Ask Your Herb Doctor, November 2022

00:00 Oh no, whoever it was hung up. So I don’t think it was any of the gang there. So the time is seven o’clock. This is Redwood Community Radio, KMED Garberville, KMUE Eureka, KLAI Laytonville, where the views and opinions expressed throughout the broadcast day are those of the speakers and not necessarily those of the station, its staff or underwriters. Time will be made available for other viewpoints. Thank you for joining us. Part 4, The Herb Doctor, comes from Tony Jones, who provides NIA’s EI Healing, a hands-on 01:03 healing philosophy, where together Tony and her client can explore old patterns and beliefs that no longer serve. Once empowered with new perspectives, different choices can be made moving towards a life that’s truly desired. The phone number is 707-223-2724 for further information or to schedule an appointment. 02:50 The phone number is 707-223-2724 for further information or to schedule an appointment. And I found the underwriter I was supposed to read before. Stark Management Consulting offers business owners a full array of administrative support from marketing and strategic planning to data analysis. Sara can help clients understand financials and develop a brand using customized tools and one-on-one training to enhance the company’s growth and stability. For more information, the website is s-t-a-r-c-k-consulting.com and apologies for not finding this before. 05:43 Well, I hate to say it, but Dr. or Andrew nor Sara have called or driven into the parking lot and Dr. Pete is not answering the phone, which I hear he only is only for the show and he only answers when he’s expecting to be on the show. So I’m assuming that because I’ve done it before where I just Dr. Pete was here and took your calls all the time. But I’m afraid that that’s not going to happen tonight, but I do have a Dr. Ray Pete from the strong, I mean on the internet from the strong sisters website or YouTube channel. 06:44 And I’ve just started, I’ve skipped the intro because we all know and love Dr. Ray Pete and know a little of his background. If you don’t, well tune in next month and I’m just going to continue here. I believe they’re starting to talk about foods to prioritize versus foods to potentially avoid. And why? If it were up to you, what are about five to 10 essential food items that you would recommend somebody includes in their diet? Just like essential, essential, so kind of the most the food that people should prioritize they eat regularly. It really depends a lot on your situation, but very, very safe and highly nutritious foods are convenient as well as safe and long run. 07:47 Those include milk, cheese without additives, eggs, low starch fruits, generally meats and fish that are not high in polyunsaturated fats and depending on your ability to digest them, well cooked vegetables are very good for most people. I’ve left out mostly grains, legumes and other seed related parts such as nuts. Yeah, would you say that the nuts and the seeds and the legumes you’re not incorporating 08:49 because of the pufas? Not just that, but plants put, they create a storage form of nutrients to support the embryos development and those nutrients have to be in insoluble form so they don’t wash away while the seed is waiting to terminate, have to be mobilized in an organized way. And those preparations for the nutrients for the seed embryo go with specific defenses against those same nutrients being used by predators such as mammals that would eat 09:53 their seeds or worms, insects, fungus and so on. So they have essentially pesticides or insecticides incorporated into the seed chemistry. They put their most special blockers of digestion and basically neurotoxins and digestive toxins into the seed as self defense because the seed is the essential, most important part of the plant. The plant can grow new leaves if a predator eats them, but the seed is the long term existence of the plant. So the worst toxins as far as animals are concerned are in the seeds. They’ve got to protect their babies. So can you expand a little bit on poofas, so beyond nuts and seeds. 10:55 Just how you view poofas influence cells and how they can cause insulin resistance? Cold organisms have had to, besides surviving the winter, which cold storage is very good for a seed to survive. And insects and fish, and other cold blooded organisms, frogs for example, can stand to be even frozen, but they can live daily life at a very low temperature close to freezing. And so those organisms, a seed when it’s ready to germinate in the spring, for example, when it’s still very cold in the northern climate, 11:59 they have to mobilize their enzymes. There has mobility in the seed cells. And a fish or an insect naturally has to move even when it’s very cold. And saturated fats harden at a very moderate temperature. If you put a butter in the icebox, it becomes very hard. Even the olive oil solidifies in the refrigerator. And so an animal or a plant living in the earth at a low temperature simply can’t survive if it has saturated fats for its energy storage. And so in proportion to the coldness of the climate, they remove hydrogens from the fats, making them liquid at cold temperature. 