Readers Summary
- Why should we look back to move forward in modern healthcare?
- Is the Paleo Solution your species real solution?
- How would have evolution had to build a human brain based upon what we know today?
- How does lipid chemistry destroy the Savanna Hypothesis with some new knowledge we have in brain chemistry?
- Will you Epi-Paleo it forward now that you have a deeper understanding how that 3 pounds of jelly works best in your head?
The paleo community has the “Paleo Solution“, and it is a great introductory book to a lifestyle that will improve people to a higher plane of health than we have while eating a standard American diet found in our western world. It is clear from fossil data humans were in better physical shape in the late paleolithic before the Younger Dryas occurred as well. It appears that this deep freeze caused massive dietary change in the homo species from predominate hunter gatherers culture to and agrarian culture because of rapid climate change and elimination of the great megafauna from our food chains. The focus of this series, however, is focused upon when we jumped from purely primate to mainly homo species and to see what diet is really best for the rapid encephalization of our species. I am not convinced the modern paleolithic diet that is quite popular now fits that bill at all. The reason I bring this forth, is because I treat very sick and ill homo sapiens every day. ‘Eating paleo’ may just not reverse their health. The proof of this is found on every single popular paleo forum you can visit. As a surgeon, I need something that really works in the most resistant cases. That is where I discovered the Epi-Paleo Rx.
In my specialty of spine surgery, this is especially true when we are dealing with cranial and spinal pathology. As a neurosurgeon these neolithic diseases are the ones I am most focused in on in my clinic. Evolution is in large part about epigenetic to cellular communication; it’s comparing notes and copying and pasting new genetic recipes to create a new dish. When we understand how that dish was created we gain deep insight of how to to keep that dish tasting crisp and fresh every time we replicate it.
For this reason, I think we must look back in time to when this transition occurred about 2.6-2.5 million years (mya) when massive climatic shifts occurred in the East African Rift that I laid out in Brain Gut 3. When we go back to the milieu that transitional man found himself in we might gain some insight to learn something about how to really reverse the neolithic diseases all physicians are seeing in their clinic daily. If these forces were strong enough to form us from ape they may hold the keys to what is optimal for our current biology with respect to our guts and our brains. The assault of these diseases to me is akin to an “unending tsunami waves” hitting our shores since the Younger Dryas forced homo to rely on sub-optimal food sources to just survive.
After my Factor X webinar, people learned that the currency of survival for all eutherian mammals was a new biologic strategy to speed up DNA expression to adapt more quickly to the environment. The reasons eutherian mammals survived is because they use a placenta to birth their young. There is now strong evidence from molecular biology that the genes that coded for the evolution of the placenta were heavily selected for after the K-T event. How do we know this? The first mammals were rather old in an evolutionary scale, about 210 x10 to the 6th years before the present time (YBP). These early mammals (such as multituberculates) were small, furry, egg-laying, monotreme-like insect predators. They were present prior to the advent of the dinosaurs, but became extinct about 35 x 10 to the 6th YBP. We know nothing about their molecular genomes, but what we do know, is that two other mammalian lines developed from them directly, the marsupials and the eutharian placentals. Humans are in the later class. How do we know placenta were heavily selected by a post K-T world? Well, the marsupials are only found in the southern hemisphere with the few exceptions. This fits perfectly with how Factor X occurred 65 million years ago as well as I laid out in my Webinar. Moreover, the placental mammals were far more successful because they radiated over 2000 genera, to about only 140 genera in the marsupial clade.
Most of the surviving species left on the land of this planet is due to that formative moment in evolution. This is a big step in knowing who we really are and how we are built. Factor X is huge for any mammal that evolved after it.
How does viral marketing, CT, Factor X, and CT-6 all come together for Homo’s solution?
Here is the most important fact in all of mammalian evolution in my opinion that is not talked about enough. With these placental mammals, we see clear and compelling patterns of acquisition of genetic parasitic elements in their genomes, mainly in the context of retroviruses like LINES, SINES, and ERVS. After K-T the best source of food was located in the deep polar seas with its huge collection of marine life and cauldron of viral particles as we covered in Brain Gut 2. The predominate macronutrient in the sea is seafood/microalgae.
It was also bitter cold for many years after a sudden global event like K-T impact. What would life do in this case like this? It would have to evolve to that environment rapidly and that is precisely what happened to our deepest ancestors by using viral marketing as laid out in Brain Gut 2. That program is wired into the neural structures of every surviving animal left on the planet. This was my thought process when I was thinking about finding the Ancient Pathway in the mammalian brain I laid out in CT-6 blog post. I think it is no coincidence that eutherian mammals 65 million years ago and modern man 13,000 years ago had to navigate the same freezing environment and survive. Clearly, this ancient program was wired into the mammalian nervous system for a deep evolutionary reason.
Let us now fast forward to 2.6 million years ago where our recent ancestors come from, the transitional apes. I have already showed you in Parts 1-3 of this series that primates and humans use massive amounts of these transposable genetic elements to create new genes to adapt quickly. What do you think transitional ape used to become man?
Evolution uses a fractal design where form always meets function, of course, and we did the very same thing again in our speciation as life did after the K-T event.
Factor X and Neolithic Disease Generation
Many people wanted to know what they could do to their human biology to make Factor X work for them to reverse the curse of neolithic disease. In my opinion, this series is that first and most important step in that direction. To know who you are, you must first know where you came from. This is the key point in Brain Gut 1. Moreover, you need to know precisely why it happened to make it actionable. Why you ask? Because it tells you where you might be headed if you fall off the path that brought your existence to life.
Today, our species has fallen way off that track. That is why humans today are mediocre as a species and are in current decline morphologically and neurologically. Moreover, we are becoming more feeble and useless as we age because of how broken we are metabolically from a physiologic stand point. This is really evidenced in the diseases of the brain and the gut of modern man. They are catastrophe’s in both size and scope, and not to mention cost. It’s why modern medicine needs a new perspective, because they don’t know how and why we evolved. This is where biology’s epistemologic foundation lies. Modern healthcare is blind to this very fundamental fact. This is why we are poor in healing chronic diseases.
In my view, when you use evolution as your North Star, you get a lot smarter about how to best treat chronic disease we see today.
What happened in Africa at the transition from ape to man?
- We had retreating forests in the middle of Africa and the opening of the grass lands we see today.
- We lost a lot of megfauna
- We began to see a lot new speciation and genera’s show up in the bone collector’s fossil data
- We begin to see stone tools in archeology
- We see Homo Habilis show up in the bone collector’s data
- We immediately see rapid changes in the Homo’s feet from apes
- We see major changes in the morphology of Homo’s spines, pelvis, and hind limb
- We begin to see rapid encephalization of Homo
- With in the first Homo species, Habilis, we see rapid development of the speech areas of the brain called Broca and Wernicke’s area for motor and comprehension of speech respectively.
- The geology of the tectonic plates in the Rift Zone raised the continent while cooling it and making the interior drier while the sea levels rose on the coast. This is the first time transitional apes like had the introduction to sea based water as a common environmental component to their life cycle. The skeletons of Lucy and Ardi told the bone collectors clearly that we did not come from the Savanna. Water was somehow tied to our evolution because of one special adaptation we had a brain that requires water constantly. Even today, most evolutionary experts are blind to this fundamental fact.
Why was water tied to our evolution?
The answer to me was pretty simple and straight forward. Construction of the human brain, itself is that answer. You can’t do it without a food chain tied to the ocean at some level. Many evolutionary experts still refute this today. In my opinion, if you refute this you will never reverse or avoid any neolithic disease. I will show you why that is the case in the remainder of this blog. None of what I am going to share with you is my invention. These are scientific facts we know are true. My part is to show you how they all fit together to create an optimal human to avoid disease and illness.
The brain separates humans from all other mammals. It gives us much of uniqueness and it controls most of our physiology at a basic level. The brain is an organ I have an intimate relationship with as a neurosurgeon. I have spent over 40 years of my life studying it. It has some special features in its membranes that make it awfully special to biology, and to evolution. It is made up of an excitable membranes filled with fats and phospholipids that have one main source on this planet. That source is the ocean. The savanna does not have these sources to support Lucy having a 189 cm cubed cerebral volume to Homo Habilis cerebral volume of 640 cm cubed. The brain is made up of long chained polyunsaturated fatty acids (0mega3 PUFA) called docosahexaennoic acid (DHA). To make make a three pound human brain you need a lot of DHA. DHA is found in seafood and microalgae in the oceans at the coasts of land. DHA is also the one constant building block in the nervous systems of all living things. Here is another queer finding about the impact of DHA. In mammals eating a terrestrial diet low in DHA and (Arachadonic acid) AA, from small to large mammals, brain size decreased with one major exception: US!
Humans are the real curve breaker. You have to begin to ask yourself why we do not follow the normal DHA/EPA brain plan if we came from the Savanna? We also know that humans migrated out of Africa using coastal waterways to the rest of the world. The bone collectors have always been puzzled by the lack of hominid fossils found but I have not been. Why is that? Two reasons stand out to me most. If we evolved quickly, as I believe we have, there would not be a lot of transtional fossils. The second point is about sea water. Bones cant stay preserved in sea water over time. They dissolve! So if our evolution occurred around sea water, it would have completely destroyed the bone evidence over time quickly. To date the hominid fossil record between small brained transitional apes and large brained homo is pretty damn poor. You would think these reasons would be intuitive to a bunch of bright bone collectors but it was not and remains a dead subject to most of their dogma. Are all these facts coincidence or not?
See when you are faced with a paradox it can stump you or you can make a theory up about how your beliefs about where we came from should dominate. That is called the Savanna Hypothesis. These facts should make you wonder who might be correct or not about our genesis. You decide. I already have for me and my patients. And this is why my patients get better from chronic illness now. I have a new perspective on where we came from and how our blueprint is designed to work. It is not a primal blueprint you were told about in a paleo book either. It is a marine blueprint.
Does size matter?
Using a modern ape to present day human brain size is analogous to comparing the economy of Rhode Island to that of the United States. The bone collectors have a neat way to calculate cranial expansion in fossils. They call it the encepalization quotient (EQ). They are expressed in {a7b724a0454d92c70890dedf5ec22a026af4df067c7b55aa6009b4d34d5da3c6} compared to modern homo sapiens relative brain sizes. Lucy falls at 46{a7b724a0454d92c70890dedf5ec22a026af4df067c7b55aa6009b4d34d5da3c6} and Homo Habilis falls at 53{a7b724a0454d92c70890dedf5ec22a026af4df067c7b55aa6009b4d34d5da3c6}. Homo Habilis is the only transition mammals that has an EQ over 50{a7b724a0454d92c70890dedf5ec22a026af4df067c7b55aa6009b4d34d5da3c6}. This happened in less than 2 million years. Modern man’s brain is moving toward Habilis and away from its largest weight we had just 20,000 years ago even today! Yes, our brain is shrinking back to our transitional ape ancestery because of how we eat today. It seems no one is realizing this is happening right under our noses.
