Phosphate and Calcium Metabolism

00:00 All right, so Dr. Pete, thank you so much for joining us again. Yeah, hi. As usual, there are people, I’m sure, who’ve just turned the radio on. Perhaps you’ve never heard your voice or don’t know anything about you. So would you please just give us a rundown of your academic and professional career? I’ve been interested in nutrition for many years. Between 1968 and 1972, I studied biology at the University of Oregon, concentrated on the chemistry and physiology of aging, especially the reproductive system. And that got me interested in many related processes Before I went to graduate school, I lived in Mexico and was interested in the economics of nutrition and how to optimize good nutrition on minimum income. 01:06 And I saw that the ancient Indian civilization had made some great technological advances in processing corn. Corn normally has quite a few toxins in it, but they discovered that cooking it with lime, calcium hydroxide, made it more edible and less toxic. And so the traditional diet there was extremely rich in calcium, just as part of the tortilla and other processed corn. And that turns out to be something that’s increasingly of interest to the biochemists of aging. In the last 5 or 10 years, our phosphate had sort of been ignored for about 100 years in biology because it was sort of like water to a fish. 02:09 It’s always there and the inorganic form of it is usually just considered as sort of the raw material from which you activate proteins or form, adenosine triphosphate, the energy-containing molecule and so on. But recently, the inorganic phosphate itself is turning out to be very central to all metabolic processes. So how were the South Americans making the lime? They were just mining limestone? Yeah, you burn limestone and then soak it in water and cook your corn in basically almost pure calcium hydroxide. And partly it makes soap out of the fatty acids and so it removes the toxic, unsaturated fats 03:12 which interfere with hormones and it changes some of the amino acids. Ordinary corn tends to have too much leucine and that contributes to some of the toxic symptoms, but it’s normally deficient in some of the vitamins and it happens that the lime process converts tryptophan into niacin and so it’s like a niacin vitamin supplement. And that’s why the nutrition diseases that occurred in the U.S., southern states, among people who lived largely on corn, never occurred in the traditionally Indian cultures. Because you’ve warned, I think it’s the right kind of word, but against tryptophan as being a potentially harmful product. 04:15 Yeah, and the process of turning it to niacin happens to be very important in regulating phosphate, which otherwise would be one of the toxic features of any grain, cereals, beans, seeds of any sort, have a very high ratio of phosphorus to calcium. And so they’re not only adding calcium, but they’re giving a means for regulating your phosphate more perfectly because niacin happens to be an anti-phosphate nutrient. Cool. So is there a recipe that they follow or is it pretty much just like trial and error when they take dried corn and boil it with some lime? Yeah, the recipe seems to be a big kettle full of corn and a big spoonful full of lime and cook it until the shells pop off the corn, the little transparent husk loosens as the corn kernel swells up and becomes hominy. 05:28 And so when it looks like hominy, you stir it a little to separate the cellulose husks. And traditionally they would let it stand in that liquid for a day, and that makes sure that the process is well. Would you be able to do the similar thing with fire ashes? Yeah, that probably is better for some of the nutrients and it makes a very delicious product. Corunda is one of the tortillas or one of the tamale-like foods made with ashes instead of calcium. Because now you said I picked up on what you said about the fatty acids and this is like saponification in soap making. You said that the fatty acids that are normally something that you want to keep down are actually esterified, I guess, by the process. And so that is similar to soap making? 