Ionizing Radiation in Context Part 1

00:00 If you have any questions for Politics and Science, you can direct them by email to politicsandscienceatmadriver.com. That’s politicsandscienceatmadriver.com. Politics and Science can be heard weekly on WMRWLP1 95.1 FM airing on Mondays at 5 p.m. 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. The following program does present the opinions of its participants and it does not necessarily reflect an official opinion of any other person or organization. This edition of Politics and Science features an interview with Dr. Raymond Pete. Raypeat.com is the website Raypeat.com and it was recorded on the 20th of April 2009. Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of Politics and Science. 01:07 This is the 20th of April and it kicks off a new series on Politics and Science about radiation and we’ll be discussing nuclear ionizing radiation focusing on its use in our culture and weighing its potential usefulness in relation to its costs to our health and environment. And I’m very happy to have on the show again today Dr. Raymond Pete who is an endocrinologist and physiologist and science historian from Eugene, Oregon. And you can find more information about Raypeat on his website Raypeat.com. Ray, are you there? Yes, sir. Excellent. Can you hear me all right? Yeah, it’s fine. Good. Welcome back and I know you have quite a bit to say about radiation. And I was wondering, first of all, I think it’s a confusing subject for people because often when people talk about radiation, say at the dentist or at the doctors, they’re always trying to make you feel safe about using it and they always compare it to other kinds of radiation. 02:13 For instance, sunlight, they say it’s, you know, bone scans are no more than two days or two hours in the sun, or I think you’ve used the example of a flight to Denver to New York comparing it to cosmic radiation. And I was just hoping to start off, you could just address the different kinds of radiation that exist and how do they compare? The medical profession and then the government and the nuclear industry made up a lot of stories to convince people that radiation doesn’t hurt them. And the sunlight is probably the basic oldest story that if it doesn’t kill you to absorb so much energy of sunlight, then why should it kill you to absorb the equivalent of an hour or something in the form of radiation? 03:18 And it’s that they’ve known really for close to 200 years that there are very different kinds of radiation that beyond the blue end of the spectrum, the invisible light in 1800 they knew was chemically active, for a long time called that the chemical rays, because they could produce changes in silver nitrate and later in photographic emulsions and so on with the beyond the blue, the ultraviolet end of the spectrum. And so they knew that the warm rays and the colored visible rays were harmless compared to these chemical burning rays, which can sunburn you. And then at the end of the 19th century, when the Curies and Becquerel and others were exploring radium, 04:30 Becquerel carried a vial of it in his pocket and got a horrible burn on his chest. And immediately the medical profession saw that as something even more fun than surgery and coterie. And so almost immediately when they saw it caused a horrible burn, they decided it was good for medical purposes like burning off warts and so on. But at the same time Thomas Edison in 1904, his main assistant died of radiation x-ray poisoning after years of amputations and burns and surgery and so on. So by 1904, Thomas Edison was already an opponent of the use of ionizing radiation in any form, but the medical profession was just starting to see that it was a profitable tool. 05:39 And so even though they knew very well the differences in types of radiation, to sell it, they had 100 years to invent stories to convince people that they wouldn’t get lethal burns. And so they invented the story that there was a threshold below which no damage at all was done. And that was greatly expanded on by the government when they wanted to show that they could explode atomic bombs in Nevada and no one would be harmed. The 40 years later Congress investigated and concluded that about 15,000 people minimum in the United States alone were killed as a result of those atmospheric tests. But the government had its agents out convincing people that below the threshold there was no harm at all and that the amounts were similar to what you get when you live in Denver or fly in an airplane or sit in the sun. 07:00 Even Linus Pauling, who opposed exposing the population to radiation, was convinced that it was worse to live in Denver than at sea level because cosmic rays were more intense supposedly at Denver and sunlight was more intense. And the facts showed that cancer of all kinds is less common at the higher you go in altitude, but someone has sophisticated this Linus Pauling neglected that property of radiation that it’s called linear energy transfer. And it happens that cosmic rays at high altitude don’t deliver much energy or damage to your tissues, but at lower altitude where they’re less intense they’re more able to react with your tissues and cause damage. 