Ray Peat on aging

"The healthy young brain contains a very large amount of cholesterol, almost all in the pure, non-esterified or free form—more than 99.5%, according to Orth and Bellosta (2012, citing Bjorkhem and Meaney, 2004). The aging, degenerating brain contains an increasing amount of esterified cholesterol,"

- September 2018 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"During the night, parathyroid hormone usually rises (Radjaipour 1986; Logue 1989, 1990; Fraser, 1998), and especially during aging, this causes a significant loss of calcium from the bones. Having a large part of the day’s calcium at bedtime reduces the nocturnal rise of PTH and calcium loss from bones"

- September 2017 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Hair loss, like obesity or hypertension, should be taken seriously, as an indication of a systemic metabolic problem. The metabolism of the hair follicle contains clues to aging, tissue regeneration, and cancer."

- September 2017 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"The easily oxidized short and medium-chain saturated fatty acids of coconut oil provide a source of energy that protects our tissues against the toxic inhibitory effects of the unsaturated fatty acids, and reduces their anti-thyroid effects. The animal studies of the last 60 years suggest that these effects also provide protection against cancer, heart disease, and premature aging. Other effects that can be expected inclu de protection against excessive blood clotting, protection of the fetal brain, protection against various stress-induced problems including epilepsy, and some degree of protection against sun-damage of the skin."

- Nutrition For Women

"Estrogen is the hormone for beginnings, a sort of biochemical eraser which can eliminate recently recorded information, restoring the underlying primitive capacity for growth. When we are threatened, by injury or aging, we need the capacity for renewal of cells."

- Nutrition For Women

"Estrogen promotes production of prolactin, a protein hormone, and its close analog, growth hormone. Ionizing radiation, aging, and oxygen deprivation all cause biochemical changes similar to those produced by estrogen."

- Nutrition For Women

"Patterns of excitation become stabilized as knowledge, and as developmental modifications of tissue: growth and aging and their ramifications. An excess of estrogen, or other factors interfering with proteolysis, could block the capacity to experience. The difficulty of recalling dreams probably relates to this synthetic (non-proteolytic) parasympathetic dominance during sleep."

- Nutrition For Women

"Even in rich cultures, protein deficiency, inappropriate exercise, and emotional tension will contribute to premature aging of the individual, and damage to the offspring."

- Nutrition For Women

"This anti-oxygen effect of estrogen suggests a convergence of reproductive aging research with Warburgs theory that damaged respiration is the primary defect in cancer, and also with Selyes observation that estrogens effect resembles the first, shock phase of the stress reaction."

- Nutrition For Women

"All of the essential nutrients are needed constantly to prevent deterioration of the body. At different times, nutrients such as vitamin C, pantothenic acid, or vitamin E, have been identified as methods to prevent premature aging. In our culture, many people do have severe deficiencies of those nutrients, but any dietary deficiency can cause degenerative changes."

- Nutrition For Women

"The distribution of fat is similar in aging and in Cushings syndrome. Vitamin E is known to shift enzyme activities in a way that would offset this distribution, and this might occur in cases caused by hormone disturbances other than mere aging."

- Nutrition For Women

"Some of the changes of aging probably relate to autoimmune reactions, in which the body attacks itself; both testosterone and progesterone normalize the immune system, suppressing auto-immune problems."

- Nutrition For Women

"Inside the cells, vitamin E inhibits destructive and wasteful oxidation (such as is involved in aging and cancer) and makes the normal oxidative process more efficient, providing more useful energy for a given amount of oxygen."

- Nutrition For Women

"n old age, the walls of blood vessels tend to become hardened with calcium. In at least some tissues, it is known that calcification begins in degenerating mitochondria, and mitochondria tend to deteriorate in aging tissue. Nutrients such as iodine, vitamin E, magnesium and vitamin B2 are especially important for maintaining the function of the mitochondria, which produce most of our energy."

- Nutrition For Women

"Since aging and x-rays have some biochemical effects similar to those of estrogen, they might also antagonize thyroxin; this suggests that large doses of thyroxin might be used in senility, radiation sickness, and cancer."

- Nutrition For Women

"An interesting theory of aging is that racemic molecules accumulate with time; these molecules are known to have different physical and biological properties."

