Posts made by T-3

@Peatful I, too, think this is an interesting topic very much related to Peat-inspired bioenergetics. Did Peat ever say anything about fear of dying or how he thought about mortality?

I think even achieving most of what i was hoping for in the way of increasing basal metabolic rate, shifting perspective toward nearly unconditional (low-PUFA) food-positivity, reducing inflammation, etc. (i.e. adopting the most obvious Peat-inspired practices), I continued to fear death intensely just as when I had been running on stress hormones for a decade on a carb-restricted diet. Although significant biophysical improvements had some noticeably positive effects on mindset, on this topic in particular, I would say I remained rather avoidant--not as much reality testing as I would have liked--thinking about death. Eventually (in the last two years maybe), my fear of death has reduced. I don't know if it was just getting older or Peat-inspired practice. It would be nice to have clearer guidance/reflection on this topic from people who:
(i) stopped fearing death before Peating
(ii) shifted perspective on death after Peating
(iii) shifted perspective on death due to practices unrelated to Peating (to help tease apart where bioenergetics and mindset toward death may be related and where they are not).

@DavidPS Thanks for posting. It's nice to see which products you and others are using. Cheers!

@LucH said in Thymus health:

M2 mode

What does "M2 mode" refer to?

@DavidPS Any recommended source for turpentine?

@gentlepotato Epic post regarding the Itaconate Shunt + GentlePotato Hypothesis as to why glucose-only has specific action stopping the Itaconate Shunt and thus improving (in Peat's words from the radio transcription you provided) both the "capacity" and "efficiency" of glucose oxidation.

The links to GABA and type-1-diabetes/autoimmune antibodies in the quote from the Peat interview were noteworthy, too.

Some random observations (expressing enthusiasm for GentlePotato's hypothesized mechanisms): In my own case, I respond to anti-excitatory supplements that are specifically GABA agonists (androsterone, kava) or operating directly on GABA receptors (progesterone). My subjective experience of plain sugar (sucrose) is similar. The mechanism(s) you mention and the overlap of our symptoms (those of us experimenting with and, at least at times, responding well to high-dose sugar or glucose as a supplement) makes me want to try glucose-only to compare. I think I do best with sucrose when I'm already uninflamed, good energetic capacity, i.e. oxidizing glucose well (which also would be contingent on having the enzymes or un-shunted baseline to be able to break sucrose down into glucose). According to your theory, glucose-only would be especially helpful when the sucrose-to-glucose pathway isn't working well and/or some stressor (e.g., TBI) has caused an Itaconate Shunt process to begin.

Upthread mentions of derangements in circadian rhythm are also interesting. Peating for several years and feeling like I'd made bioenergetic quantum leaps toward health (interpreted as "deeper capacity for" and "more efficient" glucose oxidation, specifically in brain tissue [although without a "CGM-like device" to measure such things directly, this is obviously a speculative interpretation])...only then did I want to wake up in the morning. After lifelong night-owl/sleep-deprivation/irregular-sleep patterns, I started to want to sleep "normal hours" and work/concentrate in the morning in the last six years or so. Type-1 diabetic here, btw.

Please speculate more when you've got more thoughts on the mechanisms in play explaining why sucrose-only might make a difference.

@sharko @yerrag @Peatful @Kvirion
I would like to use this tech if it returned links/citations back to source material. I think it's a cool experiment and fine to ask to be paid for the archival value-add that the LLM (might) provide.

I guess, @sharko, you are not a quant stats modeler who understands the "stochastic parrot" comment by @Kvirion and paper he linked to or valid concerns raised by @Peatful

The prompts you posted telling your LLM to "invest 100 times more" and do something "even more surprising" to Peat, etc., reveals, to me that you're unaware how those prompts are parsed and what's happening under the hood (in the code). The code will assemble a ranked list of word associations and return the top-ranked test composition by some very limited likelihood criterion in its very "small-world" model space. When you tell it to "come up with an idea" (it cannot!...it can only assemble combinations it was trained on!)...it simply returns #2 on the ranked list or does a re-ranking with a final check to give you something else on its list of guesses/synthetic text assemblages.

The idea that "AI" is "getting smarter" or graduating from high-school- to PhD-level "thinking" is absurd. This tech can be a tremendous aid for constructing text or computer code or many other useful applications, where the training dataset is sufficient in some sense to satisfy the task at hand. Thus, as an archive tool that can spot likely interconnections in the literature or sources you trained it on, I agree there is a real value-add.

