Obfuscation of Radiation Science by Industry

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. Alright, I’m back on the air and I believe I have Dr. Raymond Pete here. This is Politics and Science on 30 March 2011. And Dr. Ray Pete, can you hear me? Yes. Oh, good. Is there an echo? 01:01 No. Okay, great. Tell me if it starts happening. Okay. Dr. Ray Pete is a physiologist and an endocrinologist from Eugene, Oregon and has a website with a lot of excellent articles on it on a variety of subjects, but mostly about physiology. And that can be found at raypeat.com. That’s R-A-Y-P-E-A-T dot com. Ray, thanks so much for coming on Politics and Science again. Well, we’ve talked about radiation before, but I think it was two years ago. We had two shows in a row. I didn’t know it had been that long. Yeah, it actually has. But in light of the Fukushima power plant, which is in process of melting down as we speak, and probably will be over the next, I don’t know how long, they’ve been unable to get control of it, so it’ll probably keep going on for a few months. 02:06 And there is quite a bit of radiation being given off from that plant, although the exact amounts are subject to debate, I understand. But in light of that happening, I thought we should revisit radiation and do it in the context of your recent very excellent newsletter, which was entitled Radiation and Growth, came out this January 2001. And if people go to Dr. Pete’s website, they can read a lot of those newsletters online. And also, I believe you can sign up for the newsletter and get it hot off the press. You’re publishing that six times a year now, is that right, Dr. Pete? Yeah, the reason I wrote that newsletter last fall was two things, the transportation safety people. I think the echo is coming back. The TSA instruments that irradiate people had got my interest up again in radiation, and then I saw that there were people selling radioactive rocks as therapeutic things, 03:25 for example, to wear around your neck to cure breast cancer and so on. And I saw that T.D. Lucky, who is now at least 90 years old, was interviewed by one of these rock ladies talking about his radioactive rock that he liked to rub. And I saw that since his history for 50 years has been serving the nuclear industry to tell people that radiation is good for you rather than harmful, I realized that with Obama and his nuclear industry support that T.D. Lucky and the radioactive rocks were just part of a new wave of promotion of radiation security ideas. 04:27 I see, and T.D. Lucky, I think in this recent newsletter you talked a little bit about how he worked, and it was interesting. So he was a spokesman for the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories? Oh, I heard about his talks when I was talking about Ernest Sternglass and his low-level radiation book, for example. I talked to people who worked in the nuclear industry, and they said, oh, that’s rubbish. No one should read that stuff. It’s all phony. And I found out that they had been given weekly seminars at the nuclear factory to debunk people like Goffman, Pauling and Sternglass. And T.D. Lucky was one of the regulars at those industry seminars to educate the workers that those people were such lunatics and phonies that no respectable person should even look at their publications. 05:43 And I looked up some of the references that T.D. Lucky cites, and one of them was published in a right-wing, crazy medical journal. And others are published in nuclear-supported radiation protection journals, basically giving the nuclear industry position and nothing from the real biologists. So when people are listening to this information that we’re getting from the mainstream press and from other sources, like even this radio station, how are they supposed to ascertain who’s got the accurate data and who doesn’t? Well, if you just read the references cited by T.D. Lucky or any of these people who are propagandizing against Pauling and Goffman and Sternglass and then if you read Sternglass’s books, for example, you can judge for yourself. 06:55 Sternglass tried some information out of the agencies, although much of it was just completely destroyed and not made available. But the information that he got was very public, very simple, factual, population information, mortality figures and so on. Everything public and very sound and absolutely in a different world from the political fantasies that the Lucky people cite. And this talking about Ernest Sternglass brings us back to some of the history that you cover in this newsletter, again entitled Radiation and Growth, Incoherent Imprinting from Inappropriate Radiation. And I guess Ernest Sternglass worked with Linus Pauling, who was famous as the Nobel Prize winner, and they were both working to stop atomic testing. 