Vitamin D - KMUD, 2016-11-18

Giraffe

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https://www.toxinless.com/kmud-161118-vitamin-d.mp3

Vitamin D - KMUD, 2016-11-18

HD - Andrew Murray
RP - Ray Peat

(transcribed by Giraffe)

HD: [...] We are once again very pleased to have Dr Peat with us. Would you just outline your professional and academic background for those people who perhaps have never listened to the show?

RP: Basically, I have a Ph.D. in biology including reproductive physiology and biochemistry at the University of Oregon.

HD: [...] Vitamin D is a pro-hormone; it's not strictly speaking a vitamin, is it?

RP: No.

HD: In terms of the discovery of vitamin D and its association with rickets: do you think that there is adequate vitamin D in the general population?

RP: For preventing rickets? Pretty much all around the world there is very little rickets left, but since the idea of vitamin D as a rickets preventing substance was established, that really cut off thinking and research about what vitamin D really is and what it's doing. In the 1950s there was a period when people started thinking about nutrition ??through themselves?? like Adelle Davis's books came out. And the medical establishment reacted to discourage the public from using their own therapy. For example, vitamin A, there were stories about how horribly toxic it was, it would destroy your brain and make your skin fall off, [with] very little evidence backing it up. You can poison rats and mice giving them a million or so units of vitamin A. The same, there were some animal experiments with gigantic doses of vitamin D, and supposedly there was a case of a baby who's mother gave it a million or so units of vitamin D or took it while she was pregnant. And it supposedly caused the bones to thicken so much that there was no room for the brain to develop. And so the newspaper stories in the 50s were saying that vitamin D causes brain damage. And I have been reading Adele Davis is the 50s, and despite that I was sort of directed away from vitamin D because there was such a taboo about anything more than two- or three hundred units per day.

HD: [talks about rickets reappearing in England]

I've seen people with very low vitamin D, and I know just like TSH as a measure of the body's call for thyroid hormone has been down revised by the Endocrinological Association of the USA, they brought it down from 4.5 to 3.5, highlighting the fact that there are more and more people with hypothyroid type tendencies. The beneficial levels of vitamin D have been raised so that the lower limit I think was 20 ng/ml, now they have raised that to 30. And a lot of people and places are advocating levels of 50 to 70 nanograms. And in fact for athletes maybe even... come up with studies that show there is positive associations for 100 ng/ml blood levels of vitamin D.

What do you think about that even in the absence of rickets? There is a tendency in the population to have low...

RP: Several of the conditions that are well associated with vitamin D deficiency, some of them have doubled and tripled in the last 20 or 30 years. It looks like it's because of that fear of the sunlight, sunscreen and such. I have talked to a few people who had 10 or below ng/ml or 15 or 20, and their condition really corresponded to how low they were. Like one woman in her 60s, such she was so weak, she could hardly walk. Her muscles were simply very, very weak and shrunken. And she had, I think it was 7 or 8 ng/ml, and within a week of taking just a moderate [amount], I think it was 5,000 units a day, she could walk around. When you look at the symptoms of people with 15 ng/ml, 20, 25 and so on, you can see variations of that weakness, depression, shrinking muscles, insensitivity to insulin, tendency to have high blood sugar: all of the most common diseases of stress and aging.

HD: High blood pressure is also positively associated with the lower level of vitamin D.

RP: Yah. Everything related to aging and degenerative diseases: atrial fibrillation, enlargement of the ventricle, calcification of the valves, degeneration of the valves in several different ways, hardening of the arteries, calcification of the coronary arteries, and even calcification to the extent of what they call a heart stone, a huge mass of calcium.

HD: I think that most people associated vitamin D with calcium and phosphorus metabolism, weak bones, osteomalacia and degenerative skeletal type situations, but there is a clear and positive link to energy production and inflammation.

RP: When you look at the mechanism of just the outline that calcium helps to balance...

Vitamin D helps to balance the relation between calcium and phosphate, to prevent the overaccumulation of phosphate and to keep up the right level of calcium. When you look at the relation of that balance to inflammation, it turns out that it's really a serious problem in the population: the amount of phosphate relative to calcium.

HD: And that's because people aren't eating enough dairy?