When it comes to synthesizing new ideas as in your last few posts, any claim of "synthesizing new ideas" falls flat and does become (borderline?) dishonest. It would be dishonest, for example, to claim that what is returned by your LLM represents a "likely" Ray Peat take on a new topic he never wrote about.

Keep in mind that the training dataset is a binding constraint. The archival value-add is genuine. Claiming that the LLM comes up with "new insights" in any way associated with Ray Peat is dishonest in my view. Better to say explicitly "new insights generated by an LLM trained on a specialized training set comprised of..." and the list precisely which sources were included in the training set. Ray Peat's, Broda Barnes' oeuvres. Some filtered pub-med content you've evidently included. That specificity would match the archival value-add claim. I recommend strongly against selling the LLM with the repeated prompts you gave upthread, which, to anyone working in this space is unlikely to impress.

@Lothric Good post! After first encountering Peat's work 10 years ago, I tried to write (for myself) what an ideally designed work environment might look like, "optimized" in some sense to minimize chronic stressors or maximize opportunities to confront "peak challenge" with creativity and then "productively" adapt (hormesis). It eventually occurred to me that perhaps my question wasn't the right one, because, like you said, it assumed objective was more efficient/productive work output (using Peat-inspired principles to "work-max" or "productivity-max"). Finding experiences that provide opportunities for "wonder" is another important Peat-inspired piece of this, acknowledging how challenging it may be to find wonder in many work situations.

I don't think Peaty productivity-maxing is a bad question. Some forms of productivity (facing up to a challenge and getting things done) are good self-care and can be fulfilling in deeper ways, consistent with bioenergetic principles. The deeper consideration of leisure and self-development @Lothric mentioned is on-point: not treating leisure as recharge to make work more productive but as an end in itself (deeper structuring of one's self, including yet exceeding the domain of work).

My conclusion? Peat-inspired principles to improve work productivity can be a valuable/valid/healing/bioenergetic objective. @Lothric's point is deeper and worthwhile to consider if one can afford to. Given the high-stress work environments and socially/aesthetically-depleted environments many of us find ourselves in, a few clever Peat-inspired inventions to manage stress and increase energy can be a godsend and even more than enough to adapt and "thrive in place" (metabolically speaking, assuming some tough and unwanted constraints). If one can afford to allocate more and more energy/resources on self development beyond work, that would be a privilege and could be a life-changing opportunity toward self-possession and fulfilment on the deepest levels. Meantime, a few Peat-inspired changes in perspective/behavior/diet/activity can make a massively positive difference even when constrained to "staying stuck" in an environment one wishes they could change but can't. Cope? Maybe. Worthwhile/life-saving/meaningful although imperfect? Yes.

@short_hope I drink 1.5+ liters of whole milk, orange juice, grape juice, lots of coffee w/ milk (throughout the day), occasional coconut water, fizzy drinks with sucrose/glucose.

Fluid content in the foods we eat (whole fruit, etc.) is often not included as it should be (or not easy to quantify) when people think about their fluid intake.

I grew up with parents very interested in health food and maintaining good hydration. And I raised my children pushing frequent water consumption on them, which I now regret (before reading Ray Peat on 'salt to taste' and dangers of excess water intake). I think excessive worry about dehydration and excess water intake worked against my health objectives. I'm now feeling like good metabolic health has been finally achieved (last 5-8 years) after stopping water drinking. Of course still using water to cook soup/broth, boil potatoes, etc.

This report suggests microplastic emissions from wind turbines, and Bisphenol A in particular, could be a significant problem. The report's claims are contested/"fact-checked" by wind-energy-industry-supported researchers, which makes me take it more seriously.

A surprisingly large percentage of the turbine's mass is lost each year from friction, seawater, etc., implying microparticle emission flows of substantial mass.
https://docs.wind-watch.org/Leading-Edge-erosion-and-pollution-from-wind-turbine-blades_5_july_English.pdf

The turbines are a large proportion epoxy, with high Bisphenol A content.
"Remember that Bisphenol A amounts to approx. 13 - 15% of casting weight of a turbine blade."

Is there a way to glucose load using food? 100ml grape juice 4x per day?

So far, I'm with @ThinPicking and @Peatful in thinking it should be similar to pro-metabolic/anti-stress effects from sucrose, starch or any carbohydrate based on the mechanisms Peat described. It would be a brilliant discovery to learn that glucose-only has uniquely pro-metabolic effects or is good for chronic fatigue syndrome etc.

