Fats

00:00 Welcome to Politics and Science. Politics and Science can be heard weekly on WMRW LP1 95.1 FM, airing on Wednesdays at 5 p.m. and Sundays at noon. And in the Bellows Falls area can be heard on Wool LP Bellows Falls at 101.1 FM, airing from 3 to 4 p.m. on Sundays and from 9 to 10 a.m. on Mondays. Politics and Science presents the viewpoints of its participants and does not necessarily reflect the viewpoints of any other person or organization. And my guest today on Politics and Science is Raymond Pete, endocrinologist and physiologist from Eugene, Oregon. And, Ray, how are you today? Good. Good. Hey, I was like… And, Ray, maybe you should give your resume a bit, Ray, because obviously you can do it better than I. 01:01 Oh, well, I’m not sure I can. Okay. I was a humanities person first, and while I was studying painting and literature and such, I was interested in science and read widely in libraries and encyclopedias and such. And my first teaching job while I was studying linguistics at Ohio State was in a little college where I got assigned to teach biology. And that, because I had been reading it first along the experience of teaching it, was fun. So I taught art and English for a few years after that, but finally decided to go back to graduate school in 1968 to study biology, actually, and at university. 02:02 My first courses in the sciences didn’t impress me that I would be able to learn much in a university, same in English and philosophy and psychology and other departments I tried being a graduate student in. I basically felt that the institutions were anti-educational, that their purpose was to prepare people to conform, to get a job, and go along with the system. But by the time I finally decided to be a biologist, I had learned how to be quiet enough that I could get through the degree program. With that, the graduate school experience, I think most people, having done it, recognized that it’s exercise in conformism rather than anything very special about learning. 03:08 You mean that they’re looking for certain behavioral patterns from their students? In the 1960s, a psychologist at Oregon State University did a study of academic success and how students had scored on the Miller analogies test, which is somewhat a test of cultural knowledge. I don’t know the language, but it’s partly a study of mental flexibility and ability to reason about new problems. And she found that the students who scored average on the Miller analogies test were straight A very successful students in graduate school. And the ones who deviated from the average either up or down were the less successful in graduate school. Meaning that having an average ability and conforming really is the way to be an outstanding graduate student. 04:23 So after you were a graduate student, you got your PhD? In 1972, I actually took more courses in biochemistry than in biology, but the degree was in biology. And since then, you’ve taught at a number of universities, I believe? Yeah, I taught some courses at the University of Oregon, but also in Mexico, University of Veracruz and State University of Mexico. And you write extensively in a newsletter that I know of called Ray Pete’s newsletter. Yeah, I’ve been doing that since 1981 when I, having had essentially all of my research rejected by the journals, 05:30 I decided just to go ahead and publish my own things and not have to deal with editors. I had sent some very simple, critical things as letters to editors of, for example, Science Magazine, pointing out that they were drawing racist conclusions from evidence that had absolutely nothing to do with their conclusions. And even a little two sentence criticism like that was rejected as being more extreme than the authors of the study I was commenting on. And I considered Science to be so political that I decided to publish my own books and newsletters. I think some of your writings have what prompted me to name the show Politics and Science because the two seem very closely interwoven. 06:39 In fact, they seem to be able to not escape from each other. And to the detriment of science, I’m afraid. Yeah, in the fifties, including when I first started teaching biology, my course was officially named Biology Introduction for Physics majors. And since the students were planning to major in physics, I thought that the biological work should find something that would relate to their interests. And I thought that information technology, how the organism was interpreted as information and radiation biology, how the organism interacted with radiation. I thought those were things that would be important to physics majors. 07:44 And the radiation issue, when the students got interested in reading what the government was saying about the safety of radioactive fallout, that caused great turmoil in the trustees of the university. And they invited a professor from University of Illinois to apply for my job. And when he arrived, his invited speech on the topic of his choosing was on radiation biology. And he said, he started his lecture looking at his wrist and saying, you notice I’m not wearing a wristwatch. He said, I realized how much radiation was being emitted from the dial and threw my watch away in a radioactive disposal. 