Cold Thermogenesis 6: The Ancient Pathway
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.
Cold Thermogenesis 5: Biologic magnetism
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.
Cold Thermogenesis 4: The Holy Trinity
I just want to thank Sean Croxton for asking me to present at Paleo Summit today. The ideas discussed began with a podcast I did with Jimmy Moore, #474. Before I begin here today, I strongly suggest you listen to the Jimmy Moore podcast I did in May of 2011 as a primer for this blog post. It’s going to be a long one, so open a glass of wine as the sun sets tonight. However, I think you need to hear it all tonight since I have your attention from the Paleo Summit. I have planned for this day for some time. I am humbled to share this with you all. It was hard for me to write. If any of you remember when I first gave my initial thoughts on leptin publicly, it was on a podcast I did with Jimmy Moore in May 2011. I discussed the things that transformed my thinking back then. Most of the time I spent with Jimmy, we talked about leptin. In the beginning of the podcast, I mentioned a person who saw me injure myself as I stood up to give a lecture, and told me she knew precisely why I hurt my knee. At the time, I thought I had a good handle on these modern medicine principles she mentioned so I was a skeptical of her thoughts. She told me when I got home she was going to send me a few papers and a book to read. The book was called “The Monk Who Sold his Ferrari.” She was emphatic that I read the book before the papers. Then, she told me to read six specific papers in the order they were numbered and then reflect on what I had just read.
Cold Thermogenesis 3
Evolutionary strategy is based upon finding an environmental niche and exploiting it. Evolution is based upon change and the natural adaptations to it. Today, we are going to explore how some environmental triggers might open a “biochemical trap door.” Why is circadian biology critical? For evolution to work, a cell first must adapt to its environment. So the first thing any living cell would see in an earth day is a period of day and night. It also has to find food to make energy (ATP). In addition, it has to control its own cellular division. The epic battle for the cell is the circadian cycle has to “yoke” the metabolic cycle to its growth cycle. Most people know that the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), is the circadian pacemaker that monitors this dance between darkness and light and the seasonal cold and hot temperatures in our environment. Evolution apparently agreed with this assessment, because we now know it to be true. What most people do not know is how leptin plays a massive role in regulating it. Research has revealed that leptin can induce expression of a neuropeptide gene called vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) through the VIP cytokine response element. VIP actually is what sets the circadian pacemaker to light. Leptin yokes metabolism and sleep to the light and dark cycle. When temperature becomes the dominant environmental trigger and not light cycles, leptin induces endothelial nitric oxide synthetase (eNOS), that shuts down the photic effects of VIP on the SCN. This means that leptin forces the SCN not to be able to use light any longer to yoke circadian cycles! Once temperature begins to yoke the circadian rhythms, some very special things happen to our biochemistry that normally does not occur in other environments. These are ancient epigenetic programs that are hardwired into the DNA of every descendant of a eutherian mammal. We are descended from these animals.
Cold Thermogensis 2
Now that you understand that I believe cold environments were how life first evolved, what implications does this hold for all life and humans today? I think with this thought experiment we need to begin to talk about another aspect of evolution to fully conceptualize how cold works for biology. Let’s talk about sleep for 4 short minutes. First, I want you to watch this video before you proceed. Recently, one of my readers pointed out he was confused by Dr. Gamble when she said the normal pattern of sleep in a natural environment had two cycles. He wanted to know why her version and my version for sleep as written in my post “Rx for the Leptin Rx” were not congruent. It was a great question that really opens the discussion to the idea of evolutionary mismatches. These mismatches occur in many modern systems of biology, and they are actually increasing in frequency and severity as time elapses. The reason is quite simple. Evolution is constantly getting faster as time goes on, relative to the current state of our genome. This is really how the “cellular theory of relativity” is currently affecting our own genome today. The speed of evolutionary change has far out stripped the ability of our paleolithic genes to catch up. This mismatch causes major problems for modern humans. When they further exacerbate the system with choices not congruent with our biology, the results are magnified in disease incidence and prevalence. She also mentioned in passing, early in her talk, that people who went deep into the ground have been found to be “very productive” while in a cold dark environment. She did not expand on this concept at all, but I would strongly suggest you remember this as the cold thermogenesis series progresses on. There is a deep biologic reason this occurs. As we use this pathway, lots of things improve that we do not expect.
