[Transcript] – Jack Kruse Tells You How To Live Like A Polar Bear And Eat Like A Great White Shark

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Transcripts

Podcast from:  https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/podcast/biohacking-podcasts/jackkruse/

[00:00] Introduction

[02:03] Carbs and Performance

[13:36] The Pentose Phosphate Pathway

[22:07] How to Tap Into the PPP

[32:14] An Off Molecular Sense of Timing

[38:40] Other Things That Can Throw Off Your Body's Timing

[42:49] How EMF Affects One's Timing

[45:22] Foods With High Electron Density

[49:59] What An Elite Athlete's Diet Should Look Like

[1:01:20] End of Podcast

Ben:  Hey, folks.  It’s Ben Greenfield, and I've got Dr. Jack Kruse on the call today.  Jack, it's a pretty huge pleasure to have you back, man.

Jack:  Well, I appreciate being back.

Ben:  If you don't know who Dr. Jack Kruse is and you're listening in, head over to jackkruse.com.  He's a neurosurgeon who writes on a variety of topics, but he's really, really on the pointy end of things when it comes to health, and health versus performance, and health versus living in a modern world, and health versus our modern diet, or our Paleo diet, just a huge wealth of information.  He's the guy who first appeared on this podcast last year and talked about cold thermogenesis.  And if you haven't had a chance to listen into that show, I'm going to put a link to it in the show notes, but he's also an expert on that topic as well.  Today though, we're talking about something completely different, kind of, but related.  It's carbs and performance and whether or not you actually need carbs for performance.  So, you know what?  I figured we should probably just take the deep dive right in.  So, Dr. Kruse, why do you say you don't need carbs for performance?

Jack:  Well, the answer to that is pretty complex, but I want to start off with probably two things to direct your readers to it if they haven't read them.  There's two specific blog posts on my site that get into the nitty gritty of this situation, because I doubt we're going to be able to cover all the nitty gritty details.  The first one is called “EMF 4”, and the name of it is “Why Might We Need Carbs for Performance”.  And then the latest one is the one I posted today, and I actually posted this, Ben, actually for you based on one of your most recent blog posts about your labs that you posted for everybody to look at, and it's called “Quantum Biology”, and it's called “Quantum Scaling”.  And the reason why this topic is, how shall we say, near and dear to my heart is because most people who consider themselves expert biochemists or expert organic chemists haven't a clue truly about this.  I listen to your podcast you did it Peter Attia from The Eating Academy, and he made a comment, so did Robb Wolf, that there's just no performance on a ketogenic diet.  And while I respect both of those guys, I mean, it's really interesting for someone to say it.

Ben:  Yeah.  They say there's no evidence for like a high, high elite athlete type of performance on that diet.  Is that what you're referring to?  Like people going fast and doing really well?

Jack:  Right.  And I mean, we have several guys on my site that have been doing this.  One of them is a world-class cyclist named Barry on my site who's been doing this for almost five years.  And for someone who's supposed to be a leader to say something like this, it just goes to show you, to find these kind of pathways, you have to be willing to pick up some stones that no one else has picked up.  And just because you're not aware that these things exist, do not tell people they do not exist, especially when there's a biological framework for it, specifically the pathway we're talking about is the pentose phosphate pathway.  But then to scale it, and this is where it becomes difficult for people to understand, this pathway basically is based in quantum biology.  And that's what I got into today when I started to talk about the natural physical law for currents.  When you understand that electron current along the inner mitochondrial membrane dictates your performance, when you understand the four major variables that are critical there, you begin to start to see on a very simplistic level why 36 ATP don't equal 147 ATP.  In fact, they never will.  But here's the real tickler, Ben, that I haven't really told anybody, and I guess I'll share with you.  All of this stems from research that I did, god, eight, nine years ago when I changed and reversed my own fortunes when I looked at Einstein's miraculous year.  Most people know that he had four major papers from 1905.  Now, the first paper he gave us…

Ben:  If I could interrupt you real briefly, you used to be obese and you made an enormous transition in your life, right?  Is that what you're referring to?

Jack:  Yeah.  I was 360 pounds.  And in about 11 months, lost 133 pounds, and total 157 within, I think, like 14 and a half months.  And that's kind of what, I should say how I did this was many of the things that you and I are talking about here tonight about performance.  See, performance, longevity, and disease reversals have a lot of overlap, and that's another thing that people don't seem to understand.  Me, personally, I'm not interested probably as you are in terms of performance.  But what I am very interested in is teaching people how to reverse illnesses and do some things that most people say is physically not possible to do.

Ben:  Isn't that stuff related to performance?

Jack:  Oh, it is!  There's no question about it.  I mean, you can't have one without the other.  It's kind of like a Venn diagram where Circle A overlaps with Circle B.  They're not exactly coexistent, but they have a lot of overlap that make sense.  And this is one of those pathways where there is overlap.  But in Einstein's four papers, the first one, he gave his relativity.  He knows that.  The second one, he gave us E=MC2.  And then the third one, he gave us the photoelectric effect, for which he won the Nobel Prize.  But the fourth one is the one that's probably most important, actually to Ben and to Jack Kruse, and outside of physics, very few people seem to know about this paper.  And believe it or not, it's the most cited work out of the four.  If you can believe that, it's true, but it also has the most practical usage and real-life applications, especially for training.  And in that paper, basically, he talks about a lot of things, but it goes from foundational physics, chemistry, and biology, all the way to finance and economics.  And the paper was all about Brownian motion, okay?