08:47 And he not only didn’t get the job that he was going to apply for, but he got fired from the University of Illinois. I wonder how many they had to go through before they found a proper replacement for you. I never heard that. Yeah, well, it sounds like you’re not alone out there. And I know at one point you recommended to me a book called Cold War and Biology, which certainly speaks to the politics that are going with the science. Yeah, that’s a good introduction to the politics of genetics in a broader sense, not just the racist genetics that they were teaching in American universities, but the whole history way back to the 19th century. And maybe at some point we can cover that again. I was hoping today that we’d talk about fats somewhat, seeing that’s still a subject that’s in the news all the time. 09:50 The government always makes recommendations for what kind of fats you should be eating and they seem to change their minds about every five years or so. They come out with a new proclamation. For a while they were telling you to avoid. I remember when I was growing up, they told you to avoid greasy fried foods, which I think at that time was vegetable oil or I suppose it could have been coconut at that point. But I think a lot of people were frying their foods and in Western oil was the standard in the 50s when I was born in 55. So probably 1960 I became aware of things like that. And then at some point they did tell you that those fats were good for you, the vegetable oils, and that the thing to avoid was butter. Western oil was cottonseed oil. Oh, was it? I always thought that was corn. Well, maybe it was at some time, but in the 50s when I investigated it, it was cottonseed oil. 10:56 That has a long history way back. Mark Twain in one of his books told about hearing a conversation in the 1860s. People were talking about how they were going to make Americans eat cottonseed oil instead of butter. That’s right. There’s a fat conspiracy for you. I think I read that. They were taking olive oil from Italy and then cutting it from 10 to 1 with cottonseed oil. About 10 years ago the FDA did a survey of all of the imported olive oil sold in the US and reported that 70%!o(MISSING)f it was adulterated still. Is that right? Well, that’s not too encouraging. 11:57 I was thinking, if you feel like it, maybe we could start with a bit of the history of fat consumption, sort of what’s traditionally been eaten by humans and how that’s evolved in the last century or so. Oh, in the 19th century my relatives were still preferring fat meat to lean meat. The taste of it seemed to be an important guide. People really didn’t trim the fat from their meat because it tasted good. It was fairly isolated areas where they used the exotic oils like extracted oils. 13:08 Usually they just ate either oily fruits, the coconut itself, or avocados and sunflower seeds, and fat poultry and fat beef and pigs and so on. I guess around the 18th century was when the industrial market started promoting cod liver oil and some of the seed oils. Even fish oil was primarily used for varnish and lamps right up until the time of petroleum when petroleum became so cheap. Then the plant and fish oils became too expensive and they went looking for new markets. 14:17 The coconut oil is easy to get out with primitive technology and so the oriental countries where it was grown, they would boil the semi-dried coconut meat and float off the oil. It was very cheap and was being used to feed chickens and pigs and such in the United States and to make Oreo cookies, for example. Just because of its cheapness and it didn’t get rancid, but the agricultural industry in the 40s experimented and found that even though it was cheap, it stimulated the animal’s appetite and metabolic rates and caused them to eat more food and gain less weight. 15:23 One reaction was to use chemical poisons to slow their metabolic rate by poisoning the thyroid gland. Another discovery was that if they used fish oil or linseed oil or cotton seed oil, any of the unsaturated fats, they could slow the metabolic rate and make them put on fat more cheaply. So the seed oil industry now had a fairly good market in feeding pigs. But around that time, around 1950, the petroleum chemists had found a new use for petroleum other than fuel, making paints and plastics out of it where the fish oil and linseed oil had been a major basis for making paints and varnishes. 16:31 Now those markets were lost and so the linseed oil industry in particular looked for new ways to sell their products since the pink market was drying up and that was when the oil as an essential nutrient idea started being promoted. The study that has been cited for many decades was performed in connection with the lard industry. That claims that unsaturated fats were essential nutrients in the linseed oil industry because their products as rich in unsaturated fats picked up that isolated bit of research which happened to be early unscientific 17:40 because they had neglected or ignored or suppressed the studies which previously had demonstrated that animals thrived on a diet completely lacking the unsaturated fats or any fats in fact. But that study was so promoted by the oil industry that it created the idea that the unsaturated fats are essential nutrients. So even though they claim they’re essential, you’re saying there was an experiment where animals thrived without them? Yeah, starting about 1910 to all through the 1920s there were several experiments in which animals were actually healthier when they didn’t get any of the fats. A German study that I saw an abstract in Biological Abstracts was published in 1927 18:45 showed that as the animals received less fat in their diet the incidence of cancer decreased and the cancer rate was directly proportional to the amount of fat in the diet. And that study and the others that showed increased longevity were ignored in the research that claimed the essentiality of the unsaturated fats. I mean you hear that from so many people that they’re essential and I know it’s just ubiquitous that these things are… The University of Texas had a famous nutrition lab under Roger Williams who wrote nutrition against disease in the 50s or 60s and in his lab in the 1940s the rat disease was supposedly caused by a deficiency of essential fatty acids. 