Sheila
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Thinking Outside the Box – Cancer Treatments
KMUD - Ask Your Herb Doctor – (2014)
http://uploadingit.com/file/view/e531gz ... ritalk.mp3
HD – Andrew Murray
RP – Ray Peat Ph.D
Engineer - sound engineer in studio.
Caller – various people calling in with their questions.
HD Intro and closing end remarks not transcribed, starts at RP entrance.
Transcribed by Sheila, Verified by Moss
_____________________________________________________________________
HD: This month's subject is thinking outside the box - the relevance of thinking outside the box is novel and new approaches to cancer treatment, definitely thinking outside the box rather than a deterministic viewpoint of killing cancer cells....... So, people that listen to the show tonight who have or either know people who have diagnoses of cancer could be very relevant to those people listening and I encourage you to call in with any questions that you might want to put to either myself or Dr Peat about this month's show.
So, cancer then has traditionally been viewed as something to destroy and to this end the mainstream of treatment is either what's known as cytotoxic, cell-killing drugs which poison the body or this directed, focused radiation which does no better, it's all cidal, that is - it kills the cells directly with also the associated collateral damage and inflammation that comes from the treatment, it's either widespread or localised. Now the evolution of thinkers who challenge dogma has always heralded new breakthroughs in our understanding, and novel approaches to cancer treatment are also making themselves known. The co-discoverer [of the DNA helix], and Nobel Prize winner James Watson, recently made some observations regarding cancer and its treatment and these have again been taken further and a very much 'outside the box' theory has emerged. And Dr Peat and he joins us again in a moment here, we'll be asking him for his viewpoint on it because as he's very much an, ‘outside the box’ thinker as most of you perhaps who've tuned in to hear him have, recognised.
Now most people are under the mistaken belief, myself included, that anti-oxidants are always good for you in the diet, the more the better. But this is not true and sometimes these very antioxidants can fuel cancer metabolism so, again - let's have some lateral thinking here - and get our heads around and I know it's going to be a little bit heavy for some people who are not, really science minded, but Dr Peat will hopefully outline the questions that I put to him so far as the physiology and the chemistry of what we call the redox system in the body, the reduction-oxidation processes that are so important and necessary for regular cell function to occur. And once we elucidate the redox activity within the body, we can also understand better some of the novel approaches to cancer treatment.
So, what it is that we thought we understood about cancer and anti-oxidants for example, and in what context then does the latest understanding shed new light on the subject and so firstly, Dr Peat, thanks so much for joining us again. Hi Dr Peat?
RP: Hi, I'm here.
HD: No problem. So, as always, just to introduce yourself, your professional academic background to give people who perhaps have never listened to you before an understanding of where your research merits are.
RP: OK. [In] 1968, I had been studying, more or less independently, biology and a lot of related field but in 1968, I decided to go to graduate school for a PhD and I graduated there in 1972, specialising in reproductive ageing and oxidative changes. And it was the oxidative metabolism that I saw changing with ageing, which was really against the grain, already at that time. I saw an increase of reductive activity with ageing, for example, you can put a dye in young tissue and old tissue and reductive enzymes are fueled by the energy-producing system and the internal anti-oxidant system is part of it. The older tissue reduced the dye much more energetically, looking like it was more alive, for example, you can test the vitality of any tissue by the intensity of staining this tetrazolium chemical, and I found that an overdose of oestrogen, or deficiency of Vitamin E or any serious injury, such as X-rays, will increase the ability of the tissue to stain this dye. So, ageing and these various injuries all increased the reductive activity of the tissue, which involves what are called, the anti-oxidative enzyme defence systems. That was what got me interested in the fact that cancer is very rich in anti-oxidative defences; not only the enzymes but a lot of specific chemicals that will act as anti-oxidants. At that time people were trying to identify the specific chemicals that cancers used to defend themselves against oxidative poisons, the chemotherapy and radiation oxidative damage. But over the last 40 years, it has developed that it isn't just a simple chemical that they produce defensively, but the very basic life processes are shifted in that direction, which increases the reductive, or anti-oxidative staining of this tetrazolium dye, just as an indicator that's easy to see.
HD: OK, so what caught my attention, reading some of these articles recently was that there's definitely a 'new', novel way of looking at cells. I know you’ve mentioned this in the past prior to doing this show, which is kind of more based on the new findings in the extracellular matrix as they call it and the fluidity within which cells are mobile and constantly in motion. I think it was always positive before that everything was fairly fixed and once a cell had differentiated it couldn't do anything more, it's fate was sealed. But actually, the new theories and new studies are finding that there's much more of a new quantum state going on where things are very fluid and cells very much communicate in two directions and are subject to, and give, instructions to other components in the body. So, in terms of what they call this extra cellular matrix in which the cells kind of reside, what implications does this have for understanding an approach to cancer treatment for example?
RP: Well, the rigid doctrine of the organism that governs current cancer therapy, it really was imposed on a more basic biological view that started around 1830 with Johannes Műller in Germany, who had described tumours as a problem of organisation, not of defective cells. And that approach continued through embryology right through the 1930s and 1940s, in which people could dissociate an embryo or a primitive organism and show that the cells themselves could reconstruct the organism after they had been entirely separated. So the environment that they [the cells] live in is constantly being constructed to meet their needs, the cells have particular needs and they will change the environment to meet those needs if they have the energy and the resources. If, for some reason, a cell or an organ becomes idle, it loses its sense of direction; if there is no stimulation and no energy flowing through the system, the cell doesn't have any particular occupation or knowledge of what it should be doing but ordinary cells, everything else being ideal, will, if they see a defect in their environment, they will reach out and correct the defect. The extra cellular matrix, the main components are collagen for stiffness; the rigid, linear molecules that twist around each other. In between those stiff collagen molecules there are carbohydrate chains, polysaccharides and some with proteins attached, some just simple polysaccharides with amino groups on them that retain water, and create an elastic or springy environment against the pure, hard environment of the pure collagen system. Cells prefer a certain rigidity of environment. When you take an isolated cell and put it on a surface that varies in stiffness, the cells will creep towards the stiffer, firmer footing, they don't like squishy things to sit on. And, if you inject broken-down collagen fibres into an organism or a developing embryo, the cells will rearrange the disorganised collagen that you have given them - they're sort of like bricklayers - and they will realign it in the direction they want and tug on it and communicate partly just by the way they tug, and the other cells sense the tugging and pull back.
HD: Because they have an inherent knowledge of the structure in which they should be in?
RP: Yeah, and they like a fairly solid but they can create more of the polysaccharides so that it holds more water and is open and able to diffuse the things to feed them and so it has to be just right. And there are various specific proteins that they secrete to attach themselves to do that pulling and pushing. But there are some proteins at the surface which happen to be chemically connected and interactive with the very structure of the cell all the way through, in a very coherent, unifying way of the sulphur and sulphydryl system of the cell is what gives it much of its toughness, and it has to be constantly broken down and reformed because the cell inside is constantly in motion.
HD: So you are saying there is a constant connection of sulphydryl from the outside the cell to the centre of the cell?
