The Heart 1, KMUD, 2013

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Some small passages in the transcript have been modified for better comprehension.

I'm including in attachment Ray Peat's original 1972 PHD dissertation, which he mentions in the interview.

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[burtlancast]

Raymond Peat, Ph.D.

The heart 1

KMUD The herb doctors, 2013-05-17​

(transcribed and verified by Burtlancast)

HD: Andrew Murray (Herb Doctor)
RP: Ray Peat

HD: Good evening. This month's subject will be heart failure and hormones, plus other subjects related to it. We will be talking too about cancer and metastasis, their relations to solid tumors, and the way the body recruits collagen as part of the event that leads to a fairly poor prognosis for some cancer diagnoses. Welcome, Dr. Peat.

RP: Hi.

HD: As usual for the people who have never heard of you, could you please give us an outline of your academic and professional career?

RP: From 1968 to 1972, I was in graduate school at the University of Oregon. And I did my dissertation on reproductive aging and how oxidative metabolism changes with age. And I found that the changes that happen (causing, basically, the menopause equivalent in animals) take place in every tissue in the body. It just happens that my dissertation work concerned the uterus. But I was interested in aging changes in the brain, and ovaries, and so on. And it turns out that the same chemical and biological processes changed through time in all of these tissues. And in my dissertation, one of the aging theories that I talked about was the collagen theory of aging; that estrogen excess causes wastage of oxygen , basically suffocating tissues (the way radiation would, for example), and destroying the ability to use oxygen. And as a result of that, excess collagen is produced by the collagen producing cells (fibroblasts in the connective tissue). And with aging, the collagen becomes progressively denser and more cross-linked, creating an oxygen-deprived environment. So, my emphasis at that time was on how estrogen produced by irritation or aging causes more collagen to be produced, and to become more dense, creating further interference with oxygen consumption.

HD: Concerning the article you have recently written about congestive heart failure: in the US, about 5.7 million people suffer from congestive heart failure. And its physiology is pretty relevant to tonight's show, as it’s a feature of a defective function of the heart muscle itself. Could you explain to our listeners the physiopathology of congestive heart failure?

RP: In congestive heart failure, the heart muscle simply gets weaker, less able to pump a full volume of blood with each stroke. And the diastolic base, which should be a relaxation phase, is inadequate: the heart stays partly contracted. So it has a short stroke. And to make up for the shortness of the stroke, it tends to pump faster. And ordinarily, when a heart muscle pumps faster, it has a bigger stroke, so that it doesn't have to simply increase the speed; it can increase the volume with each stroke. But with heart failure, that's impossible to; it tends to lead to a fast, but weak, heartbeat.

HD: Ok. And the actual muscle of the heart itself becomes weaker?

RP: Well, it becomes waterlogged (a higher concentration of water in the tissue). That's because it isn't relaxing fully. And when it doesn’t relax… It's like when you work a muscle tremendously; you can actually make a muscle swell up in just 15 or 20 minutes of very intense contraction. Your muscles will gain weight because it doesn't relax fully, and retains calcium and excess water. So, a very fatigued biceps muscle, for example, is temporarily equivalent to what's happening in the failing heart. And with that condition of retaining water and calcium, if that persists for a long time (for example if the heart isn't getting enough sugar or oxygen, whatever it needs to relax; or if it's being stimulated by estrogen), it prevents the full relaxation. Then, chronically, it tends to produce more collagen. And that collagen tends to become hardened. So, at first, it's just a swollen condition; then, it gradually becomes a fibrotic condition. And that can actually lead to the development of a “bone” in the heart (a calcification) that actually contains crystalline calcium.

HD: 20 years ago, the basic treatment consisted of diuretics in order to remove excess water, which as you said, is a feature of congestive heart failure in the muscle. And even plant derivatives like digoxin, from the foxglove, as a strengthener of heart contraction, so that each contraction was more effective.

RP: Yeah. That steroid from the foxglove is similar in structure and function to progesterone. And Szent-Gyorgyi did experiments 60 years ago using a rabbit heart, in which he showed that progesterone acts on the heart like digitalis, to increase the staircase effect of heart contraction, in which a faster stimulation increases the stroke and amount of blood pumped with each contraction. And that's because the progesterone (or the digitalis) is accelerating the ability to both contract and relax.

HD: Yes, because relaxation is important for the next contraction to be functional.

RP: Yeah. That's why the failing heart has a very weak, small, beat: because it isn't relaxed. And it's becoming harder just by being filled up with water (the way your muscles feel harder when they swell up).

