5- Dr. Jack Kruse - A Thought Can Change Your DNA

(dramatic music) - This is episode five of Doc Fremento, Discovers the World. I was fortunate enough to get Dr. Jack Cruz on the show. Most people haven't heard of him, but everyone, many of you will, real soon, 2012's gonna be a big year for him. He's just amazing, I don't know if I mentioned these, the neurosurgeon, he falls into this paleo primal, low carb realm for diet, but it's not his thing. You'd have to, you're gonna need to listen, learn a little bit more about what he's doing. He's a change maker and he can teach you how to affect change in your life. He's got a different approach. He's strong, he's opinionated. He has a fantastic website, Jackcruz.com, jack.kruz.com. Go there and read "Finding Your Primal Sense." And it's a powerful piece about evolving to make a change. Many people need to make some changes. No one more so than me. And the piece was actually hard for me to read because it puts it right in front of you. And well, it makes it real. And I was just floored by it and I had to get him on the show. I can't believe I got him because after this, he'll probably, he's gonna be too big for me. I feel bad that we didn't even cover this "Finding Your Primal Sense." "Peace that he wrote because it's so damn important." But I was just letting him go because he's got the knowledge. I forgot to draw it back and bring it back to this piece that he wrote. But that's all right. I ended up talking to him 20 minutes after the show about this, which was a huge mistake because I didn't record it. It was just a personal conversation that I wish you could have all heard. Maybe if I'm lucky enough, I can get him back on in the future to talk more about change. So with that, we're gonna go right into my interview with Dr. Jack Cruz. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) Welcome to another episode of Doc Fremento Discovers the World. Today we have Dr. Jack Cruz. He's a neurosurgeon. And well, let me just give you some of his own words and I'll give you something from his about page and then let him tell you the rest of the story as Dr. Jack Cruz writes, "My goal is to start the dialogue of how to evolve healthcare using patients as foot soldiers. I am hell-bent on changing the process of how medicine is practiced and healthcare delivered in this country." Dr. Jack Cruz, welcome to the show. - Hey, how are you Brian? - I'm great. I'm excited to have you here. And why should I be here, believe me? - Thank you. Can we go back to a little bit more of your about quickly and then we'll move into your current amazing work? - Sure. - Give us a little background. - Okay, well, I guess the real story started back in my training. I used to be actually an oral surgeon and a dentist and then I graduated up a few centimeters and went into neurosurgery. And in the process of all my training, I learned a lot of different things about the brain and how the brain does different things. When I came out of residency, I actually gained quite a bit of weight 'cause I used to be very physically sick 'cause I was a big baseball player and football player when I was younger. And around 2003, I started noticing my weight creep up and it got worse all the way up until I'd say, probably about 2006, 2007. And I was at a spine meeting in Birmingham, Alabama, and I stood up and when I was getting ready to give a talk, and I had horrible pain in my knee. And long story short, turns out I call my nemenist just by standing up. And I thought, I knew right away, I said, this isn't normal. People should tear their nemenist 'cause you know when they're skiing or bungee cord jumping or something else, but not standing up and going to a podium. So one of the physicians who was there had a wife who was an amgen researcher. And we talked and we talked probably for three or four days after that because of what happened. And she basically told me she goes, look, I know what's wrong with you. You're not gonna find out from any other doctors. I'm gonna send you some stuff when I get back to San Diego and I was kinda intrigued by what she had to tell me. She sent me a package with a bunch of research in it on Lapton and she also sent me a couple of other pamphlets about nutrition and she sent me a book by Robin Sharma called The Monk Who Sold Is Forriary, which really intrigued me and I have to be honest here. I read that first before I actually read the research papers and she actually told me exactly how I should read it but I didn't follow her rules exactly 'cause I was very intrigued by the title of the book. And I read it and I cut through the research and I think I must have read maybe six papers. She sent me and all of a sudden a light bulb went off in my head and the funny thing is she predicted that too. She says you're not gonna have to read very much of these things because I know what it took for you in your training. Her husband had trained with me and she kinda knew what my education level was and she says you're gonna pick this up right away and you'll see what I mean and she was right. And I started to realize right off the bat that my obesity was at the seat of the problem. And without her being, you know, I guess this was her tactical way of telling me I was a fat ass. - Okay. - And it was kinda funny but I had this epiphany reading the stuff and it got so crazy that I wound up going to a local medical school library here in town and just started pulling articles on top of articles on top of articles and it went through, you know, nutrition journals and starting to figure out what kind of diet you know that I would eat. And then I sat down probably for a good six months and synthesized all my thoughts, wrote a lot of things down. That's when I started working on my quilt document about how everything ties together. And then I started really in depth thinking about the real cause of obesity and how it interplayed with the brain. And that's when I started doing that, that's really when a lot of pieces started falling together. And I pulled on my oral surgery training, my dental school training, my medical school training and you know, my seven years of neurosurgery training. And I came up with the idea that I could actually bypass, you know, the leptin receptor in our brain. And I could fix obesity in myself. And of course, I wasn't gonna tell anybody this because they would have thought I was a raving lunatic. But I said, this is exactly how I'm gonna do it because I think the science makes a lot of sense. - So we're saying you started with this leptin theory of yours. That's your definition. - I mean, I mean, I knew leptin was at the seat of the obesity. My hypothesis back then was that obesity was in their voluntary brain condition. And the key cause was, you know, the diet, you know, the standard American diet that I was eating is I was a classic person who was eating the standard American diet. And I realized through my reading, where I came through on the nutrition side after doing all my due diligence, I was gonna eat either a mediterranean diet or what I would call a modified paleolithic diet based on my own reading. And I didn't come to, you know, primal or paleo, the way of living until after, you know, I came up with my whole left and reset and all that. It was, it was much later in the game. - Okay. - And once I came up with the left and reset, I stood up in front of my family. I believe it was, thanks given, I think 2007. And I told them, you know, at that time, I was 357 pounds. I stood up in front of my whole family with the food on the table and I said, look, it's the last supper. I just want to let you know that in two years that I'm going to be, you know, physically fit and I'm going to look so good that I'll be able to, you know, put on a speedo in front of all of you. Of course, all laugh. I mean, it's pretty hysterical for them, but my wife noticed that I wasn't laughing. And she pulled me aside afterwards. She goes, you're really serious about this. And I said, yeah, yeah, I said, you know, I've been doing a lot of reading. And she asked me through this whole process, what I was doing. Because obviously my behavior had changed. I was going and doing a lot of reading and spent a lot of time at the office. And she saw, you know, papers on top of papers. I probably had between six and 9,000 papers strewn across my study. And, you know, I would get mad at anybody who came in there and disturbed my pilots. Yeah. You know, it was just one of those mad scientists kind of things for about 12 to 18 months. And I felt that that time I had enough data that I was going to test my hypothesis using me as the number one example. So I did that. And when I did that in the first three months, I lost 77 pounds. And I mean, it was to say, not only was I shocked, but my wife was probably more shocked. And she thought it was a fluke. And I continued on. And the first 11 months, I dropped 135 pounds. Weight loss was so dramatic that, you know, patients in my practice, you know, were asking me, hey, doc, did you have gastric bypass? You know, right. You have cancer. So what's going on? And I told everybody, well, if even one of those things are true, tell me when I took any time off to do it. You know, I