The other striking variable that one has to also factor in these ideas of mine here, is the tectonic shifts in the land massively altered the water tables of Homo’s cradle. This would have dramatically changed the water resources available to Lucy and her kind. The rising plates and cooling and drying on the interior would have favored seaside runoff and reversals of the rivers flow in places. Without any coastal forests in the Rift Zone to retreat too, water would have become the easiest resource to find high density food sources. Moreover, fresh water, not sea water, would have been a real commodity to a transitional ape because they can’t survive without it because of their encephalizing brain. Homo’s are required to drink a lot of fresh water to just survive so their explosive growth suggests that they had to have superior fresh water supplies as well. Moreover, even the famous bone collector, Louis Leaky said this in 1968, when they were plotting where to look for early hominid remains. It is not really controversial now unless you are dogmatic.
So in a few million years we went from very small brains to massive brains in the blink of eye. How did this happen? The speed of transformational change implied at least to me, a few things. What were those things?
- We had to have a massive source of DHA to fuel encephalization.
- We had to have a reliable way to get the DHA into our systems to assimilate it.
- We had to have a way to exploit the massive reservoir of DHA to alter our genes to change the chimp brain to a human one.
- There had to be a massive source of genetic components to radically change the chromosomes and the genome to shuffle the deck to get a brain.
- To support a massive cranial infrastructure transformation, there would have to be massive changes to the mammalian skeletal body plan before encephalization could proceed.
- Reproduction would have to be resort to birthing a more immature progeny with a moldable cranial vault.
- If the progeny was immature that meant that cooperation would be required via communicative abilities that transitional apes did not possess. If this were not present, reproductive fitness would extinguish our kind before we got started building a brain.
How do you build a human brain from a transitional ape?
There are other some key players in building a human brain. You need a ton of Arachadonic acid (AA). This is an omega 6 PUFA. DHA and AA make up 8-10{a7b724a0454d92c70890dedf5ec22a026af4df067c7b55aa6009b4d34d5da3c6} of the human brain by dry weight. Most of the brain weight mass is from water content. The other key building block of brain building is eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA). AA plays a role for the structure and the functional parts of the brain. DHA is critical in brain structure and EPA plays a functional role in the human brain. Many biochemists and paleoanthropologist believe even to this day, you could make all these three building blocks of the brain from their parent precursors linoleic acid (LA) and Alpha Linolenic acid (ALA). But humans and apes do not have the metabolic machinery to do these conversions in sufficient amounts to make the size brain we have had for the last 200,000 years. It means it is biologically impossible.
That one fact alone should have destroyed the savanna hypothesis, but it did not for many of the bone collectors. Getting rid of dogma is tough business in any branch of science. Then many paleolithic diet supporters (Cordain and the expensive tissue hypothesis folks) said we could build a brain using animal meat alone found on the savanna alone without any seafood/microalgae sources.
The Paleo Dilemma
One huge problem with these ideas, is that we can’t incorporate enough DHA, EPA, and AA into the special types of phospholipid membranes within the human brain when there is also a lot of saturated fat contained in the diet while the brain is forming. This is where the expertise of the many research scientists well known in the paleo community should have been exposed. It was not. You need to know about this if you are to really reverse your diseases.
While it works for “their hypothesis” it fails on the building a human brain. If your hypothesis can’t explain our brain, your hypothesis is wrong. This is where a neurosurgeon and neurobiologists should have entered Homo’s solution or its blueprint. It was left out because the scientists that spawned the evolutionary movement knew little about how a human brain is really formed in nature.
Moreover, humans do have possession of a massive brain that has to be explained by ‘their theories’ based upon the known neurobiology. They can not. Dr. Stephan Cunnane also shares my view in this area. He is the world expert in how evolution formed the human brain. This implied to me, that homo would have had to have a large ready source of these building blocks available to it in the environment at all times or it would have become extinct as fast as it evolved. Building a brain is very complex business, and it is not the domain of the people who were controlling the Theories of Hominid Evolution until the last 10 years. That has radically changed now that the neurosciences have put their two cents on the table. The role of water has been strongly emphasized by evolutionary ecologists and largely ignored by the purveyors of the dogma, the bone collectors.
What else do we need to build a human brain?
- Iodine
- Iron
- A placenta that was capable of creating a massive fat furnace to fuel the perfect mix of 03 DHA to 06 EPA to make the neural framework.
- Lots of oxygen to complete the desaturation converting shorter chain to long chain PUFA’s: DHA requires 6 O2 molecules. This is why previous to the Cambrian explosion we have no ‘big brained’ animals in the fossil record. We had no oxygen to fuel a brain’s growth. When O2 showed up life exploded.
- Efficient mitochondria carry out the oxidative metabolism and lots of them in the brain.
- Phospholipids and the special chemistry of lipids in aqueous milieu (brain and spinal cord sit in a bag of CSF fluid)
- Cell membranes respond to diet, temperature and to pressure changes epigenetically. Since humans are homeothermic, our neural lipid epigenetic variables are diet and environment dependent. These features allow biochemistry to specifically affect the acyl groups on our lipid layers in the brain for optimal cell signaling. You might be a great biochemist or organic chemist but if you do not know neural biochemistry you might not be aware of just how much you do not know.
- Proteins receptors are inserted in these special lipids to signal cells chemically and electrically. This means lipids and proteins have to be multidimensional in configuration and must thermodynamically matched to the lipids in our membranes. DHA is that “magic lipid” that does all of this. You don’t find that information in fossils or in bones on the land.
Non Geek explanation of the above 8 things: Much of what is published and out in the paleosphere is based on deeply flawed assumptions. Why? Neural biochemistry is that answer, and most have completely ignored it and its massive implications for an optimal human diet.
It means the configuration requires a very precise biochemistry to work in the brain. The lipid content of the brain is altered entirely by the environment the animal is in and the protein component alters the cellular behavior and function. Nothing works optimally without the lipid chemistry being precise. (Epigenetics is ridiculously important to a large brained mammal)
9. There are special lipid ligand for signaling nuclear receptors (hormones) and there has to be a stoichiometric relationship between the ligand released and its membrane concentration (We are talking neurotransmitter biology here for the NON GEEKS, ya know leptin and its other hormones I rant on about)
If your diet is off, your hormones will be off, and that means your brain is working sub-optimally. Now go take a look at your labs and realize that those hormone panels tell you directly about how your diet matches your brain function. You get it yet? Hormone panels are your own personal mirror to your brain function clinically.
Want some more data to show you my idea might be correct? Let me go ‘Denise Minger vegetarian style’ for you now.
How to destroy the Savanna hypothesis with brain biochemisty 101
Lets look at mammalian vegetarian brain. The best way to see how a brain is constructed is to look a brain in a terrestrial vegetarian land mammal. They have an 0mega 3 fatty acid called docopentaenoic acid (DPA) in their non neural tissues and it is very abundant in their bodies. Their neural membranes however, hoard DHA, and conserve it tremendously. WHY is that? Because DHA is so rare on land food sources, land mammals who were herbivores all have really small brain sizes compared to their body size. Moreover, as their body size got bigger (think elephant as analogy) they got a logarithmic reduction in brain size. This was also seen in the dinosaurs who were terrestrial too! So we know the environmental food sources has limited terrestrial based animals up until we showed up on planet earth.
Non Geeks: They got ‘less smart’.
More neural biochemistry insight of Homo’s Solution you were not told in any paleo book: DHA and DPA are both 22 carbon fats, but DPA has only 5 double bonds while DHA has 6. The only chemical difference is one double bond between DHA and DPA.
In 600 million years of neural evolution, Mother Nature has made no attempt to replace DHA with any other fat. Why is that?
It suggests to me, that the chemistry of the DHA molecule has a “unique electrical property” that is not fully shared by DPA in the vegetarian mammals brain. In other words, its use has limited their cerebral development. The moral here? You must have a lots of DHA no matter what dogma you currently carry in your own present beliefs to make a human brain.
Deep implication of that fact: Just living on the land , eating meat predominately, will not give you enough DHA to make the 3 pound brain we have. You might be beginning to realizing then that maybe the ‘paleo solution’ was not really Homo’s original solution at our genesis of speciation. You would also be quite correct in that assumption. It is physically impossible to build a human brain without a steady supply of DHA and brain specific nutrients and neural biology proves it definitively with out any doubt. Its a shame no one looked at the major morphologic difference between transitional ape and man before jumping the gun on what we SHOULD be eating as the base of our food pyramid, huh?
I think the paleo solution is what we CAN eat after the Younger Dryas and remain relatively healthy but to say it is optimal is just not factual. What we can eat is not that important when we are talking brain construction. What we should be eating should be the question we ask! Just because you can eat a vegetarian template does not mean we should. Since we became human we have developed the ability to eat a wide variety of diets and still survive. But when we veered off the path of what was optimal for our brain we began to see neolithic disease generation. We have the opportunity to change that if we want to when we consider what the human brain requires for optimal function.
Want more proof my radical idea might be the right solution for homo?
60{a7b724a0454d92c70890dedf5ec22a026af4df067c7b55aa6009b4d34d5da3c6} of the brain is made of lipid and all brain cell membranes have another particular characteristic. They have high levels of DHA in them! In fact, in different mammals species the content of AA and DHA do not vary but their brain size does vary. This tight relationship is broken by us, humans. Ask yourself why this is the case now? This suggests the genes that control brain growth are tightly related to a deep environmental source of DHA. If you have a neurologic disorder, eating disorder, or psychiatric disorder of any type you might to pay close attention to this part of the blog. It is where you will begin to find the remedies and clues that will heal you from what has ailed you for so long.
Geek alert: DHA is also specifically and selectively incorporated into neural cell membranes and concentrated at synapses between neurons. The synapse is the most unsaturated part of the cell membrane in the brain. That means this is where DHA is needed most. At the synapse is where chemical and electrical transmission occurs. It is vitally important in construction of a human brain. Some DHA can be made from ALA but the process is highly rate limited in human biochemistry. Another major issue is that ALA is very susceptible to oxidation, at a rate of 60{a7b724a0454d92c70890dedf5ec22a026af4df067c7b55aa6009b4d34d5da3c6} in 24 hours, compared to only 5{a7b724a0454d92c70890dedf5ec22a026af4df067c7b55aa6009b4d34d5da3c6} oxidation for DHA. That is a substantial difference. This is why I tell all my patients fowl is foul.
Even if they eat flax it is not the right kind of omega three’s for a human brain. ALA forces competition for the desaturase enzymes so that means if you have a large brain you do not ever want to eat flax of vegetarian sources of omega 3. Moreover, excitable membranes do not work well with oxidized lipids in them. Vegetarian sources of omega 3 are all loaded with the highly oxidizable ALA. This is why you need to avoid them like the plague if you are bright. ALA allows for major oxidation and that is why vegans/vegetarians/fruititarians are at serious risks for neolithic disease generation. We know that cell membrane stability is critical in all neurodegenerative disorders we treat in medicine today. The work of Patricia Kane at John Hopkins is also enlightening in this area. If you are not facile in her work you need to be. If you do not believe that, go talk to some one with Alzheimer’s disease.
Today, it is well established that dietary sources of DHA are an independent determinant of brain growth and in evolution across all species.(Broadhurst 2002)
It goes even further folks; Pierre Budowski at Hebrew University showed definitively that their is direct competition between omega 6 and omega 3 PUFAS and the balance of both in the brain is critical. This is also a tightly controlled system in the human brain. Moreover, as land based mammals grow, their body plan growth rates outstripped their ability to make DHA endogenously and they had no exogenous supply, so they kept small brains! That is why there is a relationship in all land mammals that the bigger they got the dumber they get.
This implies that DHA is the SINGLE rate limiting to step to a big brain in the entire land food web on this planet. Bye, bye savanna hypothesis!!!
