Serotonin, Endotoxins, Stress, KMUD Herb Doctors, 2011

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Found this transcript on the net, done by Geneviève Devereaux
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Serotonin, Endotoxin, Stress.
Transcription by Geneviève Devereaux
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(insert flute music here)
God I need more OJ.

Ray: Yeah, Hi. I studied biology at the university of Oregon and my disorientation was on ageing of the oxidative processes in relation to reproduction and how the hormones change with ageing and effect the efficiency pf oxidative metabolism and the main hormones that I studied were related directly to estrogen, progesterone and thyroid and the nutrition and environment al factors that influenced those and how the minor hormones and signalling are interrelated between the environment and those hormones and the respiratory production.

Int: You have a rather unique view of physiology and biology cause I know your methodology is very scientific. Can you tell us about serotonin’s effect cause I think most people think serotonin is something that is positive?

Ray: About the Second World War, biology has been heavily influenced by several factors. The agricultural industry is interested in promoting certain ideas towards food. The pharmaceutical industry is promoting a very mechanical, reductionist interpretation of health in general, based on the ideas of receptors and genetic interaction with specific hormones and receptors and drugs and then there is the government and military orientation that has its commitment to certain kinds of psychology and science, promoting again the reductionist, anti-holistic, anti-pattern orientated science. So that’s why our agricultural USDA recommended daily intake of refined carbohydrates (y’know breads and pasta and those type of foods) was 6 – 7 serving per day and that was the bottom of the triangle. And you can see that they are actually having their effect. In the last thirty five years the consumption of flour and cereals, pasta and so on has increased by three percent just as the agriculture department have put in their triangle. It should be a fat bottom on the triangle.

Int: So the agriculture area has influenced the government’s recommended daily intake where if you look at diets from 80 – 100 years ago, the grains were not such a major part of the diet.

Ray: Yeah and in these last 35 years, cereals and fats have increased. Cereals are up 3 percent and fats are up 7%. During that time meat, eggs and dairy have decreased 3% and added sugar has even decreased 1% in these thirty five years and where many people think that nutrition research should be exploratory, looking for new ways that food interact with the newly discovered biological possibilities, the financing is heavily towards industrial food products as nutrients, rather than exploring, for example, the thousands of fruits and vegetables that grow in the topics.

Int: Our country doesn’t grow those so therefore we shouldn’t eat them?

Ray: That happens with the coconut oil industry, which was used widely in products, Oreo cookies and fried foods and so on from, in about the 1850s and on. When the soil oil industry got tired of competition, they put out tremendous propaganda, starting twenty years ago, saying the tropical oils were poisonous and what they did was increase the consumption of their unsaturated fats.

Int: And now heart disease and high cholesterol and… And yeah, obesity, related to high blood pressure, cancer and dementia And diabetes have all been on the increase

Ray: Yeah and these are known to be increased by unsaturated fats, and cereals and starches. Exactly the thing that the government has promoted.

Int: Well hopefully our listeners don’t listen to what the govenerment pro,oete anyway .Getting back to serotonin. What’s the truth?

Ray: Well an example of how confused the promotion has been is that one of the major anti-depressants is called a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor that supposedly acts increasing by serotonin. They knew that it was a good treatment of viscous dogs and that because it increases their serotonin, but people studying the dogs after a month of treatment with the ssri, found that they were less viscous and that their serotonin had gone down significantly.

Int: So it actually decreased their serotonin?

Ray: Yeah I think the anti-depressants that work are actually in the long run shifting their balance away from serotonin.

Int: But the perception is out that serotonin is the good guy?

Ray: Yeah. Forty years there have been many papers published showing that, well starting back with the LSD research, they saw that LSD counteracts the effects of serotonin on smooth muscle, and then finally they showed the antagonistic effects of where it inhibits the serotonin nerves in the brain and so every place that they checked its function and it was an actual antidote to serotonin. It was opposing serotonin and improving function, such as learning abilities and many physical symptoms, anti tumor and anti-inflammatory – many health functions, but because of the government campaign against lsd type drugs, the drug companies came out with some modified forms of lysergic acid, such as bromocriptine and lisuride and some anti-serotonin drugs that were known to lower serotonin, but they advertised them as pro dopamine drugs, rather than anti-serotonin and or even anti-histamine, and in case of one that was really an anti-serotonin drug, but they took advantage of the government campaign against the anti-serotonin drugs to say that the psychedelic drugs made people insane, and so they started promoting the idea that their drugs would make people sane and happy by increasing serotonin.

Int: So that’s how it began! I know you have mentioned the fact that serotonin, primarily, is produced in the bowel.

Ray: It’s a defensive chemical everywhere. It’s one of the primitive protective reactions, for example in the bowel it causes spasms that clean out the bowels. When you eat something poisonous, it causes diarrhoea and that’s protective, but in process if it keeps up too long, it increases serotonin, 95% of it being produced in the bowels, and only 3, 4, 5% in the organs, such as the brain, and if the irritation of the bowel keeps up very long, the circulation in the blood stream becomes a problem systemically and it will cause vascular spasms, vascular leakiness, inflammation, for example when you have prolonged irritation of the intestines, tumors begin to promote serotonin release, starting mainly in the appendix. The lower part of the bowel is where it is likely to be overproduced, and that systemic effect hits the right side of the heart, primarily, and then the reason it is worse for the right side of the heart is that the lungs have the enzymes that destroy serotonin, so the platelets pick it up from the intestines in the blood stream and carry it to the lungs, where if it is working they can pretty much destroy all of the serotonin arriving in the lungs. If the lungs fail to detoxify it, then the whole body can be affected, but the right side is where it goes first, and it is pumped from the right side into the lungs. So the right side gets it in its crude form and then the rest of the body, if your lungs are efficient, the rest of the body has a much lower level.

Int: What symptoms of elevated serotonin leaking from their intestine and then acting on the right side of the lungs?

