Environmental Enrichment - Bad Science

00:00 Well, welcome to this month’s Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name’s Andrew Murray, and for those of you who perhaps have never listened to the show which runs every third Friday of the month from 7 to 8pm, we’re both licensed medical herbalists who train in England and graduated there with a degree in herbal medicine. We run a clinic in Garberville where we consult with clients about a wide range of conditions and we manufacture all our own certified organic herb extracts which are either grown on our CCUF certified herb farm or which are sourced from other USA certified organic suppliers. So as per usual, I’ve still got the same intro but Sarah is not joining me today. So you’re listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMU-D Garberville 91.1 FM and 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 environmental enrichment. Amongst other things, we’re going to cover a few other topics of interest as well as look at a couple of recent articles that have caused a bit of a stir and that 01:01 we are going to refute for the bad science they contain. As a number you, if you live in the area is 9233911. So from 7.30 to 8 o’clock onwards callers are very welcome to call in with any questions about the show’s content either this month’s or any previous content they might have questions about. If you live outside the area there’s a toll-free number is 1-800-KMU-D-RAD which is 1-800-568-3723 and we can also be reached toll-free on 1-888-WBM-ERB for further questions during normal business hours Monday through Friday. So once again, very welcome to introduce a seemingly permanent fixture to the show, thankfully, for his wisdom. Dr. Pete, thank you for joining us. Hi. Okay, I guess as always I’d like you to give an introduction of your academic background for perhaps those people who’ve just tuned into the show and have never heard you before. 02:02 In the 60s I taught biology and literature and painting and various things but then I went to a graduate school at 1968 to 72 studying biochemistry, reproductive, aging, physiology in general and since then I’ve been continuing some of the same projects that I started back in the late 60s. Okay, and you’re fairly prolific, I think that’s the right word, in terms of producing newsletters that can be accessed by people wanting to make a subscription to your newsletters and also your pretty constant and avid researcher of topics, both old and new, finding out the truth if you like about where the science is coming from and that leads me on to a couple of articles I wanted to discuss or wanted you to discuss, the bad science portion of 03:07 the articles because one of them caused a fair amount of stir in as much as the topics that we’ve talked about in the past, things like salt being good for you and sugar being good for you and saturated fats being good for you, the saturated fats seems to be working its way to the surface now with the medical establishment seemingly doing a U-turn on the polyunsaturates saying that the polyunsaturates are bad for you now, actually the saturated fats are good for you and hopefully in time here the same thing will happen with sugar but recently there’s been an article that was published that seemed to shoot down the benefits of sugar and it was done with mice and they were using two different groups of mice, the bottom line with the article was that calling sugar poisonous and it had the same kind of effects in terms of the results as when they tested mouse groups that were in bread and that the same negative effects were present in the sugar group as were in 04:11 the mouse group that were in bread in terms of their ability to control territory and dominate others as signs of their healthiness and their ability to find the best place to sleep and mate with the best females, so you’re familiar with that study done in Utah, the university in Utah that said that sugar was bad for the mice and it caused an early death and all sorts of things. Yeah, it just came out a couple days ago and people have been contacting me about it because it basically says that the amount of sugar, fructose and sucrose in three sweetened drinks that Americans are large part of the population average that many per day that that amount given to mice causes extremely high mortality next best thing to rat poison for the high rate of mortality in a period of I think it was 32 weeks or 05:17 36 weeks. 