Empiricism vs Dogmatic Modeling

00:00 The following episode of Politics and Science features an interview with Dr. Raymond Peat, endocrinologist and physiologist from Eugene, Oregon, who was recorded on July 24th, 2008. At that time we were struggling with a, how shall I say, a not very well functioning phone interface machine at WMRWLP Warren. And so the sound is a little funky, I’ve put it through some sound modifying programs and it sounds a little echoey now but the buzz is gone and I hope it’s listenable. More information about Dr. Raymond Peat can be found at reypeat.com that’s spelled R-A-Y-P-E-A-T dot com where you’ll find many fascinating articles. And if you enjoyed the show or didn’t catch all of it and wanted to hear the rest you can browse your way on a computer to radionumeral4all.net that’s radionumber4all.net and once 01:06 you get there search for Politics and Science and you’ll find a number of episodes ready to download to your computer to listen to at your convenience. Alright, and now to the interview itself. Raymond, can you hear me? Okay, let me hang up the phone. Alright, thanks for joining us again. Let’s see if I can get my knobs adjusted here correctly. Alright, you’re on the air and we’re speaking with Dr. Raymond Peat out in Eugene, Oregon. He’s an endocrinologist and physiologist who’s written a lot of books about health and nutrition and science and has a newsletter called Ray Peat’s Newsletter and you can find him on the web at reypeat.com. Raymond, can you hear me? Oh good. I lost you for a minute. 02:08 Just yesterday we were doing a sound check and we sort of picked up where we left off last week talking about fats, fats in our diet and the use of fats by humans over the years and also as animal feed. And yesterday you were talking about cholesterol and you mentioned a fellow named Chris Masterjohn and I thought perhaps one of the things you said yesterday that kind of shocked me was that for years we’ve heard that cholesterol is something you get from fat, from butter, from, you know, especially beef fat, any of those meats that are full of supposedly saturated fats and that’s why we’re being so poisoned by cholesterol and it turns out that perhaps cholesterol isn’t the boogeyman we always thought it was, it’s actually something we need to function. Yeah, but eating cholesterol, if you’re healthy, you have to eat a tremendous amount 03:09 like the experiment where they had healthy, I think there were young men eat eggs until they could see an increase in blood cholesterol. They took 22 eggs before they saw a rise in the day’s cholesterol and it does rise if you’re very sick and can’t compensate, but in a practical situation where a person might want to raise their cholesterol, you can usually do it despite eating lots of fruit because for several reasons the minerals and sugar in the fruit give the liver the energy it needs to make adequate cholesterol and they call it the U-shaped curve of mortality. You have an ideal range of cholesterol for a given age and when you’re below that range your mortality increases. 04:21 What are those ranges? Oh, the people who talk about the curve usually put the bottom of the U around 160 to 180 When you look at the figures, the bottom really varies with age like one study looked at people in a nursing home situation and saw that the ones who had the highest cholesterol I think in that group those with 270 lived the longest so you have to think about the relation of the cholesterol to the stress you’re under and consider it an anti-stress hormone. My father recently was told that he has to start taking statins 05:24 and a lot of people are on statins, what’s your opinion? Years ago they started seeing increased mortality as they used drugs to lower cholesterol and there was one, I think it was Hungarian in the 1980s that showed a great increase in cancer mortality as they lowered cholesterol and that somewhat accorded with a Veterans Administration study in the 1960s that they stopped when they saw that people on the so-called heart-protective low-fat diet were dying at a higher rate from cancer but there’s still some lingering data showing that the statins might increase total mortality 06:26 but the marketing is so intense that they managed to place articles convincing people how good it is A recent book by Melody Peterson, I think the title is Our Daily Meds gives a lot of information about how the drug industry manipulates the culture paying doctors while writing articles for doctors and just getting them to sign their names and then publishing them in prestigious journals and promoting their products that it gives a little bit of the inside information about how they’re actually buying the medical literature and Marcia Angel, seeing it from an editor’s viewpoint at the New England Journal of Medicine 07:31 emphasized that the editorial decisions can completely bias the results of a topic if people choose not to even submit their data because it doesn’t support the efficacy of the drug or the safety A lot of studies will simply not get submitted and then if the editors introduce more bias you might have 50 studies showing a drug is harmful and useless and one that gets published showing that it’s beneficial Increasingly Melody Peterson shows how the drug industry is not only modifying the research that gets done and how the universities treat their research but how the journals publish it 