Digestion and Emotion

00:00 Welcome to this month’s and this New Year’s, Ask Your Herb Doctor, Happy New Year everybody. My name’s Andrew Murray. For those of you who perhaps have never listened to the shows which run every third Friday of the month from 7 to 8pm, I’m a licensed naturopathic doctor who trained in England and graduated there with a degree in herbal medicine. We run a clinic in Garberville where I consult with clients about a wide range of conditions and recommend herbal medicine and dietary advice. So you’re listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMU-D Garberville, 91.1 FMM from 7.30 until the end of the show at 8 o’clock. You’re invited to call in with any questions either related or unrelated to this month’s subject of digestion and emotion. Some of it is carrying on from last month’s topic of you are what you eat. I had quite a few people writing afterwards on that subject. It was quite interesting to get some feedback from people who’d listened. So thank you for 01:01 that. The number here if you live in the area is 9233-911 or like so many people these days if you live outside the area, there’s a toll free number which is 1-800-KMU-D-RAD. So that’s 1-800-568-3723. So we’ll be taking calls live from 7.30 onwards. But until then, let’s introduce Dr. P. Dr. P, you’re with us? Yes. Hi, thanks so much for joining us again. As always, I want to give people the benefit of understanding your professional and academic background for those who maybe have never heard of you or who’ve just tuned in. So if you’d like to just tell them your professional and academic background. After working several years in humanities areas, I decided to study biology because of wanting to get a concrete grasp of how the brain works and making language images and so on. So I intended to work on 02:07 a PhD at University of Oregon starting in 1968 in brain biology. And I quickly found that that was the most dogmatic area in biology, genetics and nerve biology. And so immediately I looked around for less dogmatic areas and it turned out that the extreme other end of the organism, the reproductive system, happened to be the most scientific empirical. So I did my dissertation on oxidative changes in the female reproductive system with aging. And that involves a lot of nutrition related topics that were of interest to me. I think just to let people know, at one time you were actively consulting with people, weren’t you, 03:09 for quite a few years? In the 70s I just happened to meet some women who were having hormonal problems. In graduate school I had talked to some girls who immediately when they came to the university got a cheap basement apartment, started having terrible PMS. And in that 1967-68 I got interested in the role of light in brain and hormone functions and how I called it winter sickness from a light deficiency. And then when I started running into women with slightly older group 40, 45 and 50 having really serious problems like multiple sclerosis and several other nerve 04:18 related conditions, I recognized the work I had been doing with hamsters and hormones as being directly applicable to them. So I started doing nutritional consulting and finally started suggesting that they use progesterone and thyroid supplements because in some cases the diet just wasn’t enough to take care of acute problems. And also just so people that are listening can be aware of this, also you produce a monthly, or is it bi-monthly now? A bi-monthly newsletter. So anyway we’ll be giving out Dr Pete’s information at the end of the show for people who’d like to either contact him or find out more about his website and all the articles that he has that are freely available in reference there. Well Dr Pete, I wanted to carry on partly from last month’s topic on you are 05:22 what you eat and a little bit more of a focused look at diet, digestion and emotion. I know there’s some of the things that you’ve brought out in your most recent newsletter as well as the prior ones kind of peaked my interest in some other directions and I also have questions from people that have been garnered since the last month that I want to see if we can get time to put to you. But going back to last week, we mentioned this gut peptide called cholecystokinin was previously shown to have a crucial role in mediating the effects of intragastric fatty acid solutions on brain activity and they were saying that the receptors for CCK this cholecystokinin are known not only for their role in digestion but also for roles in memory function and learning and in the modulation of panic and anxiety. So there’s this link between the gut and the emotion. So it’s not gut, it’s not just for digestion and picking up food and sending it off to the various departments 06:26 that store it like the fat cells etc but it’s also triggers emotive events in people. What do you interpret from my suggestion at CCK’s role in the stimulation and secretion of bile and the digestion