35%!o(MISSING)f the sugar reared females died and only 17%!o(MISSING)f the so-called stock diet. That sounds bad on the face of it, isn’t it? You explain the science behind their findings. Yeah, twice as many deaths in this fairly moderate period of time just from drinking the equivalent of three sodas and that was so weird and extreme. I looked up what that group had been doing before this study and they were working on as you mentioned inbreeding and they found that the inbred mice had a high mortality and aggression was designed into their living arrangement so that they thought of it as accelerated evolution apparently in which the 06:23 survival of the meanest would be evident in a very short time and it happened that in the several years ago with just a year or two before they switched from their inbreeding studies to the sugar study there were three or four papers published showing that a diet enriched in starch and polyunsaturated fats powerfully increased aggression and mouse killing in rats. So the connection between starch, polyunsaturated fats and aggression was clearly established and they had an environmental setup that allowed aggression to kill off part of the population 07:24 fairly quickly and so I don’t think it was just an objective study of the effect of sugar because the so-called stock diet consisting of some grains and soy protein or soy flour had corn starch added 25%!c(MISSING)orn starch so the grains contained the polyunsaturated fats and it was a model of the aggression promoting diet but they didn’t mention that in their publicity about the fact that the so-called normal diet allowed higher survival in the females than the sugar rearing diet with the equivalent of three sodas per day so what they did was create an arrangement in which feeding 08:28 the one group of animals so that they became aggressive the setup was such that they could take over the food supply the nesting arrangement and generally bully the weaker animals until they died so that extremely high mortality is not produced by drinking three sodas a day it would be if you had to associate the sugar reared population with the population living on on starch and polyunsaturated fats would and they injured the passive people excellent okay good so just fairly bad science unfortunately turned into a mainstream article it was there’s a buzz 09:29 just gone okay so it was you hear that okay there’s a okay all right can you hear any buzzing on the line how’s your house’s phone line to you dr. Pete so far it’s perfect good okay I just heard the buzz maybe it’s just on my end all right so unfortunately as another example of some skewed science to produce results in the direction that was favorable to the outcome which was that sugar was bad for you when actually it was not modeled correctly in the the actual findings weren’t weren’t realistic okay so that’s that’s the first thing and then there was another article from a study done in Italy which reference the intake of t4 specifically Synthroid which is a fairly common prescription for thyroid deficiency and a link between Synthroid use and lung cancer so that course again a little bit of a stir given out quite a few people are using Synthroid for low 10:32 thyroid function in terms of Synthroid’s use and its activity as compound what did what did you find about that study that was erroneous there were animal studies with lung cancer specifically that are very relevant to that and they found that t3 at the active thyroid hormone inhibited the growth of the cancer cells but that t4 increased their growth and increased the metastatic ability of them and that’s similar to some studies that started about 30 years ago published in JAMA there was a study in I think it was the late 80s comparing a group of five women who had been 11:36 treated for hypothyroidism with t4 only such as Synthroid comparing them to a group of women who weren’t given any thyroid supplement so they had chosen a group of hypothyroid women and reported that the ones who received the t4 or Synthroid had a higher rate of osteoporosis but since low thyroid is compensated by a high cortisone and high prolactin and other stress hormones which cause bone problems including osteoporosis what they were doing was looking at a population with the deficient thyroid problem treated insufficiently with something like 100 micrograms of t4 and it 12:43 has been known for decades that women are much less able to convert t4 or Synthroid into the active hormone so it’s especially inappropriate for treating women with hypothyroidism together only t4. Okay from a perspective of being stimulant to turn up oxidative stress in terms of t4’s activity I don’t think you’re not really an advocate of just using t4 anyway in terms of its physiological effect and its usefulness. I mean in general both of the thyroid hormones if you can convert the thyroxin into t3 they both can have a very important anti oxidative damage function by increasing the rate of useful oxidation they keep electrons from escaping from the electron 13:53 transport chain in the mitochondrion and prevent the random oxidative damage just uncoupling the production of energy so you’re wasting oxygen and fuel with some drugs for example that used to be used for weight loss which activated the oxidation the way thyroid does but without producing useful energy even that kind of uncoupling is known to reduce oxidative damage so when you’re finding increased oxidative breakdown products when you give t4 it shows that you’re not activating oxidative metabolism the way thyroid normally