Safe Supplements

00:00 Hello everyone, I’m Danny Roddy of DannyRoddy.com and today I’m talking with painter, philosopher, and biologist Raymond P. In this hour-long episode, we’ll talk about the benefits and risks of various commercial pharmaceuticals and supplements. In addition to thanking Ray for talking with me today, I’d like to thank my patrons for making this show and all of the content I produced possible. If you would like to become a patron, please go to patreon.com slash Danny Roddy. As always, please do your own research and come to your own conclusions, and in the spirit of William Blake, the true method of knowledge is experiment. Without further ado, here is the show. Hello. Ray. Yeah. Hi. Hey, how are you? 01:00 Good. Is this an okay time? Yep. Okay, perfect. Thank you so much for talking with me. I sincerely appreciate it. As always. Also, I wanted to say the conversation with Gavin was really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, 어려 Laufer’s. Okay, great. Is this an okay time? Yep. Okay, perfect. Thank you so much for talking with me. I sincerely appreciate it. As always. Also, I wanted to say the conversation with Gavin was extremely enlightening. I’m not especially interested in politics, but I am interested in your painting of physiology. And just knowing some of the things that you talk about, I was kind of interested in anarcho-capitalism. And after reading that Gavin article, I was thinking that it kind of shook me out of that mindset and was maybe thinking that capitalism wasn’t the best thing for health and society. Was that kind of similar to what you were saying in that article? Yeah, the idea of accumulating capital so you can build machines, people wouldn’t have built 02:10 steam locomotives on ships and such if they hadn’t accumulated capital. And so lots of good things come from accumulating capital and putting it in one place. But the trouble is that Marx pointed out that it tends to accumulate all in a few hands and then the system stops running because no one can buy what is produced so efficiently in factories. And so you have business cycles. And then Lenin said, well, they discovered that you can cure the business cycle by having imperialism and invading countries to make them buy your product and keep the system running. So as long as you have wars, capitalism has no problem. But that’s the problem that it has its internal contradictions and tends to cycle down to a 03:17 crash every few years if you don’t have some way to break out of that. It almost perfectly put things into perspective of something Bucky Fuller said. And he was talking about how he was trying to shake the notion of everybody having to earn a living. And I was totally confused at what he was talking about. But he was saying that technology was getting better and better and that would free up more people to this barbaric idea of having to earn your place on the planet. Is that kind of what you’re getting at? Yeah, that was Fuller. I think a critical path, he said it somewhere. Yeah, I admired him. I listened to one of his lectures when he came to Oregon, talked, I think, six hours steady until he closed the shop. 04:18 I was reading the CIA reports on him and somewhere they mentioned that he had an incredible capacity just to talk for many hours. Yeah, he and Fidel were experts at putting the whole world story in one lecture. Cool. Okay, that’s awesome. I wasn’t specifically wanting to talk to you about politics, but I thought that was so good. And it really shifted my thinking. Oh, you know what? One last thing. I was reading two other papers by a guy named Paul K. Piff, and he was talking about the social and stress consequences of capitalism, too. He has papers called Having Less, Giving More, and the Influence of Social Class on Pro-Social Behavior, and High Social Class Predicts, Increasing, Increased Unethical Behavior. So that seemed to just really tie in to the whole thing you were talking about. Yeah, the culture is basically, 05:25 it has functioned as a system of illusions to help keep a dysfunctional system working to make the people think that they’re better off than they are. And so I think working on the culture is really where political work should be done. Propaganda analysis everywhere, including science, science and philosophy. It’s almost like the food pyramid, and then the political system synergized to destabilize a person, like the undigested starches, and then the capitalism, it’s like a perfect storm for a weird culture. Okay, let’s get on to supplements. This has been just a constant evolving area for me. I don’t remember when I first heard you say that you 06:26 preferred using the oily supplements on your skin. It must have been years ago, like 2011 or something. And I heard what you said, and I kind of rejected it because it didn’t really fit in with my life. And I put them on my legs and they were too oily and got on my pants. And it just didn’t really work out for me. So years later, just like probably like six months ago, I started putting them on my legs and stopped eating them and just like various small kind of things resolve themselves. And then I forget who sent me quote of yours saying that you only thought a few