19:59 The people in this Texas lab said that looks exactly like our vitamin B6 deficiency disease and the B vitamins only one or two of the B vitamins were known at the time the original research was done but in the 40s they had identified the deficiency disease specifically caused by a vitamin B6 deficiency and so they reproduced the diet fed in the 1929 research to their animals but gave them vitamin B6 and it completely cured the essential fatty acid deficiency without any essential fatty acids and the apparent interpretation of what had happened, why is the fat free or low fat diet caused those symptoms 21:07 was that the essential fatty acids suppressed the metabolic rate as the pig farmers demonstrated and when your metabolism is suppressed you don’t eat as much food or drink as much water and so your nutritional requirements are depressed but if you stimulate their metabolism by not giving them the suppressive essential or unsaturated fatty acids then you will reveal a vitamin deficiency and as your metabolic rate increases you eat more protein and to process that protein you use up your vitamin B6 faster so do you think people are thinking that these symptoms that are caused by the vitamin B6 deficiency 22:16 they’re blaming it on the lack of these EFAs there have been a few other isolated studies through the 50s and 60s usually one patient would get eczema and that would get published as proof that the vitamin, the essential fatty acids deficiency disease existed but at that time when they were giving a fat free diet they were often giving intravenous feeding and their concept of complete intravenous nutrition until well into the 1970s was radically deficient in several of the essential known nutrients zinc for example wasn’t included and a biotin deficiency can produce some of the related symptoms 23:24 and when your metabolic rate is high and you metabolize more protein that’s one of the deficiencies, zinc, biotin, B6 are one of the first deficiencies to show up when you’re having a high metabolic rate and eating protein but not a very rich vitamin source so you’re saying the control group that wasn’t being given the quote essential fatty acids weren’t getting any minerals and vitamins several of the publications were on intravenous feedings that they called complete nutrition and even hospitals were keeping babies on the intravenous feeding and even though the nutrition journals knew what the essential nutrients such as zinc were hospitals refused to include them because doctors weren’t doing it 24:30 and it was just the nutritionists who said humans needed zinc so it’s a little confusing because I think people think they have a symptom say eczema or something like that and some naturopathic consultant tells them to eat, what is it, flax oil or something like that and if you suppress your metabolism you can get under the metabolic rate at which you need a certain amount of nutrition and so you can cure a vitamin B6 deficiency or a biotin or zinc deficiency sometimes just by taking a toxic thing that suppresses your metabolism so you’re saying in the long run though that has other bad effects the same with for example fish oil to suppress inflammation but even people who were advocating its use published reports showing radical suppression of immunity 25:43 by eating a moderate amount of fish oil David Horopin for example went on advocating polyunsaturated fats therapeutically even though he published evidence showing decisive suppression of the immune system and you can get away with that for six months or a year, maybe a couple of years suppressing inflammation just by knocking out the immune system but it’s not good in the long run and you also hear on the fish oil front you hear that I know some people take fish oil to fight depression and what’s your take on that? I’ve read all of the publications on it and some of them say it makes depression worse some say it doesn’t do anything these are the studies you’ve seen and if you select the few that say it helps the certain group 26:48 you can truthfully report that this group improved but someone else reporting that their group got worse on fish oil if there’s a bias in the journal who gets published then you don’t actually see the empirical data that existed in the world but not in the medical literature I see, I just read a quote that you had used in one of your newsletters from somebody who used to be the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine Yeah, what was that quote, Ray? Do you remember? No It was something to the fact that you can’t really tell the truth of the studies that you’re reading unless you know all the studies that they rejected Yeah, if you have a probability at the 5%!l(MISSING)evel but if you rejected 10 or 20 or 100 publications with negative results 27:55 you’re biasing the statistics Well maybe we should, I don’t think we’ve quite actually covered all the different facts I mean most people have questions about, they probably want to know what is bad and what is good like is canola as bad as cotton seed oil and those kind of things Maybe you could cover the spectrum there for a minute In the 1960s there was a lot of concern that there was a special toxic fat in