does you’re interfering in some way with the respiratory system. Okay well thank you for that it’s those two 14:57 articles like I said caused a bit of a stir but obviously they’re not in the right context. Okay so you’re listening to ask your doctor on KMUD Garberville 91.1 FM from 7.30 to the end of the show at 8 o’clock callers are invited to come in with any questions they have either about tonight’s subject or previous subjects the number if you live in the area is 9233011 and if you live outside the area there’s a 1-800 KMUD Rad. Okay well let’s move on to the main topic of tonight the the subject of environmental enrichment in terms of negating the effects if you like or staving off the effects of brain atrophy and also the reference to Alzheimer’s says seeing that this enrichment now is proposed as a a new approach if you like for the treatment 15:57 of Alzheimer’s another neuro degenerative disease where lab findings show an association between Alzheimer’s and increased levels of destructive inflammatory mediators like nitric oxide and cortisol as well as prostaglandins what’s what do you know about the this this topic of environmental enrichment and in its perspective to energy and anti inflammation that observation that Alzheimer’s people have drastically reduced living variety they tend not to socialize as much as people who are resistant to Alzheimer’s that started to be thinking about the general range of stimulation and animal studies beyond simple more or less voluntary isolation that people old people often 17:01 develop the habit of just staying at home and watching television or something beyond that animal studies did various things isolation at different ages separating the baby animals from their mothers right after weaning giving them solitary confinement until they’re middle aged and even tightening up their environment to the point of holding them so they can’t do anything at all there’s a gradient all the way from living in a playground basically with slides and wheels and various colored objects balls to push around and so on and all the way down to being rolled up in a blanket so you can’t move 18:03 but you see the same things happening the the worst the stress is the smaller the brain gets depression is known to increase cortisol and cause atrophy of all of the tissues and that includes the brain so they see that after about three years of just being psychologically depressed people show a smaller reduction of the brain volume and animal studies starting in the 1960s at University of California Berkeley that they first found that animals given stimulation a big playground to roam in during when they weren’t eating and sleeping they found that they learned better 19:04 could solve problems better and so they examined their brains to see what was happening and they found that the enzyme colon esterase was increased in proportion to how much they were stimulated and how well they learned and they kept that study going on generation after generation and found that it not only increased this enzyme that destroys acetylcholine it involved enlargement of the whole brain especially the cortex and each generation both the enzyme increased and the brain got larger wow but so it’s passed on yeah in a physiological sort of inheritance which is getting some study now in the last 10 years but at the time they were just interested 20:10 in the fact that that the environment could cause these major biological changes especially in the brain but a lot of people said well if you’re destroying acetylcholine at a higher rate and the brain gets bigger that must mean you have more activity of the cholinergic nerves making acetylcholine but that isn’t what they found they found that the enzyme that destroys it was increased as the brain got bigger and that kind of reasoning without facts shifted over to thinking about the deterioration of of the brain in Alzheimer’s disease and they saw that there was less tissue in parts of the brain especially in the cholinergic part 21:16 and no one suggested that maybe over exposure to acetylcholine might have something to do with why the nerves atrophied because the various stress signals increase the various factors that cause brain shrinkage so they proposed poisoning the enzyme cholinesterase which was associated in the animal studies with increased intelligence memory and brain growth they proposed doing just the opposite poisoning that enzyme to increase the amount of acetylcholine in the brain and the first drug that was proposed and used according to that theory was tackling was was the name of the chemical and several studies by the late 90s were seeing that it 22:21 did absolutely nothing for the Alzheimer’s dementia but it did cause a terrifically high incidence of liver disease so in the 70s it happened that Parkinson’s disease was they were looking around for other things than albopa to treat it with because that didn’t work too well and some virus treatment investigations had found that a derivative of camphor