was working through this whole time. But I think it had a huge impact on the people that are around me. And it really had a huge impact on my immediate family because they kind of knew what I was doing. And I slowly began to explain it to my family. And you know, most of my immediate family members are not doctors, they're not scientists. So it was kind of hard to explain this to them. And when I told my wife that basically I did brain surgery on myself without using a scalpel, she knew right then and there that I was onto something. She started, you know, talking to some of her friends and people started talking in the hospital. And I began writing the book about, you know, the whole experience of that year, like what it was like and how I came up with it and this and that. And I was talking to one of my gastroenterology buddies at the hospital. His name's Don Lazarus. He's a great guy. And he said, Jack, he says, you know, you can't afford, you know, to wait to put this information in a book and it's going to take three, four, five years for it to come out. He goes, why don't you just start putting this information on the internet now because he was fairly motivated by seeing all these people that were coming to see me for spine surgery. And before I do spine surgery, I told him I said, look, if you're interested in doing this, I think I can make you a better candidate for surgery because I can change your body composition, get rid of your fat and increase your lean muscle mass. And I can do it pretty quick. And you know, many people first, when I said they're like, you're out of your mind. And I said, no, you remember how I used to look? I said, I did this on me. And I had about, I'd say in that first year, probably about, I'd say close to about 10 people who said, yeah, before you do me in surgery, I'd like to try this. And I had some humongous home runs. One in particular was a 84 year old lady who wound up having a very big lumbar surgery in her back. And she had screws and rods and everything else placed. She now is all finished, but when I started with, I guess she was 79. She's now 84 and she's got a six back on her stomach. And she told me recently, she goes, if I had had done this 20 years ago, she goes, I would have been so happy because the last two or three years of my life have been the best years of my life. She goes, I never thought this was possible. My toes are quite frankly. I said, look, if I hadn't known about this 20 years ago, I would have never got to 350 pounds. And it kind of went from there. When I started having small little home runs, some of the referring docs, and it's particularly one of my pulmonary embodies, who takes care. He owns a sleep center. He started sending me a lot of sleep apnea patients, because most people have sleep apnea, also obese, and it's actually tied to the whole left and story. And he sent me this one young guy, in particular, who he was 33 years old, he had really severe obstructive sleep apnea. And in a matter of six months, he dropped 80 pounds. And I sent him back to Dr. Ramos. And Dr. Ramos needless to say, was absolutely flawed at how the guys looked. But he was even more impressed that a sleep apnea was dramatically improved in a very short period of time. And most pulmonologists who are listened to this, or most patients with sleep apnea who are listening to this, will know that there's very few treatments in sleep apnea that can just about reverse it in six months, no matter what you do. And that includes even gastric bypass surgery, or surgery on the mouth to open up the airways. So it had a dramatic effect on my practice. And it just kind of went from there. And when I decided in 2011, actually, to put this information on the internet, it's kind of caught fire and taken off. You did that just this year? Yeah. I've only been doing this about six months. Wow. Because I just want to interrupt and say that the blog-- well, you have a website and a blog link. And your blog is a little bit more of a personal story. It's more inspirational in nature, especially recently. But the information's incredible. I mean, I don't see this information available anywhere else. And so can we jump into the left-end prescription a little bit? Sure. Absolutely. Left-end prescription, basically, is a blog post that I wrote. It's fairly simple. I believe I put it on the net sometime in June. And basically, it's got, I think, five or six steps to it. It's pretty simple to do. But I never explained to anybody when I put it out there exactly how it works. The whole goal of it-- and if you're listening, as they're interested in looking at the blog post, to find out about each step, it's all outlaid on there. Now, since we're a little bit further down the pike, I've described exactly how it works. But the simplest way to describe it here is I am trying to confuse your brain stem. In terms of how it accounts for calories from food, an explanation that the left and receptor, basically, was evolutionary designed to count the amount of electrons that come from food. That's exactly what it's designed to do. And what happens over time when you get obesity, as I told you, it's an inflammatory brain condition, the inflammation at the brain level causes that left and receptor not to work. It's kind of short circuit set. And what happens is we start to get heavier in our body composition changes. And eventually, if it's allowed to go on long enough, you can become a type 2 diabetic. You generally do the left and prescription for about six to eight weeks. And so you find some key physical findings or symptoms. And I laid all that out in a blog that came out right after that. It's called the left and prescription FAQs. Many people had a lot of questions about that. And the interesting thing that happened right around this time is several of the people on my blogs and made comments. And I'm pretty good about answering everybody's comments on my blog, which I think kind of separates my blog from most other, other, you know, paleo or primal MDs out there. But when I did that, people on Mark's Daily Apple, which is in Mark's distance site, started a, I guess you call it a thread on his nutrition form. And it said, I'm going to do a leptin reset experiment. It was started by a lady named Kim on 615 2011. Just so you know, I haven't checked it today. But that thread now is got almost 575,000 hits. People took my left and prescription and took Mark's distance book or Rob Wolf's book, because that's kind of the diet I eat. And they married the two concepts together. And basically, their results are on that web for everyone you see. So people no longer have to believe what happened to me or in my practice. These are people that I never met, never physically touched. be what I prescribed. and they put their results on the web for everybody to see. Yeah. And it's caught everybody's, I think, attention. And it's kind of cool because, you know, based on from me talking to Mark, we know that in 153 countries worldwide. And I mean, we're getting 50,000 unique hits per month. You know, this is. People looking. Yeah. for about five months. Yeah, yeah. Wow. It's pretty remarkable. But the coolest thing about it from my standpoint as a physician, I mean, I'm in this game, you know, to help people. And I always thought that I would probably help people as a neurosurgeon more by operating on them and I have to tell you, this has actually been more professionally satisfying to me than actually doing surgery because I feel like my reach is much greater. And I've actually helped a lot of people. And then you can look at the blog comments. Some of the comments, and I have to be very, very honest with you, especially in the left-end prescription and the left-end FAQs. If you read the comments, there's more gold in the comments than I think in the blog. Okay. That's a good idea. You have patients, testimonials there, and they're telling me very personal things and I'm giving them advice about maybe how to do this. And then you'll see over time the same people come back and say, "God, I can't believe how this has happened." I don't have any carbohydrate cravings anymore. I don't feel like I need to eat lunch and the weight starting to come off and all of a sudden all my other health parameters are starting to change. And it's life changing to people. Yeah, so you were saying when you're going to go through this left-end reset program, you're going to play a trick on the, where did you say the base of the-- On the brain stem. On the brain stem. So when you say trick, I don't want people, people are going to think, "Oh, it's just smoking mirrors. This is a temporary stopgap measure." No, is this something that lasts? Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, if you stay-- If you stay here on this now for five years, it's been going on a long time and I have not gained any of my weight back at all. Most of the people that have done it have found the same thing. The only thing I would say that's a little bit different that we kind of haven't covered. The left-end reset is only meant to be like the transition from going either from obese or having other medical problems where left-end is a factor to resetting it. That generally, most people, I'd say 68% of people, it only takes six to eight weeks. Some people, the more inflammation someone has, the longer it takes or the more hormonal disruption people have, the longer it takes, but it will work. You just have to have patience until you start to find the clinical findings, that I lay out in the left-end prescription FAQs. I mean, there's 30 different things to look for. And when you start to have five or six of them, that's when I tell people, "Okay, stop." And now, what you do is you transition into what I call the post-script of what to do after left-end reset. And that was just laid out because everybody asked me, "How do I eat now?" Right. And I just did that probably about a month ago. Okay. And I put that out there. And all of the left-end theories are basically tied to circadian rhythms. And what is paramount in this, in terms of how you should eat and live the rest of your life, is you should be mindful of the light cycles and also mindful of meal timing. And the reason for that is because before humans had a left-end receptor, that was functional. It generally doesn't become functional in humans until about 12 to 24 months of age. So before that, like when we were a single cell in front of our mother, we got to be pretty big until 12 months old. So how did we do that without a receptor? And, you know, I learned about this back in medical school, but I never put two and two together until about 2007. And I said, "There's got to be another system in the brain and in the human body that we default to before we use the left-end receptor." And what that default was was the neural endocrine response, which means the hormonal response in both either the mother or the fetus. And when I realized that, I said, "You know what? If I confuse the brain stem, I can make it -- I can force it to start paying attention back to hormones. And that's precisely what I do." I tell people all the time that I follow what we call a quantified self-platform. That means I draw on myself where I did during the reset. And I actually still do this today. I draw blood on myself every three months, the same sets of blood, to make sure that my hormones are optimal through this whole process. And what I found when I first started is that my hormones are extremely disordered, probably for the first year. And that as I ate, you know, given the way our biologic and circadian rhythms are wired, everything came back to what I call a homeostatic set point. And things got better and better and better. And what happened as time went on, my body composition even changed more and more and more, where I started losing fat and gaining lean muscle mass. And that occurred even before I did any exercises. Here's the most probably amazing thing that people don't believe. But the first calendar year, I didn't do any exercise. And the reason I didn't do the exercise, if you remember when I told you the story in the beginning, I told my knee-menus, "Well, I needed surgery on that, but I already used to have surgery until I fixed the underlying obesity point." Oh, okay. So the only reason I did that is because remember, I am a surgeon and I knew that I wasn't a good candidate for any kind of surgery, being a beast. So I put on myself exactly what criteria I would put on a patient. And I cruised around for almost a year with the torn meniscus. And when I lost the weight, then I had the surgery done. And this will show you just how successful it was. I had surgery and I operated the next day. I never took any pain medicine. In fact, never went back to the orthopedic surgeon. Took my own sutures out. And since that day, I have never seen a doctor since. Wow. That's how healthy I've been. And it just goes to show you when you take control of the problem, you can do pretty amazing things. Yeah, absolutely. So let me touch on hormones for just a second. Because a lot of things everyone's familiar with now. Macaronutrients, micronutrients, vitamins and things. Hormones, I think it might give people, I don't think people got their head around this yet. See, well, for instance, if you went to get a blood test, is there a blood test you'd request that check hormones or is that automatic, or is that just an automatic thing that they check in a blood test? Well, no. Generally, hey, you have to find a doctor who knows how to do this stuff. And I hate to say this, but most conventional physicians don't really get involved in this. The ones that do usually either urologist or OBGYNs. Sometimes primary care docs will do it, but most of them are afraid of it because of a lot of the studies that came out in the early or late 90s and early 2000s that were horribly flawed. But the probably the docs that are best at this are what we call naturopathic physicians or anti-aging docs. And they do all of this stuff. And they use both blood and salivary testing because there's certain hormones that are better tested one way than the other. Yeah, the key point with that is there is a battery test that I do on myself all the time, as I mentioned to you every three minutes. And I did write a blog post about that as well. I actually put down what the optimizing labs were for me. And I don't think everybody has to do that because I can afford to do this and it's not cheap. But you have to realize something. I'm actually kind of still doing an experiment on myself. I'm now five or six years into this and I do these labs all the time. So I'm trending everything. I want to know exactly what's going on in my body as time goes on. Most other people who do this who just have say like 40, 50, 100 pounds lose. You can do it without being so crazy about getting the labs done. Okay, great. Keep going when you have plateaus. When you have like say you go for a period of time for six to eight months and nothing's working. Yeah, do not change what you're doing. Get your labs done because more likely than not, there's an underlying hormonal issue that's causing the plateau. Just key factor is left in is the master hormone in the body. It controls all the other hormones. So while you're going through the reset and you're trying to recover your left and receptor, you're going to have tremendous changes in all the other hormones. You're going to see wild swings like one of the things I learned about my own physiology, which I know now I didn't know this then is particular to me. I am exquisitely sensitive for the light cycle. In fact, as we talk today, you know, we're coming to the steepest part of the year in the Northern Hemisphere for the loss of light. Well, this is the time of the year that I can barely eat any carbohydrates because if I do, it affects my cortisol level tremendously. Now, six, seven years ago, I had no clue about that. And the reason why I have a clue about it now is because because of the serial testing that I did. Now, I have some patients that test like I do, but I have to say the majority of them don't, because they can't afford it. But the ones that do have also got a much deeper level of introspection of truly how their physiology works, and I'll even take another level. The people who do this testing, actually you get so much information about yourself that you can tell exactly what foods affect your epigenetic switches on your genes. And it makes you a much more effective creator of your diet. Now, you know, many people out there advocate a diet to a population. And I'd say for probably 68% of people that works. And I think the paleo diet's a good model for that. But you have to realize if you read the comments on my blog, or you go to Rob Wolfsite, or Marxist's site, or Paul Jamminette's site, as well, you will see multitudes of people who are eating a good diet, but still not getting the results they want. And those are the people I'm interested in. I'm not really interested in the other 68% who can buy one of those books and do a standard paleo template and do well. I wasn't one of those people. I like that. Most of the people that come in my office aren't one of those people. So I'm sure a guy like Matt Lilland is not going to show up and Jack Cruz is often said, look, I need to be hacked because I'm in bad shape. He's got great results from following Rob's paleo solution. And that's all well and good. My interest is for those who aren't and giving them insights to why they're not. Telling them some of the things that I've learned from myself, from my N-1 and also from the patients who've done this, as well, that I've actually treated through this. And I just decided in the beginning that anybody you posted a question about this, I would answer it. And I think part of the reason why it's gained a lot of traction is when people started to do this on their own, they started to see tremendous results. People who could not give up any carbohydrates literally within four or five weeks said, I don't want to eat them anymore. And I've never had this happen to me. And anybody who's been obese any time in their life knows. And I'm a perfect example of this. You've tried every diet in the book. Nothing works. You yo-yo diet. You gain the weight back. And usually you gain 10 or 20% more. Again, that's because a leptin. This process effectively ends your dieting period. Dying to me is a