Cellular Repair

00:00 Well, once again, we have our very popular ever-present scientist to share his views and opinions with us on this show, and that’s Dr. Raymond Peat. Dr. Peat, thank you for joining us again. Yeah, hi. Again, as always, for those people who perhaps have never listened to the show, if you would just give people a resume of your background, that would be much appreciated. 1968 to 72, I studied mostly physiology and biochemistry at the University of Oregon and did my dissertation on age-related changes in the uterus, oxidative changes, and I found that estrogen and polyunsaturated fats tend to accumulate or increase in the tissues with 01:01 aging and interfere with the use of oxygen, and since then, I’ve been working out the implications of that, and the topic you mentioned derives from that subject. Yeah, good. Okay, so you did say that oxidative changes in utero, and I think that’s one of the first things I think I’d like you to open up with. The parallels between the development that you’ve mentioned that happens in utero, which is very interesting, which happens without a scar, so whenever tissue is damaged in utero, the scar actually doesn’t happen, whereas in regular life, once we’re exposed to the things that you’ll bring out, scarring is pretty common, but there is definitely a way to do something about it, isn’t there? In the uterus, early in the development of the embryo, there’s no blood supply, and so 02:01 the cells are just absorbing oxygen and sugar and amino acids and vitamins and such from their environment, and as the cells change there, every time they divide the environment for each new cell is different, the more cells there are, the more complex the environment is, and if you happen to be next to a hungry cell, you won’t get the same supply of oxygen and sugar, and so the changing shape as the embryo grows interacts with and modifies the supply of nutrients, and so the very shape that the embryo develops into is governed partly by the supplies that the mother can deliver to it. 03:06 Now this relates to things like brain size or skull size and everything, for example, they knew in the 50s already that if you lowered the blood sugar of a well-developed fetus using either estrogen or insulin, which would lower the blood sugar, the brain cells would simply stop multiplying as long as the blood sugar was inadequate, and if you take a chicken embryo and an egg, for example, its brain stops growing exactly when the hands provided glucose supply is used up, but if you open the egg and inject a little bit of glucose, the brain will start growing again, and the chicken will develop with a bigger brain than 04:10 normal chickens ever had. So this is why it’s so important for pregnant mothers to have optimal nutrition because it’s supporting the growth, the brain’s development and the growth of their baby to an optimal level. Yeah, from the month six to delivery, most of the brain cells develop, in fact, about half of the brain cells that are present at month six die off, and that’s how you can influence the size of the brain by providing sugar. The more sugar there is, the fewer of those month six brain cells will die off. Maybe pregnant mothers needed to just be hooked up to an IV of fructose. There you go. I know you’ve mentioned in the past that fructose crosses the placenta like glucose, but it doesn’t come back to the mother, so it’s a good sugar to provide. 05:10 Yeah, it’s what baby wants, apparently, because it doesn’t give any back. Well, supposedly, it’s very traditional in the Steiner philosophy that mothers should eat a lot of honey, and honey is very, very high in fructose like sugar is as well. They’re both similar, aren’t they, Dr. Pete? Yeah. OK, so let’s open up a little bit more. The differences between scarring in adults when they are compromised by what it is they eat and what they don’t do, and how in utero with the high levels of progesterone and the absence of the, well, hopefully the absence of the polyunsaturated fats, scarring is virtually absent. Yeah, there’s no inflammation involved in repair. If you remove some tissue in the fetus or embryo, the adveining cells simply multiply 06:11 and fill in with more cells, apparently you’ve left the available nutrient supply increased relatively by taking out some cells, and so the neighboring cells have more and can simply grow faster and fill in the space. In a mature animal, there are many things that interfere with that. The blood supply is interrupted if you have an injury, and so the supply of sugar and oxygen is reduced, and so there are mechanisms to make up for that, to try to increase the delivery of sugar and oxygen. And this is a stress metabolism. I tried to describe it to people. It’s your emergency backup. Basically, if your body is not performing under ideal conditions, then it does the next 07:15 best thing, which isn’t a particularly good