Digestion

00:00 Hey and welcome to Politics and Science. I’m your host John Barkhausen. This week we continue with another archive interview that I did with Dr. Raymond Pete. He’s a physiologist who lives in Eugene, Oregon, and he’s been studying health and the history of science for his entire life. He’s pretty much the smartest person I’ve ever talked to. And today this interview was recorded in 2010 on April 26th, and it concerns digestion, mostly human digestion, but I think it relates to all mammals as well. And it’s about how it works and how it affects us and the psychological and physical repercussions of good and healthy digestion. So I hope you can digest some of the show, and with that I’ll let it get started. Here we go. I am pleased to tell you as the host of Politics and Science that I have on the show again today Dr. Raymond Pete. 01:08 Dr. Raymond Pete is a PhD in biology from the University of Oregon with specialization in physiology. He’s taught at colleges including the University of Oregon, Urbana College, Montana State University, National College of Naturopathic Medicine, Universidad Cruzana, the Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Mexico, and Blake College. In addition to his science research, bi-monthly newsletter, and other writings, some of which are available at raypeat.com, he conducts private nutritional counseling. Hopefully Ray, are you there? Yes, hello. Oh, good. Welcome back, and I’m basing our discussion today on one of your recent newsletters. Ray Pete’s newsletter is available, I think you can find out about it, at the website raypeat.com. They’re always interesting, and this one is from January 2010 entitled, Scara Energy Cancer and the FDA’s Laxative Abuse, and I thought I’d use it as a takeoff point to talk about digestion in general, 02:16 which I don’t think there’s much coverage of that in the media at all, and yet it’s something we all have to do. And I thought, Ray, that perhaps you could start off by defining what you consider to be digestion in a healthy organism or a healthy human. Well, everything should work smoothly. The food should be appetizing so that it stimulates the whole system. Pavlov was one of the pioneers in really studying digestion scientifically, and he showed that the knowledge of the food and the sensory quality of the food completely dominates the digestive process. And recent experiments show that the taste of the food will even affect your blood sugar. 03:17 If you eat something sweet, it’ll actually raise your blood sugar. Even if your throat is cut, it’s a nervous connection that tells you that you’re ready to start using food so even if the food doesn’t get into your blood, the taste of it will start raising your blood sugar. Pavlov isn’t widely studied. There continue to be some digestive experiments, but now they’re mostly done by the pharmaceutical industry and such things as what predators do to digestion and so on. But there’s a long scientific history of digestive processes, mostly on animals, a few on people. 04:18 Walter C. Alvarez was a famous gastroenterologist who had a newspaper column, and helped get some scientific information into the general culture regarding digestion. When did that happen, Ray? When was Alvarez writing? In the 40s and 50s. Well, he did much of the scientific work in the 20s and 30s, but he became a popular columnist in the 40s and 50s. After his time, most of the good research was done on animals and related to agriculture mostly, but some of it was just a basic knowledge of how the intestine and digestive organs work. For example, they would isolate a loop of intestine so that they could measure the blood going in and out 05:26 and then put certain foods in that little piece of intestine and watch what happens. That was sort of getting detailed information on the general work that Pavlov had done regarding how the organs would respond to the nervous stimulation. They found, for example, working with the intestinal loops that the more complex the food in the intestine, the more vigorously the digestive process worked. So that one kind of experiment shoots down a whole bunch of dogma regarding food mixing or eating things in certain combinations. The most complex mixture seems to be the one that digests the most efficiently. And predigestion has been advocated for foods like proteins, but in one experiment, 06:34 the digestive enzymes were stirred with acid and some protein to be digested. And just stirring it at body temperature didn’t do much digestion, but when they added a piece of the intestine that had been washed and sterilized and fixed, so it was basically just a structural framework. Adding that structural bit of intestinal tissue, suddenly the protein digestion went full speed. So it isn’t just the enzymes in the liquid that digests the proteins into amino acids, which can then be absorbed. The