08:33 and then finally how the doctors use it So the system is pretty well sewed up now Anything relating to drug therapy you just simply can’t trust the Anglo-American literature and increasingly it has spread into Italy, Chile, France, Japan as the industries have become influential in those countries India and Russia were relatively outside the commercial pharmaceutical influence but now they’re moving in that direction too So it’s an effective globalization I suppose, same corporate policies So some of the more backward economies still manage to do some real research 09:36 So yeah, I’ve heard it said that we have one of the most effective propaganda systems in world history basically in this country at this time with access to the media pretty much sewn up by the corporations and alternative voices only heard on stations like ours which are community stations which there’s quite a few of them around the country but there’s a lot of space in between them So how’s the media situation out in Oregon? Oh, well in my lifetime the Pacifica stations have been the outstanding exceptions but the University public radio station about I guess 10 years, 15 years ago it changed its format so that students don’t have the access they used to 10:37 and now it sounds like one of those big city furniture advertising classical music stations It used to be more of a community station? Yeah, it used to be a really good station but the donors made it sound like one of those upper class nothing but classic music stations We have a pretty small range here but we do have an affiliation with Pacifica and with other community stations around the country so we try to network our programming and share it between us all Well getting back to cholesterol and there was a guy you said the last time you were in the air You spoke about somebody named Chris Masterjohn Yeah, I’ve read several of his articles that are very good My only disagreement with him is that he persists in leaving in the essential fatty acids 11:44 Yeah, that’s something a lot of alternative quote alternative health people believe in And what’s in a nutshell what’s your view on the essential fatty acids just so everybody knows Well the first claim was that it was linoleic acid then maybe linoleic was added but already after the BERS studies of the late 20s and early 30s By the 1940s their disease was shown to be nothing but a vitamin B6 deficiency And at just about the same time the agricultural researchers were showing that linoleic and linoleic acid were the causes of brain degeneration, testicular degeneration and infertility and muscle degeneration and fish oils 12:49 about the same time were causing mink degenerative disease And then the yellow fat disease was showing up in more and more animals as they were fed fish waste because of an excess of the polyunsaturated fats in the fish fat And so the linoleic acid finally was recognized to be essential for cancer but not at all essential for nutrition And the publicity coming out that the original essential fatty acids were essential for cancer kind of discouraged the marketing in that direction and that’s when it shifted to marketing fish oil as the new version of the essential fatty acids 13:53 and that’s where we are now at pretty much the peak of the fish oil promotion as the new fatty acids that are being recommended at higher intake levels to actually function as drugs to supposedly cure a lot of diseases But in fact the old research going back 40-50 years shows that it is simply a temporary suppression of inflammatory symptoms while in the long run increasing the inflammatory degenerative processes So the reason people have a subsiding of their symptoms is just their immune system has been… David Horriban who was a big promoter of polyunsaturated fats 14:55 and who died of brain cancer and was trying to treat himself with his own fats He published work showing that fish oil is very immune suppressive and others looking at why fish oil is anti-inflammatory found that it wasn’t the original long chain polyunsaturated fats that are found in the fish but when they are processed and hit the hot organs of a mammal they break down and if they break down products the aldehydes and free radicals that are decomposed from the fish oils which are actually the anti-inflammatory substances So it’s the deterioration of the material that produces temporary relief 15:59 but it’s also those things which contribute to the serious long range problems such as brain damage and vascular damage and so on And you were saying last week that fish oil does have some good properties about it It has lots of vitamin A and D Yeah depends on how it’s made but in its crude form it does come with a lot of vitamin D and A So if there was some way to get those vitamins out without… Yeah there have been a lot of products on the market extracted from fish liver oil in which they concentrate the vitamin D and A a lot so that you can get your daily dose in a couple drops of the oil And some people are taking fish oil for anti-depression I think they’re called omega-brites or something Yeah there have been studies even in the published literature 17:05 the ones I’ve seen were just about an equal number saying it isn’t effective Let’s say it is effective Same with using it as a supplement to baby food There are studies that show that it retards iron brain development even though they don’t get discussed very much