RP: Yeah. About 40 years ago some experimenters found that if they blocked the surface sulphur groups, the cell couldn't stick to its environment. So the degree of reduction and oxidation of the surface sulphur groups is a very big part of how it sticks to its environment and gets where it has to be and helps to shape its environment. And that degree of oxidation is governed by what has been called the anti-oxidant defence system.
HD: OK, all right, you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMUD Garberville 91.1 FM....and in a minute with Dr Peat we'll get into the specifics of how reduction -oxidation works in cells and how the new findings are showing that actually the concept of anti-oxidants are not necessarily positive, and how perhaps we can influence that system to be more beneficial towards resolving cancers. Also going to be bringing up an article, a very interesting article that everyone can go to on the Internet and can have a look at written by Mina Bissell on the programs called TED talks.
[ http://www.ted.com/talks/mina_bissell_e ... anguage=en ]
Basically there is a 15-minute talk on the architecture and context, the form and function of the organisation of the cell and how cancers are viewed in a different light now and she has some very exciting results.
So, Dr Peat, in terms of the – you mentioned very briefly the reduction and oxidation of cells or components of cells or molecules that are part of say, the electron transport chain or modifying chemicals, can you describe how this potential works in the matrix and how this can determine the outcome of disease and health. And, I guess, by making the simplistic consumption of anti-oxidants is a bad choice for cancer strategy...
RP: If you look at the balance between the oxidants and anti-oxidants or reductants in the cell, many people think of it as a reducing environment or an anti-oxidative environment, but when you look at the specific components, such as the molecule that transfers electrons from glucose for example, to the mitochondrion to be oxidized, NAD is the coenzyme and it becomes reduced to NADH which is the source of the anti-oxidant electrons. If you look at the healthy cell, the ratio of the oxidized form is 500 times greater than the reduced form and so that’s the governing anti-oxidant as it's in a highly oxidized state. And that is in balance with ascorbic acid and coenzyme Q10 and vitamin E and the sulphur system glutathione and glutathione-disulphide, these are all energised by the electrons from NADH which comes from glucose normally. So the cell normally is in this really highly oxidized state determined by the ratio of NAD to NADH. And if the cell is sick, for example, a cancer cell, the ratio approaches 1:1, where it's almost 50% in the reduced anti-oxidant state. If you injure a cell, you turn on this signaling system that James Watson talked about as one of the problems. He says people are looking for some way to turn that off so you don't keep pushing the cell in the direction of too much reduction, but in fact, anything that irritates the cell is likely to turn on more of the reducing system and push it in that direction of stress or cancer with a high ratio of NADH to NAD approaching 1:1.
HD: But you're saying that you want it in an oxidized form; you want the cell not to have access to anti-oxidant activity?
RP: Yeah, the healthy, active cell has about 500 times more of the oxidized NAD.
When the people who are selling their very powerful antioxidants, a lot of the advertising says it’s “many more times powerful than Vitamin C or even Vitamin E”. But what they're doing is testing the anti-oxidants in vitro, in a test tube, and they will attack and destroy the oxidizing fragments, free radicals, but it happens that just like the NAD/NADH couple which is highly oxidised, the things in balance with that, ascorbic acid and Vitamin E for example, inside the cell, they become oxidized. The dehydroascorbic acid is an oxidant and it's 8 times more concentrated in the cell than outside - it's relatively hydrophobic and it goes to the oily parts of the cell.
HD: So that will itself break down the antioxidant on the outside of the cell.
RP: Yeah. When you're irritating the cell and turning on the defensive, anti-oxidant/reductive system and producing a lot of the fragments that reduce glutathione, one of the sulphur molecules that exchanges throughout the system, when the cell is irritated, that and the associated ascorbic acid which becomes reduced, and the Vitamin E which becomes reduced, these will sop up the toxic fragments. But the trouble is, that the system which normally should be oxidized, all the way through the ascorbic acid, the Vitamin C, the Vitamin E, the Coenzyme Q10 and so on, these, the whole system gets stuck in an over-reduced, over-electrified form, with not enough oxidation going on to pull it back where it should be and since the 1930s, people have seen that any cell which is dividing - goes into this highly reduced state - in which everything shifts to the sulphydryl rather than the disulphide form.
HD: OK, and this includes the cancer cells then?
RP: Yeah, and normal cells go into this phase very quickly, divide and then return to their oxidized state. The Vitamin E and Vitamin C go back to becoming oxidants and keeping the system tightened up, helping to squeeze water out of the system. The balance where the membrane potential of the cell is normally around 100 millivolts (mV) difference when you measure it with an electrode stuck into it. The redox difference is in a range of about 15mV, a very small fraction of the energy, which is available for induction. If you measure the voltage between glucose and oxygen it's over a volt, so it's about 100 times more than the difference of 15mV which governs practically all of the reactions in the cell. The enzymes which produce energy, synthesise protein, which govern the economy of the cell - these are sensitive to being reduced or oxidized - and so this 15mV difference can shift the whole economy of the cell.
HD: And so there is a pretty tight range in which normality exists?
RP: Yeah, and when you measure the products, such as pyruvic acid versus lactic acid, these are an excreted, or easily extractive index of the oxidative or reductive state of the cell - and so when the cell is in trouble, it turns pyruvic acid into lactic acid by reducing it, so that's a reflection of the highly reduced anti-oxidant state when the cell is distressed and making lactic acid. When oxygen is working properly, it's not producing lactic acid, it's using, consuming the pyruvic acid, turning it into carbon dioxide, so the ratio between not only, pyruvic acid and lactic acid but over all between lactic acid versus carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is an acid and so in a sense it’s an oxidant, it causes retraction of electrons.
HD: 'Cause the fundamental here is basically mopping up electrons?
RP: Yeah.
HD: So let me ask you this: The reactive oxygen species are a group of molecules governed electrically. The anti-oxidant system versus the reactive oxygen species system, in terms of inflammation and what free radicals, as I've understood free radical damage to be a result of free radical liberation that isn't mopped up by anti-oxidants. Is it that free radicals, I almost think of free radicals now, as being a little bit more beneficial than anti-oxidants because they....
RP: That's Watson's interpretation but I think that shows his 50 years as a reductionist when he comes out of the static mechanical view of genetics and looks at the metabolism of the cell, he tends to over-concretise. The anti-oxidant system is doing good stuff and defending against toxic free radicals but the oxidative normal functions involving ascorbic acid or dehydro-ascorbate and Vitamin E, and the sulphydryl balancing system, those are able to control the system that he suggests the toxic free radicals would be doing. So you can get both the good defensive process against free radicals and the limiting of the production of more free radicals without resorting to one of the toxic chemicals that he's suggesting.
HD: Right, because you're advocating, and I know you have not just for the subject in hand, but in general - as good health practice - from advocating plenty of fruit consumption for example, you advocate Vitamin C and Vitamin E as very safe and gentle, relatively gentle in their anti-oxidant capacity to some of the products that I know have been mentioned, you talk about some of [versus] the 'super' antioxidants that are touted on the supplement market that people may have consumed or may have thought were a good thing. In general Vitamin C and Vitamin E are very safe and do the work very effectively?