job. Right, but at least it gets the sugar there to the degree it does, but it has other harmful inflammatory effects. Yeah, the glucose is largely provided during stress from breaking down proteins. First, you use up what’s stored as glycogen, but when that runs out, then you have to break down protein. That’s why it’s important to not go longer than eight hours, because you use up all of your glycogen in your liver, right? Yeah. I’m sorry, not to go more than eight hours without eating. Yeah, and the lack of oxygen or the presence of lactic acid, which is produced by a lack of oxygen, either of those turns on the production of a very simple protein that serves as supporting 08:18 material, but also as a barrier substance, so that cells that are injured put out the framework collagen material, but too much of that will increase the distance that oxygen and sugar has to travel to reach the cell, so it can make the problem progressively worse. The more a cell embeds itself in collagen as a result of the stress, so you get more framework material, but less functioning cellular material, and that’s a scar. But if you look at the whole life development of the organism, every tissue has to renew itself constantly, like your skin and your intestine. 09:18 Everyone knows that those are streaming from the stem cells at the bottom of the layer as the cells multiply and mature. They reach the surface where they fall off, but every tissue and organ in the body is undergoing the same sort of movement from stem cells to mature functioning cells, and ideally that’s just a continuation of the development of cells in the embryo and fetus. They’re fed, they multiply, expand, and complexify. As things interfere with the ability to use energy or oxygen, the mature animal progressively moves into a generalized inflammatory state. 10:22 It doesn’t take a specific wound to turn on these cytokines and hormones and such histamine and serotonin and so on. Which are all the back-up stress? Yeah, stress itself, a generalized systemic stress, starts turning these on in your fat cells, your liver, every organ can produce these, and that starts basically to shift the whole body in the same direction that scar formation goes. Your whole body loses vital functioning cells and replaces them with collagen, inert, connective tissue so that old meat, for example, is tough because it’s full of collagen. An old animal hide is thicker and tougher because there’s more collagen and then kid 11:29 gloves are delicate, but mature goat skin is a thicker kind of leather, and that happens in all of the tissues, progressive, basically turning towards scar tissue type of function. So I just wanted to ask what types of processes inhibit the ideal use of oxygen and sugar in our bodies? Well, the thyroid is the basic thing, and thyroid activates the respiratory enzyme for which copper is the crucial cofactor. And so if you load up on iron, an excess of iron is one of the things that tends to displace this crucial copper, and anything that interferes with your thyroid function will also interfere 12:36 with the functioning of this copper-containing enzyme. Too much darkness, not enough good light reduces the activity of this enzyme. So people need to get lots of sunshine this summer, and it doesn’t have to be during the hottest time of the day. Actually, it’s more ideal if it’s not during the burning hours, so it’s in the morning or in the later afternoon evening. It’s the red light that’s so regenerative and healing and helps your body use oxygen and sugar more efficiently. And in the absence of sunlight, if you just shine a very bright incandescent light on your tissues, within a few minutes, the oxidative enzymes are activated and reduce stress. And of course, the more of your body that’s exposed to the red light from the sun is good, or from the light bulbs, normal incandescent bulbs, but even if you just walk around with 13:36 short-sleeve shirts and shorts on in the summertime, you’ll be getting, it doesn’t matter which part of the tissue it touches, any part will help all of the tissues throughout the body. Okay, so you’re listening to Ask Your Rep, Dr. K. M. U. D. Galvival, 91.1 FM, from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o’clock. You’re invited to call in with any questions related to or unrelated even to this month’s subject of cell repair and how to avoid scouring amongst other things. I guess speaker is Dr. Raymond Pete, and thank you again for joining us, Dr. Pete. I just wanted to carry on the kind of concept of not scarring, healing without scarring is pretty new to me in terms of the way, I think most people understand the way their bodies work when they get injured, they get cut, generally form a scar. So what you’re saying is really, especially in the absence of poofa, now the polyunsaturates that people consume in their diet from the liquid vegetable oils and the other sources 14:41 of