Hof, Wim-ania and a Pair of Dimes

Yeah, I know, I know, I tried to move past this whole Kruse Missile Krisis, but as it turns out Richard Nickoley has some inside info on Jack he shared when he weighed in on the latest escapades of Jack Kruse NEUROSURGEON, and I kinda got sucked in to the discussions there ;-)  (WARNING:  Apparently "Angry Dick" is back and he drops the "c"-bomb twice in response to female commenters and defends it no less.  His comments on the God thing at the beginning are extremely offensive as well.  So if you're not into that, you might want to skip the first couple of paragraphs to "...Jack lost" and avoid the comments all together.)

But two things keep coming up over and over (and over) in discussions about the burgeoning KMK in the paleo world.  It boils down to well, maybe he's crazy, but maybe he's also on to something.  And what's the community* as a whole to do with Dude, I'm a Neurosurgeon!  After all, owing to some perfect storm of a compelling personal story, a disarming personality, letters after his name and sciencey protocols, Jack IS the main "paradigm shifter" of the moment.  The "paleo" label has been pretty much used up in terms of there being anything new under the sun there.  *By community, I'm going to drop the whole paleo/ancestral/whole real foods/LC thing.  You know what I mean by this at this point.

There's definitely an anti-establishment streak that runs wide in the community, but it threatens to run amok if it hasn't done so already.  So eager for paradigm shifting are many that they can't even seem to fathom that maybe, just maybe, some of what is referred to as "conventional wisdom" or "mainstream knowledge" might just be correct.  I mean really, I'm waiting for someone to try to convince me that the sun really does orbit the earth and I should reject everything I've learned since the establishment drilled their version of the solar system into my mush-mind in grammar school.  I think if I hear "paradigm shift" one more time, I'm gonna hurl.  Sisson started the "pair of dimes" thing last May:      

There’s a good reason so many people (mostly the sugar-burners, whose disparate group includes fruitarians, veg*ans, HEDers, body-builders, most MDs, the USDA and virtually every RD program in the country) can’t seem to grasp why a lower carb, Primal approach to eating is a better choice for health and fitness: their fundamental paradigm – the core theory that underpins everything else in that belief system – is flawed. They remain slaves to the antiquated notion that glucose is the king of fuels, so they live their lives in a fear of running low. The truth is, fat is the preferred fuel of human metabolism and has been for most of human evolution. Under normal human circumstances, we actually require only minimal amounts of glucose, most or all of which can be supplied by the liver as needed on a daily basis. The simple SAD fact that carbs/glucose are so readily available and cheap today doesn’t mean that we should depend on them as a primary source of fuel or revere them so highly. In fact, it is this blind allegiance to the “Carb Paradigm” that has driven so many of us to experience the vast array of metabolic problems that threaten to overwhelm our health care system.

Of course Taubes has been beating this drum vis a vis obesity for over a decade now.  I'm a relative new comer to all of this -- not just as a blogger but as a participant/reader.  Many of the movers and shakers had been blogging and such for years and certainly there was a surge circa the release of GCBC.  If I end up with my foot in my mouth because I haven't filled in all the history here properly, I guess that's a risk I have to take.  And hopefully I don't misrepresent anyone I name specifically.  I think the KMK is due in part to the virtual vacuum Kurt Harris left when he sorta stepped away from the community.  That's a lot to put on one person, and NO!  Kurt is not to blame here ...   But he used to talk more about changing his profession from within, we don't seem to hear as much of that from him of late (something Jack laments and sees fit to attack Kurt for on Facebook), and folks have been hearing a lot less from him lately in general.  In his classic Paleo 2.0 post of around a year ago Kurt attempted to redefine, if you will, "paleo" to equal "archaic".  It's an excellent post if you've never read it, particularly if you're reading this as a newbie to the community in these strange times.  It ended with the following:

Some will criticize my proposal as threatening to collapse a big tent.

I prefer to think of it as leaving the tent to erect a proper building.

Someone recently pointed out (over at PaleoHacks I think) that folks like Chris Masterjohn, Stephan Guyenet, and Paul Jaminet do not even identify themselves with the "paleo" label.   The latter two have found themselves embroiled in the Insulin Wars, whether they wanted to be or not.  And thanks to the popularity of Mark Sisson's primal empire, there is a steadfast faction of paleos who are low carb, period.  Mark's infamous carbohydrate curve, the one where over 150g/day will lead to insidious weight gain, was part of his Pair-of-Dimes manifesto and it rallied the troops even as some headway was being made to turn back the tide of TWICHOO.  

