KMUD “Ask Your Herb Doctor” (2013)

HD - Andrew Murray

RP - Ray Peat

HD: For those who just tuned in, could you give an outline of your academic and professional background?

RP: In the sixties, I had been working in linguistics. But on my own studying, I was very interested in general questions of aging, and the brain in particular, and how the brain makes consciousness and language possible, and how that changes during maturation and aging. So,I enrolled at the University of Oregon, thinking I would study brain biology, in 1968, and found that the brain biology people were extremely dogmatic, thinking in terms only of genetic control, membrane functions, and nothing much in between. And I looked around at the department and found out that the reproductive biologists seemed to be more scientific and actually looking for an explanation, rather than trying to explain things in terms of what they believed they knew. So I worked on reproductive aging, and our lab specialized in the female aging. And I concentrated on the energy oxidative metabolism and the changes occurring in the uterus with aging, and I found that all kinds of stress converge with the changes that you see during aging, especially in the reproductive system. It was like the lining of the uterus was a very good model for the things that happen in the brain and the whole organism. And all types of stress, from radiation to bad diet, vitamin E deficiency, deficiency of oxygen, all of these things mimic the changes that you see in aging. And, basically that's the area that I’ve been thinking about a lot ever since.

HD: OK, good. To open up the subject of aging, in light of the research that was broadcast in an article produced by Harvard, if we want to talk about the two types of interactions that happen in the aging process, in terms of the interaction with DNA, with methylation as an additive process, which degrades the DNA, and the acetylation, which apparently is more protective. They talk about an epigenetic modification; we've mentioned in the past, that unlike most modern thinking that would tell us that we are a result of our genetics and there's nothing much we can do about it, I know that you've found many different research articles that have proved beyond doubt that there very much is something that can be done, and the environment, in its own right, has its own effects on the genes, even at very local and a very time dependent manner, so it's not a case of the genes being fixed in time and space and immutable, but that definitely changes can be done in a relatively short space of time. So, when the articles talk about epigenetic modification involved in gene expression — for example, so, perhaps, stave off cancer, or even allow the cancer to exist — would you explain what that is, that epigenetic modification?

RP: Luther Burbank was a person who explored the influence of the environment. Many biologists, from the time of Lamarck, found through Barbara McClintock — who was ignored until just about twenty years ago (they sort of pulled her out of obscurity before she died) — these people had demonstrated that the need for a function could elicit the function in an organism. So that a stressful environment would cause changes in the chromosomes. Barbara McClintock referred to "jumping genes", but these things were actual movement of DNA elicited by stress in the environment. And all of these people, for almost two hundred years, were excluded from science by a very dogmatic view of genetics. All of the dogmatic views of the geneticists of the 20th century are now defunct completely. But they live on in practice in medicine. Last year, several dozen people have asked me what to do, because they've discovered that there are mutant DNA tests. There are a couple of popular genes that almost everyone has a mutated form of, but actually these make almost no difference in health or function. Very slight nutritional requirement difference. If you look at identical twins, despite that fact that all of their DNA is identical and they experience the same environment in the uterus, and most of them experience very similar environments because of their social economic level…despite all of those genetic and environment overlaps, when you look at a serious disease, there is very little overlap. For example, if one twin has rheumatoid arthritis, there's only a 12% incidence of it in the other twin. And that's now well recognized, but still the gene testing industry is trying to sell the idea that you get sick if you have certain mutated genes.

HD: So you’re saying it’s more a product of the environment perhaps in that arthritic type of situation perhaps?

RP: Yeah, and constantly, like, they put 40 mice I think was in a stimulating environment and found that just by the choices they made in their daily life they became very different in personality and behavior, just by where they happened to go in the environment influencing what they learned, and over their lifetime they became very recognizable individuals. And that would really upset medicine if they had to consider everyone as a unique individual, all the way down to the way their genes worked, because there would be no...

HD: It would be too considerate....

RP: Yeah, no exact definition of a disease, it would be "your disease, this month”.

HD: Yeah, yeah, interesting. I wonder what it is in the animals in that mice study perhaps that made the individual mice do things differently that gave them the better outcome there?

RP: Possibly just which one was the first one to be weaned and wander off and have an experience and that stimulated them in a way that the others didn't experience. The genes are being used constantly, everything you do is using your genes in a certain way, that varies according to whether you're awake or asleep for example. But if you're starving, day after day, this is going to pull up an accumulation of changes, not just the quick on-and-off effect of day and night, or incidental experiences, but it will accumulate sort of an inertia and layer after layer will be laid down in the stuff around your genes, attaching carbon atoms to the DNA itself, and attaching a great variety of molecules to the proteins that handle the genes, the histones that surround the chromosomes and move the genes to make them accessible for copying and functioning. These are relatively easy to change, the methylation is a little more sluggish, and when you are in an extremely stressful situation a lot of your genes get turned off (methylated especially), and those can be identified in the chromosomes that you inherit from your father or mother specifically. So if your father had a very hard life, you can identify the highly methylated genes in your chromosomes that came from that hard life.

HD: So that's inheritable then?

RP: Yeah. And in animal experiments it takes several generations for a very bad generation's experience to be removed when they're put into a normal environment. But if you put them into a super-environment like the…

HD: Enriched environment.

RP: Enriched, yeah, it's very stimulating, you can repair the previous generation's damage very quickly, and some nutrients and drugs can do that, remove methyl groups from the DNA and attach more of the opening groups to the histones.

HD: Dr. Raymond Peat is a specialist in hormone physiology and the aging process, having studied it for the last 35 years or so. Let’s go on then to what you’ve mentioned about methylation and demethylation and how that occurs, how that affects the gene, how it silences it, how it allows tumors to grow and how they have just found now in this piece of research the very presence of this is a very diagnostic indicator of how well the tumor will continue to grow and how switching this off is actually a fairly new approach to cancer therapy. So in terms of the process of methylation and how this happens and how this is also related to the train of thought that fasting is good for you and going without is actually fairly healthful and if you starve yourself fairly regularly and live on a meager caloric intake you'll actually have a greater chance of longevity. That's not actually true is it?

RP: No. It was definite about 70 years ago a researcher named Clive McCay I think it was showed that restricting food supply made animals live longer. But later people restricted the type of food, kept down the heavy metals in their diet alone and let them eat all the fat, protein and carbohydrate they wanted and they lived longer.