Keto Clarity: Your Definitive Guide to the Benefits of a Low-Carb, High-Fat Diet (8 page)

The point of sharing these formulas with you is to demonstrate the great similarity in the makeup of these molecules—they are all composed of the same elements (carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen), and they are all about the same size. This allows the body to use all of them as sources of energy. We shouldn’t fear one over the other. When you are a sugar-burner, your body uses glucose as the fuel molecule of choice to give you energy to function. But when you shift your body over to being a fat-burner instead, the fuel molecule of choice becomes ketones. Regardless of whether you are using glucose or ketones as the primary fuel, your body still burns other fuels, like fatty acids and alcohol.

So why do you want to reduce the amount of sugar that you burn and transition to a state of ketosis? What benefits do you get from using ketone bodies as your primary source of energy instead of glucose? That really is the million-dollar question. Once you understand why reducing sugar-burning and increasing ketosis can help with certain aspects of your health, you will want to pursue it wholeheartedly.

DOCTOR’S NOTE FROM DR. ERIC WESTMAN: It is not surprising that so much research has centered on glucose metabolism as opposed to ketone and fat metabolism. During the last hundred years or so, since the standards of modern research were developed, most people’s diets in the West have included carbohydrate, so it made practical sense to study the effects of carbohydrate and glucose.

Ben Greenfield, an elite triathlete who uses ketosis as a means for optimizing his athletic performance, says there are three primary reasons for entering a state of ketosis: 1) the metabolic superiority of fats as a fuel; 2) the mental enhancement that takes place with adequate ketone levels; and 3) the greater health and longevity that come from controlling blood sugar levels naturally in the presence of higher ketones.

Ketones are actually the preferred fuel source for the muscles, heart, liver, and brain. These vital organs do not handle carbohydrates very well; in fact, they become damaged when we consume too many carbs.

Ketones themselves are a great, and in many tissues—such as the brain—far better, fuel source than the alternative of glucose. I have always found beneficial answers to questions pertaining to health by studying the biology of aging. That is really how I became involved in treating diabetes with a high-fat diet. I became interested in type 2 diabetes as a model for accelerated aging. For over twenty years I have talked about the strong connection—perhaps even causation—between a high-fat, moderate-protein, very low-carbohydrate diet and slowing down the biological rate of aging.

– Dr. Ron Rosedale

Ketosis is also an excellent way to lose body fat. Ketones are merely a by-product of burning fat for fuel. In other words, burning fat generates ketones at the same time. When you are keto-adapted, you generate energy from both your body fat and dietary fat. However, when you consume excess carbohydrates, they turn into body fat, which cannot be easily accessed for fuel. This is why you want to be in a ketogenic state—it’s fat-burning nirvana, baby!

A low-carb, high-fat, ketogenic diet is a very powerful and highly effective fat-burning diet that’s especially useful for anyone who is overweight or obese. When I lost 180 pounds in 2004, most of the weight I dropped was in the form of body fat. My body was functioning very efficiently on fatty acids and ketone bodies because I wasn’t feeding it the high levels of carbohydrates that would have kept it working as a sugar-burner. In chapter 5, we’ll share more about how to determine what level of carbohydrate intake is best to get you into ketosis.

Weight issues tend to respond extremely well to a ketogenic approach, too. After all, it’s hard to become efficient at burning body fat if you’re busy burning sugar and starch all the time. Once those alternative fuels are out of the way, the body is more than happy to switch over to burning ketones and free fatty acids instead.

– Nora Gedgaudas

Here are some of the many health benefits that come from being in ketosis:

• Natural hunger and appetite control
  
• Effortless weight loss and maintenance
  
• Mental clarity
  
• Sounder, more restful sleep
  
• Normalized metabolic function
  
• Stabilized blood sugar and restored insulin sensitivity
  
• Lower inflammation levels
  
• Feelings of happiness and general well-being
  
• Lowered blood pressure
  
• Increased HDL (good) cholesterol
  
• Reduced triglycerides
  
• Lowered or eliminated small LDL particles (bad cholesterol)
  
• Ability to go twelve to twenty-four hours between meals
  
• Use of stored body fat as a fuel source
  
• Endless energy
  
• Eliminated heartburn
  
• Better fertility
  
• Prevention of traumatic brain injury
  
• Increased sex drive
  
• Improved immune system
  
• Slowed aging due to reduction in free radical production
  
• Improvements in blood chemistry
  
• Optimized cognitive function and improved memory
  
• Reduced acne breakouts and other skin conditions
  
• Heightened understanding of how foods affect your body
  
• Improvements in metabolic health markers
  
• Faster and better recovery from exercise
  
• Decreased anxiety and mood swings
  

I could go on and on, but I think you get the idea. Ketosis is something you may want to pursue if you are dealing with weight or health issues and you’re not getting the results you desire with your current strategy. Later on in the book, we will discuss various health conditions that are dramatically improved by a ketogenic diet, responding even better to it than to some of the best medications available. It’s exciting to think that you could see such amazing progress using nutrition rather than a drug.

I became interested in ketosis because I wanted to satisfy my own curiosity. I’d heard the anecdotes and they were compelling, but would it actually work in clinical practice, would it work for everybody, and how well? I wanted to help answer these questions for myself and the rest of the scientific community.

– Bryan Barksdale

So if ketosis is so desirable, then why has there been such deafening silence or even fierce negativity on the subject from health authorities? It really has received an undeserved negative reputation, which is especially unfortunate considering all the countless lives that it could improve. As with many things in life, it comes down to fear and a simple misunderstanding of what ketosis really means.

Part of the problem lies in the word
ketosis
itself, which closely resembles
ketoacidosis,
a medical term that’s used to describe a life-threatening condition in type 1 diabetics. Many doctors scoff at the idea of allowing one of their patients to get into a state of ketosis because they immediately think of all the negative side effects associated with ketoacidosis. This confusion may have allowed many patients to remain in a diseased state when they could have seen tremendous improvements in their health with the use of a ketogenic diet. It’s a sad reality that this kind of ignorance happens in the medical profession, with the very people we trust to be our purveyors of knowledge on health.

When I ask patients if they have ever heard of a ketogenic diet, the response is usually a blank stare. If someone is interested in trying this type of diet, they likely won’t get much help from their traditionally trained family physician. Most doctors have little training in nutrition, and their only exposure to ketosis is in dealing with diabetic patients and ketoacidosis. As a result, many physicians have an inherent bias against ketosis. That means that most people will need to become self-educated. I believe this book you are reading will go a long way in correcting this information void.

– Dr. Bill Wilson

One of my blog readers is a sixty-year-old man named Chris from Austin, Texas, who shared a story about what happened when he went to see his doctor after being on a ketogenic diet for a while. When he went in for a physical as required by his job, Chris gave a urine sample to the nurse, who discovered the presence of ketones and began lecturing him about how dangerous that was. Chris’s physician asked him if he was starving himself, but he explained he was eating a low-carb, high-fat diet. Upon hearing this, the doctor insisted Chris begin flushing the ketones out of his body immediately or else he would risk becoming diabetic. The doctor threatened to fail Chris on his physical if he did not comply.

“I was stunned,” Chris told me. The doctor was dead serious.

Thinking back on this encounter , it frustrated Chris that so many other patients who are also trying to use ketosis to improve their health are being discouraged by the very people who have been charged with helping them get better. “It just goes to show you how ignorant these doctors can be,” he said. “A simple misdiagnosis about ketones can wreak havoc with a person’s livelihood.” His doctor’s confusion regarding what the presence of ketones during a routine lab workup underscores one of the biggest obstacles facing people who want to go on a ketogenic diet.