Is that the DHA? Yeah And they’ve started adding that to baby food? Yeah Oh dear How did we get on fish oil Raymond, do you remember? Well it’s being promoted as essential That’s right, thank you So flaxseed oil has gone out of fashion I didn’t realize that and now they’re promoting mostly fish oil in the alternative medicine field? I think so The literature in the 1980s just became overwhelming 18:06 Showing that linoleic acid in particular is really the basic motor for pushing cancer excess And linolemic isn’t quite as bad and so flaxseed isn’t as bad as some of the others We’re talking to Dr. Raymond Pete If anybody would like to ask Dr. Pete a question There’s no other phone line here but I can receive emails at info at wmrw.org That’s info at wmrw.org So if essential oils are only essential for creating disease How is it that they’re so heavily promoted by the government? Several years ago the FDA had a warning not to use more than I think it was three grams a day of those one-chain unsaturated fats from fish oil 19:12 And I think they’ve dropped that warning at least it isn’t prominent like it used to be And I think right from its very beginning the FDA was captured by the food industry and then the drug industry And now they really are working primarily as a corporate defense system Yeah, it seems like they absorbed the liability for the corporations by If they approve it then you can’t sue the corporation Yeah, the same thing as government protecting the nuclear industry by saying you can’t Collect more than a certain amount of damages if you have a reactor explode in your neighborhood Right, so basically the oil industry is underwritten by the government 20:13 Yeah, the public health service has a worse record than the FDA itself The FDA interfaces with the consumers and tries to keep them happy At higher levels the agencies of the government have been more defensive of the power structure And pretty much ignoring the consumer level Like in the years of the fallout from atmospheric bomb testing The public health service was destroying data and putting out false data about the safety of radiation Yeah, that is very telling of how the government can work at its worst 21:16 Maybe you could talk about radiation for a minute and how the government’s bias towards that has made it more widespread Well, for 60 years I’ve been hearing from dentists and doctors that the dose we give you in examining you is very small and harmless And then they reduce it tenfold and they say exactly the same thing And the words are the same in 1940 and 1950 right down to the current They claim they have digitalized machines, people think it’s just bits of information coming through their bodies But it’s still the same old x-rays that are exciting to their cells 22:20 Even Linus Pauling took a less than adequate biological view He was the one warning about the dangers but he was looking only at the DNA damage But the damage is much subtler than breaking strands of DNA The excited electrons cause chemical and physiological changes that linger completely distinct from the immediate reaction of radiation with the DNA So for example you can give a dose of radiation to cells in a dish and then add new cells that weren’t exposed to radiation to that dish 23:21 And the new cells will start mutating a day or more later from something emitted by the exposed cells And that process lingers in the tissues and the blood serum And it’s called the bystander effect that you can demonstrate in the lab Cells that weren’t exposed start behaving as if they were exposed by contact with the damaged cells People exposed from the Hiroshima bomb have been studied 60 years later and they still showed essentially excited electronic states in their tissues And the same with people I guess about 20 years after the Chernobyl exposure, their serum is still toxic It can be removed from their blood and added to healthy cells and the healthy cells begin mutating 24:31 So it’s the bystander effect which lingers and might continue causing mutations, but it’s a completely separate process from mutation The safety assumptions were based on the model of how a beam of radiation will affect a molecule So it was worked out in terms of direct interaction between a molecule and radiation But in the organism that simply isn’t how it works And Russians way back in the 60s were showing that where the western paradigm was that if you irradiated an animal’s brain it would go into estrus 25:34 Supposedly something was altered in the pituitary causing the ovaries to produce more estrogen The Russians did a control experiment in which they irradiated the animal’s foot instead of its brain And it went into estrus And so they called them some kind of radiation toxin that was emitted by the exposed tissue But it’s the same thing that happens in the bystander effect It’s some physiological biochemical change that is started by the radiation but then spreads and continues And the increased estrogen happens to imitate these processes started by the radiation So there are probably many levels from the single cell which emit the bystander acting substances to the whole organism 26:43 In which estrogen becomes one of the bystander activating substances So you’re saying a little bit of radiation causes this cascading effect throughout the body Two or three years ago in Seattle they were using low level fancy latest well calibrated X-ray equipment