Ben:  Brownian motion?

Jack:  Correct.  The key take home in that is that there is a relationship to energy and energy conservation.  Basically, I'll give you a good cliche, “a hesitating mind is a fluctuating mind”.  Anytime we have distractions or fluctuations in anything we do, it is the cause of human efficiency, or I should say human inefficiency.  It can cause frustrations and a consequent lack of progress or performance across the board.  And it's therefore at the root cause of most of our failures that we have.  Now here's the crazy part, Ben, that I want to share with you.  Because if you read today's blog post, which honestly I really wrote specifically for you because I thought it was extremely important after I saw you very publicly posted your labs, and I think you kind of know how I feel about the situation, this is a sign that something radically is wrong in you, but I want you to fully understand the effect.  Because the dissipation of energy is the key factor here, and it's because things are fluctuating.  Now what Einstein said in his paper that this theorem and this natural law called “the fluctuation-dissipation theorem” basically is a fundamental law of physics, and it works on a specific brand of calculus called stochastic calculus.

And I'll explain to you what this means, because it ties directly into the PPP.  Stochastic calculus basically is the same kind of math that the stock market and the random walk works on.  It's also not the standard linear timeframe that most people think that science and evolution runs on.  That's not how it works.  It works on the square root of time.  And basically, what it says is when everything lines up perfect, you can have massive effects fairly quickly.  But when things aren't exactly perfect, like say when you're an omnivore and you eat carbohydrates, there'll be a square root effect to the time that you see the benefit.  That's part of the reason why most athletes never see this pathway, because it generally takes 24 to 36 months in order to access it.  I've said this on my site so many times and I'll say to you…

Ben:  When you say pathway, you're referring to the pentose phosphate pathway, right?

Jack:  Absolutely.  And biology and biochemistry is not a linear science, and anybody who thinks it is is sadly mistaken.  It runs on the stochastic calculus that's a fundamental property of physics.  And when you begin to understand this, it starts to make sense.  And today's blog post basically tells you about the laws that govern current.  Many of the people on your site may not realize, in the EMF series, especially my EMF 3 blog post, I basically showed you the work of Robert O. Becker, who was twice nominated for a Nobel Prize.  Basically he showed us that all the bone metabolism runs on semi-conduction.  In fact, every single system in our body runs on semi-conduction.  Once you understand this, what does that mean?  It means that Newtonian physics goes out and you have to have an understanding of quantum electrodynamic theory.  Now this is probably hurting a lot of people's heads, but why is it important.  The reason that Peter Attia and Robb Wolf, and maybe Ben Greenfield, have never seen this pathway is because it works on stochastic calculus and it takes time, time that performance athletes are maybe not willing to give.  But why do performance athletes need to understand it's important?  Because what Ben Greenfield and his followers really want is that ultimate performance, but they also want it so they're not treating their stem cells, and their longevity, and neolithic diseases when they're in their 50's and 60's to potentially take them down.  What I'm basically telling you, Ben, is that you can have your cake and eat it too, but you need to understand the fundamental physical laws that govern this biochemistry.  It's incredibly important.  And once you understand…

Ben:  I hear you.  You know…

Jack:  And once you understand…

Ben:  Go ahead.

Jack:  Go ahead.

Ben:  Well, what I was going to say is…

Jack:  Oh, I was just saying, once you understand it, you can do it.

Ben:  Yeah.  Some of the stuff that you've already written, Jack, on the pentose phosphate pathway, which I do, in a second, would love for you to kind of define the overview of for folks who are listening in who just have a huge question mark about their heads right now, hold on folks 'cause we will get into some nuts and bolts.  But I don't know if you saw my recent blog post, but I just started into full-on ketogenesis and utilization of d-ribose and some of these other things that I'm hoping allow me to tap into this pathway, but I do plan on sticking with this stuff, based off what you said, long term to see what actually happens to the human body as you do this and try to combine it with high performance.  So, that being said, what is the pentose phosphate pathway?  For people who just want to wrap their heads around this, who are listening in who've never read anything that you've written or anything like that.

Jack:  Sure.  The main functions, the main biologic functions of pentose phosphate pathway or shunt, is number one, it supplies the cell with NADPH in order to do several key factors.  The number one factor that gives the cell reducing power for biosynthetic reactions.  If you remember just about anything about training, we want to live in a chemically reduced pathway of life and not in an oxidized pathway which creates inflammation.  That should be pretty intuitive to most people.  The second big issue, and this is the issue where I think you're having a problem now, is that it serves as the biochemical reductant to maintain glutathione levels everywhere in the body.  When you lose control of glutathione, basically you lose control of your ability to fight off that excess oxidation that you bring in by being an endurance athlete.  And eventually, it slowly derives your ability to perform.  The next thing that it does, NADPH that's generated by the PPP also is utilized by the cytochrome P450 system in the liver as a detox pathway.

So, all the bad crap that you make in your body while you're doing this incredible amount of exercise is able to be taken out, and that includes the stuff that you're putting in your body that you probably shouldn't be eating, which is the carbohydrates and all the crap that's in.  The last thing that it does, and this is a biggie, and this is where the longevity Venn diagram overlaps with performance is it serves, the pathway serves as a direct electron source for the reduction of ribo and deoxyribonucleotides for RNA and DNA synthesis.  So, this is the reason why you'll see increased levels of inflammation will start to cause some really funky things going on with your labs.  In fact, some people will look at the lab and say, “God, this doesn't make any sense at all.”  And this is where we come back to that stochastic calculus.  When things don't make sense, humans immediately default back to linear thinking.  But that's not how our biology works, and that's the point that I'm trying to make to people when they understand that electron density across the inner mitochondrial membrane is dictated by a quantum effect called electron tunneling at the cytochrome, cytochrome 1 all the way through cytochrome 4, and this is where coenzyme Q10 acts.  I know that I've seen a lot of supplements that you're doing and I know that you're trying to improve your mitochondrial efficiency, but there is a limit to improving your mitochondrial efficiency if you're destroying the quantum effects that happen in your inner mitochondrial membrane.

