Transcribed by Sheila 30/11/2014

Verified by dd99 02/12/2014

Herb Doctors: HD

Ray Peat: RP

HD introduction not transcribed.

Starts at RP entrance.

HD: This month's show is on Longevity. Thanks so much for joining us again [Dr Peat]. I know that a lot of your background has been involved with reproductive physiology and ageing and so, as always, I would ask you just to introduce yourself and your professional and academic background for people who perhaps have never listened to you.

RP: OK, I started getting interested in ageing, I guess, in childhood, but through the 1950s when I would mention it to people, a few of the very old people - like a biology professor who studied around the end of the century - had some interesting ideas about the actual cause of ageing that suggested possibilities for actually preventing it. But most people in the 1950s weren't at all interested in the idea of curing ageing - it was inconceivable that anything could be done about it.

But, finally, when I decided to go to graduate school in Biology in 1968 to 1972 at the University of Oregon, I intended to study brain biology, but it happened that there were some good people working on reproductive ageing so I did my dissertation on female reproductive ageing. And that helped to answer some questions that I had been accumulating for 20 years. But it really just opened up a lot of basic biological questions: the whole nature of what an organism is and how it develops through time, growing up from an egg to an adult. The whole process is something that used to be explained as a sort of reading out from a pre-established blueprint in the genes and that led to the idea that there must be genes causing ageing and death. Rethinking that whole developmental scheme is necessary and if you see development as epigenetic or open to interaction with the environment, then ageing obviously is another epigenetic environmentally-dependent process.

HD: OK, well, what I am most happy with and constantly amazed is your interpretation of a lot of previously held scientific 'facts', for want of a better word that both I was taught when I was doing my degree and the science that we had was the same medical science that doctors get and still flawed with all of the same mistakes. And what I really appreciate is you bringing out some very different perspectives on it, which I think is very important, and very scientifically based perspectives, and ones that are not actually hidden, I mean they are there in the articles and abstracts of published medical journals, but it's very slow to reach the doctors. So, in terms of tonight's show and going over longevity, I think it is a subject that most people would be pretty interested in, in how to extend their lifespan and I know that there's lots of gene research and a billionaire investor who is trying to do 40,000 sequences a year and he hopes to get up to 100,000 sequences a year and is hopefully trying to find the answer behind ageing and is going through people's genomes and also their biomes to find out what they are dealing with and see if there is any link between those people that have degenerative disease and cancers and those people that perhaps don't, but why it is they all die and see if there can be any answers to be found. I am sure they probably will find some answers too, given long enough!

So, getting on to longevity then, I wonder if it is wrong to think we can extend our lives beyond 120 in this current world and be both healthy and strong, and I think what I wanted to ask you first, was I read a recent study in a fairly popular publication about long life and health in general, published by the University of Wisconsin, actually published in the online journal "E-Life". They were mentioning a trial that was done with a strain of e-coli and they subjected this e-coli bacteria to a normally lethal dose of radiation that would normally kill a person and they took whatever few surviving colonies of e-coli that there were, reproduced them and doubled the dose and then took the survivors from them and doubled the dose until they got 20 generations down the line, a colony of e-coli which were able to withstand a thousand times the lethal radiation dose that would kill a human and we're looking at the mechanisms behind this to see what these gene mutations had done to them to enable them to resist the effect. So they were talking about the ability to repair DNA as a primary objective in facilitating longevity. What do you think about the protection of DNA in our body as a method of sustaining longer life?

RP: I think there is a parallel between what the bacteria are doing and what happens to humans exposed to stresses like radiation, but the single-celled organisms are essentially different in how they respond to stress because 20 generations of bacteria would be just a few days and so they couldn't possibly be evolving new DNA sequences to make new functional proteins in such a short time. The radiation degrades protein so it tends to simply knock out functions when it is damaging the DNA. But the bacteria that died had their DNA so damaged they had lost function and the ones that survived simply didn't lose the function but their defence processes were activated and so what they were getting with each generation was an intensification of the defence reactions that ordinary bacteria have. Things like bacteria, yeasts and protozoa, when they are under stress they can either decide to reproduce faster, live more intensely and divide more quickly, if their genes are still working, or they can go in the direction of sort of dehydration and for radiation forming a spore and eliminating a lot of water makes the DNA very resistant to radiation because water is part of the hydroxyl radical is what destroys the DNA, so without any water tied to the DNA it is very resistant.