In any case, when PaNu morphed to Archevore, as the Ancestral Health folks included such luminaries as Tom "Fat Head" Naughton and Gary Taubes on the speaker list of AHS11 -- neither of which, especially the latter, had done anything worthy of "ancestral" cred -- it didn't seem to sit well with a lot of people, even if one could only infer that from an occasional comment or tweet.  Speaking of tweets ... it used to be enough to keep track of what folks are thinking by reading their blogs.  Now it's not just the comments on them (heck, I have trouble keeping up with my own rather meager comments by comparison at times) but the twitter feed and the Facebook page (and sometimes pages!).  I don't know how anyone keeps up with it all!  Anyways ... The whole Taubes/Guyenet dust up splintered the movement along the carbohydrate fault at the 50g meridian, leading many low carb paleos to essentially ostracize, or at least attempt to, Stephan from "their" movement.  So who do we have leading the paleo movement?  Movements need leaders after all.  Well, for all his personal charisma, and his biology degree, Mark Sisson does lack the credentialed gravitas.  I also believe he is irrevocably tainted by his commercialism/supplements/etc.   The Grok stuff may draw followers but it won't play to mainstream acceptance of PB.  Bottom line, he's not someone in a position to be the leader of a paradigm shift.  Loren Cordain seems to have fallen a bit from favor, Robb Wolf has the goods to build his own "empire", but not to shift paradigms.  I could name more names, feel free to add in the comments, but I hope I've conveyed my point.  

Enter Jack Kruse, MD, DDS.  Jack is so almost the complete package it's not even funny, as they say.  He has personal charisma, a compelling story of weight loss.  Dude, he's a neurosurgeon!  Oh ... and he was a dentist too.  And he dumped a lot, no, a TON of content on the paleo community for free.  FREE!   Jack is a much better speaker than writer (massive understatement there), and he plays to the rebel in the community.  He talks science using big words and technical terms and I do believe he could sell ice to an Inuit in the dead of arctic winter.  Unless, my friends, that Inuit had a background/education in the topics about which he speaks.  Then said Inuit would file a complaint with the Saskatchewan BBB for starters.    If you wade through the comments over at FTA you will find many Jack defenders who will try to convince you that Jack speaks enough nuggets of truth worth listening to, you should just write off the rest as eccentricity.

Wim Hof, Wim Hof, Wim Hof!!  I admit I had never heard of him before though I had inadvertently caught his act on Fox and Friends recently.  Although I've read at Todd Becker's Getting Stronger blog, and he and I have had our exchanges on our respective blogs, I did not read his Iceman post.   According to Wikipedia, with the picture shown here, Hof holds the ice immersion record of just under two hours.  Folks on FTA and all over the internet are talking about Hof and saying that he's proof humans can survive for longer than has been generally agreed upon (on average) and we've all been brainwashed to believe our bass ackwards training vis a vis hypothermia.  Folks, look at those ice cubes, realize that if I were trying to set a record I would be tensing up and protruding my belly like no get-out while the ice was being filled so that once it melted just a bit I could contract back and have less direct contact with the ice.  But the ice schtick is an illusion of sorts anyway, because we think "colder than water" therefore more harsh.  But indeed it's not, in a way it's a wash -- ice has about twice the thermal conductivity of water, but roughly half the heat capacity.  What this means to you is that ice, at say, -10C may conduct heat faster than cold water, but it takes twice as much ice to absorb an equivalent amount of heat from a warmer body than it does water.  Water is a heat sucker folks! Because the combined thermal conductivity of ice and interstitial air space is far less than that of water which will contact you pretty much over every little bit of your body.  When it comes to thermal conduction, this, and the heat capacity of water compared to ice (about double is what makes cooler-than-your-body water exposure so insidious.  So deep runs the anti-authority streak in some they are arguing with Kurt that no, a human immersed in ice water wouldn't be dead after several hours.   I'm amazed that some seem to think that Wim could survive falling through the ice that much longer than anyone else.  Yes, it has apparently been documented that he can use meditation to ramp up his autonomic nervous system, but there are limits to this too, and that's why we probably don't have Hof performing this stunt in ice-WATER.  Nickoley says because he has gone 15 minutes in a 40 degree cold plunge somehow he believes Jack when he, sounding like he was lying in a puddle of his own blood, claims he had just undergone surgery and was well into hours of lying in an ice bath intending, apparently, to stay in the cold for a long while.  Oh but don't worry -- he was being supervised ...  Lots of ice bathers over at FTA who can last up to an hour in 45ish degree water.  Well, whether or not I believe these folks is besides the point, nobody seems to be interested in the fact that these times don't come close to the 2 hours MINIMUM in icewater as Jack claims.  No ... apparently we have to not only interpret Leptinmanese (my Rosetta Stone CD is on backorder), we're also expected to leave open the hypothetical possibility that Jack is Wim on Leptinroids or something.  It's fuzzy, but I keep hearing Hof also did the MRSA thing -- I went looking but no love.  Anyone have a link?  Was this entire stunt to scam off this??