08:07 Can you explain a little bit why they got involved with that issue? In the 50s Linus Pauling was talking about the genetic effects of even one alpha emitting atom ingested into the body. He was saying that alpha particle delivers all of its energy to a very small area, so if it hits a nucleus, it’ll either kill the nucleus or mutate it. And he said that every mutation ultimately can be considered as a fatality even if it comes 100 generations later, because it’s not introducing anything of value but simply destroying some information. 09:10 But he was emphasizing the mutation damage done by any radioactive isotope, natural or artificial, and so he said that any addition made to the background radiation by the isotopes is going to cause cancer. But the terrible thing is that the fallout from nuclear reactors and atomic bombs gets into the atmosphere as particles which, when ingested, will eventually, if they stay in the body, they’ll eventually emit a particle which will either kill a cell or probably cause a mutation. And so he was already making that point between the absolute difference between radiation that you get while walking past a granite table or a granite bank or something. 10:21 That passes through delivers very little energy, but any single alpha emitting isotope that you swallow is going to deliver all of its energy as that alpha particle is absorbed by the cells. So it’s like an absolute difference, not just the idea of the sievert or the ram that spoke of the rancun or the energy of the radiation coming out of the source. The rad absorbed dose of radiation and the ram or the equivalent in a person and the sievert is the new unit referring to that effective dose. 11:25 But that effective dose, unfortunately, is part of the obscuring the actual dangers because they define effectiveness as a killing or a mutation. Again, that’s exactly what Linus Pauling was talking about in which any single isotope particle would be enough to cause cancer. But the people who are defending the industry are using this sievert unit or the radiation effectiveness biologically against the Pauling-Gothman Stern class people because effectiveness, they are defining only in terms of mutation or killing. 12:28 And so their journals are full of showing how harmless particular types of radiation are if you don’t kill the cell instantly and don’t mutate it so that you can find a broken chromosome or a piece of changed DNA right after the exposure, then you have done no harm and that’s where the situation is totally being falsified by the industry people. And as someone to check for the newer view that even though it goes far beyond what Pauling and Gothman recognized, mutagenic effects of radiation and Stern class was, he was forced to recognize that there is something far beyond mutation. 13:36 And killing effect of radiation, when he saw the many changes that were happening around Three Mile Island where he got his large numbers were in stillbirths, thyroid deficient babies born or not born because of miscarriage by the mothers after they had ingested the isotopes, huge numbers of underweight babies, miscarriages and thyroid deficient babies were produced. And then when he followed up all across the country, he looked at the miscarriages and thyroid deficiencies followed just in the number of months that you would expect from the damage to the developing embryo. 14:43 The same with the production of leukemia, it was intrauterine exposure that was producing leukemia, but then he looked at all across the country, he looked at the figures 18 years later in the scholastic aptitude scores. And the first response to his pointing out the falling scores, which happened in Utah, there was a tremendous, I think it was a 26%!d(MISSING)ecrease in the scores 18 years after the heaviest exposure to bomb tests. And right across the country, the scores decreased in proportion to the radiation exposure of the mothers 18 years earlier. The first reaction was that, well, more poor kids are now taking the tests. And he showed that that was wrong, that in fact there were lots more poor kids who were scoring lower taking the tests, but he looked at the high range, the very highest scoring students had decreased more. 16:05 They were the most sensitive to the destructive effects of prenatal radiation exposure. And one of his co-authors suggested that in vitro experiments with so-called cell membranes showed that the pre-radical production propagated in these membrane lipids and would have an extreme sensitizing effect to a very small amount of radiation. But that was in vitro somewhat hypothetical membrane thinking. But Stern-Glass showed that some mechanism must be causing this much higher sensitivity than simply mutating or killing cells. Even the industry people pretty much have to accept that the women who are exposed while pregnant to the 17:22 Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, their children had smaller brains and were mentally retarded in proportion to the amount of radiation they got. And that was blamed on just the killing of brain cells. But just recently, a study in Seattle of women getting dental x-rays, they would shield their whole body. But if they got a whole set of dental x-rays, the pregnant women delivered underweight babies from the general physiological effect. Something happened when their head was irradiated by the dentist that was transmitted to their whole body that made the pregnancy less successful. 