Cholesterol is an Important Molecule

00:00 Good evening and welcome to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMUD 91.1 FM. My name is Andrew Murray. My name is Sarah Johanneson Murray. For those of you perhaps who have never listened to our shows, which run every third Friday of the month from 7 to 8pm, we’re both licensed medical herbalists with a degree in herbal medicine, and we consult and see a wide range of clients with a wide range of different conditions. And we also have a certified organic medicinal herb farm that produces the herbs for the tinctures and extracts that we also manufacture. Well, this month, again, we are pleased to have Dr Ray Pete on the show. And for those of you perhaps who’ve never heard of Dr Pete, as I’m sure very often people tune into the show having perhaps never heard it, he will explain who he is and his background. Welcome, Dr Pete, to this month’s show. Hello, Dr Pete. Yes, hello. Hi, welcome to December’s Ask Your Herb Doctor show. 01:01 I don’t want to presume that everyone who has just tuned into tonight’s show knows your background, Dr Pete. So I would appreciate it if you would give our listeners an overview of your professional and research based work before we open up tonight’s topics. Okay, I did my PhD research in aging of the oxidative respiratory systems and how that’s affected mostly by the reproductive hormones and how it causes, for example, the middle-aged infertility in people and animals. What I found that was contrary to the textbooks at the time was that estrogen became the dominant hormone at middle age, causing distortion of the oxidative metabolic processes. And that then got me interested in the factors that contribute to that age-related imbalance. 02:09 And age pigment was one of the things I studied in connection with that change. The age pigment itself is stimulated by an excess of estrogen and it’s formed mostly from polyunsaturated oils. And it oxidizes fuel and consumes oxygen without producing anything useful except some free radicals. The way to prevent that or delay it, I later found, was to protect the thyroid hormone function. So in the years since then, I’ve worked on ways to use the diet to decrease the formation of age pigment to retard the increase in estrogen in the tissues 03:16 and to maintain an optimal thyroid function. Okay, good. Because I know that you’re very keen to emphasize the nutritional side of a person’s lifestyle, rather than simply prescribing drugs or herbal supplements, even. So I know many of the people that have been listening to you in the past or know about you, you have a pretty extensive website with plenty of articles on the website and we’ll be handing out that website address a bit later on. So in relation to a diet, I know that the topic of high cholesterol is a fairly touchy subject, given that most of the statin, well not most of them, but some of the statin drugs for sure, have been implicated in causing reasonably severe side effects. What’s your opinion, Dr. Pete, about the cause of high cholesterol 04:21 and how high a cholesterol do you consider high and how would you approach its treatment? There was a study a few years ago of women in a health rest home or convalescent hospital situations and they followed them from the time they entered until they died and watched how the level of cholesterol corresponded to their longevity and ability to function and the optimal cholesterol level for that purpose, living a long time and keeping their mentality sound was 270 milligrams per cent. Wow and the current laboratories and doctors recommend that it should be under 200? Well there was a framing him study I think it was about 20 years ago which looked at the cholesterol level 05:29 of people as they passed the age of 50 in ordinary life situations and they saw that those who did not have above a 200 milligram cholesterol level were more likely to become demanded and it’s been known for 80 or 90 years that cholesterol is an anti-toxin anti-inflammatory or basic protective substance. It’s like a protective hormone in itself. If it’s increased in experiments with animals the learning ability and maze-running ability of the animal improves just for increasing the amount of cholesterol and cell division involves cholesterol right in the apparatus that allows the cell to divide normally. 06:35 It stabilizes red blood cells. Every level of physiology is protected by adequate cholesterol. Isn’t it also true that every one of our cells has a cholesterol membrane? No. Or is that another myth? The cholesterol is everywhere in the cell. It’s stuck to the chromosomes, the structural, architectural microtubules and microfilaments all through the cell. It isn’t just a membrane-associated thing unless you say that the cell is like a sponge of membranes all the way through so it isn’t just at the surface. Is it true that every one of our cells has cholesterol or utilizes cholesterol? Yes. Even the genetic apparatus is cholesterol is an essential component of every living process. 07:39 The ability of cells to move requires cholesterol. So why do you think perhaps that modern mainstream medicine considers a figure of over 200 people associated with a high incidence of cerebral vascular? I think it’s similar to why the optimal level of blood pressure has been revised downwards. They can treat more patients and sell more drugs if more of the population is defined as thick. 