- Nutrition For Women

"One of the oldest known functions of vitamin C is its role (hydroxylation) in the synthesis of collagen for connective tissue. At high concentrations, it can also depolymerize (make more soluble) the collagen, reversing one of the important features of the aging process."

- Nutrition For Women

"The unsaturated oils also can stimulate a dangerous kind of oxidation, in which they break down in ways that seem to accelerate the aging process. One of the more conservative investigators of vitamin E recently (in A.J. Clin. Nutr., 1974) revised his opinion regarding the required amount of vitamin E: he wrote that the requirement of 15 mg./day will be increased to about 50 mg./day if the person eats much unsaturated oil (fish, seeds, etc.)."

- Nutrition For Women

"Although electronic energy is intimately involved in life, there are two chemicals that are involved in maintaining the energy charge of cells, and it is the energy charge which is most immediately related to biological function and structure. Creatine phosphate (CrP) is a kind of energy reservoir for muscle, and in a vitamin E deficiency creatine leaks out of the muscles. Aging also seems to involve defective creatine phosphate reserves (Verzar). Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is more directly involved in all kinds of life function, for example maintaining the resting state of nerves and muscles, and governing secretion, the retention of proteins, and the elimination of toxins."

- Nutrition For Women

"Many of the changes caused by daily stresses are reversed during deep slow wave sleep. The amount of slow wave sleep is decreased with aging. A few animal studies have found that artificially extended sleep reversed some of the major problems of old age. Progesterone is able to increase the amount of slow wave sleep, probably because of its effect on body temperatur"

- November 2020 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"With aging, the organism’s reduced functionality is paralleled by structural changes."

- November 2018 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"It has been known for several decades that the production of progesterone and DHEA decreases steadily with aging, and in recent years it has been noticed that when aged skin is exposed to sunlight it produces only half as much vitamin D as young skin does. Old skin has about half as much cholesterol as young skin, so it isn’t surprising that those substances derived from it are reduced."

- November 2018 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"The characteristic opacity of aged skin is the result of an accumulation of layers of dead cells on the surface. While the vital underlying skin cells contain much less cholesterol than normal, the inert cells contain an increased amount of cholesterol sulfate. When the skin’s free cholesterol content is increased experimentally, the skin regains its ability to shed the dead superficial cells. ‘When it’s lowered experimentally, as with a statin, the skin takes on the structure and appearance of old skin. Aging seems to be a state of cholesterol starvation."

- November 2018 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Excitatory transmission appears to contribute to the loss of cholesterol in the brain during aging; the amount of cholesterol in synapses decreases with aging (Sodero, et al., 2011). Although excitatory (glutamatergic) stimulation lowers brain cholesterol, environmental enrichment (meaningful experience) increases it (Levi, et al., 2005), and also reverses the age-related decline in the neurosteroids derived from cholesterol"

- November 2018 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Besides eliminating polyunsaturated fats (n-3 and n-6) from the diet to reduce the formation of cholesterol esters and to reduce the decline of cholesterol synthesis with aging, supplementing with progesterone is a way to reduce the formation of esters (Synouri-Vrettakou and Mitropoulos, 1983; Miller and Melnykovych, 1984; Jeng and Klem, 1984; Mulas, et al., 2011; Anchisi, et al., 2012). Lidocaine is another inhibitor of cholesterol ester formation (Bell, 1981; Bell, et al., 1982) that is probably useful in some degenerative conditions."

- November 2018 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"The holistic view of the organism and its adaptive potentials, advocated by Hippocrates and Aristotle, was rejected by the new science of the last few centuries. Recovering that view, and using it creatively, has become urgent, if we want to understand the processes of development, including aging and the degenerative diseases"

- November 2017 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"The accumulation of iron in the tissues during stress and aging makes them progressively more likely to experience serious damage during moments of oxygen deprivation, as the iron atoms catalyze reactions such as lipid peroxidation"

- November 2017 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"the proper function of heme oxygenase is to support progressive improvement in the organism’s phenotype, rather than the aging, inflammation, fibrosis, and cancer, that are now the eventual result of its activity. Heme oxygenase, and enzymes that make NO, HCN, and H2S, might simply need the guidance of an organism’s response to an enriched environment."