polyunsaturated oils have a very negative and inflammatory effect in the cascade that would otherwise produce active cell repair without scarring, as well as other products would have to be necessary. And some of the worst inflammatory agents are produced directly from the vegetable oil polyunsaturated fats, omega minus 6 class form the prostaglandins. And these are very pro-inflammatory. The fetus is highly protected against those, so that people talking about the essential fatty acids so-called have noticed that human babies and calves are born in an extremely deficient state, they say, and that’s been used to sell the addition of fish oil to baby formula. Goodness, when it actually is completely the opposite, they don’t need it and don’t 15:42 want it. The placenta protects the baby against those fats. They don’t cross the placenta then? No, the sugar that the baby does absorb makes the omega 9 series, which are anti-inflammatory. So humans haven’t eaten these oils in such large quantities ever before until the 1920s. And that’s part of the reason why there’s so many degenerative diseases and we’re going to talk about a few more, like the pancreatic damage that happens to the beta cells from excess omega 6. If you would, Dr. P, I know in the past you’ve mentioned this as well, but I think to people that are listening would certainly love to hear it again. Diabetes, I know you’ve mentioned that as a typical illustration of that vicious cycle that builds up when polyunsaturates intensify the stress reaction. And stress can be just everyday stress, that’s true, isn’t it? Just normal stress. It doesn’t have to be physical trauma. 16:44 Yeah, anytime your blood sugar falls, that’s a stress reaction. It first calls up adrenaline to move glycogen into the bloodstream, largely out of your liver, but your muscles have quite a bit of stored glycogen too that they can use. And adrenaline first activates that, but when you run out of stored glycogen and your blood sugar falls more. And how long does that take? Some people do it in two or three minutes, but with a good liver you should be able to go eight hours without any stress. That’s why as soon as you wake up in the morning you should have a glass of orange juice or something sweet to get your blood sugar back up from the long night of fasting. That’s why it’s called break fast breakfast. I didn’t mean to interrupt you there, Dr. Pete. So when the blood sugar falls or when you have any stress, the adrenaline after the 17:48 glycogen is depleted, the adrenaline starts mobilizing free fatty acids out of your fat cells, but also out of your other tissue cells where possible lipids are turning down very fast and the possible lipids will come into the blood releasing free fatty acids. And if you’ve incorporated a lot of the polyunsaturated fats into your tissues, these free polyunsaturated fats happen to not only interfere with sugar metabolism, but they also signal more stress hormone production. So they will tell your brain that the stress is worse than it was. Right. They have an intensifying effect then. Yeah. As opposed to the saturated fats which tend to inhibit the stress reaction. 18:49 So it’s a self-limiting thing. If you’ve been a sugar or saturated fat eater and have a stress, you release the saturated fats which are anti-inflammatory and turn off the stress hormones. Wow. Okay. So that’s why if you don’t eat, then you’ll eat yourself. If you don’t feed your body, then your body will eat itself. And just to detail for our listeners, Dr. Pete, can you please explain which oils are included in these polyunsaturated fatty acids that we’re talking about tonight or otherwise known as PUFA? Yeah. All of the things you see widely advertised, corn oil, canola, soybean oil, sunflower oil, sunflower oil, walnut oil, sesame oil. Cotton seed oil. Yeah. Okay. So to look at, I think again to refresh people perhaps at listening, I know that the epidemic 19:55 of diabetes is certainly taking the quality of life away from a lot of people. So perhaps if you illustrate the role of the cause of, or maybe not the cause, but the sequelae of diabetes as a kind of illustration of this stress reaction and the vicious cycle of inflammation. Yeah. The American diet in the last 30 or 35 years when the diabetes and obesity have been increasing so much, the polyunsaturated fats are the biggest increase in our diet, not trigger. But if you look at the nature of the pancreas, there’s a constant renewal of the beta cells that produce insulin in the pancreas. So the idea that once you’re diabetic, you’re doomed to always be diabetic because you don’t 20:56 have the cells in the pancreas. That went out when people discovered the idea of stem cells in one of my newsletters on trigger and diabetes. I mentioned the studies that showed that glucose stimulates renewal of the beta cells in the pancreas. So that’s sugar for helping a diabetic’s pancreas