Are vegan low-carb diets healthy or unhealthy? Coming right up.
Hey I'm Dr. Sten Ekberg with Wellness For Life and if you'd like to truly master
health by understanding how the body really works make sure that you
subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you don't miss anything. So this
video was requested by one of my viewers called Little Voice and she saw a video
by ask GojiMan and she asked is there any truth to all these claims? So let's
take a look. Our vegan low carb diets healthy or not (by Gojiman). Well we're not going to
talk so much about vegan or not but I'm gonna address these claims because
there's a lot of incorrect statements here claim number one the body is
designed to run on carbohydrates that your brain heart and liver prefers
glucose while the brain runs primarily on glucose when glucose is plenty it can
run as much as 75% on a fat by-product called ketones so that is an incorrect
statement heart prefers fat. If you don't eat enough good quality fat especially
saturated fat from a natural source then the body is forced to convert
carbohydrates into fat so that the heart can have its preferred fuel and most of
your other organs run from a mix of carbohydrate and fat in a stressful
situation they up regulate their their sugar use and in normal circumstances
they run more on fat so that is incorrect.
Claim number two glucose is converted into ATP therefore the body literally
runs on carbohydrate that is pure nonsense because everything that you eat
gets turned into ATP if your body can convert it into
energy at all it is because it turned it into ATP so fat protein and
carbohydrates all turn into ATP. ATP is adenosine triphosphate it's your body's
energy currency and one molecule of glucose can be turned into up to 38
units of ATP and the same holds true for protein fat however can be turned into
as much as a hundred and forty-six to 163 units of ATP so it's a much denser
much more efficient storage form of energy we can get much more energy out
of the fat than the glucose but either way it's going to be turned into ATP
before we can use it for energy so that does not mean that the body literally
runs on carbs claim number three fat and protein can be turned into glucose
through a process called gluconeogenesis this is true but the video says this
only happens if there aren't carbs available and this is not true a lot of
things there's hundreds or thousands of processes in the body that always happen
to some degree but the body adapts so depending on circumstances we up
regulate or down regulate it happens more or less but it's not an on or off
switch so again glucoeogenesis happens under
all circumstances
it does happen more obviously when carbs are low but it still happens on a
regular basis. Claim number four the World Health Organization recommends
that 60 to 70% of your calories come from carbohydrates and 10 to 15% should
come from protein and 20 to 30% should come from fat and he says that every
Health Organization is pretty much on the same page on this and this is true
that is what they recommend it doesn't make it a good idea these people are not
health experts they're not doctors they're not clinicians they're academics
they're administrators and they're politicians that's why they put them
high in organizations that's what they're good at they're not good at
health so I for one I'm not going to take my health advice from
administrators so it's a correct statement just not a wise one in my
opinion claim number five carbohydrates are the preferred fuel for the body and
therefore the body will only use fat and protein for energy when it's forced to
do so and also through the process of ketosis when carbohydrates are really
low and it is true that carbohydrates will be used first but in no way does
that mean that it's a preferred fuel it's the most dangerous thing there in
the body so it has to be gotten rid of as soon as possible so think about it
this way a good blood sugar level is somewhere between 80 to a hundred or 80
to 90 ideally milligrams of glucose per deciliter that means at any given time
the average person has four to five grams of glucose in their bloodstream
if that increases even just a little bit up to six and a half grams that's toxic
that's the level of a diabetic when your blood sugar gets up to that level you're
classified as a diabetic and if it gets even higher then you can have what
diabetics experience as a diabetic coma so sugar is very very toxic to the brain
and that's why it is so closely monitored and that's why it's so quickly
disposed of the blood sugar is always kept at a certain level and if you eat
fat it's gonna stay at a steady level if you eat carbohydrate it's gonna go up
and down up and down up and down creating an unstable supply and constant
rollercoaster swings with the reactive hypoglycemia as a very common problem
claim number six the body stores carbohydrates
therefore they are essential the body stores a lot of things it stars stores
fat protein and carbohydrate it starts the least carbohydrate because it's very
difficult it can only be stored as glycogen and the body is very limited to
how much glycogen it can store it will store a maximum about 2,000 calories of
glycogen but it can store hundreds of thousands of calories of fat even a lean
person like myself can store about has on the body about a hundred thousand
calories of fat but I cannot store any more than two thousand calories of
carbohydrate so that in no way makes carbohydrates essential claim number
seven the brain and the red blood cells use glucose only so this is half true
the brain we talked about it can run as much as 75% on
fad through ketones so that is incorrect but here is a correct statement the red
blood cells do only use glucose but it's never a problem because there's always
some blood glucose available but they don't need a whole lot because the red
blood cells are interesting little things they're very specialized during
their development they eject their nucleus so they don't have a lot of
stuff in them that needs energy to manufacture things they're transport
vehicles and their job is to transport oxygen not to use it if you have to use
anything else than sugar you have to use oxygen so that's a specialization that
the red blood cells have gone through so that they can deliver oxygen without
using it however they can only get about two units of ATP from a glucose molecule