RP: That's because they are electrically tuned to exactly a certain role or for a group of roles in the cell. And if you put in dynamite instead of alcohol you can have the same overall energy expense but it isn't under control. Some of the anti-oxidants that they're selling are more like dynamite and they don't fit into the system and so they aren't helpful at all. And when the good antioxidants are working properly, the system can run as fast as it wants practically, oxidizing at full speed, and there are examples of experiments in which as you add thyroid hormone or a chemical that uncouples the production of ATP from simply the burning of oxygen and fuel, as you rev up the oxidizing process, you get fewer and fewer free radical productions.
HD: OK... because you'd normally associate free radical production with that...
RP: Yeah, and so the good anti-oxidants are working with the mitochondria [HD: safely] and the faster that system runs, the fewer electrons get away to cause the dangerous free radicals.
HD: So this is a bit like the aerobic versus the anaerobic glycolysis and its effects.
RP: Yeah, when the cell gets out of control, oxygen is no longer able to suck up the electrons and so the cell has to expel the electrons in the form of lactic acid and that's a survival mechanism that happens that when you do that, the desperate production of lactic acid to draw excess electrons, it happens to raise the pH inside the cell and lower the pH outside the cell. And, I think it was the embryologist Holtfreter, who demonstrated that if you put an embryo in a slightly acidified solution, the cells simply leave the embryo, and float off and do their own thing. And so the cancer or the stress metabolism acidifying outside the cell is tending to destroy the cell's connection to its environment and at the same time raising the pH inside the cell makes it swell up, take up water and shifts the sulphydryl balance into the reduced state and tends to turn on constant cell division.
HD: OK, so I guess, before we get into the Danopoulos previous experiments and research with urea for the treatment of cancer, including that of liver cancer, I know that from an oxidant versus an anti-oxidant perspective, that exercise in its own right then generates sufficient biological oxidants which could be perhaps used as a valid approach to diabetes, cardiovascular disease and some cancers. And it seems there is some research to support that exercise especially exercise for diabetes and in some instances for cardiovascular disease and for diabetes and cancer is actually fairly pertinent.
RP: Yeah, exercise will cause cells to take up glucose in the absence of insulin, and will make them operate effectively, but just like the uncoupling protein or the increased thyroid, these are the cells equivalent of exercise. So that when everything is working in an organised way, the cells are exercising by simply burning oxygen and fuel and warming themselves up. So exercise should keep everything active, but when it doesn't, the organism can defend itself and imitate exercise by running things at a higher speed.
HD: OK. You're listening to KMUD Garberville. Callers are invited. We're going to get into a little bit later on about the work on liver cancer and some of the work done by a pioneering doctor back in the 80s, which is still relevant today concerning urea therapy......
OK, so Dr Peat I looked earlier on at that 15 minute TED talk that Mina Bissell presented, very interesting work that she is doing. And quite amazing where she has shown the context and the architecture of the cell was very much the governing force behind whether or not cancers were present and I know from what you were mentioning earlier on about the extra cellular matrix of the whole solution around the cell, within the cell, it's all very fluid. The cyto-skeleton starts from the outside and works its way in, it's constant, and the energy that should be present within a healthy cell gives the potential to signal and to allow changes to happen so that everything is ordered. Now what she was bringing up, was I think she was specialising in breast cancer and she showed that clip during the 15 minute speech that she gave about the cell, about one of the duct cells that secretes milk, a pre-cancerous stage and then the cancerous stage and then she basically proved that the cancerous cell could get turned back to its normal state, not by poisoning it or irradiating it, but by allowing the extracellular matrix in which it was growing to be normalised and I know this is an approach that you're positing now - as a novel way of approaching disease in general - and not just cancer but other diseases; it's more of a functional disorganisation of the environment in which the cells operate that is the cause rather than the cells themselves becoming mutant or aberrant or just losing their programme or whatever is popular, vogue theory for health.
RP: The exercise idea is very relevant to breast cancer. You've probably heard the statistics that women who are constantly having babies and nursing through their whole fertile years have a very low risk of breast cancer. And so what is working, keeps working. And so the cells that have a load and a job to do are keeping their extracellular matrix organised to support what they're doing.
HD: We do have a caller... and I do also want to ask you whether or not, how much credence do you think the high exposure to progesterone during pregnancy has on the fact that they have very low instances of breast cancer, how much of that part do you think it plays?
RP: I think that's the main thing. It erases, for example, looking at connective tissue like the tendons that are almost pure connective tissue. If you expose a rabbit for example to oestrogen, the connective tissue such as a tendon becomes stiff and hardened and every time it becomes pregnant and the oestrogen goes up you see a shift momentarily towards hardening, but after each pregnancy it's less hardened than before and it's the progesterone which reverses those changes, even in the connective tissue, the extracellular matrix. It's also erasing the intracellular oestrogen functions, the synthesis of oestrogen, the failure to detoxify it, tendency to bind it - all of these are regulated by progesterone, the anti-oestrogen.
HD: OK, let's get this caller then and see where this caller's question is going. Hi Caller you're on the air and where are you from?
Caller: Hi Dr Peat, and Andrew - you and I have spoken on computers, and my question is, I was as born with some interesting genetics and I always wondered how it happened that I was born from two eggs and I have lots of things because of that, both genders because of that. And I wondered - how the hell did that happen?
HD: Caller, I think your condition is chimerism isn't it? I think you're a chimera as far as I remember? Dr Peat, chimeras’ I think, they are extremely rare in the population?
RP: Yeah, the embryologists have made them and that's one of the early demonstrations that mutations aren't the cause of cancer. Somatic mutation theory was made defunct 40 years ago when someone took a cell from a tumour and stuck it in an early embryo; the tumour came from I think it was a black hamster and they put it in the embryo from a white hamster, both its parents were white and the developing organism had 4 parents. It was a mixture of white and black inheritance showing that what had been a cancer cell devolved into an ordinary part of the organism. And that's the sort of thing, that on a more highly differentiated tissue, that Mina Bissel is demonstrating that it's the environment, not the genes that make a cancer.
HD: Do you have anything to say about chimeras in the human population and how they come about? We know they're rare...
RP: Oh, I think they're probably not as extremely rare as one would suppose. Because the early embryos, if they happened to get too close, it's very easy for them to mix and form one organism.
HD: Because people can have two blood types, their blood can express the markers for O positive and rhesus groups - they could be B and rhesus negative in the same person. I found that quite fascinating. Let's move on then. We have another caller..
Caller: [can't hear the caller]
Engineer: We did have another caller who really wanted to ask Dr Peat something, (if I could you this opportunity) he wanted to know about the low carb diets, the fat burning ketone diet specifically, he says it's helped him quite a bit and he wanted to know what Dr Peat thought about that, the ketone diet.
HD: What do you think of that Dr Peat?
RP: You don't produce the ketones unless you're raising your cortisol enough to activate the conversion of protein into the ketones - to activate the conversion of protein into glucose - at the same time you're turning some of the fat into ketones.
HD: So it's a pretty stressful...