regenerate. To renew itself, but if, since the polyunsaturated fats and the prostatolandins that they form are toxic to the beta cells, if you don’t have enough glucose, you’ll just keep killing any beta cell that appears, even though you do have the stem cells, they’ll be converted to beta cells just to get killed by the poofa. And it happens that the stem cell, the flow from the new cell to the mature insulin cell, 22:05 it happens that one of the early stages in this streaming is from the glucagon producing alpha cells in the pancreas. The alpha cells turn into beta cells as they mature and the glucagon producing alpha cell raises the blood sugar. And so if you have a lot of the alpha cells in proportion to the beta cells, that will create apparent diabetes because the glucagon causes the breakdown of protein e-tissue and increases the glucose, which is helpful potentially if it’s only a temporary measure. So it’s like a stress reaction. The body’s trying to emergency save the lack of sugar in a diabetic’s pancreas by increasing 23:07 the amount of glucagon to raise the blood sugar. Yeah. And then if you have a lot of sugar supplied, you don’t need the glucagon producing cells, so they move on under the influence of sugar. The flow is increased and you produce the beta cells and the sugar should be holding down the stress and preventing the free fatty acids, which would form the prostaglandins that would kill the beta cells. So this is why you mentioned that study done in England that showed in the early treatment of diabetes they actually gave the diabetics sugar because they noticed they were losing so much sugar in their urine and they actually improved. Something like 12 ounces a day that said the highest quality white sugar. Yeah, and they started picking out weight. Because it lowered the stress and allowed their beta cells to fully develop. 24:08 Within just a few days, they stopped producing so much sugar in their urine as they were eating these huge amounts of sugar. And as they stopped destroying their own tissues, they began gaining weight instead of losing weight. Okay, so again, I think this moves on to our next topic. The concept of cell streaming and stem cells. Stem cells are a pretty hot topic in the last, certainly the last decade. And I wanted to just make people aware of a couple of different doctrines and you’re in one of them. So it’s a kind of the hay flick doctrine that I know you’ve mentioned before in the 60s. The one extreme was to say that there were no stem cells and then an article that you pointed out that I read earlier from a, I think it’s actually Israeli, and his name is Gershom Zajec and he has produced a lot of articles on, he’s actually an MD, but he’s 25:13 produced a lot of articles on the internet about the streaming organism and amongst other things, the Kabbalistic meditative methods of overcoming cancer amongst other things, but not to diverge from that. And your opinion about the streaming of cells from one cell type to another is that there really is no point at which stem, at which cells do not turn into different cells. You’re saying that ultimately any cell can become a progenitor or a stem cell. Yeah, that’s easiest to see probably in the liver. The Zajec has demonstrated that there is a flowing from the portal vein side of the lobule in the liver, moving the cells towards the vein in the center of the lobule. 26:15 But about 50, more than 50 years ago, LP Poulishaev was demonstrating that kind of renewal in muscle cells and even brain cells, showing that even mature neurons, given the right kind of stimulation, can undergo mitosis and become new cells. One of the current places where this is important is the idea of adrenal fatigue that a lot of people are talking about. It ultimately derives from the idea of Addison’s disease and a misinterpretation of Han Selye’s stress research in which he showed that very intense stress would cause the adrenal glands to enlarge and even bleed and then die, and then the animal would die. 27:21 But if the stress is moderate, the adrenal is very good at renewing itself. You can demonstrate the total renewal of the adrenal cortex by scooping out the contents, everything that’s inside the capsule of the adrenal gland can be scooped out and the cells of the inside of the capsule, the fibrous capsule, there’s a layer of cells that will multiply and they will, within about three months, produce a fully structured and new adrenal gland. And so it’s the same idea as the pancreas renewing itself if you give it a chance. And the same logic that you can see in the feedback systems of sugar and glucagon and 28:26 the shift to insulin in proportion to the available sugar. In the adrenal gland, the cells that are near the capsule are the cells that produce aldosterone or the other class of mineral steroids, mineral regulating steroids. As they mature and stream towards the center, they