Ray Peat article, 2005. From The Collected Works of Ray Peat.

Ray Peat, "Food-Junk and Some Mystery Ailments: Fatigue, Alzheimer's, Colitis, Immunodeficiency", p. 348

Y ears ago, I noticed that Oregon was one of the few states that still had real whipping cream and cottage cheese without additives, so I have been trustingly using cream in my coffee every day. Last week, I noticed that my cream listed carrageenan in its ingredients. Over the years, I have avoided carrageenan-containing foods such as apple cider, hot dogs, most ice creams and prepared sauces and jellies, because they caused me to have serious allergic symptoms. Carrageenan has been found to cause colitis and anaphylaxis in humans, but it is often present in baby “formulas” and a wide range of milk products, with the result that many people have come to believe that it was the milk-product that was responsible for their allergic symptoms. Because the regulators claim that it is a safe natural substance, it is very likely that it sometimes appears in foods that don’t list it on the label, for example when it is part of another ingredient. In the 1940s, carrageenan, a polysaccharide made from a type of seaweed, was recognized as a dangerous allergen. Since then it has become a standard laboratory material to use to produce inflammatory tumors (granulomas), immunodeficiency, arthritis, and other inflammations. It has also become an increasingly common material in the food industry. Articles are often written to praise its usefulness and to claim that it doesn’t produce cancer in healthy animals. Its presence in food, like that of the polyester imitation fat, microcrystalline cellulose, and many other polymers used to stabilize emulsions or to increase smoothness, is often justified by the doctrine that these molecules are too large to be absorbed. There are two points that are deliberately ignored by the food-safety regulators, 1) these materials can interact dangerously with intestinal bacteria, and 2) they can be absorbed, in the process called “persorption.” The sulfites (sodium bisulfite, potassium metabisulfite, etc.) have been used as preservatives in foods and drugs for a long time, even though they were known to cause intense allergic reactions in some people. Fresh vegetables and fish, dried fruits, ham and other preserved meats, hominy, pickles, canned vegetables and juices, and wines were

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commonly treated with large amounts of the sulfites to prevent darkening and the development of unpleasant odors. People with asthma were known to be more sensitive than other people, but the sulfites could cause a fatal asthma-like attack even in someone who had never had asthma. Even when this was known, drugs used to treat asthma were preserved with sulfites. Was the information just slow to reach the people who made the products? No, the manufacturers knew about the deadly nature of their products, but they kept on selling them. The FDA didn’t answer letters on the subject, and medical magazines such as J.A.M.A. declined to publish even brief letters seriously discussing the issue. Obviously, since many people died from what the drug companies called “paradoxical bronchoconstriction” when they used the products, the drug companies had to be protected from lawsuits, and the medical magazines and the government regulators did that through the control of information. I think a similar situation exists now in relation to the effects of carrageenan. Stress and anxiety sharply reduce the circulation of blood to the intestine and liver. Prolonged stress damages the ability of the intestinal cells to exclude large molecules. Local irritation and inflammation of the intestine also increase its permeability and decrease its ability to exclude harmful materials. But even the normal intestine is able to permit the passage of large molecules and particles, in many cases particles larger than the cells that line the intestine; this persorption of particles has been demonstrated using particles of plastic, starch grains which are sometimes several times larger than blood cells, and many other materials, including carrageenan. One of the reasons it has been easy to convince the public that persorption doesn’t happen is that there is a powerful myth in our culture about the existence of a “semipermeable” “plasma membrane” on cells through which only certain specific substances may pass. About 30 years ago some biologists made a movie of living cells under the microscope, showing an ameboid cell entering another cell, swimming around, and leaving, without encountering any perceptible resistance; persorption of food particles, moving in one side of a cell and out the other, wouldn’t seem so mysterious if more people had seen films of that sort.