and absorption of nutrients especially fats supports a link between this mental function and digestion? I think it’s good to consider at least one other digestive peptide, the gastric inhibitory polypeptide GIP. It’s my general picture of the organism for example analogous to the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. The day and the night sides of the nervous system. Everywhere you look you can see this sort of a polar opposition in two kinds of function. One is mobilizing, the other is demobilizing and relaxing. Okay that’s a parasympathetics 07:31 is a relaxing and the mobilizing is a sympathetic. When the organism is young and healthy that opposition works very nicely for night and day action and rest cycling and in the digestive system when you eat fats and proteins you secrete the cholecystokinin when you eat sugar you secrete the GIP which is also called the insulin atropic hormone because it calms down stops your acid digestion because you don’t need acid to handle sugar but it activates the insulin so that you handle the sugar and when you look at the effect in the brain, CCK activates the 08:33 corticotropic release hormone which turns on anxiety and stress and the pituitary ACTH which turns on the adrenals to handle stress and the gastrointestinal gastric inhibitory peptide responding to glucose has pretty much the opposite effects and in the hippocampus for example which is a part of the brain that’s expanded by opportunity and learning and shrunk shrunkened by stress the insulin atropic hormone responding to sugar also has receptors in the hippocampus that stimulates the birth of new cells so learning and stimulating experience and eating 09:40 sugar has the same effect as your brain eating fat and protein surprisingly turn on anxiety and stress even protein well that yeah that tends to lower your blood sugar because it also stimulates insulin got it and lowering the blood sugar turns on stress okay and in the farther down the intestine the if you could be born without bacteria they’ve created situations with cesarean birth of rats and dogs and pigs and such and keeping them in a germ-free environment they find that the everything develops perfectly in fact the animals live longer and are very resistant to 10:49 obesity and diabetes and degenerative diseases okay they have a very high metabolic rate too yeah they’re very much like the furnests is a calorie restriction animals okay and fat free diets where they don’t have the so-called essential fatty acids those animals have an extremely high metabolic rate too and so the calorie restriction and being free of germs both stimulate your your ability to oxidize food produce energy and prevent obesity and be generally healthy in long life so something is happening in the intestine that the bacteria are responsible for and the the main thing that it turns out that the bacteria are doing is usually converting starch 11:59 starches is the main bacteria promoting food they the bacteria living on on these foods that we don’t digest produce endotoxin and the endotoxin everywhere it reaches a human cell stimulates the production of nitric oxide and nitric oxide is it’s on the demobilizing side of the balance it turns off metabolism slows down oxidation so it’s it’s the main reason that having too many bacteria in the intestine creates obesity and lethargy and short life is it all forms of starch that will promote the endotoxin production or no if they’re very well cooked and easy to digest 13:05 and aren’t complex with fibrous material the difference would be a corn tortilla that had been processed in alkali to open up the starch granules making them easy to digest versus the bean carbohydrates the type of polysaccharide that human enzymes can’t work on or ideal for feeding bacteria hence all the gas yeah it’s not good for you folks when they’ve experimented with rats on this type of soluble indigestible fiber the ones that get the fiber that supports the bacterial growth become anxious and aggressive they’re fearful and so they fight too easily all right so 14:08 there’s there’s a definite connection there let me just put your information out for a moment here dr. Pete so welcome to this month’s ask Europe doctor you’re listening to ask Europe doctor on kmede gubble 91.1 FM and from 730 until the end of the show at 8 o’clock you’re invited to call in with any questions either related or unrelated to this month’s subject of digestion and emotion we have dr. Raymond Pete with us in the studio we’ll be taking calls from 730 to late o’clock so dr. Pete okay you’ve looked looked at and interpreted the link then between sort of decreased mental performance and poor digestion with the end of toxin formation especially from starch I’m glad you brought up nitric oxide because again I was looking at some articles afternoon I think I think you need to bring this out as a fairly important fairly important point because I think just like sugar and just like polyunsaturates