06:29 Yeah, I don’t know if they originally used the stuff for washing their clothes, but it is like a soapy solution that they pour off after the ending. Well, when I was visiting the mountains of Mexico and watching them make their different corn preparations, they used ashes for a certain type of product and lime for different types. And I couldn’t quite understand which ones used which, but they were very specific that the ashes were only for certain types. Yeah, they’re both very delicious. They were all very delicious, all the many types. Well, the main thrust of, I think, where we want to go with the topic this evening is I know that you’ve done a lot of research and you’ve said time and time again, aging as a broad-based subject. And I think the feature of tonight’s discussion about inorganic phosphate and how prevalent it’s become in today’s commercial food industry, and we’ll get into the reasons why in a bit. 07:36 And the pathology that comes from it that we’ll also get into is pretty interesting because the aging process, I think, is inherently something that most people would like to try and stave off as long as possible and stay as healthy as possible because everything that we do, if we’re not careful, it contributes to degeneration and oxidation and the aging process. So can you talk a little bit about the age-related changes that occur with inorganic phosphate consumption and where the bulk of people’s inorganic phosphate is coming from? Well, the main sources are meat and seeds, beans and nuts, whole wheat, much more than refined white flour or white polished rice. Those have the germ removed and the germ contains most of the phosphate. 08:41 So it sounds funny to say that white rice and white bread have advantages, but nutritionally they do. Because they also don’t have the poofa, the polyunsaturated fatty acids. Yeah, and other toxins as well. But the vegetable source of calcium that has the least phosphate would be leaves. And so since cows naturally prefer to eat a lot of leaves, cow’s milk has a very good ratio of calcium to phosphorus. So what kind of ratio, just talking about ratios for a minute, Dr. P, what kind of ratio would you be looking at as a good ratio? Well, milk and cheese are about 1.3 to 1. And human milk is much better. I think if cows weren’t given grain supplements that their milk would have an even higher ratio. 09:43 So do you think a grass-fed milk, or a cow that’s grass-fed producing milk is going to be producing milk with lower phosphate levels than a grain-fed cow? Yeah, I think so. And a lot of people habitually eat a ratio of roughly five, six or seven times as much phosphate as calcium, but probably shouldn’t exceed about two parts of phosphate for each calcium. And if you stick to a mostly milk and cheese-centered diet for your proteins, you’ll stay close to a one-to-one ratio. So we were talking earlier, Dr. Pete, about how many milligrams of calcium is in what you recommend for a daily amount of milk. Like if someone had three pints of milk a day, they’d get 2,000 milligrams of calcium and the amount of phosphate, that would be the maximum amount they’d want to take in. 10:46 And in a quart, you get about 1,200, somewhere around 1,200, 1,250 of calcium and just under 1,000 of phosphate. So a quart and a half, you’d have around one and a half grams of phosphate. And so we were talking about how much meat would be the maximum amount you want to eat per day or grains or whole grains or legumes, beans. Probably something like half a pound would be tolerable. And if you wanted to put some eggs and cheese in there, then maybe a little less than half a pound. Yeah, you have to displace one phosphate source with the other. So this is, again, I want to make sure that listeners are aware that we’re not anti-vegetarianism. Neither are we pro-meat eating because they all have their benefits and their costs. So in terms of the phosphate load, meats, you said are a fairly high source of phosphate. 11:52 Yeah, and the calcium in meat is very low. It’s as high as 10 to 1 for phosphate over calcium. So would you like to just describe the kind of cellular aging effects of phosphate and how we as consumers of phosphate, if we’re not careful, can be harming ourselves? In the last few years, a strange mutant mouse was discovered. They named it Clotho for a Greek fate. And this mutant mouse aged very rapidly and had most of the features of human aging, such as decreased lung function, respiratory failure, hardening of the arteries, osteoporosis, wrinkling of the skin, 12:53 all of the basic things that we think of as aging. Calcification generally, deposition of calcium phosphate where it shouldn’t be while taking it out of the bones where it should be. Right, okay, so that’s the aging process in general you’ve just summarized. So excess dietary phosphate is one of the factors that is involved in aging of many different organs and disease processes. Yeah, and a lack of the nutrients such as niacin, which help to get it out of the body and keep it from being absorbed so freely. Okay, there’s an article that I was looking at earlier on that mentioned the link between lung cancer and an increased inorganic phosphate consumption. I’d say a little bit about