supplements were safe. Before we get to a lot of the specifics, you could just kind of give us a background because you’ve been talking about supplements like since the 70s. And just perusing through nutrition for women again, you seem to be saying like a lot of similar things that you should take a careful approach to them. So and I know you mentioned before that you were known for 07:28 getting people off of their supplements. And I always thought that was a funny idea. Yeah, in the late 60s, when I came to Eugene, I knew someone who started the local free clinic. And in Eugene in the summer, the fields all around under the north of town were growing grass for the seed lawn seed industry. And at the end of the summer, they would burn their fields. And all of the pesticides and things that had been put on the crops would be vaporized and blow into Eugene. And people with asthma would be more likely to die during the smoky seasons. And after it caused some huge traffic accidents, they finally after many, many years limited it at least. But during that time, allergies were a major problem. And so my friend 08:32 free clinic was constantly sending allergy people to me. And I found that they were all taking ascorbic acid and vitamin A and the usual things that people take for allergies. And I had just a little before that been trying out Linus Pauling’s idea of big doses of vitamin C. And my first experience, bad experience with vitamin C was in the mid 1950s when it suddenly got very cheap. I had had previous good experiences with tiny 50 milligram tablets that cured my poison oak right away. So when it became cheap, I tried a 500 milligram tablet woke up the next morning with a sore throat and cold symptoms. And over the years, I saw that repeatedly happened that the good big dose of vitamin C always gave me 09:41 some kind of a cold symptom reaction. So around 1968, when I started seeing these allergy people in great numbers, they were all taking vitamin C and some other supplements. And so I suggested that they try stopping it. And just almost without exception, they would come back and say that their allergies were gone for the first time in years, just within a week of stopping all their supplements. And you suspect it was majorly due to some kind of endotoxin or irritation from the intestine? One of the things the endotoxin does is to impair oxidation of the lining of the intestine and create a reduced state of too many electrons. And the sulfites 10:44 and ascorbic acid are very powerful reductants. And I think the combination of endotoxin and a massive of chemical reductant can interact and set up a big inflammation in the intestine and then reflexes from that cause the nose to run and eyes to water and such. Did that just shift your thinking to be much more careful about the supplements after you experienced that? Yeah, I had previously found that after I had dental x-rays that happened three different times from the age of 10 to the age of 30 for about in the first two times, I had leukoplakia on the inside of my cheek for six months following the x-rays. And the third time 11:45 it happened, I had been thinking about what happened to stressed cells and membranes. And it occurred to me that the vitamin A would be destroyed by x-rays just as much as it is by sunburn. And so I took a big dose of vitamin A and immediately just overnight cleared up the leukoplakia. And knowing of the similarity between cervical so-called precancerous conditions, leukoplakia can occur in the cervix as well as in the lining of the cheek. I told women about it and they tried big doses of vitamin A and vitamin E and similarly got the precancerous condition to disappear. But as I continued taking the vitamin A 12:45 just as a regular supplement, I started getting headaches from it. And I’m not sure if the product had changed or if I just happened to be at that stage where I was more sensitive to it. But I found that just a touch of it on my lips would give me a migraine the next morning. So I tried out a series of individual supplements and found that riboflavin, the very important vitamin B2, was almost as powerful as ascorbic acid, forgiving me an almost immediate serious headache or asthma symptoms. One other that was very intense was rootin, whatever they were selling as a rootin concentrate was extremely allergenic. And talking 13:49 to people with allergies, pretty much they confirmed that ascorbic acid was the number one problem for most people, but vitamin B2 and rootin and sometimes vitamin A caused problems. With your biochemistry background, you suspect why these substances are they made in just a cheap way and that poses some risks to the intestines? Or why do you suspect supplements are these kinds of irritants a lot of the time? When vitamin C was first on the market, until 1953 or four, it was sold in very small 50 milligram tablets. And that was during the time when all of the classical amazing results were published. I think that was because it was free of contaminants. But the new cheap way of making it from glucose at first involved 14:54 sulfuric acid, oxidation of glucose, which and the sulfuric acid was almost always contaminated with some lead because of the way it was manufactured