Well saturated fat
story has been
very prevalent in the media lately because it's really been the cornerstone
of our dietary guidelines in the sense that we've advocated for lowering
saturated fat and been telling people for almost four decades now to reduce
the saturated fat in their diet with the intention to reduce risk for obesity and
diabetes and heart disease. However recent evidence has clearly indicated
that there is no association between dietary saturated fat and risk for heart
disease or diabetes and so we're rethinking this whole paradigm around
saturated fat and we've done some of the seminal work in our laboratory that has
linked the effects of saturated fat to the amount of carbohydrate in your diet.
And what's really important understand is it's not so much the dietary
saturated fat that we need to be concerned with, it's whether or not you're
accumulating saturated fat in your body and your membranes in your arteries
because if you do, that is associated with risk for heart disease, and it turns
out dietary saturated fat has little to do with how much saturated fat we store
it's actually the carbohydrate in our diet that's contributing to synthesis of
saturated fat in the body as well as storage in an accumulation of saturated
fat. So if you over consumed carbs then you put your body into a metabolic state
where you're more likely to store the saturated fat so it's really a story
more about carbohydrates than it is about saturated fat in the diet.
Hunger is
often a result of decreased energy supply to the brain and the brain is a
very energetically expensive organ. It burns about 600 K cals per day just
being a brain and that's primarily comes from glucose, or sugar, and if the brain
has any interruption in that supply of sugar to the brain it signals you to
want to eat, in particular eat carbohydrates and sugar, and so when
people go on a low-calorie low-fat diet they often don't have enough
carbohydrate coming in the diet to feed their brain. And that's why they that
low-fat low-calorie diets tend to fail long term despite even heroic amounts of
willpower. An alternative approach is if you restrict calories but also restrict
carbohydrate. The brain can adapt to using molecules called ketones which
accumulate on a low-carbohydrate low-calorie diet and in that case you
can restrict calories but the brain is actually well fed because ketones are
circulating at a very stable and sustainable level to feed the brain so
for many people restricting calories is better achieved by restricting
carbohydrates rather than restricting fat because it feeds the brain.
The term I prefer to use is a well formulated low-carbohydrate diet as opposed to in
practice what amounts to a casual approach to restricting carbohydrates
and I mean by that is requires more than just simply limiting potatoes and sugar
in your diet and other starches. Actually you need to understand how to manipulate
the fat quality the protein level in the diet as well as paying attention to
minerals and vitamins in terms of optimizing those nutrients as well. And so
whole science behind how to go about formulating a low-carbohydrate diet so
that it optimizes health and most important that it's sustainable
long-term.
The main
adaptation to a low-carbohydrate diet is that your body switches from relying on
carbohydrates for fuel you to using fat for fuel and that has a lot of
advantages associated with it- you sort of relieved yourself from this
dependency carbohydrate and instead train your cells in your body to use
your own body fat for fuel and also burn fat that you're eating, and this cellular
switch to fat for fuel makes it easier to lose weight, makes it easier to manage
many chronic health conditions like pre diabetes and diabetes and perhaps even
heart disease and cancer as well but fundamentally thats whats happening
yourselves or switching their fuel source over from carbs to fat.
Forty years we've been telling athletes that you need to consume high
carbohydrate diets and carbohydrate load before events in order to optimize
performance and interesting they were rethinking that entire paradigm now too
because of a wide range of athletes are switching from high carbohydrate diet
essentially abandoning the carbohydrate loading approach and instead it
adapting very low-carbohydrate high-fat moderate protein diet and these athletes
are not just finishing races, in many cases they're actually winning and in
some cases setting course records so in some ways we're almost rewriting
textbooks in terms of what we're learning about your metabolism and
high-level athletes and what their capabilities can be if they adapt to a
low-carbohydrate diet.
For individuals interested in adopting a low-carbohydrate lifestyle,
there there is wide variability between people and how they respond to a
low-carbohydrate diet and what level of carbohydrate restriction would be
appropriate for them but a good place to start is to actually measure your ketone
levels which is possible but at this point in time with with a finger stick
and using a typical glucometer that is adapted to measuring ketones instead of
glucose and so you have an immediate resolved if you will in terms of how
your body is responding to the current level of carbohydrate you're consuming
on average for most people to be in a state of ketosis requires consuming less
than approximately 50 grams per day but if you're relatively healthy and
exercising that number may be closer to 70 or 80 grams per day if you happen to
be a type 2 diabetic or someone who's profoundly insulin resistance that
number may be lower it thirty five or even thirty grams per day so there's no
real way to know unless you actually measure the result and that gives you
some feedback in order to adjust your carbohydrate intake
so it turns out that type 2 diabetics
who are the most carbohydrate intolerant respond the most favorably
to a low, well formulated ketogenic diet and it doesn't just prevent the disease,
in many existing type 2 diabetics you can put their disease into remission.
I don't like to use the term cure because of that you may not have cured
their insulin resistance but by measuring any signs or symptoms of
diabetes they would essentially not have the disease so it's a very very powerful
tool for managing and even reversing type 2 diabetes