mustard oil, rapeseed oil and so they bred a variety that didn’t have that particular fatty acid and that became canola But meanwhile Han Selie was experimenting and he showed that giving rapeseed oil would typically cause spots of tissue in the heart to die 29:03 and the mainstream medicine said that was because of the toxic fatty acid that the breeders were eliminating but Han Selie gave purified linoleic acid a major component of rapeseed oil and showed that that was the actual toxic agent to the heart not the so called special toxic fatty acid, it was the most essential fatty acid itself that was killing heart cells and he added chocolate fat, cocoa butter to the diet and that protected the heart in spite of the same amount of linoleic acid in the diet adding stearic acid in the cocoa butter was protected 30:05 so it’s the ratio that is important One of the early rat studies that got me interested in coconut oil was putting, I think there were 15 different groups of rats One series was pure coconut oil, high fat, low fat and medium fat Another one was pure unsaturated, I think it was corn oil, high, medium and low and they kept them on that diet throughout their lifespan and at the end of the normal lifespan the fat rats were the ones on an unsaturated fat diet the lean rats were the ones on the coconut saturated fat diet and the quantity of fat they ate didn’t make any significant difference 31:07 it was the ratio, the degree of unsaturation corresponded to the degree of obesity at the end of their lifespan so the high fat, low fat, isn’t the issue, it’s the unsaturation that is the problem And a series of French publications in the 1980s really defined what the pig farmers demonstrated practically the French showed biochemically how it works by using specific fatty acids on animals and examining the effects on different components of the thyroid system and they showed that increasing the number of unsaturations, the two double bonds was worse than mono-unsaturated 32:18 and three double bonds was worse than the two double bonds and the worst was the multiply unsaturated and every component of the thyroid system that they examined from the secretion of the hormone from the thyroid gland its transport on proteins through the blood and the cells’ response to it each of those components was selectively inhibited in proportion to the unsaturation of the oil that the animal was getting it very neatly explained what the pig farmers found out economically that by slowing down the metabolism of the pig it would gain weight with the unsaturated fat diet this is probably, we should devote a whole show to the thyroid itself but perhaps you could just 33:19 I think a lot of people are not knowledgeable about what the thyroid does for them and their body and perhaps you could just summarize that The real thyroid hormone, the active part of it wasn’t discovered until the 1950s but the function of the thyroid was studied since the mid and late 1900s and it was known to activate all of the organs of the body to respire, consume more oxygen and perform more perfectly and the deficiency of thyroid very early was learned to cause mental retardation and underdevelopment of the brain and the idiocy 34:22 and infertility that they developed later was a very early observation in some areas of the world, creatins were good employees because they were passive and stupid and didn’t reproduce so there was the medical establishments in those areas didn’t want to cure it because they were good perverting sheep and such chores You’re saying it was a form of eugenics or the opposite of eugenics actually? Yeah Brode Barnes in the 1930s did studies both on rabbits and in Europeans and showed that the equator belts were highly susceptible to heart disease at a very young age 35:23 in their 30s they started having atherosclerosis and heart attacks and when iodine was introduced to those regions and the heart disease mortality decreased considerably but those areas also had a very high cancer rate especially breast cancer and as recently as the 1980s when I talked to some cancer biologists in Mexico they were reporting that the iodine deficient regions in the mountains around Mexico City still had a very high rate of tuberculosis, heart disease and breast cancer and those things that Brode Barnes had noticed in Eastern Europe in the 30s Excuse me, but a deficiency of iodine slows your thyroid function? 36:28 Yeah, in those regions, some specific regions, iodine deficiency or iodine deficiency resulting from some particular food or contaminant in those areas iodine deficiency was the thing that could be remedied but in many areas the diet interacts with limited iodine so that it isn’t just an iodine deficiency but it’s eating vegetables that interrupt the formation of thyroid even though there is some iodine in their diet the cabbage family and the unsaturated fats are the two most famous causes of interrupted formation of the thyroid hormone and people with low thyroid get goiters which are big protrusions? 