turn into another layer that produces cortisol and the glucocorticoids. And then at the last stage, they produce the androgens and sex steroids. And they know it’s amazing how one cell knows how to differentiate into all those different types of cells to produce different hormones. And it happens that the things that are most stress producing, like serotonin, for 29:31 example, or shock will turn on the activity of the glomerulosa layer that produces the aldosterone. And aldosterone intensifies some of these defensive stress reactions. And the people are now starting to speak of it as an endogenous toxin that activates so many of these stress reactions. But serotonin is a major factor in turning it on. But it’s the first thing produced. And as the organism starts surviving, if it can get past that shock stage with adequate sugar, then the glucocorticoids are produced. And finally, the sex steroids, which aren’t needed if you’re going to be in shock and 30:32 starving to death and so on. So they’re the least important in the emergency mode, but the most important in a healthy mode. Yeah. So this is why it’s so important to eat optimal nutritionally, eat optimal nutrition so that all of your cells can function normally and healthily and regenerate. Yeah. And when you are in this healthy state, producing an abundance of protesterone and testosterone, for example, these turn off the aldosterone production. So once you achieve the mature, happy state, then even though your cells are still there and they’re still streaming, their function is inhibited the same way that sugar inhibits the function of the glucagon producing cells. 31:33 Okay. You’re listening to ask your doctor on KMUD-Galbaphoel 91.1 FM. And from now until the end of the show at 8 o’clock, you’re invited to call in with any questions related or unrelated to this month’s subject of cell repair and how to avoid scouring amongst other things. Guest speaker is Dr. Raymond Pete. And the number here if you live in the area is 923-3911. Or if you live outside the area, the toll-free number is 1-800-568-3723. I just wanted to bring out the point that you’d mentioned that in Africa, and I think the same parallel is something that we heard about or were taught, that honey has been traditionally used to heal wounds and is actually very effective at doing that in the absence of antibiotics or other anti-infective measures that you’ve also mentioned that sugar can be packed into a wound. If you don’t have antibiotics even, if you have a fairly large wound and you can pack 32:37 sugar into it, you have a very good chance of healing it properly. Yeah, in Africa, when there was no antibiotic available and they had to do chest surgery, they simply filled up the chest hole with massive amounts of sugar. And they discovered that it not only didn’t get infected, but it healed basically without scarring. And in the newsletter on diabetes, I mentioned some of the references where they find packing a wound with sugar inhibits the formation of excess collagen and causes almost scarless healing. Well, honey never goes bad, right? Yeah, partly it’s the osmolarity. It dehydrates things, but it also has the antiseptic ingredients that white sugar doesn’t 33:40 have, and it has the fructose which promotes actual healing instead of scar formation. OK, and some of that also is linked to the fact that the energy supply is present to drive the cellular repair locally. Yeah, keeping the energy supply equal to the demand is what short circuits the inflammation system, it goes right to repair like the fetus. OK, all right, well let’s move on to another subject. I know that you’ve talked about a little bit in the past, but we’ve never really done a show based around it, and that was the similarities of toxemia, and this will be a subject that will be of interest and importance to pregnant ladies who perhaps are halfway 34:41 through their pregnancy or not even. That toxemia and preeclampsia have similar effects to what you would expect to see in aging and fibrotic inflammatory conditions as well as atrophy in general. Yeah, just about everything that happens to a woman in preeclampsia and to the fetus is similar to what is happening to advanced aging symptoms, loss of functional tissue, all kinds of circulatory problems, hypertension, nerve problems, liver malfunction, inflammatory processes everywhere. In the 1950s, Dr. Tom Brewer was shocked when he saw the drug companies promoting the sale 35:46 of diuretics to pregnant women to prevent edema, and at the same time doctors began advocating Salk restriction besides use of diuretics and diet restriction to prevent, supposedly to prevent toxemia because toxemia involves swelling and edema, and so the drug companies said here is a diuretic to get water out of the body, but the mechanisms by which it gets water out reduces the blood volume, and that tells the kidneys that you need more