RP: Or green leaves. Green leaves and cheese and milk are really the major good sources of calcium; and meat, nuts, grains, beans, all of those have terrifically high phosphate content. That excess phosphate and the reaction of the parathyroid hormone to that high phosphate intake is exactly the same as a deficiency of vitamin D. So too much phosphate, too little vitamin D, and you get what amounts to an early stage of chronic kidney degeneration. Parathyroid hormone and phosphate are called uremic toxins, late stage kidney disease. People are starting that process very early when they don't eat enough calcium and vitamin D.

HD: Let's talk about the conversion of cholesterol-like molecules by action of sunlight on the skin. [convertion in liver and kidney, washing directly after sunbathing not good]

I read only 20 minutes is necessary to reach peak amounts of the pro-hormones, so the body actually stopped producing more after about 20 minutes.

RP: I think that's only when you are in the middle of the day at a moderate latitude. The UVB is so low most of the year in the high latitudes that it takes a long time to get enough, but like from 11 or 10 to 2 in summer in high latitudes it only takes 15 to 20 minutes to get enough.

HD: There is a decrease of UVB exposure with angle of the sun?

RP: Yah.

HD: If you are in San Francisco or that kind of latitude, then from September through to April/May you probably need to be out in the sun for an hour rather than 20 minutes?

RP: Yah, and the natural color of your skin makes a tremendous difference, and age makes a difference. There is apparently less cholesterol metabolism and such in an old person. And just the degree of pigmentation influences the amount of reaction you will have to the ultraviolet. So that in Mexico for example even in women who are outside all day, if they have dark skin and they are only exposing their face and hands, they tend to be deficient in vitamin D, even at high altitude and brilliant sunlight.

HD: Do you think that people get enough vitamin D from the food that they eat?

RP: No, it's almost impossible. If you drink say two to four quarts of vitamin D supplemented milk, if it isn't whole, legally it has to be supplemented with vitamin D, but that's only... I forgot what the current amount is, but I think [it] has been around 300 units or something like that.

HD: OK, per quart? I think levels that are advocated now are 2,000 to 4,000 IU per day. It's gonna take a lot of milk to reach that. It isn't a few other foods... things like oily fish is rich in vitamin D, but again I know you are not an advocate of oily fish from that PUFA perspective. Egg yolks are, I think, 20 IU per egg yolk. So you are not gonna get lots of vitamin D from eggs either. Is there any other forms of vitamin D rich foods?

RP: Mushrooms. If they are exposed to light have a lot. During the 40s and 50s the main form of supplemental vitamin D was synthetic by ultraviolet radiation of fungus, and the research that changed the popularity of that claimed that it was responsible for the hardening of the arteries of young people starting in the 40s and 50s.

HD: This hardening was because of calcium deposition?

RP: Yah, which normally happens in a vitamin D deficiency, but there were publications arguing that the use of the synthetic vitamin D might have been contributing to abnormal calcium metabolism. I don't know if that's true, but that came out around 1970. And milk additives switched over to vitamin D3 right after those articles came out. So I think they will have been cautious.

HD: You said earlier that mushrooms exposed to light are a significant source of vitamin D. Did you know again any figures in terms of per ounce or of mushrooms consumed what you'd get?

RP: No, I don't know. It depends on the type of mushroom and the intensity of the ultraviolet.

HD: So they would irradiate mushrooms with UVB at some point in our history?

RP: Yah. And if they gather them outside just being exposed to daylight for a few hours is enough. There've been studies using mushroom powder as a vitamin D supplement and it only took a... it was less than an ounce of powdered mushroom to make a distinct rise. It actually depressed the vitamin D3 and increased the vitamin D2.

HD: So this would be things like the common field mushrooms, button mushrooms etc. These would be sources?

RP: Yah, if they have been exposed at all to sunlight. Many people have measurable amount of D2 in their serum.

HD: You have been advocating a soup of mushrooms as a dietary supplement.

RP: Yah, for the anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer functions.

HD: [...] How do you see fibromyalgia in terms of vitamin D3 deficiency?

