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...
> 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.
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.
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?
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).
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.