18:28 So the Stern-Glass effects are supported by this kind of study that shows that irradiation of any part of the body will affect the success of the pregnancy. And when the baby is born underweight, the brain is also underweight, sometimes worse than the general underweight of the body. So there’s something happening, lingering for months after the exposure in these actual experiences in people. Fifty years after the people were exposed to the bomb in Japan, and twenty years after the Chernobyl workers were exposed, samples of their blood have been tested with removing the cells from their serum. 19:36 Their serum was then added to healthy cells, and it was able to cause mutations or chromosome breaks, even twenty to fifty years after they had been exposed. So the dental x-rays affected the whole subsequent pregnancy, but people were demonstrating lingering toxic effects circulating in their body fluids decades after exposure. If I could just play devil’s advocate here, I would think that if somebody had survived for twenty years with those toxic effects from radiation in their blood and were still alive, then I would think that the body was coping with it. Is that not true? Well, the exposed people had worse health and a higher rate of death from all causes, infectious diseases, heart disease, cancer. 20:51 Everything reduced the population faster, but the healthiest of them who survived a long time still were radically injured. And the fact that it can linger through a person’s long lifespan, studies have been done many times in animals and a few times in humans, showing that, for example, radiation to a man’s head will be associated with birth defects. In his offspring, something is transmitted through his body the same way it is through a woman’s body, affects his sperm, destabilizes them genetically so that the resulting offspring is genetically disrupted. 21:57 And the animal studies show that that sort of effect can go on generation after generation, often getting worse each generation. Once the disorganization of the genome begins, it can ultimately lead to the complete ending of the line, but sometimes it doesn’t happen for several generations. Do you know, speaking of Japan, previous nuclear horrors, which are the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, do you know how that was studied? I had heard that official health studies of the effects of the bombing didn’t start until three years after the bombing, but perhaps I have that wrong. Do you know anything about that, Ray? There were lots of effects, I don’t remember exactly when they started, but both Gossman and Sternblass have reviewed those, so it’s worth looking at both of them. 23:06 One of the tricks the government used was to draw a circle around the bomb and then take people who were within a given radius of the bomb explosion and analyze their health. But the bomb explosion produced a cloud that went off in a triangular path according to the movement of the wind and the air. So the inclusion of everyone within a radius of 360 degrees around was just a very obvious trick to dilute the actual effect of the people who got the fallout in a concentrated form. Instead of comparing the downwinders to a control group of no exposure? Yeah, it was similar to adding Canadians and Argentines to the Hiroshima population to include people in a radius who didn’t get any radiation exposure at all. 24:22 Right, so going back to Ernest Sternblass and Linus Pauling who were campaigning to stop above-ground testing of atomic weapons, how was his studies and Linus Pauling’s studies received? Well, I was one of the people talking about the difference between John Gossman and Linus Pauling. John Gossman was saying Linus Pauling was a neurotic kind of quack. And I was saying that John Gossman is either insane or a liar. At the time. He was stupid. And 20 years later he suddenly had an insight and said that was the stupidest thing he could have ever done. But he was doing it regularly as his profession for the government to campaign against Linus Pauling and the anti-bomb people. 