Keto diet and longevity. So most people realize that keto is great for burning
fat and losing weight but then they hear on the other side a lot of opponents
claiming that the body needs carbohydrate and if you cut it out too
extremely you won't live as long and it's unhealthy and side-effects and so
forth so let's take a really close look at the mechanisms and what's really
going on here. So there's a lot of studies out but one review study I found
which was interesting was ketone bodies mimic the lifespan extending properties
of caloric restriction so back in 1935 they found out that rats lived longer if
you fed them less so they reduced their diet they reduced their caloric intake
basically starved them by feeding them 30 to 50 percent less than a normal rat
would eat and they found when they did that continuously then the average
lifespan of the rat went from 500 days to 820 days so about a 60% increase in
longevity and ever since then there has been this association between calorie
restriction and longevity and they've been able to duplicate this in a number
of different species so it's not just like rats they've done it with tiny tiny
things like yeast or nematodes or fruit flies but they also done it with mice
and primates so what is it about calorie restriction that makes you live longer
that's what they try to figure out and they had different theories maybe it's
that the cells turn over slower there's less wear and tear maybe it's that the
body fat is reduced when you starve the rats
maybe the fat is so bad that it it's to sit on your body that it it does bad
things and makes you live shorter maybe it's the inflammation because we all
know inflammation is is bad and starving reduces overall inflammation may be body
temperature because once you restrict once you starve it the body thinks I
don't have as much to burn so I better conserve it and turn down the furnace I
can last a little longer or insulin they've noticed that a lot of these
things seem to do with insulin so let's look at insulin just a little bit closer
and realize that insulin is what they call a mitogenic hormone what that means
is it increases mitosis and mitosis is cell division or cell replication so
anytime a cell makes a copy of itself then it divides one time and they found
that you only have so many copies available it's called a hayflick limit
and it's tied in to longevity and telomeres and so forth which is a
genetic marker of how long you can live based on these cell divisions and we
found that insulin increases the turnover rate it increases the rate at
which cells make copies so that can be good in terms of of growth or repair but
it can be really really bad because it also increases cancer because it makes
the cancer cells turnover and replicate faster too and it's been associated with
atherosclerosis because it makes the first of all it increases inflammation
and a lot of the plaquing is in response to that but it's also been shown to
increase the formation of the a thoroughness of the atherosclerosis
which leads to heart disease and of course it's been linked to aging because
insulin if it tends makes the cells turnover faster then it increases the
rate of aging so when we look back because they could never quite figure
out which one of these is it but once we look at this we realize that insulin has
to do with virtually every single one of them because insulin increases the
turnover insulin is a fat storing hormone insulin is inflammatory
increases inflammation body temperature I don't know if
that would be directly linked specifically to insulin and of course
the insulin is linked to insulin so most of the reasons for the mechanism is tied
to insulin so what happens when we storm the rats well there's two things that
always go together first is that we reduce insulin because insulin is there
to process carbohydrates and when you eat less
you're gonna eat less carbohydrates there's less need for insulin you're
also going to increase ketones so these always go together insulin and
less insulin and more ketones they always go together
and it is always healthy it's always favorable except in one case and that is
in type 1 diabetes when the insulin goes to zero and then the ketones go sky-high
which is a pathologic disease condition as long as you have the ability to make
some insulin then it is healthy to increase the ketones and there's
different ways to increase the ketones so we know it happens in starvation or
in fasting which is prolonged periods of not eating whether it's voluntary or
involuntary fasting is generally considered voluntary and starvation's
considered involuntary exercise will increase ketones and low carb diets with
increased ketones so the question then becomes which one is it that produces
the beneficial results is it less insulin or is it more ketones and we
don't have a clear answer on this but we don't really have to worry about it
because one always follows the other so if we get one we always get the other
they both seem to have tremendous benefits to themselves if we reduce
insulin we reduced 95% of all degenerative disease when we increase
ketones we tend to get certain observable benefits as well we
can treat various different conditions with it
we know obesity and diabetes improve with ketosis
but they've also found a lot of other neurological conditions that have pretty
much been resistant or they didn't get any results at all until they tried
ketones and things like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and ALS really severe
neurological diseases tend to get better with more ketones one more thing that
ketones do is they're metabolized differently inside the cell inside your
cell you have mitochondria which produce most of the energy for you the vast
majority of all energy used is in the mitochondria and they have different
pathways and it turns out the ketones go through a more efficient pathway they
can bypass a step or two and therefore they can produce more ATP or more of
your energy currency per unit of oxygen so it's more efficient and it produces
less damage less oxidative damage by burning ketones and burning other
sources of fuel and one thing we have to realize which this is my opinion based
on a bigger perspective and a way of observing things naturally is you don't
improve all these different conditions you can't improve such a wide variety of
condition by making someone less healthy so the biggest detractor for the
opponents the biggest argument is that sure it helps for for obesity and
diabetes but we don't know the long-term effects we it's it's bad for this or you
have to have carbs or fat is is bad and they're pulling these statements but
they can't really put the picture together but the one picture I want to
keep in mind is if it brings together if you'd improve such a wide variety of
conditions then it's not a bad thing So ever since
1935 when they first figured this out the calorie restriction has been a huge
topic it's been something that people say oh yeah if only I could do that
if only I could restrict my calories for the rest of my life then I would live a
whole lot longer but the problem is when you starve yourself then unless you want
to be a rat and they put you in a cage and just feed you half of what you want
to eat you're not going to be able to keep it up because hunger doesn't feel
good the vast majority of people are not going to be able to keep it up so we
know that calorie restriction improves insulin and ketosis reduces insulin
increases ketones but you get hungry so wouldn't it be nice if there was a way
that you could reduce insulin and increase ketones without going hungry
and I know I've heard about something I think there's there's something I've I
heard that could do that but no wait wait here it's coming to me oh yeah
the ketogenic diet that's what it is because when people do that they reduce
insulin they increase ketones but they don't go hungry and this is not
so easy to understand for people who haven't tried it but once you try then
you notice that your body wants fewer meals because fat is very satisfying
then you can go longer between meals so in the end you end up eating a little
bit less maybe not less calories probably a little bit but maybe not but
the main thing you get is reduced insulin and increased ketones so you get
these anti-aging benefits you get all these health benefits because it is
primarily about the insulin and possibly some about the key
but it's certainly not about the calories the reducing of the calories
only results in changed insulin and ketones it's not the calories per se so
please share this video with anyone that you care about because we want to get as
many people as possible healthy we want to help people understand the true
principles the true mechanisms around health not just memorize a laundry list
of things to do because that's short-lived but once we understand the
mechanisms the big picture then we can start creating a long term healthy
lifestyle so leave your comments and questions below and thanks for watching