Just a note here on one advantage…
After reading this article, I realized that I had all of the symptoms of high glutamate, and having just came off of a low carbohydrate/intermittent fasting diet found my mood had worsened when carbohydrates were reintroduced, leaving me feeling irritable, anxious and negatively affecting my sleep.
I have decided to try a standard ketogenic diet and can honestly say I feel calmer and more relaxed even after just a few of days, so there is definitely an advantage in mood improvement in my case.
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Ketogenic Diet
It took me about a year to really begin to figure what to eat and how to train. That because the diet basically turned everything upside down.
Car Driving Analogy
I’d compare it to moving to England and learning how to drive on the left hand side of the road; Use your left foot for the gas, right foot for the clutch and brake and shift you’re left hand.
Food That I Now Eat
I am not a cook which limited my choices. However, my wife became interested and makes some great Keto Meals; initially that I refused to consider eating but now love.
Keto: Pizza (crust make of almond flower), Cheese Cake, Meatloaf, Spaghetti (made with squash), Lazania, etc.
I enjoy the diet and feel good on it. My metabolic condition hasn’t gotten worse. So, Keto may be helping me maybe not.
However,my condition slightly improved, based on my blood profile, on my last visit to the doctor.
One of the things play with is the percentage of the type of fat that I eat to see how it affects my blood profile reading.
I dramatically increased my saturated fat intake. Based on some information that I came across just prior to my visit to the doctor, the increase in my saturated fat in may may (maybe not) have been responsible for my improvement
With that in mind, I am keeping my saturated fat intake high to see if it produce the same effect.
Kenny Croxdale
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In my experience, the keto diet has been a huge help.
I’m now in my thirties, back working out since October after 6 years without any physical exercice, and I overtook the stats I built in 3.5 years of hard work when I was in my early 20’s.
Like everything, nothing is perfect and I don’t claim it to be. But when I read that it’s not suited for strength athletes, I have no choice but to face palm. We don’t mostly use the glycolic pathway, on the other side there is much less muscle catabolism and higher leucine concentration in our blood. Much better recovery, in other words. Isn’t that something we want?
I honestly don’t feel like I’m at a disadvantage when I use glycolitic pathway exercice structure, and can’t explain why.
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Having been a follower of keto for years, it has only dawned on me recently that this a diet defined by certain ‘experts’ in the field. I understand what criterion they have applied to come up with macros, calories, etc, a portion of which is actually based on science. However, when you strip back what the primary process of being in ketosis involves you will find a stark explanation: an absence of carbohydrate. If you start to look at anthropology, and accept basic premises that our ancestors were relatively jacked despite irregular access to carbohydrate, and that they ate meat, meat, meat without recourse to fat and protein ratios, then you will realise prescriptive advice found today is actually tantamount to dogma and opinion. There is, in reality, huge scope to experiment. The notion that, for example, you cannot ingest more than 125 PRO or that you must consume copious greens, or worry about net carbs, is BS. I’ve based these conclusions on many self experiments, as well as that of others. Long live keto, whatever that means.
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Overthinking everything is always a problem when it comes to diet. I definitely do it!
I think you a fantasizing about our ancestors. They weren’t eating “meat, meat, meat”. Starvation was the standard.
About the scope to experiment, I totally agree with you, for example I have a hard time believing in the net carb guidelines: not all fibers are created equal and there are huge differences between say Pectin, Celullose and Beta glucane. I’ve learnt since 5th grade that you don’t add units and substract of different nature. Why on earth would we substract fibers from carbs intake?
I understand the logic is that fibers will slowdown the sugar assimilation and some calories are needed to process the fibers. But this idea does not sit well with me.
Like 600lb gorilla says, don’t overthink it. When your carb consumption is very low and fat/protein high, you’ll be in ketosis. Whether it’s 0.5 or 3.5mm/L, what’s important is that your body is in fat burning mode…
I should have clarified what I meant by that: the reference to ‘meat, meat meat’ was in response to certain keto dogma around mass greens consumption, as well as those who dictate that meat = fatty cuts and/or organ meat only.