the industrialized food production and the inorganic phosphate that’s used in the production of foods and why, 14:06 maybe a lot of people don’t even know it. Oh, I think it was probably in the 60s when they started finding that I think it was because the government started regulating the adulteration of meats. They had been simply adding salt water in huge amounts. They started regulating how much water they could put in meat and they started defining the chemicals that could be used. And it turned out that phosphate, various forms, polyphosphate and phosphate salts were effective for making meat hold more water. And once that was approved, it became very standard and so all of the things you buy in delicatessants are likely to be hydrated. 15:08 Ham now is, I think, unless you have it specially made, it’s going to be hydrated with something like 15%!e(MISSING)xtra weight. So they’ve heard for it as if it’s all meat that makes it much more profitable. And also, the diapers underneath pieces of meat in grocery stores that have pre-cut pieces of meat for sale are usually very waterlogged. And they can give these chemicals to animals and cause them to have edema at the time they slaughter them and that counts as the starting weight. Then they can add 15%!b(MISSING)eyond that. So if you have very edema, this animal’s meat is even more profitable. Because fresh meat that’s just untreated and butchered up does not leak water. I mean, you were mentioning, Dr. Pete, that it’s hard to fry a steak anymore because you put it in the pan and it ends up being boiled steak and not fried. 16:10 Yeah, in the 50s, I like to have a fried ham with eggs for breakfast. But starting in the 60s, I found that I couldn’t get anything but boiled ham to put it on the frying pan and just fill up the pan with water. So I guess unless it’s like a prosciutto that’s been dry cured, it’s probably injected with a lot of water. That’s probably why prosciutto is so expensive then. Yeah, and this generally means that you’re getting a tremendous extra amount of phosphate. So not only is meat already high in phosphate, then they add extra phosphate to it. So this is why they’re noticing five to six times dietary intake of phosphate. So I guess with people eating either meat and eggs and dairy or meat and eggs and cheese and then whole grains and legumes, they’re going to be getting phosphate. So let’s talk a little bit about the best sources of calcium to balance this phosphate. 17:12 In plant materials, leaves really are a great source of calcium because they turn up greens, for example, have about ten times as much calcium as phosphate, others not quite as much. But then you have to choose your leaves according to the toxins that you want to minimize. The cabbage family is antithyroid and some leaves, well, all leaves have a fairly high unsaturated fat content and that can interfere with protein digestion. So if you can process the leaves ideally, then you can get very good nutrition out of the leaves, high protein and high calcium. Otherwise, milk and cheese are pretty much the alternative sources unless you want to grind up egg shells and that’s basically pure calcium, calcium carbonate. 18:18 Yeah, I also like to recommend nettle leaf steeped overnight because it has quite a lot of calcium. I think it’s like a thousand milligrams per half cup of leaves that are soaked in a quart of water overnight. Yeah, if you boil any of these leaves, turnip leaves, for example, you can just boil them quickly, get out most of the calcium and then throw away the leaf and have a good supplement. And I know you’ve mentioned that baking soda added to chard and spinach helps to block the oxalic acid and to release the minerals from the cellulose fibers. Yeah, and it happens that baking soda has some of the same benefits that niacin amide has. It helps your body to excrete phosphate more easily. And anything that helps your body make carbon dioxide helps to excrete phosphate. And salt and calcium happen to stimulate the production of carbon dioxide and so foods that are high in calcium and moderate in sodium will help to get rid of any excess phosphate. 19:38 Okay, well, you’re listening to Ask Your Health Doctor from 7.30 until 8 o’clock at the end of the show. People are welcome to call in with any questions. We’re very pleased to have Dr. Raymond Pete with us on the show tonight. The number here, if you live in the area is 923-3911 or if you live outside the area, the toll-free number is 1-800-KM-UD-RAD. Okay, so I just wanted to continue this with talking about the link between calcification which can occur in the vessels or in the tissues and the kind of rigidity that people get in the vessels as a result of calcified arterioles, etc. And kidney disease that can come about as a result of phosphate overload or the burden on the kidneys with phosphate consumption. So Dr. Pete, what do you have to say about people that want to try and do something about eating better and maintaining a more healthy ratio of their phosphate to calcium intake? 