Ray: Fibrous deterioration of the valves of the right side of the lung and ultimately pulmonary artery hyper tension and surprisingly the lung has some processes that seem to be the opposite of what we usually think of for antioxidants. Peroxide formed in the lungs, by basically what seems to be a toxic oxygen reaction. Peroxide helps to destroy the serotonin in the lung, so it has a specific use of free radicals, and that seems to be how negatively ionised air, helps to relieve asthma and many physiological problems and improve mood, because it helps to destroy serotonin in the lungs.

Int: So pulmonary artery hyper tension that’s one of the side effects of increased serotonin?

Ray: Yeah that’s where it got its name from toning up the circulatory system.

Int: So we wanna talk about different foods that decrease serotonin. So the number is blah blah blah 1800 K-M-U-D RAD, so Doctor peat you mentioned the effects of serotonin blah blah blah so if a patient has asthma and constipation or diarrhoea.

Ray: Yeah irritable bowel syndrome is a typical high estrogen, high serotonin problem.

Int: Are there any conditions associated with the pulmonary signs that would not normally be present in a healthy person deactivating serotonin? Are there any pulmonary symptoms that happen in patients?

Ray: Yeah the best established are the asthma symptoms and the pulmonary artery hyper tension, but I think probably, the emphysema category where you get thickening of the diffusion pathway between the membrane cells on the surface, between the lung sacs and the capillaries. Lactic acid and serotonin are closely connected. One increases the other. It is known that high lactic acid from too much exercises, causes many athletes to chronically have an increased pathway for diffusion, so that their blood leaves the lungs less perfectly oxygenated than a person with lower serotonin and lactate.

Int: So with asthmatics it’s common that if they remove the food that causes the irritation that their asthma goes away.

Ray: Yeah that’s the direct effect of the serotonin on the contraction of the smooth muscle in the bronchial tubes. That seems to be where the negatively ionized air can help, by destroying the serotonin faster.

Int: Can we bring up the question of purgatives? To un-stop people with constipation and the prime important in treating prime disorders. Inflammation of the bowels is a primary cause of death but it has seldom been referred to…

Ray: Oh yeah when I worked in the hamster lab, we saw that the old animals, practically always, when they seemed to be dying of old age were having bowel inflammation and I looked up a lot of 19 century cases and it was a very popular diagnosis of death at that time.

Int: It’s also interesting that our herbal-pharma-ka-pia are passed down the information and the different conditions that they are used for are either laxatives or purgatives or herbs that restore normal function. A lot of them are directed at the bowel and treating that and that was traditionally a very important place cause that’s where we interact with our environment. So how important do you see bowel health to general systemic health?

Ray: It’s probably the essential thing that everyone should think about more, because the connection can be traced pretty directly to Alzheimer disease and other dementias and liver disease, heart disease, arthritis. They’ve known for many years that various types of arthritis are alleviated by prolonged fasting, because of relief of the inflammation in the intestines when a person stops eating for a while, but the laxatives and the purgatives are really, the… um, a more practical way to prevent that chronic inflammation. Starches and indigestible fibers have been tested on various animals, from horses to rats and practically all of the fibers that are used as food additives, carrageenan and guar gum and various other gums, oat bran and even some of the semi-synthetic things, Metamucil, agar and psyllium, all have been identified as carcinogen for the intestines and possibly other organs and getting those out quickly before they support bacterial growth and ferment. Yeah the fermentative bacteria are known to increase the serotonin and lactic acid production. There is a back and forth increase of endotoxin by the serotonin and vice and versa. And all of these, both serotonin and endotoxin increase other factors such as carbon monoxide, surprisingly. That’s another of our short term, primitive defensive systems is the oxidation of the heme molecule and that releases carbon monoxide, that is protective in some ways in the short term, but in the long range, it is known to be closely associated with Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, brain injury, any kinds of tissue injury. It activates the conversion of pufas to inflammatory prostaglandins and all of these tend to release more of the free fatty acids, so it becomes a viscous circle of starch, serotonin, endotoxin and so on…

Int: What’s your take on dietary fiber?

Ray: The two that I have run across in literature and experimentation are raw carrots and cooked bamboo shoots.

Int: These don’t support bad bacteria?

Ray: They are antiseptic or antibiotic in themselves. You can store them for a surprisingly long time, whereas other vegetables tend to rot if you store them in a wet condition, but carrots are used to living in moist soil and so they can kill the fungus and bacteria.

Int: And so as a side note in the kitchen, they make these bamboo fiber towels and everyone knows that with cotton towels after one day of use they don’t smell so good. I guess it’s cause they’re supporting bacterial growth. But the bamboo towels, they are amazing they don’t smell as bad as the cotton towels the next day.

Ray: Yeah they don’t think all of the chemicals have been identified. It’s partly that the cellulose is very resistant to bacterial break down in itself, but it doesn’t have things like pectin. Pectin does support some of the bad bacterial growth and fermentation and the so called soluble fibers in beans and other legumes support bacterial and toxin production.

Int: Why do you think the medical and agricultural industry has been so keen to push dietary fiber down the necks of people? Traditionally we ate a low fiber diet from grains, but I mean we would have eaten our fruit and vegetables but…

Ray: The fibers like the acacia and guar gum. These things are very convenient for food processing. Carrageenan is now very widely used. They can increase the weight of meat by as much as 30% by injecting this water retaining gum and it’s used instead of cream for making ice cream, so it has a very long shelf life. Where if you used a good cream or coconut oil you could get a very fine texture that would last a long time, but it’s a just matter of cheapness of carrageenan and these other gums.

Int: Traditionally we would have eaten potatoes and South America ate a lot of masa, which has been partially digested. So what can we do with the grains and thinking about how tradition has eaten starches and cooked with it?

Ray: Dennis Burkin (no clue how to spell his last name) who sorta started the fiber fad about 30 years ago, when he discovered that Africans didn’t have a very high incident of bowel and liver cancer, and that they tended to have three bowel movements per day, where Americans are more likely to have one or fewer. He thought that fiber prevented the retention of carcinogenic toxins, but he was primarily talking about potatoes and when he came to the US and saw that people were interpreting it as oat fiber, oat bran and various other grain fibers. A few people outside of the US did research showing that those in fact increased cancer incidences.

