READERS SUMMARY: WHY IS IRON IMPORTANT? HOW DOES IT AFFECT LIFE AT A 30ft LEVEL MICROSCOPICALLY HOW DOES IT AFFECT LIFE AT A 30,000 ft LEVEL IN OUR OCEANS HOW DID EVOLUTION USE IRON TO PROTECT US AND OUR SPECIES? HOW DID A PROTECTIVE EFFECT BECOME A DEADLY DISEASE IN 50 YEARS RIGHT UNDER OUR [...]
Today, I want to introduce you to someone who is a true 'Paleo leader' by stepping up to the the challenge I put to our community at PaleoFx conference recently held in Austin, Tx. Kevin Cottrell is one of the co founders of Paleo Fx. The leaders of Paleo fx have to be commended because the conference they were able to put on in 150 days of prep time was nothing short of remarkable. The conference exceeded all my expectations and the reviews of many attendees have been stellar. The future of this community is tied to clinical application of what the science continues to show in the literature. For assimilation of the Ancestral Lifestyle to become mainstream we need to have more clinical conferences like Paleo fx, and we need to take them globally. Today, I am breaking new ground and presenting to you my first guest blog written by Mr. Kevin Cottrell, who has agreed to share his personal story and personal medical history with all of you so that he may help you in some way. I think what he has agreed to do here is the most noble and worthy things to do to help our community and mankind. I am indebted to him for this chance to publish his story for you to consider. The following post is written by Kevin, in his words, to share with you and yours, to help open your eyes and challenge your "own dogma and current intuition' to help you reach for optimal health.
Whatever you hold in your mind will tend to occur in your life. If you continue to believe as you have always believed, you will continue to act as you have always acted. If you continue to act as you have always acted, you will continue to get what you have always gotten. If you want different results in your life or your work, all you have to do is change your mind. We do not need an intelligent mind that speaks, but a patient heart that listens. Make your choices and you create your life. It has been often said that the best lifestyle is the one based upon moderation. Do you really believe that? How do you define moderation? I think each person has their own idea of what moderation really means. I do not agree with this cliche at all. Why? Too many people use moderation as an excuse not to do their best for others. Why? Because it is safe for them to do so. Conventional medical advice often advocates the mantra, "everything in moderation" as its safety net. Even as a kid that cliche bothered me deeply inside. Should a 350 pound man that eats 4 dozen chocolates at night believe this is "moderately" better than eating 6 dozen a night? Is it OK for a drug addict to be pleased when they only take 5 oxycontin instead of the usual dozen? Is it OK for the person with mental illness to only take their medications 5 days a week over 7 days a week? Is it OK for an alcoholic to drink five shots on a Friday night instead of the usual ten?
Many of you may not know this, but I was asked to do to a speech in Nashville in March of 2012. I have to say with about 6 days to prepare it was rushed, but it was a lot of fun. I want to publicly say thank you to Misty Williams and Michael Hart for making this happen. In my talk, I told 1,200 people live on stage about the three thought experiments I came up with after reading, “The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari”. I actually conceptualized the Ancient Pathway soon after the reading was done but where the thought experiments came to me, was at the foot of Michelangelo's David in Florence, when I was looking at him from behind. I realized that the major difference between him and I, was the world we both were living had radically changed in 500 years. From this insight I realized that circadian biology was the the major difference in David’s perfection and my obesity. From this spark of wisdom, I realized that obesity was an inflammatory brain condition. Because it was so, I could then reconstruct a signaling sequence to confuse my hypothalamus using signals from my vagus nerve and from the foods I ate using timing. Learning how the brain rewired in neural deafness using a cochlea implant made this easy game for me as a neurosurgeon.