30 or 40 years ago there was a study looking at people’s blood pressure with aging and those whose pressure kept rising with the years lived the longest and a decrease of blood pressure indicated the nearness of death. So as long as blood pressure is on a steady rise that was a good indicator. 08:43 What values do you consider healthy and normal for blood pressure? Well the lower number is really partly an indicator of the elasticity of the system. It’s how much pressure is there when the heart isn’t beating. And so if the system is elastic the lower number tends to be up around approaching 80 usually is a good number. And the upper number should be less than 50 points higher than that. So 120 over 80 with a 40 point difference is very good. A good plumbing engineer knows that keeping the pressure steady without great rises and falls makes the water circulate more smoothly. It’s the same in the bloodstream. You don’t want the lower number to drop too low otherwise the blood stops moving. 09:52 Okay getting back to cholesterol. Given that you would consider a value of 270 to be acceptable is this more for elderly people or would this apply to younger people? That’s for old people the same as the blood pressure thing. The cholesterol rises as there is a problem to be soothed. And when the tissues are less efficient they need more blood supply. So the blood pressure and the cholesterol tend to rise with aging as tissues need more care and attention. So do you consider this to be a dangerous treatment that doctors might be prescribing statins to older people when their bodies need a higher cholesterol to protect them? There have been several studies that they always rouse a great reaction. 10:54 But back in the mid 80s in Hungary there was a big study in which they saw that using a drug to lower cholesterol increased the death rate from just about every cause. Cancer, suicide, even getting murdered was more probable when a person had their cholesterol artificially lowered. But would you perhaps cover some of those things that cholesterol is protective then and what it would be responsible for helping us? It is the main defensive substance but it in turn is converted into other protective substances the first of which are pregnenolone and progesterone and also DHEA, another basic protective steroid. It should be massively converted into those more specific protective substances 11:59 but it can only be converted when the thyroid is adequate. Explain that. Well in an experiment they have put the bloodstream flowing into an organ like an ovary or an adrenal gland and if the blood contains vitamin A and thyroid the amount of progesterone being produced by the gland varies directly with the amount of cholesterol going into the gland so it is a massive quantitative conversion. So if you have a low blood cholesterol then you are going to have a low production of progesterone coming from that ovary? That is why it is dangerous to have it artificially lowered because it is the raw material for making all of the very specific protective steroids. So this is why the dementia is a positive reason why dementia would be higher in low cholesterol clients 13:05 because these protective hormones are not being manufactured in sufficient amounts to prevent that degradation. There are several lines of reasoning that show that progesterone for example is extremely protective to the brain. It promotes healing and regeneration after the brain has been injured and it is now being tested in people who have had car accidents and these are made for brain damage for example and it makes just a tremendous difference in survival rate and recovery rate and if your cholesterol is artificially lowered your brain is going to be deficient in progesterone. And the brain and the ovary like we have been talking about that they are very important or the cholesterol is very important for those organs. That is just two out of a lot of organs in our body and a lot of processes that require progesterone. Is that correct? 14:09 Every tissue has its response to progesterone. All nerves are stabilized by progesterone. The skin and connective tissue joins it for example in the animal experiments as well as in people that I have seen. They can create emphysema artificially in an animal and cure it with progesterone. And I have seen it happen in a week with a person just supplementing progesterone and they can breathe very nicely. Excuse me Dr. Pete can you please hold the phone a little closer to your mouth because we have just had four dollars call in and say that they are having a difficult to hear in you. We can hear you fine here in the studio but perhaps on live on the air it is a little bit harder to hear you. Okay so basically you are saying that this progesterone is very very important for anti-aging and for keeping even normal cellular processes going 15:14 and we don’t have enough cholesterol in our bloodstream that is coming from our diet or that we are synthesizing then we will probably have a low level of these protective hormones progesterone being one of them. Yeah and thyroid has to be present too for that conversion to take place. As early as 1993 it was found that during the cholesterol treatment of rabbits which caused circulatory disease they found that if they gave the same amount of cholesterol to the rabbits and also some thyroid hormone it didn’t hurt their circulatory system and the experimental cholesterol treatments have turned out to be using a toxic form of oxidized cholesterol and if you just leave cholesterol sitting in a bottle too long before doing the experiment it is likely to become oxidized and some of the cooking practices that are recommended create the toxic oxidized form of cholesterol. 