or a similar compound that was used to cure herpes and influenza also had nerve protective action and they thought why not use this amandadine or adamantine amine to treat Parkinson’s disease 23:25 and they found that it did benefit Parkinson’s disease which involved among other things an excess of acetylcholine and this amandadine was known right from the time of the virus studies it was known to be an anti-colonergic drug and it was recognized as an anti-colonergic when it was being used to improve Parkinson’s patients but the Alzheimer’s people seeing the success with Parkinson’s disease wanted to try it in their population but since they were already treating with something that increased the colonergic acetylcholine they couldn’t very well 24:26 switch right over to something absolutely opposite to inhibit the colonergic system so they suddenly discovered that as well as being anti-colonergic amandadine and the very similar mementine they found that they also inhibit the excitotoxins the glutamate aspartate excitatory system okay so suddenly this anti-colonergic drug became an anti-excitatory drug and was fit to be used in Alzheimer’s patients in combination with Tatrine or the galantamine or other drugs to poison the enzyme which this new drug was activating wow do you know are these these two compounds you mentioned are they still they still prescribed drugs or they oh yeah mementine I think is is now a standard 25:41 Alzheimer’s treatment along with whatever toxin of the of the colon estrus okay so so this this this was uh because I was always I mean in terms of my physiology studying herbal medicine I was always taught that acetylcholine was a very important neurotransmitter and it was mopped up in a synaptic synaptic synaptic excuse me cleft by acetylcholine estrus and that prevented any over stimulation firing so in for what you were just discussing right now we’re talking about a kind of excess situation where there’s an excess yeah I’m in inescapable stress right right there you go the stress hormones rather than pushing higher and higher on the cortisol and adrenaline 26:44 direction to excite things run the heart at a faster rate the body shifts when it sees futility inability to escape it can simply switch gears and turn off that system and turn on the acetylcholine cholinergic system and the confinement inescapable stress which is the extreme of isolation the extreme opposite from enriched environment this turns on the uh uh the cholinergic dominant system which lowers blood sugar and in consequence lowering the blood sugar activates histamine release some of the acetylcholine 27:48 nerves such as the vagus nerve amplify their influence by releasing histamine which uh is it’s very similar in its effects to acetylcholine so you can think of this kind of inescapable stress as turning on the histamine type of cholinergic reaction so this this is really a kind of death situation this would be going towards death and away from life um yeah biological in the learned helplessness experiments of the 60s martin seligman is the person who made that famous he’s now doing military research he found that if you almost drowned a rat but saved it uh even the rats that saw it being saved would swim on for days before they drowned 28:50 and if you put the the saved rat back in the experience of being saved would would cause it to swim much longer than the average rat might give up after a day that sounds like the seed of hope to me yeah but if if you simply held the rat in your hand and till it got the idea that it was powerless uh one experience of being unable to escape you would drop it in the water and it would basically drown in 30 minutes wow wow far out let’s go ahead the state of the heart they found was in a turned off state basically a cholinergic uh anti-mobilization of energy state wow we do have a couple of callers obviously thanks for that explanation that’s uh pretty profound so let’s take this first let’s take the first caller you’re on the air is that me please yeah you’re on the air and where are you calling from for morgan house california which is close 29:53 in avada city okay thank you uh yes the first question is has to do with uh toe fungus dr pete you mentioned in the past that sulfur was good for fungus and i was just wondering if uh if it would work with toe fungus and if i should use some dmso to get it in there and the second was you were wondering about your thoughts on irradiation of food all right there’s a 10%!s(MISSING)ulfur sold at drug stores they might not stock it on the shelf because it’s too cheap but it works very well for athletes but anywhere on the body this is a bit deeper than athletes but it’s actually in the nail bed uh yeah once it gets into the nail uh it’s very hard to get anything in there but uh it’s possible that dmso would help it penetrate through the nail but the fungus actually lives right inside the thick nail material i have been using a dremel 30:55 to thin it out as much as i can bear but uh i’ll try that