protein has to be in a certain configuration held in place by the surface fuzz of the intestine 07:38 before the enzymes can efficiently work on it. And since it’s digested in contact with the cells, then the amino acids are absorbed immediately as they’re liberated from the protein. And after the age of one, a person’s digestive system doesn’t do very well with free amino acids compared to the whole protein. So basically the food in the close to living state complex and structurally more or less just mixed by chewing is all it needs in preparation. And something that a lot of people don’t think about is that humans don’t have the enzymes 08:44 for digesting a lot of the plant materials such as cellulose, lignin, and other structural materials. So if we just simply chew vegetables, most of the material, unless we chew it for half an hour each bite, a lot of it is going to be still trapped in the undigestible framework. And bacteria in the intestine can then get at it. So you’re supporting bacterial growth when you eat most vegetable material depending on how fibrous it is. So they’re always recommending we eat fiber so I can see that that could be a problem. But before we get into solutions for digestive problems, 09:46 maybe you can cover what some of the basic problems, causes, and stages of the different types of digestive dysfunction there are. I mean a lot of people are allergic to things and there’s toxins. There’s also just, as you were talking about, Pavlov and how the mind works in interaction with digestion. I know a lot of people who are stressed out and have trouble digesting when stress is high. Yeah, just the nervous tension will make things slow down. Adrenaline will make your intestine stop moving. It’s an adaptive thing so the fight or flight reaction isn’t interrupted by intestinal activity. So high adrenaline will not only shut down the movement of the intestine and the secretion of digestive fluids, 10:47 but it even reduces the circulation to the intestine. And if it’s too intense, it prolonged shutting off the blood supply. It happens more in old people, but the chronic exposure to adrenaline can actually cause some of the intestine to die from lack of blood circulation. And short of that, prolonged stress will, by reducing circulation, it makes the intestinal wall become a poor barrier so that more toxin leaks through when you’re in an anxious state if the anxiety is prolonged so that the intestine isn’t getting enough blood to maintain its barrier function. Some types of hormonal disturbances will increase your activity of the parasympathetic nervous system, 11:54 the opposite of the adrenaline side. And that often goes with high histamine release. And when histamine is released, serotonin is often excessive too. For example, in low thyroid people, there is often an excess of all of the transmitter substances, sometimes it goes in the direction of serotonin, sometimes adrenaline. And serotonin and the parasympathetic system and histamine all excite the muscles of the intestine, cause it to contract and even go into spasm. And sometimes the spasms will shut off function. But more often, overactivity of that side will produce diarrhea. So the type of your nervous distress can make a big difference. 12:57 I see. And as our digestion gets out of balance, either it tends towards constipation or diarrhea, and is one worse than the other? Are the remedies different? Well, in constipation, if it’s associated with high adrenaline, the constipation tends to cause prolonged absorption of bacterial endotoxin. And in an acute case of diarrhea, things are washed through so fast that it often reduces the absorption of toxins. So just as a rough generality, occasional diarrhea is probably somewhat therapeutic. But chronic constipation, for thousands of years, they’ve known that it’s associated with cancer and other diseases. 13:59 Just recently I’ve been seeing cases of people with chronic constipation and bowel problems, who are having strokes, aneurysms, and abnormal clotting, and stroke hemorrhages, that are now known to be promoted by endotoxin and the inflammatory responses to the endotoxin. I know you’ve written about endotoxin quite a bit, and I’ve talked to some other medical people about that, and they’ve never heard of it, and I find that quite remarkable. And why don’t you describe how that occurs? Okay, if you feed the bacteria, that’s one factor that you can grow a culture of bacteria that are especially harmful. If you are under stress, so you’re intestine lets too much of that into your bloodstream, 15:00 that’s another stage of the problem. If you don’t feed your liver and keep it well energized with the right amount of thyroid hormone and good vitamin mineral protein supply, your liver won’t be able to detoxify any of the endotoxin that reaches the liver. And then the defensive responses, a little bit of