13:10 But the degree of unsaturation or removal of hydrogens to make them liquid oils in the cold, it makes them highly oxidizable. And if you increase the temperature of a fish, for example, at human temperatures 98 degrees, a fish very quickly stinks. And if you put highly unsaturated seed oil or fish oil, if you raise it to even room temperature or body temperature at 90 degrees Fahrenheit range, they will quickly start to harden. 14:11 The oxidation spreads and hardens them into solid masses. So if an organism is going to live outside of that cold environment, they have to get rid of the polyunsaturated fats. And the warmer the environment is, the more saturated the fat has to be to survive because the highly unsaturated fats simply turn to blue plastic-like material that is totally incompatible with life. So what does that do for metabolism? At what part of the cellular metabolism do PUFAs interfere with, like for example along the electron transport chain? 15:16 When a person eats a seed oil, for example, the first thing highly unsaturated seed oil does is if an animal chews up a plaque seed, for example, the polyunsaturated fat blocks the digestive proteolytic enzymes. And so it impairs protein to test them. That’s the very first step in your stomach to test them. And then when it gets into the blood, if it reaches your thyroid demand, it inhibits the proteolytic enzyme which is needed to form a thyroid hormone. And in circulating in the blood, if you ate enough that there’s a measurable amount circulating, it keeps the thyroid hormones from being transported on the blood proteins. 16:20 And when it gets into the cells, it blocks the action of thyroid to stimulate respiration. And so the polyunsaturated fat inhibits respiration, blocks the energy production, and at the same time is starting to de-crain and produce the reactive oxidating fragments that are toxic to cells. The circulating polyunsaturated fatty acids in the blood happen to intensify estrogen actions. It releases estrogen from binding proteins, making it more active, activates the estrogen receptors, and it imitates the actions of estrogen. 17:21 So they are systematically ensuring the metabolism and shifting the direction of animal metabolism. Part of that is the plant’s defensive reaction. The rest of it is just in the nature of energy production and the fact that these random oxidative reactions are the opposite of what we need to produce energy. For my understanding, PUFAs cause our fat cells to become insulin sensitive, and that’s not what we want. We want our fat cells to become insulin resistant. Yeah, you listed off the many consequences. Some people have questioned, where is the role of monoinsaturated fats in the diet then? So something like olive oil or avocado, how does that compare to the PUFAs versus the saturated fats that you often recommend, such as coconut oil or animal fats? 18:39 When we eat carbohydrates in excess, we make our own saturated fats. If we are free of the polyunsaturated fats, we can modify a certain percentage of our saturated fats, which we have made from carbohydrates, or a saturated fat from chocolate or beef, for example. We can unsaturate a midway down the fatty acid molecule at carbon number nine. We can start a desaturation process there. It’s nine carbons away from the end, and it’s closer to the acidic head end of the fat molecule. So the acid end makes it safer from oxidation. 19:42 So the ones we produce from saturated fats or carbohydrates are called the omega minus nine series fatty acids, and those have to be anti-inflammatory and are protective against the plant derived omega minus three or omega minus six fatty acids. So are you saying that the omega nines, that’s oleic acid, is that right? Yeah, that’s the major fat, I think in avocados, it’s a major fat, and in olive oil, for example. So did you say that though the omega nines that we get from avocado or olive oil, those are protective against omega sixes and omega threes, or only the omega nines that we produce in our bodies? 20:45 The ones we produce in our bodies, independently, are purely protective and anti-inflammatory. The trouble with those olive oil even usually contains about 10%!o(MISSING)f the puffa, and if you eat more than maybe one or two teaspoons of olive oil per day, you’re at risk of accumulating about 10%!o(MISSING)f the highly unsaturated, which will build up gradually. Over time, and offset the protective effect of the omega nine, but if your calorie intake is fairly low and you don’t over eat on olive oil, then those will be disposed of safely and the omega nines can then be protective. 