20:54 Lots of doctors for years have recommended cutting down on your calcium intake to avoid calcification, but actually that’s the same sort of reasoning that they know that calcium excites cells. They say cut down calcium if you have seizures or high blood pressure or whatever, but it turns out that that’s a whole aspect of calcium that has been neglected. If you are deficient in calcium, you tend to get cramps, might have seizures, bronchial spasms and asthma. The lack of calcium excites tissues, turns on the excitotoxic mediators, triggers inflammation, and sets up the conditions for depositing calcium. So when you’re low in calcium in your diet, you’re setting up conditions, increasing the parathyroid hormone, for example, to take calcium out of your bones, make up for what you’re not eating. 22:06 And the parathyroid hormone releases serotonin, among other things, and histamine, causing more inflammation, more calcification of the tissues, more tendency for the calcium to combine with phosphate and settle into the arteries, kidneys, brain cells, everywhere except the bones. So a calcium deficient diet is really associated with a lot of different inflammation and the stimulation of a lot of inflammatory mediators. And then, in fact, the tone of the small arteries is very responsive to calcium. So if you’re low in calcium, your blood pressure goes up. And for about 30 years, David McCurran has been saying it’s not sodium that causes high blood pressure, it’s calcium deficiency. And so eating extra calcium can often cure hypertension or avoiding excess phosphate in the diet or a good ratio. For example, one of the things that started getting me interested in phosphate was looking at the fat-free diet that George Burr and the group did in the 1930s. 23:34 They believed that unsaturated fatty acids were nutritionally essential. So one other group, William Brown, went on a six-month fat-free diet, where his diet consisted of nothing but a total of 2,500 calories a day, made up basically of sugar, syrup for several meals, and for supper, at-free cottage cheese with a small potato starch biscuit, apple and half an orange. So basically, it was a sugar and milk diet, a gallon total of milk, some of it made into cottage cheese for his dinner. For six months? Yeah, and he had chronically had lifelong migraine headaches every week, and at work he experienced a normal amount of fatigue at the end of the day, and he had hypertension, 150 over 100 sometimes. 24:45 And his cholesterol was 250 and he was about 10 pounds overweight, but a few months into the diet, the sugar and milk diet, his cholesterol had come down about 50 points, his weight stabilized about 10 pounds lower, his blood pressure came down to normal. And he never again had migraine headaches. Even after he started back on his normal… He probably never went back to normal probably. Yeah, and one of the things they kept talking about in the article was that surprisingly, at the end of the work day, he wasn’t tired. So the fat-free diet was actually good for him? Yeah, but it was a high calcium diet, essentially, and with that ratio of 1.3 to 1 of calcium to phosphorus. And several years ago, a group at the Linus Pauling Institute wrote a review of the importance of avoiding fructose, I think, was their point. 26:00 But they cited the study in which I think it was 10 or 11 men were put on a diet emphasizing sugar. I think they used decaffeinated coke with high fructose corn syrup as the main carbohydrate. Every meal had a cola drink. And for some reason, knowing that human requires 400 milligrams of magnesium every day, they put these men on 165 milligrams. And they were wanting to prove that a fructose diet would cause derangement of the mineral metabolism. And in fact, it did. But in a very surprising way, on a magnesium deficient diet, these men went into a positive magnesium balance, meaning that some part of their body was retaining a little extra magnesium every day like they were growing. 