Int: So if someone were to eat root vegetables and boil them very very well this helps to break down the starches so it doesn’t provide very much food for the bacteria and saturated fats put on the starches helps to inhibit the growth of bacteria, so mashed potatoes with lots of coconut oil and some butter for some flavour or if you need to gain weight, lots of butter.

Ray: Yeah and it happens that phosphate which you get in the grains and this might really be a part of why the fiber in grains is carcinogenic from grains, cause seeds and nuts and grains are so rich in phosphate and phosphate stimulates the breakdown of these soluble or indigestible fiber by bacteria, and calcium blocks that, phospholosis by bacteria so a high calcium, low phosphate diet goes with saturated fats in suppressing the toxic effect of the starches.

Int: What about fermenting grains, like sour dough breads?

Ray: Yeah the longer it digests, the more it will turn into a sprout and the sprout is basically a little sugar and mostly proteins and water, where the starch is mainly indigestible protein and starches with a high phosphate content.

Int: I couldn’t believe an article by a medical doctor, who had an air of credibility about them and he was really putting down a need for calcium and vitamin d, when you’ve mentioned 2 to 4 to 6000IU of Vitamin D and he was trying to say more calcium is not better and I know you would defend the increase in dietary calcium as being very pro or very anti-inflammatory.

Ray: Yeah I was thinking about the diet traditionally of the Masai and the related tribes in the high altitudes of Africa and they at least for half the year when the cows are producing milk, often drink five – ten liters of milk a day. It isn’t exceptional, so they are getting 5000mg of calcium or more very often. They don’t suffer from the usual degenerative diseases.

Int: What about the problems of calcification? What about calcified arteries?

Ray: Well that’s something way back in the 1940s and 50s, Adelle Davis reviewed it in her books that doctors consistently get it wrong. They think mechanically that if you eat more calcium that you’re gonna calcify your kidneys and arteries. It has been known that very consistently for roughly sixty years that when you’re low in calcium and or vitamin k or vitamin d, your parathyroid hormone increases and it helps to increase it from any food calcium that is in your intestine, but when that isn’t adequate the PTH, it is increased by high phosphate, but it takes calcium out of the bone to balance the phosphate and puts it to the arteries and kidneys, so the surest way to guarantee calcification of your brain and hearts and arteries and kidneys is to have a high phosphate, low calcium, low vitamin k and vitamin d diet. Perhaps that diet was funded by some drug companies cause they know that low calcium and low vitamin d will cause heart disease and bone disease and so… Some of the biggest source of dietary phosphorous is legumes, beans and peas…

Int: Ooo we have a caller… Caller: So I will eat in moderation ‘cause, what kill you one week, is the fountain of youth the next week it seems from these studies. I will have a little bit of everything and not too much of anything is the best answer. As far as food pyramids go, I’ve never eaten one. The closest thing I’ve had is a tortilla chip, but I’ve always chewed that up first cause that shape is hard to swallow ha! My question is about serotonin and I thought it was a brain chemical and since you mentioned the effects on the digestive system, I’m wondering the counteraction or the interaction of melatonin…and alcohol is it considered an endotoxin and what foods may cause alcohol to be created in the gut? It’s good to know cause there is a DUI check point in the county this weekend.

Ray: If a person has very sluggy digestion, it only happens occasionally, but yeast can grow so freely if the intestine is sluggish and the membrane immune cells are weak and that the overgrowth of yeast can turn sugars into alcohol and some people stay drunk all the time when they have yeast that are able to live in the upper part of the intestine or even in the stomach.

Int: So then would those people if they drink alcohol would they feel even more drunk, more quickly?

Ray: Yeah and that tends to increase the carbon monoxide. That’s the toxic part of it. The alcohol itself in those small amounts, chronically, they might be mildly drunk, but that isn’t probably as harmful as the fact that carbon monoxide is increased by the alcohol. That’s one of the problems with drinking any sort of alcohol chronically. It tends to push up carbon monoxide production. And one of the problems with carbon monoxide, besides blocking oxidative metabolism, just like when you’re poisoned by external carbon monoxide, the enzyme that makes the carbon monoxide, releases iron, and iron deposits in the brain, and the liver and other places with a toxic effect.

Int: And how about the connection between serotonin and melatonin…

Ray: It’s clear for a long time that the pineal gland is converting serotonin into melatonin and it’s activated by adrenaline during stress, and so it’s generally seen to have this reaction to adrenaline and it has opposite effects from serotonin, so I think of it even in the brain as a detoxifying system against serotonin. People studying rheumatoid arthritis and heart disease see the same, and I think breast cancer was another, see the enzyme that is able to convert serotonin into melatonin, so it’s probably defensive against these inflammatory, carcinogenic and degenerative effects of serotonin.

Int: What about supplementing melatonin?

Ray: I think it has its anti-inflammatory effects but I think it’s much better to work at the other end. I think it’s unnecessary. You could reduce your tryptophan intake for example, and reducing the starches and inflammation producing things.

Int: And anything that irritates the intestines will cause the intestines to produce more serotonin?

Ray: Yeah including unsaturated fatty acids.

Int: When you are in love or when you release stress and your stomach is tied in knots is serotonin involved? Or is it adrenaline?

Ray: Well under some conditions, yeah. It’s the thing that causes stress ulcers. It’s the main thing that causes stress ulcers, like the immobilised rats experimentally will quickly get intestinal bleeding and stomach ulcers, and if they are allowed to defend themselves in some way, even though they are still restrained they can block that stress reaction and lower the serotonin. And the way they were able to defend themselves was biting on a stick. It is a very good illustration in that ability to defend yourself. I think of that analogous to the two types of muscle exercise. The so called concentric exercise, where you are basically walking up hill and shortening the muscle under force and eccentric, where your muscles are stretching in the attempt to contract them, like walking down hills, which make the muscles sore and I think of the ability to bite the stick as the same as doing the same as concentric exercise. They have shown that old people with very damaged mitochondria in their muscles, after two or three weeks of doing concentric exercises, only shortening the muscle under resistance that they can repair or create new functional mitochondria in their muscle. I think the same thing happens in the nervous system when you can do something protective or constructive.