endotoxin leaking in all the time keeps us in an immunologically toned up state, so that it can be like exercise that gets you ready for a more intense stress. But if your liver is letting too much of it through then, it gets you into the chronic state of inflammation. People injured in a serious accident, often when they’re taken to the hospital, 16:09 all of their organs will suffer kidneys, lungs, liver, all of the major organs will tend to lose function. Endotoxin is the main thing that is involved in that multiple organ failure. But where it’s just a chronic process, the same reactions to endotoxin, the inflammatory reactions, produce the degenerative changes in the blood vessels and the brain, promote tumor formation from chronic inflammation that can’t be healed and corrected. All of the degenerative diseases are the last five or ten years. That’s one of the very biggest areas of medical research. 17:12 And so there’s a tremendous new increase in endotoxin and its role in degenerative diseases. But coinciding with this, the FDA has outlawed all of the traditional laxatives. Before we move on to some of what the FDA is up to, so endotoxin is a bacteria that’s always with us but we can usually keep it under control and it just gets out of control under stress situations? Yeah, with aging and more stress, our liver is less able to detoxify it and other organs have some of the detoxifying enzymes. Our brain is pretty rich in detoxification systems but delivers the main one to be concerned about if the intestine is stressed enough 18:16 that a lot of it is getting through. And low thyroid function is one of the things that makes the liver very weak at detoxifying things. And one of the things the liver always has to detoxify, endotoxin is always there unless we’re raised in a germ tree bubble. But estrogen is always there too, especially in women after puberty. The liver tends to slow down under the influence of estrogen and that tends to let estrogen increasingly interact harmfully with other systems so that you get some very similar effects from over exposure to endotoxin or to estrogen. 19:20 They both activate some of the blood vessel degenus and inflammation leading to degenerative diseases. Now inflammation in the digestive system, first of all, what is inflammation and how does it affect our digestion? The first thing that happens with endotoxin and or estrogen is the production of too much nitric oxide. One of the ways that that makes capillaries leak is that it makes them take up too much water and one of the ways these toxins cause cells to take up too much water is by knocking down their oxidative metabolism. The nitric oxide poisons the mitochondria so that they can’t produce energy very fast. 20:29 As the energy production goes down, the cell simply swells up and gets looser in structure as it fills up with water. So that increases the leakiness and lets more of the toxin get through. And as this proceeds, it goes from the capillary admitting more of the toxin to the surrounding connective tissue taking up more and more water and the wall of the intestine as well as the wall of the blood vessel. On the small level, the wall of the blood vessel gets thicker so that it cuts off the delivery of oxygen and contributes to the problem. And as the oxygen supply goes down, cells produce lactic acid and lactic acid triggers more of the inflammatory substances 21:38 and the wall of the intestine takes up more and more water through all of the layers of muscle, connective tissue, blood vessels and so on. Until at an extreme state, many people have seen x-rays of their intestine after they’ve taken a barium meal and you can see places where there are big wads of the opaque white material and other areas where there’s none at all or just a little thread of it going down a channel in the intestine. That’s often caused by the intestine becoming so thick that there’s no space left for the movement of food or liquid down the channel. Even the barium liquid can’t find a channel to get through. So that’s the worst kind of constipation is where the intestine swells up with massive amounts of water 22:47 instead of being a membrane-like tough muscular organ that becomes a big fat, heavy sausage-like organ. And you’re saying that swollen, watery state is basically a state of inflammation? Yeah, and the first simplest remedy for that for many people is just to take some aspirin and Benadryl to lower the inflammatory mediators. And the reason aspirin works is that people have consumed too much of the polyunsaturated fats which then turn into prostaglandins, which are one of the endpoints of causing inflammation and water logging. And histamine release is defended against by the antihistamines. 