21:50 I think that that’s a really important point that not many people talk about, is there are different situations depending on whether you are eating in a caloric deficit or eating in a caloric surplus. It’s almost like caloric surpluses can amplify some of these negative consequences. What can amplify them? Eating in a caloric surplus, so eating more calories than what you are burning. Eating excess calories, these go into storage and build up over time, remarkably medical literature, not so much scientific. Now people are saying almost all newborn babies are deficient in the so-called essential fatty acids, but in fact the newborn babies oxidate in metabolism and the ability to produce energy quickly and to build tissue. 23:01 It’s an extremely high rate, much higher than ever again in life, the first few months of a baby’s life. It’s consuming oxygen at an extremely high rate per unit of tissue, and that’s exactly because of the absence of the polyunsaturated fats. If it eats a so-called formula containing the so-called essential fatty acids, it very quickly starts to suppress its cellular metabolism using oxygen. The accumulation of polyunsaturated fats goes unsteadily, as soon as it’s exposed to them, especially with a synthetic formula containing pufa, that goes unsteadily and slows the metabolic rate progressively. 24:18 If you look at chart graphing the consumption of oxygen per tissue, it is at a very high point at the beginning, at an extremely low point reaching zero at old age and death. So it’s a progressive aging process and energy losing process of the tissue, exactly in proportion to the accumulation of polyunsaturated fats with time. Thinking of the way that we grew up and the way that we ate growing up, I can’t even imagine how many pufas we’ve accumulated throughout the years. One of the essential foods, or the foods that you would recommend for somebody to consume, you mentioned fish. So were you talking about like white fish, or do you have any role in your diet for fish that are high in the essential fatty acids, such as something like salmon or salmon roe? 25:23 So maybe cold water versus warm water fish as well? Salmon is terrible because of its high content of polyunsaturated fats. The desirable ones, if you can’t eat tropical fish, like in the Amazon river where the water is very warm, is fat. It is just about as saturated as butter fat, so it’s much safer. But in the cold water fish, you can select those with a very low body fat content. And so cod and soul, for example, are much better than salmon. So I know a lot of people question them, like how did the inuits get by with very little health problems when they were eating a diet high in cold water fish? 26:26 Do you have any insight on this point? It’s a very harmful diet if you have a high metabolic rate and are able to oxidize the fats as fast as you eat them. They will accumulate at a dangerous rate, but if you’re fairly sedentary and are tending to add a little fat every day, you’re going to run into all of the accumulated pro-inflammatory oxidative conditions with time and accumulation of these in your tissues. There are many people claiming that since the brain contains a high level of the omega minus 3 polyunsaturated fats that they are necessary for the brain, 27:40 somehow the baby at birth doesn’t contain them, and supposedly if they’re necessary for the brain, the baby would develop a fully normal, extremely functional brain without them. And in fact, if you look at the brain in dementia, these polyunsaturated fats are accumulating in a form bound to cholesterol. So that in proportion to dementia, the brain contains the omega minus 3 fatty acids. The whole story to promote their sale of fish oil is basically an advertisement without science or with reverse upside down science. 28:48 They are immunosuppressive, they knock out your fight blood cell function, and the oxidative breakdown products are causing the damage, and that suppression of the immune system, if you’re killing your white blood cells during a several months period, they can have an anti-inflammatory function, but eventually you’re going to want to have some living fight blood cells, even at the expense of having inflammation, and the long range effect is that you’ve weakened your immune system, and it happens that the oxidative breakdown products are supportive to the formation of antibodies, but not to the function of the thymus cells and the other necessary components of the immune system. 