HD: And very fatigued from that swelling. I've always thought that in arrhythmia and tachycardia (which are part of a congestive heart failure-type picture), the increase in the contractions of the heart was a mechanism to compensate for a lack of blood volume being ejected with each contraction in the failing heart. You’ve mentioned the Staircase effect and that's the first time I've come across this.

RP: When you’re exercising, you will notice that the beats per minute increase as you use your muscles and consume more oxygen. But at the same time that your healthy heart is beating faster, it's beating harder. So, when it's going a hundred and thirty beats per minute, it will also be something very hard. And you can feel your pulse in your wrist, or throat, as a big bulging throb with each beat: that's the staircase effect; it’s both going faster and having a bigger stroke with each contraction.

HD: Right. That's an efficient contraction. Ok. The next question I want to ask you about is for you to explain the waterlogged effect of cardiac muscles and congestive heart failure. Does it have a relationship with growing pains? Also, you have a very different way of looking at growing pains and their treatment, don't you?

RP: Yeah. It turns out that exactly the same things are happening in skeletal muscle and heart muscle. People have known it empirically; doctors have seen the changes in their patients for a hundred years, and found that thyroid would correct those problems of both the heart and the skeletal muscles. But now, fairly recently, with analysis of the genes and proteins, you can see that in fact, exactly the same things are involved in the growing pains, which come with somehow low thyroid function around puberty. Usually, a couple of years before puberty, estrogen’s increasing, blocking thyroid function. That makes the cell fatigue more easily, so it retains water, and the pain is associated with, usually, in the late afternoon or in the evening; the muscles have progressively retained more water and calcium. And they’re painful and swollen. And if a person in middle age becomes very hypothyroid, they start getting those same things: fibromyalgia is one of the variations on that.

HD: I was just going to ask.

RP: The assumption has been that the muscle disease of hypothyroidism (or hypothyroid myopathy) involves leakage of enzymes from the skeletal muscles. But in fact, the heart is also leaking those proteins; you can identify proteins coming from both the heart muscle and the skeletal muscles in hypothyroidism or in heart failure.

HD: So, you can pick these up those in the blood, then?

RP: Yea. And the urine.

HD: So, if someone got a diagnosis of fibromyalgia from having a lot of fatigue in their arms and legs and back muscles just from standing erect, would they be able to test for myoglobin in the blood?

RP: Yea. Creatine kinase is the first thing to look for if you’re suspecting a thyroid-related pain problem.

HD: Ok. The two terms hyperthyroidism and hypothyroidism get interchangeably confused, both with doctors and patients. Some people think they have hypothyroidism when they actually are hyper, and vice-versa; people thinking they are hyperthyroid may just have high adrenaline, and actually be low thyroid. What’s your take on myopathy, the muscle weakness in hypothyroidism?

RP: You can see it in an electrocardiogram, or if you kneel and have someone thump your Achilles tendon, so your toes twitch away from your body. If your thyroid function is good, the relaxation will be instantaneous, and your foot will relax with a floppy, instantaneous, complete relaxation. If your thyroid is low, it will comeback slowly to exactly where it started. And the heart is doing the same thing, with a prolongation of the QT interval. The T wave represents free repolarization, or relaxation. So, you can see it in either thumping your Achilles tendon, or looking at the electrocardiogram. And when that is slow, that means that the cell is retaining water and calcium. And in that swollen state, it is permeable; it absorbs things that it shouldn’t, and it leaks some of the enzymes that it shouldn’t leak. So, you can see those in the blood, during fatigue, or hypothyroidism.

HD: Is this related to how quick one’s reflexes are, or how alert and sharp one is? In that state, does that mean your thyroid is functioning fairly well?

RP: Yea. The conduction and time, the rate of nervous conduction is slowed in hypothyroidism. So, there are different things involved in ordinary functioning: a hypothyroid person will tend to react 10 or 20 milliseconds slower than a person with a good thyroid function. I’ve seen it when someone popped a firecracker on the fourth of July: I saw the people around the room: there were sort of a wave of jumping; you could tell who the hypothyroid people were by how fast they jumped. *chuckles*

HD: Could you elaborate a little more about the patella reflex?

RP: That shows the extent of the reflex ability; but it doesn’t show the speed of relaxation, because your lower leg is so heavy; it will swing back if your muscle is only partially relaxed. But, when you kneel, your calf muscle is very big, in relation to the small weight of your toes. And when that muscle contracts (it’s the muscle that makes you able to stand on your toes; so it’s a very strong muscle)…but when you’re kneeling, all it has to do is make your foot twitch a little bit. And so, the return from the twitch is a very small burden on the muscle. And so it won’t drag a half contracted muscle back to rest in position; it comes back exactly as the muscle reaches full relaxation.