Radical Theory #1: If our brains can rewire, then Einstein’s theories predict our biochemistry should be able to as well. My Leptin Rx and the modern cochlea implant definitively prove this in modern humans. Radical Theory #2: Considering that 90{a7b724a0454d92c70890dedf5ec22a026af4df067c7b55aa6009b4d34d5da3c6} of the earth’s current biome lives in extreme conditions on our own planet today still, we might need to consider that what we think is “our normal environment” is not so normal for most of life on our planet or our evolutionary history. Life on Earth evolved in an environment much like we see on Titan today; in a deep ocean frozen solid at its surface with the capability of life buried deep with in it. The only escape was due to ejectants of water vapor from super heated water from underwater volcanoes. All these things are present today on Earth’s crust too. There is one major difference now between the two. We are a lot warmer today than when life began. There are others, but when one looks at Titan we see a frozen giant moon with a monstrous ocean beneath it. All life on our planet came from the oceans first. We know this to be true as well. And because of this, studying extremophile forms of life here on earth today might explain the complexities of how biochemistry allows for life to exist at all in a thermoplastic environment. What the bio-astrophysics found on Titan with the Cassini Solstice mission, may be a huge clue that life first adapted to extreme environments and then was naturally selected and adapted to a cyclic warming trend on our planet's crust over time.
Radical Theory #1: If our brains can rewire, then Einstein’s theories predict our biochemistry should be able to as well. My Leptin Rx and the modern cochlea implant definitively prove this in modern humans. Radical Theory #2: Considering that 90{a7b724a0454d92c70890dedf5ec22a026af4df067c7b55aa6009b4d34d5da3c6} of the earth’s current biome lives in extreme conditions on our own planet today still, we might need to consider that what we think is “our normal environment” is not so normal for most of life on our planet or our evolutionary history. Life on Earth evolved in an environment much like we see on Titan today; in a deep ocean frozen solid at its surface with the capability of life buried deep with in it. The only escape was due to ejectants of water vapor from super heated water from underwater volcanoes. All these things are present today on Earth’s crust too. There is one major difference now between the two. We are a lot warmer today than when life began. There are others, but when one looks at Titan we see a frozen giant moon with a monstrous ocean beneath it. All life on our planet came from the oceans first. We know this to be true as well. And because of this, studying extremophile forms of life here on earth today might explain the complexities of how biochemistry allows for life to exist at all in a thermoplastic environment. What the bio-astrophysics found on Titan with the Cassini Solstice mission, may be a huge clue that life first adapted to extreme environments and then was naturally selected and adapted to a cyclic warming trend on our planet's crust over time.
TEDxNashville 2012--Brain surgery without a scalpel: Nashville neurosurgeon Dr. Jack Kruse’s third experiment revealed Nashville, Tenn.--In June of 2011, Dr. Jack Kruse began blogging about his findings as a neurosurgeon and formerly-obese American. After tearing the meniscus in his knee, he wasn’t satisfied with the prognosis from conventional medicine about his obese condition, experiencing the [...]
CT-7 is about how we are shaped by our environment by the evolutionary erosion of time that our ancestors faced. All life on this planet is shaped by two major variables in our environment: the sun and the seasonal changes. No matter the place present on earth, there are always alterations in these two factors that are cyclic, and always accounted for by all living organisms at some fashion. In some mammals, like man, it is accounted for centrally in the brain and peripherally in our organ ultradian clocks. This is why we have different patterns of aging in certain organs. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes a tremendous amount of sense because life is using the “knowns” of its environment to construct a reality that will ensure its survival. This is the basis of epigenetic signaling that we now know to be the major genetic modifier of the genome of all animals. The major signal transducer in Epigenetics is found in the cellular signaling in our cell membranes that interact with the environment and our inner hormones that signal our epigenetic switches sitting on our genes inside the nucleus. Since it is clear that our cold adapted pathways use sensory afferents to signal to open the Ancient Pathway, I think it is time we just have a blog in the CT series that discusses what a normal 24 hour day is like in a human circadian biology.
