The Heart 2, KMUD, 2013

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[burtlancast]

Raymond Peat, Ph.D.

The heart 2

KMUD The herb doctors, 2013-06-21​

(transcribed and verified by Burtlancast)

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


HD: Good evening. This month’s continuing subject is the heart. Also, we’ll be talking about a recent article by Dr Peat called “The cancer matrix”. But before this, I have to mention that I’ve got pretty excited by 4 recent newsletters from this last month’ MEDSCAPE newsletter program. Ray has been professing for more than 40 years that saturated fats like butter, coconut oil, etc… are the good fats, and that the polyunsaturated vegetable fats (safflower, linoleic acid, linolenic acid, any of the seeds oils: cotton seed, hemp seed, canola, etc) and the fish oils (which the industry has been proposing as heart friendly, because they are reducing cholesterol), are in fact harmful to one’s health.

The first article is from the British Medical Journal, and is titled “Use of dietary linoleic acid for secondary prevention of coronary heart disease and death”: the advice to substitute polyunsaturated fats for saturated fats is a key component for worldwide dietary guidelines for coronary heart disease risk reduction. However, their clinical benefits haven’t been established. In the cohort that was studied, they substituted dietary linoleic acid in place of saturated fats, and they found it increased the rate of deaths from all causes; coronary heart disease and cardiovascular heart disease. And this was an updated meta analysis of 430 patients.

Another review was done by Steve Stiles titled “Good fat vs bad fat: dietary saturated fat has undeserved bad reputation”: points are made that “evidence that potentially carcinogenic preservatives in processed meat, as well as high heat cooking methods have influenced perceptions that red meat has adverse health effects. How the preparation and cooking methods use of foods are traditionally classified as saturated fat foods may be producing substances from PUFAS and carbohydrates in those foods that are promoting disease.”

Another article is from the European Heart Journal, about the dietary intake of saturated fatty acids and the incidence of stroke and coronary heart disease in Japanese communities, famous from consuming large amounts of fish containing PUFAS. It said that saturated fatty acid intake was inversely associated with age, sex and energy-adjusted incidence of risk for total stroke, total and deep intra cranial hemorrhage, and ischemic stroke.

Another article by the European Society of Hypertension, in 18 June 2013, saying that green tea and coffee may guard against stroke, that chocolate nudges down blood pressure in a new meta analysis, and that a few cups of coffee a day protects against heart failure.

Dr Peat, how do you feel about some of these things coming out now?

RP: I’m not sure what the motivation is exactly, because the information has been sitting around for 60 years. I guess someone has slipped on their public relations for the fish oil and PUFAS, letting this stuff leak through into the media.*chuckles*

HD: Some of the generated income numbers for the sale of fish oil are pretty staggering. Dr Peat, 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: In the 50’s and 60’s, I have taught at various places, in humanities mostly. But 1968 to 1972, I returned to graduate school intending to study brain biology. But I found quickly that the nerve and brain department in the university was among the most dogmatic. Molecular biology, genetics and brain studies were highly dogmatic. So, I shifted over to the physiological chemistry of aging and the reproductive system for my thesis.

HD: Last month’s topic was the heart, linked with heart health, and the prevalence in the public of the mistaken belief that saturated fat is the culprit in blocked arteries and heart disease.

RP: You see a lot of stuff in the medical literature that’s spreading the propaganda line; superficially, it presents itself as science, or research on the effects of the fats on the animals, and so on. But when you read it closely, it’s just like a professional trick, in which they compare things that they know, or should know, to be extremely toxic, against the thing they want to sell, and say:” See, it’s less toxic than this other thing”. But, since its common knowledge that the other thing is just powerfully toxic, anything compared against it, practically, will look beneficial. That’s just… almost a trick of the trade. *chuckles*

HD: Ha ha. They are simply turning waste products into profit.

RP: Some of the bad research is just carelessness. For example, for about 40 years, people referred to lard as the saturated fat. And then they would use some middle of the range vegetable oil (canola, or something) and show an advantage to the vegetable oil over lard, and say: “Lard, the saturated fat, has these disadvantages”. But, during this period, they were feeding the pigs corn and soybeans to fatten them, because specifically of the high insaturation of the food. And so, lard was an extremely highly unsaturated fat. Hundreds and hundreds of research papers compared it using it as the so-called saturated fat.