too so about irradiate irradiation of food you have any thoughts about that um yeah it’s been known for a long time that uh it breaks down all of the uh fragile easily oxidized nutrients changes some of the amino acids turns tryptophan into some toxins uh the um advocates of it the radiation waste disposal industry uh it’s a good way to get rid of radioactive waste to put it into factories they do studies and claim that it almost doesn’t change the food at all right it seems like the the idea behind it in part at least is that they could drop supposedly drop their sanitation standards to zero and then rely on the irradiation to kill bacteria yeah yeah but it does it changes 32:03 the the flavor fairly drastically it it gives it a rancid flavor almost instantly but the public gets accustomed to degraded food so yeah okay well thanks very much thank you for that cool caller okay do we have any other yeah michael let’s set the next call please yeah hi uh i’m calling from the sand creek watershed and i got a question about kava uh that you know supposedly the most powerful anxiolytic there is um and all of this are you are my owner hello yeah you’re on the eye i can hear okay and all of the studies done i went to an herb school in the eastern part of the country and that you know like it was my teacher’s favorite herb also and it’s something that i use chronically or i guess uh yeah anyways and uh the thing that i’m curious about is like i’ve heard that a lot of the studies done that say that it has liver damage were done on like well you know like one of those studies where they gave us the above ground parts instead of just the below 33:07 ground parts and i’m just curious about your thoughts and opinions on that and if you know anything about that study yeah i do um the uh the the parts that i used anyway are the roots and the study that uh showed this another good example of skewed science um showed the hepatotoxic effects of kava were actually done with a hexane extract of um kava kava um and actually the hexane was probably more carcinogenic than anything else um in terms of its use in fiji and uh parts of uh tropical philippines um where they grow kava and use kava in hawaii to you know ceremoniously there’s no there’s no real recorded incidents of any liver toxic effects of it so uh you would think i know that’s probably an aqueous extract so they i don’t think they use ethanol to extract it which it is typically extracted in a uh 45 percent or 60 percent ethanol you can definitely make i definitely made fresh kava tincture with 35 percent okay yeah 34:10 it works great yeah well that was that was the main bit of science that came out was with a hexane extract and i believe it was to animals it was in an animal study so i think it was a rat or mouse study that showed liver damage and the liver damage almost exclusively was uh down to the hexane well do you see any long-term negative effects of using kava tonically um i can’t say that i’ve witnessed any long-term uh effects myself i know a lot of people use it for skeletal muscle relaxation that’s its main indication is to is to relax skeletal muscle which is why it’s termed an anxiolytic um yeah i think ceremoniously when it’s used it’s probably ingested in large amounts and so i think it does have a fairly profound relaxant activity if you were to use kava kava in a quote therapeutic uh sense the dose would probably be nowhere near as much and you’d probably experience some uh general anxiolytic action but not not as profound perhaps as you would 35:13 if you were in a kava ceremony totally i feel like the way it makes your mouth tingle it makes your whole mind and body tingle too that’s how it works yeah that’s the hallmark of kava well thanks for your but yeah you’re very welcome have a good one yeah thank you for calling okay we have another call on the line let’s take the next caller hello hi you’re on the air yes i want to ask something in regard to the thyroid um now i’m my situation is my thyroid is a bit low um and uh they have me on 88 micrograms of something i think they call level level oxene you know levothyroxine okay is that the same as the synthroid yeah it’s t4 okay it’s t4 all right now yeah sometimes i get the three and the four mixed up um and i asked the doctor the endocrinologist um do i need to take the t3 as well as the t4 and he said that we convert t4 into 36:13 t3 automatically yeah well is that true the reason women have five to ten times the number of thyroid problems of all sorts that men do is that their liver is relatively unable to convert t4 to the active t3 hormone efficiently uh in the 1940s when t4 was uh synthesized and brought out as a product it was tested on male medical students and it worked in them just the same as a armor thyroid extract but they didn’t bother testing it on a female population which well i’ve been having tests uh you know fairly regularly to see uh how it’s doing and they keep telling me that my thyroid is now normal uh well the um old normal uh concentration