Ray Peat and His High Sugar Diet

For the last 6ish weeks, I've consumed more sugar than I have for at least a decade. A glass of OJ in the morning, some coconut water, berries, dried mango, and a few spoonfuls of honey before noon.

Why? Because I've recently been diving deep into the heterodox nutrition work of Dr. Ray Peat.

Overview of Ray Peat and some of his ideas here

Ray Peat and his bioenergetic approach to nutrition have been confusing the hell out of people since the 1970s. Peat spent his life telling people to drink lots of orange juice and coffee, eat ice cream for health, and avoid polyunsaturated fats (and thus things like salmon) like they are radioactive waste.

Peat literally consumed 1,600 calories a day of sugar (!!), the equivalent of drinking a gallon of orange juice and chasing it with a pint of ice cream. He lived a healthy life until he died at 86, which was quite respectable given his thyroid was destroyed in a childhood medical accident.

Peat's theory was that everything was downstream of energy and metabolism. Your cells are like tiny engines: if they're not running efficiently, everything falls apart. Poor energy production leads to inflammation, which leads to disease, which leads to many of the chronic conditions we see today.

Given this view, one should eat to maximize metabolic rate. This meant eating lots of fruits and juices, dairy, saturated fats, root vegetables, and lots and lots of gelatinous meats and bone broths (my kind of guy!). It also meant avoiding seed oils (Peat was one of the original seed oil disrespectors), PUFAs in all forms, leafy greens (hard to digest), grains and legumes, and fermented foods (thanks to the presence of lactic acid). This was basically his food pyramid:

Peat was also extremely focused on the thyroid. Peat saw the thyroid (specifically the hormone T3) as the chief regulator of your metabolic rate, dictating how fast your cells burn fuel. Low thyroid function, Peat argued, is a hidden epidemic, sapping energy and contributing to everything from weight gain to depression.

Peat had a simple way to check thyroid function: body temperature! His belief was that low body temperature suggests impaired thyroid function, which I find especially interesting given Bryan Johnson's focus (and bragging) about his low body temp. Notably, Bryan also supplements his thyroid.

In my limited experience so far, I feel… surprisingly good? I've noticed fewer late-in-the-day energy crashes, and just feel generally high energy. Friends have also lost weight eating this way, and feel great.

I'm not telling you to start chugging orange juice and eating ice cream for breakfast (as fun as that sounds). But I will say that his work has challenged many of my assumptions around nutrition and diet. I'm still digging into the bioenergetic approach, and am excited to go way deeper here in the coming months. If you have anything I should read on this, please let me know!

Related: this post by my friend Michael Johnson has my vote for most interesting health post of 2025.