08:08 So the cosmic rays are harmful, but when you are in the skyscraper, for example, it’s even worse than being at a low altitude because the cosmic rays are slowed down and produce secondary and tertiary particles. So you get much more intense radiation at low altitude, sheltered by massive structure. Maybe, Ray, we should back up just a little bit and talk about what radiation actually is. Like the cosmic ray example you just used confuses me because it seems like at lower altitudes it should actually be weaker because it’s going slower implies less energy to me. So why is that the case? What’s actually happening that’s causing damage? The ordinary photon type of radiation, which includes infrared and visible light and ultraviolet, that is electromagnetic vibration and the nuclear particles are actual protons or nuclei. 09:33 Or whole atoms minus the electrons. Cosmic rays are typically iron atoms without their electrons. So they’re very massive particles but going at a very high speed. They pass through the body without doing anything except a trail of ionization that you can see when they go through an atmosphere that is saturated with water. The ionization causes a streamer of particles to appear. Who can see that? In a cloud chamber you have humid air and adjust the pressure so that it’s just about to start condensing into rain. And at that point the particles going through it ionize it, cause nucleation that condenses droplets of water like a streamer of fog appears. 10:42 And any ionization will do that but cosmic rays are constantly going through so you can visualize using a cloud chamber. The particles at lower energies will even stop in your tissue rather than passing through. And I don’t think anyone really understands why the faster ones interact less but it’s put to use in linear accelerators for example. They can adjust the voltage of protons or other particles and shoot them into your body at a given energy designing it so that they all slow down and stop near a tumor. And where they’re slowing down and stopping they’re causing the most damage. When they go through quickly like a cosmic ray at high altitude they just leave a slight trail of ionization rather than a very intense cloud of secondary reactions. 11:56 A typical physics professor’s explanation for that is that if you imagine the substance as a meteor swarm and a spaceship traveling through that if the spaceship goes very slowly it’s sure to get hit by a swarming meteor. But if it zooms right through it has a chance of getting past without interactions. Trouble is that it doesn’t apply to photon absorption because all photons go at the same speed but in fact the higher energy photons penetrate more deeply without interacting so much. So the cosmic rays are worse in a skyscraper because they’re being slowed down by hitting the walls of the skyscraper? 12:58 Yeah and they cause nuclei to disintegrate into secondary particles and those particles cause other disintegrations into tertiary particles. And so it’s like a more intense shower of lower energy but still lethal particles. The Chinese did experiments with rabbits putting them under in cages with a lead roof of different thicknesses and around half an inch to an inch thickness of lead on the roof cause rabbits to fairly quickly become sterile and miscarry. If they were pregnant when they put them under the roof they would miscarry just like you’re giving them a birth control pill and if you kept them under it they didn’t conceive at all. And why was that? 14:00 Radiation poisoning, tertiary or secondary cosmic rays. So the cosmic rays were getting through the lead which I was assuming for some reason would be blocking them. If you have a certain thickness you maximize the tertiary and secondary particles. There’s a certain probability as the lead gets thicker that one of them will have a direct hit on a nucleus and cause it to split into more particles. And then it’s making them sterile because I think we’ll get into its effects on tissue in a little bit but basically it’s adding stress. Yeah. With a shorter dose the litter would simply be reduced in weight and some of the animals would be dead and others would survive. And even though that was particles some of the radiation when the lead nuclei split you get some gamma rays and x-rays produced as well as particles. 