37:31 The pituitary gland produces thyroid stimulating hormone that compensates when your thyroid is being blocked naturally estrogen inhibits the thyroid release too and so the body is designed so that if the estrogen is inhibiting the gland the thyroid stimulating hormone increases to overcome that block and activates the thyroid to work harder and if you keep your estrogen or goitrogen high the TSH works harder and harder and the gland gets bigger and bigger until sometimes it gets to be as big as a candle Women at puberty and during pregnancy often get a fullness in the neck and that typically causes women to have creases in the skin of their neck 38:37 above and below the region where the thyroid gland is at the base of the neck on both sides of your windpipe and most women but almost no men have a defining crease right above their collar bone and just above their abdomen’s apple And that defining crease is from a low thyroid? Because at puberty the thyroid gland naturally enlarges to overcome the effect of estrogen and that makes it fullness so that the bending of the neck causes those creases to outline the puffy area where the gland is And is that something that’s completely normal? Yeah, that’s part of what makes women look attractive 39:39 because it corresponds to the years between puberty and menopause One of the things when going back to the essential fatty acids which is ostensibly the subject of the show you’ve said that it’s one of the reasons it’s sort of ridiculous to call them essential they’re ubiquitous, they’re in every green vegetable you eat and it’s actually hard to get away from them So how we can have a deficiency is a good question It’s a question of marketing, the idea that you could be deficient in something that is in every organism, even tropical organisms Coconuts have about two percent of those fats One to three percent And ruminants, sheep and cows and deer and such 40:43 have an organ to grow bacteria which detoxify those plant fats But still one or two percent of the fats get through the detox system of the ruminant So beef fat and lamb fat still have unavoidably about two percent of those unsaturated vegetables So even if you ate nothing but beef and lamb and coconuts you’d still have more than anyone ever claimed the essentiality required So by the most extreme ideas of essentiality it’s impossible unless you eat a laboratory-prepared diet to have a deficiency but the marketing departments of the linseed oil companies and the western oil and so on 41:48 They convinced people that since it’s essential in a trace amount it must be much better in a very large amount But several more recent studies have demonstrated that as you increase the unsaturated fats in the diet the cancer incidence goes up more or less in proportion to the amount And when you extrapolate it to zero the cancer incidence just like the 1927 study approaches zero When you say extrapolate to zero you mean no unsaturated fats? Yeah And fish oil, there’s a lot of marketing of fish oil too as a supplement just as a dietary supplement not necessarily for depression 42:50 A few years ago the FDA warned that the total shouldn’t exceed I think it was three grams of DHA and EPA but they more recently have dropped that and have begun promoting it without the warning but it definitely becomes toxic as the immune suppression studies demonstrated And the odd thing about the fish oil is that it’s so unstable the reason it was a good varnish is that it oxidizes almost instantly at room temperature even and in your body it’s mostly oxidized before it reaches your bloodstream 43:51 It has to pass through your digestive system to reach the bloodstream and by the time it gets there it has been heated and circulated in tiny particles exposed to oxygen And so those so-called beneficial anti-inflammatory effects are actually produced by the oxidative breakdown products of the fats And so even in the biochemistry of it it’s a toxic effect that is being sold as a benefit So it’s suppressing your immune system and that’s what’s getting rid of some of your symptoms perhaps Yeah, it’s the pre-radical oxidative decomposition products that are circulating in your blood system A very small part of it reaches your tissues as the original starting DHA and EPA 45:01 And Raymond would you like to touch, we’re talking to Raymond Pete by the way I should say that more often, endocrinologist and physiologist for Eugene Morgan And we’re talking mostly about fats today but also we’re talking about the marketing of them and the scientific research that’s gone into fats And how much does the marketing affect the scientific research? The media seems to still be very down on saturated fats and still promoting unsaturated fats Yeah, and they apparently have taken over the government because I see the government has basically a promotion of fish oil on their website Would that be the FDA? Is that the FDA or what’s the website? And the industry, just like the soy oil industry has subsidized research on the health value of soy oil 46:11 The fish oil industry is now rich enough that they are sponsoring conference citizens and paying researchers to produce studies and getting people on boards of editorial boards of the journals And it’s just like the atomic energy industry controlling the research on the safety of radiation that the health effects of the fats are being promoted by the industry, not by objective science A lot of people are familiar with the global warming being contested by the oil industry and all of the money they spend on research Now, you mentioned cancer in terms of unsaturated oils 47:12 Does that apply, I guess, fish oil is also a very unsaturated oil and that applies to fish oil as well? Except that the shorter 18 carbon oils that you get from seeds fit into our enzyme systems more powerfully And so inhibit our own enzymes more powerfully The fish oils are very long and don’t directly attack our enzymes in the same way They’re unstable and spontaneously all by themselves turn into these pre-radical and aldehyde toxins But they are safer to our enzyme systems because their number of carbons is very different from the fats that we