Keto Clarity: Your Definitive Guide to the Benefits of a Low-Carb, High-Fat Diet (14 page)

– Dr. Ron Rosedale

Dr. Gerber also is seeing improvement in patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), psoriasis, and Crohn’s disease, who all “have done very well” on a ketogenic diet. He plans to continue to educate himself further on all the benefits that this way of eating has to offer. The same could be said about the next traditionally trained physician who prefers to use nutritional therapies to help improve the health of his patients.

New York City–based family practitioner Dr. Fred Pescatore, author of several bestselling books, including
The Hampton’s Diet
and
Thin For Good
, says using a low-carb, high-fat, ketogenic approach with his patients is “the only way I practice medicine.”

“I don’t know how every other doctor on the planet doesn’t do this,” Dr. Pescatore said. “I first learned about it twenty years ago working with the late, great Dr. Robert C. Atkins.”

The Atkins Lifestyle saved my life by helping me avoid diabetes. I control my reactive hypoglycemia symptoms, which were never understood or explained to me until Dr. Atkins diagnosed me. I am on a 20- to 30-gram maintenance plan now because of my advancing age and postmenopausal hormone status. I have plenty of energy, low cardiovascular risk, and low to normal blood pressure. I have also been told I do not look my age. I wear a size 4 and can maintain that without hunger or cravings. And the inches lost while in ketosis are a plus.

– Jackie Eberstein

And all those years of being tutored by Dr. Atkins himself taught Dr. Pescatore that this isn’t just some weight loss gimmick but rather “a way to unlock your body’s healing energies.”

“I have treated every condition from allergies to weight loss and everything in between using a ketogenic therapeutic approach to practicing medicine, and it has worked every time,” he explained.

Dr. Pescatore has seen a ketogenic diet normalize cholesterol numbers, completely zap hunger, eliminate bloating, improve chronic fatigue, and much more. Dr. Pescatore sees the ketogenic diet as a way to “enjoy life to the fullest and eat really well along the way.”

“This isn’t a diet for rabbits,” he concluded.

I followed a low-carbohydrate diet for over a year in an effort to lower my postprandial blood glucose levels, which frequently topped 180 at the one-hour mark. While I had some success with low-carb, it wasn’t until I began consuming a ketogenic diet limited to 30 to 35 grams of carbohydrate per day that my postprandial blood sugar levels completely normalized. I’ve had several clients who struggled with extra weight for years and were finally able to successfully lose weight once they started a well-balanced ketogenic diet. Their satiety and energy levels increased, and several have reported improvements in the quality of their skin—a benefit I’ve personally experienced as well.

– Franziska Spritzler

Canadian physician Dr. Jay Wortman discovered the ketogenic diet through “pure serendipity” after he developed type 2 diabetes in November 2002. While he started to investigate what he could do about his illness, Dr. Wortman immediately removed all starch and sugar from his diet. Thinking he would be taking a drug to manage his diabetes for the rest of his life, as he had seen in his work as the resident doctor at a diabetic children’s camp, he was astonished at how well removing carbs from his diet controlled his disease.

“Nowhere in my medical training or practice had I encountered carbohydrate restriction as a therapeutic option, yet I very quickly discovered that the elimination of carbs was dramatically reversing all the signs and symptoms of my type 2 diabetes,” Dr. Wortman said.

Within a few days of cutting carbs, he noticed that his blood sugar had normalized, he was feeling dramatically better, and he’d begun losing weight at about a pound a day. The “unexpected and seemingly miraculous” results he was seeing were perplexing to Dr. Wortman because he had never been exposed to information about the therapeutic effects that could come from a change in diet.

“Like most of my physician colleagues, I had only a passing familiarity with nutritional science and virtually no knowledge of ketogenic diets,” he said. “But after my condition quickly improved on a low-carb, high-fat diet, I became quite curious and started looking into the scientific literature.”

What Dr. Wortman found was confirmation that he was not an anomaly. Study after study showed the benefits of the way of eating that he had stumbled on almost by accident. Needless to say, he became “fully committed” to the low-carb lifestyle and has “made it [his] mission to understand this phenomenon and to explore the possibility that it could be a viable therapy for others.”

