Normally, in podcast interviews, everyone is just jerking the other off and asking questions that make them look great.

I don’t like this jerk off fest that we now call podcasting. It makes me sick. I like asking tough and critical questions.

The problem with this approach is that people won’t like me very much. Oh well. Dr. Kruse didn’t seem to mind much. He’s able to confront criticism.

Compare this to “Science-Based Medicine” people, who refuse to be interviewed. I reached out to 5 of their editors and no one seems to be ready to be challenged.

I suggest listening to this at 1.5X.

About Dr. Jack Kruse

I like Jack for a number of reasons. He thinks out of the box, he’s willing to call people out and he offers very new and interesting ideas.

He has more of interdisciplinary knowledge than anyone I know about physics, chemistry, and biology. He’s got depth and breadth.

Dr. Kruse initially struck me as a tin hat member with all of his EMF spiels. However, he’s said enough things that were spot on that makes me compelled to study what he has to say.

I like Dr. Kruse’s methodology in that he approaches the body in a ‘first principles’ way.

This approach has benefits and drawbacks. On one hand, you’re more likely to figure things out that others haven’t. On the other, you’re more likely to be wrong.

He connects biology and physics in a way that I would love to do if I knew more physics. To him, the health of the body relies on electrons (he’s not wrong).

I always realized that biology comes down to chemistry and chemistry comes down to physics. Physics is how things get done in the body when it comes down to it. But without knowledge of biology and chemistry, the physics is also meaningless.

I like that he offers experiments that you can test for yourself based on his theories.

Dr. Kruse scored some serious points with me when I realized he doesn’t belong to any ideology and is willing to piss people off with his ‘sacrilegious’ ideas. He has no qualms about dissing paleo or any ideology that he is associated with.

Not being a dedicated member of a group is the most important shorthand rule that I use when trusting an ‘expert’ or anyone that knows more than me about a subject. You should be suspect of believing any expert belonging to a specific group, whether it be paleo, vegan, SBM or other. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t listen to them. Rather, it just means that you should be wary.

The Kruse Protocol That I Am Doing

Being cold, taking cold showers, dipping my head in cold…

Eating about a pound of raw wild salmon a day that has been frozen in industrialized freezers (to kill parasites)… I warm it up, but it’s not cooked. Plus MCT, NAC, R-Lipoic acid, Chlorella to prevent heavy metals and toxins.

Wearing red glasses for at least 4 hours a day

Getting an hour of sun+8mg of Astaxanthin

Taking care of my circadian rhythm – getting outside in the morning, red glasses at night…

A shitload of dulse for my iodine

2 gallons of cold liquid.

EMF blocking clothing

Magnetico sleep mattress

I’ve actually done all of this stuff except EMF blocking before Kruse, but now I’m making it my business to do it together.

The Interview

I am happy about the interview as he answered some questions, but many questions remain unanswered for me. But I guess that’s what his blog and book are for – figuring out the details.

I’m more open to his ideas after the interview than before.

In the interview, I try not to be antagonistic even though my questions are critical in nature. I try not to disagree much because that would kill the interview.

I was laughing a few times because I got a kick out of him dismissing other people and my own theories.

Takeaways:

-We see and will continue to see a trend of disease explosion – especially of the brain, immune system and heart.

-The paleo and ancestral people – Chris Kresser, Rob Wolf, Matt Lalonde, and Jimmy Moore don’t focus on the important things.

-In particular, we focus too much on food and less on circadian rhythms, light, water, electrons, and magnetism.

-We get too much blue light.

-We need more DHA if we get less sun.

-We need more DHA and ‘good’ water if we’re exposed to EMFs.

-Living in a city dehydrates us and therefore we need to drink more good water.

-We need more cold: Being cold, drinking cold water, cold showers and ice baths.

-I discuss my water biohack – distilled water+infrared light+hydrogen+cold… Jack says that putting the water in a copper pot on the magnetico is a good addition.

-Farmed fish is better than no fish. Supplemental DHA is better no DHA, as long as it’s from a reliable company and not exposed to light or heat.