make or that we get from seeds 48:15 And they also come with quite a few vitamins too that are good Yeah, and when you squeeze an oily fish you can’t help getting some vitamin K, vitamin A, vitamin D and a little E But the E pretty much is destroyed quickly by the oxidizing process But the B comes through very strongly because it’s harder to oxidize the K and the A Probably usually have enough activity to be of some benefit when you eat the fish oil So we have about five minutes left Ray and I thought maybe we could quickly People are probably wondering well what would you think would be good to eat For instance is olive oil okay, coconut oil, margarine, maybe you could run through the 49:16 Okay, the coconut oil is around 10%!o(MISSING)f the polyunsaturated fats But if you’re only going to use half a teaspoon or so for flavoring a food or a teaspoon full every other day or something that is small enough that it isn’t harmful So it has a minor flavoring, olive oil is fine I see But as a major part of the diet I think butter, beef fat, lamb fat and coconut oil are the safe ones And cocoa butter chocolate And some studies have found that the longer saturated fats are very protective They’re being investigated for curing cancer, heart disease And some of the best studies are using the long chain saturated fats as well as ordinary butter fats and so on 50:27 For treating liver disease, alcoholic hepatitis for example is being successfully treated with saturated fats Because about 20 years ago they noticed that alcoholic liver injury requires the polyunsaturated fats in the diet Some Hindus noticed that in the areas of India where they have primarily butter, alcoholics don’t get liver disease at the high rate They do in the areas that get the unsaturated fats And so the animal studies finally led to human studies in Chicago in which they are finding actual cures of alcoholic liver disease just with a good diet plus the saturated fats Is those ongoing studies now or are they something that, are they old? 51:32 I haven’t seen anything new in the last year or two, but they’re recent I see And when you say long chain, is that coconut oil? Well that goes up to 16 carbons and butter is 18 carbons And they are using experimentally some derived from sugar cane wax and other unusual long chain fats Those are being used therapeutically in cancer too I see And the unsaturated oils are just in everything now because of course the government has sanctioned, our government has sanctioned them And you can’t buy a potato chip that isn’t cooked in canola oil or some other unsaturated vegetable oil So how do we, if you say you go out to dinner and is there anything you can do to protect yourself? 52:34 About 15 years ago there was this big campaign to get coconut oil off the market And in recent years it’s coming back and I think if people just nag the cooks in restaurants and buyers in grocery stores They can change things It’s changing back in the last few years to people demanding that they get real butter and other saturated fats in products And finally I think most people are worried about getting fat when you say butter Even though we all love it I think, there’s nothing that tastes better on things but The animal studies from the industrial agriculture level all the way down to lab studies show that the polyunsaturated are extremely fattening 53:37 In proportion to their role in the diet The proportion to the saturated fats is more important than the actual quantity of fats So people who, I noticed in Finland where dairy foods are very common, basically probably the most common food Just going across the border from Russia to Finland You go from a start eating vegetable based diet where everyone’s fat over to a lean healthy population where there’s lots of butter fat Yeah that’s interesting General Americans who eat milk and milk products are lean and this is partly the calcium and vitamin D 54:40 But also the butter fat itself is helpful I guess that’s the French paradox again that they always talk about How come the French are so healthy when they eat all that nasty saturated fat? Well Ray I guess we’re basically out of time Is there anything else you’d like to add? We’re talking to Raymond Pete, endocrinologist and physiologist from Eugene, Oregon People are concerned about skin health and appearance and experiment with rabbits is interesting Rabbits were put on either a corn oil diet or a coconut oil diet and shaved So the sun would hit their skin and those on the unsaturated corn oil diet got wrinkly sun damaged skin And the ones on the saturated fat diet out of the sun is relatively harmless to their skin Yeah that’s kind of telling isn’t it? 55:44 Well Ray thanks so much for being on today, our blue vine would seem like a couple minutes and I appreciate you doing it Okay thank you And I’ll give out your website and contact just your website information for people Okay very good Thanks Ray, bye bye And that was Raymond Pete, I hope you could hear some of that, his voice was very weak But Ray Pete’s website is RayPete.com if you’re interested, it’s that simple Ray Pete is spelled R-A-Y and then P-E-A-T dot com and he’s a lot of excellent articles on his website If you have any questions for politics and science you can direct them by email to politicsandscienceatmadriver.com That’s politicsandscienceatmadriver.com Archive shows can be found at radioforall.net, that’s radio the number four all dot net 56:53 Politics and science presents the viewpoints of its participants and does not necessarily reflect the viewpoints of any other person or organization