15:13 And a study of dentistry in Seattle looked at a large population of people getting different types of dental work. And they used lead shields to cover their body so that nothing but their face was getting the x-ray directly. But when they looked back at the results of their treatments a pregnant woman who would get a full set of oral x-rays would expect to have a lighter birth weight baby as a result of the systemic poisoning produced by x-raying just her head. So the lead group experiments in China were exposing the whole animal but just exposing one part creates enough stress to reduce fertility to the extent of having a smaller baby. 16:20 Hmm. Well that’s to my mind making the cosmic rays and x-rays sound somewhat equivalent are they? Well in biological effect yeah they’re equivalent to poisoning and stress. Biologically in my dissertation work I looked through the biological effects of different kinds of radiation and found that I couldn’t distinguish the biological damage caused by I was saying estrogen from the radiation poisoning effect. So it’s a very general type of biological damage. In fact many biologists thought that radiation was causing the pituitary gland to make the ovaries overproduce estrogen 17:22 because the radiation was so identical to estrogen poisoning. But people did control experiments and irradiated just the head and the whole animal would show an estrogen effect as in the dental x-rays. But others x-rayed only a foot or an arm and so on and still the whole body went into an estrogenic state showing that it’s a toxin produced by any tissue interacting with the radiation. Hmm. So you don’t have to just target an area it’s actually going to have an effect on the whole animal. Yeah it spreads through the bloodstream and probably in other ways. Now going back to comparing the different kinds of radiation and cosmic radiation so is it fair to say that an x-ray at a dentist is comparable or I think this is a bone scan was the example equivalent of flying from Denver to New York in exposure? 18:34 No. If living in Denver gives you less cancer than living in New Orleans and living at 10,000 feet in Columbia or Bolivia gives you even less cancer than in Denver. And if you could spend your life flying around in an airplane you’d be even better off with less cancer. The higher altitude has been known since 1900 insurance statistics to correspond to a lower cancer incidence. So the whole story even though it fooled lines pulling it’s been known to be contrary to the fact since 1900 at least. Now x-rays are widely used medically. Dental x-rays and cat scans and bone scans and you probably can think of a couple others that I’m not thinking of right now. 19:40 And people doctors say they’re invaluable for diagnosing and treating different diseases. Do you find that they are sometimes useful and what exactly, this is actually two questions, what exactly besides the estrogenic effect what else do they do to your tissues? Well the estrogenic effect is just part of a general type of tissue excitation that involves in different ways of measuring it involves a chronic inflammation being set up. And that depending on the dose and length of time involved leads to tissue atrophy and fibrosis and the atrophy and fibrosis are what predispose you eventually to cancerization. 20:41 At first the US government sponsored interpretations of the exposure to atomic bomb radiation in Japan. What they did was draw a circle around the bomb and look at people at one mile and ten miles and so on out in the circle from the bomb. But in fact the radiation went with the wind and when they took the people who really got the radiation in one part of the radius and averaged it out with the people all at the same distance but in totally different directions. They made the radiation damage disappear so it seemed that it wasn’t causing any cancer at all. But when people more honestly looked at the data and got the actual exposure they thought that for example twenty years later looking at people who had been exposed as babies or fetuses their brains were much smaller than normal. 22:05 The same effect seen in the Chinese rabbit studies. And with the women in the study at the dental places? They actually measured their heads and their whole head was smaller if they were exposed in utero. And that amount of radiation was being used medically for a long time in the US. And Alice Stewart was the one that showed that it was causing leukemia and other childhood cancers but no one has traced US brain damage to medical x-rays yet even though it has been established in other countries. Now you spoke of a nuclear atmospheric test. The x-rays are actually waves, is that right? They’re not actually particles but I imagine anything that’s being carried by the wind is actually a particle, a radioactive particle? 