If you're really healthy then you can meet challenges without experiencing something that Hans Selye would have called stress, for example if you are not very healthy, just skipping a meal can put you in really serious stress, but a healthy person stores something like 7 or 8 ounces of glucose in the form of glycogen in the liver and the muscles and brain, and since at rest the muscles can burn primarily fatty acids, your brain is the main thing that consumes glucose.

If you're inactive and relaxed you can easily go 12-15 hours without eating or any stress at all, but if you're not able to store that much glycogen, for example low thyroid people or people with a history of a lot of sever stress aren't able to store much glycogen, and so when you run out of sugar, whether it's from going all day without eating or because your liver isn't very efficient, your body tries to increase the available glucose, normally being awake makes enough adrenaline to mobilise as much glucose from your stores as you need, but when you run out of that stored sugar, your brain still require sugar to function properly, instead of increasing adrenaline more and more, when it reaches a certain level and can't get the blood sugar up from storage, then you turn on the cortisol and that' the classes stress that can be harmful, because the cortisol dissolves first the tissues like the Thymus which is very fragile, that starts turning to sugar immediately when you run out of stored glycogen, and when the thymus is gone in just a few hours of intense stress, that happens to be one of the reasons they think adults don't have thymus glands, because by the time they're dead and are analysed, the thymus has been eaten up by stress - they may have had a perfectly normal thymus until death.

After the thymus is consumed and turned to sugar, the cortisol starts breaking down your muscles, then your skin. The brains, lungs and hearts are spared from the breakdown, partly because in a healthy person they are very saturated with androgens (testosterone and DHEA especially) which block the breakdown function of cortisol. if your brain, lungs and heart are short of those protective steroids then that's where the stress really starts causing severe, deadly damage. Post-trauatic stress disorder is produced when someone has had such terrible stress, such as torture or terrific catastrophes, they not only deplete their stored glycogen and breakdown the expendable tissues like thymus and liver, but then the cortisol starts damaging the brain and heart and so on.

They get very sever chronic symptoms. once the stress is completely resolved, then the brain can massively regenerate itself. For example they've seen MRIs of girls who have been in Anorexia for months, their brain shrinks from living on the cortisol breaking down their tissues, when they start eating the brain can rebuild itself in just a few weeks.

Q: How often does one have to eat to not have this stress reaction happen?

The famous argentine biologist, bernardo husset, he showed that if he fed his animals only once per day, they not only tended to get fat on the same amount of calories, but they had a high incidence of diabetes, but if he fed them 3 or more a day, then they were resistant to diabetes, and less fat .More or less nibbling all the time is the safest thing, but if you have a really good diet and weren't under emotional pressure,e then a person can get along on one or two meals a day.

Q: What is the optimal diet?

The Blood type has almost no effect, you can see in very different species of animal which have very different ways of living, you can see the same processes [lost] so there's a universal animal diet which is optimal, but the proportions vary with the type of activity and size, and metabolic rate and personal history. Your previous stresses will affect what you need.

Q: for someone who is stressed and not healthy, what is recommended?

RP: One of the reasons that the single meal eaters tend to get fat and diabetic, is that it triggers a great surge of insulin, and the insulin triggers cortisol. If you can eat foods that don't trigger insulin, that's the ideal thing, and fruit happens to be the best single type of food for not triggering the stress reaction because it combines very small amounts of protein, with large amounts of sugar and minerals - potassium handles sugar in place of insulin, and the fructose component of fruit doesn't require insulin, so eating a lot of fruit produces much smaller amount of insulin, cortisol, than eating for example just one big meal of meat and potatoes, stimulates insulin and cortisol, starches are more stimulating to insulin than sugars.

Q; So it's almost counter intuitive, when you're talking about taking in fructose

RP: for about 100 years, Fructose has been recognized as the ideal sugar for diabetics because they can metabolize it. It used to be sold in health food stores all across the country, you can still find it for diabetics.

Q: difference between HFCS and Fructose?

RP: the funny thing about it is if you look at the fructose and glucose content, it seems to not be any difference between any sugar, but people thought to analyze what is in the stuff other than fructose and glucose, and the reason that people get fat is the calories that is neither fructose or glucose, it is the syrupy component basically a type of corn starch or syrup, but they don't count it.

It was a trick because of the boycott of Cuban sugar starting in the 60s, the price of sugar went up, so the corn starch producers learnt how to produce something resembling sugar, it's like the old carob syrup which was not a very appetizing way to sweeten things, but during the second world war, in the United States Corn syrup started being used in canned things. The sweeter more palatable form was developed in the 60s in response to the increased price of sugar.

Q: they've done a similar thing with oils in food?

RP: Yes the cotton seed industry was a major power behind that at the end of the 1800s

To make cotton more economical they had machines to get the seeds out of the cotton, and in proportion to the production of cotton they were accumulating seeds that were too toxic to feed their animals, and they found that they could squeeze oils out of the cotton seed, and by chemically hardening in they could sell it as artificial butter, and the butter industry finally they were required to sell it in a colourless state, so that it wouldn't ruin the butter industry, but the seed industry gradually got powerful enough that they could convince people that it is better than butter.

Same as rapeseed oil?