Ray Peat - Thyroid

“Now that our public health establishment has eliminated smoking from public places, maybe they can find a way to reduce stress and disease by removing morons from positions of power.”
~Ray Peat

Not sure what that first quote has to do with the thyroid exactly, but it is awesome. Dr. Ray does coincidentally rhyme with Dr. Dre. He sounds pretty gangsta in that quote. Check yo’self fools!

If you had to summarize Peat’s primary objective in terms of his anti-aging, health problem management strategy – it would be to maximize what to him is a true evolutionary advancement – a high thyroid-generated metabolism (as opposed to like, a high amphetamine metabolism). This, in and of itself, would eliminate many health problems. But because of the thyroid hormones’ basic properties, they have a role of incalculable importance to play with the reduction of the stress and inflammation pathway of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis as well. Stress hormones and inflammation are well-known to contribute to just about every health problem known. Interestingly, thyroid hormone appears to be one of the primary governors of our response to stress, and is therefore a powerful anti-stress hormone because of it.

In fact, if you read this on how to raise your metabolism, you’ll notice in physician Henry Bieler’s description of the “adrenal type,” that many of those traits are attributable to high thyroid, not necessarily “strong adrenals” or whatever Bieler may have been attributing those characteristics to.

Anyway, here are some of the quotes I gathered from his books. They are quite revealing. We’ll discuss quite a bit more about the thyroid throughout the rest of Ray May, which is heating up! Get it? Thyroid? Heating up? Oh well, I try. Imagine how silly I’ll be once I’m eating Jello.

“Selye’s work with the diseases of stress, and the anti-stress hormones of the adrenal cortex, helped many scientists to think more clearly about the interaction of the organism with its environment, but it has led others to focus too narrowly on hormones of the adrenal cortex (such as cortisol and cortisone), and to forget the older knowledge about natural resistance. There are probably only a few physicians now practicing who would remember to check for hypothyroidism in an arthritis patient, or in other stress-related conditions. Hypothyroidism is a common cause of adrenal insufficiency, but it also has some direct effects on joint tissues. In chronic hypothyroidism (myxedema and cretinism), knees and elbows are often bent abnormally.


By the 1930’s, it was well established that the resistance of the organism depended on the energy produced by respiration under the influence of the thyroid gland, as well as on the adrenal hormones, and that the hormones of pregnancy (especially progesterone) could substitute for the adrenal hormones. In a sense, the thyroid hormone is the basic anti-stress hormone, since it is required for the production of the adrenal and pregnancy hormones.”


“Thyroid hormone is necessary for respiration on the cellular level, and makes possible all higher biological functions. Without the metabolic efficiency which is promoted by thyroid hormone, life couldn’t get much beyond the single-cell stage. Without adequate thyroid, we become sluggish, clumsy, cold, anemic, and subject to infections, heart disease, headaches, cancer, and many other diseases, and seem to be prematurely aged, because none of our tissues can function normally. Besides providing the respiratory energy which is essential to life, thyroid hormones seem to stimulate and direct protein synthesis.


In hypothyroidism there is little stomach acid, and other digestive juices (and even intestinal movement) are inadequate, so gas and constipation are common. Foods aren’t assimilated well, so even on a seemingly adequate diet there is ‘internal malnutrition.’ Magnesium is poorly absorbed, and a magnesium deficiency can lead to irritability, blood clots, vascular spasms and angina pectoris, and many other problems. Heart attacks, hardening of the arteries, and both high and low blood pressure can be caused by hypothyroidism.”


“One of the thyroid hormone’s important functions is to improve digestion and bowel health.”

Hans Selye

“Stress is not a specific reaction.  The stress response is, by definition, not specific, since it can be produced by virtually any agent.” 

-Hans Selye 

Long overdue, I finally got my hands on some Hans Selye, recently picking my way through The Stress of Life. I had always heard interesting and positive things said about Selye over the years, and became particularly interested in him after repeatedly being exposed to PUFA-basher Joe Blair’s screen name: HansSelyeWasCorrect.