in the 37:18 blood of t4 and t3 when the gland was producing it and the liver was activating it or when a person was using armor thyroid as a supplement uh the uh well i’m not using that so i mean is this working for me or is there a reason for me to take the armor instead or what uh well if you have any symptoms of hypothyroidism remaining uh then that would mean that your liver isn’t activating the t4 well when they take it when they do the blood test and they say that my my uh thyroid is at a normal level that’s well i mean they they changed the normal uh level previous to the uh use of pure thyroxin there was a very uh slight difference uh like a 4 to 1 to or 10 to 1 ratio of thyroxin to t3 in the blood but now they consider 50 to 1 to be normal 38:22 and are you saying that test the blood test isn’t reliable for me to know the blood test has been standardized on a population of people who have been using only thyroxin rather than the natural thyroid or people who have no thyroid problem at all well now if i took the armor that has the t3 also does that mean that i’m going to get uh you know make better use of it or i’m just going to be well it’s exactly the proportion that your own gland uh secretes and then the liver if if your liver is responding to the active t3 secreted by the gland the liver will go ahead and convert the rest of the t4 to t3 but uh if you take armor thyroid and and metabolize it perfectly your blood test is going to show excess above normal t3 because they’ve standardized the test to say that normal 39:29 is uh what is produced by taking thyroxin it’s going to help me i might try it how long does it take to take it before the test will show differently well if your tsh is is in the low normal range and if your temperature and pulse rate are good and if you don’t have any symptoms then you’re handling it properly the way the symptoms of having a low thyroid cold hands and feet are very common low blood sugar anxiety fatigue depression dry skin edema inability to go very long without getting hungry craving sweets no i don’t think i have too much of that um i see what what happened is i had had atrial fibrillation and uh they discovered that i had a high or overactive thyroid which i’d never had before i don’t know what caused it it came on uh and the only symptom i had was uh the the uh 40:38 heartbeat irregular heartbeat so um they told me there was basically i could take something called a thymazol which would lower the thyroid but it would make me um very susceptible to bad infections and uh you had just lots of difficult side effects the other thing they said i could do was have my thyroid basically um most of it destroyed by taking a radioactive iodine treatment and that sounds drastic but it seemed like well if i shrink my thyroid down below normal with this then that’s it and then all i have to do is take thyroid and that’s not going to have the side effects of the thymazol so i chose to do that and then you know gradually the thyroid uh you know started to shrink and it seems to have stabilized where i need to add the 88 micrograms and then i’m okay what do you think about about you know doing that for if you have hypothyroid a hypothyroid to do the uh um there was a study of people with hypothyroidism treated by three 41:44 different kinds of doctors one did surgery one did the radioactive iodine to kill the thyroid and the third group got uh just the thyroid suppressing chemical and uh the patients on the chemical most of them after six months recovered and uh the portion about 30 percent that didn’t recover in six months with another six months uh they recovered just with the suppressing chemical and then they went on to have a functioning thyroid afterwards rather than having it. Well to me i already had it but it didn’t totally destroy it they calibrated it so that it would uh just be a little bit below normal and i would still make some thyroid but i’d have to have it you know add some i just didn’t want to take the chance on the chemical because there were so many side effects whereas once you lower it with the radioactive thing then that’s done you no longer 42:45 radioactive they say it goes straight to the thyroid gland and and shrinks it and it doesn’t go anywhere else in your body so that’s what’s going on so now i have to add the thyroid so uh you’re saying that if i don’t have symptoms of hypothyroidism then i should just get with what i’m doing and i don’t need the armor uh yeah the temperature pulse rate and symptoms are are good indicators yeah i don’t have cold hands and feet or you know i think everything’s normal um sometimes i get fatigued but i think it might be a result of the uh going through the uh intense heart thing you know because it took a while for that to get balanced so um right now everything seems to be getting better well thank you i want to give somebody else a chance thank you very much yeah okay thank you vehicle all right we do have a couple of other callers dr pete so let’s say the next caller