RP: I think, it's parallel, almost identical to the hypothyroid condition. All of the inflammations that you get with low thyroid function are structurally and functionally similar to those you get from a vitamin D deficiency. And the thyroid stimulating hormone is an agent of those inflammatory processes, actually more than the direct effect of thyroxin which lowers TSH. The TSH directly activates and causes tissue to release the inflammatory cytokines, interleukins and so on, and parathyroid hormone does that. And just by taking vitamin D or increasing your calcium intake or decreasing your phosphate relative to the calcium: all of these cases in your diet will lower both TSH and parathyroid hormone. And both of these hormones are directly involved in things such as mast cell activation, releasing histamine and serotonin, increasing all of the cytokines, tumor necrosis factor, nitric oxide: all of the things that promote degenerative inflammatory processes. And so functionally vitamin D and thyroid are really parallel. You can't quite separate them.

HD: [In people with tuberculosis and other type of lung disease there is lower mortality associated with higher vitamin D levels.]

RP: Just looking at vitamin D level when they are brought into hospital, the higher the vitamin D when they come in, the more likely they are to go out alive.

HD: How many different illnesses don't have an inflammatory portion? Just recognizing that vitamin D is involved in suppressing inflammation would make anybody want supplement with vitamin D, wouldn't it?

RP: Yah and HIV, aids, malaria as well as tuberculosis are very widespread conditions that are known to increase the morbidity and mortality in proportion to how low the vitamin D is.

HD: I've read an article about a compound called cathelicidin and this was a antiviral defense that again was heightened by vitamin D in the body and that lower levels produced lower levels of this compound and also decreased natural interferon production. So these would tend to implicate that the outcome of viral conditions would be positively associated with increased vitamin D.

RP: Yah, and I think the viral process is basically an energy process. When the cells are well energized they are resistant to infection and replication of viruses.

HD: And you are saying this from an energetic viewpoint, to be able to withstand processes that cost energy to drive the system more positively than being overwhelmed.

RP: Yah, and I think you can see the energy process in the brain conditions that are associated with vitamin D deficiency. Brain injured patients have very low vitamin D and probably the injury itself is causing it to be lost in some way.

HD: I read that Parkinson's was also... There was a implicating that low levels of vitamin D in some Parkinson's patients showing that that was a kind of interference either with dopaminergic type of interference another neurosignaling interference that vitamin D positively influences.

RP: And the prion diseases are probably influenced because vitamin D prevents the polymerization of the prion protein which is involved in scrapie, mad cow disease, Alzheimer's disease and probably several other of the degenerative brain diseases. Anxiety and depression are associated with very low vitamin D.

HD: Interesting and I was thinking about herbs. From a herb perspective, Hypericum (St Johns Wort), being a classic treatment for depression and how the alchemist classified St Johns Wort way back before there was any “science” - although they were very methodical and very scientific in their own right - they classified it as a heating and drying in the third degree saying that it was a solar herb ruled by the sun and so that again, anxiety and depression (associated) with St John Wort used hand in hand with the sun and its energizing effects, if we want to get holistic about the mechanism by which that works.

Getting to the subject of the conversion of vitamin D first in the liver and then in the kidneys before it becomes active. Are you aware of anything that would bypass the necessity for healthy livers and healthy kidneys in order to have adequate vitamin D?

RP: I think the low level of vitamin D and calcium is probably the cause of the sick liver and kidneys rather than being a product. So supplementing just with calcium and vitamin D I think in many cases will correct the whatever the liver and kidney problem is. It isn't a matter of curing the disease. So that they can make or activate vitamin D. It's a matter of getting the vitamin D and calcium into the system, and maybe, you don't need to think about the disease of the kidney and liver as having some other mysterious cause, such as a virus.

HD: This was the other subject: vitamin D receptors. You said that there are many different places in many different organs and other tissues including nerves presumably where vitamin D receptors are located. So they are ubiquitous, a little bit like the sites that are binding sites for various different molecules or hormones or drugs or everything that the body produces. Is it reasonable to increase the amount of vitamin D receptors that your genotype would express in order to overcome any shortfall in the absorption or the pickup of vitamin D?

RP: The receptor is a problem. Some of the stress conditions make the receptor disappear. I think getting enough calcium and vitamin D and good nutrition generally is necessary to make sure that you aren't suppressing the receptors. Some of the receptor repression is done by overmethylation, and that can be something that... [If] your mother, for example, was deficient in vitamin D or calcium, that sets up a methylation pattern in subsequent offspring that can affect their sensitivity to vitamin D by methylating with the receptor or other interacting ...