-We should try to get much of our DHA from raw seafood, especially oysters.

-DHA increases our DC electric current, which is critical to being awake.

-We need more iodine in the form of seaweeds if we have more EMF exposure.

-If people don’t do well with saturated fats, it’s because of environmental exposure to EMFs and the environment in general.

-Obese and really thin people have an energy problem and electron loss. The obese people have it from the neck down and the anorexics have it from neck up.

-You don’t want to use your magnetico in the day time, but you want to use it while you sleep.

Dr. Kruse’s order of importance:

Circadian Rhythm – 3 DHA – 5 Limiting blue light – 6 Water (spring water) Sleep – 1 Cold – 7 Psychological stress – 2 Exercise – 4

Numbers at the end are my own rankings of importance. I forgot to include sun, diet, EMFs, and oxygen. I assume limiting EMFs would be in his top 3. Maybe I’ll message him.

Where Do We Agree?

He stresses the importance of the mitochondria, DHA, water, sleep, hormones, hypothalamus, circadian rhythm, light and sun in our health, among others. I agree with him there.

We understand the importance of these from different angles. I try to track the changes on the protein level and he’s seeing how the physics of these work.

Ideas That I’m Still On The Fence About

I still don’t have an opinion as to how much EMFs are harmful. I think it’s certainly plausible that it adversely affects us and possibly in a very significant way.

However, I need more time to form an opinion as to exactly how harmful EMFs are.

Normally, I would do a self-experiment, but since EMFs are everywhere, it’s hard to stay away from them for prolonged periods and see how I feel. It’s not an easy experiment to conduct.

See my post on the health effects of EMFs.

Disagreements/Critique

I didn’t stress our disagreements in the interview because I’m not interested in creating an argument when the point is to get his opinions. I interviewed him to get his viewpoint, not push my own.

I think limiting psychological stress and getting enough and good quality sleep are more important than anything else – for most people.

I think mitochondrial dysfunction is the cause of the problems that we see and that comes from various kinds of stressors (including psychological stress).

Based on Dr. Kruse’s answers, he never explains anything based on genetics, which I think is flawed. He obviously agrees (I hope) that genetics plays a role, but he acts as if it’s relatively unimportant.

He mentions that people who have cognitive problems and are thin must be anorexic. I don’t see this in my experience. People are normal weight and have cognitive problems, in my experience. I was normal weight. My BMI was and still is 23.5, which is very normal. I was never considered too thin or fat, yet I had a lot of mitochondrial issues in my brain. The majority of people I deal with have a relatively healthy BMI, yet they also have many mitochondrial and energy problems.

Dr. Kruse explains everything through magnetism, electrons, and quantum physics. While it’s good to have more than one perspective and I do believe that much of the biology comes down to these, I think there’s immense value in understanding things on a biochemical level as well, because this is the discussion level that most mainstream science on disease operates on.

We can’t understand how curcumin, diet or any supplements work without understanding the biochemistry of it.

It’s true that the biology works via physics, but the language in which the scientific literature speaks is not at the physics level.

For example, when he speaks about inflammation, he talks about protons, but this isn’t how the science describes it. If we think about protons, there’s no way to know which supplements will decrease inflammation. The science has to discuss the supplements in terms of protons for us to understand how these supplements are useful.

It could theoretically be that an excess of protons causes Nf-kb and other proteins (transcription factors) to go to your DNA to produces cytokines and activate neutrophils, macrophages, etc… I’m not sure what he’d say about this. It could either be that he’s describing the same process on a physics level or he’s completely discarding mainstream science and thinks inflammation is working differently. If he’s just describing things differently, then knowing the language of biology is still important in order to understand the scientific literature.

How does PQQ work? On the biochemical level, it induces PGC-1a. All we need to know is that term and the effects it has on gene expression. There’s no need to know how PQQ fits with electrons, protons, photons, magnetism or whatever. Still, it’s good to have multiple perspectives, so I’m not saying we should disregard this view. I plan on studying physics and investigating it on a deeper level.