circulation, more blood, and the kidneys circle signal with renin to activate the adrenals, 36:48 for example, to produce more aldosterone, to try to increase the blood volume to save sodium, and so when you cut down sodium, you make the adrenals produce more aldosterone to retain it. So Tom Brewer reviewed the evidence already in the 1950s. He had a good collection of scientific studies showing that more salt was secure to toxinium. Protein was the thing he mostly emphasized, but protein and plenty of salt and calcium, so milk was the ideal protein because drinking two quarts of milk you get more than 2,000 milligrams of calcium, and the calcium is one of the things that helps to turn off aldosterone, 37:50 and the sodium is very powerful at turning off the aldosterone, and the aldosterone is one of the immediate villains in producing many of the symptoms, such as leakyness of blood vessels, lets the water fall out of your blood, cause your feet and face and such to swell up, so just drinking more water just causes more edema. And that’s still a common recommendation that doctors give to pregnant mothers, I’m not just talking about in general, but actually to pregnant mothers, they say you need to increase your fluid intake, and they don’t mean orange juice or milk or other nutritious liquids, they mean water. Yeah, the medical profession has pretty much quietly forgotten about the salt restriction and diuretic episode, because it probably would be considered a crime against humanity 38:52 that would lead to replacing medicine with chiropractics or something, but they’re still doing silly things like advocating drinking more water. Okay, so to get on to calcium in its role, I think a lot of people don’t understand this, and again I don’t know how it happens, I don’t know how the whole thing happens with salt restriction being a medical piece of advice and actually causing edema, I don’t understand how people take it on board that the diuretics they’re given are really doing the opposite of what they should be doing, because they shouldn’t be used, but diuretics are actually self-defeating in terms of how they work physiologically, and how sugar has been so maligned and how it’s so important. A calcium again is another one, so the concept of when you have a low calcium diet, you’re 39:54 not drinking a lot of milk, you’re not eating cheese, and the other sources, maybe greens, are the other sources of calcium, that when you have a low calcium in your diet, your blood calcium actually gets bigger, the concentration of calcium in your blood increases, and that calcium is very damaging to soft tissues. Can you just say a little bit about that, because I think that’s another common misconception that… Yeah, David Maturin about 30 some years ago worked at a California university, and he noticed that according to the government’s own figures, the people who had the highest blood pressure ate the least salt, and the people who ate the most salt had the lowest blood pressure, and he said there’s something wrong with the side shift, restricting salt, and so he looked at the figures and saw that calcium was really the main thing affecting 40:54 blood pressure. He got fired from that university and moved to Portland, and had, I guess, about 30 years working at the university in Portland, continuing to do research, so there are many papers by Maturin showing that it’s really a calcium deficiency, rather than a sodium excess that causes high blood pressure. Because calcium is another thing that will lower the stress hormones, and that helps lower blood pressure. Yeah, parathyroid hormone is what you can see most easily coming down when you eat more calcium and have adequate vitamin D, and parathyroid hormone increases aldosterone, and so you restrict calcium, your parathyroid hormone goes up, that makes your aldosterone stress hormone go up, that makes you increase your blood pressure and retain sodium. 42:00 Okay, I think the last time this is, ask your doctor, it’s quarter to eight, so from now until the end of the show at eight o’clock, you’re invited to call in, the number here for living in the area is 923-3911, or the 800 number is 568-3723, it would be a first for the show if no one called in, and I’ll take that as a very excited state of listening listeners. People are just so plugged into listening here, I know sometimes we get lots of calls, and at this point in time it doesn’t really matter, but if you’d like to call that, that would be just fine. Okay, so the whole calcium thing is another misnomer then, that calcium, when you don’t take adequate calcium, your blood calcium goes up and calcium gets deposited in the soft tissues, and this is also part of the reason why the cardiovascular disease happens in the first place, because of the insult we’ve taken, calcium being taken up into the arterioles, and then becoming less flexible. Yeah, the parathyroid hormone takes