Int: What about the anabolic exercise of curling dumb bells that would be concentric mostly and other weight lifting you can do stationary?

Ray: There are machines that will let you put force, well shortening your muscles and let you relax as the arm or leg go back into position.

Int: I was driving so I couldn’t call when you were talking about wheat. I’m an old guy and I was on the farm in the 30s or 40s, the wheat now has almost 90% more gluten. That’s one of the problems cause you go to the store and they have gluten free this and that. Back in grandpa day, the grains were beating to have more gluten in the grains. It makes the breads and all that stick together, but I think the doctor knows what I mean when I talk about lectins and when you have a high amount of them and when you eat these lectin containing foods, your body can’t digest these but in the plant world, these protect the plants from harm. When they get in your body they don’t know what to do, cause by nature they’re designed to attach themselves to sugar. They’re attacking sugar molecules. They’re allergic to the modern agribuisiness, wheat. There is a way. I am taking something that contains sacrificial sugars, which are decoys that attach to the lectins, so your cellular sugars are protected. I wonder if you could address that a little more.

Ray: There are a lot of defensive chemicals, many different kinds. For example, bananas are extremely allergenic, probably because of their intensive production and poor soils. They are over producing according to the plant’s own preference, so the plant begins produces more defensive chemicals. Even the polyunsaturated fats in seeds are known to have a specific effect against digestive enzymes and add to the absorption of the lectins and more specific immune disruptive chemicals, but ordinary sugars, sucrose for example, has a tremendously protective effect in resisting all of these inflammation producing factors from polyunsaturated fats to the allergens and gluten type chemicals. Fructose catalyses the ability to use glucose efficiently, so sucrose is better than even well cooked starch at protecting the immune system from these irritants and toxins.

Int: Are you still there caller? (Caller Disappears) Well I hope that answers his question! I think he is taking a supplement of some type of sugar. In terms of stress, what does stress do physiologically?

Ray: The only mistake that I think Hans Selye made in his work in stress. In some places he talks about a limited ability to adapt to stress, because we are born with a certain amount of ‘adaptive energy’ or stress resistant energy, but I don’t think there is such a thing as ‘adaptive energy’. I think of such things as sugar, sucrose and fructose, which let us deal with these menacing things such as serotonin, starches, indigestible fibers, various plant irritants. The sugars are directly oxidised to energy, and inhibit the interfering substances, such as oxidising unsaturated fats. I think what the equivalent of a lack adaptive energy that Selye proposed, I think what it is, is that we have such a bad environment to adapt to that we get worse as we adapt to bad things, such as polyunsaturated fats and chronic excess of serotonin defending us against those irritants. So I think these immediate adaptive substances that in the short range protect us when we have to keep adapting with these short range measure, for example, serotonin increases collagen production, leads progressively to fibrosis of blood vessels, liver, kidney, even the brain develops collagen under excessive stress and serotonin. So too much adaptation to a bad environment, I think is what causes ageing and degeneration, rather than the lack of this hypothetical ‘adaptive energy’.

Int: So the immediate response of serotonin to give someone when they’re stressed either diarrhea or constipation. Well that’s one way of short term possibly helping if it is cleaning out the bowels with diarrhea, but in the long range, the constant exposure to the stress, it can cause the degenerative diseases you have been mentioning.

Ray: Yeah a high calcium diet and plenty of sugar and reducing those things that support bacterial growth will keep your thyroid working and carbon dioxide up. Carbon dioxide keeps the serotonin bound and out of trouble. So when you are stressed and make lactic acid that displaces the carbon dioxide and activates the release of serotonin.

Int: And when you’re stressed, you hyperventilate more easily so you blow off more Co2 so you have even less protection. We have 5 and a half minutes. Let’s keep this at 4 minutes at the most. Hello, my first depression hit in 1964 and they didn’t know anything about depression back then. They put me on (some med) and then we tried mega vitamin therapy, which did nothing either. This happened about six months after I took some very potent LSD. A lot of it was just the shock of realising everything in my life was false. That resulted in a divorce, a loss of job…I split up with my family - a lot of drama. And if people have not experienced a major depression, they just can’t understand. Like I am balanced now, I am taking venlafaxine (Effexor) and that presents problems, because I have prostatitis and that irritates the prostate so I am also taking an oh I think it is an alpha blocker. It helps deal with that. The biggest, I’m gonna try and make it fast (not really. The speech is actually longer but this is a shortened version), the biggest problem in deal with depression is the stigma. And this is just rampant. A lot of it is stress induced. I know mine use to be called chemical depression and now it is called reactive depression and all the chemicals you’re talking about is I deal with. One of the things I wanna talk about is childhood trauma/grief. One of these things I went through, I took these gas treatments. Ya probably have not heard of them. They need to be brought back again. What ya do is you breathe in some nitrous oxide – enough to put you into a hypnotic state – and then – I don’t think the doctors realised the full implication of what is going on – cause then they would switch it to a mixture of carbon dioxide and oxygen so that would kick of the medulla thinking you would suffocate, so then you would hyperventillate. You would not only hyperventilate a lot of carbon dioxide but a lot of oxygen, and I gotta tell you it would take you up there. I mean it was a real trip, a trip to hell for me, my mom would…
…you need to take your question to a VERY closed point, cause we need to…
...okay well balance is everything and I think a lot of it comes down to sharing. I’ve been to therapy. I’ve been to therapy for years, so I’m just gonna hang up and listen to, y’know I’ve had a heart attack and that fits right into it…
…we are gonna have to leave it there…
(And god dammit there isn’t time for any more input from Dr Ray.)
(Insert concluding flute music here)​

 

[Amazoniac]

so there you have it, ultra-lord. could you please re-check?