over the several decades since 1955. There have been a series of chemical innovations for making it even more cheaply, but apparently each of them introduces some kind of chemical adulterant in trace amounts. In the Journal of Free Radical Biology, I think it’s called in the late 90s, someone published a study of the reagent-grade best purity ascorbic acid that they got for lab use. They dissolved a gram of it in a liter of highly distilled water and then measured it in 15:59 electron spin analyzer, ESR or EPR, electron paramagnetic resonance, which shows free radicals. And the person who did this experiment said that just spontaneously on dissolving purified vitamin C and purified water, the content of free radicals was as high as would have been produced by, I think he said, something like 6,000 rands of x-rays, basically a killing dose. And he said, isn’t it amazing that this amount of free radicals doesn’t kill her intestines? He said it was apparently from traces. He looked at the very tiny traces of heavy metals and said any one of those, but iron was adequate, 17:05 but there were several other trace metals that wouldn’t be enough to create free radicals. Unbelievable. And that’s just one problem with the supplements. I imagine the casings they’re in and then the fillers. Those are all added variables to the allergenicity of the products? Every additive has its own manufacturing history and every reagent used in making that thing has its own history. It’s like they used to say about HIP infections. One encounter can amount to hundreds of historical encounters and opportunities for infection. But when you look at every excipient in a product, each one of those has many components, each of which has its own history and opportunity for contamination. 18:07 You’ve obviously mentioned a couple core things that you talk about a lot as being safe therapeutic agents like things like thyroid and progesterone. What is your general process for evaluating something if it’s safe or unsafe? Is the history of the substance extremely important or unpack your process I guess for us? My thinking I think got started along a certain path in 1960 when they were analyzing the amount of strontium-90 from atomic bomb fallout and collecting babies’ teeth from all around the world to measure their exposure to radioactive isotopes. But strontium-90 happens to be concentrated in the bone and the bone marrow is turning over rapidly 19:08 and so the exposure to fallout would show up as mutated blood cells and radiation exposure to the bone marrow is a known promoter of leukemia and so they were looking at the connection between childhood disease and strontium-90 and because strontium-90 is similar to calcium it associates in milk and so the government was warning parents not to feed their children so much milk because of the radioactive strontium that the bomb tests were putting into it. But I looked at the other how did the strontium-90 get into the milk and it falls under the ground in the rain. The plants that need the water and soil to grow absorb both calcium and strontium-90 20:13 and so the concentration in the soil is relatively very high after a bomb test in the ratio of strontium to calcium and when the cow eats the grass the cow purifies and selects for the calcium over the strontium. If you look at the racial in grass and cow meat and milk the milk has the least strontium-90 in proportion to other nutritional factors especially calcium so every organism is a purifying system getting what’s good and excluding as much as possible of what’s bad even to the matter of being able to select between the isotopes of potassium for example a radioactive potassium goes down every time it passes through an organism on the food chain 21:17 and so the safest thing is to get the purest food possible from an animal like a cow producing milk which is multiply filtered from the environmental source. When they talk about the chemical purity that’s only a reality in the mind of the chemist that it’s maybe better than something from a cruder factory but in relation to biological nutrients it’s just wildly out of the ballpark in terms of contamination so any any natural food is extremely purified any supplement made chemically is going to be dirty just in principle. So sometimes somebody I’ll get an email of somebody saying I’m not eating liver but I’m taking vitamin A and the B vitamins etc and this 22:21 this is just a totally non sequitur that the food versus just a litany of different pills. Yeah and one of the problems is that you get lots of unnamed and still unidentified nutrients in any living tissue or a recently living tissue for example in mushrooms the content has hardly been just sketched out there are thousands of potentially valuable nutrients or a para nutritional substances things that influence your quality of life that simply haven’t haven’t been identified and tested. It’s interesting you bring that up that was actually one of the motivators for me to talk to you because I don’t know what about being here in Mexico made it more interesting but the substances you were talking about in foods like the aphidgenin the noringin in the various substances in mushrooms those all became I don’t 