RP: Yeah, I think the problem occurs over a few years of exposure to that increased breakdown of protein, the cortisol is affecting your connective tissues, and the explorer, I don't remember his name at the moment, [the] Arctic explorer - who advocated a meat diet - he noticed that the Eskimos were very prematurely aged in appearance, their skin became very wrinkled, and I think that's what you would expect from being exposed to very high cortisol constantly.
HD: So the ketone diet is a pretty stressful way to do anything like lose weight and losing weight in general is not a very good idea unless it is done slowly, especially in people that have a lot of stored poly-unsaturates in their fat makeup - which is most people - unless they're really watching what they eat and avoiding polyunsaturates and making sure they consume lots of saturated fats. Actually I want to make a very quick point here. I was back in England three weeks ago for a couple of weeks and on my way out through the airport, I grabbed a few periodicals to read on the plane and I got a New Scientist and the Daily Telegraph and on the cover of the New Scientist it had a picture of a frying pan and the word ‘FACT’. The C was a piece of carbonised bacon and the F and the A and the T of the word FACT was still intact - so what you saw was “FAT” with a carbonised piece of bacon forming the C but it was blackened against the black background of the frying pan and it said “Have we really got 40 years of dietary advice wrong?” And it was actually a good breath of fresh air - another one of the breaths that hopefully will wake people up when they get enough of these fresh breaths coming in - to say that they were very much behind especially, dairy saturated fat and that all saturated fat in general was very good for you and that the polyunsaturates and the margarines and fish oils were actually being shown now and turned on their head and they were actually saying “Yep, we think we got 40 years of dietary advice WRONG”. So that was good to see and then the other sad point that I did see in the Daily Telegraph, was that in England they're now running GM crops, and when I left England in 2001, actually Europe was all GMO free. So now in England they're actually making a GMO crop to express omega 3 oils so that they can feed this crop to GM salmon that are grown in the environment that doesn't allow them to pick up the polyunsaturates from the algae and micro-organisms that they eat. So they're now going to feed them a GM crop- expressing omega 3s. I couldn't believe it! So, not to sure what's happening folks, but I know California is still on the cutting edge, I think, of trying to see sideways here with our food and environment and everything else that's going on. So hopefully between the West Coast and the East Coast of the States we can keep this kind of thing going and alive.
So anyway, Dr Peat, I wanted to bring up Dr Danopoulos' work with urea therapy from the 1980s, I know I had a caller some time ago that I got personally who was looking for some help and information regarding liver cancer and I know Danopoulos had done quite a bit of work in 1980, publishing in clinical oncology about an 11 year experience using oral urea treatment in liver malignancies. How much, how familiar are you with urea as a compound for treatment of carcinomas or other cancers?
RP: In the first World War, it was used as an emergency treatment to stimulate healing in wounds and hold down infections, and around that time, 1920s I think, it was often used for inoperable cancer to pack it with urea, it actually was not only keeping down infection but I think it was actually having a healing influence. The effect of forming lactic acid that I mentioned, which causes the pH of the cell to become more alkaline inside, that causes swelling and swelling promotes replication/proliferation and simply an osmotic environment which could be very concentrated sodium chloride or urea, happens to be a very innocuous substance – it doesn't exactly have an osmotic effect like sodium chloride because the sodium is kept out of the cell, but the urea acts somewhat like an osmotic dehydrator, it helps to prevent excess swelling and water retention.
HD: Interesting. So you think that's one of its main effects and that is how it is keeping the swelling down?
RP: I think so, [HD] and the dehydrated cell becomes more oxidatively active and catabolic burning fuel faster whereas the swollen cell is anabolic and simply growing and dividing. Many things can help to reduce that water retention and I think urea would work well with a good thyroid programme which helps you to retain the normal amount of sodium chloride. Hypothyroid people, not only produce the matrix which is over-hydrated - it shifts the cells so that they produce molecules so that they hold water outside the cells. The low thyroid lets your kidneys lose sodium whilst retaining water and so any of the osmotic therapies such as urea, I think, would work nicely with supplementing thyroid to normalise the sodium retention.
HD: Good, I think we have a couple of callers on the air so I should start by taking one of these. The first caller, you're on the air caller, where are you from?
Engineer: This is David back, the caller we had earlier who was having trouble. [HD]
Caller: Hello?
HD: Yeah Hi?
Caller: Hello? [Lots of issues with whether anyone can hear him – omitted].
Caller: Dr Peat, and this is, I guess, a little off topic but in a way it's not. When you're describing these processes, I mean you do it so beautifully - and it seems very complicated - but are you actually seeing images, like do you actually see these processes, and I know of course a lot of this probably has not be photographed through microscopic techniques and different things, and so do you have a way of seeing things?
RP: I see little models - not that I've seen anything exactly like it - but I have mental models, for example, of the extension of the sulphydryl-groups onto the surface of a cell. I have very concrete pictures of how that works and so it helps me when I'm looking for information it helps me to check against the published research facts to have a concrete mental image.
Caller: The reason I'm asking that question is that you were explaining like the collagen lining up and a lot of times when I'm reading your work, I find myself trying to imagine these things and then I'm thinking it's got to be an important part of your process and trying to imagine, since you're a painter, visible images of how this actually might work, is that true?
RP: Oh sure, yeah. I've always been aware of having a map of where I am going. And I was surprised in graduate school when a psychology professor was surprised at my description and I asked him how he found his way from his home to his office and he said “Go out the front door, turn left, turn left again, turn right,” ….it was all a set of rules and I think some professorial types think in terms of words and rules.
Caller: Yeah, definitely. The other thing I thought about in line with the almost visualisations of how this works, is through the years I've heard of different healers and people that are more 'New Agey' kind of thing, where they try to get people to imagine certain things and then try to heal it but then I started thinking, if you were really seeing this - like you're seeing it - you really could in a way, be a part of the healing process, in that you're seeing what's wrong and you’re seeing what you need to fix it.
RP: We were talking about the different theories of what a cancer is, the new theory is called TOFT – Tissue Organisation Field Theory – and I think that needs another adjective Organismic. It isn't just the local tissue organisation but it's also the way that tissue fits into the whole organism and how the activity of the organism keeps everything working, loading all of its parts so that they know what they're doing.
HD: It's very much, and I don't want to make a quip here, but it's very much the holistic way of looking at it and that's what I've found was so interesting, with even if they may not be totally accurate, Dr Watson's comments that were made earlier and also this kind of novel approach to cancer treatment, looking at the extra-cellular matrix is very much a holistic environment upon which every cell is in communication with every other cell; stem cells are arising all the time and actually, nothing is fixed, everything is very fluid and dynamic and very much able to change very quickly.
RP: Yeah. Individual cells for example, pigment cells, you can sometimes see them migrating through the tissue and they move at the same rate that cells have been found to able to crawl on a glass slide. That, at body temperature, that can be, something like a cm and a half per day, so very tiny cells really zips along through the solids in the tissue.
HD: Far out. So well I think we'd probably better wrap up, there's two callers on the air but not going to be able to take them unfortunately, we've run out of time. Thanks so much Dr Peat.