HD: So that's why spores can live for so long in the desert or...

RP: Yeah, if humans tried to do that, the cells under stress would either multiply very rapidly and that would be a cancer or they would go into something worse than hibernation in which they simply dried up and were like a suspended mummy-like existence. So it just doesn't work for humans. The same idea is that we have ways of handling damaged genes or threats to the genes and what people do or animals is to kill the whole cell when the organism senses that the DNA has been damaged beyond the capacity to repair it. So that's happening very fast, the cells will turnover quickly, but to not form a cancer, they have to let the damaged ones... sort of a triage... beyond a certain degree of damage they have to let the cell die. And the quicker it can die, the more material is available for stimulating stem cells to replace it. So, I think a major factor in ageing is that things interfere with that whole process of either repairing or letting the cells die quickly to be replaced. In old age, the process of cell death is retarded, interestingly, the cells become old and they can't decide what to do [laughter] and so they slow down the whole organism, [it] metabolically slows down and, in that slowing down process, they have some undesirable products, like lactic acid, that cause problems for the whole organism, instead of just dying and getting it over with.

HD: So you are saying that the process of apoptosis, cell programmed death, is actually slowed down in normal, human ageing?

RP: Yeah, I think people are now looking for what the factors are to retard that quick replacement, that quick apoptosis and activation of stem cells.

HD: Interesting. All right, getting on to energy, I know that you're very interested in energy-promoting substances in thyroid and progesterone, aspirin etc being amongst some of those definite energy promoting substances. Well, there's a compound called NAD and NAD+ and another form NADH which is very important in terms of intra-cellular, extra-cellular energy conveyance and powering reactions. So, the article that was using the e-coli forms and providing a strain of e-coli that was super-resistant to radiation was also mentioning that this compound NAD+ was another target therapy and they'd actually produced a form, obviously a patented form of this product that they were trying to sell and I think that's also part of this evening's show and try to highlight some of the mistakes that we commonly are bombarded with in terms of being told it is the truth and we'll bring out a couple of these and you'll specifically identify the mistakes that the authors of the publication, or the promoters of the product, were guilty of perpetrating if you like? NAD+, then, as a compound. How important do you see NAD+ and therefore this company's new product to be taken as a supplement to raise NAD+, how important that would be in our biological systems?

RP: Our cells are constantly in a process of oxidising and things like sugar, the electrons go to the oxidizing NAD+ and reduce it so that it becomes NADH and NADH can then pass those electrons on eventually to oxygen. So there's a streaming through NAD+/NADH to the mitochondrion and oxygen and in the normal metabolism you should have three to five hundred times as much NAD+ as NADH because there's then a rapidly oxidising state, and stresses that interfere with oxygen or that subtract the NAD+ and NADH, the lower the supply of the total NAD and NADH is, the more easily a stress causes a failure of the balance, so it shifts more easily through a very reduced NADH-dominant state.

HD: So stress depletes NAD+?

RP: Well, it depletes both of them, right. One of the things that depletes both of them is damage to the DNA, such as radiation, and in repairing the DNA breaks there are enzymes that build up a chain of repetitive bases, so it's a meaningless chain but it plugs up the hole basically in the DNA and to do that, to repair the chain, the ADP is attached. ADP comes from the supply of NAD and NADH, and so when you get a nick in the DNA you have this huge amount of NAD+/NADH available and you draw it down to repair the damage. But if you draw it down in repairing too many broken DNAs, then that interferes with the energy production of the cell. And if you have ways to block those enzymes and stop the DNA repair, then the cell can make the decision to die and stop wasting energy from the organism and instead it becomes raw materials for the stem cells.