23:24 know why but suddenly more interesting than the various supplements and since they were so easily attainable I was like why don’t I just try to like fortify my diet with these things rather than focusing on these these pills or whatever. Yeah and some of the fruits that are most interesting happen to have some of the most amazing still unidentified substances in them like the the curi moya they’re just like Mark Wayne said it was the best tasting substance in the universe. So those have a lot of medicinal qualities as well? Um that they haven’t been studied but if you eat them for a while so you can tell that there is something amazing about them. That’s good to know they’re in my refrigerator right now um that and then marmalade too like something you could make that is full of noringin and then noringin and this is something you would 24:29 normally throw away that could be I’m doing air quotes but like a supplement with something with great value. You know like orange peeling people usually throw away but they’re if they’re good oranges and well prepared the marmalade is like a super drug people might worry about the fact that marmalade is more sugar than orange peeling but the sugar itself is part of the nutritional wonder drug. When the health gets really like in a really serious condition and supplements or drugs would be of value are there certain ones you typically think of that have a proven safety record or are more physiological than other drugs like the I guess a few that you frequently mention? A general rule about drugs is that the oldest ones are best they’ve been tested for more years and the uh since the pharmaceutical industries sort of took over 25:37 the world and the government uh they have had 20-year cycles in which they talk about a new generation of the drug and the first generation is usually the safest and most effective that the second third and fourth generations are more weirdly dangerous but the toxic side effects just haven’t been published yet. Because you’ll typically read some negative effect of like literally any substance is there any way of understanding side effect data to understand like the real risks? Yeah 50 years I assume that most of the middle term side effects would have been noticed if it’s going to bring on cancer you have to use it for at least 20 preferably 40 years to know whether it’s safe because cancer is a developmental process that typically takes at least 20 years 26:42 and then regarding like if it causes your children or grandchildren to be born without heads that’s worth knowing and they aren’t going to know that for quite a few years for all of the drugs that have been patented in the last 20 years. Just because it came to me but the finasteride is probably a pretty good example of that just seems like it’s ruining lives left and right. What drug is that? Finasteride propitia. Oh yeah I hear from a lot of people who have had trouble from that. What kind of effects would you expect with inhibiting 5AR is that just because I get the email I think all the time? Well brain chemistry depends on the metabolism of progesterone as well as testosterone in your brain. If you block 27:45 any of the enzymes used in making it you’re going to have a weird brain. There’s some famous quote from the FDA saying that dihydrotestosterone apparently wasn’t used in like the organism or it had like no function or something so that was the kind of thinking that apparently was going into that making that drug which is nice to know. Yeah but it works on the progesterone system too and yeah they said progesterone is only pregnancy-related drug chemical and neglecting that the brain absolutely depends on making it and absorbing some of it that’s produced in the ovaries and adrenals and skin but it’s a major brain hormone that you’re messing with when you try to stop the production of DHT. So just to finish that thought like 28:49 restoring the pregnant alone DHEA and thyroid function would be probably a good start to trying to resolve somebody from taking that substance? Yeah and even better probably to start with increasing your cholesterol production which means keeping your intestine liver in good condition. So switching gears a little bit can we talk about nutrient deficiencies and maybe common ones that you maybe think about often have experienced yourself or written about and then the best way is to go about restoring the nutrients and I imagine that’s with the simple foods? Yeah I had fairly interesting experiences like the fact that 50 milligrams of vitamin C cured horrible cases of poison oak. I thought it was going to have to quit working in the woods but over the weekend I took two doses of 50 milligram vitamin C and the poison oak was gone 29:53 never had it again and around that same period I was feeling gloomy and happened to take a tablet of I think it was maybe 20 milligrams of vitamin B1 and in minutes I had a clear happy perspective on the world and when I worked in the woods I always by about mid summer was getting acne and people talked about how sunlight was supposed to be good for your skin but for some reason on exposure to the sunlight I would get pimples and one night I think was in the winter in Mexico I was lying