Regarding the glucose-only approach in the Stephens protocol, I read up-thread that someone theorized it could be especially beneficial for people with some specific derangement in the "normal" breakdown of other sugars into glucose and then ATP, where misfiring breakdown products become toxic to the brain, thus, possibly explaining why glucose-only is effective. More information, even speculative, about the mechanisms that make glucose special would be good to read here -- and whether there are reasonable food-based approaches to "glucose maxing" that might work (e.g. foods with more cofactors that help the breakdown process from all carbohydrates to blood-glucose).

Forum members living in Germany may wish to comment on parents giving schoolchildren glucose tablets before intense exams, etc., as a nootropic/de-stressor.

@LucH Good comment re water should be thought of primarily as 'what it takes away'.

My own regimen is zero water intake and heavy milk consumption (1.5 to 2 liters per day, full fat).

I agree with @Sattva that dietary fears such as 'need water for hydration' and 'milk makes you fat' are generally overplayed (acknowledging that everyone's context will be different). I have found it difficult to reconcile Peat's recommendation of reduced-fat milk to avoid getting fat when consumed in large quantities with my own positive experience, benefitting from unlimited full-fat milk consumption with zero water intake.

I frequently try to convince my adult sons to reduce water intake. I worry that sipping on water throughout the day interferes with the body's utilization of nutrients and likely slows the basal metabolic rate, all else equal.

@Kvirion I read your post on the other thread you linked to, where you argued that more "structure" in the form of new rules and stricter forum moderation would be needed to avoid this forum becoming "chaotic". You wrote: "a system (like a forum) without constraints and attractors will always be in permanent high chaos."

I am sympathetic to this theory. But I think you're overstating things, drawing a false dichotomy (chaos versus whatever makes a meaningful/interesting Ray-Peat/bioenergetic forum), and missing the most valuable sources of structure that the forum already has (and/or has the potential of). In the mathematical theories of dynamical systems with emergent structure (which I think you're obliquely referring to), there are some exogenous structural features that modelers impose from on high (analogous to forum rules set by a forum admin/founder). Most of the interesting action in those models, however, is "emergent", based on the choices that agents in those models make (akin to how we forum members decide to allocate attention, what to respond to and, most importantly, what to post).

It's of course your choice to avoid this forum if the content (jointly caused by forum rules and the emergent structure created voluntarily by members and their interaction) doesn't adhere to the prescriptive principles you called for. I hope you stay! In the spirit of respectful debate, I wanted to note that, although my preferences over the style of forum content matches yours substantively, I would strongly argue against imposing rules to bring about the desired forum content (which we share, but disagree about procedurally). Hoping those of you forum members calling on brad for more rules/regulation will see what that risks and why the minimalist two-rule forum structure is more than enough for forum members to go forth and generate meaningful and abundant future forum structure with the content of our posts.

Let's be productive anti-entropic agents without asking the admin for the curtailment of speech you're asking for here:
"
Therefore, It would be good to conceive some enabling constraints (guidelines) and emphasize that the main attractor is an educational exchange about bioenergetics as a medicine and philosophy...
That can be done with the help of pinned posts, FAQs, and proper moderation.
Examples of enabling constraints:
Forum entries should be
substantive and respectful
with minimal or no personal name-calling
without informal fallacies like a straw man, etc...
"

@LetTheRedeemed I appreciate your posts and hope the most interesting forum members keep posting energetically and substantively. I take seriously your concern that offensive or politically incorrect content posted on this forum may cause forum members we would like to continue contributing to leave. That is a serious tradeoff to consider when advocating, like I am, in support of brad's minimalist structure with only two rules (allowing offensive posts to continue).

I think my preferences match yours to a large degree--about which forum members' posts to read and wishing to see a greater proportion of informative rather than shit-posts/fighting . But no matter how well-intentioned, adding more rules/restrictions would, in my view, risk a lot more than is lost because of the minimalist two-rule structure at present. See RPF. There is surely a place for virtuous anger, polemics, speculation, challenging Ray's ideas, or finding new links/understandings/context (possibly offensive to some) related to Ray's ideas.

The current structure is good in my view. More rules aren't needed. The structure we're looking for will be ours to create voluntarily. Coercion not needed. .

@brad The clearly defined and minimalist structure you've created for the forum (only two rules) and, within that structure, giving meaningful expression to free speech (e.g., Lol-ing rather than banning "f&!k you"...) are much appreciated. Long may it continue.

@DonkeyDude Your wife's hypothesis about having run so long on stress hormones jibes with my experience as an explanation for your fatigue.

After a decades of running on adrenalin/cortisol to feel "normal" before discovering Peat and experimenting with exogenous thyroid supplementation, I seem to recall that there were many times when eating a carbohydrate-rich diet or taking supplements to decrease/oppose adrenalin or cortisol, I experienced paradoxical results in the first 3 to 24 months similar to what you describe.