bad word. OK? Yeah. And I never use it because I don't think it's appropriate. I think once you do this long enough and you keep your inflammation levels in your body down low enough, your leptin receptor can recover. And that's in the process what I'm doing now. I think my leptin receptor is completely recovered because I can pretty much eat whatever I want now, even irrespective of the light cycles. And I can get away with it. If I do, I do. No, I don't. I have most of the data on myself going back the longest. And I guess now I've become my own little experiment for me. And it actually helps me generate hypothesis and also test them in different people. Because I've noticed there is a wide variation in people in their hormonal response. And there are certain people that actually need more time. And it generally does tie directly to the amount of inflammation they have in their body. One thing that I like is that you're giving some serious respect to anecdotal evidence, people's personal stories. I have the problem. My big thing is food fermentation. I use it to help people heal their own guts, right? And if I ever enter a blog, go on a comment section. There was a piece written scientific paper about the fact that there's no clinical proof that ingesting a probiotic alters your gut flow at all. There's no clinical proof of this. So when I enter the conversation, I'm an anecdote. And so are the dozens of people that I've personally helped. We're all an army of anecdotes. So I kind of get tired of all that. I'm not in the medical community. So it's easy for me to ignore the word anecdote or clinical or whatever. But I'm really glad to see someone at your level giving some thought and respect to individual stories. Well, you have to also realize something. And this is where it does pay-- it would do you well to realize the history of medicine was built on empiric evidence and anecdotes. That's actually how we learned how to treat certain diseases and how we learn not to. For example, you remember back in Egyptian and Roman times, we used to put holes in people's head and drain them of blood. And you know, the whole story about the barber of Seville and why the barber shop was associated with bloodletting. But we know that doesn't work anymore. But we learned that through N-1s today in medicine. The golden goose is called the standard-- I should say the randomized control clinical trial with control groups. But there's even a problem with that that I think, especially the paleo community, has done a good job with. If people want to base everything on evidence-based medicine, there's a giant assumption that what the initial assumption is is correct. For example, I want to explain this because it's very important. Many physicians believe that cholesterol or saturated fat causes heart disease. The original assumption was made by ansochees, which we now know is false. But that single mistake has gone through just about every single study. The interesting thing is when you go back and look at the studies, critically, statins really have no effect at all on heart disease. But yet, every single cardiologist in this probably country outside of maybe Bill Davis, who just wrote his book, believe that dietary saturated fat or fats in general cause heart disease. And here's where-- that's where evidence-based medicine fails. Now, my problem as a physician, I haven't read every single specialty in terms of what the evidence says. I know what it is in my specialty, and I have to tell you. I now question everything that I thought to be true to see whether it really is true. And what I found even in neurosurgery, many of the things that I believed just five or six years ago to be true really are true. So the reason I pay a lot of attention to anecdotal evidence is because it's opened my eyes to the pitfalls of evidence-based medicine. Now, that's-- I want to be clear here. I'm not saying all evidence-based medicine is bad. Some of it is quite good. But you have to go back and look at the original assumptions before we make global judgments for population-based data. And that's a critical point. And unfortunately, I don't see that being done in medicine for probably 50 to 100 years because the process is really controlled by big, huge corporations who have special interests. And it's all mixed together. It's a real problem. The statin issue should be classed. Most people know that the pharmaceutical industry run most of these randomized control trials because they're incredibly expensive to do. So it's really hard to test some of the core dogma and belief unless you have ungodly amounts of money. And people aren't going to do that. That's why I'm pretty excited about the paleo-primal communities because I feel like they're doing one of the biggest and minus ones out there right now. Yeah. And thanks to the social networking, social media, the internet. This is all being documented lives. Right. And I mean, everyone's a blogger, right? I think that's huge. Yeah. I think it's absolutely huge. And as I told you before, we came on the show, I can't tell you I'm the most internet savvy guy. I mean, I can do pretty well. But I have been absolutely floored. Prior to six months ago, I didn't know Twitter was. I also was not using Facebook like I'm using it now. I was not using LinkedIn. Now I'm doing all these things. The cool thing about it for me is a physician. I'm in this to help people. Well, in my sphere of influence here in Nashville, I can do that to my own community. I found that Twitter and Facebook and all the other things were my blog reaches. I can now hit 153 countries worldwide. And I'm interacting with people in the Southern hemisphere. That to me is absolutely incredible. And like you said, performing brain surgery without a scalpel, right? That's absolutely true. And my other big thing that I've told many people is that I believe that the left in prescription is a thought that can change your DNA. And if you read it and you ponder it and you think about it, then you try it. Just like most of the people in the paleo and primal community say, try it for 60 days and see if I'm full of it. And that's kind of what this community done and they've done it and they come back and they're posting their results. I'm not going to tell you the results. Go read them. Yeah, it's out there. Read them for yourself because they're there. Yeah, it's super easy to find them. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that's my, my thing, my fermentation and I call myself a paleo slash LC HF experimenter. So are you familiar with the LC HF diet? It's Swedish. It's low carb high fat. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So low carb high fat. So because sometimes you'll come across paleo people, paleo to teachers or tinkerers that have a very different view of what that diet means versus a low carb high fat diet. If you ever read Loroincardane's original book, the paleo diet, I mean, it is lean. It's chicken breast and shrimp. And I hated it. I read it and I'm like, I'm not eating that way. That doesn't fit for me. I was following Rob Wolf's book, but then I got into LC HF. And, um, well, you know, I just did it to make it easier for myself. I was one head and favored the fat, but that's my N equals one. You know, that's just my, well, I think I think though the basis of everything that we're talking about within, you know, the paleo primal low carb high fat diet, most people, I think, are basically doing the same thing. I think there's little tweaks and twists. Sure. You know, to it, the one thing that I think that people probably make the big mistake is that they don't tinker enough with their diet. And I think the bigger mistake is if you're one of those people who hits platotes and there's not getting the results that you see from other people, those are the people that absolutely need to consider testing. Because usually there's something underlying. You know, they could have a leaky gut. They could have, you know, disordered hormone response. You know, you know, I found, I, I, I, I told you some of the stories. I'm going to have a 26 year old kid that came in who could just couldn't lose weight. And we found out that his testosterone level was like 226 and 26 years old. And you know, he couldn't believe it. His primary care doctor couldn't believe it. We fixed that. I actually fixed his neck too. And magically he lost 60 pounds in the next six months. By all the, I think the reason this happens because all the Taco Bell and Chick-of-A-Lay you're eating. Yeah. You know, and you had a lot of, you know, polyunsaturated fats in your diet mixed with, you know, bad processed carbs. And that caused the underlying inflammation. The cool thing about a young kid is they can bounce back fast because their brain, their hypothalamus, works way better than say a postmenopausal woman is at 60 years old. That's a lifetime. It's so funny. You just mentioned that. The inflammation. Yeah, I have a, I have someone in my life who's 60 year old woman. And she has, it hit the paleo hard core. She's a piece of, she should be studied. She's awesome. But she has plateaued right 60 year old female. So that's funny that you mentioned that. So I would tell you, in a