health q & a | your health questions answered
By Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS
UNDERSTANDING THE KETO DIET
Q:
Everyone is talking about this new keto diet. What is it? And should I try it?
A:
Let’s just get this out of the way, shall we? The keto diet is a high-fat diet. Those who advocate for ketogenic (keto) diets basically suggest that we reject the dietary guidelines of the past 40 years and embrace fat—yes fat, the one macronutrient we’ve been trying to avoid for decades. They’re suggesting that we turn the conventional wisdom about high-carb, low-fat diets on its proverbial ear. They’re telling us that the foods we were taught were great—cereals, breads, whole wheat pasta—are actually not, while the foods we were told were not good—animal products and fats—actually are.
WHAT IS KETOSIS? First, some definitions. The “keto” in ketogenic refers to ketones (also known as ketone bodies), which are a byproduct of fat metabolism. When lots of ketones show up in your urine, you can be pretty sure you’re burning fat, because that’s where ketones come from. Ketones are a wonderful metabolic fuel for the heart, the brain, and the muscles. Your body makes ketones all the time; it just doesn’t make that many of them, since it has plenty of glucose (sugar) around to use for primary fuel. 28
— Z. Lawson, Phoenix
And that is the real purpose of the ketogenic diet in a nutshell: to get you to burn fat, rather healthy tip! than sugar. On the keto diet, Here’s how consume high-quality it works. When fats such as coconut you go on a oil, grass-fed butter, very low carb just weren’t on ghee, MCT oil, or avocado oil. diet—restricting the caveman carbs to 20–50 menu. Cavemen grams a day—your would have had to body’s supply of constant become efficient fat-burners glucose (from carbs) is suddenly just to survive. cut off. Since there’s less sugar Even keto diet books aren’t in the bloodstream to fuel your new. The first commercial keto muscles, your body turns up the diet, called “Letter on Corpuketone-production machinery, lence,” was published in 1863 burning more fat and making by an obese English undertaker more ketones. When the ketones named William Banting, who in your blood, urine, or breath lost 52 pounds in about seven rise to a certain level, you’re months eating mostly meat and said to be in nutritional fat. And, of course, Dr. Robert ketosis. A diet that generates Atkins introduced ketosis to that amount of ketones is America as part of his original known as a ketogenic diet. Atkins Diet in 1972. Atkins found that nutritional ketosis forced his most stubbornly obese A FAD DIET? patients to start burning fat. In The keto diet isn’t all that the absence of carbohydrate, new—it’s been around since their bodies had no other choice. the beginning of humanity. So for many people—though Dr. David Perlmutter, the certainly not all—the results of integrative neurologist, says that ketosis is the original—and most being in nutritional ketosis can feel a little like a miracle. optimal—state of metabolism. High-fat, low-carb diets were It’s almost certain that our the standard recommended hunter-gather ancestors spent medical treatment for obesity most of their time in ketosis, (and diabetes) in the first half of since carbs (as we know them)
the 20th century, but they fell out of favor beginning around the 1950s and 1960s. Dietary fat suffered a reversal of fortune in the public eye and was gradually demonized. It, along with cholesterol, was blamed for heart disease and tied to obesity. Health organizations began recommending low-fat (high-carb) diets, a move that ultimately led to the Dietary Guidelines and the antifat recommendations we’ve been living with for the better part of 40 years. And we all know how that’s worked out.
BECOME A BETTER BUTTER BURNER One of the main reasons the ketogenic diet is so popular today is that it literally causes your body to switch from sugarburning to fat-burning. Which is great, when you think about it. Your body only can store about 1,800 calories of glycogen, the storage form of carbs. But you can store about 80 gazillion calories of fat. So if you could
FALL 2018 | AMAZING WELLNESS
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