calcium out of your bones, and moves it into all the 43:07 soft tissues, kidneys and arteries, where it causes blood pressure to rise in the arteries to become stiff. So a calcium deficient diet leads to hardened arteries and high blood pressure? Yeah. Okay, we’ve actually got three callers now. So we better start taking some callers. Hello? Hi, you’re on the air. Yes, I know you were just explaining the salt connection, but I want to get a little more clear on that, because so many doctors seem to think that salt is just the worst thing in the world, and especially if you have high blood pressure, and recently I had a situation, well, I’m a bit overweight, and my blood pressure was high, now I’m on medication and it takes care of that, it’s pretty mild, it doesn’t have side effects, but I’ve always had light salt, kind of had a craving for it, and I had atrial fibrillation recently, which it turned out was related to, suddenly I’d had an overactive thyroid, and I’m taking treatments for that to try to balance everything out, but the cardiologist thought that I should 44:12 eat, like, practically cut out salt, because she thought that that would help me lose weight, and bring my blood pressure down, and that the blood pressure could aggravate the atrial fibrillation, although it’s interesting that weight doesn’t seem to have anything to do with atrial fibrillation, like it does other kinds of heart disease, so I haven’t had an atrial fibrillation attack since I’ve been dealing with the thyroid balancing it out, but in the meantime, I’m wondering about the salt thing, I mean, my blood pressure seems to be controlled with the medication, is there any advantage to cutting back on salt for me? The hypothyroidism causes you to lose sodium, and it’s probably the main cause of people having high aldosterone, and once you have high aldosterone because of low thyroid or low calcium. 45:18 Well, I had hyperthyroid, I had an overactive thyroid, and now I’m getting it under control. That’s often a diagnosis, but it’s often a doubtful how factual the diagnosis is, because stress will cause your TSH to give an indication of hyperthyroidism, and the high stress hormones can give you many of the symptoms of hypothyroidism, but those can very often be cured by a supplement of thyroid. I’m actually taking thyroid now to balance me out. Did you have a treatment? Yes, I had the radioiodine treatment to shrink my thyroid, so now it’s down, it’s producing rest, and it should be, and I’m just about at the end of the shrinkage, and so now they’ve got me on 88 milligrams of fibroids to balance it out, 46:23 so I don’t produce less, because producing more can be really dangerous too. Increased blood viscosity is a major thing causing the rhythm problems, atrial fibrillation. Well, they’ve got me on a blood thinner and a heart regulator. Thyroid, by making you able to regulate your minerals, thins the blood, and it makes it easier for your heart to pump the blood by lowering the viscosity and regulating the minerals to maintain the right volume of blood at the right viscosity. So, investigating your thyroid function in more detail, you might not need the blood thinner, because thyroid is probably the basic thing that keeps the blood viscosity 47:33 low, and hypothyroidism is extremely common as a cause of hypertension, and that involves increased aldosterone, and that will create the appearance of so-called salt sensitivity. The calcium deficiency and low thyroid function make you actually sensitive to salt so that you can raise your blood pressure by taking salt. Well, now I’m getting my thyroid balance to where it’s supposed to be, so you say that will thin my blood naturally, they’re hoping that that will occur, but where does the salt fit in? Can I have a normal amount of salt without worrying about it? If your calcium intake is well over a thousand milligrams per day, and your vitamin D is good, then there’s very little likelihood that you will be one of those salt-sensitive 48:36 people. Okay, because I am taking a good amount of vitamin D, I’ve been tested, and I don’t have a shortage of vitamin D, which most people apparently do, and calcium, how much calcium do I need again? A thousand or two thousand milligrams. Okay. All right, well, thank you. I’ll let somebody else have a turn. Thank you very much. Okay, we’ve got two more callers, so let’s see if we can give them both equal opportunity. You’re on the air? Hello? Hi, you’re on the air. Hi. My question is about one of Dr. Pete’s newsletters on tissue found estrogen in aging, and I was just wondering, he mentions that for menopausal women, they often get a lot of the estrogen concentration in their tissues as opposed to their blood, but progesterone can knock it out of their tissues and into their blood. I was just wondering if it would be advantageous if they could take a dose of progesterone and then get a phlebotomy. Would that help to decrease the systemic estrogen? 