27:09 And also it retained a little extra calcium like they were growing, but the derangement caused by the phosphate was a slight loss of phosphate every day. They went into a negative phosphate balance. And to do that, you can account for increasing calcium and magnesium while losing phosphate. I think only if they were turning over their bones, a young bone is formed from carbon dioxide and calcium, calcium carbonate as the first bone, which is then replaced with phosphate during aging. So they were losing phosphate while gaining magnesium and calcium. I think that meant that they were building new bones. And that was on a high fructose diet. 28:13 We do actually have a cola on the air, so let’s take this first cola, Dr. Pete. Hello? Yeah, you’re on the air? Yes, I’m aging, and of course my concern is right, it’s the stiffness in the joints and in the back. And so I’m not too sure what kind of diet or what I’ve been doing that is not conducive, although I move around and I do have some times I have days where I’m more fluid than other days. Anyway, I was wondering whether the good doctor could give me some advice or whatever, and I’ll take it off the phone. Okay, thanks for your call. Dr. Pete, did you get that? Yeah, reducing the phosphate intake or getting a good ratio, ideally, not much over two to one in relation to calcium, I think is important. And that closely relates to thyroid. I think the polyunsaturated fats, which interfere with thyroid function and steroid function, they interfere with progesterone production, for example. 29:23 They happen to also lower calcium in the blood. So when you’re under stress, your calcium goes down and tends to deposit because specifically of the increased prefatty acids. And so cutting down the unsaturated fats in the diet will help to improve your calcium ratio and your thyroid function and other steroids with anti-inflammatory. So an equivalent of like three pints of milk a day would provide 2,000 milligrams of calcium or a couple glasses of milk with some egg shell powder or oyster shell powder or boiled greens. Those are all good ways, but trying to get to about 2,000 milligrams of calcium would be a good start for up in your calcium level and then keeping your whole grains and beans to not more than eight ounces a day. 30:25 Or your meat not more than eight ounces a day. So basically like eight ounces of your protein source would be a good ratio for your calcium to phosphate. And another thing I wanted to mention is egg shell powder. If you take a quarter teaspoon three times a day, that’s about 2,000 milligrams with your meals. Okay, so you’re listening to Ask Your Health Doctor on KMUD-Garbled 91.1 FM. From now until eight o’clock, our callers are invited. The number here for living in the area is 923-3911. Or if you live outside the area, the toll-free number is 1-800-KMUDRAD. So we’re pleased to be joined by Dr. Raymond Pete again with us this evening. So Dr. Pete, the recommendations have recently been coming out that phosphate be lowered as an additive in food because it’s a matter of concern and it’s a potential health impact. Do you think industry is listening to that? I think they all find some other way to make meat way more, some other way together to hold water. 31:34 I’m afraid that one of those might be the gluey, such as carrageenan or gums, that’s already in practice where they take waste fragments of meat or fish and add a jelly such as carrageenan or alginate and then glue the whole mess together with an enzyme that glues proteins together. So it looks like a real lamb chop or squid patty or whatever. These are kind of the reconstituted meats. Yeah. Okay, there is actually another caller on the air. So let’s take this next caller, Dr. Pete. Hi, you’re on the air? I had a question. I just started listening about 30 or 40 minutes ago and you were talking about the sources being inorganic. Would organic whole wheat pasta or organic meats have less phosphate? 32:38 No, unless it’s a matter of whether they have added it to one product and not to the other. But the way the animal is fed depends more on whether it has a lot of grass versus grains. Uh-huh. The grains can be organic, but they’re still very high in phosphate and so the animal will be slightly poisoned by eating them. So grass-fed meat and milk from cows that are grass-fed will have a lower phosphate level than meat and milk from cows that are grain-fed, because grains are very high in phosphate. So whole wheat pasta would be higher in phosphate than white pasta. Okay, I think when we mentioned it at the beginning of the show, when the listener might have called in, I think there might have been some confusion between the inorganic phosphate that occurs in food 33:40 and the naturally occurring phosphate. So I think that may have been part of the reason. The phosphate they add to waterlog the meat versus the phosphate that’s naturally occurring in the grains and the meat itself. Okay. Great, thank you. In physiology, when you say that the organic phosphate is a protein with a phosphorus group on it or the ATP molecule or such, when that releases the phosphate, you call it inorganic just because it’s not attached to another molecule. But we’re constantly making our own inorganic phosphate molecules. Okay, all right. So to continue the discussion about the addition of phosphate to meats in order to bulk them up and the link between phosphates and aging as decreased cell function, increased calcification. 