- November 2017 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Some of the factors that cause atrophy of the thymus gland include cortisol and other glucocorticoid hormones, estrogen, prostaglandins, polyunsaturated fatty acids, lipid peroxidation, nitric oxide, endotoxin, hypoglycemia, and ionizing radiation. Progesterone and thyroid hormone support restoration of the thymus gland, providing protection by opposing all of those agents of atrophy. An increase of sugar in the diet can correct some of the metabolic changes of aging"

- November 2016 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Drug company manipulation of information about estrogen has been more extreme than its treatment of serotonin. Activated by stress, along with serotonin, it is one of the major activators of the corticotropin release hormone, CRH, which activates the pituitary and adrenal glands, and promotes inflammation, and is a major factor in PPD (Glynn and Sandman, 29014, HahnHolbrook, 2016), as well as in other types of depression, and aging, and Alzheimer’s disease."

- May 2019 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"In women, MRI images show (Hoekzema, et al., 2017) that the grey matter of the brain shrinks considerably during pregnancy, similar to the changes of advanced aging, and in some women these changes were still present after two years. However, another study has found a very rapid restoration of brain structure in the second postpartum month. In these healthy women, the brain restoration in that two month period was equivalent to five years of rejuvenation (Luders, et al., 2018)."

- May 2019 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"The stimulation of CRH production by histamine, serotonin, endorphins, IL-1, nitric oxide, and/or estrogen in good health leads to the activation of complex and appropriate antistress reactions. When stress is very intense or prolonged, or if nutrition hasn’t been adequate, all of the activating signals, CRH itself, and the antistress glucocorticoids, can produce effects that aren’t integrated into the organism’s functions as it confronts its problems, and that produce symptoms and, eventually, degenerative processes and aging. That failure of integration is almost always the result of insufficient metabolic energy."

- May 2019 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Poor nutrition, aging, and other stresses weaken our antiinflammatory defenses, leading to chronic systemic inflammation,"

- March 2021 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Prolonged exposure to environmental conditions that are far from the perfect conditions of healthy gestation results in a systemic inflammatory state, and this chronic inflammation leads to the degenerative processes of aging, with a failure of the tissue restorative processes."

- March 2021 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"The loss of stem cells, and the accumulation of senescent cells that should have been replaced from the stem cell reserve, is a general feature of aging, though tissues differ in the rate of stem cell loss, according to their special stresses."

- March 2021 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"As our tissues accumulate polyunsaturated fats with aging, the production of prostaglandins becomes greater, and the balance is less likely to be fully repaired."

- March 2017 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Men’s testosterone declines with stress and aging, and its conversion to estrogen is increased by stress and inflammation. Endotoxin specifically increases the conversion of testosterone to estrogen"

- March 2017 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"With aging, iron and the polyunsaturated fats accumulate in the brain. Estrogen slows the removal of dopamine, increasing its opportunity to react toxically with iron and highly unsaturated fats, especially arachidonic acid and DHA; it also tends to increase the formation of prostaglandins and nitric oxide. Progesterone’s opposite effects probably account for the lower prevalence of Parkinson’s disease in women than in men."

- March 2017 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"The enzyme that degrades superoxide, superoxide dismutase (SOD), is sold as a health food supplement, following the cultural script that aging is caused by oxidative stress, and that antioxidants are protective. That view is being increasingly questioned, with the recognition of a reductive cellular state as a common factor in shock, stress, and degeneration."

- July 2019 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"The substitution of information for energy, the abstraction of the world, led to theories of aging and death of organisms as resulting from the inevitable, entropic, loss of information, the degradation of DNA through somatic mutations, produced by oxidative damage, and to a theory of the fate of the universe as an entropic heat death."

- July 2017 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Aging itself involves a metabolic shift in the direction of cancer metabolism, with a relative inability to reduce energy expenditure in the basal, fasting state, and with increased fat oxidation, decreased glucose oxidation"

- July 2016 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Some of the best known ideas of biology—including genes, membranes and receptors—have blocked, and continue to block, understanding of aging, cancer, stress, shock, epilepsy, regeneration, perception, and thinking."