on my bed with a bright light hanging over my head and I went to sleep spent about eight hours lying on my back with a bright light shining on my closed eyes and I woke up with pimples starting and that started the biochemical thinking going 31:03 and I realized that my retina uses a lot of vitamin A just in the process of making the visual pigment and so on but then the eye is the the main regulator of your reproductive hormones and when birds are exposed to constant light for example they’ll be constantly in their mating season like with artificial light in the winter birds will become fertile and start nesting and it’s because light is the signal that is springtime and that it activates your adrenals and and gonads to produce lots of steroids and the production of steroids is a heavy consumer vitamin A and so from that that enlightening insight I took a big dose of vitamin A and immediately the pimples subsided then around that same time I was getting interested in the 32:10 the curative effects and I read Adele Davis and a friend in Mexico City was dropping by and saying that his little niece was in the hospital with uncontrollable diarrhea and he would stop by two or three days in a row saying the final day he said they didn’t think he would live another day but at that point he accepted an idea from Adele Davis and I gave him a tablet or two of vitamin b6 10 milligrams which he took to the hospital gave to the little girl and within an hour or so her diarrhea stopped and instant recovery about a year or two after that a neighbor of mine had a big alcoholic nose he was a terrific consumer of gin and tequila he bought it by the the case and his nose was red 33:15 enlarged and shiny and he had a terrific problem with vocabulary he was a hobbyist short story writer and he would struggle for a long time to get the right word he wanted he had he had it in mind but he couldn’t call it up and he had this odd habit of when he was looking for a word he would put his hand on his forehead the nose and so it started me thinking about the memory and the circulation to his nose being a problem and possibly the circulation to his brain was affected by the same thing and so I quoted from Adele Davis again and as described how vitamin b2 is essential for oxidation and the blood supply is carrying oxygen so it has to carry extra oxygen when 34:19 you’re deficient in vitamin b2 to make up for the inefficient use of the oxygen and so I kept telling him this idea to try vitamin b2 supplement and he couldn’t remember it so I kept giving him notes and he would forget to take the note and I think we tied the note to his finger and he finally got to the doctor with a note and the doctor gave him a shot of vitamins and I saw him within a day or two he was talking as fluently as anyone no hesitation in vocabulary and his nose was completely normal pink color then he got a weekly shot but on some holiday uh he forgot to go to the doctor for his weekly shot next time I saw him he was hesitant in his 35:21 vocabulary and his nose was red and shiny again once you’re deficient in vitamin b2 it can raise your requirement for it for a long time afterward so basically it’s endless what could be considered efficiency like any kind of abnormal behavior or yeah a friend of mine had a four-year-old kid who was having every afternoon he would have a violent tantrum and was getting dangerous really vicious episodes and at night he would wake up screaming and having a horrible nose bleed and the the nose bleed brain connection reminded me of my friend with a shiny nose and we made up some milk powder egg and sugar cookies with 10 milligrams of vitamin b2 powdered up in this batch of maybe I guess six or eight cookies which he ate that afternoon that night 36:29 he slept through the night without having his nightmare and nose bleed and he never as far as I knew in the next years never again had his horrible tantrums what are your thoughts on like the versatility of the body does it need everything every day because it like in that the gentleman with the larger nose he needed a large proportion of the b2 versus the child that needed just one dose is there is there any way to tell what you need personally someone did experiments on rats and found looking at the the cornea which it gets its oxygen without blood vessels so it depends on oxygen diffusing in from the inside and out both they use the cornea to test the effects of a vitamin b2 deficiency and so that the mitochondria were essentially collapsed or structurally changed 37:35 so that they no longer would take up vitamin b2 when it was given to the methanormal concentration so I think that might be a unique vitamin in deficiency causing more or less heritable damage to the mitochondria of which you can regenerate create a new crop of mitochondria but it takes support in good condition over a period of probably quite a few weeks so your nutritional requirements depend on your parents your grandparents and every generation before that yeah for example something that makes your your mother low in thyroid or high in estrogen or low in in glucose for example during your gestation that powerfully sets a pattern in your nerves and endocrine glands that will greatly