case like that, I can tell you right now, hormones absolutely need to be assayed. And I guarantee you're going to find some abnormalities. And then when those abnormalities are found, the, the rule of thumb that I use is I want people's inflammatory levels. They're highly sensitive CRP to be almost at undetectable levels. And I also want their, all their hormones within, in the top quartile of what they should be in the reference range. You know, I think most docs that do this kind of stuff also shoot for the same ranges. But obviously that's kind of a stereotypical global statement I just made. When you see a patient in the office, you're, you're obviously going to biohack them and get them back, you know, to normal because everybody takes some individual tinkering. This is not the kind of, this is not the kind of thing that, you know, you can just go out and say, look, here's the paleo template, live it. And that's it. You know, and everybody's the same way. That's, it's just not reality. And those kind of cases I love because that's what I love to do. You know, I like to hack people. You know, and get them back because the smile on their face when they're done is worth a million bucks. It's just, you know, they, they didn't believe it. I can't tell you how many skeptics that I have completely kicked in the crotch, you know, with this. And it's just the coolest thing in the world. I used to think, you know, taking a discount someone's back and when they wake up, they were completely free of pain was the biggest charge. But there's nothing like seeing somebody who is a non-believer, you know, a year later and just go look at where I was and look at where I am now. And I tell them, I say, did I touch you? But I do brain surgery on you. You have a scar on your head? Right. No. You know, and it's just cool when they have that realization, I said, see, a thought can change your DNA. I just proved it to you. And I tell people, just pay it forward. Tell as many people as you can that there is an answer out there and try it because, you know, what we're talking about is not going to hurt anybody. In fact, it's going to help. Yeah. What brings people, how do people end up in your office? What happens? What happens to that? That's kind of an interesting topic right now. Basically, you got to have a neurosurgical problem. So I don't take anyone in, you know, just to do a lot than reset alone. Yeah. I've actually, I do have another practice outside my neurosurgery practice that's quite small that I have taken personal cases on, you know, if people have significant problems who really want to done, but I'm not going to pull any punches here. It's a very labor-intensive business. It takes a lot of time. And those people are paying cash money. There's no insurance for that. And it's a long process, but I've limited how many people I would do it for. Yeah. Just because I physically don't have the time, but I think through the process of what's kind of happened on the web and what a lot of the people on the comment section on the Mark Staley Apple of Ask For, they want me to come up with a web platform where I could help, you know, people in the Southern hemisphere, where I could help people in the Zambio or in Germany. And right now, we're working on actually doing something like that. We haven't, you know, got all the kinks out, but it's under construction. It's probably something that will launch sometime in 2012. Okay. Now more a little bit to the different point, what I would maybe the way I'd like to ask this is from as a neurosurgeon, what happens to people that they end up needing that service from you? Is this a dietary thing? Are these people just being getting injured? Are these car accidents? Well, most of the problems that I see are degenerative in nature. And what people are actually able to do is you're less than resistant. You're much more prone to degenerative conditions both in your spine, your lower back, your neck, and also conditions in the brain. So most of these people come in and they're expecting, hey, look, doc, I got arm pain and my primary care doc didn't have my eye and found a big disc in my neck. And I say, yeah, you're right, but did they also tell you that you've got, you know, fat replacement in your bone marrow? Did they tell you that you've got modic changes? Did they tell you this? Did they tell you that? There's fat replacement in bone marrow. Oh, yeah, that's one of the signs I can pick up metabolic bone disease usually just by looking at someone's MRI. And there's fat in the bone almost, yes, I can almost guess what your hormone levels are going to be by looking at that because I do this all the time now. Yeah. You know, five, six, seven years ago, I could never do that. But, you know, now every patient that comes in, I look at this disease, I look at the diseases that I treat as a neurosurgeon, sort of completely different set of glasses now because what I learned in my own case and the patients, you know, that I've treated since then. And this is where I started finding, you know, the vitamin D levels that everybody's talking about now. I started finding this things out six, seven, eight years ago. And I couldn't figure out why I was seeing, I only saw it so far. I think the last six years we look back at I only found one person with a normal vitamin D that gets come in some office. Wow. So low vitamin D's I can tell you are definitely correlated with degenerative disease. And is it a problem? You got a bad vitamin D issue. And is indeed actually a hormone? Yeah, it's actually last hormone in the chain that's made from pregnant alone. And, you know, we make all those things from LDL cholesterol. Another reason why cholesterol is very important. So to avoid these obvious names like osteoporosis or something like this, we're not, it's not eating American cheese and drinking milk, is it? No. In fact, I've written extensively about osteoporosis. It's probably the one disease that I've hit pretty hard in my blog that's tied to neurosurgery. I started seeing osteoporosis at unbelievable levels. And once I finished my residency and came out, and when I was in my residency, I very rarely saw osteoporosis. But when I came into private practice, I was overwhelmed with how much of what I saw. And, you know, when I saw that, I had to put two and two together. And I realized the cause of osteoporosis is left in resistance. That's the real underlying cause. And it causes many, many hormonal imbalances in the body. But I have found osteoporosis in as young 17-year-old patient. Wow. That should tell you just how incredibly rampant it is when, you know, you're eating the wrong things because ultimately what causes all hormonal disruption is eating things that cause inflammation in our body. Yeah, I don't think I've ever heard of osteoporosis describe as a lifestyle disease before. But it is. But I can tell you, I can tell you without any reservation. That's exactly what it is. When I was in training, we were taught that osteoporosis was a disease that we'd seen postmenopausal women, and occasionally in people who smoked or in men who had obstructive lung disease. That's what I was told, I guess, 20 years ago, 15 years ago. I can tell you right now that all is still true, but the number one cause in the United States without a doubt is left in resistance. There's an old law out there in the orthopedic literature called "Wolf's Law." Wolf's Law says that basically bone is laid down in stress. When we learn about that in med school and residency, that basically means if you're really, really fat, you should have really, really strong bones. Because of the stress. I'm glad you're on the way. Sure. What I found 10 years ago when I came out in private practices, the exact opposite. The fatter you were, the worse your bones were. It was completely opposite what one would expect. I will tell you that incongruity was probably one of the key things in nursery that got me thinking about many different things. That I came up with in my quilt document and also that helped me form a lot of the theories that I had about left in basically underpinning most of the degenerative conditions that are out there. Over time, if you read the literature, when left in was first described in 1994 or to now, it's relatively new. A lot of doctors don't even really know what it does. They know that it has something to do with appetite, but they don't understand that it basically controls all energy metabolism in the body. But when people look into this deeper and I promise in the next 20 to 50 years, medicine is going to really look at left in big time. Once you fix the left in problem, magically all the neolithic diseases that we see in aging get better. And people need to start paying attention to that. And I use this in nursery. As many people come to see me and I tell them, look, the arthritis you have or the MS you have or this you have, that's also going to get better when you change this. And they look at me like, you know, I'm nuts. And then, you know, they get on the internet and they start seeing other people who've already done this. I love the fact that we're maybe he isn't that crazy. I love the fact that we're talking about we're using ancient