Ray: Yeah, Hi. I studied biology at the university of Oregon and my dissertation was on ageing of the oxidative processes in relation to reproduction, and how the hormones change with ageing and affect the efficiency of oxidative metabolism and the main hormones that I studied were related directly to estrogen, progesterone and thyroid and the nutritional and environmental factors that influenced those and how the minor hormones and signaling substances in the body are interrelated between the environment and those hormones and the respiratory energy production.

Int: You have a rather unique view of physiology and biology ‘cause I know your methodology is very scientific. Can you tell us about serotonin’s effect, ‘cause I think most people think serotonin is something that is positive?

Ray: About the Second World War, biology has been heavily influenced by several factors. The agricultural industry is interested in promoting certain ideas towards food. The pharmaceutical industry is promoting a very mechanical, reductionist interpretation of health in general, based on the ideas of receptors and genetic interaction with specific hormones and receptors and drugs; and then there is the government and military orientation that has its commitment to certain kinds of psychology and science, promoting again the reductionist, anti-holistic, anti-pattern oriented science.

Int: So that’s why our agricultural USDA recommended daily intake of refined carbohydrates (y’know breads and pasta and those type of foods) was 6 – 7 serving per day and that was the bottom of the triangle.

Ray: And you can see that they are actually having their effect. In the last thirty five years the consumption of flour and cereals, pasta and so on has increased by three percent just as the agriculture department have put in their triangle. It should be a fat bottom on the triangle.

Int: So the agriculture area has influenced the government’s recommended daily intake where if you look at diets from 80 – 100 years ago, the grains were not such a major part of the diet.

Ray: Yeah and in these last 35 years, cereals and fats have increased. Cereals are up 3 percent and fats are up 7%. During that time meat, eggs and dairy have decreased 3% and added sugar has even decreased 1% in these thirty five years and where many people think that nutrition research should be exploratory, looking for new ways that food interact with the newly discovered biological possibilities, the financing is heavily towards industrial food products as nutrients, rather than exploring, for example, the thousands of fruits and vegetables that grow in the tropics.

Int: Our country doesn’t grow those so therefore we shouldn’t eat them?

Ray: That happens with the coconut oil industry, which was used widely in products, Oreo cookies and fried foods and so on from, in about the 1850s and on. When the soy oil industry got tired of competition, they put out tremendous propaganda, starting twenty years ago, saying the tropical oils were poisonous and what they did was increase the consumption of their unsaturated fats.

Int: And now heart disease and high cholesterol and…

Ray: ..Yeah, obesity, related to high blood pressure, cancer and dementia..

Int: ..And diabetes have all been on the increase.

Ray: Yeah and these are known to be increased by unsaturated fats, and cereals and starches. Exactly the things that the government has promoted.

Int: Well, hopefully our listeners don’t listen to what the government promotes around here anyway. Getting back to serotonin, what’s the truth?

Ray: Well an example of how confused the promotion has been is that one of the major anti-depressants is called a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor that supposedly acts increasing by serotonin. They knew that it was a good treatment of vicious dogs and that because it increases their serotonin, but people studying the dogs after a month of treatment with the SSRIs, found that in fact they were less vicious and that their serotonin had gone down significantly.

Int: So it actually decreased their serotonin?

Ray: Yeah I think the anti-depressants that work are actually in the long run shifting the balance away from serotonin.

Int: But the perception is out that serotonin is the good guy?

Ray: Yeah. Forty years there have been many papers published showing that, well starting back with the LSD research, they saw that LSD counteracts the effects of serotonin on smooth muscle, and then finally they showed the antagonistic effect of where it inhibits the serotonin nerves in the brain and so every place that they checked its function and it was an actual antidote to serotonin. It was opposing serotonin and was improving function, such as learning abilities and many physical symptoms, anti-tumor and anti-inflammatory – many good health functions, but because of the government campaign against LSD type drugs, the drug companies came out with some modified forms of lysergic acid, such as bromocriptine and lisuride and some anti-serotonin drugs that were known to lower serotonin, but they advertised them as pro-dopamine drugs, rather than anti-serotonin and or even antihistamine, and in case of one that was really an anti-serotonin drug, but they took advantage of the government campaign against the anti-serotonin drugs to say that the psychedelic drugs made people insane, and so they started promoting the idea that their drugs would make people sane and happy by increasing serotonin.

Int: So that’s how it began! I know you have mentioned the fact that serotonin, primarily, is produced in the bowel.

Ray: It’s a defensive chemical everywhere. It’s one of the primitive protective reactions, for example in the bowel, it causes spasms that clean out the bowels when you eat something poisonous, so it causes diarrhea and that’s protective, but in process if it keeps up too long, it increases serotonin, 95% of it being produced in the bowels, and only 3, 4, 5% in the other organs, such as the brain, and if the irritation of the bowel keeps up very long, the circulation in the bloodstream becomes a problem systemically and it will cause vascular spasms, vascular leakiness, inflammation, for example when you have prolonged irritation of the intestines, tumors begin to promote serotonin release, starting mainly in the appendix. The lower part of the bowel is where it is likely to be overproduced, and that systemic effect hits the right side of the heart, primarily, and then the reason it is worse for the right side of the heart is that the lungs have the enzymes that destroy serotonin, so the platelets pick it up from the intestines in the blood stream and carry it to the lungs, where if it is working they can pretty much destroy all of the serotonin arriving in the lungs. If the lungs fail to detoxify it, then the whole body can be affected, but the right side is where it goes first, and it is pumped from the right side into the lungs. So the right side gets it in its crude form and then the rest of the body, if your lungs are efficient, the rest of the body has a much lower level.

Int: What symptoms of elevated serotonin leaking from their intestine and then acting on the right side of the lungs?

Ray: Fibrous deterioration of the valves on the right side of the lung and ultimately pulmonary artery hypertension and surprisingly the lung has some processes that seem to be the opposite of what we usually think of for antioxidants. Peroxide formed in the lungs, by basically what seems to be a toxic oxygen reaction. Peroxide helps to destroy the serotonin in the lung, so it has a specific use of free radicals, and that seems to be how negatively ionized air helps to relieve asthma and many physiological problems and improve mood, because it helps to destroy serotonin in the lungs.

