Keto Clarity: Your Definitive Guide to the Benefits of a Low-Carb, High-Fat Diet (18 page)

There is a big difference between a ketogenic diet in which the fats consumed are coming from soybean and canola oil and one in which they’re coming from butter and coconut oil.

– Dr. Zeeshan Arain

If we were to eat at a restaurant together, you’d very quickly see how serious I am about getting quality fat in my meals. One of the first questions I ask the server before ordering any food is whether or not they have real butter. Sometimes the server will give me a funny look that reveals she has no idea what I’m talking about, and other times we’re 100 percent on the same page. Butter in restaurants can be anything from real butter (cream and salt) to a blend of butter and vegetable oil (cream, salt, and soybean or canola oil) to margarine (soybean or canola oil).

Once I ascertain that they have genuine butter, my next statement tends to make the server’s eyes completely bug out:
“Bring me more butter than you’ve ever brought any one human being in your life!”
Sometimes they think I’m joking, but my wife, Christine, will usually chime in, “He’s not kidding.” It’s always an interesting experiment in human behavior and societal constructs to see how this request is interpreted by the servers. I’ve received as little as two pats of butter all the way up to sixteen pats of butter, at the famous locally sourced restaurant 24 Diner in Austin, Texas. (Yes, I ate it all with my food!) You should see the reaction I get when people watch me eat a bite of butter with nearly every bite of food. In fact, they should give me my own reality show with cameras following me around and showing how people react to my butter consumption!

Keep carbs low
Eat more fat
Test ketones often
Overdoing protein is bad

DOCTOR’S NOTE FROM DR. ERIC WESTMAN: I can vouch for Jimmy’s high-fat eating habits. On a visit to Durham, North Carolina, during the writing of this book, we went out to lunch at a restaurant called Dain’s, where he ordered a menu item called the “Defibrillator” (another nod toward the mistaken notion that eating fat causes heart disease), a bunless bacon cheeseburger topped with a hot dog and chili. Jimmy ate a bit of butter with every bite.

Can someone please tell me why restaurants are so willing to accommodate their customers who want low-fat, vegetarian, and even gluten-free options, but they can’t do the same thing for people on a low-carb, high-fat, ketogenic diet? Maybe someday an ambitious restaurant chain will create a keto menu full of delicious, full-fat dishes. Or maybe they will give you the ability to “cut the carbs and double the fat” in any given meal to help make it more ketogenic. This might sound crazy right now, but why not meet the needs of your customer base? It certainly wouldn’t hurt if we all contacted our favorite restaurants and asked them to provide more low-carb, high-fat menu items.

Inadequate fat intake is an obvious way to thwart ketosis. Fat should make up at least 50 percent of your diet, but this percentage can go much higher for many people.

– Dr. Bill Wilson

Make no mistake about it—a ketogenic diet is a fatty diet! Why is consuming more fat, especially saturated fat (found in butter, meat, cheese, and similar whole foods, for example), such an important part of a ketogenic diet? While you may not need to eat a bite of butter with every morsel of food you put in your mouth, dietary fat is an integral part of a healthy diet and the final piece to the nutritional puzzle of what it takes to produce adequate ketones. When you cut down on your carbohydrate consumption and moderate your protein intake, you need to replace the carbohydrate and protein with something. And that something is the only thing that is left—dietary fat. Eat the amount of carbs and protein that you’ve determined through trial and error is right for you, and then eat fat until the hunger is gone—in other words, to satiety. Fat intake is the ultimate key to feeling full.