HD: What are the harmful effects of lowering cholesterol, when it comes to heart failure?

RP: Cholesterol, as far back as the 1920’s, probably earlier, was identified as a major protective, defensive molecule. For example, around 1920, someone injected half a dozen different toxins (heavy metals, snake venom, infectious bacteria, just about anything that was considered extremely toxic) and then they gave the animals a cholesterol injection, and found that it antidoted all of those harmful things. And that has been repeated about every 20 years or so; someone repeats a similar experiment showing that in any system you look at, increasing the cholesterol improves functioning. For example, injecting it into animals that are being trained, it improves their memory and learning ability. It turns out to be a component of every part of the cell’s anatomy: the nuclear framework, the cell division apparatus, the respiratory system, everything. They talk about it as a membrane component, but it’s really everywhere in the cell.

HD: Ok. It’s extremely important. I know you consistently mention that a higher cholesterol is a lot better and safer than a lower one. A low cholesterol is very damaging.

RP: Yea. I’ve known several doctors and such who deliberately kept their cholesterol down, and bragged about having 100 or 120 mg% cholesterol. And I don’t think any of them lived much beyond 40 years. *chuckles*

HD: Oops. I know 200 is the reference point above which they start prescribing statins.

RP: One of the Framingham studies found that over the age of 50, people who didn’t have higher than 200 were more likely to have dementia, showing protective effect on the brain.

HD: You’re also a very big proponent of thyroid to supply energy and to sustain metabolism.
Do you associate low thyroid with muscle weakness?

RP: Yea. And there’s a very close connection between polyunsaturated fats: it’s inversely related to thyroid function at every level. If you take one particular function of thyroid, the formation of the hormone, or the secretion from the gland, or it’s transport through the blood, or it’s action on the respiratory or genetic system in the cell, each of these functions decreases as the unsaturation of the fat molecule increases. So, the low thyroid, which allows muscles to fatigue more easily, simply because energy isn’t being produced by respiration at the necessary level, as the muscle is fatigued, it activates processes that try to provide more energy. But in doing that, they liberate fats from storage, so they become free fatty acids. This not only further suppresses the thyroid and the energy production, but it starts an inflammatory process, so that the muscle, instead of just becoming fatigued and working less, shits over to becoming inflamed and breaking down. And sometimes, the muscle breakdown can kill a person. That’s one of the side effects of the cholesterol lowering drugs.

HD: Ok. Statins are bad for you. Higher cholesterol and saturated fats are good for you.
Could you talk about the misconceptions surrounding anaerobic, endurance exercise? It’s pretty damaging, isn’t it?

RP: One experiment with just walking fast on a treadmill to keep the heart rate up to about 120 or less, they found that the liver’s production of the active thyroid hormone decreased radically in less than an hour of that kind of exercise. And if the person is very healthy, the thyroid will bounce right back from that kind of stress. But if their tissues are loaded with the thyroid suppressive fats, that much exercise liberates the fats and keeps the thyroid from recovering quickly.

HD: You are in favor of someone’s resting heart rate to be between 80-100. And you’ve also stated that aerobic exercise is damaging. Isn’t that sort of contradictory?

RP: One experiment that got my interest about 30 years ago was looking at the school performance of high school kids and their heart rate. And they found that the one’s that had the highest grades averaged an 85 beats per minute at rest. And the average around 70 were the lower performance students.

HD: Are athletes (marathonians, etc…) who maintain a low heart rate (50 or lower at rest) healthy?

RP: In general, that very slow heart rate correlates with very slow everything. Sperm production, for example, is usually very low in those endurance runners.

HD: Ok. So, not very healthy to have a very low heart rate: it’s much healthier to have a resting pulse around 80 and higher.

RP: Yea. Some of the drug companies are doing some trick research to make it look like it’s better to have a lower heart rate. But, what they’re doing is including people with heart failure. And when your heart is in the process of failing, it beats more weakly. And so, it has to beat more often. And so when you include people with heart failure, then you see that those with the fast heart rate are about to die.