16:32 For example people often recommend that you steam salmon or fish to cook it at a lower temperature than frying it or grilling it but it actually increases the toxic oxidized cholesterol so that steamed salmon has more toxic cholesterol than grilled beef steak. It’s the slow oxygen exposure to unsaturated fat which creates the toxic effect and the early experiments in Russia in 1912 treated the rabbits with cholesterol dissolved in vegetable oil and it turns out that vegetable oil is the actual culprit in heart disease. So when they slice open someone’s arteries around their heart and they see oh there’s all this cholesterol that’s blocking the arteries. 17:37 The cholesterol is there primarily to protect the cells against the pre-radicals produced by the polyunsaturated fats. Okay and polyunsaturated fats for our listeners out there tonight are from vegetable oils including soy oil, corn oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, fish oil, all the canola oil which in England is called rapeseed oil, cotton seed. And these are primarily the predominant oils used in the food chain now. So are you saying that those oils are so damaging and so toxic to the lining of our arteries that it causes this toxic reaction breakdown inside our arteries and then our body tries to patch up with pieces of cholesterol? Yes that was pretty well worked out in the 1940s. Lab animals were dying of various symptoms including infertility and softening of the brain and it was found that it was because they were adding these unsaturated vegetable oils to their feed. 18:52 And that turned out that it was blocking their thyroid function and preventing them from using the protective cholesterol. That series of experiments and observations had its ramifications through the 1940s and 50s but agriculture took advantage of the anti-thyroid effect of these vegetable oils to use them to fatten animals economically. So instead of pigs being fed the compost they were then fed corn and soy and their fat then represented a large amount of these vegetable oils. Yes it was common to use waste food like spoiling apples and vegetables and whey from the cheese factories and so on. But when they learned that they could fatten the pigs on much less food if it contained these unsaturated oils that became the basic industrial animal food. 20:04 Wow well it makes sense to me because these vegetable oils are you know if it wasn’t the industrial revolution we wouldn’t be able to make a product out of the oils so efficiently. And you know because it’s not something we’ve naturally been eating for hundreds of years thousands of years in such a concentrated form such as corn oil it does make sense that that could be something that could be bad for you. In Mark Twain’s time he told when he was driving the riverboat on the Mississippi he told about hearing merchants talking about how cheap the cotton seed oil was from the cotton industry and that they were going to teach Americans to eat that instead of butter. And that was already in the 1880s I guess it was. I know there’s another subject and I do believe it’s linked to thyroid and perhaps you can bring that out for us but diabetes seems to have been a disease that’s certainly exploded in terms of the numbers of people that are diagnosed with diabetes. 21:17 And I know you also brought out last month or the month before in October a relatively close to home story about your own father who ultimately didn’t need to use any medication for his diabetes. But could you mention a little bit about diabetes and what can be done to treat that or why I guess number one why is it such a exploded diagnosis and the roots of treatment for it. Well the diet of Americans and Europeans has changed over these years in which diabetes has been increasing with the greatly increased consumption of polyunsaturated vegetable oils. Even eggs now they feed chickens so much corn and soy that even eggs have less cholesterol and more polyunsaturated fats. 22:19 And in 1963 or 64 a researcher named PJ Randall observed that he could block the oxidation of glucose just by feeding an increased amount of fatty acids and that’s now called the Randall cycle. And that when it became popular to feed hospitalized patients intravenously with the fatty motion to try to keep them from losing weight they very quickly discovered that it suppressed their immune system and caused a variety of other symptoms but it almost immediately would cause an elevation of blood glucose and that was exactly what PJ Randall had noticed in his animal studies. 