RP: OK, thank you.
www.raypeat.com for more information.
KMUD - Ask Your Herb Doctor – (2014)
http://uploadingit.com/file/view/e531gz ... ritalk.mp3
HD – Andrew Murray
RP – Ray Peat Ph.D
Engineer - sound engineer in studio.
Caller – various people calling in with their questions.
HD Intro and closing end remarks not transcribed, starts at RP entrance.
Transcribed by Sheila, Verified by Moss
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HD: This month's subject is thinking outside the box - the relevance of thinking outside the box is novel and new approaches to cancer treatment, definitely thinking outside the box rather than a deterministic viewpoint of killing cancer cells....... So, people that listen to the show tonight who have or either know people who have diagnoses of cancer could be very relevant to those people listening and I encourage you to call in with any questions that you might want to put to either myself or Dr Peat about this month's show.
So, cancer then has traditionally been viewed as something to destroy and to this end the mainstream of treatment is either what's known as cytotoxic, cell-killing drugs which poison the body or this directed, focused radiation which does no better, it's all cidal, that is - it kills the cells directly with also the associated collateral damage and inflammation that comes from the treatment, it's either widespread or localised. Now the evolution of thinkers who challenge dogma has always heralded new breakthroughs in our understanding, and novel approaches to cancer treatment are also making themselves known. The co-discoverer [of the DNA helix], and Nobel Prize winner James Watson, recently made some observations regarding cancer and its treatment and these have again been taken further and a very much 'outside the box' theory has emerged. And Dr Peat and he joins us again in a moment here, we'll be asking him for his viewpoint on it because as he's very much an, ‘outside the box’ thinker as most of you perhaps who've tuned in to hear him have, recognised.
Now most people are under the mistaken belief, myself included, that anti-oxidants are always good for you in the diet, the more the better. But this is not true and sometimes these very antioxidants can fuel cancer metabolism so, again - let's have some lateral thinking here - and get our heads around and I know it's going to be a little bit heavy for some people who are not, really science minded, but Dr Peat will hopefully outline the questions that I put to him so far as the physiology and the chemistry of what we call the redox system in the body, the reduction-oxidation processes that are so important and necessary for regular cell function to occur. And once we elucidate the redox activity within the body, we can also understand better some of the novel approaches to cancer treatment.
So, what it is that we thought we understood about cancer and anti-oxidants for example, and in what context then does the latest understanding shed new light on the subject and so firstly, Dr Peat, thanks so much for joining us again. Hi Dr Peat?
RP: Hi, I'm here.
HD: No problem. So, as always, just to introduce yourself, your professional academic background to give people who perhaps have never listened to you before an understanding of where your research merits are.
RP: OK. [In] 1968, I had been studying, more or less independently, biology and a lot of related field but in 1968, I decided to go to graduate school for a PhD and I graduated there in 1972, specialising in reproductive ageing and oxidative changes. And it was the oxidative metabolism that I saw changing with ageing, which was really against the grain, already at that time. I saw an increase of reductive activity with ageing, for example, you can put a dye in young tissue and old tissue and reductive enzymes are fueled by the energy-producing system and the internal anti-oxidant system is part of it. The older tissue reduced the dye much more energetically, looking like it was more alive, for example, you can test the vitality of any tissue by the intensity of staining this tetrazolium chemical, and I found that an overdose of oestrogen, or deficiency of Vitamin E or any serious injury, such as X-rays, will increase the ability of the tissue to stain this dye. So, ageing and these various injuries all increased the reductive activity of the tissue, which involves what are called, the anti-oxidative enzyme defence systems. That was what got me interested in the fact that cancer is very rich in anti-oxidative defences; not only the enzymes but a lot of specific chemicals that will act as anti-oxidants. At that time people were trying to identify the specific chemicals that cancers used to defend themselves against oxidative poisons, the chemotherapy and radiation oxidative damage. But over the last 40 years, it has developed that it isn't just a simple chemical that they produce defensively, but the very basic life processes are shifted in that direction, which increases the reductive, or anti-oxidative staining of this tetrazolium dye, just as an indicator that's easy to see.
HD: OK, so what caught my attention, reading some of these articles recently was that there's definitely a 'new', novel way of looking at cells. I know you’ve mentioned this in the past prior to doing this show, which is kind of more based on the new findings in the extracellular matrix as they call it and the fluidity within which cells are mobile and constantly in motion. I think it was always positive before that everything was fairly fixed and once a cell had differentiated it couldn't do anything more, it's fate was sealed. But actually, the new theories and new studies are finding that there's much more of a new quantum state going on where things are very fluid and cells very much communicate in two directions and are subject to, and give, instructions to other components in the body. So, in terms of what they call this extra cellular matrix in which the cells kind of reside, what implications does this have for understanding an approach to cancer treatment for example?
RP: Well, the rigid doctrine of the organism that governs current cancer therapy, it really was imposed on a more basic biological view that started around 1830 with Johannes Műller in Germany, who had described tumours as a problem of organisation, not of defective cells. And that approach continued through embryology right through the 1930s and 1940s, in which people could dissociate an embryo or a primitive organism and show that the cells themselves could reconstruct the organism after they had been entirely separated. So the environment that they [the cells] live in is constantly being constructed to meet their needs, the cells have particular needs and they will change the environment to meet those needs if they have the energy and the resources. If, for some reason, a cell or an organ becomes idle, it loses its sense of direction; if there is no stimulation and no energy flowing through the system, the cell doesn't have any particular occupation or knowledge of what it should be doing but ordinary cells, everything else being ideal, will, if they see a defect in their environment, they will reach out and correct the defect. The extra cellular matrix, the main components are collagen for stiffness; the rigid, linear molecules that twist around each other. In between those stiff collagen molecules there are carbohydrate chains, polysaccharides and some with proteins attached, some just simple polysaccharides with amino groups on them that retain water, and create an elastic or springy environment against the pure, hard environment of the pure collagen system. Cells prefer a certain rigidity of environment. When you take an isolated cell and put it on a surface that varies in stiffness, the cells will creep towards the stiffer, firmer footing, they don't like squishy things to sit on. And, if you inject broken-down collagen fibres into an organism or a developing embryo, the cells will rearrange the disorganised collagen that you have given them - they're sort of like bricklayers - and they will realign it in the direction they want and tug on it and communicate partly just by the way they tug, and the other cells sense the tugging and pull back.
HD: Because they have an inherent knowledge of the structure in which they should be in?
RP: Yeah, and they like a fairly solid but they can create more of the polysaccharides so that it holds more water and is open and able to diffuse the things to feed them and so it has to be just right. And there are various specific proteins that they secrete to attach themselves to do that pulling and pushing. But there are some proteins at the surface which happen to be chemically connected and interactive with the very structure of the cell all the way through, in a very coherent, unifying way of the sulphur and sulphydryl system of the cell is what gives it much of its toughness, and it has to be constantly broken down and reformed because the cell inside is constantly in motion.
HD: So you are saying there is a constant connection of sulphydryl from the outside the cell to the centre of the cell?