both of which well sugar was demonized and polyunsaturates saturated fats were promoted so the liquid oil was the polyunsaturates 15:12 have now definitely swinging the other way even medical opinion is of the mindset now that maybe saturated fats are actually much better for the cells and much more stable and more health promoting than the polyunsaturates but it’s taken a long time and maybe I think sugar perhaps in time will come around again but it seems at the moment that nitric oxide is a pretty prevalent supplement or rather the l-arginine that nitric oxides manufacture from is becoming a fairly popular supplement especially in the bodybuilding world and I wanted to ask you that given that these things are so freely available and publications numerous publications even so-called scientific journals are coming out with studies that support nitric oxide’s importance and saying that it’s extremely important for endothelial health so the inner lining of the arteries arteriales etc is the endothelia and nitric oxide is produced within that to prevent things like stroke and 16:13 gyne and the whole other host of cardiac events that would be considered causative without nitric oxide in terms of the kind of starvation as it were because of the vasoconstriction that would happen because nitric oxide’s a vasodilator but yet there’s so much evidence contrary to that and that’s what I’d like you to bring our wise nitric oxide so dangerous because I know it’s been implicated in stroke in people that use viagra for example. Yeah I just recently heard about a doctor who treats cancer patients with intravenous arginine and just before I heard about him I had been reading way back to the 1940s people discovered that arginine stimulates cancer growth and the starvation or reduction of arginine stops cancer growth and through the 50s and 60s continuing 17:18 it’s being picked up again just recently methods to stop the conversion of arginine to nitric oxide or to reduce the availability of arginine it’s being investigated again as a way to cure cancer so there are these two very opposite things going on one nitric oxide is being proposed to cure cancer or suppressing nitric oxide it’s demonstrated to stop the growth of cancer and the the first things that I was hearing about nitric oxide I happen to be interested in endogenous carbon monoxide in the early and mid 80s and it can promote cancer by blocking the respiratory enzymes 18:22 and then in the mid and late 80s people started realizing that something was producing nitric oxide in the body and I think it was 88 or 89 when the enzyme was demonstrated we actually have the enzyme that makes this smog like free radical in our tissues and because it was already known as a major toxin in smog immediately people were investigating what it’s really doing in the body and from about 1990 up until the middle 90s there are many publications showing that very clearly nitric oxide produced in the pancreas kills insulin producing basic cells 19:23 that was just massively documented up until about 96 then the viagra people they got a patent started promoting the idea that somehow nitric oxide is associated with virility and suddenly the research by the late 90s was turning just 180 degrees saying everything that nitric oxide does must be wonderful because it is related to male virility now am i right in thinking also that nitric oxide in smog is a causative agent for asthma yeah and there are people recommending arginine and breathing nitric oxide to treat asthma but others demonstrating that it people with asthma are producing it themselves so you can measure it in their breath the worst their asthma is the more nitric oxide comes out in their breath 20:31 and it’s the same with hepatitis cancer any major systemic disease you can find increased amounts of nitric oxide related chemicals in the blood interesting i glad you mentioned that because i’ve got a question a question from a couple of other people that i want to ask you in a bit about that subject but let me just go back because nitric oxide is okay here’s a here’s a deal nitric oxide is produced in the body and supposedly has beneficial functions so what do you think about the beneficial function of nitric oxide in the body and how is that mediated to a point where it’s not dangerous as it as it is if you’re looking at being exposed to it or taking arginine to produce it in your body more than your body does what’s this what’s its real benefit it’s um it helps cells to de-differentiate by blocking their energy production if you think of the mitochondrial high energy oxidative system as 21:36 being what what creates a complex organism that uses energy so efficiently it can have many different types of tissue if you want to de-differentiate produce a stem cell you knock out the energy production and it goes back and becomes amoeba like or fungus like this is like a just cell stem cell recruitment uh yeah and it uh when a tissue is injured it