30:04 And it happens that estrogen excess causes the immune system in the same way, leading towards emphasis on antibodies, but not on the basic fight blood cell based part of the immune system. Interesting. So to be honest, like a few years ago we certainly thought that these were essential fatty acids. Do you have any resources that you would suggest someone to read through to kind of maybe get them thinking that maybe these aren’t essential fatty acids? They’ve spent so much propaganda for the benefits of these and that we need to consume them in a diet. What resources would you point people to to show that, hey, there’s actually potential downsides to consuming these? Someone recently sent me their draft of an extremely good, very readable book on the polyunsaturated cats, and it has, I think, a thousand references to it. 31:14 It can function as a textbook, but it’s also just entertaining and readable, and it’s going to be published imminently, but it is available right now. Okay, you’ll have to send it. Stay tuned, that book will be coming soon. Okay, so moving on to a slightly controversial topic in the keto and carnivore community. Can you make the case for sugar? So not saying that sugar is going to provide you with a ton of nutrients, but what role do you see sugar playing in someone’s diet? If you have a highly digestible starch, it quickly breaks down into glucose and then it can provide very safe energy and can make saturated fats as needed. 32:29 But many starches are hard to digest, and for someone with sluggish digestion, starches tend to support bacterial overgrowth in the intestine as so a person has to take into account the quality of their digestion when they’re considering what to eat. So vegetables are fine when your digestive system is working well. But if you have a test of limitations, a tendency to bacterial overgrowth or a slow peristalsis or nocturnal reflex, lots of the common symptoms are made first by starches. And in that case, a low starch fruit such as the citrus fruits can be a perfect source of carbohydrates, and you need some kind of carbohydrate to safely metabolize fats and proteins. 33:48 And any cooked vegetable will work for most people. Some people have to be very selective to pick out certain vegetables that are sure are going to produce inflammation and bacterial overgrowth. So to summarize, basically you’re kind of saying that sugar is just easy, fast energy, and so it doesn’t cause negative effects of, for example, digestion problems that maybe it would cause if someone had to break down, like what’s an example, like sweet potato. Some people may have a problem breaking down sweet potato or other vegetables to get their energy, and so sugar can play a role in just providing fast energy that can access the cells quickly. Is that right? 35:07 So starch has the same quick reaction that pure glucose does, and so it’s a powerful stimulant to insulin. So if you eat a little too much glucose or starch, it activates insulin secretion and will turn the excess sugar into fat. And the insulin content, if you have other nutritional limitations, the sudden surge of insulin from glucose or starch after turning on fat production at lower sugar and blood sugar, and that can cause stress reactions. And the difference between sucrose, the common sugar in fruits, is that it’s only 50%!g(MISSING)lucose, so it doesn’t have the glycemic reaction that a digestible starch has. 36:14 It’s only half as able to stimulate insulin because it’s only half glucose, and then the fructose component of the molecule actually has a mild insulin inhibiting effect. So it provides the sugar energy much more gradually than starch does, and it tends to avoid the glucose and insulin hypoglycemia stress reaction that a highly digestible starch does. So a lot of the anti-fructose arguments bring up the point that fructose consumption doesn’t spike insulin, and so therefore you should stay below a certain threshold or else it will automatically lead to fat gain, for example. 37:18 So where are a lot of these anti-fructose arguments coming from? Is it some relation to pufas? Where is that argument of it automatically leads to fat storage? Naturally, if you all freeze on fat, or protein, or starch, or sucrose, you’re going to get fat. And the anti-sugar argument really started back in the 50s, then they were having the idea of over-eating sugar would stimulate. The first hypoglycemia, and then Drana London, all of the typical hypoglycemia arguments, which simply are making extreme conclusions from a few experiments. 38:35 When you have sucrose with a mixed diet, it’s actually a stabilizing effect rather than a destabilizing effect, which the early arguments were making. In English, Dr. John Yatkin wrote a book and said, wait, sugar, if you eat an excess of sugar, it turns to saturated fat. The anti-cholesterol, anti-fat argument that was promoted to sell vegetable oil had sold the idea of saturated fat as a cause of heart disease. And John Yatkin said, wait, sugar causes saturated fat for rice, and so sugar is the cause of heart disease. So he had a doubly wrong argument, but that book was very popular starting in the 1970s and persistent. 