23:21 The diabetes was basically explained biochemically in the 1960s when if you feed more fats you block the response to insulin create insulin insensitivity or resistance and that’s now called type 2 diabetes or syndrome X. And is this with any kind of fat an increased fatty diet or is it just the vegetable fats? When you feed people or animals a very high sugar diet you can feed them so much that you greatly increase our own synthesis that these fats are saturated or monounsaturated fats. And even if you feed so much that you cause a great increase in triglycerides circulating fat and even cause increased deposition of fat in the liver for example it’s lowering the toxic effects of pre-radicals protecting the tissues 24:34 and it actually helps to lower the blood glucose it has an anti-diabetic effect to feed a high sugar diet. Contrasting that with starch the complex carbohydrate that dieticians have been recommending now for 30 years the starches have the opposite effect. They increase your insulin resistance very quickly just as if you were eating fat because the starches don’t support our own production of saturated fat. So you’re saying that it’s only the vegetable oils that actually lead to an increased blood glucose and a saturated fat to actually help protect against the increased blood glucose. Yes with the qualification that eggs and pork and chickens are now fed so much vegetable oil that their fats are toxic too. 25:39 So it would only be the more saturated fats like from coconut oil or from butter. Wow so not only are vegetable oils contributing to a damage to our arteries and then our body plaques it over with cholesterol. So they’re actually the cause for supposedly cholesterol linked heart attacks but also they’re responsible for elevating blood glucose levels unnecessarily. Okay and then I think there’s a mention about estrogen in particular being also a cofactor in worsening the situation. What was the cofactor? Estrogen or increased estrogen. Yes estrogen causes increased deposition of fat in the liver and increased circulating triglycerides but it interacts closely with the unsaturated fatty acids so that women typically have more of the polyunsaturated pre fatty acids circulating than men do. 26:54 It’s just a peculiarity of estrogen that it creates this bias that makes the polyunsaturated even more toxic than it would be. Now what would you say would be some of the best solutions to estrogen I guess first as we’re just talking about it now. But for ladies perhaps are listening that have either a history of estrogen type or estrogen dependent type situations or just estrogen, high estrogen in menstruating life. How would they ease that situation with natural or nutritional support? About 70 years ago there were studies in animals that showed how to do that when people were in prison camps in the Second World War there were a lot of them on the edge of starvation and when they got out and were able to eat 28:03 it was found that many of the men developed breasts and the animal experiment showed that a deficiency of protein causes the liver to be unable to remove estrogen and also to inactivate or to activate the thyroid hormone so that just eating more protein can sometimes activate metabolism and cause the ratio to go towards progesterone and to eliminate estrogen. But women must be careful to avoid these animals that have this polyunsaturated fatty acid in the fat. Yes so you wouldn’t want to eat mainly pork and poultry and fish because those are anti thyroid. The number of unsaturations in the fatty acid which is highest in fish oils for example that number corresponds with its ability to suppress the thyroid hormone function. 29:16 And so cutting out those oils from the diet as far as possible it isn’t possible to eliminate them entirely but eating as little as possible allows the thyroid to work more efficiently and having around 80 to 100 grams of protein a day as a minimum more doesn’t hurt 120, 150 even is very good for an active person. But also reducing the starches which suppress our own ability to make the saturated fats, replacing the starches with fruit sugar. For example in animal experiments they have found that just adding coca-cola to an animal’s diet will make it lean, able to eat much more food without gaining weight just because of the sugar in it. 30:27 Were they replacing the starches in the animal’s diet with the coca-cola? Yes. Right so then it was more of a sugar like a natural fruit but in the form of sucrose from the… Orange juice is the ideal way to get your sucrose but you can increase your metabolic rate from the animal experiments to suggest you can increase it 50 percent. So you would go from getting fat on 1500 calories a day to getting lean on over 2000 calories a day. Just by cutting out all your starches, increasing your protein and replacing the starches with lots of fruit. And what about you know when I’ve had people tell me oh I can’t eat that much protein because I get kidney stones? Eating enough calcium interestingly is the best protection against that and the sugar in fruit juice will act very much like vitamin D. 31:30 In vitamin D deficient diets they found that if the animals ate starch they became deficient in calcium. But if they ate sugar they acted as if they were able to assimilate and retain the calcium just as well as getting some vitamin D. So it is important to get vitamin D but the sugar alone makes a tremendous difference in how you handle your calcium. And when you eat enough calcium you suppress the inflammatory agents including the parathyroid hormone so that the calcium goes into your bones and stays there. Rather than forming stones in your kidneys. And doesn’t go into your arteries and kidneys to poison them. So then that would be a high calcium diet in conjunction with the high protein diet and a high fruit diet is what basically you’re suggesting. 