Regarding ‘starvation’, I completely accept that. It is also a pillar of contemporary voluntary fasting rationale.
That’s why meat and fasting are complementary, in my opinion.
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Fiber can be utilized for calories by humans but only after it has been transformed by gut flora into short chain fatty acids, (at a rate of about .1 grams per gram of fiber), so it affects hormones and metabolism as a fat source.
There is a difference between a) fat burning metabolism; b) the liver producing ketones from fat and c) the body going into nutritional ketosis where ketones replace blood glucose for “glucose dependent tissues” like the brain and nervous system.
On a 50-60% fat diet with 20-30% carbs, muscle will burn 75%+ fat at rest and muscles will load up with fatty acids instead of glycogen. Muscles will burn more fat than glucose on this kind of diet out to about 7-8 METS at which point the body will need to ramp up gluconeogenesis or ketosis to increase work output.
The LIVER will turn on fat burning when insulin has been low and liver glycogen is depleted, but the liver will also be pumping out glucose from gluconeogenesis. Ketones will be a byproduct of incomplete fat oxidation by the liver, but glucose dependent tissues like the brain will still be running on glucose, and low blood glucose will still cause people to have low energy and mental distress. Ketones are usually HIGHEST at that point because they are not being burned up by the brain. Blood sugar is also usually higher than on a carb based diet at that point.
In nutritional ketosis, the brain switches over to preferring ketones. Blood glucose now becomes unnecessary, and experiments have shown that people can have blood glucose levels pushed down to <20 mg/dl without mental distress when they are in “adapted”. This state requires low protein intake and ketosis replaces gluconeogenesis as the way to keep the brain alive. Ketone levels actually DROP in adaptive ketosis because the brain is using them up as they are being made. Levels are typically only around 0.1-0.4 max at that point.
Fasting does turn on autophagy, but only in a 12-48 hour window until ketone levels rise. Ketosis is the way for the body to turn OFF autophagy (autophagy scavenges malformed proteins to fuel gluconeogenesis for a non-keto adapted individual, but keto-adaptation precludes the need for blood glucose and so you don’t get autophagy when you are in ketosis. It shuts it off. That’s what it does-it replaces autophagy as the way to keep the brain alive.
This is actually widely reported by folks on longer-term keto diets, and I have experienced this myself. This is contrary to some advocates who claim real nutritional ketosis is 1.5-3.0 mmol. Personally, I think this is nonsense - unless you are fasting or on a VLCD or consuming shed loads of fat.
There is also some observations regarding metabolic efficiency, with followers reporting a drop in BMR after a year or so on keto.
Not so sure about that one. For a start, gluconeogenesis will continue to occur throughout a fast (as it does while in a fed state) regardless of ketone levels. Obviously longer terms fasts, i.e. starvation, result in loss of lean tissue. Ketones can only do so much in absence of an energy source. From an evolutionary viewpoint, it makes no sense that autophagy would be ‘turned off’ while, at the same time, the body is canabilising itself.
I don’t mean that ketosis completely shuts off autophagy, but it “tends” to replace it. As I’ve shown in studies in other posts, individuals in deep ketosis have almost no glucose burning enzymes in their muscle cells because insulin is the signal to the muscle cell to make glycolytic enzymes. This is why it takes a few days of increased insulin levels to get muscles to start disposing of glucose again.
The brain, nerves, gut organs, pancreas and a few other organs will use glucose with very low insulin levels, and of course insulin can never get too low because ketones themselves force insulin needs UP by causing a degree of resistance. Gluconeogenesis itself it mediated by counter-regulatory hormones that force insulin up. People in starvation mode may not even be in adaptive ketosis because their stress hormone levels are too high. At any rate, autophagy is most efficient as one passes into a fasting period and tends to wane with extended fasting as ketones rise and replace the need for gluconeogenesis. You may know that most IF protocols originally recommended fasting until dinner every second day (at most). Too much autophagy is bad, but you want just enough so that the body can eat up malformed proteins/enzymes without going after functional ones.
I will try to respond fuller in a bit. In the meantime, what do you think of the claims that people have cured disease such as type 2, even type 1, diabetes, acne, and, of course, cancer, using hard core fasting protocols, such as dry fasting?