Cold Thermogenesis 1: Theory To Practice Begins
Today, we are going to bend your mind a bit by explaining to you many of the things you might be believe as biologic truths published in biochemistry books today are in fact truths, when certain environmental truths are held within a constant range. Yet, they change tremendously when certain factors are altered. Often the biophysical changes do not even have to affect the thermal coefficients of the biochemistry in the hypothalamus. Just the perception of the environmental change from the brain is enough to alter the chemistry as is the enzyme and proteins existed on the top of Mount Everest or on the ocean floor in the coldest environments on earth. When biochemistry was observed in living cells and described, the scientists rarely considered these effects on our biochemistry and how it may alter the cellular terror. Our hypothalamus rewires too many stimuli, and it appears that temperature is a major factor in the rewiring protocol of our brain. Evolution has clearly needed to use this in the past for some reason. Our job as enquiring primal bio-hackers, is to figure out why and how this might have happened. In essence, they looked at the complex biologic machinery from a standard Newtonian platform. Most scientists know that Newtonian physics explain much of what we observe in the physical sciences here on earth, and that quantum mechanics best describes the physics of subatomic matter of matter in space on a universal scale. When QM theory is adapted to many biologic systems, some puzzling things emerge that are hard to explain. Complicating matters, we have few ways to measure the quantum effects within biologic systems to test how they may affect living cells. This does not imply in any way that quantum mechanics does not apply to biologic systems, because it clearly does. It is often buried in the biochemistry equations that biochemists use to describe how living cells make order from the complete chaos that rules matter. This implies the effects might be difficult to discern or measure with current techniques we have, and this is why we have yet to uncover them in biologic systems. The brain clearly uses quantum mechanics to operate. This is not a controversial point at all in the scientific world.
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The Cold Thermogenesis Protocol
The Cold Thermogenesis Protocol should be added gradually to the Leptin Rx rest protocol. This blog post is additive to the Leptin Rx, and is an evolution extension of it for those who need it. I hope you all realize that not everyone will need it. Some will need it because they have special needs that they face. This blog is designed for those who have been previously left out of the reset protocol. Those people are gastric bypass patients, HCG users, those on exogenous steroids, chronic pain patients, and those with T2D and metabolic syndrome, as a few examples. Prolonged and controlled local peripheral skin cooling can induce selective “damage,” and increased hypothalamic signaling by forcing adipocyte apoptosis and subsequent loss of subcutaneous fat without damaging the overlying skin or the underlying muscle layers. This means that acute cold cause rapid leptin sensitivity! It means that fat is forced to liberate leptin from fat cells to slowly lower its serum levels as long as the cold stimulus is applied safely. This is new scientific information that was first carried out in pigs in 2008, and subsequently tested in humans and found to be quite effective for fat removal in certain selected areas of the body.
Rewiring The Leptin Rx Reset
Evolutionary strategy is based upon finding an environmental niche and exploiting it. Evolution is based upon change and the natural adaptations to it. Today, we are going to explore how some environmental triggers might open a “biochemical trap door” that will allow me to add a new recommendation for you to consider adding to the Leptin Rx reset protocol for those who are LR. I am beginning a series on circadian biology to show you how this all ties in together. Today, I will give you a very cursory review of why circadian biology, leptin, and environment are critical to using the Quilt to obtain your Optimal life. Why is circadian biology critical to humans? For evolution to work Optimally, a cell first must adapt to its environment. The first situation any living cell would be subjected to in an earth day is a period of day and night. Over time it would also be subject to the seasons in our environment because of the earth’s revolution, tilt, and angulations of the sun. As time continued on, further life would have been subjected to solar variations and would have had to account for it. It also has to find food to make energy (ATP) to survive, and it also has to control its own cellular division. The epic battle for the cell is to have the regularly expected circadian cycles found in our environment and ”yoke” those signals to its metabolic cycle and to its growth cycle. Most people know that the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) in the brain is where the circadian pacemaker lies in humans. It monitors this dance between darkness and light, and the seasonal cold and hot temperatures in our environment to help control and monitor our own growth and development. Evolution apparently agreed to use these signals in all living things because this is what it uses for all life on earth today. What most people do not know is how leptin plays a massive role in regulating it. Many people and physicians think it plays a small role. Recent research has revealed that leptin can induce expression of a neuropeptide called vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) through the VIP cytokine response element. This is an epigenetic modification from our environment directly signaling the master hormone in our body. So what does VIP actually do?
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Hey Lyme Disease, Meet Leptin!