49:37 No, if the liver is working, if you’re eating enough protein, and if your thyroid is okay, your liver will send the estrogen straight to your kidneys to be excreted as soon as the progesterone gets it out of your cells into the bloodstream. There are several enzyme systems involved in this. The progesterone basically destroys the estrogen receptor, the binds estrogen. It destroys the enzyme that releases estrogen from the glucuronic form to deposit it in cells. It activates the enzymes that add the glucuronic acid to remove it from cells, and it shifts the oxidative enzymes so that they destroy the active form of estrogen. So everything that progesterone does to estrogen system gets it out of the 50:45 cells, then your liver will send it to your kidneys to excrete. And progesterone helps the liver get rid of the excess estrogen as well. Yeah, progesterone activates the thyroid to do that. Okay, so their body would take care of it naturally without having to take the blood out? Yeah, basically, thyroid and protein nutrition are the things that shift the balance. Okay, excellent. Thanks a lot. Thank you for your call. One more caller? You’re on the air? Hi, I’m going to talk quick and get to the point because I know you have a little time. I was told that in this culture, because people’s diets are so acidic, that there’s like a lot of cultures that don’t eat any dairy whatsoever, and the white rays, but they like a lot of fish, and people have not a lot of fish, like small amounts of fish, but a lot of vegetables, and they get all their calcium just straight from that, and they never take supplements, 51:46 and they don’t have a few of those. And it was told to me that because of the acidic diets that we have, that the body will actually release calcium out of the bones and teeth in order to save the arterial walls from being destroyed ultimately from all the acidity, to try and attempt to alkalize it, and that’s why we have so much arterial process, and I was just wondering what your thoughts were on that. Basically, I was told that it wasn’t necessary to take calcium supplements if you were eating a balanced alkaline diet. Well, one of the problems with calcium supplements is that some of the cofactors are very bad, like calcium phosphate. Some of the supplements have so much phosphate that it’s the phosphate that increases the stress hormones and activate the breakdown of the bones. But the main things 52:53 that take calcium out of the bones besides an excessive phosphate are cortisol, prolactin, and serotonin. And those all trigger parathyroid hormone, and other stress hormones. So in terms of the caller’s question about the acidic diet, do you think that has a direct effect on calcium mobilization from the bones into the blood? Well, phosphate is the main acidifying thing in the diet, and it mostly comes from beans, whole grains, and seeds and nuts, and meat. Sounds like a vegetarian diet. Oh, and meat, yeah, of course. So that’s why I think the generalization is that American diet is very acidic, because meat is very acidic, whereas dairy products are actually, milk is almost, I mean, it’s very neutral. If anything, it’s a little bit alkaline because of the high calcium, and it’s actually calcium 53:57 deficiency that will cause so much calcium to leach out of the bones and get deposited in the places you don’t want it, like your kidneys and your arteries. Okay, I don’t know if that answers the question, but we do only have three minutes left, so we need to give credit to Dr. Pete and let listeners know how they can find out more information for themselves. Thank you so much. Yeah, you’re very welcome. Thank you for calling. And for those people called in this evening, thanks for calling. Okay, Dr. Pete, thanks so much for your time again. Okay, thank you. So Dr. Raymond Pete’s website is www.raypeat, r-a-y-p-e-a-t dot com, and there’s lots of scholarly articles there for you to read. There’s probably something in the region of about 50, and they’re all fully referenced, and many different topics of contention being exposed for what they are, incredible lies, I think in short. 54:58 I can say that lie travels around the world faster than truth can get her boots on. Yeah, there you go. Okay, so we can also be reached, as I said at the beginning of the show, toll-free during Monday through Friday at 1-888-WBM-URB, and in a few days here, it’ll be the solstice, the middle of the year, and the days will start to get slowly shorter, but at this point in time, the sun’s right in the middle of the sky, and people’s thyroid should be doing good from all the sunlight. So vitamin D’s going good, and people keep this partly unsaturated fat sight of your diet, and you’ll be going a long way to improving your health. Anyway, more next month, the third Friday of next month, so thanks for listening. Thank you for listening.