Int: So pulmonary artery hypertension that’s one of the side effects of increased serotonin?

Ray: Yeah that’s where it got its name from toning up the circulatory system.

Int: So we wanna talk about different foods that decrease serotonin. So Doctor Peat you mentioned the effects of serotonin, if a patient has asthma and constipation or diarrhoea..

Ray: Yeah irritable bowel syndrome is a typical high estrogen, high serotonin problem.

Int: Are there any conditions associated with the pulmonary signs that would not normally be present in a healthy person deactivating serotonin? Are there any pulmonary symptoms that happen in patients?

Ray: Yeah the best established are the asthma symptoms and the pulmonary artery hypertension, but I think probably, the emphysema category where you get thickening of the diffusion pathway between the membrane cells on the surface, between the lung sacs and the capillaries. Lactic acid and serotonin are closely connected. One increases the other. It is known that high lactic acid from too much exercises, causes many athletes to chronically have an increased pathway for diffusion, so that their blood leaves the lungs less perfectly oxygenated than a person with lower serotonin and lactate.

Int: So with asthmatics it’s common that if they remove the food that causes the irritation that their asthma goes away.

Ray: Yeah, that’s the direct effect of the serotonin on the contraction of the smooth muscles in the bronchial tubes. That seems to be where the negatively ionized air can immediately help, by destroying the serotonin faster.

Int: Can we bring up the question of purgatives? To un-stop people with constipation and the prime important in treating prime disorders. Inflammation of the bowels is a primary cause of death but it has seldom been referred to…

Ray: Oh yeah, when I worked in a hamster lab, we saw that the old animals, practically always, when they seemed to be dying of old age were having bowel inflammation and I looked up a lot of 19 century cases and it was a very popular diagnosis of death at that time.

Int: It’s also interesting that our herbal-pharma-ka-pia are passed down the information and the different conditions that they are used for are either laxatives or purgatives or herbs that restore normal function. A lot of them are directed at the bowel and treating that and that was traditionally a very important place cause that’s where we interact with our environment. So how important do you see bowel health to general systemic health?

Ray: Probably it’s the central thing that everyone should think about more, because the connection can be traced pretty directly to Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias and liver disease, heart disease, arthritis. They’ve known for many years that various types of arthritis are alleviated by prolonged fasting, because of relief of the inflammation in the intestines when a person stops eating for a while, but the laxatives and the purgatives are really, the more practical way to prevent that chronic inflammation. Starches and indigestible fibers have been tested on various animals, from horses to rats and practically all of the fibers that are used as food additives, carrageenan and guar gum and various other gums, oat bran and even some of the semi-synthetic things, Metamucil, agar and psyllium, all have been identified as carcinogen for the intestines and possibly other organs and getting those out quickly before they support bacterial growth – Int: and ferment. – Yeah the fermentative bacteria are known to increase the serotonin and lactic acid production.

Int: And endotoxins, that we’ve mentioned.

Ray: There is a back and forth increase of endotoxin by the serotonin and vice and versa.

Int: Just for our listeners, endotoxin is something that bacteria produce in response to digesting these indigestible, fermentable, starches.

Ray: And all of these, both serotonin and endotoxin increase other factors such as carbon monoxide, surprisingly. That’s another of our short-term, primitive defensive systems is the oxidation of the heme molecule and that releases carbon monoxide, that is protective in some ways in the short term, but in the long range, it is known to be closely associated with Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, brain injury, any kinds of tissue injury. It activates the conversion of polyunsaturated fats to inflammatory prostaglandins and all of these tend to release more of the free fatty acids, so it becomes a vicious circle of starch, serotonin, endotoxin and so on…

Int: What’s your take on dietary fiber?

Ray: The two that I have run across in literature and experimentation are raw carrots and cooked bamboo shoots.

Int: These don’t support bad bacteria?

Ray: They are antiseptic or antibiotic in themselves. You can store them for a surprisingly long time, whereas other vegetables tend to rot if you store them in a wet condition, but carrots are used to living in moist soil and so they can kill the fungus and bacteria.

Int: And just as a side note in the kitchen, they make these bamboo fiber towels and everyone knows that with cotton towels after one day of use they don’t smell so good. I guess it’s cause they’re supporting bacterial growth. But the bamboo towels, they are amazing they don’t smell as bad as the cotton towels the next day.

Ray: Yeah they don’t think all of the chemicals have been identified. It’s partly that the cellulose is very resistant to bacterial break down in itself, but it doesn’t have things like pectin. Pectin does support some of the bad bacterial growth and fermentation and the so called soluble fibers in beans and other legumes support bacterial and toxin production.

Int: Why do you think the medical and agricultural industry has been so keen to push dietary fiber down the necks of people? Traditionally we ate a low fiber diet from grains, but I mean we would have eaten our fruit and vegetables but…

Ray: The fibers like the acacia and guar gum. These things are very convenient for food processing. Carrageenan is now very widely used. They can increase the weight of meat by as much as 30% by injecting this water retaining gum and it’s used instead of cream for making ice cream, so it has a very long shelf life. Where if you used a good cream or coconut oil you could get a very fine texture that would last a long time, but it’s a just matter of cheapness of carrageenan and these other gums.

Int: Traditionally we would have eaten potatoes and South America ate a lot of masa, which has been partially digested. So what can we do with the grains and thinking about how tradition has eaten starches and cooked with it?

Ray: Denis Burkitt who sorta started the fiber fad about 30 years ago, when he discovered that Africans didn’t have a very high incident of bowel and liver cancer, and that they tended to have three bowel movements per day, where Americans are more likely to have one or fewer. He thought that fiber prevented the retention of carcinogenic toxins, but he was talking primarily about potatoes and when he came to the US and saw that people were interpreting it as oat fiber, oat bran and various other grain fibers. A few people outside of the US did research showing that those in fact increased cancer incidences.