And eventually what I'm trying to tell people, and specifically you, is that when you do this consistently over a long period of time, you demolish your ability to lengthen your telomeres, and it first leads to disease, and then eventually it leads to an early death.  And the common pathway, it's not that everybody dies the same way or gets sick the same way, but when you diminish your glutathione levels, it can affect everything in your system.  Every single physiologic system can start to go haywire.  And this is what's really important for performance athletes to understand, is Ben's result is maybe not identical to your result, but I'm telling you, if you test, you're going to find that your hormone panels and your labs are really screwed up when you use exercise in a toxic dose.  And just like anything else in medicine, we have what we call therapeutic ranges for drugs.  Well, this is the thing that endurance exercisers need to understand, especially those for performance, that exercise also has a dose-response curve and there is a toxic dose to exercise.  Many of the people in Paleo Land like putting words in my mouth, saying that I'm not a fan actually.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  But the amount of exercise that we really need to fuel maximum performance is far below what most endurance exercisers believe.

Ben:  Yeah.  And Jack, I've said this before, but I in no way think that Ironman triathlon is necessarily healthy.  It's something that that is, something a lot of people do in their pursuit of perfection, in their pursuit of wanting to achieve their own personal Mount Everest or that next goal.  A lot of people do it for an escape, frankly.  But regardless of the motivation for doing that…

Jack:  I understand that.

Ben:  But what's scary is…

Jack:  I understand when you say that is…

Ben:  Go ahead.

Jack:  Well, I was just going to say, what freaks me out is when you use the word personal perfection, there lies the oxymoron.  I'm kind of okay with a guy like you saying that because I understand implicitly that you get.  What bothers me is there's a lot of people that probably follow you, follow me, and I know that in the Paleo world, they just don't understand how a guy that's an endurance athlete drops dead on a marathon course.  And they think, “Well, he was so healthy.  How could this happen?”  Well, that's the whole point of my blog is to explain to people how we really work and not what we believe.  And that's the problem.

Ben:  Well, I want to ask you in a second about how people, like from a practical perspective, actually start to tap into this pentose phosphate pathway.  And before I do that, the other thing I wanted to mention is you know what I think is scary is, I've been reading your blog, Jack, ever since you started it.  Like I read every article that you put out.  And I take into account what you and some other folks who I follow have said.  I've got dirty electricity filters all over my home, I've got my wireless router off, I only hardwire into the modem, I've got a structured water filter in my house.  I'm trying to mitigate a lot of the damage to these electron pathways that you talk about as much as possible, and my labs are still messed up.  I even eat low carb.  And granted there are some holes in what I do, but just the simple fact that I'm living healthy and beating up my body with what I do, and my labs look the way they are, what scares me is what's happening to the people who aren't even going through half the measures of what I'm doing to take care of their bodies.  And I think that's where you see, that's why you're seeing hip replacements, connective tissue degradation, and wrinkled skin, and skinny fat syndrome, and all these other issues in folks who are running marathons and doing triathlons.  So, it's scary.  But that being said, go ahead.

Jack:  I was just going to say look what just happened to Michael Crabtree from the 49ers.  A torn ACL and the guy's in the best shape of his life.  I mean he tore an Achilles.  All these injuries that people get when they're doing these things, it's not from disuse, or I should say it's from misuse.  It's because the body, it's repair mechanisms are broken.  And that's what people need to understand.  And I'm hoping, people to really take a look at your labs and start to have this “A-ha!” moment.  And maybe by doing this podcast, people can come over.  And if they want the dirty details, I mean if they really want dirty details, you read EMF 4 and Quantum Biology 8, and then maybe go through the EMF series, and you get a full-on blast of quantum mechanics, because the answer is explainable if you're willing to invest the time to learn the variables that dictate this.

Ben:  Yeah.  And folks…

Jack:  I'm not going to tell you they're easy.  They're not.

Ben:   Yeah.  I hear you.  At bengreenfieldfitness.com/jackkruse, I'm going to link to this stuff for those of you who are interested in reading those articles and just want a direct link to 'em.  But Jack, let's jump in to some nitty gritty.  How would somebody even go about starting to tap into this pentose phosphate pathway and bypass a lot of these issues that you're talking about that you run into when you're using, for example, the carbohydrate utilization pathway?

Jack:  Well, the first thing I would tell a performance athlete to do and what I told the performance athletes I work with is use CT to kind of stop the inflammatory cascade, slow things down…

Ben: You mean cold thermogenesis?