32:38 Yeah that’s why as a quick therapy diet I recommend a person having at least two quarts of milk and two quarts of orange juice every day. Because this will stimulate them. Get the thyroid going and suppress inflammation and help the liver regulate things. And would you recommend when you recommend this to people do you recommend that they have this in place of breakfast and lunch or as well as their normal three day meal. I mean three meals a day. If as it starts working it will increase their caloric needs so that if they’ve been staying maintaining their weight on a thousand or fifteen hundred calories as the milk and orange juice start to activate their thyroid hormone and lower the estrogen and cortisol they will gradually be able to increase their caloric intake up to at least two thousand calories a day. 33:47 Wow that’s quite incredible. Really is quite incredible. You’re listening yeah we better let people know what’s going on I think because we’ve been so involved with talking to Dr. Peter and listening to his advice that I’ve forgotten to mention. You’re listening to KMUD 91.1 FM and this show is Ask Your Herb Doctor. Joining us this month is Dr. Ray Pete and we’re very pleased to have him on the programme and he’s very steeped in nutritional certainly a nutritional approach to illness. He has many remarkable tenets for his treatment and also some of those things that perhaps would be counter culture especially the saturated fat versus polyunsaturated fat debate that’s raging away now. So it’s 7.37 now so until the end of the programme at eight o’clock we usually open up the lines and people are invited to call in with any questions they may have related to this month’s topic surrounding high cholesterol, high blood pressure and diabetes. We all live outside the area. The number is 1-800-568-3723 or if you’re in the area the regular number is 923-3911. 35:00 We haven’t said much about high blood pressure but… Yeah please do. The same diet increasing your thyroid function regulates the mineral balance such that it lowers your adrenaline, lowers the sympathetic nervous system activity and allows the minerals to be balanced with water so that increased thyroid function lowers blood pressure although many doctors have been misled at the few. You think it would be the opposite but it’s not. I know I have an article here from the clinical journal of endocrinology and metabolism from May 2002 and it was showing that the rule of thyroid hormone in keeping blood pressure stable and also showed that there’s evidence from short term hypothyroidism in humans where people will have elevated blood pressure. We’ll get back to that in a moment. We have a caller on the line. 36:02 Dr. Ray Peake, is that your name? Mhmm. How do you spell that please? P-E-A-T. P-E-A-T? P-E-A-T. P-E-A-T. Okay. Earlier I heard you talking about productive cholesterol is important for connective tissue. Did you say something like that? Yes. Alright, now I was born with a disease, a rare disease where I don’t have any connective tissue over my whole body. Have you heard of such a thing? Is your tissue very elastic? No, no, I don’t have the elasticity. Like, you know… It’s like I blister, I break open all the time. There’s no real treatment for it yet. When they open up the stem cell research, maybe then they might find a cure for it. 37:07 Have you tried increased amounts of vitamin E? Yeah, I did when I was younger and that made me very horny. Very horny. And I couldn’t control it hardly. I got out of girlfriend. But it was shocking to her too. Working on your hormones so that you can use enough of the antioxidants, sometimes that corrects that blister, susceptible disease. Could I achieve that goal with a hyperbaric chamber? No. No. Going to a higher altitude, in fact, where you get a lower oxygen pressure is more likely to help. Okay. The name… I guess… Can I have your address? Do you have an address that I can write to you further about this? 38:11 Do you have internet access? Yes, I don’t, but I could use the computer, the library or… Okay, well let me give you his website and you can contact Dr. Pete through his website. Okay. And also you can read a lot of… he has a lot of his freedom’s letters online there that you can read for yourself. Good. Okay, so it’s www.repeatrypeat.com. Okay. So it’s www.repeat.com and then you can go ahead and contact him directly through there. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you for your call. Okay, I don’t know if there are any other callers on the line. No. Okay, so… So Dr. Pete, it’s long been known that people with high functioning of thyroid or hyperthyroidism that they can suffer from high blood pressure. 39:14 There’s also research that shows that people with low blood pressure can also be… I’m sorry, people with low thyroid function can also be suffering with high blood pressure. In general, the research shows that increasing thyroid function lowers blood pressure and I think what has happened over the last 30 years or 40 years, I’ve seen two or three people who actually had hyperthyroidism without a doubt, but I’ve seen dozens who were told by their doctors that they were hyperthyroid, but as I encouraged them to talk to their doctors about how the diagnosis was made, many of them said, but the doctor says I’m, at the same time, hypothyroid and hyperthyroid. Doctors have been so confused that they say you can be both hyper and hypo at the same time 40:15 and most of these people that I have seen who had a diagnosis of hyperthyroidism were actually classical hypothyroid cases that doctors don’t read the old