34:41 I know you’ve mentioned before in the past and we’ve had a couple of shows on calcium and how important calcium is and the misnomer that increased calcium will cause calcification where it’s actually the opposite. You said that it’s possible to reverse the calcific aortic stenosis, say, or the arterial calcification. What commonly referred to hardening in the arteries. Yeah, the Japanese have done studies using just vitamin K and very high doses of it, very effectively rebuild osteoporotic bones while taking calcium out of arteries in their animal studies. But vitamin K is working on cellular energy and specifically on the handling of carbon dioxide as a group that lets the proteins handle calcium and things that increase your carbon dioxide work right along with vitamin K 35:52 in helping to keep the calcium and phosphate in your bones rather than in your arteries. Even baking soda helps to build strong bones and in the way it’s acting, it’s the same as vitamin K or niacinamide. It’s helping the kidneys to excrete phosphate that you don’t need helping to deposit calcium and phosphate in the bones while taking it out of arteries. You’ve also mentioned, I know in the past, the link between parathyroid hormone and calcium, how that calcium and phosphate metabolism should be treated by looking at any underlying hyperparathyroidism. People who have good thyroid function and get enough calcium in their diet have a pretty low parathyroid hormone activity 37:00 towards the low end of what’s now considered the normal range. At the middle of the so-called normal range, people tend to suffer inflammatory diseases, muscle pains, bone loss and so on. The higher the parathyroid is, the more of these degenerative inflammatory diseases you have. The first way to suppress excess parathyroid is by eating enough calcium but also vitamin D, that’s the next most important thing. So if somebody doesn’t get enough calcium in their diet or vitamin D from the sunshine or from a supplement, then they will be eating their bones. Yeah, in an experiment with animals 35 years ago, they put one group on a starchy diet, the other group with only sugar as the carbohydrate, 38:03 and the vitamin D deficiency and the ones on the regular starchy diet had very weak atrophy bones because they weren’t getting enough vitamin D to handle the calcium. But in that study, the sugar diet built strong bones despite the deficiency in vitamin D. And when you look at the experiment at the Linus Pauling Institute or the William Brown experiment, sugar was lowering phosphate. And apparently that accounted for the sugar making up for a vitamin D deficiency. It helps to handle calcium properly by helping to avoid excess phosphate. Do you think any of this can be an energy-driven process from the sugar being directly a fuel to cellular respiration? 39:06 Yeah, it shifts. As they saw in William Brown’s study, the high sugar diet with calcium increased his production of carbon dioxide. When he started the experiment, his metabolic rate was 10 or 12%!b(MISSING)elow normal. When he got on that diet, it came up almost to normal and his production of carbon dioxide or respiratory quotient was higher than it had ever been. And this would be measured by his basal body temperature, right? That would be a good way for people to assess their own metabolic rate. Yeah, that’s the quickest way to look at it. And also monitoring their carbon dioxide on blood tests. And the other thing we were talking about earlier today, Dr. Wheat, was the phosphorus in the blood or the phosphate in the blood. And there are some comprehensive metabolic panels that include phosphate in the blood and there’s a range of like 2.5 to 4.5 milligrams per deciliter. And you were suggesting that it’s better if it’s between 2 and 3. 40:10 Yeah, William Brown’s was 4 when he started and came down to 2.7 to 3, I think it was. So that’s another way people can monitor the phosphate levels in their blood. So in the wintertime, do you suggest that people eat more sugars because of the decreasing daylight hours and the decreased vitamin D exposure? I think, you know, it helps to activate the thyroid too. Your liver needs sugar to convert thyroxin into the active T3 hormone. And I think people tend to crave sweets more in the winter, which is an adaptive instinct. Okay, I think we have a caller. Hello. Hi, you’re on there. I’m curious. I have low thyroid function and I have a low body temperature like down in 97. And I’m curious if that is what you are talking about. 