# Carbon Dioxide (CO2)

Category: Metabolism

Also known as: Carbon Dioxide, carbon dioxide, co2, CO2

Carbon dioxide, produced in the cells, releases oxygen into the tissues, relaxes blood vessels, prevents edema, eliminates ammonia, and increases the efficiency of oxidative metabolism.

10 passages · 2 authors · 2008–2023 · Most-cited: [Ray Peat](https://bioenergeticoracle.com/md/voices/ray-peat/index.md)

Canonical page: https://bioenergeticoracle.com/concepts/carbon-dioxide-co2

## Synthesis

**Carbon dioxide** is not a waste product but the fundamental molecule of life, essential for all organisms, even those that can survive without oxygen. [Source 3, 6] Peat argued that the purpose of oxygen is to produce CO2, and that its presence is an indicator of proper mitochondrial respiratory functioning. [Source 4, 6] He described it as a *Lewis acid*, an electron-binding molecule that, lacking protons, intensifies the acidity of cellular proteins, sculpting their structure and function. [Source 7] This acidifying action is central to its role in causing hemoglobin and other proteins to release oxygen, a process extending far beyond the well-known Bohr effect to include the regulation of "specific receptors" via the formation of **carbamino compounds**. [Source 5]

CO2 is the body's primary endogenous vasodilator, relaxing blood vessels to increase blood flow in proportion to metabolic demand, which prevents edema and protects against the strain of high blood pressure. [Source 4, 5, 9] Peat noted that Russian physiologists observed CO2 produced by active brain cells relaxes brain capillaries, and Dinkov has written that chronic CO2 treatment can even reverse **soft tissue calcification** in heavily calcified blood vessels. [Source 5, 9] The molecule also actively structures the cell's ionic environment; as carbonic acid flows out of the cell, it drags calcium and sodium with it, maintaining the cell's preference for potassium and accounting for the alkaline pH of the blood relative to the cell's interior. [Source 6]

The production of CO2 is directly tied to thyroid hormone, which acts on **cytochrome oxidase** to stimulate respiration and the deposition of calcium carbonate in new bone. [Source 2] A failure to produce adequate CO2, as seen in diabetes or hypothyroidism, shifts metabolism toward the production of **lactic acid**, which displaces CO2 from the blood and creates a systemic stress response. [Source 8] This shift underlies all degenerative diseases, which Peat characterized as centered on an excess of inflammatory processes that de-energize cells away from CO2 production. [Source 10] CO2 works synergistically with **progesterone** to calm and energize cells, while protectively opposing the toxic effects of estrogen and other excitatory molecules. [Source 10]

The therapeutic potential of CO2 has been historically recognized and then ignored. Yandell Henderson used it to cure shock, and it was once administered as "carbogen" (5% CO2, 95% O2) for resuscitation before hospitals adopted the harmful practice of hyperventilating patients with pure oxygen. [Source 1, 5] Peat cited experiments where rats given a zero-oxygen supply were protected from brain damage by the addition of CO2, and where animals poisoned to death with 50% CO2 were revived an hour later with no brain damage. [Source 3] He also noted that CO2 helps restore cells damaged by carbon monoxide poisoning. [Source 8] Dinkov has written that CO2 can even help dissolve **lipofuscin**, the "aging spots" long considered an irreversible byproduct of iron and PUFA damage. [Source 9]

## People also ask

### How does carbon dioxide help release oxygen from hemoglobin?

Peat argued that CO2 acts as a Lewis acid, intensifying the acidity of cellular proteins to sculpt their function, which causes hemoglobin to release oxygen through the Bohr effect and the formation of carbamino compounds.

### Why is carbon dioxide considered a vasodilator in the body?

The corpus describes CO2 as the body's primary endogenous vasodilator, relaxing blood vessels to increase blood flow in proportion to metabolic demand, which prevents edema and protects against high blood pressure.

### What happens when the body fails to produce enough carbon dioxide?

Peat argued that inadequate CO2 production, as in diabetes or hypothyroidism, shifts metabolism toward lactic acid production, displacing CO2 from the blood and creating a systemic stress response that underlies degenerative diseases.

## Related concepts

- [Antioxidants](https://bioenergeticoracle.com/md/concepts/antioxidants/index.md)
- [Glial](https://bioenergeticoracle.com/md/concepts/glial/index.md)
- [Oxidation](https://bioenergeticoracle.com/md/concepts/oxidation/index.md)
- [Pregnenolone steal](https://bioenergeticoracle.com/md/concepts/pregnenolone-steal/index.md)
- [Acidosis](https://bioenergeticoracle.com/md/concepts/acidosis/index.md)
- [Adrenaline](https://bioenergeticoracle.com/md/concepts/adrenaline/index.md)

## Cited passages

Passage numbers match the `[Source N]` markers in the synthesis above.