23:51 And so to reduce the risk in the long run, it’s important to minimize your intake of those precursors of the inflammatory prostaglandins. I see. So you recommend not eating unsaturated fats because of that? So moving along, part of the digestive process is peristalsis where I guess your actual intestine has a contraction that moves down the length of it and moves food along. Yeah, and if their water logged, the muscles simply can’t contract. It’s like if your arms swelled up to be two feet in diameter, you wouldn’t be able to bend it. That’s right. That’s a good point. 24:54 So now you mentioned aspirin helps a lot as an anti-inflammatory. Are there other techniques? And I’m curious, if you go to a doctor, what’s the normal recommendation for, say, somebody coming in who’s constipated? Oh, they tell them to drink more water or they give them starch-like material that binds water and makes the stool moister. That’s pretty much the standard approach to think of it as just a mechanical problem, but having a moist stool is nice if you have an intestine that can pass it along, but if it’s swollen shut, that isn’t going to do any good at all. And in fact, some of those things can support bacterial growth, and so very sick people sometimes just basically tend to swell up with gas when they take those instead of having a laxative action. 26:04 Are there situations where peristalsis stops and you can use something that would get it contracting again? Well, the sugar is one of the very effective things, sugar and salt, because they lower adrenaline, and if stress has stopped your intestine just because of adrenaline excess, sugar and salt and maybe a little quick thyroid supplement can get it going again. Hypothyroidism, one of the classical symptoms is chronic constipation, but now that so many people are getting drugged, there are a lot of opiates that are being widely prescribed that morphine and opium, 27:07 everyone knows that they can cause terrible constipation, but the intestine is normally a very rich source of endorphins, the natural endogenous opiates, and so that’s one of the ways stress increases the endorphins, and the endorphins act just like exogenous opiates do, they tend to stop the intestinal action. And so several people have been proposing the anti-opiates that have been used for many years for treating heroin overdoses and so on, that they are seeing that they can cure chronic spontaneous constipation just because stress so often increases the endorphins to the point that they get a 28:10 morphine-like constipation. That’s very interesting. So in hypothyroidism as a cause of digestive problems and particularly constipation, is the medical world aware of that? They used to be, 50 years ago, all doctors knew that constipation and dry skin and falling hair were the most common signs of hypothyroidism, but after the Second World War, medical education changed from a perception to following instructions of the drug salesman, so nowadays it doesn’t occur to most doctors to look at the common signs and see a simple endocrine solution. We’re talking to Dr. Raymond Pete, who’s a physiologist and has a PhD in biology, and we’re talking about digestion today. 29:17 You’re listening to Politics and Science, and we’re about halfway through. Ray, I know some people who have been prescribed a product, I think it’s called Imodin, and I was lent some of that once when I had diarrhea, and I don’t believe I had another movement for about three weeks after that, and I was curious if you knew what that was and how it acted. No, I don’t know what it is. I think I’ve seen it advertised, but it happens to sound sort of like the good substance in some of the natural oxidates, Imodin, but I think the one you mentioned is spelled IMM. Yes, I believe so. Yeah, and we should probably talk about Imodin and the FDA’s position on that at this point. Maybe you could describe sort of the history of its use and where it comes from and what its status is in terms of mainstream medical practice. 30:27 The main traditional laxatives were herbs. Sometimes minerals were used, but like sulfur, flowers of sulfur works as a laxative, but the most common were herbs. And tobacco was sometimes a component of laxatives, and that increases the tone of the intestine. And an herb, nukesbomica, is an old one that started, it contains strychnin, and that went out of the laxative world about almost a hundred years ago. And the component that remained was Imodin, which is in cascara and aloe, and rhubarb fruit, and it has many protective effects other than helping cure constipation. 31:43 But a medical mythology that grew up sometime in the 20th century was the idea that these natural laxatives were stimulant, but if the intestine isn’t swollen, you can stimulate it with something like histamine or serotonin. But the idea was that the natural laxatives were stimulating the nerves and muscles to contract, but that was just a mistaken definition of them. And the other medical idea, fear of stimulants, because of the idea that stimulation was going to be addictive, around that same time euphoria became a very bad word, and stimulants might cause euphoria. 