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Comment by NewUser76312 | Hacker News Reader

There's a niche online health community which follows the work of a late Dr. Ray Peat, who have been touting the benefits of aspirin for a long time:

https://raypeat.com/articles/aging/aspirin-brain-cancer.shtm...

Some of Dr. Peat's disciples have even begun their own independent cancer research (in mice) trying to prove efficacy of far more basic interventions:

https://x.com/haidut/status/1751716166387597730

I've been an observer of this sphere since ~2017, have implemented various Peat-related concepts towards my own health and fitness, to overall positive results. What's interesting is seeing more and more of these theories - under the theme of 'bioenergetics' - starting to be proven out even in conventional research.

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I looked up Ray Peat because I was unfamiliar with him.

I'm sure some of his advice has backing to it. A lot of it doesn't. A good amount of it even has a fair body of evidence against the claim (like Alzheimer's can be stopped by using tobacco).

This is classic highlighting hits while ignoring misses. A quack that tells you to exercise and eat 5lbs of raw chicken every day can be right about the exercise, that doesn't mean their raw chicken diet is also valid.

"There is some evidence that exposure to nicotine, which is one of the components of cigarette smoke, can actually reduce the risk of dementia. Such reports may be useful in indicating possible research directions for drug design.

However, nicotine intake through smoking would not be beneficial. Any positive effects would be outweighed by the significant harm caused by the other toxic components in cigarette smoke." https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/about-dementia/managing-the-ri...

Nicotine is cheaply available in pill, patch and gum form.

However, nicotine intake through smoking would not be beneficial.

They are speaking generically of course, if someone was genetically predisposed, or showed other signs, it could make sense.

I mean, I don't care about all of the failed Tesla work, nor his odd life. But I sure do like my transmitted electricity.

Tesla had a scientific foundation for inventions like alternating current because he could do the experiments.

He didn't just story-tell about how they might be true like how Peat claims walnuts are carcinogenic due to unsaturated fat and sucrose cures disease and his other crockpot ideas.

When one or two of his ideas happen to sound reasonable, it's the research that should get the epistemic credit, not a guy shotgunning 100 dumb ideas. What about all his claims that go against the evidence like avocados being carcinogenic due to unsaturated fat?

This is a common problem with cult followings. Their followers keep bringing you claims to debunk, they watch them get debunked, and they never stop to ask themself why they are still playing human centipede with the guy shitting these claims into their mouth.

And debunking claims is how we know the earth is round and the sun is at the center of the solar system. It sounds like you're real issue is with the cult followers who believe everything.

His followers might have serious health conditions and might be grasping for straws. You can't blame them, really. Better to address the source of overstated claims.

Also, if someone tells lies then even if there is only a small fraction of people who believe them, then the law of large numbers on the internet says that these lies will get amplified.

> I'm sure some of his advice has backing to it. A lot of it doesn't. A good amount of it even has a fair body of evidence against the claim (like Alzheimer's can be stopped by using tobacco).

Can you post the quote/reference for this? At worst I would think he referenced some observational study about smokers - people ingesting significant nicotine - having lowered incidences of Alzheimer's. That wouldn't surprise me in the slightest because we see the same types of studies for things like caffeine.

Mild stimulants and metabolism boosters in particular (energy and metabolism are the core of Peat's theories) are likely associated with protective effects.

So please post specifics from Peat, and be careful to avoid internet broken telephone - a lot of people attribute quotes and ideas to him that he never said nor endorsed.

Devil of a time digging up the original source, but here it is.

> People who take aspirin, drink coffee, and use tobacco, have a much lower incidence of Alzheimer’s disease than people who don’t use those things. Caffeine inhibits brain phospholipase, making it neuroprotective in a wide spectrum of conditions. In recent tests, aspirin has been found to prevent the misfolding of the prion protein, and even to reverse the misfolded beta sheet conformation, restoring it to the harmless normal conformation. Nicotine might have a similar effect, preventing deposition of amyloid fibrils and disrupting those already formed (Ono, et al., 2002). Vitamin E, aspirin, progesterone, and nicotine also inhibit phospholipase, which contributes to their antiinflammatory action. Each of the amyloid-forming proteins probably has molecules that interfere with its toxic accumulation.

https://raypeat.com/articles/aging/madcow.shtml

It's ironic that your knee jerk reaction was to choose one thing (nicotine for brain issues like Alzheimer's) that surely must be quackery, right? I mean, it's so obvious that there's no need to look it up.