Int: So if someone were to eat root vegetables and boil them very, very well this helps to break down the starches so it doesn’t provide very much food for the bacteria and saturated fats put on the starches helps to inhibit the growth of bacteria, so mashed potatoes with lots of coconut oil and some butter for some flavour or if you need to gain weight, lots of butter.

Ray: Yeah and it happens that phosphate, which you get in the grains, and this might really be a part of why the fiber in grains is carcinogenic from grains, cause seeds and nuts and grains are so rich in phosphorus and phosphate stimulates the breakdown of these soluble or indigestible fiber by bacteria, and calcium blocks that, phospholysis by bacteria so a high calcium, low phosphate diet goes with saturated fats in suppressing the toxic effect of the starches.

Int: What about fermenting grains, like sourdough breads?

Ray: Yeah the longer it digests, the more it will turn into a sprout and the sprout is basically a little sugar and mostly proteins and water, where the starch is mostly indigestible protein and starches with a high phosphate content.

Int: I couldn’t believe an article by a medical doctor, who had an air of credibility about them and he was really putting down a need for calcium and vitamin D, when you’ve mentioned 2 to 4 to 6000IU of Vitamin D and he was trying to say more calcium is not better and I know you would defend the increase in dietary calcium as being very pro or very anti-inflammatory.

Ray: Yeah, I was thinking about the diet traditionally of the Masai and the related tribes in the high altitudes of Africa and they at least for half the year when the cows are producing milk, often drink five – ten liters of milk a day. It isn’t exceptional, so they are getting 5000mg of calcium or more very often. They don’t suffer from the usual degenerative diseases.

Int: What about the problems of calcification? What about calcified arteries?

Ray: Well, that’s something way back in the 1940s and 50s, Adelle Davis reviewed it in her books that doctors consistently get it wrong. They think mechanically that if you eat more calcium, you’re going to calcify your kidneys and arteries. It has been known very consistently for roughly sixty years that when you’re low in calcium and or vitamin K or vitamin D, your parathyroid hormone increases and it helps to increase it from any food calcium that is in your intestine, but when that isn’t adequate the PTH, is increased by high phosphate, but it takes calcium out of the bones to balance the phosphate and puts it to the arteries and kidneys, so the surest way to guarantee calcification of your brain and hearts and arteries and kidneys is to have a high phosphate, low calcium, low vitamin K and vitamin D diet.

Int: Perhaps that diet was funded by some drug companies cause they know that low calcium and low vitamin d will cause heart disease and bone disease and so… Some of the biggest source of dietary phosphorous is legumes, beans and peas…

Int: We have a caller…

Caller: So I will eat in moderation ‘cause, what kills you one week, is the fountain of youth the next week it seems from these studies. I will have a little bit of everything and not too much of anything is the best answer. As far as food pyramids go, I’ve never eaten one. The closest thing I’ve had is a tortilla chip, but I’ve always chewed that up first cause that shape is hard to swallow ha! My question is about serotonin and I thought it was a brain chemical and since you mentioned the effects on the digestive system, I’m wondering the counteraction or the interaction of melatonin…and alcohol is it considered an endotoxin and what foods may cause alcohol to be created in the gut? It’s good to know because there is a DUI check point in the county this weekend.

Ray: If a person has very sluggish digestion, it only happens occasionally, but yeast can grow so freely if the intestine is sluggish and the membrane immune cells are weak and that the overgrowth of yeast can turn sugars into alcohol and some people stay drunk all the time when they have yeast that are able to live in the upper part of the intestine or even in the stomach.

Int: So then would those people if they drink alcohol would they feel even more drunk, more quickly?

Ray: Yeah, and that tends to increase the carbon monoxide. That’s the toxic part of it. The alcohol itself in those small amounts, chronically, they might be mildly drunk, but that isn’t probably as harmful as the fact that carbon monoxide is increased by the alcohol. That’s one of the problems with drinking any sort of alcohol chronically. It tends to push up carbon monoxide production. And one of the problems with carbon monoxide, besides blocking oxidative metabolism, just like when you’re poisoned by external carbon monoxide, the enzyme that makes the carbon monoxide, releases iron, and iron deposits in the brain, and the liver and other places with a toxic effect.

Int: And how about the connection between serotonin and melatonin…

Ray: It’s clear for a long time that the pineal gland is converting serotonin to melatonin and it’s activated by adrenalin during stress, and so it’s generally seen to have this reaction to adrenalin and it has opposite effects from serotonin, so I think of it even in the brain as a detoxifying system against serotonin. People studying rheumatoid arthritis and heart disease see the same, and I think breast cancers was another, see the enzyme that is able to convert serotonin into melatonin, so it’s probably defensive against these inflammatory, carcinogenic and degenerative effects of serotonin.

Int: What about supplementing melatonin?

Ray: I think it has its anti-inflammatory effects but I think it’s much better to work at the other end. I think it’s unnecessary. You could reduce your tryptophan intake for example, and reducing the starches and inflammation producing things.

Int: And anything that irritates the intestines will cause the intestines to produce more serotonin?

Ray: Yeah, including unsaturated fatty acids.

Int: When you are in love or when you release stress and your stomach is tied in knots is serotonin involved? Or is it adrenaline?

Ray: Well, under some conditions, yeah. It’s the thing that causes stress ulcers. It’s the main thing that causes stress ulcers, like the immobilized rats experimentally will quickly get intestinal bleeding and stomach ulcers, and if they are allowed to defend themselves in some way, even though they are still restrained, they can block that stress reaction and lower the serotonin.

Int: And the way they were able to defend themselves was biting on a stick. It is a very good illustration of that ability to defend yourself.

Ray: I think of that as analogous to the two types of muscle exercise. The concentric, so-called exercise where you are basically walking uphill and shortening the muscle under force and eccentric, where your muscles are stretching in the attempt to contract them, like walking downhills, which make the muscles sore and I think of the ability to bite the stick as the same as doing the same as concentric exercise. They have shown that old people with very damaged mitochondria in their muscles, after two or three weeks of doing concentric exercises, only shortening the muscle under resistance that they can repair or create new functional mitochondria in their muscle. I think the same thing happens in the nervous system when you can do something protective or constructive.