I do not believe there is a more misunderstood disease by conventional medicine than Lyme disease and Fibromyalgia. Many healthcare providers do not even think FM exists to the determent of millions of people. It is estimated that ten million people suffer from these diseases today. 75% of them are women. The reason for that is because leptin is involved, and as you all know it is a sexually dimorphic hormone. These are diseases that affect the fat cells in all parts of our body. They also cause issues with adiponectin, which is also sexually dimorphic. Many women will be glad to know that fact. Understanding Lyme disease actually helps you understand FM very well. Both diseases cause abnormal activation of an immune mediated pathway that takes over cytokine production in the fat cells that line our GI tracts, respiratory tracts, sinuses, and many other organs. Most know that Lyme is most commonly associated with a tick bite, and the host gets infected with spirochete bacteria. What most do not know, is that this tick liberates a neurotoxin that causes most of its symptoms. This neurotoxin activation is common to many diseases just like Lyme disease. FM, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Sick building Syndrome, and mold exposure are just a few. All these diseases activate the same pathway, and this is why they have features that are quite similar clinical findings. Making these connections clinically helped me tie this all together. Since I came to a deep understanding of how important leptin is to our body several years ago, it made complete sense to me to think all these diseases might have a leptin link because of the constellation of symptoms were all tied to specific cytokine activation. This is precisely how leptin resistance develops too. This is how a change of perspective might help a physician see a problem in a new way. It is precisely how Evolutionary medicine prism has allowed me to come to bio-hack just about any disease we face as a species now.
The Primal Principles of Optimal Living
Today is the last day of 2011 and I have written over 60,ooo words for the new book that I agreed to write with Mark Sisson since 12/23/2011. The book has just flowed from me. As I wrote one chapter today, it occurred to me that I have neglected the blog. I thought about what I learned the most about me this year in 2011. I learned that I spent an entire lifetime feeding my left hemisphere and subjugated the talents I had in my right hemisphere. You can’t become an oral surgeon and a neurosurgeon if you pander constantly to your more creative side. In fact, you need to use and develop the skill set in your left hemisphere. It has helped me become who I am today. I realized in the process of writing the book that like a body builder who works on their upper body to the detriment of their other body parts, you can become unbalanced in who you become. I realized rather abruptly that the thing I learned about myself in 2011 is that I have a pretty good right hemisphere that I need to let out of the bag more often. I learned this year how to tap it and how to exercise and use it to complement my left side. In fact, I think I have found evidence of sub intelligence abilities I never knew I had. I stumbled upon them when I decided to launch the blog, and begin to talk about what I have found and the connections I have made between disparate biological systems. The more I wrote and shared, the more interesting things I found hidden inside me. My wife posited that it was likely due to open my world up to the people I serve having a great effect of expanding my own abilities. She is a pretty smart lady because I think she is correct, and she knows me better than anyone on this planet. We got into a discussion tonight while we are getting ready for an open house party for our friends and family tonight for New Years Eve, and it opened my mind to the thoughts I am writing now for you here.
What Is The Primal Spirit?
The best of all gifts around any Christmas tree are the presence of a happy family and friends all wrapped up in the rapture of each other. I hope that these 12 thoughts might make the coming days that you spend with your loved ones the beginning of how you chose to spread the Primal Spirit. Christmas is not the sparkling glitter, lights and outward display of commercialism. The secret of the season lies in burning a bright inner primal glow for everyone to see. It’s about re-lighting a fire inside our heart, and sharing that flame to light those who you touch. Sharing that good will and joy are a vital part of finding peace of mind. It’s will lead us to higher thoughts, and elevate us to seek a greater plan to help us achieve our optimal life. This Primal spirit is a glorious dream in the souls of all of mankind. Now is the time to open your mind to its creativity. Here are the Kruse family’s wishes for you our new friends during this holiday season.
Finding Your Primal Sense
I recently did a video interview with a former patient and friend of mine, Mrs. Jodi Wibel, from New Orleans, who sustained a massive change to her life recently. This will be chronicled in an informal video testimonial on my site shortly. Her story inspired me on many levels to write this blog. Much of what she said to me that day really resonated with me. She told me after the interview that I needed to write more about how I think, and how I motivate and seek to help people change themselves when they are at a crossroads. Too often, we and the people around us, become creatures to how we think chronically, without ever realizing it. This thinking is what creates ruts and plateaus in our life. Change is best carried out, not when we are in a rut, but when we are at the edge of our comfort zone. Even our friends and family can be enablers to our bad habitual thinking about change. People who lack the clarity, courage, or determination to follow their own dreams will often find ways to discourage yours. When you change for the better, the people around you will be inspired to change also. But only after doing their best to make you stop. Live your truth and don’t ever stop! I tell you this now so you read it and understand it consciously, because this unconscious thought is behind why you do not appear to want change. Once you perceive that this might be a correct statement, you will then begin to look at your circumstances from a new perspective. That new perspective is critical in seeing your life in a new way. Jodi believed it was the key to how the science became part of her “skeptics life” without a fight from her old habitual thinking. You must break free of the shackles of your old mind and embrace all your fears. On the other side of all your fears is the freedom in your life to make choices to give you an Optimal Life. For this entire week, her single thought has filled my mind with how to write this post. I decided to stop trying to feel it and to just write what my thoughts were about how I view change now after my own leptin Rx reset 5 years ago.