So ...

The new leader has been born amidst the perfect storm.  Only he's not going to be able to lead to, nor does he seem particularly interested in leading to the paradigm shift most seem united in wanting.  I'd even jump aboard the train to revise dietary recommendations to properly address the sources of nutrition so long as Fat Head and his merry band of VLC'ers doesn't get too much say in drafting the new ones.  But this is not where the Kruser is headed, and not where he wants to take you .... if you let him.  And he's telling you this, but his defenders aren't even listening it would appear.   You see, some have swallowed the BAB and jumped into the ice baths in desperation, and some have seen benefits so all is forgiven if Jack stretched the truth to get you on board his magical mystery tour.  

Ultimately, where is he taking you though?  At TEDx in Nashville he dropped the Kruse Missile.  If he's to be believed, Jack intentionally injected MRSA virus and underwent abdominal surgery (to remove intentionally gained fat) to test/prove that his CT would be effective in (a) preventing the infection from taking hold, and (b) managing post-op pain without drugs.  Now, I ask you this.  What does such an as-yet undocumented n=1 experiment do for ANYONE?  Nothing.  I can guarantee you that cold therapy has been studied until the grassfed cows come home for injury (which surgery ultimately is) recovery.  I've only ever had oral surgery but it was pretty involved and most take a lot more post-op pain killers than I ever required.  And I used ... ice!  LOL.  Really folks.  But as my detractors, especially, are quick to point out, my ice packs didn't kill off the adipose tissue about my jaw!  Now he claims on his Facebook page to be treating intractable MRSA in a patient with CT.   Leaving aside the veracity of the claim, what does Jack's experiment do to forward the progress of medicine?  Do you think nobody else is looking into ways to  prevent the spread of infection which has become an increasing threat with surgery as things like MRSA have come to be?  I remain indignant over Jack's claims of having purposefully exposed himself to this, let alone his surgeon, and whatever medical personnel were involved in this super-elective tummy tuck.   I don't wish mental illness on anyone, but I hope for everyone's sake he is mentally ill and just thinks he's done what he says he has. ... and that someone close to Jack will move to intervene for his sake, and the sake of his beautiful wife and two children.  Really, despite efforts, there is no favorable light in which to cast the TEDx claims.  Either he's delusional, a flat out liar, or a danger to himself and society with his deliberate acts.

Which brings me full circle to the whole paradigm shifting upsetting the apple cart movement.  Modern medicine is rife with problems.  Doctors are not perfect, but I'm trying to envision how sanctioning such experimentations and revolutionary thinkers improves the system.  Emily Deans, a practicing psychiatrist wrote an excellent post relating to this a while back:  The Glorious Cause .  I imagine it was not an easy post for her to write and hit the publish button on, but I think it is an important read and I encourage those of you who have not read it to do so.  I don't believe that conventional Western medicine is so all wrong.  But there certainly is a right and a wrong way for Jack to set in motion the changes he envisions.  Everyone has dreams ... some of us are bigger dreamers than others.  Who knows, most of the great geniuses were thought to be crazy in their own times.  So this fuels the dreamers to suppose "what if that's Jack Kruse" now and all of his critics will end up wiping egg off their faces when he reveals Factor X.