cultural diets to cure diseases and fix hormones that we just discovered 17 years ago. That's why if you think about the giant circle where this all makes sense is think about what we talked about before. Where do you think the ancient people came up with this? Because they did anecdotes just like we're talking about today. That's all they had, right? That's right. That's all the same. Yeah. All right. And they put these things together. They realized, Hey, you know, I can eat this if I do this to this food. And that was passed down from generation to generation to generation. Don't think that they didn't figure out, well, I can eat this because it's not good for me. The key thing that I think we forget today is that when we evolved, we evolved around the equator. We now span every part of this globe. Well, if you think the same diet that we evolved on on the equator is the same diet that we should eat in the Arctic Circle and Antarctica, here out your mind. That's not the way it is. But think about it. When someone writes a diet book, you know, like the perfect health diet, I think it's a great book and it's a great diet. That's Paul. That's right. That book should be, you know, used all over the world, you know, for everybody with different genetic switches, that just makes no sense to me. Okay. So kind of letting some critics to the West and the Prices work where, yes, every one of these ancient cultures thrived with a unique diet, but it probably had more to do with where they were on the planet. Like the fact that you were eating pure fat. I think the foundation of both. Yeah. The honest with you, I really do think, you know, there's this big argument right now in the Paleoosphere, you know, about the Kidavins and why they're able to eat so many carbohydrates and not get fat. Well, everybody keeps forgetting that not everybody has the Kidavins epigenetics, you know, a guy in New York City is not going to have, you know, with European descent, it's not going to have the same epigenetics. So why would you think you can eat 70% carbohydrates? Right. But yet there's people out there that actually think just because these people did it, everybody else should do it. And that's that's part of the where the whole thing falls apart for me. And I if you if you really followed my blog and you understand some of the concepts I've laid out there, I never talk about macronutrients. Never. And why? Because they're not important. What is important, however, is the response, the hormone response of the brain to the food that you're eating because that tells us that's the Rosetta Stone, exactly how we partition calories. And to find out how that works, you just have to severely test your blood over and over and over again. You know, there's people, there's people on Mark Daley Apple site who did not listen to me for six or seven months and they kept hitting the wall and they kept saying, oh, I have a adrenal fatigue and I've just not, I said, we just get tested. Yeah, I've heard a adrenal fatigue. We'll run over again. Yeah. That's what happened. They found out that their real problem was related to their hormones. And when they fixed that, guess what happened, their plateaus went away. Okay. So it's really hard to get people to understand this, but the people who do, it doesn't take a lot of testing to figure this, this kind of stuff out. Unfortunately, it does take a doctor to understand it. Yeah. Yeah. So you are going to have to find some better help. Right. And that's, and that's one of the big problems that people are finding in the paleoce. You're like, many people have tried to get help and they'll get help for part of their problem, but not all of it. And that's, that's part of, you know, what my modus operandi is now. I want to create a different healthcare system. And you know, there's a big, there's a big poll in the paleo community. In fact, probably at the ancestral health symposium this year, me and a couple of the founding fathers, we're giving a talk about what we think we need to do to take care of, you know, the paleo primal community in terms of healthcare going forward. Because obviously, conventional medicine right now, we take care of sick people. That's how the systems built paleo and primal healthcare really is about taking care of people who are well, who want to get to optimal. It's a totally different mindset. And many of the things, even the ways we look at certain laboratory values is completely different. The like, the way I look at a VAP in a conventional medical setting versus say, say, somebody on the internet who's got a leaky gut tremendously different. Most physicians don't understand, you know, how I use an HDL level, how I use it as a proxy for how much inflammation is actually coming through the gut into the poor double circulation into the liver. But that stuff right then and there tells me, okay, we got a huge problem. This has to be fixed because basically, that's like a conduit for throwing gasoline on this fire that's burning in their body. Great stuff. Can we move on just real quick to something of interest besides paleo primal stuff? Do you ever have much experience with like cognitive enhancers like neutropics? Yeah, I mean, I know quite a bit about them. I have to tell you that some of them, I think short-term uses for changes like kids in college and things like that. Yeah, they work great. But if not something I'd advocate for long-term use because the best way to improve your cognitive ability is to have a hormonal balance in your body. That's when your brain works the best. Okay. And but yeah, if you want to use like, I have a recipe and actually, I use it in my practice called optimal coffee. And that would be something that you'd probably be interested in. I use coconut oil, coffee, cinnamon, nutmeg, and turmeric in the coffee. And that's how I drink my coffee. I only drink coffee usually at breakfast time. Yeah. And I don't do it every day. There's some days I do do it, some days I don't. If I'm in surgery and I know I'm not going to eat any lunch, I usually have an optimal coffee. And that's how it has tremendous effects. In fact, my son is 18 years old as in college. He just used it to take his finals in the last couple of weeks. Wow. It's amazing. Yeah. You know, the effect that it had. Not only that, he found that his retention and his learning, you know, when he'd study and wake up was like 20% better. He felt more efficient. But there's a lot of different things out there that have been. Yeah, I'm going to definitely have to look into the optimal coffee. Now, I've got a friend that I follow Dave Aspert. He's the bulletproof exec. Yeah. He wrote that. I've read about his bulletproof coffee. That's how I see it. One of my blog commenters actually told me about his bulletproof coffee. I didn't know about it until about two weeks ago. And I saw that he used butter and his. I thought that was kind of interesting. And I think it'd be good. The only thing I'd have an issue with that is with the Casey and protein. I think it'd be better with ghee to be quite honest. Okay, I can see it there. Yeah, he definitely grass-fed butter and the combination of MCT oil is actually. Yeah, well, I use MCT oil a lot. I'm a huge fan of that because of the effects that it has on brain cells. It actually makes brain cells work much more efficiently. I call it like putting STP in the gas tank for your brain. It cleans everything out. So I'm gonna save my pennies and just invest in a 50 gallon drum of coconut oil and however much MCT oil I can afford because I hit the butter. I hit the butter pretty hard. I mean uh yeah I'm a big fan of butter too but I have to tell you for people who are making the transition you know to go from just say good to great. I think G is a better choice. Okay. Indeed or just for people know that's also clarified butter. Yeah clarified butter basically all it is it takes all the bad proteins that are in dairy and removes them so that you're basically just dealing with all the fat. Okay yeah the casing is a protein right and that's the people have allergies too and there's two types of casing and it's all very confusing. Yeah the two main proteins in in dairy products are way in uh casing and way protein has a lot of good effects. It can if it can if have some bad effects and diabetics but um the casing protein as far as I'm concerned it's not really good for anybody. Okay kind of like um I guess I would consider it like the gluten correlate grain. Okay and I think those two things probably need to be eliminated in most people's diet and I think almost every paleo diet out there does that uh same thing with low carb high fat I don't think many people eat those things routinely. Right okay so we'll be able to address our these uh common names like serotonin and melatonin levels with our natural foods and a little help of uh diagnosing our hormonal situation. You know we're gonna get better sleep or we're gonna feel better. Yes absolutely. That's that's gonna happen. Yeah that all happens because of the the conversion in the brain. There's a lot of effects there. I mean I could talk to you probably for hours about sleep. Sleep is absolutely vital to this whole issue and as I talked to you before