secretes a great burst of nitric oxide and that calls up stem cells from the environment but it also creates them that de-differentiates the existence of joining tissues so that they can form whatever new tissue is needed so de-differentiation is a part of forming the organism in the first place as the embryo develops okay nitric oxide has a constructive role and then for tissue a wound 22:42 healing it’s essential but that very same burst that calls up repair cells and de-differentiates cells to make repair cells if if that doesn’t have the ability to be turned off it keeps de-differentiating and stimulating tissue renewal so you get an unhealing wound the least bad example of that would be a keloid okay a scar tissue that just keeps growing and getting bigger without forming the right kind of tissue but in the worst case when it becomes a tumor in the cancer okay so how do you do do you do you see the control how do you see the control of nitric oxide so that it’s a proportion response if if and when you need it through injury and blocking it uh dietarily or supplementary so that you’re not 23:49 exposed to this pretty dangerous compound at all until until such a time as your body might need it for whatever reason everything that we have that is involved in producing oxidative energy helps to turn it off so vitamin b1 and niacinamide the anti-inflammatory things like progesterone and pregnant alone thyroid hormone all of the differentiating mobilizing energy intensifying substances turn it off and everything that interferes with those turns it on and keeps it going so it’s the demobilizing for example going into hibernation an animal produces these demobilizing signals with nitric oxide and anything that makes the 24:56 organism tend to give up and stop struggling demobilizing because of stress or isolation inescapable stress right powerfully turns on nitric oxide and it so in in the brain function when your brain is being turned off it experiences depression wants to retreat okay and uh the things like anxiety and and aggression you aggress if someone doesn’t let you retreat hi i wanted to ask you about the the mind mind body connection because i know that when i’ve spoken to you previously you you’ve kind of advocating what i think a lot of kind of new age or alternative thinking people would would have held as a you know a tenant of their belief in sort of a higher power if you like through focused attention and positive thinking your body 26:02 your physical body can definitely be improved and i i know i’ve had this conversation with you previously about well what would come first you know would you uh would you use supplements that will promote uh you know everything that we’ve been talking about now so progesterone thyroid the b vitamins etc to turn this uh negative cascade off or would you have a positive mental outlook or do you see the two being as important together and do you have any kind of protocol that you would be looking at would be a good rationale for achieving both of those things when you look at the example of the uh psychologists who create depression by torturing animals okay convincing them that they can’t escape once they form the idea that they can’t escape they don’t try to escape anymore so it’s an intellectual switch that happens 27:03 uh from from the bad experience and if you have made an animal helpless by those experiences just one experience of escape will cure it it’ll have it it’ll have the knowledge yeah it’s resistant because of that knowledge and um the um the culture is killing people too often but they they can’t escape they have to do what they have to do put up and shut up yeah and so something as simple as taking a vacation or getting a new job yeah can make a tremendous difference a person can pop right out of a prolonged depression if they get a new kind of work for example let me let me just hold you hold your train of thought there dr p we’ve got the first call of the evening so let’s let’s take this call and see where where they’re going call 28:05 you’re on the air and where you from i’m from uh canza city canza city hi go ahead uh yeah my question um for dr pete is uh do you think using low dose of remandex as an aromatase inhibitor would be appropriate for a female who is correcting her metabolic rate by a thyroid diet but has a fair amount of fat to lose still um would that be safe to use while she loses the fat safely um those chemicals all have some side effects so there are much better ways to turn off estrogen production just the uh the endotoxin from bacteria is a powerful promoter of aromatase and estrogen production and so taking an antibiotic or eating a kind of fiber that doesn’t support bacterial growth or avoiding starches and eating saturated fats which have a 29:05 germicidal effect saturated fatty acids are are very much like antiseptics as far as the intestinal bacteria go so just by making those dietary changes you can make a tremendous impact on your