### Source 1 — Ray Peat and Bud Weiss - The Biology of Carbon Dioxide - 2010

Ray Peat · Interview · Sep 18, 2022 · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tgKX-DkEm4

> **Question:** Dr. Peat, I have a question for you. Recently I read a medical paper about near-death experience. And they had several patients who went into cardiac arrest when they were dying in the hospital, and then they returned to life. And the only common denominator that they could find between these people was that they had very elevated levels of carbon dioxide. And I'm wondering if you could respond to that.
>
> **Ray Peat:** A few people in the last 10 years are starting to, I guess they're discovering it themselves and then looking back at the literature and seeing that carbon dioxide protects not only against free radicals, lipid peroxidation. One group, Kogan is the Russian's name, who has done a lot of work on the antioxidant effect of CO2. But quite a few people are now, just the last few years, starting to talk about permissive hypercapnia, where instead of ventilating someone to death, that's two or three of the most popular ways hospitals kill people, is giving them pure oxygen. When people, for example, aren't getting enough oxygen to the brain, they'll give them pure oxygen and then hyperventilate them. The idea is to shrink their brain by hyperventilating them because it shuts down the blood circulation of the brain. But if they're dying of a lack of oxygen to the brain, it's not what you want to do. First experiences I had with carbon dioxide therapy was a person who several times had rushed to the emergency room with stroke symptoms, paralysis, and I think it was called a transient ischemic attack. I told him about the Russian research with carbon dioxide and suggested he drink a Coke when he had those attacks, and that worked for him. And I mentioned that in a nutrition class. And I had said soda water, meaning carbonated water. But the next week, one of the students said that she had interpreted as baking soda in water, which basically the same idea. But she said she gave a spoonful of baking soda to her mother, who had been half paralyzed for six months. 15 minutes after drinking just a glass of baking soda water, the paralysis lifted and stayed away. And they're doing that sort of thing now just by not ventilating people to death, as is the typical hospital practice.

### Source 2 — Ray Peat and Bud Weiss - The Biology of Carbon Dioxide - 2010

Ray Peat · Interview · Sep 18, 2022 · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tgKX-DkEm4

> **Bud Weiss:** One of the most popular books that was built on a lot of Dr. Peat's work, but sort of really not only popularized it, but I think kind of, you know, brought it down a bit is uh by john lee uh you know the book called uh what your doctor may not tell you about uh menopause but there's it's much more um well explicated by dr pete's book it's himself which is uh from men from humans from menopause yeah uh which is also
>
> **Ray Peat:** From PMS to menopause, female hormones in context.
>
> **Bud Weiss:** I'm sorry, I want to make sure we cover two other things. And if we have some time, I'll come back to you and be glad to. Because most people are not aware of the relationship between thyroid hormone and CO2. So would you just speak a little bit about that?

### Source 3 — Ray Peat and Bud Weiss - The Biology of Carbon Dioxide - 2010

Ray Peat · Interview · Sep 18, 2022 · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tgKX-DkEm4

> **Ray Peat:** In another 1941 publication in the journal Growth, three different authors, two of them were talking about bacteria, anaerobic, anaerobic, another one about protozoa. And they found that none of the single-celled organisms, even the anaerobes, which can live totally without oxygen, none of them could live without carbon dioxide. If they're making carbon dioxide and you remove it as fast as they make it and don't let them build it up, they can't survive. So that gives you a picture of All of us, it raises the question, what's the ideal amount of carbon dioxide in the environment? The carboniferous period where life and evolution were so abundant had, I think it was 20 times as much carbon dioxide as we have now. And the temperature was pretty stable all through those changes in carbon dioxide. The expansion of vegetation, for example, will reflect infrared light back into space. So it's sort of like the Earth has a thermostat that will regulate for huge changes in CO2. 30 years ago, they discovered undersea vents that Miles down in the dark, the density of organisms from bacteria through worms and crustaceans, even eels, the life density is 10,000 to 100,000 times too dense to account for by solar energy. They're all getting their energy out of this volcanic stuff. There's one called the Champagne Vent. which is exuding streams of liquid pure carbon dioxide, where these very odd organisms are thriving at a very low oxygen environment. But it says that these primitive organisms love the most carbon dioxide possible. When you look at the lifespan, not only our loss of bone and tissue with aging, but all animals, and even plants, suffer from a lack of carbon dioxide. If you lower it, even plants won't do well, single-celled animals and so on. Quite a few animals have learned how to optimize CO2 in their environment. Salamanders and frogs, for example, will burrow in the mud.