- January 2019 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"The possibility of extending the period of development, delaying or eliminating aging and restoring normal differentiation to cancerous tissue, grew out of the work of the experimental embryologists who saw the importance of investigating the physical-chemical properties of the living substance itself."

- January 2019 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"The biological changes associated with the shift of fuels from glucose to fatty acids and amino acids in stress, aging, and dementia, have been called the deprivation syndrome"

- January 2017 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"As the proportion of polyunsaturated fatty acids increases with aging, some arachidonic acid becomes incorporated into the brain, and, especially during the night, the highly unsaturated fatty acids amplify the excitatory processes, including the formation of prostaglandins and other inflammation-producing compounds."

- January 2017 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"tamin E deficiency or PUFA excess, by ionizing radiation, by oxygen deprivation, or by aging. All of these conditions involved interference with, or decreased activity of, the crucial respiratory enzyme, cytochrome C oxidase."

- January 2016 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"With aging, and during stress, animals metabolism shifts toward reduction, with a higher ratio of lactate to pyruvate, of NADH to NAD, of ascorbate to dehydroascorbate, etc., a state of reductive stress."

- January 2016 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Some of the obvious changes of aging, such as loss of muscle (Martinez-Moreno, et al., 2007) and gain of fat (Bahadoran, et al., 2015) and decreased sensitivity to insulin (Ropelle, et al., 2013), are produced by increased nitric oxide."

- January 2016 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"During aging and many stress-induced conditions, it can be therapeutic to use substances that block our energy-limiting systems, to permit restoration of full energy production."

- January 2016 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"People who studied the effects of steroids on aging skin found that the steroids which reversed structural age changes in the skin (progesterone, testosterone, pregnenolone) sometimes restored hair growth"

- Generative Energy Restoring The Wholeness Of Life

"I think oxygen wastage is a central event in aging. Just as a cut potato requires oxygen to make melanin, so do our tissues. Iron tends to keep accumulating in our tissues with aging, and iron appears to be a factor in wasting oxygen (especially in age pigment)."

- Generative Energy Restoring The Wholeness Of Life

"Two clear differences have been found between old blood and young blood. The albumin in old blood is in a more oxidized state. (I think it was the famous gerontologist, Verzar, who first reported this.) Although, at least in aging humans, there is much less oxygen in the blood, something causes the albumin to be in a more oxidized state in older blood. The other distinct feature of older blood might also seem paradoxical at first: the red blood cells are younger. That is, in an old individual, the red blood cells are more fragile-possibly from being more quickly damaged from oxidation-and are replaced sooner, and so, on average, they are many weeks younger than the cells in a healthy young individual. Neither of these features is paradoxical. Poor oxygenation is a stress, and causes the waste of glucose and compensatory mobilization of fat from storage, and the relatively reducing environment in the cytoplasm causes the mobilization of iron from storage, in the toxic reduced (ferrous) form. Products of the peroxidative interaction of iron with unsaturated fats are evident in the blood (and other tissues) during stress, and especially so in older animals."

- Generative Energy Restoring The Wholeness Of Life

"One of the basic metabolic changes in aging is slowing of the rate of protein turn-over in cells, and it appears that dietary restriction enhances the protein turn-over rate in aging animals. I think it is likely that unsaturated fats and the amino acid, cysteine, both contribute to the agerelated retardation of protein metabolism"

- Generative Energy Restoring The Wholeness Of Life

"W. Donner Denckla suggested that there is a death hormone in the pituitary gland, which appears at puberty and initiates the process of aging by suppressing the use of oxygen. He maintained that merely providing thyroid supplement wouldnt protect against it, and that it was a distinct hormone, although it tended to appear in tissue extracts in association with prolactin and growth hormone. Although I think there is still a lot to be learned about the pituitary hormones, I dont think Denckla discovered anything except puberty."

- Generative Energy Restoring The Wholeness Of Life

"The skeletal changes (shrinkage, curving of the back, moving forward of the lower jaw) which are so characteristic of old age in humans, also occur in other animals in aging and under the influence of the stress hormones."