Cortisol Response
Cortisol is a glucocorticoid hormone. It is the most important one in humans, produced by the adrenal cortex and participates in the body's homeostasis and stress responses. Cortisol concentrations also follow a circadian rhythm. It is a more complex rhythm than the human melatonin rhythm. Unlike the melatonin rhythm, human cortisol rhythms do not seem to be totally associated with day and night per se, but seem to be more closely tied to the "transition periods" from dark to light and to a lesser extent, from light to dark. Transitioning light levels play a tremendous role in cortisol rhythms in humans. In addition to its circadian rhythm exhibiting a predictable peak in the morning, cortisol levels typically elevate sharply in the morning, 30 minutes to an hour after awakening. The glucocorticoid levels synthesized by the adrenal gland across the 24 hour day appear to be under the control of two distinct systems, one governed by the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, and one controlled by the autonomic nervous system through the adrenal medulla. Evidence supports that cortisol production can be uncoupled from the HPA axis controller of its release (ACTH). Night time light stimulates the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) and this sends a neural signal to the autonomic systems to increase cortisol production from the adrenal gland, but not the brain. This is not coupled to pulsatile ACTH release in the pituitary, and has separate neural pathways. Studies have shown that exposure to high levels of polychromatic (white) light (80lux at the cornea) in the morning, but not in the evening, could increase cortisol levels in humans. It appears the intensity of light is critical to the real effect on cortisol levels. Studies have also shown that morning light can increase heart rate, suggesting an impact of light on the autonomic nervous system that modulates cortisol release from the adrenal gland. More recent studies have shown bright light to dramatically reduces cortisol levels in humans.
So You Completed The Leptin Rx? What’s Next?
Once you have added the Leptin Rx to your paleo/primal template and you have successfully experienced all the "small wins" that I mentioned in the Leptin FAQ's blog, what should you do next? If you recall reading the blog on how the leptin Rx works, it basically is a plan to make your gastrointestinal tract perform visceral exercises that it is not accustomed to performing, in order to cause neuroplastic changes in your hypothalamus' arcuate nucleus. It uses the vagus nerve as the "stimulator" to send these new messages to the brain. After a period of time, the inflammation will slowly dissipate at the median eminence, and these afferent signals will force expression of certain genes that have been repressed since we were in utero. These genes and pathways are hardwired into our DNA at conception, and used until the child is 12-24 months old. After this time, they are not expressed any longer, because transgenerational epigenetics favors instead the use of the leptin receptor from an evolutionary perspective. This occurs because the leptin receptor in the arcuate nucleus is far more sensitive and accurate in accounting for electrons from food than was using older circadian and ultradian cycles that we used in uteri during morphogenesis. The human brain learns "what neural circuits" to use by repetitive firing. We have a saying in brain surgery, nerves that fire together wire together. This is the basis of the theory of Hebbian learning. These exercises I told you about in the Leptin Rx signal hypothalamic neurons to adapt to these visceral responses to food in a new way, to sensitize the leptin receptor in order to account for electrons from food in precisely how it was designed to do by evolution. In essence, we are altering the genetic expression of the genes in our arcuate nucleus. I describe it to my patients as "performing brain surgery on them without using a blade." The visceral responses to the Leptin Rx are transcribed by the vagus nerve, and this information is sent to the brain. This message is dramatically different than the one the patient is used to giving the leptin receptor, and the new message induces changes to the neuropeptides in the brainstem. After some time, (6-8 weeks for most) changes will be induced. These can be followed by the clinician or the patient. Those clinical signs are outlined in the Leptin FAQ blog post. In doing this, we force the neurons to see neurochemical signals that radically confuse the leptin receptor and the brain. The brain's response to a signal it does not understand is to revert to an older known pathway or to learn a new way to tackle on old problem. I would suggest you watch How your brain re-learns from 2007 by Dr. VS Ramachandran in a TED talk. He exquisitely explains how this type of learning is stimulated in the brain for phantom limb pain and its treatment. One need not use expensive technology to induce gene expression. It is possible to do without an NIH grant too. It requires some synthesis of thought and experience. When you understand the essence of how the brain works, you just need to design a program and force it upon the brain to decipher what to do. That is the essence of the Leptin Rx reset.