One characteristic of extended fasting is that it can reduce metabolic rate to very low levels which would slow down cancer. Keep in mind though that diabetes, both 1 and 2 are autoimmune related. Autophagy ramps UP the immune system which would speed up autoimmune destructive forces. It is evidence that autophagy drops dramatically in extended fasting as the body replaces glucose needs with ketones. So autoimmune diseases may benefit from deep extended fasting because it shuts down the immune system. Also the body is able to invest fewer resources into the immune system during deep fasting BECAUSE deep fasting DOES shut down the growth of precancerous cells so autophagy ceases to be important. I am thinking of extended water fasting. I don’t know exactly what dry fasting means?
reading up, short term hard dry fasting should help destroy precancerous and cancerous cells, but it is most likely to speed up the autoimmune mechanism that leads to type 1 diabetes (and also as new evidence suggests, type 2 diabetes which also seems to involve the immune system in at least some of its forms and stages). Very low insulin needs may cancel out the immuno-activation effect though.
In fact, both type 1 and type 2 diabetes tend to emerge after periods when the immune system has been activated such as after an entero-virus infection. Type 2 might also be related to autoimmunity to insulin receptors and insulin itself, and in the final stages of type 2 diabetes the immune system has been shown to attack pancreatic cells.
So I’m a PhD organic chemist and not a nutritional expert, but how is this possible? Fiber are carbohydrate polymers that are not able to be hydrolyzed by our enzymes. The chemical structure of fibers (ethers and hydroxyl groups contained within or around rings) are neither similar to short chain fatty acids in structure (straight alkyl chains) or functionality (carboxylic acid functional).
Edit: I’m not at all challenging your knowledge or saying you’re wrong, just that it would be surprising to me.
Again, I am not sure phrases like ‘adaptive ketosis’ and ‘starvation ketosis’ have much real-life application. You are either in ketosis or you are not. I appreciate the role counter-regulatory hormones play during fasting but during extended fasts, e.g. 3-5 days, ketones will commonly rise to 2 or even 3.0mmol despite evelated cortisol, etc. However, I understand your keys points and do not disagree.
I think keto is highly individualized, some people respond well and love it, others don’t. I think a lot of people attempt it because of the popularity and simplistic nature, and for many of them, keto is far better than the processed sugary carbs they’ve been eating and drinking. I think for the vast majority of folks, a well balanced, healthy nutrition plan consisting of carbs, protein and fat, quality food is best, but that requires more discipline and control which many people have a problem with.
For me, a huge drawback of keto is I hate it. I don’t like how I feel in or out of the gym, mentally or physically. For others, they love it.
Only intestinal bacteria have the enzymes to change fiber into butyrate (4 carbon “short chain” fatty acids) probably by transforming it into Acetyl CoA first. Both fat and glucose can be changed into acetyl CoA and bacteria have the enzymes to turn Acetyl CoA back into butyrate. From butyrate, the body can build up larger fatty acids.
https://mbio.asm.org/content/5/2/e00889-14
By the way, we know that the liver can convert fructose, glucose, galactose and alcohol into triglycerides in the liver. How would turning glucose from fiber into short chain fatty acids be different? I’m not sure, but I will look into those pathways as well.
There is pretty strong emerging evidence that the fiber itself does not benefit the colon, (the “sweeping out the intestines” ) theory but rather provides a nutritional source for bacteria which protect the intestines and also by providing butyrate that lines the intestinal tract and protects it. Clearly, fermentation of fibrous veggies like cucumbers in naturally brined pickles demonstrates that bacteria are able to derive nutrition from fiber as well.
By the way, conversion of fiber (in grass) to butyrate by large gut herbivores like cows demonstrates the bacterial conversion of fiber to saturated fat as cows eat virtually all fiber but store virtually 100% saturated fat for fuel on their bodies. It’s the bacteria in the hind gut that do that. Part of the reason why gorillas have a much much larger intestine than humans.
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You can read my deleted response, but I it’s not really a sufficient forum to avoid over-generalizing on this topic.