RP: Yeah. About 40 years ago some experimenters found that if they blocked the surface sulphur groups, the cell couldn't stick to its environment. So the degree of reduction and oxidation of the surface sulphur groups is a very big part of how it sticks to its environment and gets where it has to be and helps to shape its environment. And that degree of oxidation is governed by what has been called the anti-oxidant defence system.
HD: OK, all right, you're listening to Ask Your Herb Doctor on KMUD Garberville 91.1 FM....and in a minute with Dr Peat we'll get into the specifics of how reduction -oxidation works in cells and how the new findings are showing that actually the concept of anti-oxidants are not necessarily positive, and how perhaps we can influence that system to be more beneficial towards resolving cancers. Also going to be bringing up an article, a very interesting article that everyone can go to on the Internet and can have a look at written by Mina Bissell on the programs called TED talks.
[ http://www.ted.com/talks/mina_bissell_e ... anguage=en ]
Basically there is a 15-minute talk on the architecture and context, the form and function of the organisation of the cell and how cancers are viewed in a different light now and she has some very exciting results.
So, Dr Peat, in terms of the – you mentioned very briefly the reduction and oxidation of cells or components of cells or molecules that are part of say, the electron transport chain or modifying chemicals, can you describe how this potential works in the matrix and how this can determine the outcome of disease and health. And, I guess, by making the simplistic consumption of anti-oxidants is a bad choice for cancer strategy...
RP: If you look at the balance between the oxidants and anti-oxidants or reductants in the cell, many people think of it as a reducing environment or an anti-oxidative environment, but when you look at the specific components, such as the molecule that transfers electrons from glucose for example, to the mitochondrion to be oxidized, NAD is the coenzyme and it becomes reduced to NADH which is the source of the anti-oxidant electrons. If you look at the healthy cell, the ratio of the oxidized form is 500 times greater than the reduced form and so that’s the governing anti-oxidant as it's in a highly oxidized state. And that is in balance with ascorbic acid and coenzyme Q10 and vitamin E and the sulphur system glutathione and glutathione-disulphide, these are all energised by the electrons from NADH which comes from glucose normally. So the cell normally is in this really highly oxidized state determined by the ratio of NAD to NADH. And if the cell is sick, for example, a cancer cell, the ratio approaches 1:1, where it's almost 50% in the reduced anti-oxidant state. If you injure a cell, you turn on this signaling system that James Watson talked about as one of the problems. He says people are looking for some way to turn that off so you don't keep pushing the cell in the direction of too much reduction, but in fact, anything that irritates the cell is likely to turn on more of the reducing system and push it in that direction of stress or cancer with a high ratio of NADH to NAD approaching 1:1.
HD: But you're saying that you want it in an oxidized form; you want the cell not to have access to anti-oxidant activity?
RP: Yeah, the healthy, active cell has about 500 times more of the oxidized NAD.
When the people who are selling their very powerful antioxidants, a lot of the advertising says it’s “many more times powerful than Vitamin C or even Vitamin E”. But what they're doing is testing the anti-oxidants in vitro, in a test tube, and they will attack and destroy the oxidizing fragments, free radicals, but it happens that just like the NAD/NADH couple which is highly oxidised, the things in balance with that, ascorbic acid and Vitamin E for example, inside the cell, they become oxidized. The dehydroascorbic acid is an oxidant and it's 8 times more concentrated in the cell than outside - it's relatively hydrophobic and it goes to the oily parts of the cell.
HD: So that will itself break down the antioxidant on the outside of the cell.
RP: Yeah. When you're irritating the cell and turning on the defensive, anti-oxidant/reductive system and producing a lot of the fragments that reduce glutathione, one of the sulphur molecules that exchanges throughout the system, when the cell is irritated, that and the associated ascorbic acid which becomes reduced, and the Vitamin E which becomes reduced, these will sop up the toxic fragments. But the trouble is, that the system which normally should be oxidized, all the way through the ascorbic acid, the Vitamin C, the Vitamin E, the Coenzyme Q10 and so on, these, the whole system gets stuck in an over-reduced, over-electrified form, with not enough oxidation going on to pull it back where it should be and since the 1930s, people have seen that any cell which is dividing - goes into this highly reduced state - in which everything shifts to the sulphydryl rather than the disulphide form.
HD: OK, and this includes the cancer cells then?
RP: Yeah, and normal cells go into this phase very quickly, divide and then return to their oxidized state. The Vitamin E and Vitamin C go back to becoming oxidants and keeping the system tightened up, helping to squeeze water out of the system. The balance where the membrane potential of the cell is normally around 100 millivolts (mV) difference when you measure it with an electrode stuck into it. The redox difference is in a range of about 15mV, a very small fraction of the energy, which is available for induction. If you measure the voltage between glucose and oxygen it's over a volt, so it's about 100 times more than the difference of 15mV which governs practically all of the reactions in the cell. The enzymes which produce energy, synthesise protein, which govern the economy of the cell - these are sensitive to being reduced or oxidized - and so this 15mV difference can shift the whole economy of the cell.
HD: And so there is a pretty tight range in which normality exists?
RP: Yeah, and when you measure the products, such as pyruvic acid versus lactic acid, these are an excreted, or easily extractive index of the oxidative or reductive state of the cell - and so when the cell is in trouble, it turns pyruvic acid into lactic acid by reducing it, so that's a reflection of the highly reduced anti-oxidant state when the cell is distressed and making lactic acid. When oxygen is working properly, it's not producing lactic acid, it's using, consuming the pyruvic acid, turning it into carbon dioxide, so the ratio between not only, pyruvic acid and lactic acid but over all between lactic acid versus carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is an acid and so in a sense it’s an oxidant, it causes retraction of electrons.
HD: 'Cause the fundamental here is basically mopping up electrons?
RP: Yeah.
HD: So let me ask you this: The reactive oxygen species are a group of molecules governed electrically. The anti-oxidant system versus the reactive oxygen species system, in terms of inflammation and what free radicals, as I've understood free radical damage to be a result of free radical liberation that isn't mopped up by anti-oxidants. Is it that free radicals, I almost think of free radicals now, as being a little bit more beneficial than anti-oxidants because they....
RP: That's Watson's interpretation but I think that shows his 50 years as a reductionist when he comes out of the static mechanical view of genetics and looks at the metabolism of the cell, he tends to over-concretise. The anti-oxidant system is doing good stuff and defending against toxic free radicals but the oxidative normal functions involving ascorbic acid or dehydro-ascorbate and Vitamin E, and the sulphydryl balancing system, those are able to control the system that he suggests the toxic free radicals would be doing. So you can get both the good defensive process against free radicals and the limiting of the production of more free radicals without resorting to one of the toxic chemicals that he's suggesting.
HD: Right, because you're advocating, and I know you have not just for the subject in hand, but in general - as good health practice - from advocating plenty of fruit consumption for example, you advocate Vitamin C and Vitamin E as very safe and gentle, relatively gentle in their anti-oxidant capacity to some of the products that I know have been mentioned, you talk about some of [versus] the 'super' antioxidants that are touted on the supplement market that people may have consumed or may have thought were a good thing. In general Vitamin C and Vitamin E are very safe and do the work very effectively?
