Keto Diet vs Balanced Diet What's the Keto Diet?
What's a Balanced Diet?
Or could keto even be a balanced diet?
Coming right up.
(Logo with music) Someone everyone might have their opinion about what a balanced diet is,
but I am just going to introduce a definition of a balanced diet that I hope we all can
agree on for the purposes of what we are going to talk about today.
So A balanced diet by my definition is a diet that either maintains balance in the body
or restores balance to the body.
Most of what people are suffering from today is things like high blood pressure, obesity,
diabetes, insulin resistance, the modern degenerative diseases and they are all diseases of imbalance
. So if there is a diet that can restore that balance that would be the balanced diet.
Can we just agree on that?
Good.
If we want to maintain a balance in the body that can be very very different from trying
to restore balance to the body.
So what is a balanced diet?
Most of us have hear the word or heard the term thrown around very carelessly and usually
it means that we should eat something like the food pyramid.
That we should eat lots of grain and rice potato, and vegetables and meats and not so
much fat and so forth and we have sort of accepted without thinking about it that that
is the balanced diet because that is what has been recommended for the last 50 years
and that is what most people have been eating more or less in the range of for this last
century.
So we think that is balanced just because we familiar with it.
It seems normal it is what we ... if we go to a restaurant that we find on the menus
if we go to the stores that is whats on all the shelves.
but balanced again is not what we have been eating or what is recommended balanced is
what can bring the body back to balance.
What is an extreme diet?
A lot of the Keto, Atkins, Paleo they are all often seen as extreme diet because they
are different than the main stream or the standard or the balanced or the recommended
diet.
But we have to start thinking about where do humans come from.
How long have we been around?
What have we eaten for the most part?
And there is a huge variety in that.
That depending on where you live in the world if you were Aborigine in Australia if you
are an Eskimo up in the Arctic.
Or if you lived in some place in the Swiss Alps.
There is an enormous difference in the foods available, but people typically did really
well as long as they ate whole food.
So we have to think about something else here.
The difference between to maintain and restore.
If you are twenty years old and very active and you don't have insulin resistance then
you can maintain that balance not getting insulin resistance with quite a bit of carbohydrates.
If you have a wide range of food available to eat without disrupting that balance significantly.
But if you have had 10 or 20 years of sugar and you have packed your liver full of sugar
and fat and become insulin resistant then we want to think of that as you broke your
carbohydrate machine.
Your body has all these different systems to break down and process and burn and store
carbohydrates as fat but if you break it if you abuse that machine for a very long time
then it doesn't work any more and now the rules change.
You can't do the same things that you would do to maintain as you would to restore.
And I think this is the biggest problem with the standard official guidelines.
That even though a lot of young active people could maintain their health, could not develop
insulin resistance , if they are active and they eat a lot like that that rule doesn't
apply to people who have already developed insulin resistance.
And that is most of us.
If we look at the number of obese and over weight people and assuming that insulin resistance
has something to do with that which is most likely does then that is about 80% of the
population in the US.
And probably not too different in most Western countries.
Now we might have to do what is considered a little bit more extreme.
but the extreme might be the appropriate and the balanced thing for that person in that
situation.
So let's just go through here a few different principles.
So keto is typically considered a very low carb that is when you reduced the carbohydrates
so low that the body has to get adapted to an alternate fuel.
It has to start burning fat instead and if we do that for some period of time then the
body can start pulling fat out of the cells and can ease up the sugar and fat pressure
on the cells and liver and we can start cleaning out the system.
We can start using the fuel instead of just storing it.
And insulin is a storage hormone.
So any time we eat and insulin goes up we are storing something when we eat less carbs
or we go longer between meals we are using up the fuel and insulin can go down.
So keto is a very low carb diet.
So usually 10 to 50 grams of net carbs or 2% to 10% of calories from carbohydrates and
why is that range so large?
Because everyone is different.
Because we have different genetics we have different heritage different ethnicity, we
are different ages.
Some people might be teenagers others might be 60-70 years old the rules change.
If we are insulin resistant.
How insulin resistant are we.
Are we just a little bit?
That we can walk it off or are we extremely insulin resistant where we have to do a lot
of things right or extreme things for a period of time to reverse that?
How long have we been insulin resistant?
Just a few years or decades?
What is our activity level?
What's our ability to utilize the fuel?
And what's our body size.
Obviously a five foot person is going to have different energy requirements than a six foot
six person.
Keto is a very low carb diet that is so low in carbs that the body has to find a... develop
a alternate source of fuel.
It has to develop mechanisms to get the energy from fat instead.
And in terms of low carb obviously fasting is the lowest carb because that is when you
don't eat anything.
So if you can extend the periods of fasting in addition to doing a low carb diet than
that would increase the body's ability to reverse that insulin.
Low carb to a lot of people would be maybe 50 to 100 grams somewhere between 10-20% of
calories from carbohydrate.
And for some people that might even be enough to reverse their insulin resistance.
If they have a lot of these factors sort of in their favor they might go low carb and
still reverse their insulin resistance.
It is unlikely though if you have developed insulin resistance that you could reverse
it with the standard American diet (SAD).
That diet recommends 45-65% of carbohydrates of calories from carbohydrates somewhere between
250-350 grams per day.
And there are probably people who can maintain health at that level, but very very few people
if any can probably reverse significant insulin resistance or weight problems on that kind
of diet.
There are a lot of different cultures around the world and some people eat a lot of corn
and some people eat a lot of rice and they all seem to do relatively well until they
introduce sugar.
Because sugar is something that puts the insulin in turbo mode and in terms of getting the
liver clogged up and insulin resistance sugar is many many many times worse than any other
normally occurring carbohydrate.
So there are a lot of people a lot of populations that have eaten high carb diets without developing
insulin resistance because they did not have a lot of processed food and not a lot of sugar.
But again once you have broken the machine the rules change.
and we can't look at the people who are able to maintain a healthy level on high carb and
say look they are healthy on that diet therefore you should be able to be healthy on that diet.
It doesn't work that way.
So if you have very stubborn weight or diabetes then I would suggest that the balanced diet
for you is Ketogenic diet with intermittent fasting.
Some of you might get away with low carb and eating fewer meals just try it out and see
what works for you.
Once you have restored your balance Once you have returned to health and you are insulin
sensitive again.
Now you have a little more flexibility and now have some leeway.
You can probably introduce some potatoes and some rice and end up in the low carb range
here maybe you can or maybe you can't.
Okay?
These variables will determine that and you just have to keep and eye on it to see what
works for you.
If you lose weight and you feel healthy and your insulin resistance goes away and then
you start increasing the carbs and your A1c and your insulin goes up again then that wasn't
okay for you.
And chances are that if you have been insulin resistant that the standard American diet
will never be okay for you again.
Because once you have broken your machine even if you reverse it it is never the same
as what it was when you were a teenager.
What is the most appropriate diet.
I think that as humans if we have not broken our machine if we have not developed the insulin
resistance in the first place I think the healthiest diet is somewhere around low carb.
I believe that is what humans have been eating for most of the time that we have been here
on the planet and I do believe that that was seasonal.
That depending on where we live for the most part we did not have equal access to food
all around the years.
So I think we were some where between low carb and keto and fasting depending on what
was available.
So I believe that once you have... as long as your are insulin resistant you probably
want to do keto and fasting.
Once you have more normal levels I think that you want to go between low carb, keto and
fasting and alternate those to keep your body on its toes so to speak.
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