HD: Excellent. People can use this test to evaluate their thyroid function. Just kneel on a chair (facing the back of the chair, so your legs are off the chair), and have your leg relaxed. Then have someone gently tap behind you, your Achilles tendon; it will elicit a reflex; your foot will swing out away from you; and it’s how quickly it will return to its resting state, where your toes are pointing down to the floor again. It’s that resting repolarization that’s the important marker of the health of your thyroid. If your toes take a long time to return, they kind of gently swing back down to perpendicular, then that’s not a very good sign. And if they swing out and then back down quickly, that’s actually a good sign.

RP: Another way of looking at that reflex system is insomnia: many doctors think that thyroid is a stimulant that will make you stay awake; but when you think of the brain as having exactly the same process of excitation and relaxation as your heart muscle or your leg muscle, when the brain is fatigued, if it’s somewhat hypothyroid, it gets the equivalent of a growing pain, or a cramp. And it can’t relax fully. And that amounts to insomnia. And so, if you can energize the brain cells, you can get sleep to come on quickly. And the active thyroid hormone, and magnesium, and sugar, are the things that most quickly will restore energy to your brain, or your muscles, heart, and so on.

HD: Someone wants to know the best foods for the heart.

RP: Fruit is extremely important. And avoiding polyunsaturated fats. Because the heart is much more efficient using oxygen when it’s burning sugar rather than fat. And having all of the minerals: calcium, magnesium, sodium, and potassium: those interact very closely. People think of calcium as the exciting ion, which it is when the cell is excited and can’t get rid of it. But calcium happens to inhibit some of the hormones that maintain inflammation and excitation. So, if you are well saturated with all of these alkaline minerals, that will help the heart to relax more quickly, and then contract more quickly.

HD: Ok. You said calcium, potassium, magnesium, and sodium. Eggshells and milk are a good source of calcium; then green leafy vegetables are rich in magnesium and potassium.

RP: And fruits…orange juice and watermelon, for example, are good for the sodium and potassium.

HD: And then obviously, table salt. There’s absolutely no truth in the fact that salt is harmful; it’s actually very beneficial for you. And actually, lack of salt is more harmful. The BBC has recently published some very interesting health articles that corroborate some of the things you are saying.

RP: One thing about sodium: if you restrict sodium, you increase your aldosterone. And one of the current interest in heart drug treatment is to find an aldosterone inhibitor. But eating enough sodium is the simplest way to suppress excess aldosterone.

HD: Ha ha. But it’s too cheap; they can’t patent it. In one of the BBC articles, they are now advising people to get sun, as there’s now rising vit D deficiency causing rising rickets, and there’s very little evidence that sun exposure causes melanoma. It’s actually probably related to polyunsaturated oils in the diet.

RP: There have been a couple of studies in which they’ve found, in fact, that the incidence of melanoma decreased with the altitude at which a person lives. So, it’s inversely related to ultraviolet light exposure.

HD: Ha ha.

Caller: My father died of a heart attack. I’ve heard Dr Peat talk about the harmful effects of estrogen on the heart. And I myself have a grand mal seizure (epilepsy attack episode) once a month. It’s known as a catamenial epilepsy, because of this out of whack ratio between estrogen and progesterone. What can I do?

RP: Keeping your cholesterol level up; fruit is one of the best ways to help the liver make enough cholesterol. And then if your cholesterol production is good, thyroid and Vit A are the main things for turning cholesterol into progesterone, which not only has anti-seizure effects, but it has heart-protective effects, steadying the heart rhythm the way digitalis does, and blocking aldosterone, preventing fibrosis of the heart, and so on. So, keeping your cholesterol production up, but having the factors that convert it to progesterone is exactly…

Caller: (interrupts) should we eat a raw carrot a day?

RP: Yea. The effect of having the raw carrot every day, or bamboo shoots, these are antiseptic fibers that can’t be easily broken down by the micro organisms. So they don’t stimulate bacterial growth; in fact, they tend to sterilize the intestine. And, at the same time, the fibers bind the estrogen which your liver is producing and excreting all the time in the bile and prevents it from being reabsorbed. So, immediately, you can see a decrease in your estrogen level, a day or two after eating a raw carrot. And that reduction of absorption of bacterial products and estrogen very quickly reduces your stress and cortisol production, and that allows your progesterone to increase.

Caller: What’s your opinion about the GAPS diet?