balance between estrogen and cortisol versus the protective progesterone and andretones and so on okay that sounds good um i had one more question um could you just explain briefly the mechanisms of histamine and uh the good ways to correct that histamine and waste what um just just ways to correct oh someone who has um just histamine responses periodically uh since i was mentioning the saturated fats uh some of the uh shorter chain saturated fats in coconut oil have an anti histamine effect uh coffee 30:10 is a very effective uh turn signal to turn off uh histamine production anything that energizes and restores cell function tends to uh prevent the production of histamine how about sugar oh definitely yeah the um a person wrote a book about histamine about 40 years ago and he demonstrated that histamine is produced in every kind of cell in the organism when it’s sufficiently stressed and that was before nitric oxide was known but uh histamine turns on nitric oxide so uh those are the two probably universal uh stress uh injury uh signals okay great we do have another caller that’s just come in so let’s take this next caller hi caller you’re on the 31:10 am where you from yes uh andrew this is david in missouri oh hey david um you know on the last show we were talking about uh the bacteria and the intestine and you had mentioned that uh a lot times tetracycline will be used and it will kill i don’t remember the exact wording but it was something to the extent that the harmful bacteria are killed and the beneficial survive did we know that for sure or like if you’re using something like tetracycline does it pretty much you know depending on the dust does it kill most of the bacteria and how does it selectively uh spare the what we would call beneficial and then i guess uh along the same lines there i’ve always heard that there is kind of a symbiotic relationship with certain uh intestinal bacteria that help to um absorb certain nutrients okay so i’m assuming that would be considered a beneficial bacteria if 32:18 that is true um i think the um interactions of the intestinal bacteria are too complicated to divide them neatly into beneficial and harmful in the germ-free animals they’ve done experiments with introducing a single species of lactobacillus and even the supposedly beneficial bacteria will make the germ-free animal susceptible to uh injury that it wasn’t susceptible to before so it’s the context and interaction of the different bacteria and generally the healthier person is the uh more sterile their small intestine is okay interesting so you know what do you think of the idea that certain nutrients are absorbed through the actions of 33:24 so-called beneficial bacteria is that is that kind of a fallacy or um yeah i think it’s uh there’s a little effect there but i don’t think it it makes a big nutritional difference the uh totally germ-free animals have had the extremely efficient digestive systems and i’ve heard you say that i just i was just curious because you still hear this being talked about all the time like there’s these beneficial bacteria and of course i know people are selling beneficial bacteria so that’s part of the part of the reason that’s being done i’m sure disney i wanted to ask you is the term free fatty acids is that always referring to polyunsaturated fat or is there instances where free fatty acids are actually saturated fat yeah there can be either way coconut soap is is the salt of the saturated free fatty acids 34:31 and so if you if you actually could eat a bite of free fatty acids it would taste like acidic soap ah interesting we do have a couple of callers also so let’s let’s wrap this one let’s wrap this one up okay thank you yeah thanks for your call so let’s get this next caller on the air we’ve got two more so let’s uh take this next one away from hi i’m kim from garberville oh hey welcome to the show thank you so i just had a question i was wondering what the effect of um infrared like sauna would have on the cell mitochondria um it produces nitric oxide doesn’t it dr p what do you think of infrared in terms of uh possible uh nitric oxide production from the mitochondria water absorbs infrared very powerfully and and so uh real infrared feels warm and it 35:32 helps to keep your body temperature up and keeping your body temperature up is very good essential for the mitochondria and the the stress of cold is enough to turn on uh nitric oxide and that can start down the pathway of hibernation and turning off functions so uh infrared as it keeps your body temperature up helps your mitochondria uh the uh far red visible light dark red anywhere from orange to dark red these aren’t aren’t very well absorbed by water and so they go right through your tissue uh you can see a red light shining through your whole body if you’re in the dark uh you can see it through your hand yeah put a light behind your hand that’s because it it penetrates and is only absorbed 36:34 by uh blue copper is the main