Ray Peat

It's how humans got through famines and winters.

Ray Peat spent decades making the point that the stress hormones are, at bottom, fuel hormones, and that what we call stress is very often an energy problem.

Jay Feldman puts it in one sentence, "When demand outruns supply, you have to dig into stress." Cortisol is the shovel.

It isn't the villain.

Cortisol belly is real.

It just isn't caused by eating dessert.

Now, if you've been listening to this show for a while, you know Ray Peat argued that polyunsaturated fats, the seed oils, amplify the stress response and that the fat released from storage during stress feeds right back into more stress hormones.

I want to be careful here because the evidence is mixed, and I'd rather tell you that than oversell it.

Every morning of fasted cardio and ice water pushes more of that stored fat into your bloodstream.

Ray Peat argued for decades that unsaturated fats, especially when stress releases them into the blood, interfere with thyroid hormone and with the way your cells burn sugar.

That brings us to what those free fatty acids do once they're in your blood.

In nineteen sixty-three, the British biochemist Philip Randall described what's now called the glucose fatty acid cycle or the Randall cycle.

Cortisol's job in an emergency is to make sure your brain never runs out of sugar.

When glycogen runs low, cortisol turns up gluconeogenesis, the making of new glucose, and one of its main raw materials is amino acids pulled out of protein.

Ray Peat pointed out for years that the tissues cortisol breaks down to supply them include your muscle and your thymus, the gland that trains your immune cells.

In nineteen eighty, Peter Lemon and James Mullin had six men exercise for an hour at a moderate pace, once with their muscle glycogen depleted and once with it loaded.

I told you we're playing basketball.

I'm like, I love the, the Ray Peat and the pro metabolic and all this stuff, but I'm not caught up in that theory either.

I can take from that.

I can take from paleo, could take from whole food, whole 30, whatever.

So i- this, this theory doesn't really make sense.

And then I...

Yeah, I remember people s- maybe it was even longer than six years ago, putting in the comments, be like, "Look up Ray Peat," or like lear- "What about pro-metabolic?" Like, "What about this?" And I was like, oh, wait a second, I do have low body temperature.

I am, like, waking up in the middle of the night, kinda cold hands and feet.

It could be going, it could be going

... um, you know, people have been told that it's evil and bad for you and all these different things, but, um, uh, for the listeners at home, if you haven't already, it's time to study Dr. Ray Peat

Mm-hmm

That's really all I'll say.

Go down the Ray Peat rabbit hole, uh, tonight on YouTube-

Mm

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Warren Buffett style.