23:10 Yeah and those particles get ingested it isn’t that they radiate at you from the dust outside you but they get in your food and water and air and enter your particle as a food atom and then they still follow the same course of nuclear decay and break down into radiation and particles inside your tissues and in that situation where they emit an alpha particle or a helium nucleus if it is emitted right inside the cell it’s going to cause total damage and be absorbed within just a few cell diameters from where the radioactive particle decayed. The nuclear industry said why worry about alpha particles leaking out of our power plants or coming out of the bomb test fallout and they would have an alpha emitter and an amplified detector with a space between them they would put a sheet of typing paper 24:37 and the sputtering of the detector would stop when they put the paper in the path of the alpha radiation beam. They said see it just takes a sheet of paper to stop the beam but the difference is when you have ingested the particle that emits those beams there is no paper between the particle and the cell that gets poisoned. So every time a nuclear facility has a leak that particles are actually being emitted and people breathe them in and when they disintegrate in the body the reaction happens. Just two or three years ago someone compared the blood serum of Japanese who were still alive but who had been exposed to the atomic bomb and they showed that they could demonstrate lingering photochemical emission differences in their blood serum 60 years after the exposure. 25:53 So it lingers that long. Are there still radioactive particles in them? It’s still unstable biochemical material that it spreads the influence and persists unless something intervenes to correct the whole process but these people 60 years later still were different from unexposed people. And this is something that has been coming up in the last ten years or so that if you irradiate cells in a dish to produce mutations and then put those cells with unexposed cells in another dish those unexposed cells keep mutating long after from something eating them. 26:54 They will be emitted by the irradiated cells and if you irradiate fish they will emit into the water some of the toxic materials that cause biochemical disturbances in the other fish. And the genetic instability is really the most horrifying part of the exposure because it’s called the bystander effect that is transmitted as some kind of signal from the injured cell which then injures the cells that receive this material. And that transmitted effect destabilizes the chromosomes generations later and no one really knows how long that can go on. 27:56 But in the lab situation it can be passed through many generations of cells as a tendency to mutate and produce defects in cells that were many generations removed. Now what about there was just a study done I think in Germany and a fellow was here around central Vermont speaking about it his name was Eisenstein I believe and I don’t actually know the details of the study except that it did show that around nuclear power plants there was definitely a higher leukemia rate among children. And why is it that children and young I guess all young living things are more susceptible to damage from radiation? It’s that instead of being played out like a genetic blueprint being read out literally to form each stage of development during growth that was where genetics dogma was used conveniently by the physics dogma. 29:19 They say that if it didn’t mutate your DNA then it didn’t cause any damage because DNA controls everything. But the bystander effect is produced by doses in the micro gray region where they used to call 50 gray exposure or 500 grams the dangerous toxic dose. A millionth of a gray is now known to produce these bystander effects and the developing organism is never simply a matter of a blueprint in the DNA being played out step by step. But doctors used to say what a mother ate had no influence on the quality of the baby being developed that as long as the mother ate enough to live to give birth the baby was not going to be affected by the mother’s poverty or starvation. 30:39 And that was because of this doctrine that environment has nothing to do with it. The genes totally determine what the organism is but in fact even the formation of the ovum is environmentally determined by the conditions in the mother’s physiology. The way the cytoplasm of the oocyte is assembled even before there’s a fertilized egg this is modified by the environment and mother’s experience. And then once the fertilized egg starts developing it’s still progressively modified at every stage by its environment. And so if estrogen is introduced during the pregnancy and the dose is small enough that the pregnancy can survive the change in the environment for example the reduction of available glucose causes the brain to develop differently. 31:56 And for example the cortex of the brain is thinner in proportion to estrogen exposure and the radiation exposure causes the whole brain to be considerably smaller but just a fairly seemingly insignificant imbalance towards estrogen causes the cortex to be thinner than normal. And so it’s because the young organism is in a developmental stage it hasn’t decided exactly what it can become because the environment at every stage is part of what it can become. And so if you introduce inflammation and stress anywhere along the line the younger the organism the more deviation from its ideal possibilities there will be. 32:58 I see. We’re talking to Dr. Raymond Pete endocrinologist, physiologist and science historian from Eugene, Oregon. So it sounds like if that’s the effect on younger beings human and otherwise it sounds like it’s by all means a good idea to avoid any kind of radiation exposure including x-rays and dental x-rays and things like that. But even the time of day can influence your ability to tolerate stresses including x-ray and for example if you go for a jog before breakfast your chromosomes are going to be more susceptible to breakage and if you had had some juice before you went for a jog the blood sugar makes your chromosomes break more easily. And so having your radiation injury in the late afternoon you’re going to have much less risk of damage. 