41:12 If you have any suggestions for that. Yeah, he’s very much. Talk to me. Okay. Thank you. Sometimes if you have eaten things that suppressed your thyroid, sometimes just a deficiency of protein can create a low thyroid state, but usually polyunsaturated fats or too much of the cabbage family vegetables, too many beans and grains. All these have some anti thyroid agents changing your diet away from those towards the fruit and milk and cheese categories. The saturated fats don’t have these toxic anti thyroid effects. So butter and coconut oil can actually help to increase your metabolic rate and thyroid while reducing inflammation. 42:14 Isn’t it only one teaspoon of these polyunsaturated fats a day that starts suppressing the immune system and the thyroid? Yeah, they’ve looked at various animal studies to see where the influence of polyunsaturated fats in increasing the cancer mortality where it starts and it’s with four grams a day for the average human body weight. Which is one teaspoon. Yeah, and that even the saturated fat foods like milk and coconut oil, cheese and butter and so on, about 2%!o(MISSING)f those fats are unsaturated. So even when you’re avoiding the cooking oils and mayonnaise and so on, you’re still getting two or three grams a day of the puffa unavoidably. And the other sources are if anybody ever ate fried food out in a restaurant or you didn’t cook it at home with your own coconut oil, you have a lot more than one teaspoon in a serving of fried food. 43:25 Yeah, and the cancer mortality increases more or less in proportion to the amount of puffa in the diet. So polyunsaturated fats include fish oil, hemp seed oil, black seed oil, canola, sunflower soy, cotton seed. Okay, there is another corner on the air, so let’s take this next corner. Corn oil too. Hello. Hi, you’re on the air. Yeah, we had a question regarding the hardening of the arteries. You said something about vitamin K and also baking soda works similarly. Do you suggest taking that for hardening of the arteries and how much would you take? Well, vitamin K, you can get a high potency formula of a mixture of K1 and K2. And with that, I think from 1 to 10 milligrams per day is up in the safe range as well as probably being therapeutic for the bones and arteries. 44:35 And what about where would you get vitamin K? And if you can’t get it, can you use baking soda instead? Well, liver and kale are the famously rich sources. I take liver once or twice a month at least, and kale is a good source. But I’ve known people who regularly take one or two teaspoons of baking soda with meals or after meals. They notice that it increases their endurance and energy, prevents fatigue and so on. Interesting. I use it myself for heartburn. It works incredibly well instantaneously. And they’ve tested it on athletes, and as much as a tablespoon at the start of a race can really improve their endurance and performance. 45:39 But oh well, I think usually the amount you take for stomach acidity is a good amount. And vitamin K, you can buy that online, a brand that’s pretty pure, and it’s in a clean oil source, is Thorn Research, vitamin K liquid. And one drop is one milligram, so we’re talking about one drop a day of this stuff. It’s pretty potent. You say one drop a day? Yeah, one drop a day was, Dr. Feet recommended one to 15 drops of pure vitamin K. Very good, thank you. Okay, very good. Okay, so let’s quickly go back to vitamin D just because as we’re falling into the autumn solstice tomorrow and the daylight hours, we’ll be decreasing here at some point and we’ll be getting some rain and cloud cover. Then the vitamin D, many, many, many different processes are supported by adequate vitamin D exposure. And we’ve talked about vitamin D in relation to calcification and how vitamin D can offset calcification or correct calcium deposition in the wrong place rather than putting it down in the bones. 46:54 One of the things that is currently being studied is the so-called activated vitamin D 1,25 hydroxycholic calciferol, which is the kind that you make when you’re deficient in calcium or vitamin D. And it seems to have bad effects and the anti-aging protein, Clotho, suppresses the formation of that activated stuff. So taking vitamin D and calcium are having a similar effect as that anti-aging protein. Clotho, cool. All right, so this was Clotho, just a little, because I don’t know how many people will recognize the name. I must admit I didn’t. It’s only been discovered since 1998, 1998, was it, as a Japanese? Sometimes I like that. Yeah, and it’s an agonist, right? 