Keto Diet Part Three

Welcome to part three of the continuation BLOG on the Keto Diet, which is also applicable to any high fat, low carb diet. This BLOG will start addressing what the promoters of the Keto Diet say are the limitations of the diet.

Personally, I think that if you have to make exceptions for the use of your diet plan, it is not a good diet plan.

Any diet plan that is healthy should have no restrictions for its use.

With this in mind, let’s explore what the promoters of the Keto Diet have to say concerning "pitfalls" of the diet.

Of course, they are going to say that this is a great diet and the benefits outweigh the pitfalls. But why should a healthy diet have any pitfalls?

Promoter Pitfall: “During the first few weeks of the ketogenic diet, the body has to go through a ‘metabolic shift.’ While going through this shift, the body will experience a small degree of fatigue, brain fog, and even dehydration due to the increased water loss. Once the body gets used to manufacturing ketones as the main energy substrate, the body actually has more energy than it previously had, and you won't have to be fighting through all those low-blood-sugar crashes your high-carb meals previously gave you. Additionally, hydration should be an area of high priority, especially before, during, and after exercise.”

This is the Reality:

Your body is designed to function primarily on a carbohydrate diet.

• This does not mean living on an abundance of refined sugar that our society has become accustomed to.

• When you evaluate the food that "Mother Nature" provides, you will find that there is an abundance of carbohydrates (complex ones, not refined sugar) with proportional parts of fats, proteins, vitamins, and minerals needed for optimum physiological function.

  • I know that fruits can have a fair amount of simple sugars.

  • However, they come come with vitamins, minerals, etc. to process this sugar.

  • Therefore, they are not empty calories.

  • Since we are talking about the Keto Diet, that's all I'll say for now about fruit.

• Your body is also designed to function under differing nutritional intake states as an ideal diet is not always available.

  • This allows you to exist during times when food sources are limited or during times of famine.

  • This does not mean that forcing your body to function in one of these survival states is better than optimizing your nutrition using a balance of good nutritional sources which contain a significant amount of carbohydrates.

Your body does not maintain an excess of any metabolic components that it is capable of producing.

• This limits the volume of stored metabolic components and wasted resources.

• If you own a business, you would not maintain a large inventory of items that you never sell or utilize in your business. Doing so will decrease your ability to provide the inventory that is being sold or utilized, and subsequently could cause your business to fail.

• To keep your body functioning more efficiently, excess components are not maintained.

When you make this abrupt shift in the nutritional components that you are providing your body to function with, it takes it a few days to make the necessary metabolic shifts to handle the persistent ketotic state.

• Remember in the first BLOG, I said that your body does not maintain an excess amount of the molecules needed to carry out a persistent ketotic state, as it does not maintain an excess of any molecules that it does not regularly use.

• Thus the symptoms experienced during this transition or "metabolic shift."

• The statement that you will have more energy after this metabolic shift is just a fallacy.

  • The promoters even admit (in a later pitfall) that if you are doing something that requires a lot of quick energy production, you need to consume more carbohydrates to provide the energy for this high energy demand time. Really?!

• They also don’t mention that with a normal diet, your muscles absorb some of the excess glucose that you eat when insulin is being produced.

  • This provides energy that is stored as glycogen that must be used for muscle activity.

  • When you don’t eat sugar, without insulin, your muscles cannot absorb glucose being made by the liver and do not have a mechanism for manufacturing glucose.

  • Once your muscles have consumed their glycogen stores, they must rely on the ketones and aldehydes from fat metabolism that are present in your blood stream.

  • If you are vigorously working, they may not be able to absorb enough of these molecules to meet the energy demands of what you are doing.

    • Therefore, you experience fatigue.

• With dwindling sugar reserves in your liver, the brain relies on the sugar manufactured by the liver.

  • This amount of glucose may not be sufficient to fully supply your brain causing the “brain fog” that you experience.

The low-blood-sugar crashes that they are talking about are really a result of consuming too many simple carbohydrates and sugars.

• When you consume large amounts of these types of carbs, your body has to produce a lot of insulin to drive the excess sugar into fat cells, muscle cells and the liver.

• This keeps your blood sugar levels from getting too high which can cause injury to neural tissue.

• The sugar levels drop faster than the insulin gets broken down resulting in your blood sugar dropping to low normal levels or even a little lower resulting in the "low-blood-sugar crash" they are talking about.

  • This is more commonly known as an insulin downer.

  • Avoiding sugar and simple carbs, which are prevalent in highly processed foods, will avoid this insulin downer.

Your body removes excess ketones as high levels cause other issues, such as ketoacidosis.

• The ketones are excreted by the kidneys which draws a lot of water with them through an osmotic process.

  • You urinate a lot which can cause you to become dehydrated.

  • The same thing happens when your blood sugar is too high such as what diabetics experience.

  • Sugar that passes through the kidneys is excreted by the filtration system, but is then reabsorbed back into your circulation.

  • When blood sugar is too high, the kidneys cannot resorb the excess glucose which is excreted in the urine and draws a lot of water with it using the same osmotic process as with the ketones.

  • This makes the diabetic urinate a lot causing dehydration and thirst.

    • Thus the diabetic symptoms of drinking and urinating excessively when their blood sugar is too high.

• The main difference between high blood sugar and ketones is that ketones can cause kidney damage, which is another drawback of the high fat, high protein diets.

• They don't mention this.

I'm going to stop for now as I want to keep these BLOGs reasonably short. I will continue with the pitfalls in my next BLOG. If you have any comments or questions, please leave them in the comments section below, or send me an email to drmeline@ss-health.com. See you in the next BLOG.