increase your requirements and if you intensely 38:39 work on them the earlier in life the better but at any age if you put enough effort into it you can overcome those pre settings you’ve mentioned that meat eaters would normally get a fourth to a half a grain of thyroid in their food every day do you look at thyroid I remember being interested that you called it like a supplement where a lot of people like to label it as like a drug do you look at thyroid like eating oysters and liver except it’s it’s almost impossible to get because the FDA made it illegal yeah seeing the various ways the country people ate in Mexico and in other countries I realized that just the meaning of a traditional diet to a large extent was that it was nutritionally very complex and included hormones especially the thyroid gland people always would eat the chicken necks and and fish heads and they would save all of the 39:42 glands from pigs and all of the fruit animals sheep and cows and such and they would use those in sausages with the smaller animals the the whole animal tended to be stewed and used in a very comprehensive way but the blood for example carries a lot of hormones and blood is a very frequent component of food in a basic traditional diet I forgot where you said it but I think when you were talking it might have been in relation to progesterone or thyroid but when you used to consult very often when somebody had a problem you would have them read books on it before they actually took anything is that is do you think that’s a good approach because or is just doing it like the way of really learning about it like what what are your thoughts on that because sometimes it seems that there’s just like a lot of confusion involved in embarking on thyroid 40:43 when you don’t know the the client very well it’s best to give them the information that can make them take responsibility for themselves but sometimes when I saw someone in desperate like a suicidal condition I would intervene by giving them a quick acting thyroid or dosing them with some progesterone when you can see it happening you know that the person is in a desperate condition and that if they’re going to be converted into a well person within an hour you can take the time to to oversee it yourself but otherwise if you are just consulting more or less random people it’s better if you make them get in in form so that they can watch themselves 41:43 undergo the changes yeah for what it’s worth I think in your from PMS Dementipause you have like a Q&A format and like when I was first learning about your work that was I feel like one of the most helpful things that I embarked on when I was reading your literature at first because it was super easy to understand by the way are you thinking about putting your books up anywhere anytime soon um yeah I’ve got them in electronic form but they’re so big that I can’t email them and so I’ve we’ve been trying to just find out how to make them easily accessible electronically awesome awesome I think I get emails every day for people asking when your books are available um okay uh nutritional requirements for a hypothyroid versus healthy person I know you’ve mentioned that vitamin A can be kind of a double-edged sword is there any other nutrient that is needed in well I know vitamin A is needed in lesser amounts for the hypothyroid person is 42:46 something like magnesium like especially important for the hypothyroid person anything like that you can think of um yeah thyroid is required to retain magnesium by cells so when your hypothyroid the slightest stress makes the magnesium fall out for your your cells and get lost in the urine and and so a constant daily supply of magnesium is essential for things like promoting preventing cramps and depression and all of the inflammatory things that come from magnesium deficiency but once your thyroid is up where it should be then you can go for really probably two two weeks or more without anywhere near the required amount of magnesium so most nutrients you can go without for a couple weeks as long as you’re getting energy 43:47 that’s interesting so you don’t need everything every day there’s lots of versatility in the yeah okay that’s that’s good you know and uh that Traskin study on vitamin A he thought that the healthier people needed more vitamin A is that similar to your thinking as well yeah because you’re turning over your cholesterol to progesterone and testosterone chemistry constantly and that uses lots of vitamin A and when your thyroid is low then you have a very low requirement for vitamin A that the FDA sees if you had to do a general ballpark of somebody a healthy person with high thyroid activity how much thyroid i’m sorry vitamin A do you think they would need during my 20s i apparently needed around 50 000 units per day the researcher dentist Emanuel Traskin at one of his conventions circulated a questionnaire and asked people to list 44:53 their symptoms and all of the supplements that they used and he published a chart showing a straight line of a inverse relationship between the amount of vitamin A from no supplement to 100 000 units a day and the number of symptoms went from i forget how many but multiple symptoms down to zero