Ray Peat discussing NO with HD (Andrew Murray) from the Peat forums:
"HD: OK – All right, so, I wanted to ask you some questions about your most recent newsletter which was based on “Nitric Oxide” and hopefully open it up for people to understand the context in which we’re talking about as a product. I think, the very first question that I wanted to pose: given that the compound manufactured by Pfizer will be well-known to many, both in its generic form, and in the off-counter, or other brand label types of product, being Viagra.
Nitric oxide has a majorly vasodilatory effect, as I understand it and that's just one of them, though I guess that's mediated by Viagra, and that drug is approved as a FDA approval for erectile dysfunction. What is it about nitric oxide that makes it so dangerous and responsible for things like cardiac arrest, stroke, arrhythmias and also increased ocular pressure which most people wouldn't even associate with Viagra?
I've had several people who have used it and have had heart attack and stroke and that prompted me to even look at it as being something that should be definitely taken seriously. And I know also the kind of recreational drug users whose use poppers, exactly the same compound, has some very damaging effects on the body. What's your take on nitric oxide?
RP: Speaking of poppers, several of the early theorists of AIDS were blaming it on whatever the chemical is, I guess it's nitric oxide, that's produced from the poppers, some kind of nitric compound anyway, and they were arguing that that in itself was enough to account for the AIDS among the people who were using that as a pleasure drug.
But in the 1980s, everyone knew nitric oxide primarily as a toxic component of smog, and so when people started discovering that it was being produced in small amounts in the body, immediately they started looking for the parallels with smog poisoning: lung injury, circulatory disease and so on. And one of the first things they found was that it kills the beta cells in the pancreas that produce insulin, so in early 1940s there was this flurry of papers demonstrating that our internal smog is just as toxic as Los Angeles smog!
But then the Viagra patent and publicity came out in the later 1990s and right then suddenly the medical publications all found that it was a glorious, protective and natural or protecting just about every function you could think of, making you smarter, have more endurance and all kinds of good things. But then, after a few years, I guess the investment in publicity started wearing off and people started coming back to the diabetes-producing effects and looking at what it's actually doing biochemically.
The basic way it causes harm probably is that it is kind of parallel to the effects of carbon monoxide or cyanide, in being a competitor for oxygen in the mitochondria, the enzymes that produce most of our energy. It, in several ways, knocks out not only the key final respiratory enzyme, cytochrome oxidase, but it poisons the previous electron transporting parts of the mitochondrion too. So, simply turning off the energy supply can account for a lot of its problems. But it also, when you're stopping the oxidative run through the mitochondrion, as the mitochondrion starts leaking in effect electrons that have no place to go, and the whole cell shifts over to a reduced chemical state.
That the electrons aren't being constantly drawn down and so the balance, if you imagine a stream of electrons falling steadily towards oxygen, when you cut off that, they accumulate and float back and literally the reducing environment shifts the whole balance of the self-reduced sulphur compounds and it's expressed all the way out to the surface, and the surface properties of the cell change, and there are some enzymes right across the surface, so this reducing the energy from energy inside the cell is available to reduce oxygen outside the cells since the mitochondria aren't using it productively. In fact this cloud of excess electrons flows through the enzyme called NADPH-oxidase and directly reduces oxygen on the surface.
And that produces super oxide; a possibly toxic free radical that’s then produces hydrogen peroxide. And in the immune cells that are under stress, that's considered productive because it helps to break down bacteria or whatever is exciting/disturbing the white blood cell. So this toxic, oxidative burst has its useful aspects but probably it’s one of the better outcomes rather than just using the hydrogen peroxide directly, or producing nitric oxide, this hydrogen peroxide can be used to oxidise chloride that is always present into hyperchloride which becomes one of the very strong germ digesting chemicals that when a phagocyte has eaten something then it's basically like “chlorox”, it helps to break down the particle."
https://raypeatforum.com/community/threads/nitric-oxide-kmud-2014.5532/
I don't know whether non members can access it anymore as they have introduced a membership fee.
Although I trust most fish tanks more than most hedge fund operated 'nonprofit' hospitals, so…
