Wednesday, May 9, 2012

The Revilers

You might remember I finally though I found something good coming out of Paleohacks. Now, of course, they've got to go and play a scene out of high school. I suppose Patrik does an okay job explaining the situation, but he can't manage to without insulting the victim, so maybe Richard Nikoley's explanation about what happened to Dr. Jack Kruse would serve as a better background.
The short of it was that some twitter hi-jinks plus one phone call that is probably illegal led to Dr. Kruse being booted off a cruise ship. He was supposed to be a speaker for some low-carb diet folks. If you read his blog you'll find an almost stream of consciousness style, a lot of hyperbole, and advice that most of his detractors are more or less fine with if only it comes out of somebody else's mouth.
What's different about Kruse? The ancient pathway. You can tell by the post I linked to the guy is hard to read. Most people appear to have missed, for instance, this statement:
So carbohydrates are very good for us in season with high light cycles. This is when they are quite safe. When they do hurt us?
The revilers like to ignore about half the stuff he says in order to make fun of him, but they don't touch the pathway. This is not because it is impossible, but because it requires a bit more work than making snarky comments on the internet. Here is something else Dr. Kruse says:
The mere presence of the CD36 receptor in all mammals suggests that mammals are built by evolutionary design to have a “taste” for fatty foods in cold. the fact that the SCN also wires to the hypothalamus to turn off NPY is another big clue why we should not eat carbs in the winter.
and a little earlier in the post,
eNOS directly inactivates the function of hypothalamic NPY! NPY is stimulated by carbohydrates in the hypothalamus and it drives carbohydrates cravings and food seeking behaviors.
Now, supposedly, no studies have ever shown that NPY does what Kruse says it does, but you already know what I am going to say. Find me a study with cold AND a ketogenic diet. I'm guessing it doesn't exist. Add in the adaptation time. Can you get a NPY test easily? But if you want to take Kruse down, this is what you have to do. Either he's right about this, or he is wrong. He is still basically providing decent advice, but the ancient pathway is the one unique contribution he's made. Frankly, if nothing else, he has spurred me on to learn more about this stuff.

But the revilers seem interested in some sort of morality based game, one that they lose. I have some particular moral views; if I were to apply them as a filter I'd have to turn off the internet.
I don't even hold myself up as particularly moral. Of course, for those of us actually trying to learn, we realize that we can learn from immoral people- we merely need to be careful that they aren't teaching us immorality. Indeed, it is from the practitioners of game that I take an observation, that these attacks on Kruse are primarily status driven.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

So you can just make stuff up because there isn't a study yet? Being an ex-fruitarian, this all seems so familiar. The SCN is not regulated by outside temperature in humans. NPY increases in cold in all mammals it has been tested in. Though yeah, it would be awesome to test it in humans with different diets. My own experience though is that I was very committed to eating "seasonally" two years ago, which to me meant eating keto in the winter, and I did very poorly to say the least. Depressed, tired, cold, etc. I was in an archaeology class at the time and we were looking at remains of cellars where ancient people stored roots. "Like squirrels" the professor said. Either way, you know very well I don't do well on a root-based diet either. I seem to do very well on the "Perfect Health Diet" sort of thing year-round.

The fact that his protocol works for people has nothing to do with some "ancient pathway." Robb Wolf and Mathieu Lalonde have already commented on the real reasons cold therapy works. I don't think they are random haters trying to bring Kruse down.

August said...

I went looking to see if they've got a blood test for NPY. Maybe you haters hate enough to put up some money. It doesn't take a study disprove Kruse; one of us willing to do the protocol and test would do it. It looks like they could make one, but I haven't found out if they've actually made one yet.
What I found funny, though, is that I found out that Neuropeptide Y prevents the blood pressure fall induced by endotoxin in conscious rats with adrenal medullectomy. Entirely circumstantial of course, but the reason I stopped following Kruse's protocol was because my blood pressure dropped and I fainted. I didn't think it had to do with the protocol-I hadn't even done the cold that day, but my carbs may have been low enough. So, I upped my carbs and somehow those ice baths fell by the wayside. Yeah, that's a rat study, and it probably has nothing to do with my problems. The Honey Revolution diet, though, explained the relationship between SCN and carbohydrates- and that was enough for me to go back and read Kruse's stuff more carefully. I may try Kruse's protocol with added fructose, because
peter@hyperlipid is out with something about fructose and is a bit critical of Lustig for what seems to be actual scientific reasons.
If you can't give up the hate, go back to the twitter/facebook catfight. I'm not there and don't intend on going there. I want to learn. I want to heal too.