Dr. Kruse says the reason why some people do better or worse with saturated fat is because of their “environment”, which means EMFs and the like. But I’ve found biochemical, hormonal and a genetic basis for this, whereas EMFs does not explain anything on the detailed level. It might be the driver of the biochemical processes, but the details are critical and they are missing. I assume he’d say we need to read his book and blog to get the details.

Dr. Kruse tries to lump everything in his unifying theory of electrons, magnetism, water and the like, but he glosses over how our genes interact with this system. He’ll say one person is skinny and one is fat because of electron loss, but he doesn’t explain why people are losing electrons differently. It’s the details that are needed in order to fully evaluate his theories. Again, I assume he’d say we need to read his book and blog to get the details.

While I think the Paleo people overemphasize foods, I also think Dr. Kruse under-emphasizes it. He could be right that in a different environment, food will affect us differently. However, in an environment that’s constant, I found a very significant difference from eating different foods.

I also do not support a high-fat diet if people aren’t getting into ketosis.

Kruse’s Ideas That I’m Leaning Against

He says we could use our BUN/Creatinine ratio to test oxidative stress. He says he’s never seen anyone with less than a ratio of 15 in the city. All of my BUN/creatinine ratios were lower than 15 (I’ve checked it ~10X). When I wasn’t doing very well healthwise and my oxidative stress was much higher, it was at a 7. So my own tests do not fit with his experience.

Creatinine is higher if you have more muscle mass and BUN will increase if you consume more protein. So someone with a lower protein diet and a higher muscle mass will have a low ratio, regardless of the EMF environment we’re in or our redox potential. When my diet was lower in protein my BUN was lower and it’s increased as I upped my protein, but during that BUN increase, I actually felt better.

In defense of Dr. Kruse, he will argue that the BUN/creatinine ratio is just one measure, but I think it’s a weak measure.

Dr. Kruse mentions and seems to believe that too little superoxide is the more common problem in people with diseases like Alzheimer’s, Type 2 diabetes, Parkinson’s, etc… All of my reading of the literature goes against this theory. He certainly knows things that I don’t, but based on the scientific literature and my own understanding, too little superoxide is not the problem. And this is supported by genetic data and oxidative stress tests. However, bursts of oxidative stress are definitely important and if we don’t exercise or get sun then we don’t get these bursts. He seems to say that we need a magnetic field to create superoxide. If I have too much superoxide, does that suggest that my magnetic field is too good?

Dr. Kruse doesn’t believe ATP is very important, or as important as science makes it out to be. He also doesn’t believe in the chemiosmotic theory of ATP production. These ideas go against mainstream science. I have no problem with ideas that go against the mainstream, but he’s a lone soldier with these theories and I don’t know enough physics to have a strong opinion one way or another.

Dr. Kruse says that Alzheimer’s and Type 2 diabetes are circadian rhythm disorders – that our clock in the SCN is not working faster than our biology clock. I think our circadian rhythm is extremely important, but there’s obviously a lot of other significant factors. For example, a disrupted circadian rhythm is probably a contributing factor to Type 2 diabetes, but it’s also a disease of consuming too many calories, in my view. I tend to think that chronic disease is caused by many factors, whereas Dr. Kruse focuses overwhelmingly on a few.

How Much Does ALA Convert to DHA?

Dr. Kruse says we barely have any ability to synthesize our own DHA.

According to Wikipedia: “Because humans and other mammals are able to make their own DHA from other fatty acids, DHA deficiency is not common. But, if that DHA-synthesizing enzyme is defective, it could lead to problems with infertility” [1].

The citation comes from an article that cites a researcher:

“As long as this endogenous system is working fine, humans can synthesize enough DHA in their bodies if they have the precursor,” Nakamura said. “But some groups [of people] may have a decreased ability to synthesize DHA. In this case, the dietary supplements may help” [2].

Another study says that 9% of alpha-linolenic acid is converted to DHA, in young women [3].

Now, I believe that people will do better by eating seafood and/or DHA, but the question is to what extent we can convert it. I don’t know the answer to that yet.

Dr. Kruse sent me a study reviewing this topic in depth and the conclusion is that supplementation with ALA converts to EPA, but this doesn’t translate into an increase in DHA. Score one for Dr. Kruse.

