Ray Peat Died

In 2009 I had a run of bad health. I got stung by a bee, it got infected, and then I did a round of antibiotics. The antibiotics wiped me out and while I was sick I agreed to getting a tetanus boost which overloaded my system. A few weeks later I had raging tinnitus, digestive problems, heart palpitations and I thought I was dying. I started trying all kinds of things to fix myself not knowing what was wrong, including low carb. I went low carb for a long time and lost a bunch of weight but felt awful. One day for a lark, I googled "high sugar diet" and found Ray Peat.

Ray Peat was a retired biologist that lived in Oregon. He believed that helping the body make energy was critical. The best way to do that according to Ray was to eat lots of sugar, protein, and fat soluble vitamins like Vitamin A, K, E, and D. He was a pioneer of the idea that red light had special benefits and that seed oils are toxic, that cancer and diabetes were metabolic conditions that could be treated by treating the thyroid.

Ray was criticized by a lot of people for his fringe ideas but I think he was way ahead of his time on a lot of it. The most impressive part of Ray's behavior was that he sold only a few products. These were his books, which were in the process of being digitized and reprinted for the entire 13 years I kept up with him. They were never available to purchase. He also had a newsletter, to sign up you had to mail cash in an envelope to his PO box. Finally, a progesterone supplement which I don't think he had been involved with for many years. Every article, hundreds of hours of podcasts, he gave away for free. More than that, his email address was right on his website and he would write back if you emailed him a health question. He must have spent hours per day replying to people. Over the years people even built a repository of his responses and it was always encouraged by the community to check for an answer before emailing Ray, but he'd write back anyway.

I follow Danny Roddy who is sort of an heir of Ray's legacy and work, one of many in the community who follow in Ray's footsteps. He put together a call in show and I watched all 3 hours of it. Grown men called in crying, but what really got me was the number of people who said they would call Ray and chat with him on the phone regularly. A number of callers said Ray saved their lives. All in all even if people disagreed with Ray, he wasn't in it for the money. He literally just wanted to help people the best way he could. They don't make people like that anymore.