symptoms in the high metabolizers who were using a vitamin A 100 000 per day supplement is there any dead giveaway because the vitamin D is pretty easy because there’s a test and i i guess a vast majority of the emails i receive and then that causes me to go look for papers or search through your work and it seems like the vitamin A and then vitamin k are a little more ambiguous to what how much a person actually needs and whether it’s suppressing the thyroid or helping or not is there any dead giveaway for like a vitamin a deficiency or the need for vitamin 45:58 k to do you think or is it just kind of experimentation i think experimentation is best when the person has extremely high blood pressure especially the difference between systolic diastolic effects 70 or more i figured they should try some big doses of vitamin k because it is needed for keeping calcium out of your arteries and as as they become vitamin k deficient and calcium overloaded they become stiff and you get a very hard kind of circulation it pressure rises sharply on contraction and then falls drastically on relaxation because there’s no elasticity in the system and i’ve seen people in just a week or two bring their top and bottom numbers much closer like like a hundred point difference disappearing in 47:02 just a week or two from a big vitamin k supplement like 40 or 50 milligrams speaking of vitamins d a and k2 these tend to have i mean reading from your work and then doing some reading on my own they seem to be extremely therapeutic when given the right amount and i know we mentioned at the beginning of the conversation that they might be better off use topically can you maybe explain maybe your own process or what has worked for other people when using them topically oh um you have to use about um oh sometimes 10 times the oral dose depending on you know if you’re going to bathe every day you for sure need about 10 times as much on your skin because it takes some time for the vitamin d to soak in and as your skin the faster your skin is being replaced the more of the vitamin d that you put on it is going to be lost 48:05 with the shedding cells so if you have some symptom like extreme weakness that muscular weakness and skeletal muscular symptoms will disappear in a day or two when you get a if you bring your serum vitamin d level up from say five or ten milligrams to 30 to 50 just a tremendous difference in the brain function muscle function absence of bone pain and so on so if you wanted to use 5000 IU of vitamin d per day you should put 50 000 IU on your skin um yeah but you still should after doing it for a while you should have a blood test some people with very sensitive thin skin might absorb as much as 30 or 40 percent of what they put on and then a and k2 would be a little more ambiguous because the tests aren’t so good for those yeah you can get the vitamin a 49:10 measured but i think it’s very expensive and uh usually it’s it’s not worth having it done because if you just eat uh eggs and occasionally liver you’re going to have plenty do you use a combination of those every day or is it kind of just like a once or twice a week kind of thing of the the oily vitamins and yeah in the winter i try to do it every day in the summer the food supply is is usually fresher and and so i often don’t use them every day in the summer your thoughts on the probiotic strains be like aniformis and then be subtilis and and they’re contained i guess in a product called biosporin that’s uh from europe somewhere uh good they’re safe antibiotics that can work for a lot of people with a bowel dysbiosis bad bacteria overgrowth but um i think 50:16 first thing is just to cut out the the foods that are supporting the bad bacteria which are usually polyunsaturated fatty acids and hard to digest starchy fibrous foods like grains beans seeds and such and then the disinfecting foods such as cooked mushrooms and raw raw carrots these are natural antibiotics but uh when you have a really serious intense bacterial problem these subtilis and like aniformis those are useful and the life extension magazine i think this month has a a good article on the phage bacterial virus that kills kills lots of the toxic bacteria would this be uh useful in place of antibiotics like penicillin and minocycline in the macrolides or would this be kind of a law like if all those fail then this would be something to investigate 51:21 yeah but um i’ve seen uh just carrot salad every day work just as well as penicillin for for reducing the stress that’s causing a hormone imbalance for example if you’re having a very high cortisol and estrogen and low testosterone and progesterone sometimes the supplement of any of the antibiotics can do it but so can just having a raw carrot salad every day do you think if you’re going to use aspirin consistently do you think it should be dissolved in water and then two do you mind talking a little bit about the relationship between aspirin and vitamin k2 it’s not an acute thing the the aspirin one of its effects the famous effect but it’s a very trivial effect in the actual benefit you get from aspirin 52:22 is is the knocking out of of the clotting platelet function and that effect that can cause uncontrolled bleeding