34:07 I see when your body is basically fortified against different stresses. Well maybe towards the end of the show we can talk about what you can actually do to mitigate the effects of radiation. I guess I’d like to also have you talk about the efficacy of using medical radiation for diagnostic and I guess treatment also. One article published in JAMA about ten years ago criticized the use of the bone scans because they showed that they were thrown off by any consistent change in ratio of fat and water. Fat doesn’t absorb x-rays as much as water does and so if you reduce the amount of fat in your bone marrow bone marrow is normally extremely fat rich. 35:14 And if you exchange that for water and make a sort of sick anemic waterlogged bone marrow which estrogen can do you’re going to seem to have more dense bones. So especially for measuring the effects of estrogen x-ray bone scans are simply not scientific. And there are ultrasound bone measuring devices that can actually determine the strength of the bone from the elastic sound transmission through the bone. It doesn’t just measure the density you can have soft but highly calcified bones and so the ultrasound really measures the bone quality. And incidentally each ultrasound treatment is likely to make your bone stronger because it stimulates healing and regeneration. 36:19 Or each exposure to x-ray is going to increase your stress and make your bones weaker. Well it sounds like especially for bone scans that x-rays are probably not a good idea. Yeah and ultrasound technology has existed for many years in which dentists could see cavities and have nice pictures of the insides of the teeth without any x-rays at all. Yeah I’ve looked into that without much luck finding anybody at least in this country who’s doing that. No it’s just a technology that no one wants to use because they have x-rays and believe they’re safe. So what about I know Newsweek came out with an article not too long ago about CAT scans and actually was quite cautionary about people having too many of them. 37:23 How do they fit into the scale of exposure? One is too many. One CAT scan is too many? Yeah. Why is that? It’s a lot of radiation. It’s the equivalent of many many chest x-rays. It’s making an x-ray picture from many different angles so that you can look at it in the computer and see many different perspectives. Is there any time when you think an x-ray would be a useful tool? No because the other technologies are better magnetic resonance and ultrasound. The technology is there and it would be improved if people would start using it more. They’re invested in their present machines. So you’re basically saying it’s irresponsible that the medical authorities at this point are advocating continued use of x-rays? 38:27 Well it was irresponsible in 1920 and continuing for 100 years beyond when they knew it was harmful. It’s worse than irresponsible. Can you say a few words about John Goffman, somebody who did work for the Nuclear Regulatory Agency, or the Atomic Energy Commission I think? Yeah. I was aware of him from the 1940s on as one of the main government devils. For 30 years he said how wonderful x-rays and other radiation forms are and that they’re not known to be harmful. I would prove that they’re going to kill 15,000 people just by exploding some bombs in Nevada. For 30 years he was a government spokesman and said that people like Linus Pauling were irresponsible fearmongers. 39:33 Later I think it was 1968 or so he said in the middle of one of his speeches where he was saying it hasn’t been proved that these bomb tests are going to result in 20 years in death and disease. He suddenly realized what he was saying. He realized he was stupid or crazy to be saying such stuff. It took him 30 years to come to that realization but once he did then he became the government’s greatest enemy. He started the campaign against the use of nuclear technology. And great medical technology. His last big book was demonstrating that breast cancer and heart disease are caused in the United States mainly by medical x-rays. 40:35 Breast cancer is lowest in West Virginia where there are the fewest doctor visits by patients per capita and highest in the rich areas of California where there are most doctors and most test exams per patient. That’s very similar to what Samuel