### Source 4 — Glossary

Ray Peat · Glossary

> Carbon Dioxide (CO2)
>
> Carbon dioxide, produced in the cells, releases oxygen into the tissues, relaxes blood vessels, prevents edema, eliminates ammonia, and increases the efficiency of oxidative metabolism.
>
> The presence of carbon dioxide is an indicator of proper mitochondrial respiratory functioning.
>
> In every type of tissue, it is the failure to oxidize glucose that produces oxidative stress and cellular damage.

### Source 5 — Natural Order and Gilbert Ling

Ray Peat · Newsletter · 2020

> Carbon dioxide had once been seen as a hormone, and it had been used medically for ulcers, arthritis, cancer, and mental problems, and Yandell Henderson’s work had led to its use as “carbogen” (5% CO2, 95% O2) for resuscitation, but by the middle of the century most therapeutic uses had been stopped, and hospitals had been taught to use pure oxygen instead of carbogen, and patients with brain swelling were being hyperventilated with oxygen to lower their blood carbon dioxide. Oral urea had been used to treat ulcers, heart failure, sickle cell anemia, glaucoma and Meniere’s disease, etc., intravenous urea had been used to treat brain swelling, and topical urea had been used to treat wounds. As recently as the 1950s urea was recognized as the most effective treatment for brain swelling, but the “science based” membrane theory reasoned that the removal of water from cells was always governed by osmosis, and since urea could remove water from cells, it must be osmotically active. As an osmolyte, it was added to distilled water for intravenous use, and the red blood cells behaved as they would in distilled water, dissolving. The report that urea causes hemolysis led to general discontinuation of its use for treating brain injury. It is still common to refer to its “osmotic” effects on water. As urea is ubiquitous, the dangerous confusion caused by the membrane theory is ubiquitous. People who die because they don’t receive urea therapy are among the casualties of the membrane theory.
>
> In the 1950s, Gilbert Ling noticed that in the presence of increased carbon dioxide, a given stimulus produces less contraction of a muscle than with a lower concentration of carbon dioxide. Around the same time, Russian physiologists found that the CO2 produced by active brain cells relaxes brain blood vessels, including capillaries, increasing the flow of blood in proportion to the increasing metabolic needs. Hemoglobin’s ability to transport carbon dioxide and oxygen has been studied as an example of how changes in a protein’s structure affects its functions. When CO2 associates with an amino (-NH2) group on the protein (forming a carbamino compound), hemoglobin’s properties are altered, causing it to release the oxygen that had been bound.

### Source 6 — It’s Rainmaking Time — Energy-Protective Materials (June 2014)

Ray Peat · Interview · Jun 14, 2014 · http://l-i-g-h-t.com/files/rainmaking-time-energy-protective-materials.mp4

> **Kim Greenhouse:** Would you talk a little bit about CO2 because since 2009 and since the EPA declared war on carbon dioxide (CO2) and since the whole global warming thing and anything connected to climate changing, people are scared to death of CO2. And I just realized in doing an interview with Dr Mark Sircus that oxygen isn’t everything in fact, if you don’t have enough CO2, you’re not going to be well. There is a lot of confusion about this. Explain what CO2 is and what does CO2 have to do with aging and heath?
>
> **Ray Peat:** About 60 years ago, some people working with microorganisms did a survey and found that although some bacteria, protozoa and so on can survive without oxygen like in deep sea vents, there are organisms that totally live without oxygen and use sulphuric acid as their oxidant for example. These experimenters tested many different types of organism and even those which can live without oxygen can’t live without CO2, so it really should be considered the basic material of life, not oxygen. The purpose of oxygen from that point of view is to make CO2, and if you consider it in the context of Gilbert Ling’s cell structure, with the protein itself is a weak acid and the weak acid is electrically charged with a negative charge which attracts positive ions so that it spontaneously binds things like potassium, sodium, magnesium and calcium. But if you adjust the composition as a whole, the whole colloid or coacervate of the cell, the water softener prefers to bind calcium over sodium, but if you put a very high concentration of salt through your water softener, you can wash out the calcium and then it will extract calcium from your hard water because of its chemical nature and the acidic group of the right size will prefer one ion over the other. And CO2 is one of the factors that cause our proteins to prefer potassium over sodium. At the same time that the cell is regulating its salt and ion balance by having the right amount of CO2, it’s producing a steady stream of CO2 flowing out of the cell into the blood and as it leaves the mitochondrion, it reacts with water forming carbonic acid.