And covering the patients with lead aprons and so on And they found that a full set of dental X-rays if the woman was pregnant at the time even though her body was shielded thoroughly Her baby turned out under weight showing that basically the same effect as taking a dose of estrogen while pregnant It spreads a stress influence that malnourishes the developing fetus and causes its brain to develop less foliage and unexposed fetus 27:56 Now the method you used to describe how the government assessed the dangers of radiation poisoning Where they just sort of had a hypothetical theory that one molecule being affected by ionizing radiation But they didn’t take into account the living being I think you’ve said before that that’s common in how science is conducted in the west They do a lot of experiments in test tubes basically And worse than that rather than if you look through PubMed you see lots of abstracts described as in vitro But now they have the concept in silico What does that mean? It means they didn’t have anything living at all it was all done in a computer But people read the article and they’re used to seeing in vitro and they think real cells were involved 29:00 But in silico it means in the computer I’ve never heard of that before In silico And what’s wrong with that Ray? What’s wrong with doing, I guess that’s modeling basically isn’t it? Yeah, it’s like the medieval arguments about angels How much force-based does an angel need to dance and how many can get on the head of a pin You mean it’s meaningless unless it’s Yeah, worse than meaningless It is a way of amplifying your favorite hypothesis or assumption It’ll actually promote some absolutely wrong theory if you do your modeling right Yeah So in studying science I think a lot of people are a little bit confused that 30:06 We just figured it’s empirical and they’re testing theories all the time And of course the best theory will end up on top because it’ll get the most positive results How come that isn’t the way it works? Lots of reasons but probably the basic thing is that it’s all filtered through the culture And the system of assumptions And the assumptions if you look at different cultures The whole background of velocity and religion influences what you think can be taken seriously as an assumption And because in the medieval times people believed in alchemy and the influence of the planets and astrology 31:17 Ordinary chemists and physiologists think it’s absurd to consider the phase of the moon When you’re doing a chemical or biological study But several people have looked at lab results done over a period of time And have seen that the phase of the moon does influence many experiments in lab And for example I worked in the hamster lab at the university Where the indoor temperature was kept constant and the light was artificially controlled So a person would not have any cues indoors whether it was winter or summer But somehow the hamsters knew what was going on outside the walls 32:23 Because their thymuses would atrophy in the winter season and come back in the spring Just like they do when they’re exposed to changing day length And that was investigated Professor Brown in Indiana did many tests with potatoes, oysters and flowering plants And he had noticed that his experiments varied with the moon And he got some oysters from the east coast and studied their metabolism in Indiana And if it had been genetically determined the way the paradigm said it must be Because hamsters can’t know when it’s winter if you’re controlling their light cycle 33:29 So it must be some kind of genetically operated clock in their brains Brown took his oysters to Indiana and they were still metabolically cycling As if the tides were coming into Indiana And he did the same thing with potatoes which aren’t susceptible to tides And so no one knew about monthly cycles in potatoes But he saw a similar metabolic moon cycle in potato metabolism And flowering plants that he saw that he could take one of these plants that opened its petals at dawn and closes them at sunset Taking it indoors they still kept up the same cycle And so he took it into a big building where no cues from the outside apparently reached 34:39 And he still did it so he took his plants into a mineshaft and they kept cycling until they got down I think it was hundreds of feet below the surface The plants finally didn’t receive a cue and no longer cycled So he demonstrated that something lunar or planetary influence was able to penetrate hundreds of feet of shielding And his plants showed that when properly shielded they no longer cycled disproving the idea that it’s a genetic clock And other people were able to train plants to move their leaves at different times of day by giving them cues that overrode the environmental cues 35:45 Again disproving that it’s all controlled by an abstract genetic clock I see, so you’re saying that genetics is a dogma that’s been pretty much accepted by the culture as the… Yeah, it really is primarily a kind of religious belief that… Remember the Le Marc Cuvier controversy? The person who took over the museum that Le Marc had been the director of for years When Le Marc was doing his work showing the inheritance of acquired traits The man that took over was a Christian catastrophist who basically said there was no evolution It was accounted for by a flood destroying the ancient species and so on 36:51 So in history the