25:31 Yes, he was one of the main spokesmen for the Atomic Energy Agency, wasn’t he? Yeah, and his old stupid arguments are still, you can still find them anywhere on the internet. And in the professional journals of radiation protection, the industry is never going to give up as long as they’re subsidized and supported by the government. And any insight into how he happened to change his mind? It was sort of an epiphany, wasn’t it? Yeah, he was in the middle of a talk and said, this is a crazy thing to be saying. That until we know that we’re destroying all future generations of humanity, we should go on testing until we’re sure. 26:38 And he later said that he and hundreds of other people in similar positions could be tried for war crimes. And there was a quote recently that was in that letter by Professor Chris Busby who just wrote a reply. If you search his name, you’ll probably find his article on the internet. Just wrote a reply to the atomic industry experts who are denying that there’s any danger from the Fukushima plant. And he quoted Goffman as saying that the nuclear industry is waging war on humanity, which is, that’s quite a turnaround. Yeah, and it wasn’t really a total turnaround. He still loved atomic bombs and he still, Linus Pauling in 1959 said that the figures for a low cancer rate in Denver must be wrong 27:52 because cosmic rays give people a lot of radiation. The nuclear industry likes that argument that if you live in Denver or fly in an airplane at high altitude, you’re getting many times more radiation than breathing fallout from the nuclear plants. And because of several, I guess, both personal and scientific reasons, both Pauling and Goffman never gave up that basic perception that would tend to validate those propaganda lines of the nuclear industry. Just before he died, Goffman was still saying that you get more radiation by living in Denver than at sea level. It’s true that a certain kind of radiation is more intense, but the cosmic rays that they’re talking about are relatively harmless 29:04 compared to if you are at sea level where you get fewer of the primary cosmic rays, you get secondary and tertiary cosmic rays that deliver their energy into your body at a much higher rate. So one of the most popular arguments of the industry is that anyone who flies or lives in the mountains has nothing to complain about getting some isotopes from the industry. But it’s a total deception and it’s sort of sad that Goffman and Pauling never investigated the issue enough to be able to knock that one down too. Well, can you knock it down for us, Ray, because I don’t think you’ve quite explained why the cosmic radiation isn’t the same as ionizing radiation? 30:11 Well, the idea of linear energy transfer is the essential thing, and the higher the velocity of a particle, the less likely it is to stop in your tissue. And if you look at a track of a particle going through a target or a piece of tissue, when you find one that is losing enough energy that it’s coming to rest, the track where it enters the tissue is only a pale gray showing not much interaction with the substance, and as it slows down, it’s like the point of a pencil, the chemical reactions become saturating and black, exposing the film or whatever it’s stopping in. 31:16 The ionization becomes extremely intense at the very last micron or two of movement of the particle through the tissue. It delivers all of its remaining energy right in that cell, but if it passes through you at a high velocity, very little radiation is lost. And the type of radiation that we’re exposed to when the cosmic ray primary goes through us, it’s the decelerating type of radiation where the particle is weakly deflected by passing through near the atoms in our body. But the energy delivered is very small per unit of tissue, and experiments have been done showing that their secondary and tertiary particles mostly are ending right near the surface of the Earth, 32:32 and so those are the ones which are doing most of the biological damage from cosmic rays, so as far as the cosmic rays are concerned, it’s worse to live at sea level, but the industry argues the reverse that high altitude is where you’re getting the worst radiation, so they’re turning the evidence exactly upside down to support their interest. They do the same thing with the idea of radon gas. They say people who are exposed to radon in their homes have less lung cancer than people who aren’t exposed, therefore radiation is good for you. But lung is the place that’s least exposed to radon. 33:34 It dissolves in fat tissue, and the brain being mostly fat is where your fat, subcutaneous fat, and brain get most of the radon exposure. And in fact the figure shows that dementia corresponds very closely to radon exposure. So you’re saying the radon actually ends up in your brain if you’re exposed to it, and over time that might cause Alzheimer’s or dementia? Yeah, but the industry says since you breathe it you would expect lung cancer, but no you wouldn’t expect it because it goes through your lung in a fraction of a second. And does that coincide with radon maps of the United States? Yeah, dementia does, but lung cancer doesn’t because it’s a complete irrelevancy. So it’s a little bit of a red herring they’re raising there again. 