32:56 Incidentally, a good laxative can cause euphoria, but I shouldn’t mention that to your doctor. But the myth of stimulating by using a laxative was what led doctors to advocate drinking more water and taking one of these bulk forming water binding laxatives, and to support their recommendation, they claimed that the stimulating laxative would cause the colon to turn brown or black, and that was supposed to be proof of their harmfulness and addictiveness and so on, but it turns out that constipation as the constant irritation, the intestine, as a defensive reaction often produces a brown or black pigment. 34:00 So the idea that they were the brown substance like cascara or dried aloe, that became an image in most doctors’ minds that it was going to cause this melanosis of the intestine, but that just isn’t scientifically supported. So doctors were using cascara, sagrada, and aloe? Yeah, that was an old laxative called nature’s remedy, which was for many years, I guess about 100 years, contained just aloe and cascara. But about 20 years ago, the cancer drug industry started doing research with some of the chemicals in the same chemical family as the active ingredient of aloe and cascara, 35:07 and one of these was pretty effective at killing cancer, but slightly after killing the cancer, it would kill the heart, and it was a synthetic derivative of some of these natural compounds, such as anthraquinones. Anthraquinones, you said? Yeah, and when this cancer drug was found to kill the heart, that research led to look for variations that wouldn’t kill the heart, but would still kill the cancer, and that eventually led them to re-investigate. All of these natural substances, and it turns out that the emodin is a good cancer drug, even though it doesn’t kill your heart, but it’s a natural substance, and so they’re still working on how to make a synthetic, patentable version of it that they can sell as a cancer drug that doesn’t kill the patient. 36:23 But because of the involvement of the cancer industry, the FDA began putting out warnings that the natural substance might cause cancer because it vaguely resembles some compounds that do cause cancer, but there was never research to support that, but that added to the laxative addiction doctrine, and the black intestine doctrine, and the FDA used that cancer risk, finally, to outlaw the natural substances to be sold as laxatives. But coincidentally, as they were using that argument, within a matter of weeks, they granted approval to a drug called Zelnorm, which was a synthetic that intensified the serotonin effect to simply over-stimulate the intestine. 37:41 The FDA, following all of this worry about avoiding stimulant laxatives, they’ve approved a synthetic that was nothing but a very powerful stimulant, simultaneously with taking off the natural laxatives. The market was wide open for this Zelnorm product to be sold at three or four dollars per tablet, and since there was a captive market for it, they were making something like a billion dollars a year for several years until too many people started having their colons die or other parts of their intestine die to be removed. And the drug was authorized for a maximum of, I think it was four months with a possible repetition of a four-month period, but after that, the doctors were required not to prescribe it anymore, even though the company was making so much money when patients did have to use it. 38:58 But the instruction was that after a lot of four months’ time, then they had to find a laxative solution. So the FDA knew that there was no permanent good laxative solution, and that it was, in Europe, it was outlawed because it killed people’s intestines. But the FDA let them go for about five years, making their billions, and then outlawed it, but gave them a period of several months to use it as an investigational new drug, simply a way to let them keep it on the market and reeducate the doctors. And sort of get out of it, saving some face. From the way you describe that, I think listeners can tell that you feel that the FDA is a captured agency, basically working hand in hand. 40:07 It would be interesting to see how rich the people in the FDA got after that episode. Traditionally, that’s what happens. The people involved in approving bad drugs very often wind up very rich. I think we’ve all seen that or heard about it, where people working for the drug industry rotate out of their drug industry job into regulatory agency jobs, and then when that’s finished and they’ve done their job there, they move back into the drug industry again. Not a very healthy practice for running a government serving the public good. The FDA’s involvement in these chemicals goes back much farther than just the laxative issue, because this family of chemicals, the quinones, was found a hundred years ago to be protective. 