Non Geek Alert: Holy moly, I need to rethink my diet and my environmental temperature since I have diseases caused by a bad brain! Think Leptin Resistance, obesity, ED, etc.
There is only one large mammal that comes close to the brain/body growth of Homo sapiens. Humans and dolphins are the only two mammals that break this evolutionary trend. Stop and ask yourself why that might be the case now? The dolphin’s brain makes up 1{a7b724a0454d92c70890dedf5ec22a026af4df067c7b55aa6009b4d34d5da3c6} of its total body weight. They also have an affinity for fish in their diet and they eat very few carbohydrates at all. This strongly suggests that human evolution was somehow tied to the water. We laid this all out without using any of the bone collector theories too.
They ignored the human brain in their theory generation and now it should make you realize all those beliefs they have seared into your brain about fossils is perilous at best. As a neurosurgeon, I embraced the brain to give me Homo’s solution. It is impossible to have the human brain in your head if you were not evolved eating some nutrient source with a lot of DHA! It is no longer tenable to argue about it. And supplementation of DHA does not equal eating shellfish for optimal health. No one can out supplement a great Epi-Paleo diet.
Another major point has to be made. All the genes assimilated over the eons to form the brain use free T3 as their metabolic switch to cause brain growth. Most people in the paleosphere believe that a low carb diet cause a low free T3 state. This false belief is caused because they fail to account for what happens to free T3 in a cold wet environment devoid of carbs that is loaded with seafood high in Selenium, Iodine, Iron, Magnesium, Zinc, and DHA. See context matters huge to neural biochemistry.
T3 is sensitive to dietary carbs when that is the type of diet you are adapted to eating without much seafood in it. But a diet loaded with the above nutrients, and devoid of carbs, this dramatically increases free T3 while also lowering TSH to a massive degree. This is precisely the environment we found in the Rift Zone where humans came from. The ‘carbophiles’ always forget that evolution might have others ways to skin the cat that we have moved away from today. Somebody also forgot to tell them as we have our brain shrunk too! This implies de-evolution.
They seem to forget that most of us have known for several decades the effect of insulin/carbs on T3. But we also know eating carbs all day is a great way to destroy a brain with Alzheimer’s and neurologic diseases we see today commonly. They need to reconcile these facts with disease data. They can not. Just because we can eat carbs all day long does not make it optimal. This recent link might show you just how wrong many in paleo-land might be. The ‘bad mojo’ that low carb diets get in paleo is disturbing, and is perpetrated by those trying to control the “meme” of what paleo is to them and not to science. Here, I am only concerned what is optimal for our species. Paleo is good. I now believe there is another solution for Homo that maybe best.
The environment provided for a “low carb, high seafood diet” that massively stimulative to the genes controlling brain growth by raising T3 and lowering TSH. In my medical career, I have seen no evidence that a low carbohydrate diet causes any hypothyroidism as many bloggers write about, like its common knowledge to everyone. Maybe it is to them, but I doubt they can cure themselves from even a bad thought, much less a neurologic disease. It’s only common knowledge when you’re beholden to dogma. A low carb diet, with concomitent elevations in brain nutrients, is where optimal brain function happens for homo happens, in my clinical experience.
It limits what hurts our brain function and optimizes the nutrients it needs to function ideally. Question dogma, always even it is right about a lot of things.
Non Geeks: With regards to brain function, paleo may not be the optimal solution for homo.
What does this mean for our Optimal Homo diet? Remember, you are still part of the Homo tree.
It means you better consider becoming Epi-Paleo if you want to remain smart, and not begin your de-evolutionary slide to mediocre like many of our species have already done.
Someone named Jeff, just recently said on an internet site, ” Humans can survive very easily on most foods.
Thriving into old age and keeping the effects of degeneration to a minimum is the holy grail of Nutritional Genomics.
This in and of itself, goes far beyond the Paleo template, which truly is a fad diet based on a lot of assumptions.”
More Support: Webinars by Dr. Kruse
- Factor X (May 2012)
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The Paleo Solution: The Original Human Diet |
Additional Resources
- Brain Gut 1: Who Are We, Really?
- Brain Gut 2: Viral Marketing
- Brain Gut 3: Look In The Past To See Your Prologue
- Brain Gut 6: Epi-Paleo Rx
- The Quilt
- Cold Thermogenesis 6: The Ancient Pathway
Cites
- http://www.wsg.washington.edu/communications/online/shellfishnutrition_09.pdf
- http://www.livestrong.com/article/339801-nutritional-values-of-meat-fish/
- http://foodconfessional.wordpress.com/2008/04/16/meat-nutrition-information/
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seafood
- S.J> Gould. 2002 The structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge, MA Belknap/Harvard Univ. Press.
- Tobias, P. 1998 Water and human evolution. Out there. 35: 38-44. 4
- Bazan, N. 2007 Homeostatic regulation of photoreceptor cell Integrity. The Proctor Lecture. Invest. Opthalmol.Vis Sci 48(11):4866-4881
- Bitsanis, D. Crawford, M.A. et al. AA predominats in the membrane PGof the early and term placenta. J. Nutr 135 135 (11): 2566-2 571.
- Broadhurst, C.L. et al. 2002 Brain Specific lipids from Marine Lacustrine, or terrestrial food resources: Potential impact on Early African Homo sapiens. Comp Biochem Physiology B Biochem. Mol biol. 131: 653-6. 73.
- Volek JS, et al. Body composition and hormonal responses to a carbohydrate-restricted diet. Metabolism. 2002 Jul; 51 (7): 864-870
- Bisschop PH, et al. Isocaloric carbohydrate deprivation induces protein catabolism despite a low T3-syndrome in healthy men. Clinical Endocrinology, 2001; 54: 75-80
Totally thankful for the Non-Geek Alerts! And thankful for everything you do! I need a re-read!
Mind blowing as always, even to a non geek like me. Can krill sipplements be as good as food sources? Is there a best way to transition to epi-paleo? Everytime I try, I can make it a few days with a perfect diet, but I feel shaky, weak and emotionally ustable. I end up eating carbs and always fall of the wagon that way. Thanks!
@Coldbren Food is always better than a supplement……but if you must……get brain supplements in if you want Optimal.
GODMSACKED. I think you just gave me the key to fix a few things.
So, If I have low T3, I can raise it by eating an epi-paleo template (ketogenic, seafood centered)? DO I still need thyroid meds? Or Do I only need them until I’m optimal?
the puzzle pieces continue to fall into place.
@gretchen…….totally depends upon CRH/ACTH/cortisol axis……remember what I said in Hormone 101 blog……if they are up the thyroid hormone T3 gets turned off……even from great food. CRH is a competitive inhibitor to T3 and T4. It turns it into rT3. This is why measuring rT3 is a must for modern humans who have mismatches.
I (used to) eat canned sardines. You said that fish should be fresh or frozen. What is lost in canned fish?
For the rest : yet another very interesting blog that convinces me right away. I buy this storyline. I guess I have to change my diet if I want to stay smart enough to understand everyting you give me.
@Andre……bad fish is better than great meat. That is Brain Gut 4 in a sentence. How is that for controversial.
Can someone point me to the description of the “Epi-Paleo” diet? I must have missed it along the way. I take it the general idea is to use seafood as the primary source of protein. Thanks.
@Eric You missed nothing…….I have not unleashed it…….unless you did a consult with me, and you have not so you have not formally heard it yet. But rest assured it’s coming.
I was feeling relatively pleased with my diet until “fowl is foul” hit me very hard in my not so bright brain. So now the chicken has to go…please tell me bacon is still ok!
@Ray…….bacon is a great condiment that finds itself wrapped around all my shellfish and fish in my house. The only good think about fowl is their eggs…….the only fowl I eat is duck.
It’s getting personal.
@Lee……..no I would disagree. I’d say it’s getting real……..on the science that really matters for humans.
Time to re-read hormone 101….
@Gretchen that blog post should take on a massive meaning to anyone reading this one.
“Moreover, as land based mammals grow, their body plan growth rates outstripped their ability to make DHA endogenously and they had no exogenous supply, so they kept small brains!”
Since there is a very limited amount of long chain and medium chain fatty acids in green plant matter, most of the synthesis of critical lipid components in herbivores is done by gut bacteria. Thus ruminants have huge guts, multiple stomachs and rumen (microbial fermentation chambers) to change low quality, nutrient poor grasses into something that will build tissues. Cows may graze, but it’s the gut bacteria that eat!
This gives you a huge clue to what humans with their short gut and vestigial appendix should be eating…and it ain’t plant matter. Although salads for variety are nice.
Dr K, do you think the 10 % loss in brain volume that homo sapiens has experienced in the last 150 years is solely caused by the shift away from ancestral food sources?
@Kathyu we lost that 130 gms since Cromagnon man……so it was a bit more than 150 yrs. I think it was because man moved away from water sources as he populated the world. It was loss of a ready substrate.
This is a fabulous summery of the evolution of our brains…really ties in Factor X and the watery imperative. This is getting a print out for sure!
I understand exactly why my struggling with veggies may not be a good use of time….shag ’em, I’ll just get my nutrients from the water and focus on light and hormones. Off to join the tadpoles in our pond…..
@SeaHorse……I though you in particular would particular be keen on that part.
Dr K, another amazing blog! Thank you for taking us all along on this path of optimal. A question: you say that a major problem is that we can’t get sufficient DHA etc into cell membranes when there is lots of saturated fats during brain formation. Can you say more about that? What are the implications for fat in the diet from sources other than shellfish/seafood? (e.g. CO?) Thanks.
@Lauren Just wait til Brain Gut 5 when we go into some more detail and begin to find many flaws in what many believe to be true about the paleo template.
And I think that saying that rapid encephalization occured because of abundant DHA being available from marine sources is a good call.
Shrimp scampi for dinner!
Hi Dr.Kruse,
great blog again. one question, you say one can’t consume enough DHA in a supplement to equate/compare eating seafood, can you elaborate this. Thanks!
@JimG I am not sure what you want me elaborate on. It seems pretty self explanatory. Your brain has specific requirements and when they are not met you get suboptimal function. Thinks AD, PD, Autism, depression, ED, etc………
I have been reading some of Ray Peats articles on sugar lately and found this:
“Besides being one of the forms of sugar involved in ordinary energy production, interchangeable with glucose, fructose has some special functions, that aren’t as well performed by glucose. It is the main sugar involved in reproduction, in the seminal fluid and intrauterine fluid, and in the developing fetus. After these crucial stages of life are past, glucose becomes the primary molecular source of energy, except when the system is under stress. It has been suggested (Jauniaux, et al., 2005) that the predominance of fructose rather than glucose in the embryo’s environment helps to maintain ATP and the oxidative state (cellular redox potential) during development in the low-oxygen environment. The placenta turns glucose from the mother’s blood into fructose, and the fructose in the mother’s blood can pass through into the fetus, and although glucose can move back from the fetus into the mother’s blood, fructose is unable to move in that direction, so a high concentration is maintained in the fluids around the fetus.”
Does this statement on fructose/glucose fit into your theory of homo evolution?
@AKman this is not specific for humans at all…..most mammals use this and it is not a really important issue in development.