HD: Ok. It has been believed for a long time that heart muscle cells are finite, and that exercise hypertrophies them but doesn’t increase their number. New research shows stem cells are able to differentiate into new heart muscle cells: does thyroid intervene in this phenomenon?

RP: Partly; it keeps the cells alive. But as long as the heart cells are able to respire using glucose and producing carbon dioxide, any muscle cell in the heart that’s damaged will be replaced by a recruited stem cell, maybe coming in from the blood, or another part of the heart, which in the presence of the thyroid and the good environment of plentiful glucose and carbon dioxide will mature into a muscle cell. But if the cell is blocked by these free fatty acids which interfere with the use of glucose, then the cells of the heart produce lactic acid. And lactic acid is a signal to produce collagen. And the stem cells arriving get that kind of signal from the environment of the sick heart and turn into fibroblasts and produce connective tissue. So the heart becomes progressively fibrotic and [contains] less contractile cells. And in experiments, they’ve produced 2 kinds of heart enlargement; the first, in which the heart simply works harder, like when you take more thyroid, it pumps harder, and pumps more blood (or if you block the output of the heart by having…what produces high blood pressure…you create more resistance: that causes the heart to enlarge). But the [second] kind of heart enlargement, the stressed [kind] of heart, it enlarges by producing more collagen, and becomes fibrotic. And the enlarged heart that has developed with increased function and thyroid provision is a good muscular functioning heart. And when animals have been caused to develop an enlarged fibrotic heart (with the other type of heart interference), then giving them T3 over a period of time causes the fibrosis to regress and be replaced by good functioning heart. And that kind of animal research has been somewhat indirectly applied to people preparing cadaver hearts for donation for transplants. And they found that if they gave T3 to the donor heart before they removed it, to have it ready for removal and transplant, the transplant was much more successful.

HD: That’s interesting. You say that T3 is anti-fibrotic.

RP: Yea. In the liver, heart, every place it’s been studied, it helps to reverse the fibrosis.

HD: Do you know the mechanism?

RP: I think, developing good new tissue, stem cells, and keeping the environment low in lactic acid and high in carbon dioxide allows the differentiation to go into the right direction.
And, organs and tissues are always trying to break down and renew the extra-cellular matrix, which is where the collagen fibrosis exists. That’s always been broken down and replaced; in the thyroid deficient stressed person, the replacement becomes worse than it was. But with adequate thyroid and nutrition, the fibrosis is replaced progressively by more functional tissue.

HD: A caller asks if you could explain in lay terms what “saturated” means in saturated fat.

RP: The fat is a chain of carbon atoms, and they are covered with hydrogen atoms. And if you remove some of those hydrogen atoms, for example if one removes from a middle of the chain carbon it’s 2 hydrogens, that’s unsaturating it. So, if it’s saturated, it just means it has all the hydrogen attached that it can hold. And polyunsaturated means that you got more than one set of carbon atoms with a double bond of electrons between the carbons, lacking the hydrogens that had been filling every possible space.

HD: Just adding that saturated fats have the characteristic of being solid at room temperature.

RP: Yea. And that doesn’t apply at all to the living state where we live at 98 or 99 degrees; those fats aren’t at all, more rigid or stiff in any way, but there’s a whole literature that talks about them, as if they stay stiff when they are at our body temperature.*chuckles*

HD: Promoting the ideology that they are bad for us, right?

RP: Yea. And in fact, each carbon in a saturated fat is free to rotate against its neighbor. And the removal of the hydrogens creates a stiff bond between those carbons. So, actually, the polyunsaturated is less free to rotate than a saturated fat.

HD: Do you think that makes the cell’s membrane (for lack of a better word) less fluid?

RP: Yes. The fact that the highly unsaturated fat is easily attacked by oxygen means that the fats on the surface, or wherever they are, very quickly tend to attach chemically to adjoining proteins. So, when you look at it in the right situation, you see that the polyunsaturated membranes are often very rigid because of oxydation attaching them to the protein underlying them.