about the whole left and reset it's based on circadian rhythms. Well you can't talk about circadian rhythms without talking about sleep and I will tell you the reason why most people have sleep apnea our obese is because they can't sleep and and that's where that tie comes in. I was gonna say that sounds like a vicious circle cycle. Oh it is. Can't sleep but that's the problem I have to stop it. Yeah. It's a huge it's a huge factor and most of the patients that see me in the clinic uh one of the first questions I ask them is tell me about their sleep and you know most people are coming to see me either for you know a brain problem or a neck or low back problem they're kind of like why do you want to know mama asleep and I said wait if your sleep's bad you're never going to get better and they're kind of shocked when I tell them that and I also told them that it gives me some insight you know to the underlying information in their body you know I'll tell you I'll give you some insight to how a clinician thinks when someone doesn't sleep well the first thing that I realized is that they have high levels of a cytokine in their brain called IL-6 and you get IL-6 from a variety different biochemical reactions but the number one place we see it is some of those people that left the resistance. Now the next thing that generally happens how do I check for an IL-6 level in people there is a test out there for it but it's extremely expensive it's about 500 bucks in a hospital so no I don't go check an IL-6 on everybody have I done it on myself yes but there is a very cheap test that you can get called the DHEA level which is a hormone that's the precursor for our sex-tery hormones and there's a 98 98% correlation of those who have bad sleep with low DHEA levels now you can get that from either a simple blood test that costs less than 40 bucks or you can get it from a salivary assay from a place called ZRT labs and you'll find out what your DHEA level is once you diagnose that then you can actually tell somebody look you can supplement DHEA or you can eat with things that will help you replenish your DHEA to bring the levels up and then you can seriously test it over time to see if what you're doing from a macronutrient standpoint is actually helping the other thing you do simple are you sleeping better and what patients will find is as their DHEA level becomes optimal and at top 25% their sleep becomes rock star status and then magically their plattoes start to go away magically all the other things they were concerned about get better not like that their thyroid function you know if they were hypothyroid which most people are who have excess weight that also improves some people you know like women with leaky guts like some of the things you were talking about fixing with fermented carbohydrates sometimes they need a little T3 or T4 thrown in the mix to get their pituitary gland fired up or get their thyroid fired up to get them going but generally as things move on everything improves and and clinically these are all the things that I use in the office to find out if the how sleep is tied to our hormones that's right it's pretty simple not so well brain surgery yeah and all kind of goes no right so it all kind of goes back to like the rob wolf statement that will do 30 days 60 days whatever your number is and then how do you feel how do you know how do you perform how do you sleep these are the markers that a person can judge themselves you know how they're doing and then when you find a sleep problem or you platto on weight then it's time to maybe dig into those yes the tests and okay the other caveat that I would make to people who are going to be listening to this think about it this the more inflammation you have the longer it's going to take like lob is not going to tell somebody with ms who's morbidly obese in 30 days you're going to be better because they're not okay that's a person that's going to take a lot longer time but we need to do a better job in our community to let people know that it's still going to make you better but the time to get better is going to take longer okay there's many people out there who are very very thin you just don't have good body count the same issue they have if you have high levels of inflammation your body that's the key and what you have to do is you have to give people small little clinical winds and when that happens over time that's when they start seeing those winds and you'll see them in their lab results and people see them in their results you know their waist finds will go down their muscles will get bigger you know their friends and family will start saying you know dude you look different yeah this is happening around here you're different you know my wife here's all the time from the girls that do her pedicures got your feet are so soft how does the skin yeah everything everything yeah in here and that's my own thing that there's a immune to this that's that's just amazing now I got to cover this before you disappear on me this this article the teeth and disease yeah it is fantastic um I have this whole theory about teeth and tooth health and that from ancient days ago my dad was always having ruckian out problems and they were always coincided with his antibiotic use and but anyways so I've always been kind of interested in the in the mouth from from my childhood and then after discovering western a price's work I was like wow this is some remarkable stuff I can't believe this isn't common knowledge and then but this article here you bring in two different ideas and kind of fuse them together some knowledge here that is it's absolutely fantastic yeah well that's I guess that's probably based on my educational training that you know we talked about the beginning many people you know hear that I'm a neurosurgeon first and forget that I also was a dentist and an oral surgeon yeah you know before I became uh well that that's pretty rare so normally if someone's a neurosurgeon you don't remember to my bother to get asked and if they were a dentist first right and you know I will tell you that I I always think of myself honestly as a dentist first and a neurosurgeon second because you know that's kind of I did that before I was a neurosurgeon and I really enjoyed it and I learned a lot of the foundational work you know that I'm now using from dentistry but here's the interesting thing that you may find interesting and maybe some of your listeners will I have a friend who I went to dental school with who who's now becoming what I would call the online paleo dentist and we've talked offline many times how we cannot believe that we never learned about western A price when we're in dental school we've gotten back to saying yes and subsequently why and it's again it ties back to money and and issues related to the ADA and western A price back in the 30s and 40s what I didn't like what he had to say when against what organized dentistry believed and I'm not kidding I did not know about western A price until probably I guess it was maybe two or three years ago and and the crazy thing was I was already as a neurosurgeon using like vitamin K2 that he called factor X in his you know book yeah I didn't put that together until like two or three years ago and I thought to myself because I use vitamin K2 to treat osteoporosis I've been doing that for probably 10 years and when I started putting this all together I started calling some of my old dental school classmates and talking to them on Facebook I said you guys need to read this guy's work and I have this personal crusade right now to give get rid of fluoride in our water supply. And I tell anybody who follows our principles of lifestyle, you need to avoid fluoride as much as you can. Build filtering systems in your house to get rid of it. It's that important. Well, I really wanted to motivate one of my dental student buddies to get into this. And it turns out that he has got a real good friend who runs the paleodontology section at the University of Arkansas, and he's Peter Unger. And him and John have just petitioned, I believe, the NIH to get a grant to start to study these things, which is huge. And I'm hoping that we can make some huge changes in dentistry, because my belief is there is more things that we can find in the oral cavity that truly tell us about what macronutrient-- we may have to stop here. That's fine. I'll give you a pause. All right, Jack, you're back? Yeah. All right, cool. Sorry, Dr.