### Source 7 — Generative Energy #35: CO2, Ketosis, and Mitochondria | PUFA, Sugar, Iron, and AGEs | Progesterone and Cell Stability

Ray Peat · Interview · Aug 29, 2020 · https://open.spotify.com/episode/2Iz99Wy5JmrbohNj4OZCxP

> ## Carbon Dioxide as a Lewis Acid
>
> **Ray Peat:** Overlapping with their studies, there were people working on the implications of carbon dioxide as the product of oxidative metabolism. The tendency is to not notice that carbon dioxide in itself is acidic. The common theory of acid in textbooks is the proton donor theory. But all of these physical ordering processes caused by oxygen are really the *electron retraction* theory of acidity. Carbon dioxide doesn't have any protons, so if you think of proton release as the essence of an acid, you can't think of CO2 as an acid. But it's called a Lewis acid. Having two oxygens on one carbon, it's a very powerful electron binder. The instant it sits down on a protein, the protein shifts its electrons to be close to the center of the carbon dioxide molecule. So it increases the acidity. You have a pre-existing protein with acidity, and when you oxidize something and produce carbon dioxide, that intensifies the acidity. That's part of the sculpting effect of respiration. It intensifies whatever process was creating it in the first place. The more you breathe, the more able you are to breathe, in effect.

### Source 8 — Herb Doctors: Diabetes I

Ray Peat · Interview · Feb 21, 2014 · http://l-i-g-h-t.com/files/herb-doctors-diabetes-I.mp4

> **Andrew Murray:** I got an email -- just a very side note. I got an email from a person in England who listens to the show, Dr. Peat, and going to be talking with them some point in the future.
>
> **Sound Engineer:** Yeah. It costs us money to have more than 25 at a time and that is something we need to do. But this is a plea to Dr. Peat’s international listeners to pre-support KMUD, so that you will always be able to listen to them over the Internet. And so, I have a question. Well, one person wanted you to speak more in layman terms in general I'm sure. So, in general, that is a general idea. And someone from Leggett has a friend with suspected CO2 poisoning and possible brain damage damage and is interested in nutritional ideas to address that.
>
> **Andrew Murray:** CO2 poisoning. I’m sorry, Carbon monoxide. Carbon monoxide, then CO.
>
> **Ray Peat:** CO2 is one of the things that helps to restore the cells that are damaged by carbon monoxide; good vitamin nutrition is helpful.
>
> **Andrew Murray:** Alright, so, carbon dioxide, and obviously, nutritional support.

### Source 9 — The Underappreciated Role of Carbon Dioxide in Health - Discussion between Georgi Dinkov and Dr. Mercola

Georgi Dinkov · Interview · Dec 21, 2023 · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQiSdhyhn5g

> **Dr. Joseph Mercola:** It's essentially like a dry suit and it inflates like the Michelin man. And it has essentially blocked off because carbon dioxide doesn't penetrate neoprene or rubber. So it stays in there. It's like a bag and it's safer and it doesn't escape.
>
> **Georgi Dinkov:** Yep. So it fairly diffuses through your skin and you can feel it almost immediately because you start feeling hot.
>
> **Georgi Dinkov:** And that's actually a sign of vasodilation, which brings us to the first important, probably one of the most important factors, cardiovascular effects of CO2. is that it's the natural vasodilator inside of the body, the endogenous one, which means it keeps your blood vessels supple. So if basically there is some kind of a stressful event, the heart needs to increase its activity and delivery of blood to the tissues, that the blood vessels can actually expand and accommodate that without creating more strain for the heart. Because if they don't expand, if they're not supple, if they cannot expand to accommodate the higher flow of blood, then you're going to get higher blood pressure, right? And also ultimately, because of the higher resistance to the heart, you can get heart failure. In fact, I think one of the endpoints of untreated high blood pressure is congestive heart failure. So it turns out that the role of carbon dioxide, its primary physiological mechanical role, let's put a mechanical role, is actually to provide this ability of the blood vessels... to be able to expand on demand. And also with chronic treatment, it's been shown to be able to do that even in heavily calcified blood vessels. So you can actually reverse soft tissue calcification if the treatment continues for sufficiently long.

### Source 10 — Buteyko Breathing - Bud Weiss, 2008-09-15

Ray Peat · Interview · Sep 15, 2008

> **Ray Peat:** There were a few others besides Buteyko, but it was really central to many of the things that I worked on, because progesterone and carbon dioxide for example both have an energizing and calming effect on all cells, everything from the brain to secretory and hormonal tissues. My interest was not particularly in relation to asthma, but Buteyko noticed many other effects of carbon dioxide when he was working with people treating asthma as a focus. He noticed that some of the patients recovered from other degenerative terminal diseases. Those have been where I spent most of most of my effort thinking about the role of carbon dioxide in all of the inflammatory and degenerative diseases, and how it works synergistically with progesterone and protectively against the toxic effects of estrogen and other excitatory molecules. And it turns out that all of the degenerative diseases are centered on an excess of inflammatory processes which de-energize the cells and shift the metabolism away from the production of carbon dioxide and with a dominant tendency towards producing lactic acid in excess that can't be consumed and converted to carbon dioxide.

_Generated 2026-07-20 from the Bioenergetic Oracle corpus._