41:15 Well, the herbal medical people have used it for hundreds of years, but scientists a hundred years ago started getting interested in the cellular effects of substances such as emoden from aloe and cascara. Many colored plant substances contain analogous materials, but W.F. Koch was experimenting with the anti-cancer effects of these materials as early as the 19 teens and set up a clinic using them in the 1920s. The FDA, by the 1940s, were determined to shut him down, and that story of his trials and the FDA involvement is a good introduction to the politics of science for anyone who wants to read about it. 42:30 There were two trials, but he won both trials because so many of his patients were there to testify, and he had the evidence that they had been cured of their cancers, but he moved to Brazil so he would be less persecuted by the FDA. And he was producing variations on the quinones, how did you say that? Yeah, the quinones, and the FDA’s response was that quinones are toxic, and he demonstrated in court putting a certain amount of a simple quinone into water and then diluting it to the strength that he had adjusted that he infected in the patients. And the FDA said there’s none in there, but the jury had seen him put it in and diluted, but the FDA’s instruments weren’t good enough to detect it, and so they said there’s none there. 43:38 It can’t have been what cured the patient, and they said, but if there was any there, it would be toxic because quinones are toxic. But about eight years after his second trial, ubiquinone or coenzyme Q10 was discovered and found to work exactly as Koch had described the function of the quinones that he was using and extracting from plants and such as stimulating mitochondrial oxidative metabolism. With all of its anti-inflammatory, anti-allergic, anti-spasmodic, anti-cancer pro-differentiating, anti-infective effects. So his treatment was basically just helping your cells go back to a healthy state? 44:39 Yeah. And the fame, he wasn’t allowed to publish in any English language medical journal after about 19, I think 1914 or 1917 was his last publication in an English journal, but in European and South American journals he became famous. And Albert St. Georgie, who came to the U.S. a couple years after Koch’s world famous win against the FDA, St. Georgie was researching exactly the same electronic oxidative systems in the cell that when he was working in Europe that was the basis for his Nobel Prize. Much of it, besides the vitamin C, vitamin C was sort of incidental to working on the cellular energy metabolism. But St. Georgie never mentioned the name Koch because if he had he would have gotten the same treatment from the FDA by associating himself with Koch who had been so thoroughly persecuted. 46:06 But throughout his life St. Georgie kept following the Koch approach to how cell oxidative processes are essentially, they’re an essential part of the life process and so are the proper place to focus in treating diseases. So the emotin you were speaking of that was used as a laxative over the as a traditional medicine and that was actually doctors could prescribe that up until when was the cell norm, when did that come out? 2002. So and at this point doctors aren’t allowed to prescribe emotin? I think they can prescribe it but it can’t be sold as a laxative. They can just prescribe it as a substance. 47:14 I see, as a food supplement or such. Yeah. I see. So and where does it come from Ray? I don’t think anybody knows that. Well the rhubarb root and the aloe leaf contain variations of the molecule but the cascara bark all across North America and I guess similar latitudes around the world. It’s a very common plant and they just strip the bark off and in its fresh state the bark will cause stimulation of the intestinal muscles and cramping and discomfort. So traditionally it was never used in its fresh state and aging it for at least a year the bark turns black just like the color of bitter chocolate and in that state the soapy quality of the molecule has broken down. 48:28 The glucose part has been removed so that it’s an oil soluble molecule and in that state it isn’t an intestinal stimulant. It’s an anti-inflammatory somewhat slightly sedative energy increasing substance decreases. Many of the chemical processes involved in cancer and many stress conditions just recently malaria was found to be toxic by activating a process that’s essential to cancer. And so it could be that emodin will turn out to be tried as a treatment for many other diseases other than cancer and constipation. 