Jack:  Correct.  That's the first thing I would have people do.  And then the second thing that's really important is to actually make their mitochondria more efficient.  I've done a mitochondrial efficiency webinar and I'm not going to get into all the details, but there are four major steps that you want to do to maximize your mitochondrial efficiency.  Coenzyme Q10 is one because that's the big quantum [0:22:47] ______ on the inner mitochondrial membrane.  D-ribose, which you know about and you've talked about on your site, is able to restore ATP substrates like ADP, AMP, inosine, and hypoxanthine.  Niacin is a big one.  Acetyl l-carnitine and alpha lipoic acid, all of those things are what I would call STP gas treatments for your inner mitochondrial charge because you have to maintain that physiological charge across that membrane in order to make sure you have enough electron density to pass over it.  And when I talk about electron density, I really hit that on today's blog post for your folks.  The ketogenic diet, basically in a nutshell, what is its main goal for a performance athlete?  It provides the most amount of both the photoelectric effect across your inner mitochondrial membrane in order to fuel your ability to make ATP in a much more efficient fashion.  And with time, like I said on my blog, between 24 and 36 months, you will see a VO2Max expansion that no experts can explain.  And when I tell you…

Ben:  And how long did you say again?  You said 24 to 36 months?

Jack:  Yeah.  Most people take 24 to 36 months.  But I will tell you, if you already are starting off and you're fit and your metabolic profile, the three major labs that I do a hack on is vitamin D, highly sensitive CRP, and DHEA.  If those aren't screwed up, you could actually do it in 12 to 14 months.  And when I did this, that's the reason why I was able to lose the 133 pounds in 11 months.  I mean you have to realize, I had hundreds of people seeing me do this, but none of these blog posts were written eight years ago when I did it.  And people used to ask me all the time how I did it, and if I told them that I basically used Einstein's math to make biochemistry work for me, they would have thought I was bat shit crazy.  But people don't think I'm bat shit crazy anymore, because not only has it worked for me, but it works for lots of other people.  I guess the flak that I'm catching now from most of the performance paleo crew is that they just don't believe this.  And I'm trying to get them to understand, I get that they don't believe it because this pathway's been hidden from them because of their beliefs and they just don't understand it.  But are there people out there that have done this?  Yes.  That's why when you and I first talked…

Ben:  This guy who you said who's on your site, this elite cyclist, this guy named Barry, does he have a blog or anything?  Or does he just kind of keep to himself?

Jack:  Yeah, he does.  No, he has a blog, but he keeps it very quiet because he's a Tour de France athlete.  And he's doing things…

Ben:  What's his blog?

Jack:  I'm not going to turn him out.  I would tell you, “Go to my site and you'll find him.”  And he's also a friend of mine on Facebook and I can introduce you two, but I think you need to get him on and talk to him because I think he's your future.  You want to talk to him because he's a very interesting cat.  And where he trains, he trains up in the Northern Isles of you know the UK, and he goes up into Sweden and Finland.  And I mean when I tell you he's got an amazing track record, many of the guys that he trains with now just train strictly fasting.  He runs 50-mile races, Ben, completely empty.  I mean, it's just shocking.  And the guy is a phenomenal, phenomenal performance athlete.  We're talking documented finishes that you can verify.  It's just something that people need to realize if you're going to do this, you have to be all-in.  Here's the real downside with this, I guess with this whole performance angle is when you understand that this science is based on quantum electrodynamic theory and semi-conduction, you need to understand that the details matter a lot.

Let me give you a good analogy so your listeners will understand.  If everybody can close your eyes for a minute and just think about CNBC, watching an Intel semiconductor factory.  Everybody knows that when Intel makes semiconductors, they have clean rooms.  And in those clean rooms, there's no dirt, everybody's wearing a white suit, and it's phenomenal.  But very few people understand the reason why.  The reason why is if any debris gets into the silicon wafer, it blocks the ability to move electrons over that wafer coherently, and what coherently means is complete degrees of freedom so you can have 100% energy transduction.  That is the reason why your iPhone, your laptop, and your computer can do some amazing things that, say, your Atari system back when you were five years old couldn't do.  But that same factor plays a role in your biology.  The reason why Ben can do a triathlon and not be dead at the end of it is because you also work on semi-conduction.

But here's the problem, when you put debris in your body, which we call dielectric blockers, it causes something that's named avalanche collapse of the energy transduction pathway.  When that happens, you have to start to use ATP to offset the loss of electrons on that inner mitochondrial membrane.  And when that happens, that throws off your ability to tell time in your brain, and this is where the PPP becomes important.  This is when the PPP gets hidden from your consciousness, and you need to realize exactly how this happens.  Because once you understand how it happens and how to check for it for you to turn it back on, amazing things will happen.  The major semiconductor, like in the musculoskeletal system is collagen and the other one is water.  So, for example, in water, when you drink fluoridated water, you're basically taking a perfectly good water that can have these quantum effects and removing it because fluoride is a dielectric blocker, it stops the ability of water to be able to do that.  The other one that's a big one is trans fats or excessive omega-6's.  Those act as dielectric blockers on your cell membranes that screw up cell signaling.  The more of those you have in, the less you can tell time.  The less you can tell time means the more you have to rely on ATP, and the more you have to rely on ATP, you rely on the fast replenishing pathways, which is the ATP-PC system, which is the rapid availability of energy rather than the quantity.

The quantity issue is the third one which is related to the amount of ATP made from one mole of stearic acid, which is 147 ATP, versus the second pathway which everybody seems to know about your world, which is carbohydrates and 36 ATP, which is the glycolytic pathway.  You don't want to live on the first two pathways if you're a performance athlete.  But guess what?  98% of performance athletes live on that pathway.  And when you do that chronically, your labs show you that you're doing something wrong.  That's why when you posted your labs, I was like, “Man, I hope this opens up people's eyes that a guy like you who does what you do, everybody knows what you can do, and all the protections that you take still are destroying his biology.”  I think it's an eye opener and applaud you for doing it.  I laid this challenge out at Paleo f(x) in 2011, and only one of the Paleo leaders took it and did it.  Everybody else just snickered behind my back and talked a lot of smack.  But I think when guys like you, and other guys out there like Barry, and some other professional athletes start to do this stuff and start to see the sixth, seventh, and eighth year, and see that their labs actually still look pretty good on a circadian cycle, you're going to be shocked.

