Remembering Dr. Raymond Peat
Ray died on November 24, 2022. I wasn’t active here at the time, but he made such a big impact on my life I felt it was only right to pay him a tribute.
I still remember the day I came across Ray’s ideas. It was 2012 and I was watching a video on YouTube from nutrition researcher Danny Roddy talking and summarizing some of Ray’s ideas around nutrition. To be totally honest, these ideas seemed like they were from outer space, but something kept me watching. As I watched little light bulbs began to go off as I was hearing answers to questions I had to for years.
Up until that point I had many health issues that I was trying to sort out. I was hypothyroid, had issues with brain fog, what seemed to be chronic fatigue. I was constantly cold, had terrible skin quality, was irritable, and just didn’t feel well at all. This lasted for far too long.
I tried just about everything to feel better. I had bought all the books, saw different doctors, practitioners, allergy specialists, thyroid specialists, herbalists, went to sleep studies for the possibility of sleep apnea. Then I turned to food and decided to give every diet there was a try. Paleo, veganism, vegetarianism, low carb, carnivore, fruitarianism, eliminating sugar, green juice cleanses, etc.
While watching Danny Roddy talk about things like the importance of sugar, raw carrots, avoidance of polyunsaturated fats, crazy ideas about serotonin, and the same name kept popping… Ray Peat. I did a quick search and found out Ray had a PhD in biology but his ideas still seemed strange to say the least. I couldn’t help but shake a feeling though, that things he was saying were making sense to me on a more intuitive level, so I kept looking into Ray. Which then turned into a full out month long binge of his material. All of the ailments that I had been experiencing, Ray seemed to have an answer for every one. And unlike the very pricey experts I had seen previously, his suggestions actually worked! Which were free of charge by the way.
If you’re old enough to remember, when playing video games on Nintendo you could rent a device at Blockbuster or Gamestop called “game genie”, you would hook this device up to whatever game you were playing and all of the sudden you had all the cheat codes imaginable to that game. You could play on “God Mode”. You had endless amounts of lives, unlimited ammo, invincibility etc. It was a lot of fun.
This is the only thing I can compare to finding Ray, what that I had found the game genie for my health. He had given me the cheat codes.
All the time, money and searching for what made me feel miserable turned out to actually be fixable, and all those answers came from one man… for free. He never charged a thing.
I became obsessed with his work and pretty much dove right in. I slowly seemed to fix each problem and ailment until one day I remember thinking, “I actually feel good today”. It was a really great feeling to have.
What surprised me the most was the day I figured out I could actually email and communicate with him personally. No office staff, no fees, just a guy (who I basically idolized at this point), who was in his 70’s at the time, and was on the other side of his computer helping me with whatever I needed. Over the next 10 years I corresponded with him maybe about 150-200 times through email and he never charged me a penny.
He was once asked why he took so much time out of his day to reply to the probably hundreds of emails a day he received and his response was “well if I can help just one more person that will make it worth it”.
Ray was a saint.
The word genius gets thrown around a bit, and sometimes too much in my opinion. But to me Ray was a true genius. Lots of people can use big words and sound as smart and technical as they want (which he could and did when the time was right), but could also explain those complex subjects to an 8 year old as well. To me this is the mark of a true genius. Distilling down genius level work down to it’s simple and purest from so even a child can understand.
To me a true genius also breaks an existing paradigm and creates a whole new way of thinking based in truth. Ray did just that and his legacy will on breaking paradigms. Ray is someone that comes around every once in 100 years, even if that. I’ve heard researcher Danny Roddy joke (and I think he’s actually correct) Ray was 100 years ahead of this time. His ideas will be proven right as time goes on and are even now as we speak.
Ray’s ideas about serotonin would have had him laughed out of medical centers just a few years ago but now the information coming out about serotonin and SSRI’s has everyone changing their tune on that fairly quickly as shown here:
But Ray spoke very simply most of the time and gave some of the most cheapest practical solutions and advice someone could give for someone to feel better.
One of the things I believe Ray wanted to be remembered for though was his love for painting. He was a phenomenal painter and I believe it’s a large part of the reason he was a genius in the field of biology, specifically nutrition.
There’s a new group of people in the nutrition “biohacker” scene, people like Peter Attia, Andrew Huberman, Rhonda Patrick, Thomas Delauer, etc. They’re very intelligent, but I believe a bit too reductionist. They tend to split everything into it’s parts on understand health that way, whether than what they components are actually apart of in the grander scheme. They know every flavanoid, can name certain chemical pathways, cite studies, etc. but in my opinion what they have wrong is the big picture. I think they tend to hyper focus on details but don’t have a context for the bigger picture.
To me it’s no different than building a brand new luxury home and knowing all the ins and outs of where the granite countertop was quarried, where the rare exotic wood for the cabinets was imported, the special finish on the bathroom appliances, etc. but meanwhile the foundation of the house was built on unstable ground and the house is weeks away from sliding down a muddy hill into complete destruction. Why do all these amenities in a house matter when the whole thing will be destroyed in a week anyway.
This is what brings me back to Ray’s love of painting. I was in an art program at a university for a period of time and I one key takeaway I had from the experience was to be a good artist you not only have to master detail but you must also master the general composition of the piece (the bigger picture). If you’re doing a portrait, yes you can have the persons nose, mouth or eyes perfect, but if you don’t have the persons general form and structure of their head right, or maybe the general expression of their face, the portrait just won’t look right. Same as if you’re doing a landscape, you can get each little flower, bush, or tree perfect, but if the overall composition of landscape doesn’t look right, those flowers, bushes and trees won’t make a difference and the painting will look off. To me the skill of painting is to be able to master both the detail and the big picture, and to me that’s part of what made Ray the biological nutrition genius he was.
I believe it ended up taking a painter/biologist to crack the code.
He could keep up with any PhD using whichever technical words or concept they wanted but he also knew the cell’s ability to produce energy in the form of ATP was the foundation of health, and that energy and structure were interdependent, on every level. These are probably the deepest concepts in biology, maybe the universe.
I will be curious to see where what happens with Ray’s legacy from here. There are famous athletes and celebrities that use his principles in a semi-secret manner (some even mention his name directly) and others can a bit hush-hush about it, but his name still doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. Maybe after death he will break more into mainstream. I hope that's the case.
I often find myself wanting to email him about a question I have and realize I can no longer do that. That’s sad. I miss him a lot. He was a very good man.
I am grateful for the knowledge he left though, and hope to get through all of it in my lifetime.
People like Ray in the world are extremely rare and extremely good. He was one of the most kind, generous, considerate, selfless men on this planet and I hope he will forever be remembered by those things.