49:31 So it’s interesting at the same time they’re banning that that there other other sections of science are starting to do some serious research on its efficacy. Yeah the cancer industry is I suspect that they’ll resort to using the natural drug as an additive support for one of their patented drugs. They’ve done that with several other substances for example adding caffeine to some of their cancer therapies and simple natural substances that in themselves have an anti-inflammatory anti-cancer effect. It turns out that it makes their cancer drug more effective and less harmful. 50:32 So you’re saying they patent something just so that they have the rights to it and then they add the actually effective natural substance that they can’t patent to it to make their patented thing effective. Yeah that has become fairly common in the cancer drug industry. And can you maybe it’s too much to ask at this point we only have about seven minutes left but how does the emodin work? What does it just basically get your cells to be producing energy the way they’re supposed to be again? Yeah I think well the actual consumption of oxygen and production of ATP I think that’s secondary to a general tuning up the natural substances such as progesterone, caffeine to some extent the thyroid hormones these bind to proteins and cause the proteins electronic behavior to change. 51:51 The respiratory chain in the mitochondria is in a way tuned up by the small molecules that are associated with it. Coenzyme Q10 helps it to take in energy without producing destructive oxidative reactions. And vitamin K which is a quite known analogous to emodin and the other the anti-cancer and laxative substances, vitamin K increases the effectiveness of coenzyme Q10. And there’s an overlap with all of these natural regulatory substances that can only be explained as a sort of tuning up of the whole cell system. 52:59 The quickest way to get at it probably is to look at Saint George’s last two or three books where he’s talking about the various substances that act on DNA and proteins as a system increasing the coherence of the cell electronically and I don’t think that these substances will be understood or cancer or even hormone actions I don’t think will be understood unless the coherence of the cell’s electronic system is taken into account so that the cytoplasm and its constant movement and the nucleic acids and their responsiveness to these processes in cytoplasm 54:01 are integrated with what’s happening in the mitochondrion. So it isn’t like a lock and key where the coenzyme Q10 or the quite known is just activating a single enzyme. I think it’s that they act in many places in a coordinated way with the natural efficient structure functioning of the cell. And I think you said in your newsletter that the approach of Coke and Georgie is in contrast to which is basically making your body healthier and able to deactivate toxins is in contrast to what became sort of the mainstream medical approach which was trying to target cancer cells and basically a war mentality. 55:03 Yeah, I see that as something that has gone on ever since the divide in how the immune system is seen to function. Metchnikov saw the immune system as a developmental process of the whole organism, not just something aimed at killing germs, but the drug industry wanted to think of their product as a term killing analog to the immune system. So they shut down the Metchnikov approach and went to the kill the enemy approach and that drug industry motivated attack against bacteria immediately went over to the approach towards cancer as identifying the cancer as an alien mutant rather than as a dysregulation of a natural process. 56:11 So instead of energizing the system to normalize the process of tumor development, the whole industry is focused on having to kill the cancer as an alien. Going back to digestion, I think you’ve touched on much of this, but if people are hoping to improve their digestion, natural food substances that they might use? Well, raw carrots by having a germicidal effect on the bacteria can be very helpful until you get your hormones working. A good thyroid and a steroid hormone system will make your intestine have the energy to control the flora on its own, but in the meantime, a daily raw carrot helps to keep down the endotoxin absorption. 57:15 And when they’re available, cooked bamboo shoots are another good intestine protector that will hold down the endotoxin. So those are the fibers you would recommend? Yeah, because the grain fibers turned out to cause bowel cancer in several research settings, and keeping your general nutrition up with adequate protein is the other main thing to make your digestion work. So eating milk, cheese, and orange juice along with one of those protective disinfecting fibers will take care of most of the bowel problems. 58:20 And you can find out a lot of his information by reading 70 or 90 articles he has posted at his website. I’ve been your host, John Barkhausen, and please tune in again next week for another edition of Politics and Science.