Keto diet and epilepsy let's take a little look at epilepsy and how the keto
diet actually got started most people probably don't know that the keto diet
originally was a treatment for epilepsy especially in kids and it had a
fantastic success rate it was the majority and then 90 percent range
got complete or almost complete resolution of their symptoms and that
was the case until they developed drugs and then they said oh you don't have to
keep eating all this fat we've got a simple pill and then you can eat
whatever you want now depending on your philosophy I don't think that's a great
idea because there's tons and tons of side effects with drugs and if you keep
eating all that sugar then you're creating other ill health effects as you
well know but let's just look take a quick look at what epilepsy is so
epilepsy is a spontaneous action potential it's a spontaneous
uncontrolled discharge of energy and signals from a cell so the brain signals
with electricity and it's supposed to do that in a controlled fashion so we have
something called a resting membrane potential that's the difference that's
the the lying down here that the voltage of the membrane is being pushed down so
that it's stabilized so it's harder for it to discharge it kept it like a spring
you load it up and you keep it far away from the place where where it discharges
so then when the brain wants to send a signal then it creates a chain of events
where it slowly increases the potential until it reaches a threshold and then
everything happens all at once it's a sudden action we're called an action
potential and that starts a propagation of a wave that becomes a brain signal
and then the brain slowly after this and slowly and slowly in relation to how
quickly it happens but it still happens that reset still happens in milliseconds
and then the brain brings it down below threshold and it pushes it down toward
the resting membrane potential so that it's stable until next time it's
supposed to fire off so there different things that can affect this resting
membrane potential and if it starts creeping up toward that point of
spontaneous discharge then we have an unstable membrane and that's what
happens in epilepsy when cells start firing uncontrollably and randomly so
the way that cells talk to each other is through synapses and when they do that
they either increase or decrease the resting membrane potential so this cell
over here has a synapse and it sends a signal to increase the resting membrane
potential meaning it's bringing it closer to threshold and it does that by
let's say 5 millivolts but at the same time this cell over here sends an
inhibitory signal it pushes the potential further down by minus 10
millivolts so the net effect is a minus 5 so even though there's two cells one
is bringing it trying to make it fire and one is trying to make it stop the
net effect is that this cell is stabilized and brought down so of course
in the brain there's a hundred billion brain cells and each brain cell makes on
average five to ten thousand connections so the complexity of how all these
networks are interacting and firing and stabilizing and turning off is just
immense when everything is working the brain does this on purpose but there's a
number of factors that can affect this and that can destabilize these membranes
so one is hereditary some people are have defects another one is trauma if
you've had kin Cushing's or head trauma and you've sort
of damaged some of the cells that might be inhibitory then you can have a
predisposition for for a lesser membrane potential minerals can be very very
important because the way that the membranes fire is through the influx and
outflux by transporting minerals metal ions like sodium and potassium and
calcium across this membrane magnesium also is important magnesium is calming
to people because it has a stabilizing effect on this membrane and finally the
reason we're bringing this up is that sugar can have a tremendous
destabilizing effect on this membrane so and there's a lot of different ideas on
why ketosis is so beneficial for the brain and so forth but if we just look
at at the very very most basic observation that it cured it reversed
the symptoms of the majority of epileptic kids so epilepsy is
instability of cell membranes if you cut out the sugar the symptoms go away so
that means the stability of the brain increases that alone should be enough of
an argument to eat a low-carb diet and we also know that a high glucose high
average glucose and a high a 1c produces a faster brain degeneration your brain
shrinks a little bit more a year-by-year the higher your blood sugar is so
there's a lot of different different observations to to support that one of
the most common misconceptions about the brain is people say you have to have
carbohydrates because the brain only runs on fuel they say and that's not
true it's almost true because the the brain is more restricted on fuel than
other body cells like your heart and your muscles they can run on a
variety of different fuels they can break down proteins into glucose they
can break they love fat the heart runs primarily on fat for energy the brain
can't use fat but it uses glucose and ketones and some people say that the
people in favor of or opposed to ketosis in favor of high carb they say that you
have to have carbs because the brain only runs on that and the brain will
always burn that first so that's why it prefers glucose and you can turn that
around and say well the glucose is dangerous for the brain so that's why it
burns it first because glucose in diabetics high blood sugar will put you
in a coma low blood sugar will put you in a coma stable blood sugar promotes
health and promotes brain function and that's the main thing that ketosis does
for the brain it stabilizes blood sugar it puts it at a very very stable level
it it hardly varies at all and once we cut the carbs enough once we
cut them back far enough then the brain can run about 75% on ketones and 25% on
glucose so when we cut the carbs back far enough when you cut them low enough
then the body will learn to burn fat better it will make ketones and ketones
become the backup fuel for the brain and it can use as much as 75% of the fuel
from ketones so when people say we have to eat carbohydrates because the brain
needs it that's a very very small portion you don't need a whole lot of
glucose and you don't have to worry about it because it if you eat enough
vegetables you're gonna get a few grams of carbs every day regardless so you're
going to get plenty of glucose for the brain to supply the last 25% of what the
brain needs and when you cut carbs down you're not
threatening your blood sugar level okay yes the brain needs some glucose but you
can never cut back far enough because the body has other ways of restoring
blood sugar and the best way to keep it really really stable the way the brain
loves it is to get into ketosis and make some ketones for the brain so like I
said way back the ketogenic diet started as a treatment for epilepsy in children
and back then they didn't know a whole lot about nutrition they didn't
understand ketosis very well they just knew that if you cut the carbs way back
try to get them down to zero then and and increase the fats then you could
reverse epilepsy but they didn't understand necessarily a whole lot about
the quality of fats they didn't understand much maybe about whole food
nutrition and they didn't understand that you could eat lots and lots of
vegetables and you could use tools like intermittent fasting which is perfectly
fine even in kids because if you stabilize blood sugar then you don't
need to eat like a hummingbird you don't need to top off your blood sugar every
couple hours because your body learns to balance out the energy supply over the
24 hours so you if you eat a couple of times a day that's plenty with
intermittent fasting and with vegetables and with whole food then you can turn
that into a very very healthy lifestyle and that was some of the arguments way
back and that's why it fell out of favor because people the the kids got tired of
the diet cuz it was really bland and they were almost chewing on butter
sticks basically and then drugs came around and they said look we've got the
pill now you can eat whatever you want so that's that's why it fell out of
favor and people sort of forgot about it until we had this epidemic of insulin
resistance and diabetes and obesity and now it became the primary tool for
weight loss and insulin resistance so the point though is stabilizing blood
doesn't just insulae reduce insulin resistance and obesity it's also good
for the brain it is good for your health and it is good for every organ in the
body if you do it right please share this video with as many people as you
can leave your comments and questions below if you have experience with this
please share so we can hear some success stories again thanks for watching