thing that absorbs enzymes that contain copper in the in the blue form that does absorb red and those happen to be the respiratory enzymes and uh so the the far red activates the respiratory enzymes and probably a major reason for that is that it bounces the nitric oxide molecule uh loosens it and presets from the respiratory enzymes where it has been blocking it interesting so that’s beneficial yeah yeah all right thank you so much you’re welcome okay we’ve got two more callers still another one called in why the first one’s on hold so let’s take this next caller you’re on the air and where you’re from hi i’m calling from sacramento okay yeah welcome to the show go and watch your question um this is related to what dr pete said about um treating corn with 37:39 alkali um or lime rather um to make it more digestible and i was wondering do uh sprouted grain tortillas are they also considered good for digestion dr pete sprouted grain oh yeah the starch is largely uh consumed and used as the storage proteins in the seed happen to have lots of uh ammonia or amino groups which are used to make actual functioning proteins with the energy from the starch and so when you sprout a grain you get rid of the toxic proteins that could release uh too much arginine and produce uh nitric oxide and histamine and you get rid of most of the the uh starches so sprouts are basically a good nutrition like uh leaves 38:45 oh great so it doesn’t matter whether it’s sprouted wheat or barley or whatever in general it’s a good thing dr pete did you hear that no the gentleman asked does it it didn’t matter whether it was wheat or barley that generally sprouted uh things were a good thing um did you hear what i said or is there a problem with the line at the moment yeah the the line is getting a little garbled okay the the gentleman wanted to know if all sprouted things were beneficial because of how you know what they went through um yeah the all all seeds as far as i know have some toxic effects many of them are built in by the the plant to uh protect their offspring and once the sprouting has begun uh the seed detoxifies those intrinsic chemicals and and so 39:50 it especially if it’s very well cooked then it becomes nutritious okay so i think to answer your question then call it um the the activity of sprouting neutralizes the defensive compounds that are in the seeds originally so i think the answer would be yes uh most sprouted uh items would be beneficial and nutritional for you oh great thank you one one final question if i may okay quickly uh a progesterone uh for men is it beneficial or harmful dog speak did you hear that oh yeah the um men who are in in good health have a fair amount of progesterone it’s rarely measured in men but uh it prevents abnormal excess clotting and it’s a precursor for other hormones but if you have a good amount of progesterone it protects you against fluctuations in the 40:58 adrenal steroids uh aldosterone and uh cortisol so that progesterone is sort of an all-purpose defensive hormone and it’s a very highly concentrated in the brain men men as well as women so it’s it’s definitely not just a female hormone but if you have too much of it if you take a supplement it opposes testosterone and so a man doesn’t want to take it regularly and stop his whiskers growing for example but for an emergency a big supplement can be helpful for uh for example epilepsy or arthritis it’s very helpful for men as well as 41:59 women how and to so i can interrupt you for a second dr p how quickly uh would you metabolize a dose of progesterone if you did take it and it was a large dose for something that was uh uh you know so go ahead i know a doctor who uh insisted that taking progesterone orally wouldn’t show up in the blood so he took i think a fourth of a teaspoon and then drew his blood every half hour for 12 hours i think and he showed that it peaked in around the first hour and then gradually decreased over the next day okay all right so we’ve been 24 hours or so okay we have another caller are still waiting here so let’s take this the next caller caller you’re on the air i am and where you’re from i’m in garbable thank you you’re in garbable too okay go ahead what’s your question uh well uh thank you again for a wonderful show a lot of 43:01 wonderful information uh there was one thing that an earlier caller mentioned about beneficial bacteria um is it uh the doctor’s opinion then or your opinion as well that yogurt for its uh supposed beneficials is not so beneficial um if it has had the um some of the lactic acid drained off or if it has just uh coagulated without becoming very sour then then it’s fine but the there are a difference then uh between like greek yogurt and milk yogurt or is uh yeah i think the greek which isn’t sour is safe but the very acidic ones uh uh and the related products i i discovered that by uh drinking a a cup of kefir uh uh yeah 44:02 every day i would have a cup of that for lunch i would get a migraine