Ben:  Yeah.  And as far as what you just mentioned about the molecular sense of timing being off, I think you actually wrote that in that “Why You Might Need Carbs for Performance Article”, that EMF 4 that I'm going to link to in the show notes.  But when you say molecular sense of timing is off, a lot of people I think, have no clue what that even means.  What do you mean by that?  What would cause someone's timing to be off?

Jack:  Okay.  This one is pretty simple.  We'll just go through a quick quantum dance.  Most people know “big time”.  What “big time” means is the time scales of how evolution acts on science.  In other words, small changes over a long period of time can lead to massive changes.  Okay?  That's the end of the spectrum that Darwin explained to science and everybody accepts.  “Small time” is quantum time, and that's the time Jack Kruse is talking about.  That's the time that Einstein's talking about.  What I basically told you earlier the Intel example is that semiconductor engineers get paid millions of dollars to move electrons over silicon.  Well, performance athletes get paid hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars to move electrons really quickly over their inner mitochondrial membrane.  Okay?  When your sense of timing is off, that means that current of flow of those electrons changes.  When that changes and it decreases, your performance will never be maximal.  And that's where the sense of timing comes off because in a completely coherent quantum system, you're designed to make 100% energy transfer.  Most people, when you actually go back and look at the chemistry of ATP, it cannot explain how Ben can run a hundred-meter dash then jump in the ocean swim three miles.  It just physically, the mathematics of ATP hydrolysis doesn't make sense.

And the reason it doesn't make sense is because that's not the primary energy source.  The primary energy source is the quantum effect of superconduction on the inner mitochondrial membrane and via water in carbon nanotubes that I talked about in the Quantum Biology 1 blog post.  So, the key factor is it's the ability to move electrons across that inner mitochondrial membrane and in those carbon nanotubes that are in your cells.  That's what allows you guys to do the most amazing things that you can do.  And the problem is is when you lose that ability, it's because you're losing a sense of timing.  And its timing at the suprachiasmatic nucleus in your brain, which is where circadian rhythms are controlled.  And where circadian rhythms are involved, that's where hormones are involved.  That's part of the reason why your hormone panel was so demolished.  Because when your molecular sense of timing is off, the key Rosetta Stone moment is go get all your labs wrong, like you did, and then try to explain it.  And this is what will freak people out when they do it.

The problem is most people don't do what you did.  I've been pounding the table for two years for people to do this, and I think I have the biochemical and the physics background to explain to people exactly how this works.  Because when you lose that coherent ability to tunnel electrons along your inner mitochondrial membrane and in those carbon nanotubes via water conduction, what do you, as either a Crossfitter or an endurance athlete have to live on?  You must live on the fast ATP recycling system, which is the ATP creatine phosphate system, or you have to live on the glycolytic pathway, and that's the reason why people who are performance athletes or Crossfitters believe that they need to eat these things in order to keep their performance up.

One of the things I talked about too, Ben, in the EMF 4 blog post is here's something else that I don't think any performance athlete's ever paid attention to and they should.  When you use the fast ATP-CP system, there's a special problem built in, because it only makes two ATP per cycle through, but it is extremely fast in terms of recycling, but it uses a methylation pathway to guanidinoacetate to form creatine.  And this single step in this pathway consumes more methyl groups than all the other methyl reactions in the human body combined.  This is the reason why people have huge problems with their B vitamins, especially B6 and B12.  And if you want to complicate this even more, if you're a performance athlete who's a slow methylator, or say you have the 677 or 1298 SNP for the MTHFR, you're even more screwed.  And this is the reason why I always tell people, if you're a vegan, a performance or endurance athlete that falls apart early, you have horrible vitamin D levels, you have a major dopamine-serotonin issue, you have trouble with your ammonia cycles, you have horrible endogenous glutathione on recycling.  All of these things are the reasons why your labs get destroyed.  And you need to start to put point A, with point B, with point C so you can understand why this happens.  Because eventual poor performance will lead to early onset heart disease, atherosclerosis, and autoimmune issues.  And that's the reason why I call all performance athletes, whether they have the 677 or 1298 SNP, slow methylators because they live on the ATP-PC system and they're just churning up every single methyl group in their body.

Ben:  Right, right.  So, it's basically like speeding up death in a way?

Jack:  Well, that's kind of what I said at Paleo f(x) to an audience with their mouth wide open and their eyes as big as hubcaps.  It's the truth.

Ben:  So, you talk about carbs being kind of a way to throw someone's timing off, just based off of that advanced methylation and things of that nature.  You also talked about fluoridated water.  Are there other things that can cause your timing to be off?