Oops…it was a typo…I meant 150,000 years…
Oops again…15,000…
If Modern Humans Are So Smart, Why Are Our Brains Shrinking?
http://discovermagazine.com/2010/sep/25-modern-humans-smart-why-brain-shrinking/
@Kathylu Hawks theory in that paper also is quite flawed because he uses population genetics but yet he fails to mention that the Younger Dryas absolutely devastated hominids 13,000 yrs ago and ushered in an agrarian survival as the megafauna abruptly died off. If you ask me……this is what caused us to lose the 130 gms of brain we used to have. Moreover, I think you have to be decidly more smart to survive in ancient conditions than we are today. Today we benefit from a cognitive stimulatory environment but our brain is built to learn best via movement. This is why every study known on exercise shows it stimulates BDNF in our hippocampus to make new memories and those memoriesare seared into our consciousness by cortisol and melatonin as we sleep. Our sex steroids, namely DHEA and E2 and Testosterone strengthen the synapses and growth hormone locks them in to a hebbian circuit for recurrent memory. This cortisol link is where PTSD comes in. When cortisol is tied to massive emotional discharge……from a trauma……we can not put these memories into our long term memory because the cortisol spike that goes too high does not allow BDNF to happen. The crazy thing is that the memory however is locked into our brain and stored but we remain blind to it because no pathways are wired into or out of it by the post memory processing. There are now drugs that allow us to access them ironically.
That article dismisses the agricultural arguement based on australian homo’s brain shrinkage prior to the advent of agriculture in that environment.
Your blogs always send me off on a mad scientific paper search frenzy! This time my quest was for the source of Arachidonic Acid for encephalization, because in your blog ‘Is fish oil good or bad’ you said that the brain has a 100 to 1 ratio of 06 to 03 within it normally. So, if a source of DHA is a limit on brain size then I would think that AA might be an issue too, since 100x more of it is needed to build the brain. The first thing that I thought was, ‘Homo habilis wasn’t pouring high omega 6 vegetable oil over seafood!’; however, my Google-fu taught me that high omega 6 vegetables don’t have high arachidonic acid anyway, and that it comes from animal sources. I read an interesting paper (Crawford et al., 2008), which said that “…both arachidonic and DHA are needed for the growth and development of the brain and its function (Crawford and Sinclair 1972). The difficulty the Dolphin and other marine mammals have is in obtaining arachidonic acid from the marine food chain to serve the brain. Hence arachidonic acid supply would be a constraint on brain evolution in the marine habitat although assumedly still required for mammalian reproduction (Williams and Crawford 1987). A littoral ecosystem would have provided and evolving primate with access to both arachidonic acid and DHA and hence would have had the best of both worlds.” So, the coastal Homo would have had to be eating both seafood and land based animals? Very interesting…I’m going to have to stop at the library this week to get Cunnane’s Human Brain Evolution book, and I look forward to hearing more about the Epi-Paleo Rx.
@Tess Your comment is spot and when one actually looks at what it takes to build a brain the current dogma out there just is not tenable. You point on the dolphins is also spot on but as you can see I am not interested in them. I am interested in showing your why humans are the major curve breakers……..because we collected both AA and DHA at amazing rates because of our new novel environment in the cradle of our genesis in the Eat African Rift.
It would seem some groups that eat lots of seafood, and in particular shellfish, such as the Japanese would be pretty optimal in their lifestyle. And if I am correct, they have the longest lifespan or at least top 3. Although having lived in Japan, they are adapting to a western diet and eating crap food as well as heavy carbs. just my two cents.
@Pete the Japenese longevity is tied to okinawa and is tied to a specific defect in their mitochondria that has nothing to do with their diet. The rest of the mainlanders diet early like the rest of the world because they do not have the magic mitochondrial allele.
There is a book called “Omega 3 – Queen of Fats” by Susan Allport that would support very well all the arguments put forward by Dr Jack. I would highly recommend it, it is a masterful and wonderful book. I see no contradiction between what it says and this week’s essay. Both are wonderful
@Patrick Thanks I will need to get that book then. I have not heard of it.
hmmm, this magic mitochondrial allele sounds interesting. perhaps a new blog post to come? thanks for all the work Dr. Kruse! it is much appreciated.
@Pete it is already written about here: https://jackkruse.com/why-we-die-and-why-we-live/ Look for the Tanaka reference in the Lancet form the 90’s
So to be clear we need to consume copious amounts of food source omega 3s as well as land sourced AA? One isn’t negating the effect of the other?
@Monte You are correct. You wont need to go out of your way to get the AA because it is not a rare substrate in our food chains. It is quite common. DHA however is the critical link as I laid out in this blog.
great post Jack…so lots of fish & less meat to help with my depression & anxiety!
@Julian yes indeed.
@Andres When you look at brain lipid biochemistry the data is even more dramatic for a water based evolution. The only reason it is not talked over more is because of the bone collectors who formulated the Savanna hypothesis to begin with. Once again dogma rears its ugly head. When a physician begins to see this possibility we then can adjust our perspective about how to bet treat many of the diseases we do and magically patients respond. I am glad this blog stimulated you to find this info on your own and share it here with my readers.
Oreopithecus was a swamp-ape that lived 7 to 9 million years ago on an isolated island in today’s Italy. It seems to be more similar to the later Australopithecus than to any other primate. Homo is next in similarity to Oreopithecus while the African and Asian apes show the least morphological similarity to Oreopithecus amongst the hominoids. Oreopithecus was bipedal, just like humans, unlike the knuckle-walking African apes we supposedly are related to. Oreopithecus might be very close to the common ancestor of Pan, Homo and Gorilla. If Oreopithecus was the ancestor of Homo, this would also explain a large number of aquatic adaptations found in today’s humans, but not in other primate species.
Australopithecus (Lucy) is most likely a descedant of Oreopithecus, and lived in Africa 3 million years ago. It still was bipedal, but it is unlikely they are direct ancestors of Homo because of the back-evolution to an arboreal life-style. Alternatively, it’s possible that Pan is not at all very closely related to Homo and that the similarity in mitochondrial DNA is caused by climatic selection on the mitochondria.
Interesting that some scientists support the Savannah hypothesis by stating that the availability of AA was believed to be a limiting factor in brain development for coastal/lacustrine populations (i.e. they only ate from marine/lacustrine sources, not AA rich land mammals). So, they vacated (or never inhabited) the coasts, following land animals for AA and got DHA from eating the brains of those animals. That would explain the absence of coastal hominid fossils. It seems to me that even a coastal population would expoit the best resources of both land and water. After all, where do most animals congregate? At the water’s edge. So, primates adapted to a semi aquatic/coastal environment would eat marine/lacustrine foods and land based animals. So, no problem finding AA (along with lots of DHA!). How to explain the absence of fossils? Water and time would destroy lots of evidence.
@Kathylu. You are connecting the same data sets I am. Why anyone thinks we came from the Savanna these days is just hard to support.
Any concerns with purines at a fish intake of 1 pound per day? Gout?
@Monte Diaz If someone is already sick (gout, increase uric acid, T2D) you might be concerned but I have not seen this as a problem clinically in taking care of people. Their health generally improves on an epi paleo template faster than any other evolutionary template I have used.
Good point Monte. Best not to consume lots of fructose with your seafood.
Great Stuff!!!
WP showed that K-2 played a big role in development of children skulls to be optimal, does this vitamin also play a significant role in allowing the expansion of the brain for the young and old?
How does the use of MCT’s play into this? It seems the brain would love it because of the increase in ketone production?
@Bobert Brain expansion is fueled bu keeping the suture of the skull non fused until most neuronal growth is complete at age 6. Many nutrients are critical for suture closure…..not just K2. Ketosis is huge for children. They are born into ketosis with an immature nervous system, especially with myelin production of the major fiber tracts of the cerebral cortex. Ketosis actually supports myelination. Grains and glycation destroy and inhibit it. That comes later in the series.
Dr Jack wrote: “This cortisol link is where PTSD comes in. When cortisol is tied to massive emotional discharge……from a trauma……we can not put these memories into our long term memory because the cortisol spike that goes too high does not allow BDNF to happen. The crazy thing is that the memory however is locked into our brain and stored but we remain blind to it because no pathways are wired into or out of it by the post memory processing. There are now drugs that allow us to access them ironically.”
I find this quite fascinating,I have been/am involved in “Primal Therapy” which seeks to do exactly that………evoke and integrate these ‘memories’ that constantly activates but are not accesible normally and cause all kind of ‘mental mayhem’. I have been trying to interest the therapist in your ideas with little influence so far. Now I feel like going the other way, try to interest you in the “primal theory” put forth by Dr Arthur Janov. There is a fascinating congruence there somewhere if only it could be brought forth. A lot of your work about tapping into ‘ancient pathways’ via cold etc also are VERY reminiscient and have a familiar feel about them. Janov approaches it more from ‘personal history’ as in psycho-therapy, you come at it from the evolutionary genetic point of view. Sometimes I think/feel if yours and Janov’s insights could be melded to-gether it would be a powerful and amazing ‘therapy’. I find myself trying to do this ‘all by myself’ using both ideas. I wish I did not feel so alone with it thought
Great post as always. Love this latest series.
Quick question regarding fat consumption.
I’ve recently adopted the ‘bulletproof IF’ protocol: Coffee w/ MCT oil, Coconut Oil, Ghee, cinnamon, stevia, and tumeric for breakfast (plus some supplements: Krill oil, Magnesium, K, Resveratrol) and lunch, then eat my meals in a 4-6 hour window after working out (2pm-6pm).
1) Is this protocol potentially sub-optimal; and 2) Can having so much saturated and MCT fat w/ the coffee upset the balance of Omega 3 (DHA mainly)I get from the Krill supplement plus seafood I eat at dinner?
@Hari it could be but I doubt it. If you had a low cortisol or trashed DHEA.
Great stuff!
Sounds like the ideal breakfast is scallops cooked in (grass fed) lard, and some sauteed kale along with it!
Your response to Bobert about babies and ketosis got me thinking – how early do our “official” food guidelines recommend giving fish, and grains to babies?
If you look at this guideline from the Oregon dairy council – which you expect to be dairy heavy (and I am OK with that), they start to introduce grains – manufactured cereals no less – at 4-6 months and hold off on fish until after 12 months!
No wonder kids are running into developmental problems, poor eyesight etc.
Of course, *none* of the traditional societies studied by Weston price were introducing grains, much less manufactured cereals, to kids at such young ages – I’ll bet they were ketogenic for several years.
My grandmother always wanted us to eat lots of fish – I didn;t really like it as a kid, unless it was cooked in (our homemade, grass fed) butter! Didn’t know I was doing myself such a favour!
@Paul N Ketosis the first few yrs of life is maintained by breast feeding. The sad part of modern life is that babies need breast milk a lot longer than we all think.
A further comment about the coastal/lacustrine environments in East Africa back then. Normally, lacustrine (freshwater lakes) are more varied ecosystems than ocean coasts – they attract lots of herbivores. If the rift valleys were freshwater lakes I would expect a greater variety of terrestrial animals, though maybe less of the aquatic life (and maybe less DHA in the fish/shellfish? If the people lived at an interface where there is coast on one side, and freshwater lakes/rivers on the other, or nearby, then they would truly have the best of all worlds.