- Generative Energy Restoring The Wholeness Of Life

"In my experiments, I found that both aging and estrogen stimulation caused a great increase in the availability of reactive electrons, which I measured by their reaction with a dye. These electrons come from an interactive system that involves the proteins (cysteine) and glutathione, and the various cofactor-catalysts such as ascorbic acid and NADH"

- 2001 - February

"Intense exercise damages cells in ways that cumulatively impair metabolism. There is clear evidence that glycolysis, producing lactic acid from glucose, has toxic effects, suppressing respiration and killing cells. Within_five minutes, exercise lowers the activity of enzymes that oxidize glucose. Diabetes, Alzheimers disease, and general aging involve increased lactic acid production and accumulated metabolic (mitochondrial) damage."

- 2000 - July

"Exercise, like aging, obesity, and diabetes, increases the levels of circulating free fatty acids and lactate. But ordinary activity of an integral sort, activates the systems in an organized way, increasing carbon dioxide and circulation"

- 2000 - July

"Mitochondrial metabolism is now being seen as the basic problem in aging and several degenerative diseases."

- 2000 - July

"In ordinary nuclear chromosomal genes, DNA repair is well known. The other kind of repair, in which unmutated cells replace the. genetically damaged cells, has been commonly observed in the skin of the face: During intense sun exposure, mutant cells accumulate; but after a period in which the skin hasnt been exposed to the damaging radiation, the skin is made up of healthy young cells. In the way that the skin can be seen to recover from genetic damage, that had been considered to be permanent and cumulative, simply by avoiding the damaging factor, mitochondnal aging is coming to be seen as both avoidable and repairable."

- 2000 - July

"Iron and calcium both tend to accumulate with aging or stress, and both promote excitatory damage; bicarbonate contributes to keeping iron in its inactive state, and probably has a similar effect against a broad spectrum of excitatory substances."

- 1999 - December- Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Shock, inflammation, aging and death have been proposed to have survival value, because of this totalitarian view of genetics. Couldnt it be that organisms simply arent perfect, and that some things are just systematically screwed up? That ts, an organism has a certain strength, resistance, or adaptive capacity, but if it finds itself in conditions that are too difficult, then processes that never did anything to aid survival might develop, as several individually valid defensive maneuvers ‘start to interfere with each other."

- 1998 - Ray Peat's Newsletter - 4

"The inappropriateness of the mental image of a cell with pumps and motors leads to the treatment of shock with things that produce shock, of heart failure with things that produce heart failure, and of aging with things that accelerate aging."

- 1998 - Ray Peat's Newsletter - 4

"In aging, connective tissue becomes hardened by chemical cross-linking of the large molecules. If amino groups are well saturated with carbon dioxide, this type of reaction should be inhibited."

- 1998 - Ray Peat's Newsletter - 3

"What we call inflammation offers a good conceptual link between the studies on excitotoxicity or cellular stress, and the newer approaches to the treatment of aging and degenerative diseases, based on ideas of regeneration and development. Controlling inflammation becomes part -of promoting regeneration."

- 1998 - Ray Peat's Newsletter - 2

"Since the time of Brown-Sequard.and Eugen Steinach, it has been accepted that declining testicular function is a common feature of aging, and testosterone was probably the first hormone that was clearly found to decrease consistently with aging."

- 1998 - May Ray Peat's Newsletter

"The active thyroid hormone, T3, declines with aging, and this necessarily lowers production of pregnenolone and progesterone."

- 1998 - May Ray Peat's Newsletter

"In aging women and men, as the breasts and prostate atrophy, their estrogen/antiestrogen ratio increases."

- 1998 - May Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Progesterone and pregnenolone also decline in aging men."

- 1998 - May Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Oxygen deprivation causes tissues to retain  calcium (and iron), as does estrogen in many  cases, being similar to aging in promoting cellular  uptake of calcium. Since the porphyrins strongly bind metals, it has been suggested that they may have a role in mediating the deposition of metals in stressed tissues."

- 1997 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"In general, lactic acid in the blood can be taken as a sign of defective respiration, since the breakdown of glucose to lactic acid increases to make up for deficient oxidative energy production. Normal aging seems to involve a tendency toward excess lactic acid production, and age-pigment is known to activate the process."

- 1997 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Carrels work with tissue-culture led hum to believe that changes in the organisms fluids were a major part of the aging process. Extracts from animal embryos have been used medically for treating old people, because of their confirmed effect on cell function."