from too much aspirin is by blocking or interfering with the proteins that are produced by the liver under the influence of vitamin k so not everyone experiences this but if you have taken antibiotics and have a deficiency of the type of bacteria that produces vitamin k in your intestine then you’re susceptible to aspirins knocking out of this vitamin k dependent clotting protein so just as as insurance it’s good to have a source of vitamin k in your diet aged cheese or a well-cooked greens or ordinary foods for good sources these are the protein s and c yeah those are made under the influence of vitamin k in the liver and they are the anti 53:27 coagulant factors dependent on vitamin k so people who have excess clotting problems are sometimes told to avoid vitamin k but if you haven’t measured the proteins s and c it might be the worst thing to do is to avoid vitamin k because vitamin k is required for the normal resolution of simulated clotting and and so you can have a tendency to strokes if you’re a very extremely deficient in vitamin k people talk about vitamin d being an epidemic like a deficiency do you think vitamin k is similar um yeah i i think it’s just about as general as vitamin d the reason people are are so deficient in vitamin d is mostly in the northern latitudes working indoors only getting maybe a couple weeks of good sunlight when they’re on vacation and in muslim and catholic 54:33 countries women have traditionally gone out in public very covered up and if you’re dark skin it takes a very large amount of sunlight to produce as much vitamin d as you need so working indoors wearing too many clothes and having dark skin all make you more susceptible to vitamin d deficiency and the use of sunscreen makes it even worse because people go on vacation and block their vitamin d formation even when they’re in the sun does the inclusion of mushrooms change any of your general diet recommendations and part two of that question uh can you replace the carrot if you just eat mushrooms every day yeah yeah i’ve done that i got tired of carrots after eating one a day for 20 years uh bamboo shoots are another alternative we made more interesting recipes than than raw carrots would it be risky to replace eggs with mushrooms oh well mushrooms have really 55:40 a good broad spectrum nutritional value but you just have to eat an awful lot of them how much have you been averaging right oh sometimes of ridiculous amounts like once every week or two we’ll have a big bowl of mushroom soup which is almost like porridge but i i think we must eat eight ounces at least each in in the soup days other days much less when it’s just like tonight we’re having a liver with mushrooms probably four ounces of each yeah i i keep being kind of shocked on how cool mushrooms are so i appreciate your work on that and turning me on to them i have pretty much one last question for you if you could take any substance on a desert island what would it be and including your just normal diet whatever it was as a supplement uh yeah like 56:42 just like a substance you think is really helpful i guess i think it would probably be either pregnant alone or progesterone if you for example fall off a cliff or get sunburned or get bitten by a strange animal no matter what happens to you you want to have a lot of progesterone or pregnant alone it’s kind of a universal antidote like if you’re in a car wreck and and uh can move you should squeeze a bunch of progesterone into your mouth cool right is there anything else you wanted to touch on that we i glossed over too fast or we didn’t get to no and uh what are you working on right now oh i’ve just finished my november newsletter on autoimmunity and i’m thinking of of the next one being on glucose as an anti-aging 57:44 nutrient that will get some attention uh and then can you let people know how they can purchase your newsletter i’m yeah the email is repeats newsletter at gmail.com i have no apostrophe and repeat and that’s 12 issues every two months i’m sorry one issue every two months and that’s for over two years yeah awesome ray thank you so much for talking with me it’s been a complete pleasure as always thank you so much and uh thank you okay thank you i’ll talk to you soon ray take care okay thanks that’s gonna conclude this week’s episode i’d like to thank ray again for talking with me today along with my patrons for their support of the show and making all of the content i produced possible that was a real special episode for me i always enjoyed talking to ray and i hope you enjoyed it too there were so many questions for this episode and i kind of dropped the ball and i i didn’t ask them all so i didn’t want to keep ray passed an hour which i that’s 58:47 what i said i was gonna do so i apologize if you had your question in line and didn’t get to it i myself didn’t ask a lot of questions i was personally interested so uh thank you so much for listening i have an amazing listenership with this show and the podcast and all the content and i sincerely appreciate it if you’re listening to this on youtube hit the like button and that really supports the show and again thank you so much for listening and i sincerely appreciate it and i’ll talk to you guys soon