genetics as an anti-environmental approach was strictly a biblical orientation against the whatever the Le Marcian environmentalist orientation was Yeah, I always said that genetic orientation always is very convenient for liability in terms of anybody causing environmental damage Whether it be to your own body in terms of pollution or to the environment in general If you can’t directly link them in a simple cause and effect they can always just say it’s genetics It has been very convenient for the medical profession for the last 50 or 60 years It’s either genetic or it’s a virus and there’s nothing you can do to expect the cure 37:57 And especially with cancer the government was very influential in reinforcing that interpretation And that’s closely related to military medical research The germ warfare people were getting government subsidies and they were inclined to the It’s your own fault for having bad genes theory And much of the research was done to say that the military didn’t cause the problems The environmentalism in cancer research simply couldn’t get funding after about 1945 39:07 Is that right? Since 1945? It’s all been genetic? It was persisting into the early 50s but it’s pretty much at the end of the Second World War That the whole school of biology simply was defunded and put out of existence The idea that embryos develop according to a field, developmental field and gradient That was a dominant theory along with the idea that cancer is a metabolic physiological field distortion So embryology and cancer were related to these metabolic and pattern based ideas The genetics and militaristic approach simply cut those off 40:15 And the best research was done through the 30s and the war itself interrupted a lot of the research But when the government came out of the war having funded the Manhattan Project That sort of money was then directed into germ warfare research And that gradually shifted to so called cancer research The Fort Detrick germ warfare lab simply changed its name While not doing very different research when it shifted over to the war against cancer So these cultural beliefs that seem to be directing research and taking some theories for the truth And rejecting other theories regardless of the empirical evidence 41:19 They basically are also responsible for the misinformation we’ve heard about cholesterol? In different ways they talk about genetically determined tendencies towards high cholesterol That you can see in the form of cholesterol receptors The whole idea of receptor is a genetic pharmacological idea It is very much like the ads you see on TV where a drug zooms around in your body and goes right to the place where it’s needed The receptor idea is like a switch that turns on a gene And there are molecules that drugs and substances stick to 42:24 And if they have any involvement in physiology those are called the receptor But that is promoted as a genetically determined thing And so one drug company was collecting genes from a village in the Mediterranean area Where people didn’t have heart disease and trying to promote a gene change as a drug product But the environmental influences simply were in the interest Because if you can identify a problem as a permanent genetic feature of the patient And then work on that gene receptor with a drug then you’ve got a product 43:25 The cholesterol receptors are regulated by hormones such as the thyroid And so if a person doesn’t have enough of the receptor so called that takes cholesterol out of your blood You can take thyroid and increase the amount of that receptor But that doesn’t please anyone but the thyroid industry They haven’t really taken advantage of it And the thyroid industry, I know a lot of people are hopping around here but I know a lot of people who do take thyroid And there’s several products on the market, there’s synthroid, there’s cytomel There’s Sinoplus, all of these are aimed at their thyroid hormone which basically gets your thyroid jump started a bit Yeah, in the 1930s the main product was made by the Armour Meat Company 44:32 Which became the Armour Pharmaceutical Company Because they had a lot of beef and pork, thyroid that they didn’t know what to do with So they would sell those or the ovaries or adrenals or whatever wasn’t popular as meat They would dehydrate and sell as a drug product And in the 30s that was the standard treatment The symptoms of hypothyroidism were identified And when they would give them the Armour Thyroid containing both T4 and T3 The symptoms would be alleviated But after the war The company came on the market with purified pyroxam Which is only a fraction of the fraction of the Armour Thyroid 45:34 The thyroid contains the proteins that you digest and then it liberates the two thyroid substances T4 and T3 But T4 is released by the gland about four times as much as the active T3 And the liver then, when conditions are right, when the environment is right The liver completes the activation so that most of your thyroid function is really coming from the liver Which the liver is an interface with the environment So when your nutrition calls for it then your liver produces 70-80%!o(MISSING)f the active thyroid hormone But after the war the drug company had an interest in promoting a product So they said the main substance and the easiest to make was thyroxam 46:41 And they gave it to 25-year-old male medical students, very healthy people And said