I can already hear some of you saying, “But isn’t eating all that fat going to raise my cholesterol and clog my arteries, leading to a heart attack?” That is the prevailing message we have heard ad nauseum for most of our lives, and it doesn’t help matters when pop culture reinforces the notion that there is something wrong with consuming fat. Take, for example, a couple of episodes of the hit CBS TV show
The Big Bang Theory.
In one, the character Bernadette orders a nonfat yogurt but gets the full-fat version instead. Her reaction? “This isn’t a nonfat yogurt, this is fatty-fat-fat!”—implying that the fat in it is somehow bad. And in another episode, Bernadette, who is a waitress at The Cheesecake Factory, plots revenge against a friend’s ex and his new girlfriend: “If she orders something low-fat, I’ll totally give her the full-fat version.” The very clear implication is that fat would harm her in some way. I can’t help but roll my eyes whenever I see this kind of erroneous message in our mainstream culture, knowing that it just reinforces the lies and distortions regarding dietary fat and that viewers are like lemmings, nodding in agreement.

One of the most frequent roadblocks to ketosis is trying to do low-carb
and
low-fat. [In Dr. Atkins’ clinic] it was sometimes difficult to get patients to eat natural fat because of their fear of it. Some expected to have a heart attack after the first serving of full-fat cheese. Once patients experience the ease with which they can lose weight with fewer cravings and manageable hunger and they see their cardiovascular lab values improve, they tend to relax.

– Jackie Eberstein

Let me encourage you to pick up a copy of our previous book,
Cholesterol Clarity,
to learn the truth about the connection between saturated fat, cholesterol, and heart disease. The prevailing wisdom on this subject is already beginning to change among medical and health professionals around the world. Cracks in the once-indomitable armor of the anti–saturated fat message are beginning to appear, and it’s only a matter of time before it starts to crumble and fall. Learn more about why saturated fat is good for you in the blockbuster 2014 book
The Big Fat Surprise,
by Nina Teicholz.

DOCTOR’S NOTE FROM DR. ERIC WESTMAN: Richard Veech, one of the world’s experts on ketones, said, “If I had a heart attack, I [would] want to be given intravenous ketones.” Several animal studies have shown that ketones improve heart function during periods of low blood supply or during a heart attack.

In October 2013, a cardiologist named Dr. Aseem Malhotra wrote an earth-shattering commentary in the prestigious
British Medical Journal
defending the consumption of foods containing saturated fat such as butter, cheese, and red meat and putting the blame for chronic health problems such as heart disease directly on the real culprits—sugar, fast food, baked goods, and fake fats like margarine. He notes that a low-fat diet and food products that use “low-fat” as a health claim on their packaging are generally loaded with sugar. Dr. Malhotra sounded the alarm about how deeply misled we have been about the role of fat in the diet. But he’s not alone.

In the May 1, 2013, issue of the journal
American Society for Nutrition,
Long Island University biochemistry professor Dr. Glen Lawrence states that blaming dietary fat for health calamities like obesity and heart disease is completely unfounded. Dr. Lawrence says we need a “rational reevaluation of existing dietary recommendations” regarding the role of saturated fat in the diet, along with a closer examination of the highly inflammatory properties of so-called healthy oils like the polyunsaturated fats (canola oil, soybean oil, and so on). While many self-proclaimed health experts boldly state that saturated fat is harmful to health, Dr. Lawrence contends that there hasn’t been any evidence that isolates the role saturated fat plays from other factors. He concludes that we need “to use a more holistic approach to dietary policy.” Absolutely!

And finally, a story on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” by Allison Aubrey that aired February 12, 2014, entitled “The Full-Fat Paradox: Whole Milk May Keep Us Lean,” revealed that the truth about dietary fat isn’t what we we’ve been told. Aubrey cites a study in the
Scandinavian
Journal of Primary Health Care
that found that men who ate a diet rich in butter, cream, and other high-fat dairy had a significantly lower likelihood of becoming obese compared to men who did not eat dairy. She also noted that a meta-analysis (a detailed examination of multiple research papers that looks for patterns in the data) published in the
European Journal of Nutrition
found that there is no evidence that high-fat dairy foods contribute to a risk of obesity or heart disease, and in fact that eating high-fat dairy was associated with a lower risk of obesity. This goes against everything we have been told about the role fat plays in our diet. And yet stories like this one indicate that the tide is beginning to turn when it comes to the perception of dietary fat’s role in a healthy lifestyle.