Even after normalizing thyroid (at least in the blood), I think I continued to behaviorally/psychologically "crave" stress to feel the endogenous stress hormones I was unfortunately so accustomed to: sleep deprivation, HIIT, anger, provoking conflict, etc.

Does anyone know if there's any literature or if Ray wrote anything regarding how long it takes to re-establish thyroid homeostasis in tissue -- across the many different types of tissue in the body -- following early responses (as expected) to thyroid supplementation (e.g. normal serum levels in thyroid-panel blood tests, normal body temperature, normal-range speedy Achilles tendon reflect)?

I once asked a very well-published senior endocrinologist (indirectly about Ray's critiques of endos relying too much on blood tests) whether he thought blood tests implied normal thyroid action in the tissue. His response was entirely sympathetic to Ray and other's critiques of over-reliance on blood tests when assessing a person's thyroid status. He went on to say that, because biopsies of human tissue are invasive/impractical/expensive -- and maybe also because the available techniques to analyze what healthy thyroid action looks like in tissues, e.g., leading to ample ATP production (I'm not sure about how good the existing lab techniques are), we know almost nothing about thyroid action in the tissue for a typical patient that endos see!

I'd be curious to hear other thoughts about reliable tests (we probably already know a lot of the common symptom profiles we can notice ourselves) to assess thyroid saturation/action and efficiency of mitochondria and ATP production. Given unlimited money, willingness to be biopsied, and access to the best university labs (not just run-of-the-mill tests offered by Labcorp, etc.)...how reliably might one measure thyroid levels in the tissue?

I suspect it's possible to have normal-to-high free T3, very good body temperature, and still suffer from metabolic problems (insufficient ATP or inflammation) in one's brain tissue (or elsewhere).

In my experience, homeostasis (of a much improved kind) eventually came after multiple years of Peat-inspired diet and thyroid supplementation. But the improvements were not in lock-step. The most frustrating and noticeable paradoxical situation was just as you described: achieving high body temperature with NDT or T3 and having brain fog, malaise, incapacitating fatigue (in the first month or so). I think it was the result of being an adrenalin/cortisol "addict". Brain fog and psychological tone lifted noticeably after 2 or 3 months of thyroid meds for me. But other improvements took longer.

I also don't think re-establishing homeostasis after beginning thyroid meds is typically a path of "steady", one-way (i.e., monotonic increasing) improvement. There should be improvements to justify continuing with the experiment, and it sounds like there were! I would expect that there will also be frustrating and unexpected (hopefully temporary) setbacks -- like waves of fatigue because your adrenalin/cortisol is much lower than you're used to.

@DavidPS That audio clip speaks directly to this thread.

In it, Peat mentions:
(i) Broda Barnes' finding that doubling dietary protein doubled his exogenous NDT requirement;
(ii) after the age of 30, aminio acids "of replacement" (especially methionine and cysteine) become inflammatory (at least in excess), and restricting them can be especially helpful for people that don't respond well to thyroid supplementation and/or have paradoxical inflammatory symptoms;
(iii) Peat recommends a 1:7 ratio of protein to carbohydrate or, equivalently (with some other assumptions about macros), 80-100g of protein in a 4000 calorie diet for a 30-year old man should be adjusted downward to 40-50g of protein in a 2000 calorie diet for an 80-year old;
(iv) limiting M-TOR with dietary methionine restriction (or taking rapamycin, as advocated by Tarmander at RPF) are worth considering as life-extension strategies based on the rodent studies @Mauritio posted in this thread.

Thanks for so consistently focusing us and directing attention to what's germane and highly relevant!

@LucH Good post. From those studies, do we think there are actionable dietary strategies or supplements that would specifically help keep reverse-T3 levels low or reasonably "under control"? Making sure there's plenty of selenium and (from the posts by @BroJonas, @DavidPS and @DonkeyDude ) total cholesterol>160 (or greater). Does that match your interpretation of what those studies and Peat's quotes imply about what can be done to promote pro-metabolic, well-functioning Deiodinases-3 and limit antimetabolic/high levels of reverse-T3? What else?

@Mauritio said in Methionine/Cysteine restriction increases longetivity AND energy expenditure:

Methylobacterium sp.

Are you considering trying to source Methylobacterium-sp for research/experimentation? I hope anyone who finds a source or undertakes an experiment will share details and provide reports -- to see if methionine/cysteine restriction could be achieved by methionase or a methionase-generating bacterium.