And yet, if you'd researched it, you'd have found that it's an active area of research, not just for Alzheimer's treatment, but for several types of brain injury.

https://discoveries.vanderbilthealth.com/2019/09/nicotine-to...

https://www.science.org/content/article/nicotine-and-alzheim...

https://www.healthline.com/health/alzheimers-dementia/nicoti...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1670208/ (Nicotine for Alzheimer's)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35138210/ (Nicotine for traumatic brain injury).

It won't be a miracle cure. And of course all of these articles are quick to point out that even if nicotine is potentially beneficial, smoking is still definitely bad for your health, and that's a strong confounding factor.

There's cause for caution and I personally wouldn't start using nicotine or recommending it at this point. But it's not something to dismiss out of hand as "quackery", either. It seems more and more likely that the cure for Alzheimer's won't be a single drug, but rather a combination of several things: lifestyle changes, supplements, and drugs all working together. Nicotine might well play a role in this.

At this point, I think it would be right to call Ray Peat out for overstating the efficacy of an uproven treatment, but unfair to label him as a quack, at least based on this piece of evidence.

You've weakened what Pete said to make him more reasonable (Motte and Baily). He didn't call for simple nicotine consumption, he called for tobacco use.

That's where the quackery enters. Taking something with a kernel of truth and then expanding it past what the research says into unsafe practices.

This is how a lot of quacks work.

> People who take aspirin, drink coffee, and use tobacco, have a much lower incidence of Alzheimer’s disease than people who don’t use those things.

> People who take aspirin, drink coffee, and use tobacco, have a much lower incidence of Alzheimer’s disease than people who don’t use those things

This is true though.

Tobacco smokers do have a lower incidence of Alzheimer's compared to non-smokers.

This strange fact is what started the research, as noted in several of the links I shared.

Of course, for smokers, it's offset by higher cancer, higher dementia, all kinds of other problems.

> He didn't call for simple nicotine consumption, he called for tobacco use.

Are you sure? I'm not familiar with Ray Peat but I've just spent a few minutes researching and it seems like the man himself never said this, but rather his followers took quotes out of context - like the one you shared - and ran with it.

As far as I can see, he recommends using patches rather than smoking. If I'm wrong, can you find a quote from him (not someone else cherry picking his writing) specifically reccomending smoking?

Ray Peat is as quacky as health quacks can get. Completely nuts.

Can you provide some examples that back up your statement?

Edit: Some people are getting angry (and in some cases, deleting their comments). Let me be clearer: I have no idea who Ray Peat is. The OP commented that Peat is a "quack" and I was just asking why, because they didn't provide any supporting documentation.

Oddly enough, I just now discovered that I used to live down the street from Peat, before he passed away. I don't recall ever meeting him, though.

Many appear to be public information. Here are some listed on his RationalWiki entry:

Avocados

Peat claimed that avocados are carcinogenic because they contain a lot of unsaturated fat.[8] Like all the other nonsense he spouted, he failed to back up this ridiculous claim with any scientific evidence.

Orange juice

Peat was a big fan of orange juice which he said is "anti-estrogenic".[41] He also claimed that orange juice is good because it raises people's cholesterol.[42] There is not any evidence in the medical literature that shows orange juice consumption raises cholesterol. Studies have found the opposite, as it lows LDL-c and total cholesterol.[43][44] A 2022 review of clinical trials found that orange juice significantly reduces circulating total cholesterol levels.[45] Everything Peat said about foods should be fact-checked because in most cases he was entirely wrong in what he had claimed.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ray_Peat

Thanks. Great page. For some reason, this one didn't show up for me in the first few pages of Google results.