Epstein says about mammography. Oh yeah have you talked to him yet? Just on the phone briefly and we’re going to have an interview with him on May 4th I believe. Oh yeah there was a study in Scandinavia a few years ago that showed that the total mortality was higher in women who got their breast scans. And that’s kind of alarming because I know they’re being recommended all the time to people. I know especially I recently heard an example of not only was that done to somebody but then a metal pellet was planted without their knowledge in the place that they’d performed a biopsy on. 41:46 And they left that pellet in there so they could mark the spot where they had been looking at. And that to me how does that strike you as a technique? Well it’s not a normal medical technique. Did you hear the NPR program a couple of days ago broadcasting a segment from Columbia Medical School’s blessing of the white coat ceremony? No I didn’t know they were so religious. Yeah they bless the white coats and then have the students put them on as they call them up like they’re getting a diploma. And it’s an attitude that physicians are sanctified by their profession. And so they really feel that they can’t do any harm if they’re sincerely being physicians. 42:47 What I hear are mostly horror stories. Women who are told that they’re just going to have an exploratory surgery and then they’re ovaries are removed. And it just seems like the people I talk to have been really seriously abused by their doctors. Now I know in a previous show a long time ago we talked about some of the history of the use of radiation by I guess medical military. And perhaps we should cover some of that at some point. It’s a horrendous story which I don’t actually like to talk about because it’s so depressing. But I think it is good to know sort of where the technology came from and how the professionals that developed it basically used it in a completely immoral fashion. 43:51 And I don’t think that code of ethics has changed much. Ray one of the things they’re using now for ionizing radiation technology for is for what do they call it? They radiate food to preserve it. Just the name of that technique has escaped me. It’s just irradiated food I believe is what they call it. And they irradiate meat and they also irradiate fruit and maybe other vegetables as well. And what’s your opinion on, I mean that makes meat last I think quite a bit longer. Sometimes it does and sometimes it well it immediately almost instantly spoils it to some extent. But it stops other enzyme and bacterial changes. It’ll kill enough microorganisms that it stops some types of rotting. 44:53 But it also stops the natural defense processes. So apples for example will instantly turn color from the radiation and get soft and sour. It becomes susceptible to certain types of decay later because the natural defense processes of the cells have been destroyed. And it activates some of the aging processes in meat and other tissues that increase the toxicity. Proteins are degraded into toxic compounds. Fats are made rancid and toxic. Every component in proportion to its oxidizability is affected. And when they’ve fed these processed foods to experimental animals, 45:59 the animals show the effects of poisoning and malnutrition. The most susceptible components to damage are things like vitamin B2 and folic acid. And vitamin A is very almost totally destroyed by this irradiation. So it becomes a deficient food nutritionally. At the same time, the destruction of these compounds converts them into toxic reactive compounds that further reduce the nutritional value and increase the toxic effects of the rest of the food. And since prolonged feeding consistently causes damage in the lab animals, 47:03 a lot of people have been devising techniques to test food to show whether it’s been irradiated or not. And these same tests that show the radiation damage in food can also show the same kind of effects that show lingering radiation damage in people. The thing they saw in the Japanese blood serum, a photochemical luminescence, you can do that same test and show that the breakdown of the fats in particular causes photo luminescence in the degraded food product. And if it was an animal, oysters or chickens or fish, the bones capture the excited electrons. 