/RP: It IS glucose.
HD2: OK. So there's another caller on the air, so let's take this next caller.
Caller: Hello is that me? Hi, I would like to ask the Dr, OK, I stopped eating meat, beef basically but I eat a little of lamb. I ate a little pork and I eat a lot of fish. I stopped drinking coffee, I stopped using mostly butter and I stopped using milk altogether and I'm curious about what is – because I have like this lower back condition – but I don't have the arthritis any more that I had, basically from beef, I think they call it uric acid. But I have a lower back condition and kind of a hip condition and I was curious and you know I take Vitamin D3 and I take soluble B12 which is good, but I'm kinda curious about what would be good. Cause you know I don't use sugar at all, I mean if I use anything I use a little bit of honey, anyway and I am going to go off....
HD: Wait can you stay on because Dr Peat may have some questions for you.
Caller: OK, but I can’t hear. Can you turn him up a little bit?
HD2: Ok, Dr Peat, can you try to talk especially loud for this next caller here?
RP: I'll see. Honey has all of the virtues of ordinary sucrose [HD2: white sugar] and it has some special benefits such as anti-septic materials that the bees collect from the flowers, but basically....
Caller: I also understand that there were some old Chinese Princesses that were preserved in honey that are still like OK and the honey is still edible!
RP: Ordinary white sugar has many of those same properties. They've done major surgery, like chest surgery where they didn't have antibiotics and they've just filled the hole with white, crystalline sugar and the person recovered and had fewer scars than would have happened if they'd used antibiotics...
Caller: Really? That's fascinating.
RP: Yeah, I've got some of the references in my diabetes and sugar newsletter.
Caller: Did you hear my questions?
RP: Yeah, I think you probably had a slight weakness of thyroid function. Meat eaters, often get, if they eat too much meat in relation to their thyroid function they'll often get symptoms including arthritis....
Caller: Oh.
RP: And the low back symptoms are very common in thyroid problems. So you want to check your temperature and pulse rate and maybe have your thyroid function checked but sometimes just a daily raw carrot, will help make up for the thyroid deficiency by reducing the bacterial toxins that poison your liver and interfere with thyroid function.
Caller: OK and what about kidney?
RP: Same thing. The endotoxin absorbed from poorly-digested plant material is the main thing. The endotoxin interferes with glucose or sugar oxidation and prevents the activation of the thyroid hormone and then that leads to all of the inflammatory things and especially cartilage, the discs between vertebrae tend to swell or become soft when you're thyroid deficient and having endotoxin.
Caller: What I was saying was that I stopped taking any basic dairy, I do do a little butter and a little bit of yoghurt, but I don't do any milk, I don't do any beef...
RP: What about eggs?
Caller: No, I eat eggs maybe twice a week.
RP: You want to try to get at least 80g of good protein every day.
Caller: Oh yeah, no, no I understand the protein, I eat lamb and a lot of fish and stuff but I stopped doing milk, coffee, sugar you know, white sugar and beef basically.
RP: What about fruit like orange juice?
Caller: I'm not into orange juice, I mean I can use it, but it tends to make me rather phlegmy in my throat...
RP: Well what about dates, and grapes, raisins.
Caller: I love ALL that stuff. And I eat them a lot.
RP: Calcium would be the main thing to concentrate on if you're eating enough fish and lamb and eggs, you should maybe try powdering eggshells...
HD: You know what, I'm sorry, to have to break here we've only got two minutes left, we need to wrap up the show. We need to thank Dr Peat for his generous time and his wisdom. Thank you Dr Peat so much for joining us.
RP: OK.
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