First Interview with KWAI

00:00 And it might be a wonderful world for you if you listen to our guest, Dr. Raymond Pete. Aloha, Dr. Pete. How are you today? Hello. Very good. Good. We’re so thrilled to have you on our show all week long. Karen and I have been telling people in our store that you’re going to be our guest and everybody loves your books, but I was kind of interested in your background, Dr. Pete. I understand you started working with hormones and progesterone all the way back in 1968. I’m kind of curious, what caused you to get into this field? I had been teaching linguistics and painting, alternately, but I had been interested in science from childhood, but I saw medical so-called science going off in very perverse directions through the 1950s, and so I didn’t think of going to the university graduate 01:03 school in biology because my dad’s experience in high school biology very, very retarded with textbooks and so on, made me think that there wasn’t much science in the biological field, but finally I decided that I needed to use laboratory instruments that were too expensive to get myself, so I enrolled in graduate school and figured that just by not arguing with the teachers, I could get through the program and get to use the labs, which I did. Now, your insight always amazes me because I’m one of those gullible believers when I am told that I, for instance, should take estrogen because I’m aging. I believed. In fact, I was writing a dissertation on the positive benefits of estrogen until I met 02:06 you, and it blew all that stuff right out of the water, and I looked back at how gullible I was and how easily people are misled into believing what the pharmaceutical industries want them to believe, and so… Advertising is very powerful. A group of 13 estrogen companies got together in 1942 when it was already known that estrogen caused miscarriages, sterility, cancer, seizures, and so on, but they had a product and they wanted to sell it as the female hormone, even though it’s also a male hormone, but they got together and with advertising and pressure, political pressure, they convinced the FDA to approve the use of estrogen to prevent miscarriages, which it caused, actually, and 03:07 by advertising, they got the public interested in estrogen as an anti-aging hormone, so it started really with a definite conspiracy of 13 companies in 1942. Well, and it’s continued to this day, even with well-meaning individual sexes and somers who advocates the use of bioidentical hormones, she always throws large amounts of estrogen into the equation, including the estriol, so would you mind talking about that? Yeah, the body has many protective systems for inactivating estrogen, the strong estrogen, estrogen diol, and so it has enzymes to oxidize in different ways, this fairly reduced form of estrogen, and by oxidizing it to estriol or estrone, it reduces the estrogen-like activity. 04:13 It also has several other systems for destroying estrogen efficiently, if your metabolism is working right well, estrogen should be totally eliminated after about 12 hours following ovulation and implantation, it should be disposed of thoroughly within a few days of ovulation. I was going to say, Dr. Pete, I’m even amazed when we’re talking about estrogen that, having worked in the natural foods industry now for 42 years, when I read my trade magazines, I’m still seeing advertisements for estrogen-based products in all the natural food trade magazines. It’s still not only in the pharmaceutical industry, it’s in the natural foods industry, and I like it that you and Karen can straighten people out. But it’s not that estrogen is bad, right? It needs to be in a certain ratio. I’ve been thinking about how common estrogen is throughout the universe. 05:19 Anytime an organism is injured, it produces estrogen which stimulates growth and repair, and even more common biological material is ATP, the so-called energy molecule. And anytime we’re injured, or even when a cell is slightly stressed, it loses some of its ATP, which acts as a signal to other cells to repair the damage. But when a lizard is attacked and drops its tail, it’s probably a surge of ATP that cuts the tail up. And ATP forms to make a blister, dissolving the tissue between the layers of skin so that fluid flows in. ATP are most life-supporting basic molecule as these potentially deadly destructive effects 06:29 cutting off dissolving tissue so that repair can take place. Estrogen is just supposed to be biologically active. It’s an excitement at an early stage of injury, like it slightly inflames the uterus to cause the growth of cells preparing a place for the embryo to implant. But if the estrogen stays present too long, it kills the embryo by over-exciting the surrounding cells. In the 1950s, my thesis advisor Sodor Wall was demonstrating that by giving an estrogen supplement to a pregnant animal, the day that it becomes pregnant, you can prevent implantation by a small amount such as is used in birth control pills. 