you’re on here yes this is david from Missouri hi david um dr pete i wanted to ask about uh 43:50 what i’m starting to gather from you know reading most of your nutritional philosophy and then also looking at the east west healing cookbook that you wrote the foreword for and i’ve noticed that um on a lot of the food preparation that they will take the seeds out of like cucumbers and tomatoes and um you know you always skin the potatoes and i think i understand why but i just wanted to understand this a little bit better i know that we don’t want seeds because they have polyunsaturated fats but you would think that a lot of those seeds would just pass through but is it because a lot of these things will lodge in the crooks and crannies of the intestine and possibly just sit there and become an irritant or possibly the bacteria will feed off of that because it’s i know some seeds some seeds do pass through harmlessly uh like cactus pear seeds uh they’re so tough that they pass through without being an irritant but tomato seeds are so tender that 45:00 if they get crushed by by chewing they release and fairly toxic materials protein oxidizing and uh seeds in general are protected for the plant’s benefit by uh toxins that are aimed at whatever predator threatens them so many seeds contain toxins that are intended to prevent mammalian enzymes from digesting them uh huh so like like a blackberry seed you know blackberries i mean they seem so good but those seeds they seem like they’re just going to get stuck in the intestine somewhere you know it’s so hard is that is that a possibility are those going to pass through or are they going to create that toxic effect they pass right through unless you chew them and and have an allergic reaction okay and so like the potato skin obviously that 46:02 is not digestible so that’s going to probably sit in the intestine and feed bacteria or is that going to pass through too no uh cellulose is a very harmless fiber because uh bacteria generally can’t break it down only a few types of bacteria can attack cellulose so it passes through just as bulky fiber but the potato family like the tomatoes the whole family includes uh chemicals that are highly allergenic so if you’re allergic to tomatoes you’re likely to have some reaction to chilies uh eggplants and potatoes too so you’re saying just the whole potato in general or the skin itself well the skin is has the most allergens okay so it is good I did appeal back then more than likely yeah okay and then um the other thing is you know I’ve 47:04 noticed that you recommend it seems like you know you don’t say for sure on this but you usually will say just plain white sugar rather than like the you know like if you on the health food store now they’re always promoting these um cane organic sugars that aren’t refined so they’re not white they’re like brownish colored and different things I guess the problem with these things that are not more purified is that they have allergens allergens in them or possibly things from the processing of the different substances is that yeah if if you’ve um ever tasted black strapped molasses sometimes you can taste smoke in it and they used to burn the cane fields to make them easier to harvest and so they would be smoky and then they would boil it down and uh the molasses would collect minerals a lot of nutritious stuff but also the junk 48:04 and and smoky material and wow even with uh very clean material like um maple syrup or um the mage juice uh those come out very clean and when they’re cooked uh the high temperature if it’s browning the sugar that’s breaking down the sugar itself and uh producing some highly irritating possibly toxic materials so if these different sugars were produced properly they would be great but you’re we’re kind of playing it safe by just getting white sugar to just probably the purest form of uh glucose and fructose right yeah if they could for example be uh concentrated in a vacuum with a moderate temperature uh maybe uh something like pasteurization temperature uh that would be a very safe way to make sugar uh without having 49:12 to wash the brown stuff out of it so you could uh and so like uh the fructose that you can buy like in the health food stores you had mentioned to me in an email one time that you know you just got to make sure that you don’t have a reaction to it i guess what you were indicating there is that how they produce it again is is potentially a problem is that correct um yeah i think it’s all made from cornstarch industrially and uh you have to just test it yourself some people have a fairly intense quick reaction allergic to it other people do beautifully on it and i’m not sure if it’s the person’s difference or the product’s difference and and if if you did find a fructose that worked best for you or if you it worked and you didn’t have an allergic reaction that would be the ideal of sugar right yeah okay um fruit is really ideal because you get so many other nutrients uh with the the sugar okay and you