Dr. Wortman was working with the First Nations and Inuit Health Branch of Health Canada, where type 2 diabetes was a significant problem, and he surmised that the modern diet full of sugar and refined carbohydrates was the primary driver of this epidemic. He became quite intrigued by the idea that returning to their traditional hunter-gatherer diet of meat, seafood, and fat would result in a turnaround in health for the First Nations people. He had the great fortune to meet several prominent American researchers and clinicians, who helped him design a dietary trial to test his theory.

“Dr. Stephen Phinney, Dr. Eric Westman, and Dr. Mary Vernon collaborated with me to launch the dietary trial in a small Canadian First Nations community known as Alert Bay,” Dr. Wortman recalled. “I was approached by a documentary filmmaker named Mary Bissell who wanted to record the study in a film for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.”

That documentary,
My Big Fat Diet,
was broadcast nationally on Canadian television several times. It followed several of the study participants and documented their weight loss and improved health markers. The success of the study captured the attention of Health Canada, Canada’s federal health department, which agreed to fund a research position for Dr. Wortman so that he could continue to look into the health benefits of a ketogenic diet.

“I developed other study protocols, some of which led to clinical trials, others of which did not get funded,” he said. “I learned during this period that it is very hard to challenge the conventional thinking in the area of nutritional science. I came to understand just how perfectly the system is designed to protect the status quo.”

The ketogenic diet was likely the diet of hunter-gatherers for most of our existence on Earth, except possibly in tropical areas where fruit was available much of the year. It has been known since the early 1900s that nutritional ketosis occurred in many of the Inuit people living in the Arctic, in whom chronic disease was a rarity. Therefore, it is safe to presume that ketones have been part of a healthy human metabolism for millennia.

– Dr. Keith Runyan

Nevertheless, the popularity of
My Big Fat Diet
and other similar documentaries have helped to keep the momentum for examining ketosis going strong. When the funding from Health Canada eventually ended, Dr. Wortman said it’s likely “the office that produced the Canadian Food Guide was relieved.” He returned to clinical practice, where he offers his patients hope that ketosis can improve their health.

“One of the striking things I find in offering up the ketogenic diet to my patients is the incredibly positive feedback I get from the ones who have corrected their poor metabolic markers, lost weight, and greatly improved their general sense of well-being through this simple dietary approach,” Dr. Wortman noted. “It is not uncommon to see tears of gratitude from my patients. I have yet to see that ever happen after prescribing a drug.”

Many chronic symptoms and health conditions—such as fatigue, sleepiness, mood disorders, insomnia, gastroesophageal reflux disease, lipid disorders, high blood pressure, headaches (including migraines), gas, bloating, irritable bowel syndrome, joint inflammation, acne, and difficulty concentrating, to name a few—will improve on a ketogenic diet. Treating lifestyle conditions with lifestyle change such as this can make us a healthier and less drug-dependent country.

– Jackie Eberstein

These are just a few of the many medical professionals who understand the importance of ketogenic diets for their patients’ health.

But to experience all the health benefits of ketosis, you need to follow certain guidelines—restricting carbs, moderating protein, increasing fat intake, and testing ketone levels. We’ll explore each of these concepts much more extensively over the next few chapters.

Key Keto Clarity Concepts

• Plenty of doctors are prescribing ketogenic diets for their patients.
  
• Lifestyle changes should be the first treatment option.
  
• Low-carb, high-fat diets improve a variety of health markers.
  
• Low-fat diets have failed patients who have tried it.
  
• Ketogenic diets can reverse many chronic diseases.
  
• Ketones provide therapeutic health benefits; they’re not just an alternative fuel source.
  
• The ketogenic diet can improve health without prescription drugs.
  
• Doctors are not trained in using low-carb, high-fat diets with patients.
  
• Returning to a traditional hunter-gatherer diet can improve health.
  
• Nutritional research is intended to protect the status quo.