The best way to describe this pathway to the lay public is to explain this is how evolution allows for ideal form to meet function in a tough environment. This environment is likely the primordial environment for life on our planet. This makes astrophysicists excited, because life might also be evolving in places like Titan. After all 5 extinction events on this planet geologist have told us they were followed by an extended cold climate. In cold mammals live longer. You will find out more about why this happens in Energy and Epigenetics 4 and 5 blog posts. The pathway uses very little energy from ATP and gives a whole lot to the organism who uses it. Fat burning is required and it is tied to a biochemical pathway that paleo forgot to speak about. But it requires cold temperature to be present and used commonly. In the pathway, the less effort you give, the faster and more powerful you will be when this pathway is active. People who live in this pathway can run a marathon with no training. They can lift unreal amounts of weight with little training. Their reserve and recovery are just incredible. You have to see it to believe it. Many will say cold thermogenesis a hormetic process, when in reality it is created using a coherent energy source due to something called the Hall effect. When we have had extinction events on Earth before, the events usually affect the evaporation of water in some fashion from the surface of lakes and oceans. It also affects the transpiration from the forest trees, plants, and flowers and this change cools the air. You must understand how climatology works here; liquid water needs to absorb a lot of latent heat to in order to evaporate, so it sucks energy from the atmosphere to make this energy transfer. This loss of energy from the atmosphere directly cools the planet and this preserves the charge on life's inner mitochondrial membrane and in the nanotubes present in our cells that contain water. This is how life lives long in the cold. Those people don't realize this because they do not live in this pathway for the majority of their life, and few studies have been done to say otherwise. The link above is recently added to this blog post. It seems science is now proving me correct in my theories of extinction events.
My first encounter with thermoplasticity in human biology I first became aware of this seeming paradox as a neurosurgical resident in my first year of training. We were doing a real "gnarly" brain surgery case. It was a young mother who had a massive basilar tip aneurysm. Back in the mid 90's before endovascular coiling procedures we use today, this was the most risky operation that existed in all of medicine. I spent a month prepping for this case. We had to enlist the cardiovascular surgeons to come in and surgically open the patients chest wide open to stop her heart on purpose temporarily and place her on complete cardiopulmonary bypass to stop all the blood flow to her brain. We had less than 20 minutes to then place a clip across the aneurysm to save her life. To complete this herculean surgical task, we had to fill her entire chest cavity with ice to preserve her heart muscle and cool her core temperature so that we could have 20 minutes to complete the brain surgery. Simultaneously, we would open her skull and split the Sylvian fissure in the brain and approach her basilar artery in the geographic center of her head and attempt to put a clip on it without disturbing any of her surrounding anatomy. The best mental image I can give you for this is the ultimate game of "Operation" you used to play as a kid. You must avoid hitting the sides or the nose lights up!!!! One problem in this case, in this game there was live bullets. This maneuver was deadly if not performed correctly the first time. This is one of the most delicate surgeries one can do on a human. Moreover, even if we were successful with the clip obliteration of the aneurysm, we had to restart her frozen heart, get her off cardio pulmonary bypass without an air embolus and awake. In this case everything went well until the last part and this taught me a lesson I would never forget. She died after the operation was a complete success. Her head was already closed up surgically and dressed, the intraoperative angiogram looked awesome, and we restarted her heart and got her off cardio pulmonary bypass without any evidence of a stroke and then she died suddenly. She received two units of cooled banked blood because our surgical team felt she lost some ability to carry oxygen in her blood because several of the monitors showed she had a low oxygen carrying capacity of her hemoglobin. This concerned us because we were worried about her risk of having a stroke because of low oxygenation due to her loss of blood flow for 20 minutes when she was on full bypass. So we did what any surgeon would do. We gave her blood to restore her oxygen carrying capacity and the oxygen monitors showed her oxygenation had totally returned to normal. We were all happy until I noticed her pupils were fixed and dilated when I was putting on her dressings. She also had blue fingers. And then all of a sudden she got a fatal heart rhythm, and she died right there in my arms. I was devastated. I will never forget talking to her family later that day.