- 1995 - September Ray Peat's Newsletter

"It is now established that aging animals, at the time they become infertile, are deficient in progesterone, but still produce estrogen. Even in young individuals, when stress occurs around the time of ovulation, interference with progesterone production will prevent implantation. If progesterone becomes deficient after the embryo has become implanted, miscarriage occurs."

- 1995 - August.September - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"About 30 years ago, researchers began to understand that reproductive aging was not caused by the lack of eggs, and the aged uterus was able to support pregnancy if it had the might hormonal support. Interest turned to the brain cells in the hypothalamus which regulate the pituitary."

- 1995 - August.September - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Stress, especially when augmented by estrogen, leads to injury, exhaustion, and aging. The uterus and ovaries participate in the response to stress, but (as Zeilmaker and Wise have shown) the brain proves to be more directly involved in menopause than the ovaries or uterus. Coordination turns out to be crucial for complex processes such as ovulation, fertilization, and implantation. The destruction of the nerve cells that regulate the pituitary makes coordination impossible."

- 1995 - August.September - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"gonadotropins participate in the development, maintenance, and functioning of the ovaries, and their effects depend on their timing, their balance with each other and with the steroids produced by the ovaries in response to their stimulation, and their actions are modified by many other factors, ovarian, nervous, pituitary, uterine, and immunological. During youth, the system functions in a coordinated way, with ovulation as a consequence. During aging, the crucial changes appear to be a decreased ability of the ovary and the brain to produce progesterone."

- 1995 - August.September - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Reperfusion injury, any stress causing oxygen deplation and an excessively reduced (electron-rich) cellutar state, the importance of lipid peroxidation and iron in aging, and the role of iron in damaging steroid synthesis in steroidogenic tissues, have been important lines of study lately."

- 1994 - June - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"The heart gives us some clues to our general resistance to stress, aging, disease, and death. The heart and the brain are the most stress-resistant organs, and while moderate stress and malnutrition can cause the skin and thymus gland to lose more than 90% of their substance, only the most prolonged and intense stress can cause the heart and brain to lose more than a fourth of their substance."

- 1992 - June - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"The many ways in which the heart is able to resist stress, and even to thrive on it can be generalized to develop ways to protect other organs, and the whole body, from the chronic and cumulative stresses that lead to generalized atrophy, declining function, and aging. During stress, the heart and other working organs become resistant to the glucocorticoid hormones. When a person is given radioactive testosterone, it can be seen to reach the highest concentration in the heart. It is testosterone’s antiglucocorticoid effect which causes it to enlarge skeletal muscles, when exercise is moderate."

- 1992 - June - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"In thinking about Meerson’s achievements in protecting the heart against stress, it is important to remember that the heart ts our most stress-resistant organ, and that the things that protect the heart from deadly stress will also protect the other organs from the everyday stresses, which accumulate to cause the problems of general aging. Liver, lungs, pancreas and other essential organs are susceptible to the same kinds of damage as the heart, but under conditions that are relatively mild and ordinary."

- 1992 - June - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"The consistency with which oxygen becomes deficient in aging, stress, and estrogen excess suggests that a basic coordination mechanism may be involved, jn which there is a shift toward the conditions which will activate the expression of certain genes - possibly the hypoglycernia-stress-heat-shock proteins, or possibly simply the proteins of cell division and growth."

- 1992 - June - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Although Mechnikov believed that the phagocytes were responsible for the atrophy of aging, he also believed that bacterial toxins from the intestine dominated the aging process."

- 1992 - August.September - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"With aging, pregnenolone and its derivatives, progesterone and DHEA, decline sharply. The brain, the organ with the highest concentration of those stabilizing substances, has many systems for adapting to their decreasing concentration, but the immune system is probably less able to compensate for those aging changes."

- 1992 - August.September - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"While many people think of thyroid as a kind of stimulant, because it can cure the coma or lethargy of myxedema, this is a very misleading idea. In hypothyroidism, the brain exciting hormones adrenalin, estrogen, and cortisol are usually elevated, and the nerve-muscle relaxant magnesium is low. Normal, deep sleep is rare in a hypothyroid person. The correct dose of trilodothyronine (the active thyroid hormone) with magnesium is a reliable treatment for insomnia, cramps, and anxiety, whether these symptoms are caused by fatigue, or aging, or alcohol withdrawal."