The statements about DHA/DPA in herbivore brains are fascinating. I wonder then how that ratio compares in chimps/bonobos, compared to humans? Presumably they have more DHA than the herbivores, but still much less than us.
http://www.bodybio.com/BodyBio/docs/BodyBioBulletin-4to1Oil.pdf
After a dozen years or more of close examination of detailed
red cell lipid analysis at BodyBio, we have witnessed and
documented repeated over-expression of omega 3 fatty acids
EPA and DHA, with the ultimate suppression of omega 6
fatty acids. BodyBio analyzes the patient’s complex lipid
biochemistry through a computerized report, which is then
forwarded to the physician. Over 90% are reporting high
EPA and DHA levels most often from taking an excess of
fi sh oil. The patients often record their fish oil
(and fish intake) along with their current supplements on
their medical history form.
The elevated levels of EPA and DHA predominantly come
from suggestions by their regular physicians
to try fi sh oil. With the encouragement now coming from
an authority, the over-expression of EPA and DHA has
reached epidemic proportions. However, the direct effect
on the body is that fi sh oil suppresses arachidonic acid
and other omega 6 fatty acids (Gurr 2002 6 ), which further
cause metabolic disturbances (see case studies). This is
clearly visible in the patient’s red blood cell fatty acid report,
showing a distorted fatty acid profile and a disturbed
metabolism, much of which is reversible with correct lipid
adjustment. All nutrients should be added gently unless
one is armed with pertinent information and guidance,
such as a lab test showing defi ciency,
or by a knowledgeable professional aware of the current
popular excessive use of fish oils.
(The high 90% that we see of over-expression of fish oil
is skewed because the individual who seeks
a RBC fatty acid test is one who has read up [Google?]
on the latest nutrient promotion, often taking fi sh oil, and
then seeks a doctor that has an interest in
fatty acid analysis and nutrition).
(BodyBio RBC fatty acid reports are performed
at Kennedy Krieger Institute – Johns Hopkins University, the premier
fatty acid testing laboratory in the world)
@Jansz The key to epigenetics is having perfect cell membrane signaling. Eat your DHA and EPA and try to avoid supplementation if possible. Without testing you’re flying blind, but you already know that.
Jack..when can we expect ‘Epi-paleo’??
@Julian As this series rolls on all the part to be revealed. We are at the beginning.
Jack, how about the summer edition of your Optimized Cookbook? Surely you will have plenty of seafood recipes?
@Nonchalant It will have a nice mix…..but yes there are plenty.
@Jack Says:
@Jansz The key to epigenetics is having perfect cell membrane signaling.
Eat your DHA and EPA and try to avoid supplementation if possible.
Without testing you’re flying blind, but you already know that.
————-
Yes, eating EPA & DHA is the way to go.
Yesterday I drew blood for
Essential & Metabolic Fatty Acids Analysis (EMFA) by Genova Diagnostics
membrane signaling, integrity of membrane
not sure how to evaluate its adequacy or deficiency, could use hint.
Guessing, eating physical krill should give us better EPA/DHA/phospholipids profile
than any other sea foods
Cand get whole krill yet
so
I eat sea food and chase it with 4/day PC’s from BodyBio.
..
Jansz if you have a co morbid AF issue Krill could really make a difference. What I usually rec for that issue is eating shrimp and its exoskeleton because the PS and PC are in the package.
If we combine this info with CPC 4, does it then appear there are real dangers with too much red meat in the diet? (Russell Blaylock talks about the potential toxicity of iron via red meat and suggests avoiding it if you’re at higher risk of cancer.)
@Lauren I dont think so……unless your red meat is grain fed. Red meat is loaded with carnosine which is very favorable to telomeres. Dr. Blaylock is a smart guy but I dont buy his take on red meat at all. Most of the risk of iron is tied to the grain fed issue, the high fructose co morbid consumption, or if one has a permeable gut. The other way around a high iron level or a high red meat diet is coffee. It totally blocks absorbtion of iron in the gut and this is why coffee drinkers have such low rates of Ca and of Alzheimers. We must put everything in context before we say things that could spook people.
Jack wrote:
“Brain expansion is fueled by keeping the suture of the skull non fused until most neuronal growth is complete at age 6. Many nutrients are critical for suture closure…..not just K2. Ketosis is huge for children. They are born into ketosis with an immature nervous system, especially with myelin production of the major fiber tracts of the cerebral cortex. Ketosis actually supports myelination. Grains and glycation destroy and inhibit it.”
As one who works with pregnant and nursing women, I am absolutely fascinated by these recent blogs–so mind blowing! The introduction of solids to babies is generally recommended between 5 to 8 months. With “neutral” rice cereal being the number one choice recommended choice to Moms. (As a Mom, this is killing me to think of all the things I should have done differently, could I do it over. My ketogenic 6-year old, however, generally requires that I follow her lead.) Now, how do we get the pediatric advice to change so that babies are introduced to better foods early on? And not introduced at all to foods that will wreak havoc on their system? Nearly every information source tells parents to start with a single-grain, iron-fortified cereal. Pureed sardines, anyone?
@Kristi for infants the recs of 5-8 months is too soon……I think breast feeding is cut short way to often in modern times. 3-5 yrs is likely ideal. As for changing the pediatricians……..tell them to read the blog and learn about neural lipid biochemistry. Its all about the brain and not about their pediatric beliefs.
Thanks very much! My meat is grass fed (and I’ve been eating whole shrimp… heads, shells and all) twice a week. Thanks for the inspiration.
Jack Says:
Jansz if you have a co morbid AF issue Krill could really make a difference.
What I usually rec for that issue is eating shrimp and its exoskeleton
because the PS and PC are in the package.
Yes. I buy tiny whole dried shrimps (and anchovy).
http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/7491/image235b.jpg
The exoskeleton contains fluoride. How much can you eat safely?
Should I really worry about fluoride when I have plenty of iodine & iodide?
.
@Jansz seafood is pretty low in F unless it is from the SF basin
Jack Says:
@Jansz seafood is pretty low in F unless it is from the SF basin
——————————————————————————————————————-
How to convince Mr Remøy from rimfrostkrill
to sell unadulterated product.
——————————————————————————————————————–
http://www.rimfrostkrill.com/press-release-olympic-seafood-as-introduces-its-flagship-brand-the-rimfrost-krill-collection-at-vitafoods-2012/
RIMFROST GENUINE is Antarctic krill meal
where only the fluoride containing krill shells and water are removed
before mild low-temperature drying and packaging of the product while still on board the Juvel.
———————————————————————————————————————
I send him e-mail and got automatic reply.
—-
Hopefully you have answer for me.
I am in Parsippany NJ USA 07054
How can I buy your Antarctic Krill Meal. How much it cost, shipping?
Also,
is there a way to buy unadulterated complete Krill for human consumption.
Frozen, dry frozen (CO2) or freeze dried (lyophilized).
————————————————————————————————————————
Thank you for your message. I am currently out of the office – with limited access to e-mail. I will be back in the office 16 July.
For urgent matters, please call my mobile +47 913 89 300 or the office at +47 700 81 200 and leave a message.
Best regards,
Even T. Remøy
Antarctic Krill Meal
“Even T. Remøy”
.
@Jansz we need to take a Kruse Cruise to the poles…….to get the krill. We need to expand the thoughts that become healthy things to communities who need to hear the message.
Jack,
Several people have asked you about eating a large amount of fish or for that matter grass fed beef in regard to the Uric acid levels. I had a gout flare just after starting the Leptin Rx 6 Months ago and have just had a major flare of both the toe and ankle. My UA level is highly elevated and the conventional wisdom treats gout by limiting all meats and fish/shellfish. Uloric or other meds will lower the UA levels but the paleo diet plan is loaded with items high in purine.
Could you please address this issue directly and clearly so those of us in pain today can understand how we can become optimum without gout?
Thanks,
Eric
@Eric Sure. You have an altered gut flora and you need to fix it to lower your uric acid level and run away from your gout. Seafood does not create gout…….an altered gut flora from years of sub optimal however does.
To anyone…. What does ” PS and PC” refer to?
have learned so much from reading your blog. thank you. sure, i find stuff i can nitpick, but the big picture is O.K. For a while, i wasn’t sure what the proper perspective was, geology, biology, evolutionary biology, archaeology? then it came to me- it was your time in NY at the history museum. Paleo- Ontology. that is a missing spot in my education- no geology & little biology. but lots of organic chem, physical chem, electrical engineering and physics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleontology
Every time i read a post, i research the topic and it opens up a brand new world. For instance, that Sardinia & Tuscany were once an island in an Italian archipalego b/n Africa& Europe. Or a giant lake in North America, Lake Agassiz, drained,& caused a global cooling, leading to uncertain times & the start of agriculture in the Near East. The KT event. Extinction Events- climate crisis- Asteroids- just fascinating stuff.
a new term is appropriate. epi-paleo-ontology.
have a question. from what i have read here
fish or krill oil supplementation can screw up your 03:06 ratio. don’t fly in the dark w/o testing. How about eating what the fish eat & cutting out the middle man, so to speak. that is eating the seaweed or microalgae? (altho, i have read the microalgae have the DHA b/ no EPA?)
@Wally seaweed has its role…….but the key is when you are mammal with a Ferrari built into your head……you better know how to optimally fuel it. The brain controls everything about us. That includes diets and hormones. Just because we CAN do and EAT some things does not imply they are OPTIMAL for the Ferrari in our head. That is the problem with most of the world and blogosphere. We all have vague notions of what is right, instead of biologically specific wisdoms of what a brain optimally requires. This blog, and the next one will bring that reality to your 8 lobes in your own head for you to decide……..of what is a human’s best decision the paleo solution or the Epi-paleo Rx? You decide after examining the data. I want you to question EVERYTHING.
You can continue to build your current life or you can begin to build you current un-lived life that is present only in your mind now as you read. The space between is where illness, disease, and your longevity lies. That decision is also yours. You might think you can find yourself in a question or answer paleo-hacks, in the blogosphere, or some primal or paleo book………I believe you can create yourself from the data of science. Here, we just shine a light on what others have found……so you can create the treasure map to optimal for you. What I attempt to do here is innovate and weave a web for you to consider where optimal may really lie for us as a species. Many times it is not where you thought.
Ahh, obviously my 03:06 is out of kilter for having asked such a question. by analogy w/ cows 1) the plant seafood is concentrated by the animal seafood so we don’t have to bulk up as much of it to get the equivalent DHA & 2) it may not be digestible or bioavailable to us as the grass that grass-fed cows eat is not.
@Wally……..your answer is buried in your labs not in your ideas. We all have ideas of where we are until the labs shatter that reality. Accepting Epi-Paleo change into my life has made me realize that sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together. That is what inspires me to change every day now. 80% of the information we get from life comes from our visual inputs, but what we see with our eyes may pale in comparison to what we see with our thoughts via our minds eye. I like your thoughts more than your comments……….Your thoughts become real things in a concrete world. Things become your eventual actions and your actions become new habits in life…….new habits become a new life that you live. I have learned to embrace change, because nothing diminishes anxiety faster than action. I came to realize each person’s task in life is to improve our former selves. Not all of us get this text message in time. All of our dreams can come true if we have the courage to just pursue them at some level. Our life does not get better by chance; it gets better by accepting change.
I love it – cant wait to read Brain Gut 5
@Jack Says:
@Wally……..your answer is buried in your labs not in your ideas.
———————-
dr Jack
one of your ideas is to motivate and teach doctors about better ways.
I note that laboratories also need helping hand.
At the minimum it would be a good idea to discuss and formulate what constitute optimized fatty acid analysis so we could recognize it when we see it.