34:39 Yeah, some of the other experiments with cosmic rays that make the linear energy transfer very clear. Putting about a half an inch of lead as a roof over animals will cause them to miscarry or become sterile or develop cancer and other diseases at a very high rate. And that’s because of the slowing effect of the lead on cosmic rays, increasing the probability of them coming to rest in your cells. So a slow cosmic rays is somewhat equivalent possibly to inhaling one of the lower, less harmful emitters, but once you inhale it and it lodges in a certain part of your tissue all that energy is delivered right to one part of your tissue. 35:48 Yeah, it’s the coming to rest in your tissue that delivers the deadly energy. Besides that killing, mutating energy, the decelerating energy that’s less harmful immediately, it still can have a long range effect by giving misleading signals to the developing cell interactive system. One of the basic tricks behind this idea that radiation is only dangerous if it kills or mutates is the research done with bacteria. And they extrapolate from bacteria to human beings and to do that successfully they just have to leave out the later lifetime effects of the radiation on that individual and then the subsequent generations effects. 37:08 I see they’re using radiation to model what might happen to humans or other mammals. Based on bacteria. And they only studied it over a short period of time. Just the instantaneous mutating effects of what they’re looking at where Carmel Mothersell and her collaborators have demonstrated the bystander effect. What it is that’s transmitted through the body fluids when a man’s head is irradiated or a woman’s head and the baby is affected. She and her group have shown that you can irradiate cells enough to cause death and mutations and so on in a culture dish. And then you can take the fluid from those cells and add it to fresh cells and you get those cells behave just as if they had been irradiated too. 38:18 Analogous to the effect of the serum from the Chernobyl workers causing chromosome breaks in cells from healthy people. So there’s some sort of instability that’s set up. Yeah, and one of the transmitters that they have identified, there are probably a lot of things that cells emit when they’re stressed. One that they’ve tested is simply serotonin. And they found that serotonin level of 25 nanograms per milliliter produced by the radiation damaged cells was enough to transmit genomic instability to new cells. And that’s without any extra radiation added. Yeah, that’s just the indirect effect transmitted through the fluids. 39:20 And if they irradiated fish in water and then put new fish in the water, they suffered similar effects transmitted from the secretions into the water of the injured fish causing similar injury in the unexposed fish. That’s very interesting. That’s pretty recent research. I’m looking at the references in your paper and that’s 2007. So is this fairly new evidence that’s coming to light? Yeah, these few people, if you look up bystander effect, you’ll find hundreds of articles over the last 10 years. But I was running into it in Russian research in the 1960s already. They found that, in fact, I incorporated some of those ideas into my thesis work. 40:21 They showed that first they would irradiate an animal’s head and show that it affected the pregnancy later. But then they found that irradiating any part of the animal had the same estrogenic effect. And they used the term stressin as a name for the unidentified substance secreted by the injured tissue that would then transmit genetic instability to the rest of the organism and the offspring. The so-called stressins are now gradually being identified as the cytokines and serotonin and other things that injured cells produce. It’s interesting you brought up Russian research because one of the things I wanted to talk about today was the different interpretations of what happened to Chernobyl at Chernobyl 41:28 with the meltdown there of the reactor back in 1986. We’re just about at the 25th year anniversary of that event. And the World Health Organization in association with the International Atomic Energy Agency, an UNSEER, which is a committee of the UN, has issued several studies about Chernobyl and their assessment of the damage done by Chernobyl radically differs with a Russian study that just came out a year ago. I think they said, you know, immediately UNSEER basically said that the only people who were harmed were the immediate workers and then there’s been some thyroid problems that could have been alleviated if the government had acted quickly and issued potassium iodine for those children who were exposed. The Russian study, which I have the book in front of me, is quite amazingly thorough looking and it’s taken them many years to put together. 