- 1991 - June- Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Another kind of fish, the salmon, which return to fresh water for reproducing, show the other extreme of adaptation to an osmotic problem. After living isotonically in the hypertonic ocean environment, keeping their mineral content and osmolarity lower than sea-water’s, they suddenly have to readapt to the extremely hypotonic fresh water. The secretion of prolactin and glucocorticoid steroids seems to facilitate this sudden adaptation, but those hormones also seem to produce an explosively rapid kind of aging. I think their condition is similar to the Cushingeid symptoms that frequently appear in middle-aged people."

- 1991 - July - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Since I had already spent years investigating the effects of light on hormones and health, I began to see that the existing knowledge regarding the involvement of stress and glucocorticoid hormones in the aging process meshed perfectly with my concept of winter-sickness"

- 1991 - January - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"large number of biochemical similarities in aging and in the state of estrogen dominance, and the absence of any detectable biochemical differences between the states, except their history.? For example, in both states the oxygen tension is relatively low, and as a result, unsaturated lipids are rapidly changed into age pigment or lipofuscin through lipid peroxidation."

- 1991 - January - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"The gerontologist, V.V. Frolkis, recently found that mice lived 43% longer than animals on the standard diet when they periodically had activated charcoal added | to their food. This is the clearest evidence I have seen that bowel toxins make a major contribution to the aging process."

- 1991 - February.March - Ray Peat's Newsletter (1)

"While Bogomoletz and Metchnikof saw the bowel toxins as the factor which drove the aging process, [ see bowel toxins rather as a relatively late-acting factor that accelerates a process which develops for other reasons. Once our detoxifying mechanisms begin to fail, bowel toxins pass the bowel with relative ease, and rapidly destroy the remaining systems of defense and detoxification."

- 1991 - February.March - Ray Peat's Newsletter (1)

"The altered hormonal environment and weakened digestion of an aging organism create a new balance between the animal and the bowel flora, sometimes allowing the proliferation of more toxic flora."

- 1991 - February.March - Ray Peat's Newsletter (1)

"Clotting too easily is just one of the problems that can be caused by an excess of estrogen, and I don’t mean to give it too much emphasis, since [ consider its toxic effects on the brain, and its acceleration of brain aging to be its worst effects"

- 1991 - April - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Although many kinds of experiments showed both prenatal and transgenerational influences of the environment on intelligence, body proportions, andrate of aging, the genetics reductionist school ignored them, and defined themselves as the only scientific school of biology."

- 1990 - October - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Professor Soderwall and his students at the University of Oregon had shown that the corpora lutea (areas in the ovary which mainly produce progesterone) appeared to fail in aging hamsters, and that vitamin E supplements could extend fertility by asignificant amount."

- 1990 - October - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Progesterone’s effect in pregnancy is to assure the availability of oxygen and nutrients for the embryo, but it also has the general effect of inhibiting the formation of lipofuscin, and of other aging signs, by improving metabolic efficiency."

- 1990 - October - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"the idea that estrogen’s influence appears to increase with aging, and even to contribute to the process of aging, was contrary to the doctrine that has been promoted by the pharmaceutical industry."

- 1990 - October - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"The idea of many factors acting in the same direction, and tending to have a cumulative effect, seemed to me to have a general biological significance. It seemed to be part of the answer to the question of what it is which is lost, or accumulated, during aging, which accounts for the decreased ability to adapt to the changing environment."

- 1990 - October - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"The main features of aging can be produced directly by administering excessive amounts of cortisol. These features include atrophy of skin, arteries, muscle, bone, immune system, and parts of the brain, loss of pigment (melanin), deposition of fat in certain areas, and slowed conduction velocity of nerves."

- 1990 - October - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"The physiology of aging (especially reproductive aging) overlaps the physiology of stress."

- 1990 - October - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Many studies have demonstrated that puberty seems to trigger the mechanism of aging, and the idea of a death hormone, located in the pituitary gland, has been suggested."

- 1990 - October - Ray Peat's Newsletter