I submit the following as to why Jack is not the next paradigm shifter.  First, he's fighting a system, however ill-defined, not fashioning novel scientific hypotheses.  This is important.  He is not putting forth original speculations to explain a phenomenon (obesity, immunity, longevity, whatever).  Everything, and I mean pretty much everything he's suggesting has been studied (perhaps not with RCT's but tried and/or written about) He's not saying the earth orbits the sun when conventional wisdom is the opposite.  This has been what Taubes tried, only it turns out TWICHOO came about once the evidence was already overwhelming that the earth orbits the sun and he tried to convince us otherwise.  Jack is not attempting paradigm shifting with novel ideas.  No.  He is claiming that the evidence has been there all along for his protocols.  The leptin reset, the cold therapy, it's all been there, complete with rewriting the evolutionary history of humans.  The difference between Jack and the revolutionary paradigm shifters of years' past is that the hard core, irrefutable evidence countering Jack's often incoherent claims is right there.  There's nothing he points to that says ... gee, maybe they're wrong about that.  It's not just the admittedly unimportant claim that Phelps trains in 50 degree waters 18 hours a day, it's the fact that humans die with the kind of cold exposure he claims to have subjected himself to.  We all know that fat cells don't die absent tissue damage unless the type of cold exposure he's advocating leads to frost bite.  

The most telling thing to me about this wannabe paradigm shifter is that there's no evidence he made any effort to work within the system for change.  There is a ton of literature researching cold therapy etc.  Heck, for her last surgery, the nurse informed us that the OR would be cold and my mother would have a special warm air inflated "blanket" of sorts to keep her warm (though presumably not the leg being operated on).  See?  Folks have thought of how to use temperature to prevent infections already.  If Jack is interested in cold for surgery recovery, why doesn't Jack Kruse NeuroSURGEON apply his talents in a research facility investigating just that??  Here is where his stunt is that epic FAIL.  He claims on FB he'll be releasing patient videos.  How about the video of Subject Numero Uno dude?   It won't change a thing because not a single one of you will be able to opt for cold therapy or whatever based on what Jack claims he did.  Not a one.  I'm eternally grateful to my mother's most recent pain management doctor.  She had very little pain and no, she wasn't drugged drooling either.  Honestly I can't imagine her recovery managed any better than it was or even wanting any sort of paradigm shift there.  Maybe I'm too blinded by personal experience now here, but I don't think so.  How many of Jack's true believers even know what paradigm he's trying to change here anyway.  If he wants to pioneer surgeries or non-surgical interventions there's plenty of room for that in the proper venues.

In the end, there's a reason for the safeguards we have in the system.  And however imperfect, they are better than the alternative where desperate folks will be drained of financial resources and risk life and limb for unproven and ineffective medical procedures.  Is that what we want?  I'll even sacrifice having a doctor who thinks dietary cholesterol clogs my arteries if when the time comes that I need surgery, they'll advise and perform that which has been effective and life improving for hundreds of human patients before me.  I guess when push comes to shove, I'm less worried about paradigms and all that, and more that my doctor is educated and informed to treat me the best way he/she knows how.  It would be nice for alternatives to be more readily available as well, but I'm not sure that a world where a neurosurgeon can obtain and culture MRSA to inject himself in a whacky self-experiment is one I'd prefer to the status quo.

I was all set to publish this when someone on the FTA post mentioned that there was a new interview up of Jack and Abel James.  It's here.  So now he's like Einstein, only he's nothing like Einstein.  It sounds like Factor X is going to be a vagal nerve stimulator.  He discusses how this is used for epileptics to control seizures but they lose weight.  Abel seems mesmerized by Jack's personality and utterly incapable of grasping why it is that Jack's critics are so many and increasingly vocal.   Jack ridicules "mental masturbation" over peer review studies while claiming that polar bears hibernate and emerge from the ice "shredded".  Yeah, real critical thinking going on there on Abel's part not to even check if this is true.  Turns out polar bears don't even hibernate.  I think Neal Matheson summed it up best why this matters -- it makes everyone look bad.  I've been saying since day one of this blog that if we're going to use science to counter supposed "bad science" it had damn well be right.   That low carbers insisted on touting some metabolic advantage and denouncing calories, not to mention this increasing movement towards zero carb, very high fat,  has ultimately hurt the progress of mainstream acceptance for an effective treatment for obesity and diabetes.  It is the insistence that it be the long term lifestyle suited to everyone that relegates the lifestyle time and again to the fringe.  I realize the various conference and pow wow organizers are in a tough spot.  They need the name draws to build an audience.  Surely a conference headlined by a bunch of academics nobody ever heard of, or even folks like Lustig who is hardly a dynamic speaker is not what they want at this time.  But promoting Jack Kruse is going to backfire because if there are so many within the community protesting (and increasingly vocally at that), what do you think those looking in from the outside are thinking??  Seriously, dudes!!