Caller: I’m 66, and I’ve had 4 major surgeries and only have 8 feet of intestines left (the rest has been removed), have a double ostomy (which means my small intestine and my colon come to the outside of my body using a prosthetic bag for defecation purposes). Danatrol was a product I was taking to slow down my peristaltic action, otherwise it was so fast I would dehydrate all the time; it’s not available anymore. I’ve tried then atropine, which didn’t help. My physician has me now on [hydromorasol]; you gentlemen know that opiates derivatives slow down the peristaltic action, causing constipation, which is what I need. Is there any other substance you know of that could slow my peristaltis down ?

RP: Have you tried antihistamines? Such as cyproheptadine, which is both anti serotonin and anti histamine?

Caller: No sir.

RP: They have a slight belladonna, or atropine-like side effect.

Caller: Thank you. By the way, for some reason, my mother knew that mono- and poly-unsaturated oils were the basis for laquers, paints and varnishes. Because they discovered that crude oil was a cheaper base for these things; she told me at a very young age to only use butter, olive oil or coconut oil. And I’ve been telling these organic hippies for years to quit eating organic poly- and mono-unsaturated oils, and they tell me: “Well, it’s organic”. And my argument is: “Rattle snake venom is organic too; you think that’s any good for you?” Good evening, gentlemen.

HD: *chuckles* It’s unfortunate we’re just brainwashed by these powerful industries with vested interests. As far as a herbal product, an astringent is what the caller would need, that would help lose watery stools. For example, tannins (which exist too in tea, and tend to dry up your mouth) are used for diarrhea.

Caller: What do you think of HDL versus LDL? Is the balance important?

RP: Both of them are anti-inflammatory. The protein which carries the cholesterol itself has a very important protective biological effect, defending against things that would irritate and inflame. Although some of the studies have shown that there’s a close correlation between high HDL and some of the inflammatory diseases such as cancer, that’s because it rises defensively against exposure to those chemical irritants. So, the level of HDL, or the proportion of the total cholesterol is just reflecting how stressful your environment is. For example, drinking too much alcohol will raise your HDL. Being exposed to too much of the fish oil type of irritation, or peroxidation, will raise your HDL defensively.

Caller: Are you saying HDL is the bad cholesterol?

RP: No. It’s defensive. But having it high doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re on a good diet program, because just drinking too much liquor can raise it.

Caller: What HDL/LDL ratio is good?

RP: I don’t think it’s as simple as that. But 2 or 3 HDL to 1 LDL is usually reasonable.

Caller: What is the function of the lymphoid tissue in the jaw area, and is it safe to have a Cat Scan in this area?

RP: Definitely, Cat Scans aren’t safe. That amount of radiation is known to have a permanently inflammatory action. And the more of them you have, the more certain it is that there will be some lingering damage from it. But the swollen lymph glands, sometimes it can just mean that you’re being exposed to allergens, or possibly foods that you’re somewhat sensitive to. It’s very common in the spring to have a period of several of the lymph glands around the throat and neck to swell up, because of air pollen and possibly changing foods from the season change.

Caller: Ok. I’ve had this little nod for about 4 years; the doctors said to just keep an eye on it. For the past 5 months, it has swollen up, and a sonogram showed some scar tissue, and the doctors want to do a Cat Scan. Is there some herbs, or a diet to reduce this swelling?

RP: If it’s hardened, that suggests that it might be becoming cancerous. So, I would think that doing a biopsy would be reasonable if it’s actually hardened over what it has been previously.

Caller: It’s now twice the size, and they’ve put me on antibiotics, and the swelling went down, so I stopped the antibiotics, and after one week, it swelled up back again. It’s at the corner of the jaw, in a very sensitive area containing salivary glands, and they don’t know what it is.

RP: If an antibiotic made it go down, I would just keep trying that line of approach, and maybe have a raw carrot everyday to help to cleanup your intestines.

Caller: Is it a good idea to take herbal cleansers while on antibiotics?

RP: Eating a fiber like a raw carrot every day has an antibiotic action. And you have to know which herbs you’re working with, because some of them could increase inflammation.