RP: Yea. The simplest thing is to avoid starches and polyunsaturated fats, because those are the things that promote…

Caller: (interrupts) is olive oil something to avoid?

RP: Well, the olive oil is saturated enough that it helps the carrot with a germicidal action: coconut oil, butter and olive oil, especially associated with the fibers of carrot, help to suppress micro organisms.

Caller: How does one get off and recover from SSRI’s?

RP: I hear that a lot. Basically, it’s doing everything you can to restore a good, intense metabolic rate. Restore the energy level of cells, so that they don’t go into the stress state. The high serotonin trains the nervous system to stay in the stress state, because the serotonin activates the pituitary’s ACTH and adrenal system. But ultimately, the way to break that pattern is to increase your cellular energy production, lower stress, keep your thyroid function up, and keep the estrogen down.

Caller: Does it take a long time to recover from long term usage of SSRI’s?

RP: Yea. People seem to take about a year to feel fairly normal again, even doing everything right. The serotonin itself creates an inflammatory state in the nerves, and body in general. And so, they affect your whole metabolism; they tend to increase fat production and stress. And so, you want to concentrate on keeping your whole body into an unstressed condition. Eating frequently is probably one of the helpful things, not forcing yourself to go on adrenalin.

Caller: This is David from Missouri. What are the ramifications of having a competing frequency from your cell phone close to your heart, which has itself its own frequency?

RP: It’s pretty well established that you damage the tissue, create stress in the brain; the cancer rate increases when your head is exposed to the microwave frequencies.

Caller: Is there a benefit in not cooking too much bamboo shoots? Their center can sometimes resemble a soft baked potato.

RP: No; they still have a good fiber, even if they’re soft.

Caller: Is there natural antibiotics in the water used to boil your bamboo shoots?

RP: Yea. The Japanese and Chinese have some drugs that they make from extracts of the bamboo plant; I think they get the strongest ones from the leaves. But I think there is the same antiseptic, and probably anti-cancer material in the shoots.

Caller: Does freezing the bamboo shoots harm their nutritional content?

RP: I don’t think so.

Caller: I’ve been using frozen orange juice, organic sometimes, instead of non organic oranges. I’ve been hearing that the Tropicana orange juice brand extracts the oils from the orange peel and adds it back to the juice; all orange juice producers are doing that.

RP: Yea. And I think there’s a worst process that all the big companies are using, the last 5 or 10 years, which is to use enzymes to break up the pulp so that they have less waste and more volume in the juice. The stuff that used to be pretty solid material that had to be discarded as…

Caller: (interrupts) Tropicana says they do not do that in their non pulp orange juice. I’ve called two of the organic ones (Cascadian and another one) and they both said they aren’t doing it either. Do you think there’s a benefit drinking these processed orange juices?

RP: Oh yeah!

Caller: So, the fresh one is definitely better; but drinking the processed ones are still going to be better than not doing it, right?

RP: Yea. For example, people with heart pains, even with frozen orange juice concentrates, you can see a very quick relief from mild heart pains, just by drinking a pint of orange juice per day.

HD: I want to mention about SSRI’s that there’s a website called http://www.drugawareness.org with a lot of info about getting off SSRI’s. The site is by Ann Blake-Tracy, and her phone is 08002800730.

Caller: For the last ten years, I’ve had chronic sinusitis. Could it strain my heart? I’ve heard even abscessed tooths can affect he heart.

RP: I think there’s a definite relation between sinus or tooth infections and the heart. But I don’t think it goes from the sinus or tooth to the heart. But I think it’s endotoxin from chronic intestinal inflammation…that sometimes bacteria enters the bloodstream along with the endotoxin. But just the endotoxin alone is enough to cause sinusitis, and inflamed periodontal tissues. And at the same time, it’s causing these changes in the heart: calcium retention, water retention, easy fatigability…

Caller: Right. I do exercise. I’ve been off gluten for two years; it’s very helpful. But I don’t seem to get ahead of the sinusitis; is there anything I should try?

RP: When the simple foods, and the fibers to disinfect your intestines; when those aren’t enough, then the drugs that are most helpful in my experience are aspirin, and the anti histamines. Benadryl, for example, if you could get the pure chemical, it’s better than prepared tablets. And cyproheptadine, which is an anti-serotonin, anti-histamine. And then, antibiotics.

Caller: What about [Cardiosore]? I’ve tried that once, but I have the ability to make my own.

RP: One another thing that helps the general immune system and avoidance of inflammation is Vit D. Have you had a blood test for Vit D?