48:10 And all you have to do is dissolve the bone in a dark photo detecting, a light detecting device. And the irradiated foods will luminesce as the bones dissolve because electrons were trapped in an excited state in the bones. And that has been used in people. You can show where you’ve had dental x-rays by eating a piece of the tooth that was exposed. And they will luminesce as the trapped, excited electrons are released. Now, when you spoke earlier of, you can detect the oxidized fats in meat that’s been irradiated. Does that mean that, is oxidation just one of the side effects of radiation? Is that really what’s going on when you shoot in a bunch of protons that don’t have electrons attached to them? 49:18 Yeah, to the extent that there is something present to receive the excited electrons, they will react and you’ll have oxidation happening in which the electrons are going into a lower state. I see. Even ultraviolet can cause some processes like that. If you get too much ultraviolet light from the sun, the vitamin B2 in your skin can get into an excited state. And then if you have eaten a lot of polyunsaturated fats, the excited vitamin B2 can extract electrons from the exposed double bonds on the fats 50:23 and create breakage in the fats. And the fats will spread and oxidizing process and attack the DNA and so on. That’s how you get skin cancer from ultraviolet. The wrinkles and cancerization process from sunlight really highly correspond to the amount of polyunsaturated fat that has been in your diet previously. The wrinkles occur very quickly when you’ve been eating a lot of vegetable oil. And I suppose that’s what you’re describing there is how the medical authorities, and I guess the nuclear atomic agency authorities, where they start using sunlight as the comparison with x-rays and nuclear waste environmental pollution. Because you can get cancer from both types of radiation. It’s such a flimsy connection though, because you have to be predisposed to it and then you have to get an intense sunburn and not have the antioxidants in your diet before it becomes carcinogenic. 51:41 Whereas with the other radiation, there’s really not much protection that you can have against it. Especially when isotopes have been injected and the penetrating x-rays and gamma rays will affect tissues all the way through your system. Well, we have a few minutes left. We’re talking to Dr. Raymond Peake, endocrinologist, physiologist and science historian from Eugene, Oregon. And Ray, I thought maybe you could just sum up if you would be so kind with what people can do if they have to go to the dentist and have to get an x-ray, what they can do to gird their loins, so to speak, to protect themselves. The first thing is to really reconsider why you need it. Dentists will tell you you need an x-ray just because they think their insurance requires that they protect themselves by having the x-ray record. 52:54 But endodontists will tell you that you can’t do a root canal without having an x-ray. But I have talked to some endodontists who were very proud of the fact that they didn’t need x-rays, but they would later do x-rays to prove to their doubtful colleagues that they have done it perfectly. It’s a matter of skill and judgment. You don’t have to necessarily get it just because the doctor wants you to. And more and more dentists are willing to. Sometimes they’ll have to patient sign a paper that they refuse to x-rays. Then the dentist has to use their skill and judgment. And it’s often the same situation. A lot of medical x-rays are really useless and pointless. 54:01 Anyone before they get a mammogram should look into the research on it and maybe listen to Sam Epstein. But what you can do if you are determined to get an x-ray is to try to schedule it in the late afternoon in the summer and have your blood sugar steady and high enough. You can have some gelatinous soup and orange juice and milk ahead of time and make sure your hormonal situation is adequate because you don’t want estrogen effects interacting with radiation effects. Progesterone treatment has been found to protect against x-ray damage to some tissues. 55:06 Magnetide is probably the most protective single thing. Having lots of magnesium in your cells, you need to have your blood sugar steady to keep the magnesium in your cells. But having a magnesium-rich food before and after the x-ray, coffee is protective against all kinds of radiations. The caffeine is the main thing in the coffee, but the coffee is also a good source of magnesium and niacin, both of which are radiation protectors. Niacin amide is a general tissue protector against stress, including radiation. The antioxidants, vitamin E and vitamin K and ubiquinone or coenzyme Q10 are protective. 56:19 We have about one minute left. Do you have anything else to add to that? No. Well, I think that’s a good place to stop then. We’ll leave it there for now and maybe pick it up next week. I want to thank you very much, Dr. Pete, for coming on again. Thank you for all your information and for your work. I’ll give out your website again. All right. Thank you, Dr. Pete. That was Dr. Raymond Pete, endocrinologist, physiologist and science historian from Eugene, Oregon. You can find out more about his writings on his website, raypeat.com, where he has many of his articles. And you can also subscribe to his newsletter, which is fascinating, raypeat.com. If you have any questions for Politics and Science, you can direct them by email to politicsandscienceatmadriver.com. 57:24 That’s politicsandscienceatmadriver.com. Politics and Science can be heard weekly on WMRWLP1, 95.1 FM, airing on Mondays at 5 p.m. 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.