39:46 And then I think it was largely, I think his name is Robert Lustig, a professor of pediatrics in San Francisco, made some even stranger arguments saying that fructose is like, it’s as toxic as alcohol. And he, in his famous video, showed a lot of references on the blue screen in the background. And I looked up some of his references, and once I looked up, it didn’t support his argument at all. In fact, fructose is a very powerful specific antidote to ethanol poisoning, absolutely to reverse what he says. 40:49 And the reason is ethanol, like a high-fat diet, shifts the electronic balance of the cell metabolism in the correction of too many electrons or a reducing state. It’s an antidote to antmotabolism poisoning and starvation. The extreme of the ketogenic principle when you form ketokines by starving yourself for sugar, you are mobilizing fat metabolism and putting yourself in a high-reducing state. 41:53 And the opposite of what fructose does to the cell. And it’s a very interesting argument that our audience will not like, but we like to challenge our views and challenge everyone’s views, so I appreciate you sharing. Now we have a follow-up on the sugar. Yeah, so considering we came from a keto and then carnivore zero-carb diet, what is the best way for somebody to start incorporating sugar after they have starved for their bodies from it for quite some time? Or carbs, yeah. I don’t think it’s a matter of having to work gradually into it. A dose of sugar, as long as it isn’t grossly excessive, will be the first best antidote to the poisoning that you have been experiencing. 43:02 In an extreme state of the reducing diet or the starvation condition, the ketones derived from outside your body are actually a good, safe energy source. So if you get ketones from fruits and vegetables, those are just like sugar. They’re protective and start the repair process of lowering the stress hormones, getting you out of the reducing stress condition, starting up the cellular oxidation again, and either the ketones from the outside, found in vegetables and fruits, 44:04 or sugars are the essential thing for getting your oxidative metabolism going again. So what do you say to someone who says, well, in the past, like our ancestors, they didn’t have access to carbohydrates, and so they were certainly fat-fueled, like they relied on animal meat and animal fats? Well, if you look at primates of fruits, it happens that the longest-lived in proportion to body size primate is the squirrel monkey. They have a pure fruit diet, and the size of a squirrel, but they live an average of 30 years, which, for their body sizes, is a very long time. 45:13 And brain development is in proportion to the amount of sugar that can be provided to the developing nerve tissue. It requires sugar and energy. It’s a very high oxidizing tissue, and that oxidation has to be based on sugar on glucose specifically. And to develop a brain, the primates have to have a relatively high carbohydrate diet. Chimpanzees don’t get as much carbohydrate as the predating monkeys, and they’re for their body size, especially in their long-life or intelligence. 46:19 The squirrel monkey has a huge brain in proportion to its body size. Chimpanzees and gorillas have relatively small brains. And so is there any evidence from our early lineage that carbohydrates were beneficial as opposed to ketosis? For example, one of the African precursors of lomo sapiens lived on a type of giant grass, sort of like sugarcane. 47:37 They had specially developed lowers for mashing the sugary juice out of this reed along the Nile River, and they had very well-developed brains. So many of the arguments are extremely ideological. They have an idea of what they think human beings should be, and so they shaped their evidence, basically, to 50 arguments. And I’ve heard you say many times that our environment right now is very different than environment of early homo sapiens, where we face a lot more stress from, for example, like 5G and other sorts of life stresses like pollution, etc. So I think that that’s something to think about for the audience as well, is potentially our needs as human species now is different than it was X years ago. Is that true of what you kind of believe? 49:08 For example, in 1963 there was a competitive hydrogen bomb testing spree in both Soviet Union and United States that loaded the whole atmosphere of the Northern Hemisphere with immense amounts of radioactive isotopes. So starting in 1963, babies were exposed to brain-damaging amounts of radiation concentrated in the uterus and affecting brain development. And roughly in the same generation, the vaccination media was instituted, especially in the United States, rising to a horrible peak of something like 60 vaccinations per child in recent decades. 50:29 So these terrible environmental influences have become universal and have to be taken into account. Radiation damage, for example, is amplified by polyunsaturated fats. And by estrogen, in fact, estrogen and polyunsaturated fats synergize in tissue damage with ionizing radiation. Their effects are essentially similar and overlapping on synergistic. So there’s just some things we cannot control in our environment, but we can control our diet. So I just have one more follow-up question on the sugar and the carbs. What would you say to somebody who has type 1 or type 2 diabetes? 