textbooks anymore. For example, one thing that happens very often in hypothyroidism is that the activity of the sympathetic nervous system and adrenaline production increase to compensate for the lack of thyroid actual energy production. And I’ve seen people with 40 times the daily output of adrenaline times the normal amount who were hypothyroid. So because our bodies so low thyroid and their metabolism is so slow, their bodies trying to compensate by stimulating adrenaline production and of course, what does adrenaline do but raise blood pressure? And I’ve seen people who had as fast a pulse as 180 beats per minute at rest after a year 41:20 who that was taken as one of the diagnostic features for hyperthyroidism, but when they took thyroid within a week for the first time in years, they had a normal pulse rate of 80 or 90 by lowering the adrenaline. Because then it was supplying the thyroid hormone that they were lacking in the first place. So this is why I wanted our listeners to be aware of is that a lot of times modern medicine just treats the disease. It doesn’t treat the cause of the disease. So high cholesterol, high blood pressure and diabetes are so common in America today and in the world today. And if you look deeper, the cause of this could be thyroid disease, which is easily treated. And there’s dietary recommendations that Dr. Pete has described some of tonight that can help your thyroid health. And the medication is also fairly innocuous and safe to take. So can you tell us anything more about the interaction between the high blood pressure and the thyroid, Dr. Pete? 42:26 Yeah, the toxemia of pregnancy or pre-eclampsia is one of the things that got me interested in how blood pressure is regulated by thyroid. It’s very common starting in the 1950s when the drug companies came out with their chemical diuretics. They told women that if they take the diuretics and restrict salt intake during pregnancy that they’ll prevent the high blood pressure of toxemia. And what they were doing was starving the developing baby of an adequate blood supply by reducing the blood volume. And they created millions of stressed, damaged pregnancies by restricting the salt intake. And the adrenaline rises when you restrict the salt intake just as it does when you restrict the thyroid function. 43:37 So I noticed that premenstrual syndrome had many features in common with toxemia of pregnancy. And women were told to restrict their salt intake premenstrually. And because some researchers found that they could cure toxemia and bring the blood pressure down to normal by giving the women adequate amounts of salt and protein, I suggested that for premenstrual syndrome, women who get swollen feet and so on, try eating as much sodium as they crave. And sometimes that’s a very large amount, maybe 15 grams a day premenstrually is what they crave naturally. And they found that it prevented their swelling feet and other symptoms. So after seeing that work, not only in the pregnancy research, but in many women with premenstrual symptoms, I saw that old people very often had a similar syndrome. 44:50 And when they would go on a salt restricted diet, they would develop insomnia very frequently, suggesting that their adrenaline had gone up. So I suggested to some friends who were in their 80s that they start eating as much salt as they felt like. And not only did they sleep better, but their blood pressure came down. They completely counter what you’d normally hear. Well, salt at one time was highly treasured and was used as a monetary trading. So, I mean, it’s just a very modern way of thinking that salt is bad for you, really. It’s very, very modern. We’ve been dependent upon salt for forever. A man named David McCarren 30 years ago noticed that the government figures that were used to support the low salt diet treatment for high blood pressure, he noticed that in the actual figures, the people who ate the most salt had the lowest blood pressure. 45:56 And those who ate the least salt had the highest blood pressure. And he saw that what they had been neglecting was the calcium intake that often went the other direction of the sodium. When people didn’t eat milk and cheese, they would often eat salty snack foods. But he showed that it wasn’t the sodium excess that was causing high blood pressure, it was the calcium deficiency. So perhaps these people that have been on a low salt diet, they need to increase their salt and increase their calcium foods. And obesity is another thing that is often associated with high blood pressure, but the same thing applies to obesity. The people, I noticed that when I was traveling in the Slavic countries, there was very little milk available and lots of the people were very fat. 46:57 And as soon as I went across the border from Russia into Finland, I saw the stores were full of milk and cheese and everyone was slender and healthy. And that was how I looked up David McCarren’s work with calcium. And it turns out that salt and calcium both, as you increase them, your metabolic rate increases, your ability to oxidize sugar. And the anti-diabetic effect is increased with increasing sodium and calcium. And obesity is decreased because you’re burning your sugar. Rather than converting it into fat and storing it. Yeah, with chickens, they gave them slightly salty water, almost like sea water. And all of the signs of aging as well as obesity were decreased just by having to drink a little salt water. 