Some tests being sold as evaluation of O6/O3 are misleading to the point that chasing test results, to make improvements, people are hurting them selves.
In my view, saying O6/O3 ratio should be X does not say much, actually it is confusing because it looks like something, but it is undefined. There is number of O3’s and O6, which one we are talking about?
Laboratories looking to make a buck are coming up with tests such as
Spectracell HS-Omega-3® Index (and number of other (cheap) tests available over internet.
measures the percentage of EPA and DHA levels in red blood cell membranes
This test is leading me, making me eat Krill and Fish oil by the buckets. The more I eat, the better my test results will be. That is wrong.
Much better (but not fully) is
Essential & Metabolic Fatty Acids Analysis (EMFA) by Genova Diagnostics
This test is good overall, but is missing upper ranges for EPA, DHA and other (ie; newer can have too much of them).
Again, test designed to sell Krill and Fish oils, which when in excess, suppress equally important AA and LA & ALA (and the commentary follows which may not be accurate because of all this supplementation)
It shows all kind of ratios but is missing highly important ALA/LA which really is one of many of O6/O3 ratios that we should observe.
http://img705.imageshack.us/img705/5059/image163x.jpg
Dr. Patrick Hanaway, Vice President and Chief Medical Officer Genova Diagnostics
Telephone: 800-522-4762
Contacting Dr Hanaway likely could help in this area.
———-
Now on really thin ice;
Dr Kane prefers testing fatty Acids at
Kennedy Krieger Institute – Johns Hopkins University,
the premier fatty acid testing laboratory in the world
This test have the bells and whistles, many more fatty acids cathegories are tested, lower and upper ranges are presented.
The best currently available.
Howewer, they could have added post processing, say similar to what Genova does.
Something similar to what is on page #3, link above.
..
@Jansz. I agree but Genova and Lab Corp wont change for me. I have already asked. For people with neuro degeneration I think Kane’s testing is best but people do not want to come out of their pockets and pay. I can barely get people with these diseases to pay their co pays. Until they see the benefits they wont change. Those that do will follow the path. This is why the cheap 06/3 ratios stick around……….because most people wont pay. You figure out how to get people to adapt to that change and let me know…….because for 20 yrs I have not been able to get people to understand that much of what they need to follow is not covered under insurance. (IE: BHRT s a great example)
Dr. Kruse,
I haven’t posted in awhile but continue to be an avid reader of your work. You once gave me the follwing advice which I follw strictly:
“Jack Says:
November 14th, 2011 at 11:25 pm
@Paul if you can only be on Phenobarb then you have to consider things that you can do to modify your response. I would go strict ketogenic paleo and would eat almost exclusively MCT and see if you could then switch to something else. If not then you must do simultaneous HRT, keep your gut and liver optimal because of all the drugs your on and I would consider adding Zn and ECCG (green tea and green tea extract) because both are great aromatizer inhibitors. I also consider curcumin as a must supplement, with NAC, sillymarin and alpha lipoic acid. You need to do everything you can to keep the liver and gut functioning optimally with your set of circumstances.”
May I assume this advice would now be qualifed wtih the recommendation to include more seafood and less meat?
You also advised me to take 500 mg. of Krill Oil 3 x daily. Is this still valid?
Thanks.
@Paul it is all still valid. For you the diet is a must……how you do it is your choice. But to stay away from guys like me for as long as you can you must directly control your epigenetics……..and that you control 100% of the time.
Doug Says:
July 12th, 2012 at 7:38 pm
To anyone…. What does ” PS and PC” refer to?
______________________________________________
Doug I think Jack is referring to:
phosphatidylserine = PS
phosphatidylcholine = PC
but he will correct me if I’m wrong. Both are good support for AF.
@Gretchen She is 100% correct.
As everything seems to come down to brain health, what are your thoughts on Asprey’s recommendation of Aniracetam?
Considering adding it to my new stack of supplements that include Krill oil, Vit K, D3, Mag, and a new emphasis on US Wellness Sardines, Salmon, and Mackerel.
@Hari Dave is offering things that will help a sick brain now…….short term. They work. I am teaching you to fix the underlying Ferrari engine in your head to purr once again. His goals and my goals are the same but the path we travel is radically different. I want long term health and he wants improvement in short term performance.
Dr Kruse, the lipid content of my brain is altered entirely by my enviornment and the protein I eat alters the cellular behaviour and function. So if I strive to live optimally, I better eat a lot of seafood,some meat but not chicken. Plant food not that important and can infact be very damaging due to ALA oxidation. I need to live by circadian rhythms and practice CT, especially I must live through a cold, dark winter and also embrace the sun and not be afraid of it. If I do live in this manner my body will be scupltured to the way it should look purely by brain function and not gym function. If I rely on the latter I may look good on the outside but be completely trashed on the inside with resultant health problems as I age. Am I getting it?
@Ray beautifully……….and as you progress…..you will begin to feel that you can do more. And as you do more more things will happen to improve your hormone status and you will arrive at Optimal.
I have loaded copies of my Omega 6 vs Omega 3 whole blood tests at this address; http://medical-tests-optimal.blogspot.com/ This test cost $99.00 from LEF.org, on sale. http://www.lef.org/Vitamins-Supplements/ItemLCOMEGA/Omega-Score-Blood-Test.html My results look good to me. I am open to questions or comments.
@ Ray, well said. How many people obsess at the gym with “outer” health, while destroying “inner” health? I know a guy who is a you MMA competitor. He works out all the time, and eats lots of bread and egg whites and lean chicken – was told to stay away from fatty fish, egg yolks, organ meats as they are high in “saturated fat and cholesterol”! Not only is his brain likely suffering, but he has perpetual acne, and bruises take a long time to dissappear- wonder why?
@ Jack, you have said repeatedly that fish oil supplements don’t cut it for DHA. Can you expand on this? I presume part of it is that because of their production process, many of them are rancid.
But it also sounds like the Terry Wahls line, of “if supplement x from food is good, then it is likely that there are many other things in that same food that we have yet discover”.
The number of co-factors, like vitA+D and so on strongly suggest that osialted fish oils may be missing other essential nutrients.
Besides which, with the exception of fermented fish and fish liver oils, no one evolved on isolated fish oils!
Is it fair to say the seafood proteins, and other micronutrients/cofactors within, are as important as the DHA itself?
And, what is the effect of canning (heat processing) said seafood – home canning guidelines require pressure canning at 120C for over an hour! – it can’t be good for the proteins, let alone the DHA?
@Paul N BG series is just beginning. I am quite glad to see some of my readers are beginning to see the deep implications of what I have been trying to carefully portray to you for over a year now. This science is vast and deep. Most people in the paleo sphere and in medicine have no clue about it and what it means for us. After BG 5 I will show you why.
Whatever is optimal for our brain is the optimal human diet……..and using supplements is not the best option……but if your food sucks it maybe a good option for your particular case. Terry Wahl’s is coming at this too in her own way (from an MS perspective)…….but I promise you when she reads this post…….she will smile big time. The answer to healthcare’s ills is in this blog. Moreover, that link you posted is totally correct. Lipid biochemistry in the brain is at the seat of many neolithic diseases. I said many times obesity is an inflamamtory brain condition. So is MS, AD, PD, depression, AN, bulemia, T2D, IR, hypothalamic amenorrhea, most mental disorders………the list is vast.
The implications are found between my written words. Smart people will have to decide for themselves what to do with that information. My goal is to shine light on that and then let you decide.
@Paul N how about another vegetarian hitting the skids…….Sad. He went veggie 3 yrs ago and boom. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2173193/Green-Mile-star-Michael-Clarke-Duncan-intensive-care-suffering-heart-attack.html
While googling on DHA, I came across this fascinating paper about The role of DHA and AA as determinants of the evolution of hominid brain development
In there, they not only explain in the same was Jack why we had to evolve in a coastal environment – for the availability of both AA and DHA, but also give a quantum mechanics explanation of why DPA (dominant in herbivore brains) can’t work for brain signalling – it’s DHA or nothing – the more DHA in the brain, the more signalling there is.
They point to nutritional DHA (and seafood) deficiencies as being a factor in neurodegenerative diseases and depression.
So when the vegans say they represent “higher evolution”of mankind, I don’t think they could further from the truth.
@Paul N any vegetarian who believes that is demonstrating they do not understand neural lipid biochemistry (with judgement clouded by some dogma) and that is predominantly because when you eat only vegetables you can’t think well. This is not a knock on them personally at all…..it is pure biologic fact. The implications of BG 4 for a vegan/vegetarian is huge. If you want proof of why being one is dangerous here is the proof. When you eat that way, you de evolve the human brain’s evolution.……..another ironic twist of evolutionary fate, I guess. I guess this makes it easier to “herd” them into dogma’s because their thinking is suboptimal since their lipid biochemistry is. The implication for spectrum disorders, Down’s syndrome, and AD then takes on a new perspective too.
Maybe this is why the veganism and vegetarianism these days has become more like a political or cult at some level. I am not sure of many things, but what I am positive of is…….the science of neural biology is strongly pointing a light that we need to adjust our thinking about what a human, with a massive brain in its head, should be eating to get optimal health.
What we have been taught to believe is clearly 100% abjectly WRONG. Being socialized by culture, religion, belief, teaching etc……..might be one of the quickest ways to undercut great health. If you read the Quilt document I told everyone over a year ago be ready to embrace paradox, ambiguity and irony at every turn………this blog is a perfect example.
@BobWayne
ALA (as usuall) suppressed, probably by excessive EPA/DHA supplementation
AA (as usual) suppressed, probably by excessive EPA/DHA supplementation
GLA low, another blow to AA, AA is made from GLA (and they even not highlited that GLA is low)
AA/EPA=1.78 should be (18-100)
@Jansz This is where a healthy meal of nuts would help old Bob……or some seeds………
William Weir, The Hartford Courant, Conn.
The Hartford Courant, Connecticut
06-21-12 (Artificial light is WORSE than the diet for a mammal with a big brain……………Dr. Jack Kruse circa 2006 Now this.)
June 21–The American Medical Association Wednesday adopted recommendations based on a report co-authored by a University of Connecticut researcher asserting that certain types of nighttime lighting can adversely affect health and may be linked to breast cancer and other medical conditions.
The AMA’s house of delegates voted to adopt policies based on the report “Light Pollution: Adverse Health Effects of Nighttime Lighting,” co-authored by Richard Stevens, an epidemiologist at the University of Connecticut Health Center. He was one of four writers.
With the AMA accepting the report, Stevens said, funding should become more readily available for further research.
“There is no question that lighting suppresses circadian rhythms,” he said, adding that the next step will be to determine how much it affects specific medical conditions.
Dr. Steven Lockley, a professor of medicine at Harvard University and one of the report’s four authors, said the AMA’s policies will help educate the public about artificial light, particularly regarding the risks of working night shifts. Studies consistently have shown that shift workers are at a higher risk for breast cancer, heart disease and other health problems.
“The main goal is to increase the awareness of the general health risks, so that people can make informed decisions about their health,” he said.
With Wednesday’s vote, the AMA now recommends that new technologies be developed to reduce the health risks of indoor and outdoor lighting and calls for more research into the health risks and benefits of exposure to nighttime lighting in workplaces.