RP: That's because they are electrically tuned to exactly a certain role or for a group of roles in the cell. And if you put in dynamite instead of alcohol you can have the same overall energy expense but it isn't under control. Some of the anti-oxidants that they're selling are more like dynamite and they don't fit into the system and so they aren't helpful at all. And when the good antioxidants are working properly, the system can run as fast as it wants practically, oxidizing at full speed, and there are examples of experiments in which as you add thyroid hormone or a chemical that uncouples the production of ATP from simply the burning of oxygen and fuel, as you rev up the oxidizing process, you get fewer and fewer free radical productions.
HD: OK... because you'd normally associate free radical production with that...
RP: Yeah, and so the good anti-oxidants are working with the mitochondria [HD: safely] and the faster that system runs, the fewer electrons get away to cause the dangerous free radicals.
HD: So this is a bit like the aerobic versus the anaerobic glycolysis and its effects.
RP: Yeah, when the cell gets out of control, oxygen is no longer able to suck up the electrons and so the cell has to expel the electrons in the form of lactic acid and that's a survival mechanism that happens that when you do that, the desperate production of lactic acid to draw excess electrons, it happens to raise the pH inside the cell and lower the pH outside the cell. And, I think it was the embryologist Holtfreter, who demonstrated that if you put an embryo in a slightly acidified solution, the cells simply leave the embryo, and float off and do their own thing. And so the cancer or the stress metabolism acidifying outside the cell is tending to destroy the cell's connection to its environment and at the same time raising the pH inside the cell makes it swell up, take up water and shifts the sulphydryl balance into the reduced state and tends to turn on constant cell division.
HD: OK, so I guess, before we get into the Danopoulos previous experiments and research with urea for the treatment of cancer, including that of liver cancer, I know that from an oxidant versus an anti-oxidant perspective, that exercise in its own right then generates sufficient biological oxidants which could be perhaps used as a valid approach to diabetes, cardiovascular disease and some cancers. And it seems there is some research to support that exercise especially exercise for diabetes and in some instances for cardiovascular disease and for diabetes and cancer is actually fairly pertinent.
RP: Yeah, exercise will cause cells to take up glucose in the absence of insulin, and will make them operate effectively, but just like the uncoupling protein or the increased thyroid, these are the cells equivalent of exercise. So that when everything is working in an organised way, the cells are exercising by simply burning oxygen and fuel and warming themselves up. So exercise should keep everything active, but when it doesn't, the organism can defend itself and imitate exercise by running things at a higher speed.
HD: OK. You're listening to KMUD Garberville. Callers are invited. We're going to get into a little bit later on about the work on liver cancer and some of the work done by a pioneering doctor back in the 80s, which is still relevant today concerning urea therapy......
OK, so Dr Peat I looked earlier on at that 15 minute TED talk that Mina Bissell presented, very interesting work that she is doing. And quite amazing where she has shown the context and the architecture of the cell was very much the governing force behind whether or not cancers were present and I know from what you were mentioning earlier on about the extra cellular matrix of the whole solution around the cell, within the cell, it's all very fluid. The cyto-skeleton starts from the outside and works its way in, it's constant, and the energy that should be present within a healthy cell gives the potential to signal and to allow changes to happen so that everything is ordered. Now what she was bringing up, was I think she was specialising in breast cancer and she showed that clip during the 15 minute speech that she gave about the cell, about one of the duct cells that secretes milk, a pre-cancerous stage and then the cancerous stage and then she basically proved that the cancerous cell could get turned back to its normal state, not by poisoning it or irradiating it, but by allowing the extracellular matrix in which it was growing to be normalised and I know this is an approach that you're positing now - as a novel way of approaching disease in general - and not just cancer but other diseases; it's more of a functional disorganisation of the environment in which the cells operate that is the cause rather than the cells themselves becoming mutant or aberrant or just losing their programme or whatever is popular, vogue theory for health.
RP: The exercise idea is very relevant to breast cancer. You've probably heard the statistics that women who are constantly having babies and nursing through their whole fertile years have a very low risk of breast cancer. And so what is working, keeps working. And so the cells that have a load and a job to do are keeping their extracellular matrix organised to support what they're doing.
HD: We do have a caller... and I do also want to ask you whether or not, how much credence do you think the high exposure to progesterone during pregnancy has on the fact that they have very low instances of breast cancer, how much of that part do you think it plays?
RP: I think that's the main thing. It erases, for example, looking at connective tissue like the tendons that are almost pure connective tissue. If you expose a rabbit for example to oestrogen, the connective tissue such as a tendon becomes stiff and hardened and every time it becomes pregnant and the oestrogen goes up you see a shift momentarily towards hardening, but after each pregnancy it's less hardened than before and it's the progesterone which reverses those changes, even in the connective tissue, the extracellular matrix. It's also erasing the intracellular oestrogen functions, the synthesis of oestrogen, the failure to detoxify it, tendency to bind it - all of these are regulated by progesterone, the anti-oestrogen.
HD: OK, let's get this caller then and see where this caller's question is going. Hi Caller you're on the air and where are you from?
Caller: Hi Dr Peat, and Andrew - you and I have spoken on computers, and my question is, I was as born with some interesting genetics and I always wondered how it happened that I was born from two eggs and I have lots of things because of that, both genders because of that. And I wondered - how the hell did that happen?
HD: Caller, I think your condition is chimerism isn't it? I think you're a chimera as far as I remember? Dr Peat, chimeras’ I think, they are extremely rare in the population?
RP: Yeah, the embryologists have made them and that's one of the early demonstrations that mutations aren't the cause of cancer. Somatic mutation theory was made defunct 40 years ago when someone took a cell from a tumour and stuck it in an early embryo; the tumour came from I think it was a black hamster and they put it in the embryo from a white hamster, both its parents were white and the developing organism had 4 parents. It was a mixture of white and black inheritance showing that what had been a cancer cell devolved into an ordinary part of the organism. And that's the sort of thing, that on a more highly differentiated tissue, that Mina Bissel is demonstrating that it's the environment, not the genes that make a cancer.
HD: Do you have anything to say about chimeras in the human population and how they come about? We know they're rare...
RP: Oh, I think they're probably not as extremely rare as one would suppose. Because the early embryos, if they happened to get too close, it's very easy for them to mix and form one organism.
HD: Because people can have two blood types, their blood can express the markers for O positive and rhesus groups - they could be B and rhesus negative in the same person. I found that quite fascinating. Let's move on then. We have another caller..
Caller: [can't hear the caller]
Engineer: We did have another caller who really wanted to ask Dr Peat something, (if I could you this opportunity) he wanted to know about the low carb diets, the fat burning ketone diet specifically, he says it's helped him quite a bit and he wanted to know what Dr Peat thought about that, the ketone diet.
HD: What do you think of that Dr Peat?
RP: You don't produce the ketones unless you're raising your cortisol enough to activate the conversion of protein into the ketones - to activate the conversion of protein into glucose - at the same time you're turning some of the fat into ketones.
HD: So it's a pretty stressful...