So I guess I'll just do it by saying I sincerely hope for an end to the Kruse Missile Krisis.  I'll even retire my Leptin Man if this is the last we hear of this stuff in the mainstream community.   I do think there is enough foundation here for eating real, whole animal and vegetable foods (as one desires) that it's time for the community to shed it's rebel & martyr complex and recognize this.  There are enough folks on board to sustain a credible and sizeable niche in the larger mainstream.   So I'm all for letting Jack be Jack so long as he's not hurting anyone else.  However I must say that it sounds like he didn't even let his family in on what he was up to until after the surgery.  I know if I did that to my husband or vice versa, and there aren't even children involved in our case, there'd be some serious discussions going on involving someone in Emily Deans' profession and/or attorneys.  Let his website go viral and whatnot.  Many attempt to marginalize his critics by claiming personal animus, or that he's not hurting anyone, or that his ideas are too visionary for us mere mortals to grasp.  There's a new brand of rebellion out there that the "old guard" of paleo is just turning to sour grapes or they've sold out by working within guidelines established in their fields.  They've lost their own inner Jack and feel threatened by his genius and are jealous of his meteoric rise.  I'm baffled by it and I think it speaks to the gullibility and desperation of people out there more than anything that can be said about Jack.

I go back and forth as to what's going on here.  He seems off his rocker yet comes off in command of his faculties in interviews and such.  This can be deceiving because how many times to we have to see a friend, neighbor, even sibling or parent interviewed on TV after their loved one has committed an act of horrific proportion before we realize that appearances can, indeed, be deceiving.  I'm not sure how long this photo has been on his Twitter page, but does the composition look familiar?  All he needs is the outstretched hand and a different background and Ron Rosedale is seeing come serious competition on the televangelist front!!  In any case, I know for my part who I'd like to meet at AHS12.  I could care less about meeting Jack, it's his wife Sandy I'd like to meet.  Has anyone ever met her?  In his Abel James podcast he speaks of meeting Abel's significant other at PaleoFX.   Does Jack bring his wife along ever?  Will she be on the LC Cruise?  I mean, I can see not going along to boring conferences, but surely she'll enjoy a week in the Caribbean.  And I put forth this challenge on FTA -- I'll buy the 80 lbs of ice if Jack will just put all the rumors to rest and get in his hotel room tub on Sunday morning while a bunch of us watch.

But that gets me to why I think Jack's probably not crazy, he's just playing the community for all it's worth.  He loves to give sneak previews and swear his friends to secrecy.  Why ... when will he reveal Factor X?  I suppose when folks grow tired of CT.  Think about this.  He did CT all along -- indeed he said in the interview that his LR diet wasn't fully paleo at first.  So what did Dr. Helping-people reveal first?  His LR.  Why not the whole thing?  And I'm willing to bet whatever Factor X turns out to be, he's been using that all along too.  Just think how many LR failures who gave up on him might have benefited knowing the whole thing, right?  As for Factor X, he's revealed it to Richard Nickoley.  Why is there so much controversy over his Jan 9 Bio hack?  Because there's doubt and that doubt would vaporize in an instant had he documented it.  Jack doesn't want to set the record straight, he wants the criticism.  Heck, he baited it on FB according to his interview with Abel.  So I suppose posts like this one only serve to help his cause ... that is, unless, this juggernaut of insanity can be stopped before it destroys the community Jack USED to whatever end he's using it.  Or ... he is crazy and needs help.  I go back and forth on what's going on here ....

I'll leave you with this quote from Richard, complete with his italicized emphasis:

"I like Jack.  I like the idea of Jack."

Whether or not folks like him as an individual, I think many more like the *idea* of him.  That perhaps we're witnessing genius in our time with the answer to all our ills.  And I also believe that even those who don't like the idea of Jack per se, perhaps (myself included?) *want* to like the idea of him, if that makes any sense.  I want to believe that there are great thinkers out there (there are) and that one day they'll solve the various problems.  But folks, Jack Kruse ain't that guy.  And I'm willing to bet half my telomere length on that statement!