“The natural 24-hour cycle of light and dark helps maintain alignment of circadian biological rhythms along with basic processes that help our bodies to function normally,” Dr. Alexander Ding, an AMA board member, said Wednesday. “Excessive exposure to nighttime lighting disrupts these essential processes and can create potentially harmful health effects and hazardous situations.”
The AMA also recommends that any workplaces with night-shift employees should establish an “employee fatigue risk management plan.”
Another of the report’s co-authors, Dr. David Blask of the Tulane University School of Medicine, said the AMA’s action should bring the issue more into the mainstream.
“A major effect of this is that it’s going to put those in the scientific community who are on the fence or wary of this area on notice that it’s time to get on board with this, that this is the real deal,” Blask said. “And that it has the potential to affect all of us, in addition to shift workers.”
“I think it’s a big deal,” Stevens agreed. “This is a turning point event. When I got started on this, it was like a blip on the radar screen.”
Stevens has been studying the effects of nighttime lighting for 25 years and was the first researcher to raise the possibility that there might be a connection to breast cancer.
“I asked in a published a paper in 1987: Could the increase in electric light explain the pandemic of breast cancer?” he said. Stevens co-authored nine of the 134 studies cited in the report.
Like a lot of new scientific concepts, he said, the theory seemed on the fringe at first. But it has slowly gained traction, and more researchers since have focused on other possible adverse health effects of artificial lighting, such as obesity and mood and sleep disorders.
“It’s an exploding area, and it’s very exciting,” he said.
Stevens’ theory is that exposure to artificial light for prolonged periods will disrupt the body’s biological clock that regulates sleep and wakefulness, known as circadian rhythms. Electric light — around for only the past 150 years — has impaired these natural rhythms, which have evolved over millions of years. As a result, Stevens said, hormone and melatonin levels are disrupted and that could lead to the onset of breast cancer.
The report calls artificial light “a man-made self-experiment” that throws sleep out of whack. It also asserts that excessive light at night — including light from TVs and computers — can cause sleep disorders, especially in children and adolescents.
___
(c)2012 The Hartford Courant (Hartford, Conn.)
Visit The Hartford Courant (Hartford, Conn.) at http://www.courant.com
A final thought…….if artificial light can cause cancer………what other minor issues might it also affect? Well, when you do an education consult with me you might find out just how much in the dark modern healthcare really is………..
Thank you Jack,
I am eating home made sauerkraut and bone broth now so I will increase the amounts and see what happens. Thank you for addressing this.
Eric
Dr. Kruse,
A common neolithic disease many people experience, including myself is acne. From your blog you mentioned it a couple of times, but do you believe that acne is a manifestation of this O3O6 imbalance? Is it even an indicator of the shortage of AA or DHA? I hope you touch on this issue because visually inspecting skin health is probably the most cost effective hormonal test you can do, is it not? I hope you might address this further sometime in the future. There certainly are interesting theories out there even connecting it with B5 or vitamin A.
@Ray F acne is a skin condition tied to a permeable gut. We see it with alterations in DHEA and the sex steroid hormones. Skin is ectodermally derived as the brain is and the hormones panel is a also a mirror for its health. If the gut is off your skin is usually off pretty badly too. B5 and Vitamin A are connected to it because as you will soon see in the BG series Vitamin A uses a receptor that forms a heterodimer with several other key receptors in brain growth.
What do you think of egg yolks (pastured, of course) as a source of PC?
@BJK77 I like them a lot. Eggs are the only good thing from a chicken in my opinion.
The theory you laid out is interesting but it is a fact that Homo Neanderthal had a 250cm larger brain than H sapiens. (~1450 cm compared to our ~1200 cm)H Neanderthal lived a terrestrial existence on the interior as well as the coasts of Europe. They did not live and migrate by the water. Very often the water was frozen over. Everyone pretty much agrees that they lived on land based meat. Why were their brains bigger? How does this fit into your theory? Did the mega fauna have higher DHA contents than current terrestrial animals?
@John Not everyone agrees with that at all. Dr’s. Cunnane and Crawford being the two world experts who do not. And in BG 5 you will see where some thought they had a solution it was not the solution for homo.
I heard a report(Dr Ron Hoffman} about an Everest climber
with a good memory.As he recently climbed Everest he continually shuffled a deck of cards(over 30 times during his assent) and remembered each card perfectly after each shuffle.
This is a very cold mountain. I think it was the CT
that gave his brain the ability to do this, and not the exercise or little oxygen bottle they need just to get to the top, or the ‘exercise'(many die from exhaustion).
Bothof these deplete his energy reserve, while CT(thanks to Jack)maybe was the boost his brain needed to accomplish this mental task.
@Wil CT is pure amazingness for our human brain. I cant stress this enough. When I hear Paleo leaders saying CT is just hormesis it shows a fundamental flaw in understanding neural lipid biochemistry.
Looking foreword to BG-5. I want to hear about iodine, it’s role and how other primates handle it.
Thanks Jack.I agree.
I think it takes more energy to make an ice cube than to boil a cup of water.
Just after reading the new comments here this morning, a young, endurance athlete friend of mine posted on facebook that she’s now a vegan and going to pursue her next half-ironman while on a vegan diet. We live at 7500 ft. The community I live in is very high-end athlete rich, and this new book, “Eat and Run” by ultrarunner Scott Jurek is having a profound influence on runners and endurance athletes in town. I’ve already heard of 3 converts in the past week!!
http://scottjurek.com/eatandrun/
I’m an herbalist, and I’ve worked with this young woman in the past, and my first word of advice was for her to run a full blood panel now and then again in 6 months. She’s young, fertile, and fit, but it kills me to think of what might happen so quickly if she continues to train at her current intensity level, and change her diet so drastically. Quick, easy-to-read links regarding vegan damage and blood work would be appreciated.
@Kristi tell her to make you the beneficiary on her term life insurance……..That may get her to think. The author of Born to Run just died of a massive heart attack. I guess the clueless will never learn until they hurt or kill themselves. Kristi if you google Denise Minger and read her work on the China Study that would stop most in their tracks…….but she has tons of links your looking for. I do not deal with this issue at all because anyone who has chosen it must change their mind to get to optimal. I can make a vegan/veggie optimal when they are their own worst enemy. People like the Whole 30 folks think they can help them……..I think you must help yourself first before you can get optimal. If you come on the forum look up Barry in optimal training or nutrition…..he is in France now working with Tour athletes…he does it the correct way. Cold and ketosis.
Send her this link……..vegan down: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2173193/Green-Mile-star-Michael-Clarke-Duncan-given-CPR-girlfriend-Omarosa-suffering-heart-attack.html
After my recent consult with Dr. Jack I finally got that I need lots of choline to de-fat my liver. One of the top food sources for choline is roe- fish EGGS! What do you think about that as an optimal food, Dr?
@Dali Dula Your jumping the gun on me!…….Most of the paleo world believes its eggs and liver as main choline source because of some bloggers (CM). You my friend found the best source that I was going to unleash down the pike.
@Jack, Thank you! Awesome links. I’m hoping that because she’s young, and also a scientist, I can sway her back from the dark side with info like this. Thank you!
In the past month, I have noticed a slow but steady reduction in brain fog, and improved mental energy. Initially, I thought this was the result of starting on Armour. After reading BG4, my instinct says that the improvements are more likely from increasing my seafood consumption to at least 8 ounces / day, 7 days / week.
@Atl I agree.
@ Dali @ Jack, gee I am so encouraged to learn thanks to this blog. I searched roe in Australia and found it is all going to Sardinia for a special sauce! http://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/food-wine/roe-is-me-i-need-more-fish-eggs/story-fn86jbrr-1226292295256
Here is that article as it requires a login
Roe is me, I need more fish eggs
• by: John Lethlean
• From: The Australian
• March 10, 2012 12:00AM
THE poor old mullet needs a makeover. It’s difficult not to think about the humble fish with the little eyes without also thinking of Billy Ray Cyrus or Warwick Capper, and that’s just for starters. These are not flattering associations.
Website urbandictionary.com actually suggests the collective noun for a group of bogans should be a mullet of bogans. It’s a fish with a PR problem.Anyhow, I was lucky enough to come home with some mullet the other day (a bogan of mullet, perhaps?) after an assignment on the water with some professional fishermen. And even the crusty old boys of the sea weren’t all that complimentary about the fishies called mullet (they were yellow-eye mullet, a species commonly found in Victoria and South Australia, where they’re usually sold as “Coorong mullet”.)But they ate pretty well, I thought, fried in cubes in a salt and Szechuan pepper crust and served with a fiery nam jim sort of Thai tomato relish. More important, they offered up a potentially interesting by-product.
You see, where you see roe, I see bottarga. Or potential bottarga, anyway, the wonderful cured and sun-dried roe of – traditionally – Mediterranean mullet or tuna, the quintessential Sardinian condiment.
How hard can it be, I thought?So I pulled the roe sacs out of the lady fishes and wondered how to transform them. Now, bottarga, even Sardinian bottarga, is made with the roe of Australian grey mullet, often, because there’s not enough left in the Med. They must have much bigger roe sacs, the greys. Anyway, undeterred by lack of a recipe, I packed the little roe sacs into salt and bunged them in the fridge, which as we all know has a powerful dehydrating effect.
This was wrong, I now know, but what I ended up with a month later was a tasty, fishy little nodule of dried eggs in a membrane looking like a small dog turd. But grated, it did indeed add a salty, fishy something to salad, scrambled eggs and, of course, pasta.As seafood guru John Susman points out, the Moroccan version of bottarga is mixed with spices and sprinkled on all sorts of things.Pepper did me.Now, would my bottarga make a Sardinian weep for the isola of his birth?* Laugh, perhaps. But I was kind of proud, given it was a first attempt.
So I called George, a man who knows what’s what at the wholesale fish market, and told him I needed more lady mullet. He got me two, not quite a bogan but beggars can’t be choosers, explaining that finding mullet with roe intact is difficult because most are already stripped for … the Sardinian bottarga export market.So I appreciated his effort. It was the same deal, though: tiny roe sacs. He also handed me a sac of rainbow trout roe, as a kind of eggy “sorry”. What was there to lose.This time I rinsed, salted for just two hours, and then rinsed again before refrigerating. I’d read this is more or less how it’s done. More or less. The trout roe – fresh – made a most appalling taramasalata.But bottarga Mark II is rather good, honestly, even if it looks like a really, really small dog turd. The dried trout roe is, err, a work in progress.
So I’m looking for a big, grey, very pregnant lady mullet. A bogan of them, even. I do believe I’m on the cusp of a breakthrough. One taste of my bottarga and you’ll know the mullet is in fact the Brangelina of fish.
@John H It sounds like you guys down under need to keep some of this at home! You have the big hole in the ozone to deal woth so you clearly need your vitamin D!
Dr K-I have to say I am feeling better already just since we had a consult a few weeks ago! I want to thank-you for that meeting and all these great posts. Quick question. Fish skin. Should we be eating the skin with our fish? I’m assuming yes as I understand that it is a particularly fatty part.
@Emilie This is a great question and too few people ask it. If you read our forums (and I know you do) Inger case is especially educational. Her before and after shots in the thread Do Hormones smell on page 2 show you what eating fish skin can do. It is one of the better sources of natural vitamin D and A one can get and after Brain Gut 5 you will begin to see why this is really important. Inger shows you with a picture what difference It can make. I add my fish skins to sauces in my Vitamix when I am making sauces. Yesterday I did this while making Seabass.