know just one more question since you brought up fruit 50:20 like eating grapes that are seedless grapes is that skin a problem on a grape where’s it going to stick stick in the intestine and then feed bacteria or is it broken down pretty quickly one problem with grapes if you don’t wash them very carefully is that the white bloom on skin if you if you rub it and polish it that comes off it’s because yeast grow on the waxy surface of the skin i’ve wondered about that because you can almost see it yeah and and so it the fungus growing on the on the skin always has it’s a normal amount of estrogen in which could be a drawback but i so even if you just chewed it really really well it probably still wouldn’t help in that aspect with it well yeah but uh a moderate amount of grapes i don’t think that amount of irritation is going to worry most people okay well thank you thank thank you for your 51:27 call okay okay we do have we’ve got two or three more people but we’re definitely going to have time for one more and depending on how depending on how quick the uh the caller is their question or their question is then we might get to some more but let’s take the next next caller a very quick addendum to the last call is does cooking deactivate the enzymes in tomato seeds and then we’ll get to our next caller yes it deactivates the enzymes but it doesn’t destroy the allergens okay next caller you’re on the air oh hello hi i’m yvonne from mckinleyville okay and i wanted i one of my questions was already answered regarding his position on sugar so we can skip that one okay and i wondered what his position on salt and um and fats is doctor p each one salt and fat salt and fats what can help yeah what kind of what kind of fat are you asking about at the beginning of the program you said something about his positions 52:31 on sugar salt oh okay and uh okay okay so i can’t remember what you said about that we’re talking in relation to saturation and polyunsaturated dr p is very much a pro advocate of saturated fats and okay he’s very much uh very much behind using salt and getting adequate salt in your diet as a does he talk about what kind of salt well i know dr p you want to answer yes clean white salt like sea salt without additives is good yeah okay all right yeah that’s the end of me so maybe somebody else can have a turn thank thank you we do have one more caller and if caller wants to keep it short we should be able to squeeze you in and just go ahead hi i’m calling from will galt far west okay thank you i i have a question but i also want to say to the other callers that what’s been recognized about alzheimer’s is that it can come with iron deposits in the brain in this traditional herb from india turmeric has been recognized as being able to 53:32 chelate that iron like you have curcuminoid receptors throughout your body curcumin the active chemical component of turmeric so you can consume turmeric to help with alzheimer’s it’ll help remove the excess iron deposits and above that it also helps rebuild the collagen and removes the other deposits from your joints too so it helps with arthritis and as for the toe fungus neem is the traditional medicine to use neem oil you can use topically neem you can take internally also potentially activated charcoal because it’s it’s likely that dude has like a bacterial problem in his body and you could consume the activated charcoal but you can use the neem oil directly on the fungus also so to facilitate the liver you can consume dandelion root it’s an excellent liver tonic dr. p what do you think about the iron deposits i know you’ve always you’ve mentioned iron in a very dangerous reactive uh element yeah that fits right into what we’ve been talking about the uh the stress hormones that that lead to alzheimer’s disease 54:39 iron is sort of the endpoint of all of these changes uh nitric oxide and the prostaglandins activate enzymes which release and deposit iron in the brain where it then continues amplifying the the destructive reactions the functionality of it okay i’m afraid it is almost eight o’clock so don’t want to make want to make sure that um i give out dr. pete’s contact details for people who want to find out more about him and uh let’s just spend this last couple of minutes thanking dr. pete for his time thank you so much for joining us dr. pete okay thank you thank you so okay the uh web address uh web address of dr. pete is www.repeatpeat.com he has lots of articles that he’s published and i’ve all fully referenced scientific journal articles if you like um so go to his website he’s got a big resource there for information not just on tonight’s topic but lots of information on thyroid hormones good 55:44 fats versus bad fats salt sugar etc so until the third friday of next month my name is andrew we can be contacted on 1-888-WPM-URB for any questions monday through friday next month we’ll be in september folks and heading towards the fall uh hope the uh hope the weather’s going to be good where you are okay till next month