Jack:  Oh, absolutely.  I mean, in our modern world, just think about when we started this podcast with when we talked about Einstein's fourth paper about the dissipation of energy.  Anything that gets us to fluctuate in our normal daily routine basically causes a loss of energy.  Any loss of energy is directly proportional to your performance.  So, I would tell you that you need to really limit your fluctuations.  You want to get as much flow, as current of flow across your inner mitochondrial membranes as possible.  So, for example, if you are a modern human and you live in an environment that is loaded with wireless EMF, I'll explain to you why that is going to destroy your performance.  Number one reason is it's going to dehydrate you of the water that's in your carbon nanotubes that you need to superconduct both electrons and protons.  And I haven't really talked about protonicity, which is basically electricity using protons, but for guys who do what you do, that's one of probably the single most important factors for performance that's really utilized massively in the PPP.

So, your surroundings, your environment is a huge factor.  You don't want to do anything that dehydrates you.  Everybody in your world and in the paleo world know about magnesium levels, but what few people know about, you can't replenish your magnesium level if you're dehydrated.  You know why, Ben?  Because magnesium is a hydrophilic ion.  So, if you're dehydrated, you could take all the magnesium you want, it's not going to matter.  You're just going to piss it or crap it out.  And the reason why is you need the water to keep it intracellular.  That's part of the reason why I always taught my athletes don't even bother getting mag levels on your blood work unless you have an RBC mag level because the only magnesium that matters for energy production is the intracellular component, not the extracellular component.

Another example is blue light.  When you have fake artificial light on at night after the sun sets, or say you're on your iPad, or you're using your Zio, or something that you guys would do for performance, remember, blue light directly affects your ability to make melatonin at night.  Melatonin is actually what gives the direction of current on your inner mitochondrial membrane.  Without the direction of current, you can actually have backward flow across your inner mitochondrial membrane.  And this is, again, another quantum effect where current of flow is directly proportional to the current's direction.  I talked about that today's blog post because these are all little nuances that no one seems to realize play massive roles.  When you can't make melatonin, it's because your pineal gland has got too much blue light.  That's it.  So, that's the reason why most performance athletes know that sleep is quite important, but when they sleep is most important.  They need to sleep when the sun is down and not when the sun is up.  So, the way you train also becomes very important.  We're hardwired for fitness if we would just stop some of the beliefs that we have and really look at nature's law for determining what energy utilization is in our body, people would do a whole lot better.

Ben:  Yeah.  It's amazing.  So, as far as EMF timing, we kind of talked about that, or what would cause someone's timing to be off.  I said EMF because I wanted you to mention that real quick.  You talk about how EMF might play a role here.  Can you explain where that comes into play?

Jack:  There's a lot of ways it comes into play, but the number one way is, like I said, it basically dehydrates you all of the coherent water that's in your carbon nanotubes.  Again, what I just said, most of your listeners are probably going, “Where the hell is this coming from?”  If you don't know this information, I've got a blog post called Quantum Biology 1, and it's called “The Zero Entropy System”.  Basically, what it is, in the last 10 years, we have found out that within a cell, there are carbon nanotubes that are filled with water.  The interface between the carbon nanotube and the water that fills it is where the quantum magic for energy production happens.  And it has to be at its very specific nanoscopic level, meaning that in the beginning of the carbon nanotube, say, where it's 12 nanometers, that's not where the quantum dance happens.  The quantum dance happens below two nanometers.  And the first place that gets to be hydrated from EMF is actually the small diameter carbon nanotubes.

And if anybody wants a real-world idea about how this works, it's simple.  Go take yourself a piece of steak that's nice and juicy, put it in a microwave, put it on for five minutes, and then try to eat it.  You'll see that it's shoe leather.  Why is that?  Because a microwave is an EMF and it completely dehydrates the food that it has.  That's part of the reason, like if you eat a bagel and heat it up in a microwave, you'll notice that if you leave it in there long enough, it gets rock hard.  Why?  ‘Cause the intrinsic water in it gets dehydrated.  So, what do people do with a microwave?  A lot time, they'll wet a paper towel and put it around the thing they're trying to cook so they can rehydrate it.  So, this is exactly what happens to us.  So, if you live in an environment that's a high EMF environment, you're basically screwing your performance before you ever get out of the starting blocks.

Ben:  Interesting.  The other thing that I wanted to go over here was you talk about ketogenesis, specifically, and using ketogenesis and the pentose phosphate pathway.  And you say that foods that have higher ATP densities, like a ketogenic diet, have more what you call electron density.  What does that mean?  What's a food that has a high electron density?

Jack:  Well, I'll give you a simple one.  Let's make it very simple. I don't know how many of your people follow Chemistry, but it is simple.  Let's take coconut oil versus, let's say, a pineapple.  Okay?  Pineapple is basically water and fructose with some other crap in it.  It basically, if we just say we ate one mole of it, it would give you 36 ATP.  So, in other words, one mole of that food, when it's broken down from your gut and delivered to your inner mitochondrial membrane, basically food is broken down into electrons.  Those electrons enter your inner mitochondrial membrane, move across it, after all that pineapple's been moved through, the maximum amount of energy you can make is 36 ATP.  Now for one mole of coconut oil, you make five times as much ATP.  How does that happen?  Well, it's pretty simple.  The reason it happens is because the food is more electron dense when we talk about it from a quantum effect.  And to show you why this is intuitively important for circadian biology and also for biochemistry, Ben, let me ask you question.  When do fruits tend to grow?  They grow in long life cycles while the photoelectric effect from the sun is strong.  When do we eat ketogenic?  In the winter time, when their photoelectric effect is short.

