Jack Kruse

In my day job as a neurosurgeon, I operate on a lot of diseased spines. In the last 12 years, I have repaired over 1000 vertebral fractures from osteoporosis. If you remember back to my podcast with Jimmy Moore, I mentioned in the talk that the changes I had seen in osteoporosis incidence and prevalence is what made me look for the underlying cause. This ultimately led me to leptin and our diet. Many people think since bones are hard and used for support that they are not an active tissue. Bone is a very active tissue in the body that is constantly turned over. We constantly lay down new bone to stressors and resorb bone from areas that are not stressed. Since bone is so active, it uses massive amounts of energy. This is where leptin comes in. Any tissue that requires a ton of energy is coupled to leptin biochemistry. The story on bones and osteoporosis, however, is a very complicated one. I am going to give you a flavor of just how complicated. This osteoporosis series will have many twists and turns. Most seasoned spine surgeons wont know much of what you are going to learn here about bone. Most don't know that osteoporosis is caused by leptin resistance. Just ask one and see if I am correct. Most will tell you to take Calcium, Vitamin D, and exercise a bit to treat osteoporosis. They may mention a Rx for a bisphosphonate class of drugs too. I don't use these drugs at all. If you do just that, you can bet you won't cure a thing and you might even make the problem worse. Spine surgeons are taught a law called Wolff's law in reference to bone metabolism. It says the more stressed a bone is, the more bone is laid down and the stronger the bone is. This law is why most spine surgeons don't think that obese folks will have osteoporosis when they come to see us, much less test for it. These are the people who are experiencing a silent epidemic of this condition. Their numbers have exploded over the last thirty years. I mentioned that in my career I have seen a tremendous increase in this disease. In medical school, I think I had a one hour lecture on this disease. Now it is involved in close to 80{a7b724a0454d92c70890dedf5ec22a026af4df067c7b55aa6009b4d34d5da3c6} of the cases I see in my clinic. Few spine surgeons expect to see osteoporosis in our younger patients because most think this is predominantly a disease of old women with low estrogen levels. We are not taught to look for it in its correct biologic context, so it is often missed as a diagnosis, but often found on MRI imaging as loss of mineral content and more fat present in the marrow space. Spine surgeons must be more vigilant about this disease, because if it's tied to the leptin hormone, it points to the fuels we are putting in our Ferrari's! I will show you why diet is a huge factor in the development of metabolic bone disease that you should consider. This is why I treat osteopenia and osteoporosis a lot differently than conventional wisdom you will hear from other sources.