In a general sense, Hans Selye was correct, and his work has tied up a bunch of loose ends and re-affirmed the direction I’ve been heading in over the past year.

That direction is one in which the stress response of the human body, in which cortisol is the primary star player that I tend to focus on, is the primary instigator of the general degeneration process – from impaired glucose metabolism to low body temperature to poor immune system to a rise in weight set point to you name it.

When I first began my health exploration, it seemed pretty clear that diet was far and away the most pivotal element in the development of all these modern diseases, as human races all over the globe had tremendous physical fortitude and disease resistance as catalogued by the likes of Weston A. Price, Denis Burkitt, Hugh Trowell, Robert McCarrison, and others. And a change in diet from unrefined, nutritious, primitive, unprocessed foods to the white stuff and vegetable oil brought about massive degeneration. No one was spared, and all races of human beings worldwide have since received tattered and torn genetic hand-me-downs. We don’t even have 32 straight teeth anymore. Degenerates I tellz ya!

And this still holds true in my belief system. When citizens of the globe get half of their calories from refined sugar and starch and an ever-greater amount from oxidized, PUFA-rich seed oils, it’s hard to blame their maladies on “high stress levels” without first addressing what is a known and thoroughly-proven root cause of the entire unraveling of good health.

Still, I’ve been fascinated to study how germs can cause type 2 diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and autoimmune disease… How dieting can cause infertility… How death of a parent can cause a model to gain 60 pounds in a year… How carbohydrate restriction can cause a dude’s balls to shrivel up to the size of raisins or a woman to suffer from severe panic attacks… How a vegan diet can rot your kids’ teeth out even if you are breastfeeding them… How undersleeping can cause diabetes… Or how running marathons can trigger autoimmune disease or stop a woman from menstruating.

In fact, because so many people are engaged in doing some of these things, many cases in the name of health, it has become my primary focus to tell everyone how stupid they are (which comes natural to me anyways – I got pretty poor grades all throughout grade school and junior high and was repeatedly called a dumbass, quietly, as I hit puberty way before anyone else and was the biggest, strongest, and most physically dominant guy up until high school when my dwarf friends all outgrew me by a foot. So, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, I like to call other people dumb now). These are often much MORE harmful than eating a crappy diet built around nutritionally-devoid foods, especially when we are all in a weakened state due to our bum genetics and pansy, fragile endocrine systems.

But what Selye offers is simply a unification of ALL those things under one umbrella. His career and research all funneled into the idea that the human being, and all mammals, have a generalized stress response – or General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS). And any stressor, whether it’s nutrient deficiency, omega 6 overload (more significance on this to come), gluten allergy, a toxic substance in the environment, too much exercise, sleep deprivation, drug use, endurance exercise, psychological distress from a traumatic event, injury, infectious illness, dietary restriction, cold, negative body image, pregnancy, not following your dreams in life, or being in an abusive relationship makes little difference in the overall outcome.

Stress = Stress, and it comes in all shapes, sizes, and in 32 fruity flavors.

What’s poetic about all of this is that, while this response to stress is reliable, general, and alike for us all, the triggers of those stresses and how they translate into physical symptoms of illness couldn’t possibly be more unique or individual. In other words, both commonality and individuality are in a sense fused together.

Selye originally noticed this when he introduced a very wide variety of stressors, from toxic chemicals to psychological stress upon lab animals. After autopsy, all of them showed similar pathology. The adrenals were enlarged, inflamed, and congested, and other endocrine patterns were seen that go along with the increase in adrenal activity.

This was exactly what Robert McCarrison observed as well in his laboratory in India. Only McCarrison was producing dietary deficiencies ranging from the exclusion of various B-vitamins to supplying diets with inadequate protein. Yet, the pathological changes were always the same, and were witnessed in everything from pigeons to guinea pigs to monkeys. Swollen adrenals, atrophied thyroid gland, atrophied sex glands, deranged digestive tracts with paper thin digestive walls (Leaky Gut anyone?). Note, he used primarily refined carbohydrates, the staple foods of nearly every current human civilization, to induce these deficiencies.