it works just like real thyroid in these healthy young men But they didn’t test it in thick people or in women Women’s livers are much less active than men because of the effect of estrogen A certain amount of alcohol takes longer for a woman to eliminate from the bodies than a man So the liver in general is less active than females But the drug product thyroxam was sold across the board even though it had only been tested in young men And it was more than ten years later that the real active hormone T3 came on the market 47:45 It wasn’t even known at the time that the thyroid supplement was being marketed as thyroxam And the tests that determined whether you were a hypothyroid or not This regarded all of the symptoms that had been associated with hypothyroidism through the up until about 1945 And the tests at first measured only the iodine bound to protein Which has very little to do with your thyroid function And according to those tests the thyroxam product would raise your protein bound iodine And so that was compatible with marketing the synthetic drug But after about twenty years they saw that the protein bound iodine test had almost nothing to do with your thyroid function 48:54 If you ate seaweed you would get a lot of protein bound iodine but your thyroid function would go down And so they started looking for new ways to test the thyroid But they had established over those twenty years that instead of half of the population benefiting from thyroid The tests suggested that only five percent of the people would benefit from thyroid So whatever new test came on the market the assumption had been established in the culture that only about five percent would need thyroid And so any new test has been standardized to that paradigm of looking at a percentage of the population Rather than whether the substance cured symptoms And so now they are treating the thyroid stimulating hormone level and disregarding the actual effects of the hormone on the person’s health and physiology 50:06 So they’re basically treating one of the markers instead of the actual symptoms Yeah, that seems to happen a lot in medicine They start mistaking the marker for the actual problem Yeah, and they call it subclinical and don’t even make it explicit what they mean by clinical The AIDS test I think is something like that isn’t it? Yeah, there have been several traditional drugs that alleviate symptoms that those tend to be suppressed or forgotten But the so-called virus has attracted very little attention 51:12 What they’re doing now is using a lab process to amplify a substance that relates to the virus It isn’t the actual virus but they call it the viral load but it’s something they create in the laboratory Meanwhile they ignore the use or consider them simply additional therapies that could be added to the valuable and profitable drugs that they use to treat the AIDS people I was going to talk to you about Chris Masterjohn’s experience in cholesterol today but maybe we’ll save that for another day You’re going to say something else about the AIDS drugs? 52:14 There are a couple very good books on one is Infending the AIDS Virus by Peter Duisburg And the other one is by Harvey Beale about Peter Duisburg and the virus and disease I’ve been following it now for 20 years and the establishment people just don’t want to talk about it They won’t let these people publish responses to articles in the major journals The average doctor reading it thinks they have no answer but it’s just that the editors don’t want to hear their answer The main line is the virus theory of AIDS people have never answered the criticism of Peter Duisburg who basically says the virus is harmless 53:21 And that begs the question what’s causing the harm? He thinks it’s a drug I’m inclined to the idea that it’s the interaction of drugs, poly-impact rated paths, radiation exposure and other toxins in the environment So that would be another case of an environmental problem that’s… When you’ve grasped the incidents over the last 60 years of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome It’s a straight progressive increase since the bomb tests began after the Second World War And there was no sudden jump after time age became official as a disease It’s a steady increase going back 60 years Well that’s very interesting Well we’re just about out of time We’ve been talking to Dr. Raymond Peat from Eugene, Oregon 54:24 He’s a physiologist and an endocrinologist and puts out a newsletter called Ray Peat’s Newsletter And you can find him on the web at raypeat.com Where you have a lot of excellent articles Getting more and more articles up there I’ve noticed too Yeah I have another 10 or 15 that will go up in a couple of weeks I hope Great, well they’re very interesting and even if you don’t necessarily agree with everything that’s said there Plenty of food for thought And a lot of medical history and scientific history that I certainly have never heard about before So I find it all fascinating Thanks Ray for your work Okay And we’ll talk to you soon Bye And that concludes today’s broadcast of Politics and Science I hope you enjoyed it Other Politics and Science shows can be found at RadioNumeralForAll.net That’s Radio and then the number 4 55:26 AllALL.net And once you get there type in Politics and Science I’ve been your host today, John Barkhausen Please tune in again next week for another edition of Politics and Science