HD: If you talk about a transcription event that occurs in the DNA to produce all these different things one of which is the vitamin D receptor. Do you know how long lived these receptors are? With receptors disappearing?

RP: That would be at the rate they are replaced. And I don't know specifically how long they last, but other receptors are typically turning over very fast. So the cells can remain adaptable usually just two or three days and not much of the receptor is been recycled.

Caller: [Was tested low in vitamin D. Would supplementing 8,000 units a day be too much?]

RP: If you figure that being in a bathing suit in the sun for 20 or 30 minutes enough to just start turning pink, that can make 10,000 or 15,000 units. So 5,000 or 10,000 units is never gonna be harmful.

Caller: [repeating her question]

RP: I've never heard of 10,000 a day being harmful.

Caller: Did you say that you need added calcium for the vitamin D to work better?

RP: You need a good ratio of calcium to phosphate, and I think it's really protective to take in well over a thousand. I try to get about 2,500 mg of calcium per day.

Caller: What are the foods that are good for that?

RP: Milk, cheese and leafy greens that are well-cooked and the water they are cooked in.

Caller: They have to be cooked?

RP: We can't digest raw leaves, so most of the calcium is not being assimilated from the salad greens.

Caller: So I should eat cooked broccoli or something like that?

RP: Yah.

Caller: How much? Anything green, like green beans? Anything that's green has calcium?

RP: One or two big servings of kale or chard will give you a good part of the day's requirement, but I think the best way is to have more than a quart a day of low fat milk.

Caller: Oh, I can't possibly drink a quart a day of milk. I eat a little cheese...

HD: Just for example, how much do you weigh?

[part skipped]

Caller: I am a bit on the heavy side.

HD: There is a very positive association with the inability to absorb vitamin D in obese people. The body fat has a direct suppressing effect on vitamin D absorption. Dr Peat, how do you understand that?

RP: Vitamin D and calcium, both have a direct suppressive effect on fat formation. The fatty liver for example, in animal studies it is corrected by both, vitamin D and calcium.

Caller: So that will help you not get so fat?

RP: Yah, and a high calcium intake by itself just with a normal amount of vitamin D is very effective at preventing overweight.

Caller: And what happens with the kidneys?

RP: Not enough calcium and vitamin D or too much phosphate, the combination, any of those will cause your parathyroid hormone to increase, and elevated phosphate and elevated parathyroid hormone are very toxic to the kidneys.

Caller: [talks about her thyroid]

RP: Thyroid works in many ways similarly to vitamin D and regulates calcium and magnesium in particular.

HD: Let's take the next caller.

Caller: [Question about sediment in the urine.]

HD: [Asks back.]

Caller: [Urine looks cloudy when in a glass jar.]

RP: If you have a fairly high protein intake, and your urine is on the acid side, on around pH 5, and you have a very high calcium intake, say from the equivalent of two liters of milk per day, that you'll have a lot of calcium appearing in the urine, and if the urine is acidic, it isn't likely to form stones, but when it stands, the pH can rise as the carbon dioxide evaporates. That can precipitate crystals. So other things being equal, it isn't necessarily harmful to have precipitation in the urine.

HD: Do you think that people that have clear urine (for want of a better word) are "healthy" compared to those that have less than see-trough, opaque type of urine?

RP: I think that clarity is largely from the amount of fluid you are drinking, and if the urine is acidic, I don't think that some cloudiness is going to hurt, but there can be bad causes of cloudiness, infection for example. And I think the yellow color of urine is considered to indicate cell turnover. So sometimes the morning urine will be yellow, and the afternoon urine clear because during the night with the high stress hormones a lot of cells are breaking down and the fragments of the nucleic acids turning over, I think can produce some of the yellow pigment.

HD: I'm afraid that's all we got time for. Thank you very much for your time Dr Peat.

RP: I wanted to mention that the klotho protein that we talked about a few months ago as the anti-aging protein, it's very similar to vitamin D in some of its functions. A vitamin D deficiency produces the degenerative changes that mutation or deficiency of the klotho protein can produce.