47:56 Sorry, Clotho, it’s a beta glucuronidease, right? Yeah, and no one really yet understands that, apparently, how it works. They just know some of the side effects. Right, but it’s important as an anti-aging compound then. Yeah, and they’re doing experiments with mice, increasing the production of it makes them live extra long. I forget, like, 30%!l(MISSING)onger to have an extra dose of that protein. But since you can do some of the same things with fructose, niacinamide, baking soda, and so on. Well, let’s talk about some good food sources of niacinamide. Well, liver and milk, cheese, eggs, tortillas. Coffee? Oh, yeah, coffee, a dark roast coffee is a very good source of also magnesium, which works against phosphate with magnesium with calcium. 49:05 How many milligrams of niacinamide is in a cup of coffee? I figured that I was getting with the dark roast coffee, I could get close to 40 milligrams a day just from the coffee. Drinking several cups. Okay, I don’t think there’s any more. Okay, fine, so we’ve got about six minutes left to go here, so we should probably not take too many more quarters. But again, from the perspective of phosphate to calcium intake and the foods that are high in phosphate that people should probably take note of that they need adequate calcium if they’re going to consume these kind of foods. And I said sometime during the show that it’s not an anti-vegetarianism or an anti-meat-eating program, but both of those things, the beans and the nuts as well as the meats are fairly high in phosphates. And so calcium, as much as it’s been maligned as a problem for hardening of the arteries or that kind of thing, it’s really something that people need to make sure they consume more of. 50:16 And again, it’s very agonistic with vitamin D. Whenever you eat the high phosphate foods like meat or nuts, if you are constantly having some sugar along with it, fructose in the intestine increases the resistance of the intestine to taking up phosphate. So it’s like a phosphate blocker in the intestine while a phosphate loss promoter in the kidneys. Good sugar sources are of course fruit, fresh ripe juicy fruit, honey, sugar, milk has a good sugar, lactose. Those are all good sugars that have fructose in them or lactose is very similar in action to fructose. And it’s sort of equivalent to protecting against the high iron content of meat by having some coffee at the same meal. 51:17 But if you put sugar in the coffee, then you’re protecting against the phosphate too. And protecting your adrenal glands from lowered blood sugar. Great, I love it. All of those things that they would have told you about for you are actually the things that are good for you. Obviously the saturated fats, animal fats are very good for you, calcium, lots of milk, very good for you, cheese. I think our ancestors had it figured out how to make it from thousands of years ago till now. And I think we can’t reinvent the wheel with all of our modern day processed foods. That’s right, we’re just coming back to where we came from. So I’m glad there’s research showing that phosphate adulteration, if you want to call it, in meats is actually showing itself to be a potential problem. As always, I think the industrialization or mechanization of our food industry turns up compounds that are cheap and no doubt make money. And that’s why they’re added, but not always good. So anyway, thank you so much for your time, Dr. Pete. I’ll let people know how to get hold of you. 52:21 Thank you for joining us. Okay, so it’s a couple of minutes to the top of the hour. Anyone that’s listened to the show, if you go to www.reypeatrypeat.com, look at the home page then, you’ll find a link to the articles. And the articles is probably about 50, I think 50 or maybe 60 articles the last time I looked. And many of them, well, all of them are fully referenced, but many of them will be around the subjects of aging and things like we’ve talked about this evening with phosphate and AIDS. And the anti-aging effects of some of the hormones we’ve mentioned, things like thyroid hormone, and we’ve talked about pregnella and progesterone, etc. in the past. But those things are kind of anti-aging. So his website has got a great source of reference material. He’s a research endocrinologist, so he knows what he’s talking about. And yeah, our phone number is 1-800-888-BEGA-PARDON-WBM-URB. We can be reached anytime after the show, Monday through Friday. 53:30 Sarah? Thank you for listening. We enjoyed the show. Thank you, Dr. Pete. Yeah, thank you so much.