Highly-recommended for-the-public-audience author Jon Gabriel’s emphasis on the psychological focus that must be incorporated when helping someone overcome obesity or impaired glucose metabolism has helped my comprehensive viewpoint expand even more. It’s no coincidence that two people with long-term weight problems contacted me recently with virtually the same story. They were never fat, and then a close parent died in their teenage years and the pounds flew onto them and never left.

Likewise, I talked to a girl in the area I’m in right now who’s looking to help get military wives back into shape. Seems when the husband goes off to war they start packing on some extra "rations."

Anyway, that’s a rough introduction to Selye. We’ll be talking about some more specifics in the weeks ahead, which will be great to relieve us of some of our food Nazism as we approach the time of year when relaxed and guiltless indulgence should be our frame of mind… for health’s sake.

If you haven’t done so already, take a moment to review the description of Henry Bieler’s “Adrenal Type” in THIS FREE EBOOK. It is no coincidence that Bieler found those with the strongest and most resilient adrenal glands to be the ones who, in the face of stress, sickness, or whatever challenges they faced, could resist just about anything (like the healthy “primitives” discovered by Price). That is the ultimate ideal, and something that we’ll go over from Selye’s work pointing in a similar direction in the upcoming posts.

Befriending Insulin

Make no mistake, there are some insulin haters out there. They have managed to pollute the minds of good folks like you and me into thinking that insulin is like Insulin Bin Laden – a bad dude with no redeeming qualities.

Newcomers to www.180degreehealth.com are often still under the influence of low-carbism. Yeah, I know Taubes had a lot of references. I get it. I read the book multiple times as well as many of the references which provide ample refutation to the belief that carbohydrates are inherently toxic and lead to obesity and metabolic disease (like the works of T.L. Cleave and Denis Burkitt for starters).

But insulin is a beautiful thing. Insulin, for starters, helps take food energy out of our bloodstream after digestion takes place and packs it away into muscle cells. Wow! I bet that feels really good, stimulates your metabolism, improves your immune system, satisfies your appetite, and makes your muscles grow…. It does.

The problem is, most people’s bodies are NOT working correctly, and the muscle cells are resistant to insulin. This is where the problem lies, and there is no single piece of evidence the world over that suggests, in the slightest degree, that unrefined carbohydrate staples consumed by human beings over the past 10,000 years has anything to do with causing that dysfunction.

So the problem is the overcompensation that occurs when insulin is not communicating with muscle cells efficiently. The result is that the benefits of insulin are not realized by the body. It’s kinda like water. You only get the benefits of water for cellular hydration if you drink with your mouth open.

One of insulin’s wonderful qualities in preventing obesity and metabolic disease is the fact that it is a primary satiating hormone. Yeah Taubes, you heard me. The only reason in animal studies that little critters ate themselves to death when insulin was injected is because insulin lowers blood sugar – and the animals kept eating and eating and eating in order to keep from dying from hypoglycemia.

Insulin, in the ABSENCE of food, definitely isn’t satiating. It’s deadly.

But insulin, under normal circumstances, is an appetite suppressant.

Insulin is also the primary driver of muscle growth. Because it packs amino acids and glucose needed for muscle growth into muscle cells, muscle tissue cannot be added very efficiently without insulin present in sizeable quantity.

Because of this, among other actions of insulin (such as working in concert with leptin to raise metabolism, suppress appetite, increase lipolysis/fat burning, and so forth), insulin is a profound stimulator of the metabolic rate as well – which is probably why very low-carbohydrate diets, and low-calorie diets, produce huge drops in T3 – the active hormone that regulates metabolism.

Along with the drop in T3 comes drops in testosterone as well – another of the primary hormones involved in building muscle mass and decreasing body fat, which depends upon ample amounts of insulin to be stimulated.