42:38 It has said that over a million people have almost died, have died, excuse me, with many more to come. Yeah, the Western journals reviewing, I think it was 300 basically Western articles published in languages that Americans could read concluded that 28 people died as a result of Chernobyl or maybe as many as 60 or 70 died from cleaning up Chernobyl. This group that wrote the book looked at, I think it was 5,000 studies and concluded that a million people were killed. Yeah, and it’s not over yet because that pollution is still on the ground. That’s the sort of difference that I’ve always seen that has led me to read foreign science by preference to American. 43:44 I started running into it. I think I mentioned previously the book by Carl Lindegren called Cold War in Biology. He documented the firings of college professors and even high school teachers who questioned the Neil Darwin approach to biology. I was aware that you couldn’t trust American genetics and biology professors since that academic cleansing process had been done in the late 1940s. Yeah, it sounds like science especially, well maybe in every country, it’s a political occupation because I’m speculating that people’s jobs depend on taking certain points of view and holding them dear and not deviating from them. 44:49 Such as you were talking about genetic dogma, the majority view or the consensus in this country is not necessarily agree with other people’s theories. Yeah, that’s the idea of having a consensus of scientists and of peer-reviewed journals and so on. I see it as exactly the same as people who form their political views by taking a consensus of what the network newscasters are saying. That’s really how it works. It does form the political opinions of most Americans to watch the news and listen to the network radios. Today, speaking of the news, there was on Democracy Now, which is actually coming up in about 10 minutes. People who listen to that will hear George Monbio, who’s an English environmentalist and a writer who writes in The Guardian, debating Helen Caldecott over nuclear power. 46:03 George Monbio has witnessed the events at Fukushima through the news, as we all have so far. He wrote an article saying that those events have actually convinced him that nuclear power is the answer because he said that we’ve had a terrible accident there and yet hardly anybody is hurt. He basically based that assumption he’s making on the unseer and the IAEA UN health reports of what happened to the people at Chernobyl, where he said only 43 deaths resulted. Helen Caldecott thought that was an outrageous lie and an insult to the people who actually did die in Chernobyl. He accused her of being a conspiracy theorist because, of course, an organization as prestigious as the UN Committee on Radiation wouldn’t fabricate anything. 47:06 Can you give us your take on that, Ray? Well, the UN is really primarily the instrument of the imperialist countries and the nuclear industry wouldn’t exist without the political support of the states which represent corporate interests. The whole system works together. The public is taxed to finance the nuclear industry and the state and the corporations support the universities and the broadcast media. Science has to, in the same way as who gets invaded, it isn’t a matter of who is doing something objectively, it’s who is hurting who’s interest. 48:22 Helen Caldecott is threatening to hurt the interests of the nuclear industry and so the whole system has to exclude people like that. You said that Linus Pauling had his passport revoked for taking stands against the development of nuclear weapons and above-ground testing. Yes, and professors, even when I was in graduate school in biology, when he had his passport revoked, the faculty, even Caltech, were basically shunning him. And that, I think, motivated him to leave there under pressure. And even as recently as 1970, in the academic world, he was considered a quack and sort of an outcast. 49:27 Just because of his radiation, peace, position. Right. We’re almost out of time. We have about eight minutes left, maximum. And I was looking at the Chernoble book. It’s called Chernoble Consequences of the Catastrophe for People in the Environment by Alexei Yablokov, Vasily Nesterenko, and Alexei Nesterenko. And it’s edited by Janet Sherman, who’s an American doctor, and published by the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. And in it, it has some very interesting statistics about disease in the United States, and linking that to fallout. And it shows a huge, from looking at the incidence of thyroid cancer in children, a huge incidence starting in 1935, the thyroid cancer incidence quadruples. 