instead of 38 if we want to get more than two we have to use the oxygen and
again the red blood cells job is to deliver oxygen not to use it up that's
why they only use glucose and they're the only cells that do that as far as I
know claim number eight there are two molecules of water associated with every
molecule of glycogen and it is true that glycogen is what we call hydrophilic it
attracts water it holds water to it like a sponge but it's incorrect that it's
two molecules to one molecule because glycogen is an enormous molecule it
holds tens of thousands of units to it so there's tens of thousands of
molecules of water per like a molecule not two so the two comes from the fact
that it holds about two to three times its weight in water claim number nine on
a low-carb diet you can lose weight initially
and you will lose six to ten pounds very quickly but it's all water there's some
truth to this because most of the weight loss in the beginning is water but
that's true for no matter what diet you go on it is not true that six to ten
pounds are due to the water loss from glycogen that is limited about three to
four pounds because you can only store about one pound of glycogen which holds
about two to three times its weight in water claim number 10 ketosis is only
normal if you're sick or starving this is not true
again there's thousands of processes going on in the body all the time and
they don't go on or off they go up or down and every night you do a little bit
of up regulation for ketosis everyone makes more ketones during the night so
it's a normal phenomenon and it's true there is more when we are sick or
starving because the body is very adaptive claim number eleven you may
lose weight with the ketogenic diet but he says it's all water loss and also he
says the weight loss is not sustainable because if you keep eating like that
then you're gonna gain the weight back so again I'm sorry all you guys who have
consistently lost weight over years and years that didn't really happen and we
do know that carbohydrates is a food that triggers insulin and insulin is a
fat storage hormone so we do know and there is an abundance of meta analysis
meta studies on this and there's a lot of clinical research and results as well
that the carbohydrates trigger insulin causes fat storage
and insulin resistance if you want to get out of that you reduce the carbs and
you fix the problem claim number twelve fat in the blood slows the blood flow
and thereby creates insulin resistance high cholesterol and cardiovascular
disease and this is really interesting because it's the blood sugar that turns
into fat triglycerides high triglycerides which is fat in the blood
is almost invariably caused by high blood sugar because if your insulin
resistance the blood sugar can't get out into the cell so the body has no choice
but to convert it into fat and now you have some of this happening but the
insulin resistance is a result of the carbohydrates not the fat and the high
cholesterol and the cardiovascular disease comes from inflammation which is
a result of insulin due to carbohydrates so end an incorrect statement claim
number thirteen these are all the reasons that the World Health
Organization recommends a high carb diet the main reason that they do that is
that they're politicians and there is something called lobbying the biggest
industry in the world is processed foods and they need to pack a bunch of starch
and sugar into their food and they have lobbyists who influence all these
politicians in the World Health Organization and any other health
organization that's why the Captain Crunch and the marshmallow cereals have
a heart-healthy symbol on them because there is lobbying activity claim number
fourteen low-carb and keto is not good in the long run it's not a long term
diet so the only way the longest term that I
can think of would be as long as Homo sapiens has been around then that would
be about 250,000 years there is probably most likely due to all the available
evidence we have probably had a whole lot better access to fat and protein
through the months of the year then we have vegetables and fruit and grain
grain is a new addition in the last 10,000 years so low carb and ketosis is
what humans have done for most of their existence so long term study would be
the 250,000 years that we have been around so again that is not a correct
statement so one thing that he said was that that I completely agree with that a
lot of confusion comes about from eating processed foods it's not so much whether
we can eat a certain potato or we can eat a certain thing but it's when we
turn the potato into a potato chip it is when we we process the food we destroy
the nutrients we change it around we still need to eat low carb but if we
eat whole food it's gonna be pretty much low carb and grains have not been part
of human diet for all of these years as far as the vegan aspect I don't want to
get into a whole lot of detail so this is not about vegan versus not but we
need to understand that some of the things that we do can be good short-term
and some can be good long-term so vegetables are cleansing they're
wonderful for a short period of time to clean out the body to cleanse the liver
to assist the body and getting rid of accumulated junk but it's not a
long-term plan it's not good for the long term because it doesn't have the
building blocks animal products have better quality building block
and they're more bioavailable they go more directly in in their natural form
in the body so we need both we need vegetables and we need animal
foods animal foods and vegetables in the long run for balance and lots and lots
of vegetables for periods of time as a cleanse so I hope that helps answer some
of these questions and these are important questions these are very very
common misunderstandings there's a lot of myths there's a lot of outright
misinformation so if you'd like me to do individual videos on some of these then
please let me know I'll probably do some anyway but if there's specific ones that
you'd like to know more about let me know and I'll do a short video on that
and expand on it if you're new to this channel and you enjoy this kind of
information where we talk about how things really work so that you can get
your as healthy as possible make sure that you subscribe and hit that
notification bell so that we can keep this content coming your way thanks for
watching