for several hours afterwards and so i started reading about what’s happening and uh for one thing the type of lactic acid produced by bacteria is racemic and the kind we make is mostly uh the uh one one confirmation that works differently and the racemic type made by bacteria is more uh able to produce inflammation and fibrosis if you’re chronically overloaded with it and uh really that that actually dovetails nicely into my main question i think um i i was recently more or less diagnosed by a western style doctor with a particular type of skin condition that i’ve been suffering uh for 20 years or so uh the hydrogen uh sorry a hydrogenitis supertiva supposedly uh something that deals 45:11 with the aegypene gland which is the type of sweat gland that causes cyst um so does that uh do you have any info on that and when you’re talking about uh you know yogurt and and the inflammation caused by certain uh bacterias i’ve been actually trying to support my system in general with uh well kiefer you mentioned i enjoy it maybe that’s a bad idea uh people have experimented with i even killing the lactobacillus and it in itself even when it’s dead it has a very definite anti-inflammatory effect in intestine anti-inflammatory so it would be a good thing then for for a condition that causes inflammation and cysting or uh yeah the um that seems to be the implication that uh it isn’t the um 46:19 the lactic acid or the metabolism of the lactic acid bacteria that is anti-inflammatory but uh just something about the uh the chemistry of the organism even if it’s dead and since the inflammation in the intestine is quickly reflected in the physiology of the skin soothing your intestine will take care of a lot of skin conditions uh okay you’re saying uh the the bacteria itself is beneficial but not the lactic acid that is uh common with many sour yogurts yeah yeah so uh okay yogurt will minus the lactic acid is is better awesome well thank you very much all right thank you for your call okay if anybody else is listening and uh wants to get a question or two in before the end of the show at eight o’clock 47:20 the number if you’re in the area is nine two three three nine one one or there’s a toll free number which is one eight hundred five six eight three seven two three that’s one eight hundred k m u d rad okay so uh dr p i think just uh if perhaps you’ve got the time i’ll get some uh these questions that i’ve had uh put to you anyway um i’m glad uh i’m glad that we’ve had some of these questions surrounding uh surrounding what you’ve been talking about and not something completely different that’s uh that’s always always very useful to have people uh newly newly challenged if you like so i wanted to ask you that um from a uh a perspective of kind of Hippocratic Medicine they always mentioned that the uh the liver was the seat of anger um do you have any comment on how this might come about and it might be related to digestion and endotoxin and inflammation um yeah what do you think about that does that make any any sense or do you think it’s just um 48:20 the the liver to the extent that it’s injured will ruin the whole organism it it’s the uh the chemist for the whole organism and uh the uh if you’re starving and not getting enough protein especially or not enough b vitamins your liver loses the ability to detoxify and and you get gross hormone imbalances and uh that can uh lead to a progressive inflammation fibrosis and uh as these processes get more serious uh the liver becomes a larger source of nitric oxide and at the point that it’s becoming a inflamed and cirrhotic uh then it starts secreting nitric 49:22 oxide uh to the whole system and uh the lungs uh with an acute injury to the liver the lungs will become acutely inflamed uh when they transplant a liver of they’ve measured the uh sick person’s nitric oxide very high when they put in a new liver uh suddenly the uh nitric oxide is low and the lungs suddenly begin working more efficiently uh the uh demonstrating that the liver is poisoning the lungs so that the oxygen doesn’t get through efficiently and with the brain the same thing is happening edema uh is produced in the brain by uh the endotoxin nitric oxide combination and uh the um ammonia produced by the liver which is uh being injured uh 50:27 was a traditional uh explanation for why the brain has problems in proportion to the liver but um now it’s known that the ammonia is activating the nerves that are excited by the glutamic acid uh msg excitatory amino acids and those excitatory amino acids act largely through nitric oxide and and so uh depression anxiety uh and i i assume aggression is uh part of this mixture of uh gradual poisoning to different degrees interesting do you know if there’s any uh do you know if there’s any blood test uh for nitric oxide like there is for cholesterol or you know uh any other most other compounds that are fairly common have you heard of that um i don’t know 51:32 what labs have available it’s