keto ketogenic ketosis what does that all mean is it just a fad or is it
something good and natural that we can do long term stay tuned and I'll explain
the basics hey I'm Dr. Sten Ekberg with wellness for life and by subscribing to
our channel you will learn everything that you need to know to master true
health. keto ketogenic ketosis there's nothing strange about it your body has a
few basic resources for fuel and one is carbohydrate which results in blood
sugar and another is fat that it can burn for fuel proteins can be used for
fuel but they're primarily building blocks so fat or carbohydrate that's
what we have to burn for fuel so the problem today is the people eat
way way way way way too much carbohydrate which creates insulin
responses and insulin resistance and diabetes and inflammation and obesity so
to counteract that we have energy from fats and now we can use different
amounts of fat versus carbohydrate if we use very very low amount of
carbohydrates the body gets more dependent on fat it gets better at
burning the fat now the brain uses primarily glucose which comes from
carbohydrate also known as blood sugar but if the blood sugar and starts
running a little bit low then the brain learns to depend on what's called ketone
bodies and ketone bodies are a byproduct of fat metabolism so if you eat a lot of
carbohydrates then your body doesn't have to rely on fat so much so it kind
of forgets how to use the fat and the reason that the carbs the blood sugar
gets burned first is that blood sugar needs to be maintained within a very
very narrow band a little bit too much is toxic a little bit too low
is also detrimental so the brain the body has all these defense mechanisms to
keep it within a very or narrow range that's why carbs get burned first but if
we start cutting back on the carbs now the brain has to start depending on fat
and it up regulates it changes the receptors it changes the metabolic
pathways it changes the enzymes so it can utilize the fat more efficiently and
this can be very very effective if you are having trouble with insulin
resistance or stubborn weight this idea has been around for a very long time
because before they had all these drugs for everything and people saw natural
solutions one of the main problems that they started addressing with diet was
kids with epilepsy and they found that they had about a 95 percent recovery
were remission or dramatic improvement if they put these kids on an extremely
high fat diet so why are you cutting down the carbohydrates way way way down
to less than 5 percent of of calories and having almost all the rest of it
from fat these kids brains did remarkably better so sugar is very toxic
for the brain so it's not just about the weight and and weight loss and so forth
it's about your overall health ketosis is a natural response from the body
during starvation and historically presumably during thousands or millions
of years there has been periods of starvation and during that time there's
very very little blood sugar available and for probably months at a time the
body has relied on fat and it has produced ketones and during those times
the brain relies primarily on ketone bodies for energy so ketosis is a very
natural thing and during starvation something else happens also that
it's very beneficial there's something called a toff adji which means that the
body gets better at cleaning up it gets better because it start kind of
cannibalizing itself to get resources for energy it starts breaking down fat
which most people would think is good and it starts breaking down protein
which most people think is not so good but at the same time it improves not
just the breakdown but it improves the cleanup it improves the ability to
recycle and clean out waste products so it's an excellent detoxification method
and also what starvation does is it increases dramatically your amount of
human growth hormone which is a rejuvenating rebuilding hormone so the
body has these different mechanisms it gets better at cleaning up when it has
to break things down but it also produces more growth hormone so it can
rebuild cells better and get more economical with the body's resources so
there's some debate whether this is a good thing for long-term or if it's
damaging overall what some people are afraid of is what medical doctors talk
about called diabetic ketoacidosis that's a pathological state in diabetes
when you have absolutely no ability to use your blood sugar your blood sugar
goes really high but there's no way to get it out of the blood and into the
cells now you are at the most extreme level of starvation because there's
nothing coming into the cells and in these situations the acidity from the
ketosis goes up dramatically but we're talking about something that can't
happen in a healthy person if you have any insulin and any ability to use that
blood sugar at all then your ketones are never going to get to that level so
diabetic that has gotten to that point it has he has hundreds or thousands of
times the ketones that a normal healthy person could ever get to no matter how
hard they tried and if we look at populations like maybe
the Eskimos they are relying for very long periods of time throughout the year
on primarily protein and fat and those people those populations will probably
run six months at a time on ketone metabolism and they have no ill effects
so what's more important is to understand we're gonna cover more in a
series on nutrition it's the quality of the food it's not just that you want to
look at how much fat and how much carbs we want to look at do the fats have are
they are they whole food are they come from a healthy animal because then they
have plenty of nutrition for your body to support it and some people think oh
well I have to go low carbs so they start putting in a bunch of artificial
sweeteners like aspartame and acesulfame and all that
now you're poisoning your body there's nothing good about that at all so we
have to keep understanding that even though we're making these changes it's
still about eating whole natural healthy food that comes from nature in a as
unspoiled as unprocessed state as possible so is this for everybody
I think everyone can benefit from doing it from time to time does everyone need
to do it probably not I certainly advocate low
carbs for most people because as a population 99% of us eat way way way too
many carbs but it doesn't mean that everyone has to go into ketosis it's not
gonna hurt you but I don't think you need to so the people who really really
could benefit from this are people who have trouble losing weight who know that
their insulin resistance who are diabetic or borderline diabetic these
people need to dramatically transform their metabolism they need to get a
little bit more extreme to get those those desired results if you have any
experience with this if you have any questions if you have any challenges let
me know and I'll be more than happy to try to address those
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