Also in the 1960s, Gerhard Volkheimer rediscovered the phenomenon of persorption, which had been demonstrated a century earlier. Starch grains, or other hard particles, can be found in the blood, urine, and other fluids after they have been ingested. The iodine stain for starch, and the characteristic shape of the granules, makes their observation very easy. The absorption of immunologically intact proteins and other particles has been demonstrated many times, but myth is more important than fact; all of my biology professors, for example, denied that proteins could be absorbed by any part of the digestive system. The accepted description of the absorption of chylomicrons, tiny particles of fat, helps to understand the way medical professors think about the intestine. These particles, they say, are disassembled by the intestine cells on one side, their molecular parts are taken up by the cells, and similar particles are excreted out the other side of the cells, into the lymphatic vessels. As they visualize one of these cells, it consists of at least four barriers, with each theoretical cell surface membrane consisting of an outer water-compatible phase, in intramembranal lipid region, and an inner water-compatible phase where the membrane rests on the “cell contents.” Endocytosis, for example the ingestion of a bacterial particle by a phagocyte, is described in a similar way, to avoid any breach in the “lipid bilayer membrane.” This mental armature has made it essentially impossible for the biomedical culture to assimilate the facts of persorption, which would have led 150 years ago to the scientific study of allergy and immunology in relation to the digestive system. Volkheimer found that mice fed raw starch aged at an abnormally fast rate, and when he dissected the starch-fed mice, he found a multitude of starch-grain-blocked arterioles in every organ, each of which caused the death of the cells that depended on the blood supplied by that arteriole. It isn’t hard to see how this would affect the functions of organs such as the brain and heart, even without considering the immunological and other implications of the presence of foreign particles randomly distributed through the tissue. In 1979 some of my students in Mexico wanted a project to do in the lab. Since several traditional foods are made with corn that has been boiled in alkali, I thought it would be valuable to see whether this treatment reduced the ability of the starch grains to be persorbed. For breakfast one day, they ate only atole, tamales, and tortillas, all made

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from the alkali treated corn. None of the students could find any starch grains after centrifuging their blood and urine. That led me to substitute those foods whenever possible for other starches. I have written previously about some of the environmental factors, including radiation, estrogens, and unsaturated fats, that are known to damage the immune system and the brain, and that we have been increasingly exposed to since 1940. To better understand the nature of the diseases that are now becoming so common, we can look at them in a series, from the bowel, to the liver, to the immune system, and to the brain and hormones. The incidence of several inflammatory diseases, for example Crohn’s disease, a chronic inflammation of the intestine, has been increasing during the last 50 years in the industrialized countries, and at the same time, the incidence of several liver diseases has also been increasing. The entry of bacteria into the blood stream, which can lead to septicemia, is ordinarily considered to be of importance only in extreme immunodeficiency states, such as old age or in premature infants, but the death rate of young adults from septicemia has been increasing rapidly since the 1940s. The permeability of the intestine that allows bacteria to enter the blood stream is very serious if the phagocytic cells are weakened. Carrageenan poisoning is one known cause of the disappearance of macrophages. Its powerful immunosuppression would tend to be superimposed onto the immunological damage that has been produced by radiation, unsaturated fats, and estrogens. The liver tumor that is characteristic of young women using the oral contraceptive pill is a hepatocellular adenoma, which is considered to be a premalignant tumor. In Japan, Mexico, and several European countries, the incidence of hepatocellular tumors has increased steadily and tremendously in recent decades, and it has increased in men as well as in women. This is the sort of tumor that very likely represents an increased burden of toxins absorbed from the bowel. Carrageenan contributes to the disappearance of the liver enzymes (the cytochrome P-450 system) that detoxify drugs, hormones, and a variety of other chemicals. Carrageenan enters even the intact, uninflamed gut, and damages both chemical defenses and immunological defenses. When it has produced inflammatory bowel damage, the amount absorbed will be

greater, as will the absorption of bacterial endotoxin. Carrageenan and endotoxin synergize in many ways, including their effects on nitric oxide, prostaglandins, toxic free radicals, and the defensive enzyme systems. The continuing efficient production of energy is a basic aspect of metabolic defense, and this is interrupted by carrageenan and endotoxin. The energy failure becomes part of a vicious circle, in which permeability of the intestine is increased by the very factors that it should exclude. Once the protective barrier-functions of the intestine and liver have been damaged, allergens and many materials with specific biological effects can enter the tissues. The polysaccharide components of connective tissue constitute a major part of our regulatory system for maintaining differentiated cell functioning, and absorbed starches act as “false signals,” with a great capacity for deranging cellular functioning. Several types of research indicate that carrageenan changes cellular function in complex ways, imitating changes seen in cancer, for example. R.J.V. Pulvertaft found “a close similarity between Burkitt cells and human lymphocytes stimulated by bean extract.” He concluded that “…the possibility of a relation between Burkitt’s lymphoma and a diet of beans should not be neglected,” though he emphasized that other factors must be considered, since most people who eat beans don’t develop the disease. The intestinal parasites which are common in tropical Africa can cause inflammation of the bowel, leading to the absorption of large amounts of antigens. Since the bowel becomes inflamed in influenza, it is reasonable to think that some of the symptoms of “the flu” are produced by absorbed bowel toxins. The variations in the post-influenza syndromes are very likely influenced by the nature of the bacteria or foods which are present, chronically or at the time of an uncompensated stress or inflammatory disease. K.M. Stevens has argued that while rheumatic fever and glomerulonephritis are caused by the antigens of streptococci, systemic lupus erythematosis (SLE) is probably caused by the antigens of gram-positive lactobacilli found in the normal flora. Migraine, SLE, chronic fatigue syndrome, thyroid problems, and some kinds of porphyria seem to be more common in women of reproductive age, and are often exacerbated by premenstrual hormone changes. According to Stevens, “SLE is almost entirely a disease of women of child-bearing age. One possibility for this selection could be