Key Points:

“The majority of evidence from isotopic tracer studies show that the conversion of ALA to DHA is of the order of 1% in infants, and considerably lower in adults”

“Supplementation of the diet with high levels of ALA leads to small but significant increases in EPA and DPAn-3 although supplementation with preformed EPA is approximately 15-fold more efficacious in this regard.”

“Dietary DHA increases blood and tissue DHA beyond that achievable with consumption of usual intakes of any precursor omega-3 PUFA, against a background of western diets providing ample n-6 fatty acids”

“Present evidence indicates that EPA/DHA status can be improved by increasing their intake or by decreasing omega-6 intake, and a combination of the two is likely to be most effective.”

Here’s Dr. Kruse’s response to this:

“ALA in humans is not well converted to long chained DHA in humans because of the enzyme biochemistry in humans is not well developed. We now know because of the work of Kaduce in 2008, that adult neurons can make DHA endogenously, but its ability to do so is sharply limited. In adults humans, the DHA synthesis pathway is very inefficient and essentially stops at DPA omega 3, causing a sick brain to be dependent upon a constant source of new DHA from the marine food chain.

DHA is not burned for energy in humans because of this factor. That factor is this: bio-energetics of this lipid due to its specific ability to conduct electrical signals. This theory was tested by Turner et al., who demonstrated a positive linear relationship between the high molecular activity of the enzyme Na+K+ATPase (the sodium–potassium pump) and membrane concentration of DHA in the surrounding phospholipids in brain, heart, and kidney tissue of samples from both mammals and birds. Further, the highest concentration of DHA was found in the mammalian brain as was the highest activity rate of the pump. This is significant as the sodium-potassium pump accounts for some 20% of the basal metabolic rate but approximately 60% of the energy utilization in the brain.” This is precisely how evolution got the extra energy for the brain and heart to work well in mammals.

Most of the energy in the brain is tied to phospholipid recycling for cell membrane recycling. This was reported by Purdon and Rapoport in 2007. Most people in the research circles think DHA is concentrated in the brain because of conformational fluidity of DHA, but this does not appear to be the case because melting points past the first three double bonds in PUFA’s does not alter melting point abilities of other PUFA’s substantially. Turner’s paper (cited below) has even deeper implications for humans. It appears that DHA lipids allow humans membranes to do some unique electrophysiologic things that few other mammals can do. DHA acts as a metabolic neuro-physiologic pacemaker to amazing biochemical abilities. DHA appears to directly impact and influence the metabolism of the whole organism via an impact on the basal metabolic rate because of the linear relationship in how the Na/K ATPase functions. Here is the Site.

Some Questions I Didn’t Get to Ask

Why is one person affected in one way and someone else affected another way? Dr. Kruse explains how our body’s function in a unifying way and he hasn’t explained why one person has one issue and someone else has a different issue. I’m sure he’s got answers, but it’s hard to get that out in an interview. These questions are very complex. I will read his blog.

Is there significant longevity and health in the Gulf South, Louisiana, where Dr. Kruse lives?

What’s the solution to EMFs? The world is overpopulated and technology isn’t going away. We can’t all move to specific locations, as that would then cause overcrowding and become an EMF hellhole. I don’t think there has to be a good solution, but I should’ve dug more into what his vision of how we can live in a “better” world.

How is inflammation from protons?

Conclusions

I agree with Dr. Kruse on many of his ideas and disagree with him on some others. I am on the fence about much of what he says.

I don’t think people should dismiss him or say he’s crazy because there’s much we don’t know.

Few people have a strong grasp of biology, chemistry, and physics as Dr. Kruse does.

Given that he knows significantly more than me about these, I can’t say he’s wrong. But I also realize that all because he knows more, it doesn’t mean he’s right. I have my own opinions.

We should definitely pay attention to what he says and I plan on conducting experiments based on his ideas and see what the results are.

The litmus test about his ideas is trying them out and seeing how they work for you. All of the theories become irrelevant if they don’t work for you.

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