-- Let's get back to the paleodentist. What was his name? Yeah, he's one of my classmates from dental schools, named John Sartino, and he's a dentist in the tipsy New York. And his good friend, that he was college classmate since his Peter Unger, who's at the University of Arkansas. And they're tag teaming. In fact, Rob Wolf just mentioned Dr. Unger's work on Twitter the other day. And I had told John that it looks like Rob is actually paying attention to the things that are going on in dentistry, because I believe that we can find out so many things from an oral cavity examination about our physiology, about our hormones status, if we just do it. The problem is most physicians don't know anything about the oral cavity. But most dentists do. Yeah. And the problem is most dentists are not really plugged in to this lifestyle yet. Right, right. But we're looking to change that. And John Sartino is one of those guys that I think is going to lead that charge, because he's already started doing it in his own community and got a bunch of the dentists together, have meetings to start talk about these things. And he's even starting to petition our old dental school and also the NIH about starting to look at these things. And I think that's a great thing. It's awesome. Do you have a blog or anything like that? You can find-- Oh, yeah. Well, he does have a blog. I don't know what the address is. But I think a few-- By the time the show goes up, I'll have found it. And I'll have it added to the show notes. And he just did a podcast with Jimmy Moore in the last two weeks. Oh, great. That's going to be good. You can find that link on there. And I believe he even talks about Dr. Unger on there. Oh, great. Yeah. Jimmy Moore. Of course. Cool. We'll check that out for sure. Yeah, I was interested. I want to ask you one more question. It's kind of a strange thing for me. It's also root canals. Yeah. Do you have something to say about the patas? Yeah, don't get one. Thank you. Damn, I was open, you'd say that. Well, I mean, I got to tell you a funny story. I hope you-- Please, please. I think you really appreciate this. I just had Oz on call last week. And one of our good friends had some people in, because the Saints were playing the Titans in your NFL game. And all these people from New Orleans came up. And I just started talking to this guy. And he told me he just had a recent root canal about a month ago. And ever since he's had the root canal, he's got these horrible ulcers in his mouth. He's been to like 19 Dennis down in New Orleans. No one knows what's going on. Yeah. And we were sitting there drinking a glass of-- or he was drinking a glass of wine. And I was drinking water. And I just looked out and I said, dude, you know what your problem is? You're having an allergic reaction to the gutter perch, or that was put in your root canal. And you need to get it out as soon as possible. Yeah. Yeah. And then he said to me, he goes, how do you know that? And I said, well, I'm going to shock even more. I said, you want to-- because he couldn't drink the red wine that I gave him, because it hurt his mouth. No. The tanens in the wine. Right. So he was drinking the white wine. I said, how about if I prove to you right now that I'm right? And he goes, OK. So I went over and opened up New Tiva coconut oil and gave him two huge tablespoons and told him to put it in his mouth, we ate a little milk and swiss it around. I took a 10,000 IU capsule of vitamin D, put a pinhole and it scored it in under his tongue, and told him to swiss it around as well. Then I said, take some of this red wine. I specifically gave him a mall back in Argentina, because it's a very tannic wine. I said, OK, tell me. Did it bob your tooth? He goes, no. I said, do you know why? He said, no. I said, well, we just affected your immune system in your mouth. And we also gave you basically an antibacterial and an antiviral and antifungus mouthwash. That's natural. Yeah. I said, you need to remove. As soon as you go home, you tell him to take it out. You just take the whole-- can they just extract the tooth at that point? Well, that's what he wants to do. I don't think he wants to go. There's another option. You can go for another filling material that he's probably not allergic to. But I don't think he's going to do this because this guy-- if you heard his whole story, it was unbelievable. What happens to him? He almost had what I would call an autoimmune severe reaction is mouth. In medicine, we know it on the skin. It's called Stephen Johnson Syndrome. He basically got the same kind of reaction in his mouth, where he had ulcers that were bleeding up under his lip in his mouth on the tongue side, on the cheek side. He couldn't eat anything. And it coincided right after he had the root canal done. And that's in a very extreme example. But most people who have root canals will tell you, they just don't feel right down the road. But especially Dennis, very rarely tie the root canal to the underlying medical problems down the road. Why? Because Dennis aren't taught any of this. I can tell you, being a Dennis myself, I never once heard any of this. And I found this out, subsequently by paying attention and doing some my own reading. There's a lot of people out there that have these symptoms. And just like any other drug that we use in medicine, if someone's allergic to something, it can cause an autoimmune reaction. It can cause an allergic reaction, right then and there, in the mouth. And when you do a root canal, the end of the tooth, where the root, I should say, the nerve goes into the jawbone, is like a siv. And that's leaking directly into the systemic circulation. And a huge inflammatory response. And you can actually check it by doing what they call a highly sensitive CRP, right after somebody has a root canal. And you're going to see it through the roof. And it'll stay sustained for a period of time. So that's so funny. And then so back to the article, it actually talks about how the oral cavity may be where obesity starts. Right? It's true. It's fantastic. I don't want to go too far down that road. People need to read that article. It's called the teeth and disease. It's at jetcruise.com/theteethandisease. You just go to the blog and the website and you'll find it. But I just really wanted to cover that one because it's a real pet project of mine is teeth and no dentists. Yeah, most people are pretty surprised to find out that actually left them, actually, acts in the mouth. I've told some of my neurosurgery buddies that there's actually a hypophilomic parodid axis. The parodid gland is the gland that makes the lives in our mouth. And people didn't believe me. And I said, look, I remember when I was in dental school in 1986, I learned about an intercranologist from Loma Linda named John Loneura. He's the one that described this and people thought I was full of it. They went back and looked at it and sure enough, it's there. It's true. It's kind of cool. Yeah, right. I just love it. But if you follow some of these ancient natural food ways, these paths, you're going to avoid this oral cavity problem by putting the wrong thing in your mouth to activate this mechanism of disease that's going to happen, right? All this problem. So this is, it's amazing. We've covered, we don't want to solve every problem in the world in one night. We're in damn close here. Wow. I see. There's a lot, like I said, there's a lot of stuff on the blog and how I plan on releasing stuff over time. I would tell people, just go to my blog site and start reading the quilt document. The quilt document covers 30 different levies. And levies are things that protect the community. Since I did my training in New Orleans, that's why I use the word levies. Because it protects the city. If you protect your cell and your body using these 30 different levies systems, you'll never get any neolithic diseases. And I've ordered the protection system, the levies system from one through 30, leptin stands at number two. So obviously, I've spent a lot of time talking about leptin since it's the kingpin at the top. Okay. But if you go through each one of them, I'm going to talk about each one of those levies in detail over the next several years and tell people exactly how they can optimize that levie to help them avoid disease. Yeah. This is an entire college career that's the only you'd have. I mean, you'd have an entire education if you made it through this, the quilt. Well, that's exactly what I did in college medical school, dental school. I mean, I'm basically giving you 30 years of experience and trying to lay it out in a blog post so that people can understand it. Well, I love it. And that's why I had you on the show because, I mean, you're a master experimenter. definitely a guru and I think you're starting to become a geek because I hate to say it but I think you're right about that. Those are the three criteria to get on the show. So you just snuck in on the geek factor. So that's funny. Thank you so much Dr. Jack for Dr. Jack Cruz for joining me. You have a few of something to plug, where else to go besides the blog. I don't have anything to plug out right now. All I'm doing is putting the blog out. If anybody has any questions, just ask a question on the comment section. Leave your email and I promise you if you've looked at the blog, I generally answer every single one of them in between my cases. Or when I'm not busy, but I usually get to all of them. You can usually find me either on Facebook. You can find me on Mark Daley Apple site, on Rob Wolff site, Jimmy Moore's site. I'm pretty much everywhere. I try to make myself as accessible as I can to people because my goal is to really help people help themselves. I think you are and I can't wait to see you start popping up everywhere on all the shows and I look forward to hearing more from you. Thank you for this. It's been great. All right, no problem, Brian. It was great spending some time with you tonight. [BLANK_AUDIO]