HD: I really wanted to talk more to you about the vitamin D receptor, and how that could be enhanced, because I think vitamin D is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the process of inflammation and all the diseases associated with. Maybe next month we pick up just the last part of what I wanted to look at with vitamin D and maybe bring the vitamin D receptor into more light and help people to understand how important vitamin D is, especially now we are going into the darker times of the year.

So thanks so much for your time Dr Peat.

RP: The calcium metabolism and sugar oxidation is another subject ...

HD: Good, I got some notes here. Thanks very much.

RP: Thank you.
 
Last edited:

Queequeg

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moss

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Thanks Giraffe.
Have amended and added a couple of bits below. This is a great interview and the subject of Vit D is a fav.

RP: That would be ??derated which?? they will replaced. And I don't know specifically how long they last, but other receptors are typically turning over very fast. So the cells can remain adaptable usually just two or three days and not much of the receptor is been recycled.
The missing bit (??) is, that would be at the rate they are replaced

RP: And the prion diseases are probably influenced because vitamin D prevents the polymerization of the prion protein which is involved in scrapie, mad cow disease, Alzheimer's disease and probably several other of the degenerative brain diseases. Anxiety and depression are associated with very low vitamin D.

Missing this paragraph

HD: Interesting and I was thinking about herbs. From a herb perspective, Hypericum (St Johns Wort), being a classic treatment for depression and how the alchemist classified St Johns Wort way back before there was any “science” - although they were very methodical and very scientific in their own right - they classified it as a heating and drying in the third degree saying that it was a solar herb ruled by the sun and so that again, anxiety and depression (associated) with St John Wort used hand in hand with the sun and its energizing effects, if we want to get holistic about the mechanism by which that works.

HD:
Getting to the subject of the conversion of vitamin D first in the liver and then in the kidneys before it becomes active. Are you aware of anything that would bypass the necessity for healthy livers and healthy kidneys in order to have adequate vitamin D?
 

burtlancast

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Thanks, Giraffe.
Here's my verified version.

God, i have come to hate with a passion Andrew Murray and his verbal diarrhea designed solely to promote himself.
It takes me double the time to verify his ramblings than i do for Ray.
 

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Nighteyes

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God, i have come to hate with a passion Andrew Murray and his verbal diarrhea designed solely to promote himself.
It takes me double the time to verify his ramblings than i do for Ray.

Ha this is so true. In some of the older shows its really bad. He'll start the show talking about something and just goes on and on. WE WANT RAY for pete's sake.
 

burtlancast

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Here's a question by Andrew about mandatory activation in the liver and kidneys of Vitamin D precursors that Ray answered in an ambiguous way:


"AM: Getting into the subject of the conversion of vitamin D (first in the liver and then in the kidneys), before it becomes active: are you aware of anything that would bypass this necessary activation by healthy livers and healthy kidneys, in order to have adequate vitamin D?

RP: I think the low level of vitamin D and calcium is probably the cause of the sick liver and kidneys, rather than being a product [of it]. So, supplementing just with calcium and vitamin D, I think, in many cases will correct the whatever liver and kidney problem is. It isn't a matter of curing the disease so that they can make (or activate) vitamin D. It's a matter of getting the vitamin D and calcium into the system. And maybe, you don't need to think about the disease of the kidney and liver as having some other mysterious cause, such as a virus, etc…"

Andrew meant that maybe the science textbooks have falsified this step, and that maybe the Vitamin D precursors don't need the liver and the kidneys to become activated.
Ray missed the point altogether and just commented about how a sick liver or kidney can recuperate to normal by supplementing with calcium and Vitamin D.
 

aquaman

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Thanks, Giraffe.
Here's my verified version.

God, i have come to hate with a passion Andrew Murray and his verbal diarrhea designed solely to promote himself.
It takes me double the time to verify his ramblings than i do for Ray.

Very harsh!

The guy has provided us with 100s of hours of useful interviews with Ray. You should be sending him and the radio station money rather than complaining ;)
 

burtlancast

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Actually, Andrew is a very nice person.

It's just that, strictly on the academic side, he regularly puts his foot into his mouth, and most often than not adds nothing to the content.
 
Last edited:

amethyst

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I don't know if this has been posted before, but wanted to post this to go along with the interview-here's a good list of calcium content in various foods:

Calcium Content of Foods
 

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