07:33 And how they work by a quick abortion, actually, rather than preventing conception or preventing implantation. And he found that on the second, third, fourth days and so on, following implantation, if you gave just slightly larger amounts of estrogen all the way up until delivery, staying on the same slope of increasing doses of estrogen, you could kill the embryo or the fetus just by adjusting the dose of estrogen to counteract the increasing progesterone, which is there to maintain pregnancy. So at any stage, estrogen produces abortion when it is out of balance with progesterone. And so if a woman is pregnant and the progesterone levels don’t increase? Yeah, when a woman is either having a sluggish liver or low thyroid so that her estrogen is chronically too high 08:41 or her progesterone is chronically low, she will often bleed every month, several months into the pregnancy as if you were menstruating on cycle. And during any of those cyclic surges of estrogen, that’s when miscarriages are most likely to happen. And then how would this affect the sexual persuasion of the child who should that pregnancy make it all the way to the end? How would that affect the child being bathed in a more highly estrogenic environment? It damages the sexual differentiation, but there is some research that stress prematurely causes an intersexual differentiation. And what does that mean if it’s happen? Not definitely either one. And how would that show up with sexual organs? Does that mean you would have like homaproditism? 09:46 No, the main thing is that the male has smaller genitals and the distance between the genitals and the anus is decreased in proportion to the estrogen. And would that affect a more transgender society? Yeah, they’re seeing the distance that characterizes the estrogen exposure of male genitals decreasing in recent decades in the polluted countries. And so would you say that oftentimes when people say, hey, I was born this way as in men who are gay, women who are lesbian, truly are born this way due to this? Sure, I think that’s a big part of it. You can see it in crocodiles and alligators and ocean otters and fish, frogs, everyone is affected by the estrogen pollution. 10:56 And it’s amazing to me that you pointed out some things that no one like myself would ever even consider in their wildest imaginations would have an estrogenic effect, such as X-rays and radiation. So being that, I’d like your feeling on the Fukushima radiation, but do you think that’s gone away and is harmless? Did you read about the mad cow, a dairy cow that turned out to be infected with so-called spongiform encephalopathy? I did, and I was curious what your take on that would be. I suspect that its exposure to the Japanese radiation of the animals in California because the breakout of mad cow disease in England was in the area where Chernobyl radiation rained down on the pastures and it followed in the years immediately following Chernobyl exposure. 11:59 And who came up with the lies about the sheep awful and that stuff causing? Well, the Pentagon was doing that in the 1940s following the atomic bomb in the 1950s with the hydrogen bomb. When the fallout from the hydrogen bomb drifted across the islands, they sent a Carlton guide to check. I think his name was, he was a pediatrician, but he was posing as a virologist, but he was sent by the military to an area that had been exposed to hydrogen bomb fallout to study what supposedly was a traditional brain disease, Kuru that he claimed had been passed on for generations by cannibalism, but actually it was never reported before the hydrogen bomb fallout. 13:13 And he was in a miraculously short time, he identified what he claimed was a new slow virus and got the Nobel Prize for discovering a virus that probably doesn’t exist. But the whole thing was a military cover-up basically. He was not a virologist, didn’t know anything about it, didn’t do the kind of research that could have identified it, and the same symptoms can be produced by radiation. So is there anything we can do to protect ourselves from this radiation from Fukushima, from X-rays, and because every time I go to the dentist, he insists that I must have an X-ray which he of course says is like sitting in the sun and now they have these new panoramics. It’s that you have all those baloney and it’s very difficult to talk them out of doing these X-rays, but you point out that they’re estrogenics. So is there anything that we can do to offset any damage from the X-rays? 14:20 Yeah, two or three papers were published. I discussed them in my radiation newsletter January of a year ago. They showed that estrogen was synergistic with radiation in causing cancer, and that the same way that progesterone blocks cancer produced by estrogen, it also blocks cancer produced by radiation. And so if someone knew that they had a history of a lot of diagnostic X-rays, one of the ways they could possibly prevent some long-term effects is to start using progesterone on a regular basis? Yeah, I think on the long term that is protective. They know that when they do the so-called Gatman knife brain treatment that the symptoms of nerve cell degeneration aren’t seen for usually more than 18 months, sometimes several years later. 15:34 The cells stay in an inflamed condition, like they’ve seen blood serum 20 years after the Chernobyl, 50 years after the Japanese bomb exposures. They’ve seen a chronically inflamed condition that shows up even in the blood serum decades after exposure. And so I think that’s the sort of thing that can be reversed even at a late date so that the chronic inflammatory state doesn’t persist. I hope that’s true because I was a military kid who had a lot of diagnostic X-rays, which scares me when I think about them. So what do you think about? Vitamin A works with progesterone as another protective thing, but it also happens to sensitize you to the radiation that the radiation breaks down the vitamin A in your tissue. 