51:33 Because I know that you definitely do prefer our main fuel source to be carbs, but so many people seem to be going to a low-carb diet to manage these conditions. The first thing to consider is what do they mean that they have type 1 or type 2 diabetes? For 50 years or more, I’ve been talking to people who had that diagnosis and I asked them how it was diagnosed. In principle, you can’t diagnose type 1 without actually doing a blood test for insulin. But out of hundreds of people I’ve talked to, only half a dozen or so actually had their insulin measured. But they were immediately treated for diabetes without a rational diagnosis, for cancer or diabetes or anything. 52:43 Its first step is to understand what was meant with some blood glucose at the basis for the diagnosis. In kids, that’s often all that’s measured. The most common cause for high glucose is stress, causing unopposed cortisol secretion. So if you don’t measure for either insulin or cortisol, you might be doing exactly the wrong treatment. To lower cortisol, sugar is the most powerful treatment. Two doctors in France and England in the late 19th century were curing terminal diabetic patients. 53:51 They would eat a normal meal, lots of protein for example, but their muscles were wasting away. Even when they didn’t eat sugar, they would eat steak for example. It would show up in their urine as very high glucose and their body would disappear week by week. But when they fed them 12 ounces a day of ordinary white sugar, as well as a standard meat and potatoes diet, they recovered. I heard Matt Blackburn talking about these studies and how they were removed from scientific literature, like access to them. He said he just bought a book on Amazon from the British literature of medicine, some year 1860 something. 54:53 He now has access to those studies. It will be interesting for him to post those. You have seen those studies? I haven’t seen that book. It’s interesting because that’s just not talked about anymore. I think it’s an interesting perspective that maybe someone should consider. Moving on to the final nutrition question that we have, and this was a very popular question from our audience. Dr. Pete, let’s say that you were about 50 or 60 pounds overweight. What would you do to lose weight? First, stop eating for a while and then go on low fat milk and cheese diet with a little bit of orange juice and an occasional egg and oyster. Calcium and vitamin D are supportive of the thyroid hormone. 56:02 It’s good to check your thyroid hormone and vitamin D if you’re at all overweight because a deficiency of those is extremely common. It slows the metabolism. A high-proof intake will suppress your vitamin D metabolism as well as your thyroid metabolism. So making sure those are good. You want to lower the phosphate in your diet relative to calcium and so milk and cheese as a staple of your diet will tremendously increase your heat production and energy metabolism, oxygen consumption and make it much easier to lose weight. And then the foods, moderate amounts of egg, shellfish, such as oysters and some orange juice will provide essential nutrients and anti-inflammatory things that support your background metabolism. 57:25 I think that’s great. That’s like the first time I’ve heard somebody describe a weight loss diet that isn’t purely focused on calories but instead focused on still getting the necessary nutrients that your organs need to function optimally. But would you still say that calories still do matter? He said yes. Yeah, like so eat less. Yeah, but the difference is that a person who has been dieting very often will be burning calories at a rate of 7 or 800 calories per day. And so they get fat on just a few snacks. But when you shift over, making sure your vitamin D and thyroid are okay, but shift over to a high calcium to phosphate ratio in your diet. Not much meat, not much shellfish, not much ordinary fish, but enough shellfish to trace minerals. 58:33 The high calcium to phosphate ratio and high protein are relative to fat with the rest of carbohydrate enough so that you handle the protein and fat metabolism without stress. That will very quickly increase your calorie consumption from 7 or 800 a day up to the normal 2000 per day, making it tremendously easier to lose weight. And as you stay out of the stress condition, your muscles are going to recover and you’ll put on weight in the form of muscle as part of your ability to burn 1000 or 1500 more calories per day. 59:34 And that was the version of Ask Your Herb Doctor Without The Herb Doctors or Dr. Pete, but I did have some Dr. Pete information for you out there. Thank you all so much for joining us. And up next, we’re stepping out on a wing and a prayer with Shaila and Shaka. .