[Dom]: Your gut microbiome has an appetite for whatever you're feeding it and that probably
influences profoundly your own appetite.
So I think if you have sugar-eating gut microbes, you're probably going to be craving sugar
if you go a few hours without having sugar.
And I think I would be very interested in not only, like, shifting someone from a high-carb
diet to two or three different types of ketogenic diets, I think, would be important with specific
fatty acid compositions and fiber compositions.
And I think it's the diversity of the fiber that's incorporated.
[Rhonda]: Diversity, yes, it is very important.
There have been there's lots of different types of bacteria and they're eating different
precursors to generate a lot of these other signaling molecules, short chain fatty acids
and things like that that are regulating your immune system, that are regulating literally
hematopoiesis, Tregs, natural killer cells lots of...and this is a whole blooming field
of research.
That's also another reason I've been a little hesitant to experiment with this because I'm
so, fiber is so important for me, fiber from vegetables.
You know, I'm not adverse to fiber from fruits, so fiber from fruits, legumes, beans, like,
I like to get a lot of fiber in my diet, and so I don't know if that, is
that compatible with it?
[Dom]: I get more fiber on a ketogenic diet.
You know, and we're talking about a well-formulated ketogenic diet, as Jeff Volek likes to...
And because that is really important because you talk to people that you eat ketogenic
diets and it's all over the board.
But I think a well-formulated ketogenic diet would have an abundance of fiber sources,
everything from green vegetables, of course, but would include a salad, and I think it's
really important from a gut microbiome perspective to get in raw vegetables, I think, from what
I've known and a half-dozen individuals that I talk to that are, kind of experts in this
field.
They think that that has a pretty profound effect, and I have always done that and I
would say my gut health has not...
It may be due to what I eliminated in my diet.
I grew up in an Italian family eating a lot of pasta, bread, so they were the staple foods,
and I gravitated toward a Paleo diet mid-90s, early 2000s and then the ketogenic diet, and
I have never had better gut health than when on a ketogenic diet, but my diet is, like
I said, more of a modified Atkins and has a pretty liberal amount of vegetables in it.
And I think the benefit to including the vegetables, they're just carriers for the fat and they
also slow protein digestion, which helps minimize the insulin spike that you can get from protein
and helps keep me in ketosis.
But, I mean, getting back to your question about the ketogenic diet or high-fat diet
influencing endotoxin or factors, I would think that would show up in
the literature that if some, and maybe it does, but it usually, a high-fat diet is
in the context of a high-carbohydrate diet, too.
So that's what we don't know when we talk about LDL particles being elevated, like,
even skyrocketed, LDL, little peak.
That is only understood in the context of a high-fat diet, which also includes also
sugar like a western diet.
So we don't yet understand lipidomics and the shifts in lipid profile of the ketogenic
diet, LDL(p), specifically, we don't understand it in the context of ketoadaptation.
[Rhonda]: Okay, what's that?
[Dom]: Ketoadaptation, I would, it's, kind of, a term that Jeff Volek and Stephen Phinney
coined, but I think it's very descriptive in my mind as a physiological process when
your body has adapted to using fatty acids and ketones for fuel where you've biochemically
and physiologically shifted your metabolism from burning glucose as the primary fuel to
burning glucose and also equal or maybe more, in some cases, ketone bodies primarily from
your central nervous system.
So when that happens, that's acutely, you get an elevation of blood ketones and over
time, what you do is get an upregulation of the transport mechanism so your ability to
make ketones, utilize ketones, and metabolize ketones in
the cell is dramatically increased as
is
the oxidative capacity of
your cells.
[Rhonda]: After
you start making more ketones.
[Dom]: After, yeah.
It's, sort of, driven by being in a state of ketosis enhances fat oxidation over time.
So when we say ketoadaptation, we should probably say keto and fat adaptation.
So there's studies out there that show our metabolic physiology changes pretty profoundly
from eating this.
We basically, we burn what we eat, right?
So with a high-carbohydrate diet, we are pretty much burning that as fuel and our bodies can
adapt remarkably well to burning a macronutrient profile that's reflective of the ketogenic
diet.
And when we do that, a lot of really remarkable, beneficial metabolic processes happen including
mitochondrial biogenesis, reduction of ROS, reduction of inflammation, a reduction of
specific inflammatory cytokines that may be associated with with age-related chronic diseases
are reduced.