16:35 And so if you replace it after the injury, that helps counteract the estrogen-like effects. And what would be a good dose of vitamin A on average for a 50-year-old adult woman? That’s hard to say because being an unsaturated oily material, it can interfere with thyroid function. So the amount you need corresponds exactly to the level of thyroid activity you have. A low thyroid person can get symptoms of vitamin A poisoning from just a very small amount, like 5,000 units. When I was in my teens and twenties, I found that I needed 50 to 100,000 units to prevent having acne or even leukoplakia. Following dental X-rays, I would get these white, spongy growths inside my cheeks that dentists said were either cancerous or pre-cancerous. 17:46 And I found that these big doses of vitamin A would clear it up completely in a week. And that’s a pre-cancerous estrogen-stimulated condition that also appears on the cervix of the uterus. And vitamin A and progesterone similar or literally will reverse that. And so were you taking thyroid at the time also? No, I just happened to be a hyperthyroid person during that period. And you’ve mentioned that hyper and hypo are actually kind of the same thing? No, doctors confuse hypo-thyroidism with hyper for various historical reasons. But if you aren’t, the basic thing that thyroid does is increase your oxidating metabolism. And when the synthroid products came on the market, only thyroxins rather than the complete combination of T3 and T4, 18:57 when that came on the market, they wanted to say that thyroxin was the real thyroid hormone. And it happens that it doesn’t stimulate oxidative metabolism until it’s turned into T3. And so for about 20 years there was the doctrine that thyroid doesn’t stimulate oxidative metabolism as its basic mechanism. But in fact, the thyroxin interferes with the oxygen metabolism if it’s out of balance. And it’s really the increased consumption of oxygen and production of defensive energy systems that makes thyroid valuable. And for example, the oxidative energy is used to convert cholesterol into pregnenolone and progesterone, 20:00 DHEA, male hormones and so on, to counteract estrogen as part of the defense against estrogen. And so if you have excess cholesterol, it’s usually because your thyroid is deficient, or your vitamin A is deficient, and you aren’t converting it to the protective progesterone, testosterone hormones. Well, if you’re just tuning in, you’re listening to The Source Nutritional Radio Show with our very special guest today, Dr. Ray Pete. And Dr. Pete, I wanted to ask you, we have Dr. Lita Lee on our radio show probably about four times a year, because she’s one of our most interesting guests. And I love the expression that she first coined, and what is considered a pro-thyroid diet, and she said, you eat organic. Do you agree with that, or could you elaborate on that? Well, lately everyone’s been calling their stuff organic. 21:03 I was getting a kind of organic whipping cream for my coffee, and I saw they were putting keratin in it. And when they can say that keratin is an organic food just because you get it out of the ocean, but the ocean isn’t such a great, clean food source anymore. And the true achievement is highly allergenic. People have died by contact with it, and many people have very serious allergic reactions to it when they eat it. And when it breaks down, it becomes carcinogenic. It’s still allowed, not only in the food supply, but it can be called organic. And some of the nuclear industry, our factions were applying to the government to be able to call nuclear waste a fertilized food organic. 22:18 I have to say, I do work as an organic farm inspector, and I remember when the USDA was coming up with the standards for organic, they were going to allow human sewage sludge to be used as a fertilizer, irradiated food to be labeled organic, and GMO food being labeled organic, and people like Karen and I petitioned the USDA. And I was very surprised because the federal government, the USDA, listened to our complaints saying they would take away the integrity of the organic industry if they allow those three things to be labeled organic. So I know it’s a complicated world. It’s not always very black and white, but we have to work with some kind of a standard. Yeah, carcinogenic is the main problem with some of the foods called organic, but naturally it’s best if you can get really clean organic food. Well, today you’d probably have to grow it yourself. Dr. Bitt, you mentioned pregnant along. That’s one of my favorite supplements since you introduced us to it. 23:23 And I wonder if you could elaborate a little bit on the benefit of pregnant along. And some of the stair tactics that are used are put on the labels saying this causes cancer. Yeah, the stuff just seems to come out of thin air the way when some of the drug companies in the 40s wanted to get natural progesterone off the market. They said you can’t take it orally because it’s destroyed by the stomach acid. But there was absolutely no source for that. It was just inserted into an article and then multiplied until all the doctors in the country believed it. And California, for reasons that I explained in one of the articles on my website about conflicts of interest, California decided to call progesterone a cause of cancer. 