Int: What about the anabolic exercise of curling non-burtlan bells that would be concentric mostly and other weight lifting you can do stationary?

Ray: There are machines that will let you put force, well shortening your muscles and let you relax as the arm or leg goes back into position.

Caller: I was driving so I couldn’t call when you were talking about wheat. I’m an old guy and I was on the farm in the 30s or 40s, the wheat now has almost 90% more gluten. That’s one of the problems cause you go to the store and they have gluten free this and that. Back in grandpa day, the grains were beating to have more gluten in the grains. It makes the breads and all that stick together, but I think the doctor knows what I mean when I talk about lectins and when you have a high amount of them and when you eat these lectin containing foods, your body can’t digest these but in the plant world, these protect the plants from harm. When they get in your body they don’t know what to do, cause by nature they’re designed to attach themselves to sugar. They’re attacking sugar molecules. They’re allergic to the modern agribusiness, wheat. There is a way. I am taking something that contains sacrificial sugars, which are decoys that attach to the lectins, so your cellular sugars are protected. I wonder if you could address that a little more.

Ray: There are a lot of defensive chemicals, many different kinds. For example, bananas are extremely allergenic, probably because of their intensive production and poor soils. They are over producing according to the plant’s own preference, so the plant produces more defensive chemicals. Even the polyunsaturated fats in seeds are known to have a specific effect against digestive enzymes and add to the absorption of the lectins and more specific immune disruptive chemicals. But ordinary sugars, sucrose for example, has a tremendously protective effect in resisting all of these inflammation producing factors from polyunsaturated fats to the allergens and gluten-type chemicals. Fructose catalyses the ability to use glucose efficiently, so sucrose is better than even well-cooked starch at protecting the immune system from these irritants and toxins.

Int: Are you still there caller? (Caller Disappears) Well, I hope that answers his question! I think he is taking a supplement of some type of sugar. In terms of stress, what does stress do physiologically?

Ray: The only mistake that I think Hans Selye made in all of his work on stress, he, in some places talks about a limited ability to adapt to stress, because we are born with a certain amount of ‘adaptive energy’ or stress resistant energy, but I don’t think there is such a thing as ‘adaptive energy’. I think of such things as sugar, sucrose and fructose, which let us deal with these menacing things such as serotonin, starches, indigestible fibers, various plant irritants. The sugars are directly oxidized to energy, and inhibit the interfering substances, such as oxidized unsaturated fats. I think what the equivalent of a lack adaptive energy that Selye proposed, I think what it is, is that we have such a bad environment to adapt to that we get worse as we adapt to bad things, such as polyunsaturated fats and chronic excess of serotonin defending us against those irritants. So I think these immediate adaptive substances that in the short range protect us when we have to keep adapting with these short range measure, for example, serotonin increases collagen production, leads progressively to fibrosis of blood vessels, liver, kidneys, even the brain develops collagen under excessive stress and serotonin. So, too much adaptation to a bad environment I think is what causes ageing and degeneration, rather than the lack of this hypothetical ‘adaptive energy’.

Int: So the immediate response of serotonin to give someone when they’re stressed either diarrhea or constipation. Well that’s one way of short term possibly helping if it is cleaning out the bowels with diarrhea, but in the long range, the constant exposure to the stress, it can cause the degenerative diseases you have been mentioning.

Ray: Yeah, a high calcium diet and plenty of sugar and reducing those things that support bacterial growth will keep your thyroid working and carbon dioxide up. Carbon dioxide keeps the serotonin bound and out of trouble. So when you are stressed and make lactic acid that displaces the carbon dioxide and activates the release of serotonin.

Int: And when you’re stressed, you hyperventilate more easily so you blow off more CO2 so you have even less protection. We have 5 and a half minutes. Let’s keep this at 4 minutes at the most.

Caller: Hello, my first depression hit in 1964 and they didn’t know anything about depression back then. They put me on (some med) and then we tried mega vitamin therapy, which did nothing either. This happened about six months after I took some very potent LSD. A lot of it was just the shock of realizing everything in my life was false. That resulted in a divorce, a loss of job…I split up with my family - a lot of drama. And if people have not experienced a major depression, they just can’t understand. Like I am balanced now, I am taking venlafaxine (Effexor) and that presents problems, because I have prostatitis and that irritates the prostate so I am also taking an oh I think it is an alpha blocker. It helps deal with that. The biggest, I’m gonna try and make it fast, the biggest problem in deal with depression is the stigma. And this is just rampant. A lot of it is stress induced. I know mine used to be called chemical depression and now it is called reactive depression and all the chemicals you’re talking about is I deal with. One of the things I wanna talk about is childhood trauma/grief. One of these things I went through, I took these gas treatments. You probably have not heard of them. They need to be brought back again. What you do is you breathe in some nitrous oxide – enough to put you into a hypnotic state – and then – I don’t think the doctors realized the full implication of what is going on – cause then they would switch it to a mixture of carbon dioxide and oxygen so that would kick of the medulla thinking you would suffocate, so then you would hyperventilate. You would not only hyperventilate a lot of carbon dioxide but a lot of oxygen, and I gotta tell you it would take you up there. I mean it was a real trip, a trip to hell for me, my mom would…
Int: …you need to take your question to a VERY closed point, cause we need to…
Caller: ...okay, well, balance is everything and I think a lot of it comes down to sharing. I’ve been to therapy. I’ve been to therapy for years, so I’m just gonna hang up and listen to, y’know I’ve had a heart attack and that fits right into it…
Int: …we are gonna have to leave it there…

Ray: Thank you!
(And god dammit there isn’t time for any more input from Dr Ray.)
(Insert concluding flute music here)

 

[Amazoniac]

No way! Why does that font worked for me and not for narouz?