becoming very common in research to look at the whole range of things produced by nitric oxide but i don’t know if any local medical labs that that do that okay all right well i had another question it’s a little bit different from all of the others but nonetheless um in terms of um well-being emotional well-being uh being restorative and uh a kind of dynamic uh process uh that is going to uh improve the general health of an organism when their mind’s in that place of emotionally being uh satisfied happy having a positive outlook in a positive thinking etc um exercise i know i’m having you know pretty in my in my younger younger days sound like an old person now but in my younger days when i used to go to the gym 52:32 i remember feeling really very positive about it and i’m looking back at it now it’s probably because i was probably running on a lot of adrenaline uh from working out and uh just charging around like a crazy person but um in terms of uh exercise i know that you always advocate gentle weight-bearing exercise you don’t advocate any aerobic exercise in terms of um generating a healthy physique with exercise well what would you suggest rather than you know protein shakes and amino acids and supplements what would you suggest as being one of the some of the best food sources and perhaps i maybe you’ve mentioned uh gelatin i don’t know if you think that gelatin is a good thing because of the amino acids or what would you suggest um yeah gelatin is at at least safe uh it doesn’t stimulate muscle growth the way other proteins such as meat can do but uh the the person’s history really is has to be taken into account when you’re 53:36 looking at the the diet and the exercise program because i’ve known people who ate gigantic amounts of meat and were producing so much cortisol in response to the meat right that they had extremely high levels of amino acids in their urine and their muscles were being damaged by that same high level of cortisol and so ideally in like the germ-free animals they can run on a very little protein and lots of carbohydrate the carbohydrate gets used for energy and you would assimilate essentially all of the protein that you eat because your cortisol wouldn’t be destroying it and excreting it interesting so well what kind of 54:38 carbohydrates it wouldn’t be starchy and dangerous uh fruits yeah yeah all right so that’s it pretty much then you’re saying that the fruit would be a very good source of amino acids as muscle building compounds um yeah as long as you’re getting all of the essential nutrients for example from some seafoods and eggs right then uh uh fruits and uh gelatin yeah would be a very safe diet for adults okay very good well i know we’ve got four minutes left that’s probably not too long to go too much further without having having trouble with the engineer and the next person on the show so i do thank you for your time dr peat once once more and let me give out your information to people who’ve listened okay thank you thanks so much okay so dr raymond peat uh is view viewable that’s the right word on the web um w w w dot ray peat dot com r a y p e a t dot com 55:43 has a a wealth of articles uh on links on the home page uh all of which are fully referenced they’re very scholarly articles some people might find them a little um hard reading because they’re pretty technical um but there’s a lot of information in there that if you want to start delving into some of it i know you on the web you can find out uh quite a bit about what he’s saying in terms of the descriptive terms that it might be used but very good articles uh like i said well well referenced and well researched that’s that’s his job and that’s what he’s spent the last 25 30 years doing um so w w dot ray peat dot com uh for people who’d want to contact me uh monday through friday i have a toll free number one eight eight eight w b m herb um let’s see what else we got a couple of minutes here i don’t think i’ll just close the show by thanking you for your time uh and until february the third friday in february uh next month uh wish you a happy new year again good night 57:01 you All right everybody that was asked the herb doctor great show all right couple things and throw your way here came up thanks Jessica Baker of 58:09 Jade Dragon acupuncture for her support of Redwood Community Radio practicing and teaching Chinese medicine herbalism aromatherapy and aromatherapy Jessica is available for conferences workshops and private consultations located at 607 F Street and that’s in Arcada Jade Dragon acupuncture can be reached at 822-434-3 00 or online at Jade Dragon acupuncture.com also support for k-mud comes from the end of the lost coast and shelter cove fireplace spa and sauna suites overlooking the ocean offer views of the migrating California gray whales fish tank expresso and delgada pizza and bakery are open daily end of the lost coast home the yellow submarine where all you need is love and a reservation for more