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that women during this period harbour a peculiar flora. This is indeed the case; large numbers of gram-positive lactobacilli are present in the vagina only during the thirty-odd years when regular menstrual activity is present.” In 1974, I noticed that I consistently got a migraine headache after drinking a lactobacillus milk product, and stopped using (and recommending) yogurt and other lactobacillus foods, though I suspected it was the lactic acid which caused the immediate symptoms. Lactic acid is a metabolic burden, especially when combined with an estrogen excess, but Stevens’ main point, about the significance of our immunological response to systemic bacterial antigens, deserves more attention. On a typical diet, tissues progressively accumulate linoleic acid, and this alters the structure of mitochondrial cardiolipin, which governs the response of the mitochondrial enzymes to the thyroid hormone. This process is especially evident in the female liver. In the “autoimmune” diseases, such as lupus, there are typically antibodies to cardiolipin, as if the body were trying to reject its own tissues, which have been altered by the storage of linoleic acid. The altered mitochondrial function, which is involved in so many symptoms, can become part of a vicious circle, with endotoxin and estrogen having central roles, once the stage has been set by the combination of diet, stress, and toxins. A few months ago I had a questionnaire circulated in a “fibromyositis” discussion group on the internet, and the consistency of responses was interesting. The questions were:

1) Have you noticed that any of your symptoms are worse premen strually?

2) Have you noticed that any symptom is less severe premenstrually?

3) Do any symptoms seem to be worse periodically, but without being associated with the premenstrual time?

4) Did your symptoms appear after use of oral contraceptives or IUD?

Except for one woman who was taking oral contraceptives at the time she became sick, and kept taking them, and who didn’t notice any cycle, all of the answers to the first three questions (15 of the 16 who responded) were identical: 1) yes, 2) no, 3) no.

The premenstrual estrogen-dominance usually leads progressively to higher prolactin and lower thyroid function. Estrogen is closely associated with endotoxinemia, and with histamine and nitric oxide formation, and with the whole range of inflammatory and “autoimmune” diseases. Anything that irritates the bowel, leading to increased endotoxin absorption, contributes to the same cluster of metabolic consequences. I have previously discussed the use of antibiotics (and/or carrot fiber and/or charcoal) to relieve the premenstrual syndrome, and have mentioned the study in which the lifespan was extended by occasionally adding charcoal to the diet. A few years ago, I heard about a Mexican farmer who collected his neighbors’ runt pigs, and got them to grow normally by adding charcoal to their diet. This probably achieves the same thing as adding antibiotics to their food, which is practiced by pig farmers in the U.S. to promote growth and efficient use of food. Charcoal, besides binding and removing toxins, is also a powerful catalyst for the oxidative destruction of many toxic chemicals. In a sense, it anticipates the action of the protective enzymes of the intestinal wall and the liver. Some women with premenstrual fatigue have found that the “premenstrual” phase tends to get longer and longer, until they have chronic fatigue. I found that to be one of the easiest “PMS” problems to correct. When people are older, and have been sick longer, the fatigue problem is likely to involve more systems of the body. The larger the quantity of “toxic fat” stored in the body, the more careful the person must be about increasing metabolic and physical activity. Using more vitamin E, short-chain saturated fats, and other anti-lipid-peroxidation agents is important. The inflammatory diseases that develop after prolonged stress are sometimes hard to correct. But avoiding exposure to the major toxic allergens—such as carrageenan—is an essential consideration, just as important as correcting the thyroid function and avoiding the antithyroid substances. Low cholesterol is very commonly involved in the diseases of stress, and—like inadequate dietary protein—will make the system less responsive to supplementary thyroid hormone. The proliferative aspects of the inflammatory diseases represent, I think, a primitive form of regeneration. Arthritis, atherosclerosis, various granulomatous processes, breast diseases, liver adenomas, etc., provide an opportunity for investigating the various systems and sub-

Fatigue, Alzheimer’s, Colitis, Immunodeficiency

stances that guide cell proliferation toward reconstruction, rather than obstructive and deformative, degenerative, processes. Degenerative diseases probably all contain clues for understanding regeneration, as I have suggested in relation to Alzheimer’s disease and inflammation. I will be talking about these in other newsletters, but the first step will always be to minimize exposure to the disruptive substances.