Not loving the name Epi-Paleo. How about Optimal-neuro? Epi-optimal-paleo Optimal-paleo-nuero?
@John I first used it at Paleo fx (and the soon to be released videos), so I am just keeping it for continuity sake. I may go with something else before the blog on the template comes out. It is clear if you have my e-cook book that what I advocate is pretty different than most of the rest of the cook books out there. In BG 5 you will see why.
Still traveling. Will catch up later this week. My younger brother and I are in upper Michigan. Can’t resist this. Most of the people we met commented on my ‘ah’ youth. I figured they were all being polite. At the beach a curious 6 year old began talking with my brother and when I caught up she asked who I was. I said I was the big sister. The girl looked closely at us both and pointed at me and said ‘You look younger’. Very cute. I told my brother, “looks like it’s Dr Kruse for you!” Will definitely make that appt after you come back from vacation.
I like Epi-Paleo, actually. Two meanings.
oh yeah, I’m loving how everyone is thinking I’m they younger bro – I’m 38 and he’s 35 – everyone loves it – except for him 🙂
Dr. Kruse
I assume then a wild salmon filet with skin on wrapped in bacon would be a near perfect dish then correct for health, fat loss, and vitality?
@Golooram Yes that is heaven.
Comparison of Fatty Acid Composition between Farmed and Wild Indian White Shrimps, Fenneropenaeus indicus
Hossein Ouraji, Abolghasem Esmaeili Fereidoni, Majid Shayegan, Shima Masoudi Asil
Department of Fisheries, Sari Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources University, Sari, Iran.
Email: [email protected]
Received June 28th, 2011; revised August 9th, 2011; accepted August 16th, 2011.
ABSTRACT
The aim of this study is comparison of fatty acid profile between wild and farmed Indian white shrimps.
According to the score-plot produced by the principle component analysis the wild Indian white shrimp showed a fatty acid composi-tion clearly different from the farmed Indian white shrimp.
In both groups, palmitic acid (16:0) and oleic acid (18: 1n-9) were the main SFA and MUFA, respectively.
Based on results, the wild shrimp contained a higher level (P < 0.05) of n-3 poly unsaturated fatty acids, whereas farmed shrimp contained a high level of n-6 poly unsaturated fatty (P < 0.05).
Arachidonic acid (20: 4n-6), eicosapentaenoic acid (20: 5n-3) and docosahexaenoic acid (22: 6n-3) were significantly higher in wild shrimps.
The n-3/n-6 fatty acids ratio was significantly higher in wild shrimps (P < 0.05).
The compari-son demonstrated that the nutritional value of wild shrimps is better than farmed shrimp
and fatty acid profile of com-mercial diets should be reformed in order to maintenance of farmed shrimps nutritional value.
.
@Jansz I think we all get that…….but here is the real comparison. Check Farmed raised shrimp to a great grass fed steak…….then come talk to me as I am eating my farm raised shrimp. After Brain Gut 5 you will see why.
So seafood is good for the T3 and TSH (my hormones love you)… great news. One concern or question I have is, how much is enough seafood and can you consume too much? what about the mercury and so forth we have all been warned about in fish. I already have high levels of lead in my body. I love seafood, so this is wonderful news. I just like to know how much and which ones are most beneficial. thanks Doc.
@Danielle The antidote for the Hg is in the seafood. Selenium in proteins. Bad seafood is better than good meat. You will see that very soon. There is not toxic dose for seafood……just for fish oil. And I am not into fish oil as a life decision……..
I wonder about mercury as well. Everyone seems to talk about selenium and treat mercury fears as “yesterday’s” news. I used to be this way too. But I can’t keep ignoring all the reports that come out of people getting mercury poisoning from canned tuna!
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/09/why-mercury-tuna-still-legal
@Monte I never mentioned canned tuna have I? I think canned tuna is really not food to be honest. Pretty processed and is like seafood spam. Canned stuff is not top shelf…………seafood.
@Jack Says:
@Jansz I think we all get that…….but here is the real comparison.
Check Farmed raised shrimp to a great grass fed steak…….then come talk to me as I am eating my farm raised shrimp.
After Brain Gut 5 you will see why.
——
In my freezer I have raw Farmed raised shrimp deveined tail on, good size, from Costco. No heads, no guts, no veins, hardly any shell.
But now I am eating tiny whole wild shrimps, dried, some Chinese other Koreans.
I mix them with wild whole anchovies.
What was so good about mackrel heads smothee?
Tiny wild shrimps must be at least as good, I guess if not better.
.
@Jansz Inger has found the key thing about fish heads…….brains an eyes add huge minerals and nutrients and skin……and the skin holds huge Vitamin A and D sources.
Dr. K,
you said the only thing about chicken that you like are the eggs. what about chicken bones/feet for making broth? what is your opinion on that?
And i suppose you would prefer fish broth over bone broth from cows/pigs, etc?
Thanks!
@Pete…….I dont use chicken bones for any broth…….its not in my cookbook bone broths.
I cringe when the person ahead of me at the seafood counter requests the salmon skin to be removed, and it’s thrown away. What is the proper etiquette? Can I ask to have their skin?
@Nonchalant I do.
Dr.K, so many native populations were decimated when people from overseas, densely populated grain-based societies contacted them and brought along their diseases. If these contacts had taken place in the Winter, do you think the result would have been the same?
@Nonchalant Nope…….CT-6 re read it……..immunity and cold are brothers.
Dr. K – you said the brains and eyes are important for minerals and nutrients. Are these ok cooked or is raw preferable?
@ BJK raw is best but cooked is fine too……..great for neurologic issues.
Dr Kruse could a diet heavy in seafood help someone with Parkinson’s disease? Or would they have to do it all – embrace the cold, respect light cycles, eat epi-paleo?
@NonChalant NO doubt. When BG 5 hits……..make sure you really read it closely. It has massive implications for HOMO.
Is there any part of a raw, wild caught fish that isn’t ok to eat? I’m assuming the entire thing is good for you but just want to check… my fish head smoothies are increasing in size due to the addition of roe, liver, etc.
@Lauren it is all good.
Dr. Kruse,
any hope for Tinnitus sufferers? Every morning I wake up with very loud ringing. It slowly gets better during the day (but does not disappear). I was thinking that mucus or lymph fluid during night might be an issue. Cut out dairy ???
Have been taking Gingko, no improvement.
Thanks.
Werner
@Werner………absolutely. When you read BG 5……I have 4 patients whose tinnitus vanished. One person who was scheduled for microvascular decompression of the 9th cranial nerve got better with my Epi- paleo template in 4 weeks with no surgery. His video will be later in the BG series.
Thanks a lot.
Looking forward with great anticipation for BG 5.
Meanwhile taking B1 and Q10.
For my raw fish smoothies:
I have two options, which one is better?
1) Whole Foods wild caught cleaned fish (no guts) and eat the whole fish b/c of price
2) Asian Store fish with all it’s parts including guts but no idea whether wild caught or not and only eat the head in smoothies, throw away the rest b/c it’s cheap. Or maybe eat the rest b/c it’s got the guts?
Everything else I eat is always wild caught.
@Souldanzer either way
@Souldanzer
http://www.hmart.com/company_new/shop_main.asp
At H-mart I see fish labeled “wild” where applicable.
Use above link to locate store.
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Seeing that Asian cuisine encorporates the use of whole fish and whole shrimp in its dishes I would expect to see improved cognition and performance in school since it is jet fuel for the brain. This of course is exactly what happens. Asian students are usually high achievers.
You say canned tuna and canned fish in general is not that great but two things: What about canned sardines and mackerals where the fish are whole and unprocessed which includes bones. Also you did state that ‘bad fish is better than great meat’. Does this extend to canned sardines or mackeral (but not tuna)?
Off to buy some roe. Please let it be affordable!!
Most of the cans of sardines, oysters, and salmon I have found all are BPA free and unprocessed. I have little trouble finding it. I can not tell you what you might find in your areas. It does extend to them but not tuna. I think canned tuna has become a very processed food now.
Crispy skin salmon. Saurkraut. Sweet potatoes (for summer).
Yum!
Great to hear! Canned tuna is not my preference. The others I too have found BPA free cans. Very inexpensive yet actually good for my health. What a relief sometimes!
@Dee Here is the link I told you about: Blum WF, Juul A, “Reference Ranges of Leptin Levels
According to Body Mass Index, Gender and Development Stage” in Leptin: The Voice of Adipose Tissue, Blumm WF, Kiess WF, and Rascher W, eds, 1997, 319-326.
Dr Jack
I understand that when you want good levels of DHA, you mean delivered it by eating food, specially fish or better shellfish.
but, after all this eating,
I would like to measure my Fatty Acids and be able to recognize when they are good and when they are not.
I have two points that I need help with when evaluating DHA and EPA (blood tests).
Dr Patricia Kane, (speaking about supplementation) with EPA & DHA, recomends titrating with small doses and at the
ratio EPA/DHA=(3:1)
relatively lots of EPA and less of DHA (in small pills)
Neither Genova Diagnostics nor Kennedy Krieger Laboratory
provide any desirable ratio for EPA/DHA ratio
but they provide desirable ranges.
Krieger Lab
Result Low High
EPA 0.25 0.43
DHA 2.59 4.87
Ratio 0.0965 0.0883
I just got from them
http://www.bodybio.com/content.aspx?page=AMD
(Keep in mind that DHA must be balanced with EPA, at a ratio of approximately 3:1, EPA:DHA.
The reason? Alone, or in unbalanced supplementation, DHA can be excitatory,
despite its known connection to eye and brain health.
So, I was hoping to look for EPA/DHA=3 in my blood test, but that may not be possible.
Could use some help.
———————————–
Similar situation exist with LA(O6)/ALA(O3)=4:1
Supplement recomendation is LA(O6)/ALA(O3)=4:1
Neither lab checks LA(O6)/ALA(O3) ratio
but they provide desirable ranges.
Krieger Lab
Result Low High
ALA 0.08 0.46
LA 8.64 10.81
Ratio 108 23.5
——————————————-
Shrimp eat the plankton/algae. People eat the shrimp and get the algae in the shrimp’s gut at the same time! Is the astaxanthin in shrimp important for us?
@Glen astaxtanthin is important…….great antioxident in cell membranes.
Is this TSH the same one they test for in a typical blood draw? Last October, my TSH was .8 UIU/ml (with .3 – 5.1 range). Can I draw any conclusions from this number? I know I need in-depth testing…just need a doc to order them—whatever these other tests should be. (I know, I know, it’s extensive and likely not covered by insurance.) But I am curious to know if the .8 TSH tells me anything, though it’s nearly year old data—before increased seafood consumption.
interesting the fish oil guru Dr Barry Sears incorporates a little GLA (borage oil, i guess) into his superfish oil. he doesn’t say how much 🙂 “EicoRx is a proprietary omega-3 / omega-6 formulation designed for people concerned with healthy aging and inflammation based chronic disorders. the man is a money making machine. $60 for 120 capsules. i have ordered some borage oil to play around with. Being a seed oil, i”m sure it is a PUFA 6, so it’s kind of like playing w/ fire.
“EicoRx combines the same formulation of OmegaRx with a precise amount of omega-6 gamma linolenic acid (GLA) for additional inflammation regulation potential that up-regulates the body’s innate cellular rejuvenation responses that are deeply embedded in the genes.”
@wally Go buy http://www.vitalchoice seafood. Better return on your investment.