Insulin also works on an axis with the catecholamines – which includes cortisol. When insulin goes up, adrenal activity falls. When insulin goes down, adrenal activity picks up. Keep insulin too low for too long and you run the risk of adrenal fatigue. You are also likely to increase the activity of cortisol (which, unlike carbohydrate ingestion, actually DOES cause insulin resistance) by keeping insulin levels suppressed, which increases insulin resistance, decreases testosterone, decreases fat burning, and otherwise takes you ever-closer to metabolic syndrome.

The result is more body fat and less lean muscle tissue – not to mention a slower metabolism in general, which all ties into the fact that your muscle cells are literally starving. There is no insulin to pump vital matter into cells when insulin is low, and if you return to eating lots of carbohydrates, they are very fattening until the point at which your cortisol levels fall, your metabolism rises, your insulin resistance decreases, and then… finally, your muscle cells start receiving nutrients and you feel better for once - something nearly everyone patient enough to give RRARF a full course has experienced in full. 

The point of this post is simple. You NEED insulin. Insulin can do some amazing things for you, first and foremost allow you to experience life at your full physical potential. But you have to be insulin sensitive to receive those benefits.

The ever-popular way to deal with insulin resistance by taking carbohydrates away from a person may have all kinds of benefits in the short-term. This is because chronically-high insulin levels as a result of insulin resistance (not caused by unrefined carbs) are lowered, and many other systems are able to come into balance because of this drop in insulin.

However, it is a dead end, and is not fixing the problem. Eventually, a person on a low-carb diet will run into negative symptoms of insulin deficiency, such as decreased metabolic rate, suppressed fat burning, weight regain, lowered testosterone, decreased immune function, and so forth. This takes a lot longer to take place in an overweight, insulin resistant person, and happens VERY quickly in an insulin sensitive lean person that has no business being on a low-carb diet in the first place.

Insulin resistance, most likely, is a development that takes place as an anti-starvation system in the body – preventing fat burning while also preventing energy from being packed into muscle cells where it would raise the metabolism and build calorically-expensive muscle tissue. As we’ve discussed and will continue to discuss, the human famine response exists to prevent starvation, but any chronic form of stress from sleep deprivation to anxiety to chronic inflammation or dental infection to overexercising to nutrient deficiency is capable of triggering that chain of hormonal events… a theme seen in response to all kinds of deficiencies and stressors according to the work of true health pioneers (not to discredit Suzanne Somers, Susan Powter, or my favorite Richard Simmons) such as Robert McCarrison and Hans Selye.

The best way to bring metabolic syndrome under control? Eat unrefined, nutritious foods to appetite or beyond without severe macronutrient restriction (but an emphasis on starch to increase insulin sensitivity and lower cortisol most quickly), get lots of rest and relaxation, lots of sleep, and whatever else you can do to minimize your burden of stress, inflammation, etc. – ranging from having root canals pulled to treating sleep apnea to decreasing the omega 6 polyunsaturated fat content of your diet. Read more about this strategy that I call RRARF (Rehabilitative Rest and Aggressive Re-Feeding) in THIS FREE EBOOK.

Ironically, the hyperinsulinemia epidemic that is sweeping the globe is best solved by befriending insulin and eating plenty of high-quality, nutritious, starchy carbohydrates (as well as other foods that stimulate insulin, like beef and cheese.... mmm, cheeseburger). Going to war against insulin with a low-carbohydrate or low-calorie diet may result in many victorious battles, but that war can never be won on a collective basis with that strategy… Even if a large percentage of people could follow such a diet long-term, which they cannot and never will, because most people’s bodies are too damn smart to let them get away with it for long.

For further reading, I highly recommend THIS Series of  ARTICLES written over the summer by James Krieger (badass) that highlights many of the errors in the low-carb theories about insulin that we’ve been discussing here for the last couple of years with some very new and interesting twists.