50:33 And I know we’re told always that the cancer rate is going down, but it’s things like that that make me doubt that. Yeah, and Chris Busby’s article mentioned his research showing that just a small increase above background radiation was enough to cause something like a 20 to 90%!i(MISSING)ncrease in leukemia if it was a prenatal exposure. And when people say it’s only 50%!a(MISSING)dded to background radiation, as if that’s nothing, an alternative point of view would be, well, let’s see your evidence that background radiation is so safe, can you prove that it isn’t killing 100 million people every year? 51:37 Because everyone is exposed to it, and it’s known that that kind of radiation causes all kinds of disease, including infectious disease, susceptibility, heart disease, brain disease, and so on. And the people selling mammograms and other x-ray treatments or tests use that sort of comparison to background, but when you take your focus away from what they’re specifically talking about, some Swedes did a big study about 10 years ago on the population who had been given mammograms that they had noticed that the cancer mortality didn’t decrease in Sweden, although most of the women were getting mammograms. 52:39 And so they compared the ones who had had them and the ones who hadn’t, and they saw that maybe there was one fewer cases of death from breast cancer, but for every six increased deaths from something else, heart disease, for example. And Gossman showed that all kinds of medical x-rays to the chest increase heart disease as well as breast cancer. But when you limit the thing that you’re focusing on and forget total mortality, then you can, with a little jiggling of the figures, you can get a slight decrease in a certain kind of mortality. Basically, any exposure to ionizing radiation is going to increase your chances of having a bad outcome, even if it’s years and years later. 54:08 Yeah, if a very intense cloud comes by with a lot of radioactive iodine, the thyroid is the first thing that’s able to be protected by eating iodine-rich foods or taking enough thyroid to suppress your thyroid-stimulating hormones so the gland becomes inactive. A spoonful of powdered kelp or other seaweed will pretty well saturate your body so you don’t take up the radioactive iodine, and some of the things being recommended neglect the fact that the iodine is only going to protect your thyroid, but if you take too much iodine and suppress the function of your thyroid gland, you’re going to slow all of your metabolic processes, including the DNA repair enzymes. 55:11 So keeping your metabolic rate high by avoiding the toxic foods is very important for your general long-range resistance to radiation. The iodine danger is passed in about six weeks after the accident, so the long-range things such as cesium and strontium, you want to help to wash those out of your body after they’ve been taken in, and eating a calcium-rich diet and a potassium-rich diet will increase the turnover of these in your tissues while a thyroid-supporting diet low in the polyunsaturated fats will increase the repair processes and prevent to some extent those long-range bystander effects that can increase for years after the exposure. 56:15 And you mentioned red light before, is that an effective technique? Yeah, during, for example, if you’re near a flash of radiation, if you have a CAT scan or some kind of very intense radiation, those effects will linger as excited molecules in your tissues for hours. So if in the first hour after you get a flash exposure of intense radiation, you get lots of sunlight, or in the absence of sunlight, you want bright incandescent light that’s rich in the red spectrum. It’s the red frequency that deactivates those excited electrons in molecules following intense radiation. And I suppose it would be best to avoid milk from cows that are eating in the field, if that comes by. Well, yeah, but I, 40, 50 years ago, looked at the figures for the amount of radiation in milk and in vegetables, and the government was telling people to avoid milk that the cows had just absorbed strontium into. 57:33 And I saw that if you ate vegetables for your nutrients, you would be getting several times more strontium than you would from the milk because the cow has concentrated calcium where the plants tend to receive a high proportion of strontium from the fresh fallout. Hmm. So the cow is a good filter even during the fallout storm. All right. Well, Ray, thanks so much for your knowledge and advice and for talking to us today. Okay, thank you. All right. Goodbye for now. Bye. And unfortunately, we’re out of time. Once again, this has been Politics and Science. I’m John Barkhausen, and you’re listening to WMRWLP Warn. And the preceding and the following show did and does present the viewpoints of its participants and does not necessarily represent an official opinion of any other person or organization. 58:39 Some past editions of the show can be found at radioforall.net, search for Politics and Science. That’s radio, the number four, a-l-l dot net.