So, biology's built in plan is [0:46:55] ______ with foods that are low energy food stuffs when the sun is powerful and give us high energy food stuffs when the sun's not plentiful.  That's part of the reason why you can eat way need more carbs and you can eat a pound of meat or a pound bacon right, and it's because the amount of energy that's there is incredible, and that energy is delivered to your inner mitochondrial membrane.  The key factor becomes, for you as the performance athlete, is can you handle that amount of ATP at the outset.  And if you're a carb burner, which is what I laid out in EMF 4, you will never, ever, ever be able to utilize what a ketogenic diet can do for you because it requires upregulation of all those hormones in your inner mitochondrial membrane in the cell that are basically controlled by the brain.  And this is where the big dance comes in.  People need to understand that the mathematics that control these decision making processes in your quantum computer in your brain are on this stochastic calculus.  The square root is directly proportional to the time.

That's part of the reason why the more you do right, the more details you get right in this pathway, the quicker you get the effect.  The more you dissipate and fluctuate, the more you dissipate energy.  And these are not Jack Kruse's opinions.  These are foundational laws in quantum physics.  And that's what people really need to understand.  We don't need a randomized controlled clinical trial like Peter Attia or Robb Wolf tell people.  The reason why, it's simple.  These are Einstein's foundational laws.  And once people begin to realize what I'm saying, you put practice, I should say a theory to practice and watch what happens.

Ben:  Yeah.  It makes sense.  So, I want to give people just a little bit of an example from a practical standpoint.  We've obviously talked about some things like mitigating EMF, and eliminating fluoridated water, and shifting to lower carbohydrate intake, and things like that, but I want to give people kind of an idea of what Jack Kruse would like to see on an athlete's plate, for example.  What you would propose somebody who listens to this and is like, “Okay, I'm going to put my foot down.  I'm going to roll out of bed tomorrow morning.  I'm going to try to start eating the way that Jack Kruse would eat if he were able to say what the perfect you know elite athlete diet would look like, from a breakfast, lunch, dinner standpoint.”  What would you propose as like a sample day of eating for a high-performance athlete who wanted to tap into the pentose phosphate pathway?

Jack:  This is pretty simple, Ben.  It's probably the easiest question you asked me.  And here it is.  Live like a polar bear and eat like a great white shark.  Every time you look down at your plate, think of those two things.  If what you see doesn't fit, then don't eat it.

Ben:  Live like a polar bear and…

Jack:  Live like a polar bear and eat like a great white shark.  That's pretty much it.  It's fat and protein…

Ben:  That's going to be the title of this podcast, by the way.

Jack:  I would just tell you, I think it's really that simple.  Now I will say, Ben, to get it completely right, as I try to explain it to you earlier, the details matter in semiconduction, you also need to be mindful of the circadian cycle.  So, for example, when you eat becomes critically important in terms of performance.  And see, the further you get down this pathway, you're going to find that fasted racing is probably going to lead to your greatest performance.  And that is completely counterintuitive to people of your ilk and people who follow you, but I can promise you…

Ben:  It's totally counterintuitive.

Jack:  Right.  I can promise you when you hit this pathway, you just will not believe what you will be able to do.  Because you will be a maximum fat burner after that race.  You'll eat high fat for recovery and replenish all your glycogen, and most people out there in the performance world think that you need carbs, or fructose specifically, to replenish glycogen, that completely tells me they don't understand a god damn thing about the pentose phosphate pathway and what it does.  That's why I put all those details in that EMF 4 blog post, so when people like you say, “I don't understand how this works,” 'cause I know that you guys don't because this stuff is not laid out in a biochemistry book.  I mean, this pathway is not a pathway that really gets talked about a lot either in medical school, or for PhD thesis, or anything else because it's not really well understood.  But when you understand what it does, it makes the major reducing chemical for the body, it replenishes glutathione, and it dictates when we're going to replicate our RNA and DNA.  From an evolutionary perspective, that's a pretty damn important pathway.

Ben:  Yeah.  So, as far as actual foods, so you said, “Live like a polar bear, eat like a great white shark.”  What would you have for breakfast?

Jack:  Well, I wouldn't do this on race day  I'll just give you a regular day.  I'd say probably a six-egg omelet with probably coconut oil in my coffee, probably a pretty whopping scoop of it.  In the omelet, I'd probably have some fruits and vegetables with high polyphenols 'cause I want to stimulate the sirtuin pathway.  I probably also consider adding some kind of protein or meat to it.  You could go with sausage, bacon, ham.  Whatever, you got left over meat from the night before, I'd be fine with that.  Also shrimp would be a really good choice to put in that omelet.  Generally, breakfast for me is the biggest meal of the day.  I would say probably 50 to 60% of my calories come from that time.  I don't eat any lunch, and I haven't for a long time.  I eat a pretty sizeable breakfast.  And that's another part of this whole equation that we haven't really talked about, when you begin to eat like this, you start to realize that your hunger and your cravings go away even after you start to exercise.  And the crazy thing is you'll naturally be able to calorie restrict, which is one of the things I know that you try to employ in your training because it has such a huge beneficial effect on the sirtuin pathway.  But this way, you can do it without even trying.  And at the same time, you're going to keep your hormone panel completely fine.

At dinner time, that's when I'm going to really, really pound protein.  I'm probably going to eat a lot of fish there.  I'm probably make phosphate in either butter, bacon fat, ghee, coconut oil with heavy cream.  I'll always add spices, usually fresh organic spices like oregano, rosemary, basil, garlic, onions, thyme, margarine, those kind of things.  Always put curcumin or turmeric pretty much anything I eat.  I'm trying to think of what else.  In terms of vegetables, whatever's seasonal.  My carbohydrates, when I do eat them, are completely tied to the light cycle.  So, for example, it's now the end of May, I'm in my biggest ramp up phase of carbohydrates between probably June 21st and August 15th.  I'll go from probably 25 to 50 grams of carbohydrates around December 21st, and there's days in June and July that I'll get up to 250 to 300 grams of carbohydrates.