HD: Things like fresh juices of Galium aparine (also called “cleavers”) are very indicated for lymph adenopathies. Also pokeroot (from pokeweed), which is extremely strong (and poisonous if not prepared and dosed properly), and smilax Sarsaparilla, which is used as a lymphatic agent. Also, blue flag (Iris versicolor) is a good lymphatic agent. And lymph obstructions can sometimes be pushed through by gently massaging the area over time.

Caller: It’s not harmful to touch it or apply pressure on it?

HD: No. But don’t put too much pressure at first, as it may cause some local irritation. It makes sense to use antibiotics, as a lot of gut-related issues (eaten allergens) can show themselves as lymphatic swelling.

Caller: What is your opinion on the mysterious infections like Lyme, and what are the root causes of fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome?

RP: Specifically, chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia are very closely related to nutrition and the hormones. And I think the mysterious infections are over-diagnosed; some doctors specialize in them because they’re good business if you have to treat them for months at a time. But if you think you might have been exposed to something like that, a good course of the right antibiotics should clear it up in maybe 2 or 3 weeks.

Caller: Is it possible that some of these pathogens would prevent the thyroid from doing its job optimally, and thus create a catch-22 situation?

RP: Just ordinary bacteria, any of dozens of different kinds of bacteria living in the small intestine, which should be sterile, just this great range of bacteria in the intestine will cause enough toxicity to interfere, mixed with everything else, with your thyroid function. So, keeping the intestine clean is the first step.

HD: Also, decreasing the transit time will help. And the reason Ray keeps mentioning eating a raw carrot a day especially for people with GI issues is that carrot fiber is indigestible and passes through and has a sweeping action on the bowel’s wall, dislodging waste, and absorbing excess estrogen.

RP: Yea. There have been some experiments with either antibiotics in the intestine [showing they] will lower estrogen and cortisol, and will increase the protective hormones. Carrots do the same thing. Apparently, both antibiotics and carrots are working by lowering the endotoxin absorption. The carrots actually carry away a lot of the estrogen which otherwise would be recycled, reabsorbed and passed through the liver again.

HD: And remember how carrots can be in the refrigerator for months, as germs cannot easily break them down.

Caller: Don’t you think the previous caller should have a biopsy anyway, because cancer caught early is easier to cure?

RP: Well, if it softens and seems normal after taking an antibiotic for a few days, that means pretty well that it wasn’t cancerous. And the hardness is a very accurate way to diagnose; they’ve found that, when doing breast cancer surgery, that just feeling the lymph nodes in the armpit, they can diagnose accurately just by whether they’re hard or not, whether there’s cancer in them.

Caller: You’re saying that if it was cancer, taking antibiotics wouldn’t have made it come down?

RP: Yea. It would stay hard.

Caller: Would it stay the same size?

RP: No. It could get smaller. But if it’s hardened and cancerous, it has like a mesh of compacted collagen surrounding the cells, which are becoming defective. And that collagen takes days or weeks to soften up when it’s being cured.

Caller: Ok. My daughter’s cholesterol is 264; she’s in her early 40’s. Isn’t that too high?

RP: I think that’s probably just expressing low thyroid function. The cholesterol is the precursor to several of the protective hormones. Pregnenolone, progesterone and DHEA.

Caller: I think my daughter is supplementing thyroid, as they found thyroid problems with her.

RP: As your thyroid function goes down, your cholesterol goes up in a defensive reaction, of trying to keep the production of these protective hormones up. And so, when you take thyroid, you start turning cholesterol into the good stuff, and so the cholesterol goes down.

Caller: She just needs to take her thyroid, and it will balance itself?

RP: Yeah. And temperature and pulse rate, and appetite, and quality of sleep are good indicators of thyroid function.

Caller: Does eating butter and beef fat clog your arteries?

RP: No.

HD: Dr Peat, can you quickly define what are the polyunsaturated oils?

RP: Mayonnaise is almost always highly unsaturated; corn oil, safflower oil, hemp seed oil, linseed oil, fish oil. And olive oil contains up to 10% of the potentially dangerous polyunsaturated. But it has so much of the monounsaturated that it’s relatively safe.

HD: And all the seed oils are the same thing, right?

RP: Yea. Olive oil is a fruit oil.

HD: Ok. Thank you very much for joining us, Dr Peat.

RP: Thank you.