That’s scary, no shared reality

Guess it’s why it takes half the population forever to still be “doing their research”

It's important to actually read sources when it comes to controversial people and topics, rather than trusting some Wiki's summation of something. The Wiki completely misrepresents what Dr. Peat said.

"He made many other ridiculous claims such as avocados causing cancer.[8]" https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ray_Peat#cite_ref-Vegetables_8...

Link [8]: "Vegetables". raypeat.com. Goes to: https://raypeat.com/articles/articles/vegetables.shtml

The quote in question: "Not all fruits, of course, are perfectly safe--avocados, for example, contain so much unsaturated fat that they can be carcinogenic and hepatotoxic."

Note that phrasing "can be", "Not... perfectly safe.". Also btw, did you know that carrots "can be" hepatotoxic (toxic to the liver) because of all the vitamin A? This doesn't mean that carrots are bad, but rather that they shouldn't be an excessively large part of one's daily diet. They are not "perfectly safe".

Let's examine how Peat came to this idea based on the research. Remember, the actual claim is that "avocados.. can be carcinogenic and hepatotixic." Not that avocados cause cancer. That is not what he wrote. That wiki article has a clear bias.

Anyways, his research for the actual claim:

"In Vivo 1998 Nov-Dec;12(6):675-89. Comparative anticancer effects of vaccination and dietary factors on experimentally-induced cancers. ... Experiments in mammary glands cancer showed that a 15% olive-oil diet reduced significantly the tumor incidence caused by 9,10-dimethyl-1,2-benzanthracene. The antitumor effect of the olive-oil diet was connected to its content of monounsaturated fatty acids, such as oleic and palmitic acids. The promotive tumorigenic effects of other high-fat diets (avocado, soybeans) were associated with high content of some polyunsaturated fatty acids (linoleic and alpha-linolenic). Different diets have different targets. The effect of the same diet depends on its anti-tumor substances content. CONCLUSIONS: Vaccination and some diets have similar mechanism in their tumor-preventive effects."

"Ann Nutr Metab 1991;35(5):253-60. Effect of dietary avocado oils on hepatic collagen metabolism. Wermam MJ, Mokady S, Neeman I Department of Food Engineering and Biotechnology, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa. The effect of various avocado and soybean oils on collagen metabolism in the liver was studied in growing female rats for 8 weeks and in day-old chicks for 1 week. In comparison with rats fed either refined avocado oil, refined or unrefined soybean oils, rats fed unrefined avocado oil showed a significant decrease in total collagen solubility in the liver, while there were no changes in total collagen, protein and moisture content. Chicks fed unrefined avocado oil as compared to those fed refined avocado oil also showed a decrease in hepatic total soluble collagen while hepatic total collagen remained unaffected. Electron micrographs and light-microscope examinations of rats' liver revealed collagen accumulation in the periportal location. This is suggestive of the early stages of fibrosis."

All he did was link real-world research to a possible hypothesis. A logical argument. Now you can criticize this argument and say that we can't draw any such conclusions from in vivo and animal model experiments, but at least then you'd be actually engaging with the content of the ideas, not outsourcing your thinking to a poorly-written Wiki article.

Indeed, thanks. I try to be skeptical about assumptions, even my own.

Cherry picking bits and pieces of research and then escalating them to much more general claims then they actually make really is the essence of good quality quackery though.

"avocados, for example, contain so much unsaturated fat that they can be carcinogenic and hepatotoxic" is exactly what he says in the article text. That explicitly read as "consumption of avocados can cause cancer", not the much weaker claim "it's possible that there's a mechanism by which avocados might cause cancer or be hepatotoxic but we don't actually know", which is what you actually get if you look at those reference.

Even the quotes he chooses are mismatched to what he says in the text. The liver one is about dietary avocado oils specifically, not avocados generally, and has the weakest possible conclusion that the chicks have something "suggestive of early stages of fibrosis" for unrefined but not refined. It's beyond just in vivo and animal model limitations, it: doesn't address dietary avocado consumption and doesn't conclusively show liver toxicity. That this reference is so weak, and yet the one he chose, is itself quite damning.

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