24:24 Even though the articles they cited to support the position, some of them were very strong arguments showing that it prevents cancer. And their scientific support was really crazy. But the fact that California got progesterone on their list of cancer agents, that seems to have simply spread over to pregnant along without any argument at all. And so why do these companies acquiesce and put that warning on their label? Because California gave lawyers a law that lets them collect money pursuing anyone that they want to. There have been articles published calling it the shakedown state because lawyers were accusing people for having an asphalt in their parking lot 25:31 because asphalt is carcinogenic and so on. Oh my goodness. So what is your take on pregnenolone? What benefit will that have for people with dementia, for instance? If the pregnenolone is well made and pure and in recent years everything on the market does seem to be pure if the retailer isn’t adding a lot of crazy excipients. But pure pregnenolone has, since the 1940s with experiments in rats, it’s been known to have essentially no side effects at any dose. They gave rats a 10 gram single dose by stomach tube, which would be like a person eating a pound of it. And the only effect was that the rats weren’t hungry until their stomachs had emptied the stuff out. 26:35 And if any of the rats were under stress at the time of the experiment, their stress hormones went down to normal. That was the only side effect that it stopped abnormal stress reactions. So we could presume that that would happen for people too, that it would bring stress hormones down? Is it what? Would it bring stress hormones down in people too? Just after I read the rat experiment and saw that it had made people more efficient in studies of workers using it, I decided to take 3,000 milligrams to 4,000 milligrams every day for a year. And it felt like I had great resistance, it felt no stress no matter what was happening. And were there any negative side effects at all? 27:36 Not at all. And do you take that much to this day? No, it was too expensive. I haven’t taken any for years now, but I stopped because for a while a lot of junk was on the market. And when I tried to import the pure stuff, the FDA kept getting in the way. Dr. Peter, I know you lecture around the United States and in Mexico to many different universities, including the National College of Natural Pathic Medicine. And I am a little curious, what kind of reaction do you get? Because you say a lot of things, and I have to say I agree with what you say, but you do say a lot of things that nobody else is saying. Oh, I pretty much stopped lecturing about 20 years ago when the word got out what I was saying about unsaturated fat. The doctors stopped wanting to hear me when they knew what I would say about estrogen. 28:42 And then the health food industry stopped wanting to hear me when they knew what I would say about corn oil and soy oil and the polyunsaturated oil, fish oil and so on, because those are so important to their business that they didn’t want bad information put out about them. And so what is it that you say about that that would be problematic for them? I see the polyunsaturated N-3 and N-6 oils as being behind all the inflammatory degenerative diseases and basically all of the degenerative diseases involve an inflammatory component which is amplified by the N-3 and N-6 breakdown products. 29:43 And do you think the cumulative value of those oils in the human body as they get packed away in the tissue have a metabolic suppressor action? Yeah, the prostaglandins and various isoprostase and free radical breakdown products and so on. Those fats happen to inhibit the enzymes which make our natural N-9 polyunsaturated fats such as the mead acid and it’s called an essential fatty acid deficiency when you can find the mead acid at minus 9 in the blood but it happens that that’s a protective anti-inflammatory fat that gives great resistance to the animals that are so-called deficient in the essential fatty acids. 30:49 And so in other words it would be beneficial to us to avoid those polyunsaturated oils such as corn, canola, safflower, sunflower, almond, all those oils we should avoid. Yeah, I try to avoid those as far as possible even avoiding pork and chicken that have been fed those foods. Oh, it gets very complex. Well I know in your free time Dr. Pete you’re a terrific artist, you paint a lot don’t you? Yeah, I try to alternate studying and writing with painting or sculpting. That’s wonderful. Can I ask you again about the Fukushima radiation because I vacillate people come in and tell me oh you got to be positive and stop dwelling on the negative and then by the same token because we’re in Hawaii and kind of in the pathway of where that stuff is coming and has come, how do you not think about it in terms of how people’s health? 