Caller: (interrups) I haven’t. But I take ten thousands units of Vit D3 a day: is that a reasonable dosage?

RP: Yea. If it’s Vit D3. And do you get sunlight exposure?

Caller: Yes. I walk everyday.

HD: We were talking earlier about cholesterol and the relation between low cholesterol and heart failure.

RP: Yea. The drugs that lower cholesterol, one of the recognized side-effect of both of the main categories of cholesterol-lowering drugs is to cause occasional muscle breakdown (rhabdomyolysis: the muscle dissolves itself). And one of the known things is the interference with the production of Coenzyme Q10. But that isn’t the sole reason for the muscle breakdown. The simple lack of cholesterol; it’s a cell-stabilizing substance with hormone-like action, which in the absence of progesterone and the other protective steroids, it actually has a cell-protective effect in the skeletal muscles and in the heart. The same process that causes rhabdomyolysis in the skeletal muscles can happen in the heart, cholesterol deficiency tending to kill heart cells.

HD: You recommend a cholesterol of 200, but you don’t have any problem with 250 or more, especially when over 50 years age?

RP: Yea. The Framingham study found that people over 50 who had at least 200 cholesterol or higher had a much lower risk of Alzheimer disease, because it’s brain-protective, as well as heart-protective.

Caller: I’ve had a tooth infection for a few years now, and have been treating it with tea tree oil. But I still have discharges from it. Does Ray have a few suggestions about treating such tooth infections?

RP: I knew a dentist who cured chronic tooth problems like periodontal disease with simply giving his patient a laxative. And he would talk it at dental conferences and say he was a good surgeon, but he found there was no need at all to do periodontal surgery if he gave his patients laxatives. But the idea didn’t catch on among the dentists. *chuckles*

HD: Do you have any constipation at all?

Caller: Not really. But I would say my digestion isn’t top.

RP: Sometimes, just avoiding starchy…especially raw vegetables, and raw fibers fruit; apples are easier on the intestines if they’re well cooked. And vegetables ought to be cooked about 40 minutes to be protective to the intestines.

Caller: Wow. So, avoid raw vegetables.

RP: Yea. If you keep the vegetables you’ve been eating, and you put them in a plastic bag, where they don’t get oxygen, and then keep them at 98 degrees for a few days, and you’ll basically see what happens to them. Because we don’t have the enzymes for breaking up the cellulose of vegetable material. And so, the bacteria are favored by the warm, moist conditions. And the bacteria can thrive on raw vegetables.

Caller: Wow. That’s just so opposite to what everybody else’s saying.

HD: I know Dr Peat is always advocating on making sure the transit time through the gut is as quick as possible, to prevent bad bacterial overgrowth and endotoxins getting into the blood and causing inflammation. The gut and its transit time is probably the single most important factor for good health.

RP: Raw carrots are the exception among vegetables, because being a root vegetable, they happen to be very germicidal; bacteria won’t touch them in the transit time.

Caller: Should one avoid salads?

RP: Yea. Green salads, or other vegetables other than raw carrots.

Caller: Ok. And do you know anything about the light therapies out there?

RP: Yes. Sunlight is the best in general. And if you’re gonna be exposed to full sunlight very long, then you have to worry about sunburn. So, avoiding sunburn is the only caution. But many hours a day of brilliant light (white light, incandescent light, or sunlight) it has many effects, balancing the hormones, increasing your defensive hormones, such as progesterone and testosterone. Just a year ago, an American researcher trained rats and found that just shining red light on their heads, because red light penetrates through the tissues, he found that their learning was improved just by exposure to light.

Caller: Wow. So, that could be helpful for a tooth infection.

RP: It helps your whole system; lowers the stress, and probably lowers the tendency to absorb endotoxins through your intestines.

HD: Alright. Thanks very much for joining us, Dr Peat. We really appreciate your time.

RP: Ok. Thank you.

 

[Koveras]

This transcribing effort started in December 2014, and has managed to transcribe 55 interviews out of 116 available

Is there a simple list somewhere of the 55 that have been fully transcribed thus far?

Thanks to all those involved - very much appreciate the work

 

[burtlancast]

Is there a simple list somewhere of the 55 that have been fully transcribed thus far?

All details are grouped in this headpost: PERSONAL TRANSCRIPTIONS THREAD

 

[SQu]

Thanks Burt. I was helping till I got stuck with a smart phone as my only means of access. I enjoyed it and would not have stopped otherwise

 

[cdg]

Just made the Dissertation searchable: Ray Peat - Dissertation OCR.pdf