Two sources come up on the first results page from a not-so-thorough search:
https://webshop.dsmz.de/en/bacteria/Methylobacterium-sp-oxid-48.html

https://www.atcc.org/products/baa-1243

@Emilia Your diet sounds on-point, delicious and brilliantly pro-metabolic. I'm glad you mentioned about your cholesterol levels being adequate (for endogenous youth-steroid production), which is another important consideration when trying to rule out mechanisms that may lead to unwanted symptoms in general and to thyroid supplementation in particular.

Warm temperature in the hands and fingers, reaction speed (moderately quick "twitchiness" in the heel/hands/wrists) and absent brain fog (cognitive tone that wants to "see new possibilities", hungry for new insight, sensitive to aesthetics, e.g. 5-sense sensory pleasure of being outdoors, at least some fleeting moments of child-like "wonder", as Peat repeatedly mentioned) are among my most reliable "intuitive" indicators of good thyroid/metabolic status. Now I better understand your frustration: having on-point pro-metabolic diet for years on end and yet cold fingers as a persistent sign of (or consistent with) hypothyroidism or some metabolic block to achieving comfortably warm body temperature.

Just on a hunch: might you consider trying a quarter or half a grain of NDT?

I mostly prefer T3. But for whole-body warmth, there are times when NDT outperforms, especially in wintertime. I think NDT is more complex. I've had paradoxical responses to it after being on it regularly for multiple months, which brings me back to nibbling a T3 tablet as the simplest and most direct way for me to achieve the pro-metabolic markers I'm able to perceive. I use NDT sporadically every winter, usually for a spell of 3 or 5 days every few weeks if I don't get as much sunshine as I'd like, or am unusually busy with a work project that keeps me stuck in the office or sleep-deprived (e.g., international travel).

Please let us know if you figure anything out (with or without exogenous thyroid) that returns warmth to your hands and achieves the pro-metabolic markers you're wanting.

@Emilia I don't know. Based on what Peat wrote responding to people responding poorly to exogenous T3, I guess you've probably already given detailed consideration to the possibility of nutrient deficiencies, imbalanced ratios (copper : zinc, phosphorous : calcium, methionine : glycine, etc.) or high estrogen, prolactin, or Peaty approaches to treating PCOS (which may not be relevant at all, as I'm only guessing).

Based on my own experience, it's hard for me to imagine such negative symptoms in response to such a small does (2 or 3 micrograms of T3). But then again, I fully acknowledge that we're all different. Our beautiful heterogeneity (albeit sometimes frustrating in the context of not finding the benefits of a Peat experiment that others have posted about) should be kept front of mind. I'm mindful here to avoid overgeneralizations or one-size-fits-all pronouncements regarding how T3 can be used -- or may not be needed -- to achieve whatever we're individually after regarding whatever constitutes good metabolic health.

I can imagine how frustrating this is and don't mean to second-guess, but I have to ask:
--How confident are you that your hair loss is caused by 2mcg of T3?
--Have you tried NDT? If so, did it feel similar? Did it lead to similar problems?

I'm with @Peatful in thinking that it's wise to stop anything that seems to be repeatedly causing negative symptoms. I wouldn't want you soldiering through without pausing and coming at it from a different angle.

On the other hand (at the risk of sounding like an uncritical promoter), I think it bears repeating that there's a lot of exaggerated fear-mongering by the medical establishment and in alt-health circles overstating (alleged) risks of T3 and NDT, while ignoring profound benefits (e.g., deliberately obscuring or discounting the work of Broda Barnes). The profoundly under-appreciated therapeutic potential for T3 notwithstanding, it seems it's not working well -- not a good match for your context -- at this time.

If you're willing to start a thread giving more detail about what you eat, what brought you to Peating, what health challenges led you to want to experiment with thyroid, how frequently you've experimented with the 2 or 3 mcg of T3, and more details about other things you may have noticed when experimenting with it, then this board would probably generate some further thoughts on what's going on.

The basics (which I'm guessing you've already thought about intensively after a decade of Peating) would be to introduce T3 when you're:
-- very well-fed overall (eating ample portions of whatever energy-dense foods you particularly enjoy);
-- getting plenty of salt;
-- eating good amounts of foods that provide the B vitamins and aminos that Peat talked about frequently;
-- consuming enough tropical fruits, ice cream, other sweets that would be generally protective against the paradoxical adrenalin/cortisol responses to T3 that Peat wrote about some people experiencing in the initial days or weeks when experimenting with thyroid meds.

I hope that you'll achieve what you're wanting to achieve with exogenous thyroid, should you decide to revisit T3 or NDT -- or perhaps, better, finding a way to use food to achieve it.