31:53 We noticed within a week of the Fukushima radiation that our air purifier started making a pinging noise rather like an electrical fly trap and couldn’t figure out what is this noise that this thing is making, is it defective? And then I think about after what about a week and a half it stopped doing that. But could that have been from hot particles of radiation shortly after the fallout? I don’t know how the purifier works but the particles do produce ionization that could affect electronic devices. The nuclear industry like the estrogen industry and the oil industry has been very busy with propaganda ever since the 1940s convincing the public that nuclear power will be good for the public in many ways. 32:56 They’ve been selling radioactive potions since the 1920s. People are still selling radioactive rocks as cures. They used to sell it in marvels and to cure impotence and arthritis and so on. And you can get some quick relief from X-raying your knee. For example, for arthritis it kills the cells that produce inflammation but it creates a long-term systemic inflammation that is much worse for the short-term relief. And that’s the sort of thing that happens with the breakdown of fish oils. You get short-term suppression of inflammation but long-term promotion of inflammation. 33:58 The propaganda covers the spectrum of every kind of radiation. They say that the fallout in your food is equivalent to flying across the country on an airplane, for example. There are several kinds of lies built into that. Every person who repeats that is repeating layered lying propaganda. For example, it’s true that you can say there’s a certain amount of radiation from cosmic rays coming through the airplane when you’re at 35,000 feet. But it happens that the biological effect of radiation cosmic rays at, say, 10,000 feet altitude on the mountain or on an airplane, 35:01 that has less biological effect by a great amount per unit of radiation than the same cosmic rays do at sea level. And the cosmic rays at high altitude pass right through you, doing very little. But on the way through the atmosphere they run into air atoms causing secondary and tertiary breakdown, nuclear fusion. And it’s those fusion products produced on the way down close to sea level that increase the environmental radiation. And that’s why a big part of the reason why cancer rates are much lower, heart disease is much lower when you live at from 5,000 to 10,000 feet, the elevation above sea level. Closer to sea level, the cosmic rays are more intense. 36:05 So the nuclear industry is turning things upside down to say that eating a banana or a Fukushima oyster or whatever can be compared to cosmic rays. They’ve got it exactly backwards. But we live on an island and we like to go out in the sun and be exposed to those rays. So should we be afraid that our cancer levels are going to increase because we’re at sea level? The ultraviolet produces effects in your skin that are very similar to what x-rays and cosmic rays and gamma rays produce throughout your tissues. It’s just that the toxic effect of ultraviolet is limited to two or three millimeters near the top of your skin. And it happens that the red light of sunlight, the yellow, green, orange, red frequencies, 37:11 happen to be neutralizers of the damage done by radiation of the toxic kind. For example, experiments with frogs would give them a certain dose of gamma rays that would kill them very quickly. But if they gave the dose and within the hour gave them some very bright red light following the gamma ray exposure, they recovered, they weren’t sick. So would that be good for us to do is get one of those red lights and lay under it a little bit for protection from Fukushima? Well, natural sunlight contains enough of that. If you filter out that protective red and orange light, sunlight will even kill plants that normally grow all day in the sun. The blue light and ultraviolet is toxic, even the plants. But it’s the red light that allows plants to stand the ultraviolet all day. 38:16 So would that be the far infrared light bulb that we can buy? No, just the red, red, orange, and yellow are all protective. You don’t want too much of the ultraviolet because your blood does circulate up through the surface of your skin and your white blood cells will get killed, everything gets sunburned. So you don’t want to get sunburned. And having a tan, the melanin pigment catches the biggest part of the ultraviolet and protects your skin from that immune-suppressing effect of UV. So what’s wrong with people who don’t tan and they just burn? Sometimes the vitamin D deficiency that’s involved your body knows that it needs more vitamin D. And so it doesn’t make the pigment allowing more ultraviolet to be absorbed. 39:17 And I’ve seen people who couldn’t tan suddenly tanning normally when they took some vitamin D. Interesting. Well, Dr. Pete, we only have about one minute left here. And I know Karen and I would love to bring you on for next week’s show also if you have the time for it. Okay. Oh, terrific. Lovely. And people can go to your website, which is terrific. I love it. It’s Ray-P-R-A-Y-P-E-A-T dot com. And I love your artwork, Dr. Pete. Yeah, I think all of us at work in this industry of trying to generate help, sometimes you need to back away. We all have to have some kind of a hobby or a release or something else to focus our time and attention on. I love your blue book from PMS to menopause and your nutrition for women and your yellow book. We’re going to talk about that all next week because I have a bunch more questions for you, Dr. Pete. 40:20 I want to thank you for being our guest today, sharing your Saturday morning with us, and we’ll have you on again with us next week. Okay, very good. Aloha. Aloha.