48:03 So they quickly took the salt water away because they want the chickens to be nice and obese so they can make more money. Yeah, those were just lab chicken. So they couldn’t sell that to the chicken industry to stay here. The salt is going to cure, fix your financial problems. Yeah, no one cares if chickens live in healthy old chickens. It’s a little bit off the subject perhaps, but about diuretics. I guess I’m thinking of sodium and salt and diuretics and the kind of the osmolar concentration of the blood and how diuretics work to excrete more water, etc, etc. Do you have any safe methods for increasing diuresis? Yeah, calcium, it helps. And by optimizing sugar metabolism, it energizes the kidneys so that they work better. But baking soda and sodium chloride both have a diuretic effect. 49:08 And the only chemical diuretic that I would recommend in any situation happens to be one that diures are now using to prevent mountain sickness. It’s called diamox and it was originally used to lower eyeball pressure to prevent glaucoma. And how it works is that it increases your carbon dioxide in your tissues and that helps to regulate the salt. And it’s used in many conditions including epilepsy and glaucoma as well as high blood pressure. Excellent. Okay, we have a caller on the line, Dr. Pete, so are you on the air? Hello, I just wondered how olive oil is. I mean, in a quantity like as much as a tablespoon a day, it’s fine, but it does have 10%!o(MISSING)f the polyunsaturated fats. 50:11 10%!?(MISSING) Is it okay when it’s cooked? Yeah, those fats are toxic even if you eat cold pressed unsaturated fats. They warm up in your body and then the blood pumps catalysts and oxygen through the warm fat so it doesn’t matter how fresh they are when you eat them. They’re going to get rancid anyway once they’re in your body. Okay, thank you. Bye. Thank you for your call. Did you want to carry on? Carry on with high blood pressure in the diuretics. Sodium chloride, can you explain, Dr. Pete, how salt can actually be a diuretic when we’ve been so ingrained in thoughts of you? In these studies, Tom Brewer and his wife wrote some books, Nutrition for Pregnant Women, two or three books on the subject. 51:16 And he gives a research background, but how it works is that estrogen suppresses your ability to make albumin and it makes your blood vessels leaky and it causes you to lose sodium easily. And so the blood volume decreases and the kidneys don’t get enough oxygen or sugar because of the shrinking, the loss of sodium and albumin. And the albumin getting into your tissues causes toxic effects as it leaks out of the bloodstream. And the kidneys put out hormones that drive your heart to beat harder and tighten up your blood vessels to even try to increase the circulation to the kidneys and in the case of pregnancy to the uterus to feed the developing baby. And just by the albumin doesn’t work to retain water when there’s not an associated cloud of sodium atoms bound to the albumin in the bloodstream. 52:31 And so just by eating sodium, the albumin which is still in your bloodstream now has an ability to osmotically attract water and eating salt will pull water back into your bloodstream, increase the blood volume. And then you can excrete it through your kidneys. Yeah, and then it refuses the kidneys, energizes them and they stop driving the blood vessels to tighten up and so it lets the excess sodium out. Okay, well that’s a very interesting description. We do have a time for one more caller but we have to remind callers that we need to make it quick because it’s four minutes till the end of the show. Yes, I have a question about how your thyroid relates to Lyme disease. Well, the whole immune system is the issue there. A very healthy immune system can throw off chronic infections like that. 53:42 Like Lyme disease? Yeah, it’s best to do it quickly with an antibiotic but you always want to back up the antibiotic with an optimized immune system and the thyroid and calcium and vitamin D are really basic things to make your immune system not cause inflammation but to be able to eliminate pathogens. Alright, thank you Dr. Interesting Program. Thank you for your call. Thank you. Well, as I said, it’s three minutes to now so we’d better give an outro. I thank you to Dr. Pete. Thank you very much Dr. Pete for joining us on the show and for those listeners who would like to read more about the information Dr. Pete has to share. If you can go visit his website at www.raypeat.com and that’s R-A-Y-P-E-A-T. 54:48 He has numerous articles there that are free of charge to read newsletters that he has written. And I can usually send a few references for issues that I don’t have on the website if people email me. If you have questions about specific conditions and you’d like to email Dr. Pete, you can do that. Alternatively, you can consult with Andrew and I and we can email Dr. Pete on your behalf. If you have any further questions, you can call us on 888-WBM-ERB and that’s 926-4372. And thank you very much for listening to the show and thank you very much Dr. Pete for joining us this evening. Thank you. Thank you for your time. Okay, well, for all of those of you who listened, we thank you for tuning in. For those of you who have ears, let them hear. And we’ll be joining you again next year in 2009. So for all of you, we wish you a very merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year. Good night.