RP: Yeah, I think the problem occurs over a few years of exposure to that increased breakdown of protein, the cortisol is affecting your connective tissues, and the explorer, I don't remember his name at the moment, [the] Arctic explorer - who advocated a meat diet - he noticed that the Eskimos were very prematurely aged in appearance, their skin became very wrinkled, and I think that's what you would expect from being exposed to very high cortisol constantly.
HD: So the ketone diet is a pretty stressful way to do anything like lose weight and losing weight in general is not a very good idea unless it is done slowly, especially in people that have a lot of stored poly-unsaturates in their fat makeup - which is most people - unless they're really watching what they eat and avoiding polyunsaturates and making sure they consume lots of saturated fats. Actually I want to make a very quick point here. I was back in England three weeks ago for a couple of weeks and on my way out through the airport, I grabbed a few periodicals to read on the plane and I got a New Scientist and the Daily Telegraph and on the cover of the New Scientist it had a picture of a frying pan and the word ‘FACT’. The C was a piece of carbonised bacon and the F and the A and the T of the word FACT was still intact - so what you saw was “FAT” with a carbonised piece of bacon forming the C but it was blackened against the black background of the frying pan and it said “Have we really got 40 years of dietary advice wrong?” And it was actually a good breath of fresh air - another one of the breaths that hopefully will wake people up when they get enough of these fresh breaths coming in - to say that they were very much behind especially, dairy saturated fat and that all saturated fat in general was very good for you and that the polyunsaturates and the margarines and fish oils were actually being shown now and turned on their head and they were actually saying “Yep, we think we got 40 years of dietary advice WRONG”. So that was good to see and then the other sad point that I did see in the Daily Telegraph, was that in England they're now running GM crops, and when I left England in 2001, actually Europe was all GMO free. So now in England they're actually making a GMO crop to express omega 3 oils so that they can feed this crop to GM salmon that are grown in the environment that doesn't allow them to pick up the polyunsaturates from the algae and micro-organisms that they eat. So they're now going to feed them a GM crop- expressing omega 3s. I couldn't believe it! So, not to sure what's happening folks, but I know California is still on the cutting edge, I think, of trying to see sideways here with our food and environment and everything else that's going on. So hopefully between the West Coast and the East Coast of the States we can keep this kind of thing going and alive.
So anyway, Dr Peat, I wanted to bring up Dr Danopoulos' work with urea therapy from the 1980s, I know I had a caller some time ago that I got personally who was looking for some help and information regarding liver cancer and I know Danopoulos had done quite a bit of work in 1980, publishing in clinical oncology about an 11 year experience using oral urea treatment in liver malignancies. How much, how familiar are you with urea as a compound for treatment of carcinomas or other cancers?
RP: In the first World War, it was used as an emergency treatment to stimulate healing in wounds and hold down infections, and around that time, 1920s I think, it was often used for inoperable cancer to pack it with urea, it actually was not only keeping down infection but I think it was actually having a healing influence. The effect of forming lactic acid that I mentioned, which causes the pH of the cell to become more alkaline inside, that causes swelling and swelling promotes replication/proliferation and simply an osmotic environment which could be very concentrated sodium chloride or urea, happens to be a very innocuous substance – it doesn't exactly have an osmotic effect like sodium chloride because the sodium is kept out of the cell, but the urea acts somewhat like an osmotic dehydrator, it helps to prevent excess swelling and water retention.
HD: Interesting. So you think that's one of its main effects and that is how it is keeping the swelling down?
RP: I think so, [HD] and the dehydrated cell becomes more oxidatively active and catabolic burning fuel faster whereas the swollen cell is anabolic and simply growing and dividing. Many things can help to reduce that water retention and I think urea would work well with a good thyroid programme which helps you to retain the normal amount of sodium chloride. Hypothyroid people, not only produce the matrix which is over-hydrated - it shifts the cells so that they produce molecules so that they hold water outside the cells. The low thyroid lets your kidneys lose sodium whilst retaining water and so any of the osmotic therapies such as urea, I think, would work nicely with supplementing thyroid to normalise the sodium retention.
HD: Good, I think we have a couple of callers on the air so I should start by taking one of these. The first caller, you're on the air caller, where are you from?
Engineer: This is David back, the caller we had earlier who was having trouble. [HD]
Caller: Hello?
HD: Yeah Hi?
Caller: Hello? [Lots of issues with whether anyone can hear him – omitted].
Caller: Dr Peat, and this is, I guess, a little off topic but in a way it's not. When you're describing these processes, I mean you do it so beautifully - and it seems very complicated - but are you actually seeing images, like do you actually see these processes, and I know of course a lot of this probably has not be photographed through microscopic techniques and different things, and so do you have a way of seeing things?
RP: I see little models - not that I've seen anything exactly like it - but I have mental models, for example, of the extension of the sulphydryl-groups onto the surface of a cell. I have very concrete pictures of how that works and so it helps me when I'm looking for information it helps me to check against the published research facts to have a concrete mental image.
Caller: The reason I'm asking that question is that you were explaining like the collagen lining up and a lot of times when I'm reading your work, I find myself trying to imagine these things and then I'm thinking it's got to be an important part of your process and trying to imagine, since you're a painter, visible images of how this actually might work, is that true?
RP: Oh sure, yeah. I've always been aware of having a map of where I am going. And I was surprised in graduate school when a psychology professor was surprised at my description and I asked him how he found his way from his home to his office and he said “Go out the front door, turn left, turn left again, turn right,” ….it was all a set of rules and I think some professorial types think in terms of words and rules.
Caller: Yeah, definitely. The other thing I thought about in line with the almost visualisations of how this works, is through the years I've heard of different healers and people that are more 'New Agey' kind of thing, where they try to get people to imagine certain things and then try to heal it but then I started thinking, if you were really seeing this - like you're seeing it - you really could in a way, be a part of the healing process, in that you're seeing what's wrong and you’re seeing what you need to fix it.
RP: We were talking about the different theories of what a cancer is, the new theory is called TOFT – Tissue Organisation Field Theory – and I think that needs another adjective Organismic. It isn't just the local tissue organisation but it's also the way that tissue fits into the whole organism and how the activity of the organism keeps everything working, loading all of its parts so that they know what they're doing.
HD: It's very much, and I don't want to make a quip here, but it's very much the holistic way of looking at it and that's what I've found was so interesting, with even if they may not be totally accurate, Dr Watson's comments that were made earlier and also this kind of novel approach to cancer treatment, looking at the extra-cellular matrix is very much a holistic environment upon which every cell is in communication with every other cell; stem cells are arising all the time and actually, nothing is fixed, everything is very fluid and dynamic and very much able to change very quickly.
RP: Yeah. Individual cells for example, pigment cells, you can sometimes see them migrating through the tissue and they move at the same rate that cells have been found to able to crawl on a glass slide. That, at body temperature, that can be, something like a cm and a half per day, so very tiny cells really zips along through the solids in the tissue.
HD: Far out. So well I think we'd probably better wrap up, there's two callers on the air but not going to be able to take them unfortunately, we've run out of time. Thanks so much Dr Peat.
RP: OK, thank you.
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