Ben:  Got it.  Interesting.  And then you're basically…

Jack:  I use circadian…

Ben:  Yeah.  You're carb cycling based off of the time of year, essentially.  Interesting.

Jack:  Correct.

Ben:  And then your supplements, you pretty much talked about some of the stuff you recommend, like acetyl l-carnitine, and coenzyme Q10, and d-ribose.  For people listening in, I'm going to link to Jack's articles in the show notes, I'm going to link to some of the stuff that he's talked about as well as the past podcasts that we've done with him.

Jack, you're obviously brilliant.  If you're listening to Jack and I talk and some of this went over your head, I'd recommend you just kind of take the slow dose form.  Go over to Jack's website and read his post.  ‘Cause honestly like when he gets going and he's talking, sometimes some of the stuff, you've got to either go back and listen to this podcast again or just go read some of the stuff that he's written so you can digest it a little bit more slowly.  But ultimately, and I don't know if you agree with me here, Jack, what this seems to come down to is that if you're serious about being an elite performer and you also want to make sure that you're not going to die early or destroy your body, you need to be able to tap into this pentose phosphate pathway and you need to be patient while you're doing it and not expect all the results to come all at once 'cause it takes a little while to teach your body how to do.

Jack:  Correct. The only other point that I'd make in there is if you want the fastest result, realize the fastest result is tied to the exact details of understanding how semiconduction works.  Meaning the more things you do right, the faster it'll happen.  And that's part of the reason why probably the CT series, the EMF series, and the current Quantum Biology series are so incredibly important for people to understand.  When one thing is wrong in semiconduction, bad shit happens, and I'll give a quick example.  In bone, there is a thing called a doping mechanism that collagen uses.  In regular bone, that's normal.  We use copper.  Okay?  If you replace one atom of copper in our bone semicondution with beryllium, you go from normal bone to having an osteogenic sarcoma.  And I just want people to understand what that means.  One atom difference could have that huge a difference.  Now here's the crazier thing that may shock some of your readers, if you go read about FORTEO and some of the bisphosphonate drugs that are out there, guess what one of the side effects of using those medicines are long-term?  Osteogenic sarcoma.  You know why?  Replaces copper for beryllium from your diet. Long-term.

So, guess what?  The details matter in biology, and the problem is no one is taught that.  I wasn't taught it at medical school, most doctors today don't know about it, most trainers have their head completely up their ass on this issue.  It's incumbent upon your listeners and your readers to read what I wrote, be critical about it, think about it, read, learn as much as you can about the science that dictates these fundamental laws of nature and realize how they apply to biology.  And when you do that and you start to do an experiment like you're doing, Ben, I think then we can really change the world.  And one of the things I'm concerned about in your world is that when people start to do this, and I think is the reason why Barry doesn't want to talk a lot of people, he's a competitive athlete.  If he's got an edge, he doesn't want to share this with people.  And that's where I don't know if this information is going to disseminate in your group.  But in my world, where I'm taking care of people who have Neolithic diseases or trying to reverse 'em, they're all about this.  The problem they have is that they just can't focus in on the details.  Performance athletes, it's easy to get them to be pretty regimented and disciplined, but it's much harder to get somebody who's 360 pounds who has hyperthyroidism and lack resistance to understand that eating that one jelly donut that Mark Sisson said was okay is a problem.

Ben:  Yeah, yeah.  Wow, we could talk all day long and you are a wealth of information for folks, especially like the high performers folks.  I'm really hoping that they listen into this.  People who, whatever, maybe you're listening and you want to qualify for Ironman Hawaii or you want to go dominate your local marathon or 10K, or you have your eyes set on performance, it goes way up above and beyond Gatorade, folks.  Way above and beyond Gatorade.  So, Jack, thanks so much for your time and for coming on the podcast.

Jack:  Hey.  No problem, Ben.  Anytime.

Ben:  Alright, folks.  This is Ben Greenfield and Jack Kruse, and I will be sure and put links to everything over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/jackkruse.  Over and out.

 

Jack Kruse is a brilliant but highly controversial neurosurgeon who originally joined us for the podcast episode “How You Can Use Cold Thermogenesis To Perform Like Lance Armstrong And Michael Phelps”.

Today he's back.

And he's going to tell you how to live like a Polar Bear and eat like a Great White Shark.

Don't know what that means? You're about to find out…

In this Jack Kruse podcast, you're going to find out:

-Whether you actually need carbs for performance…

-How long it takes to turn yourself into a fat burning machine…

-How something called the “Pentose Phosphate Pathway” (PPP)  is an untapped wealth of energy for most people…

-Why you can’t access the fat burning pathway when your molecular sense of timing is off, and how to fix that timing…

-Which foods that have higher ATP densities and more electron density, and why that's importance…

-A sample day of eating for a high performance individual who wants to use ketogenesis and the PPP…

During our conversation, Jack references the following articles (which I'd highly recommend you read):

Why You Might Need Carbs For Performance

Quantum Scaling

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ask Ben a Podcast Question

One thought on “[Transcript] – Jack Kruse Tells You How To Live Like A Polar Bear And Eat Like A Great White Shark

  1. bruno says:

    thanks!

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