Hey this video is a comment on Dr. Mike on diets where he did a diet review on
ketogenic diets. It was a great video I really enjoyed it very clear very well
organized I just felt that perspective was a little bit limited and a lot of
the comments indicated that people don't really understand this still so I just
wanted to broaden the perspective a little bit. Coming right up.
Hey I'm Dr. Ekberg with Wellness For Life and if you'd like to truly master
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Ketogenic diets is one of the hottest topics around a lot of people have an
opinion but to this day a lot of people still don't understand a whole lot about
it. What it is or how it fits into human physiology or what's the historical
perspective is it a natural thing etc. So we want to understand that the ketogenic
diet it's just part it's it's on a spectrum
if we look at carbohydrate consumption as going from extreme as in the standard
American diet down to low carbs to ketogenic and to intermittent fasting
and fasting. This is really just extreme ridiculous amounts of carbohydrate
versus more normal versus restricted levels to reverse conditions so standard
American diet people eat about 3 400 grams of carbs per day a low-carb would
be about 60 to 80 grams and if you cut that back enough so that the body
doesn't have enough carbohydrates to always burn them first then the body
will learn to develop an alternate fuel it will learn to access fat and as it
breaks down fat some of those byproducts are called ketone bodies and when we cut
the carbs way way back the brain can use as much as 50 to 75 percent of its
energy from ketone bodies so a lot of people say that Oh well the brain
to have glucose it runs only on glucose that's not true the brain is designed to
run on glucose or ketone bodies and it just depends on what phase of
carbohydrate consumption were in historically this has been a important
survival tool because if there is no food around for a week then we go into
starvation we go into fasting no carbohydrates we need something else so
humans have done this for since we long as we've been around basically so Dr.
Mike did a great review of what it is and and so forth, but then I wanted to
kind of elaborate just a little bit on a few points because his he said that it
was proven for weight loss and diabetes type 2 and epilepsy and he said that's
great so for those things go ahead and then he said that there wasn't really
much evidence for it working with anything else well that's kind of a
medical perspective that's looking at diseases as individual entities but once
we understand that insulin resistance is linked to every degenerative condition
there is there is virtually no disease and I'm sure you can find one exception
somewhere but the vast majority way way over 90 percent of diseases that we die
from and suffer from and spend money on in our healthcare system which is a
disease and symptom management system depend on insulin resistance and this is
just a scale and based on physiology we understand that if this is creating the
problem then reducing this is going to resolve a lot of the problems and
clinically this is what we see so we'll come back to the to the research part
one more benefit and if you want to talk research then of course it's this fairly
new but there was a Nobel price in 2016 awarded to a person who proved the
mechanics of autophagy and autophagy is a clean up
and recycling process that's been proven to be beneficial in all sorts of
different conditions so in addition to insulin resistance if we combine the
fact that we're reducing insulin resistance with the fact that we can
produce some autophagy down in the states of ketogenic diet and even more
so in the intermittent fasting now we understand that even though the research
isn't there yet this may be the simple single most powerful tool and concept
that we have to reverse all kinds of diseases one of the drawbacks Dr. Mike
mentioned was that the potential harm of giving up large food groups so this is a
little bit a little bit too narrow-minded this means you don't
really understand nutrition especially historically the only food group that
you're giving up is grains and starchy carbohydrates that's the only food group
that you're giving up and humans have not had that food long enough to become
dependent on it for most of human history we haven't even had that food
group so that argument doesn't really have any bearing whatsoever he did say
though that some people develop side effects and they get what's called a
keto flu and we want to understand that there's more to this than just eating a
ton of fat and cutting out carbohydrates because it still needs to be quality
food and the other reason that people develop side effects is that the more
toxic and the more degenerated and the more sugar dependent you are the more
withdrawal symptoms sugar is a drug so first when you give up a drug you will
have a reaction there's just no way about it heroin has reactions of
withdrawal and so does sugar and the peeps um people have tried this can
attest to how difficult can be because sugar is a drug and the
other part is toxicity everything that the body gets used to become sort of a
status quo and anytime that you change it you will have a reaction anyone in
clinical practice that works with changing diets and changing lifestyle is
going to observe this so that's that's not news it doesn't mean that there's
something bad it means that there's a healing crisis there's something that
you have to get through before the body is used to the new lifestyle he said
that he would not recommend it for the majority of patients because it was too
hard it was too restrictive you would have to drastically change your food
habits and that's one point of view but again if we look at how well are we
doing as a nation we spend three point two trillion dollars on health care we
have the sickest people on the planet and our diabetes and our obesity is
through the roof it's exponential it's not even under any sort of control so we
have to ask how well are we doing with what we're currently doing and then we
want to ask if we want to change it then maybe it's going to be a little bit hard
maybe we have to wake up and understand that if you go through a grocery store
and there is 20,000 shelf items then all but 200 are modern all but 200 are grain
and sugar and processed foods and chemicals and artificial flavors and
artificial sweeteners and artificial colors and the list goes on and on and
on so sure it's gonna be a bit of a change but are we worth it as a species
or are we just gonna say oh it's too hard and possible side effects we kind
of talked about that they're not really side effects they're just transitions
and then he says that there's a lack of research and I'm all in favor of
research I think we should research things I think we should understand as
much as we possibly can about research about every phenomena that we're studying so
research is great but we can't wait for the research we have to look at clinical
results and we look-- have to look at what humans have done historically and
we have to look at physiological principles and then if the research can
fill in the gaps afterwards that's great but if they can't it doesn't mean that
we don't do the things that make sense and what makes sense again if you go
through a grocery store and you think that food is whatever is on the Shelf
then maybe a ketogenic diet isn't going to make sense maybe it's going to seem
too extreme but if you understand that there's nothing in that grocery store
that existed ten thousand years ago then it's not so extreme the ketogenic diet
is not the extreme part the extreme part is what have we done to our lifestyle
what have we done to our food supply our food chain our environment in the last
50 to 100 years that's the extreme part and it's it's unfortunate but somewhere
we have to kind of wake up and do something the other thing about research
is we have to ask who's going to pay for the research so the vast majority of
research is paid for most of the medical organizations most of the government
agencies their major contributors are pharmaceutical companies and processed
food industries and neither of those entities have anything to gain from you
eating natural food and getting healthy there's about and another part of the
research thing is not only who pays for it but how much is going to get
published so there is a rule I call the 90/10 rule that says basically 90% of
research is going to be published if it's favorable
to whoever paid for the study and 10% is gonna be published if it's not favorable
so there's a huge discrepancy in what research not only gets done but what
gets published so we don't really know what's going on and long term what are
the long-term effects well if we really honestly look back and if we study human
populations that have been around for tens of thousands of years we have
plenty of cultures there's been tribes in Africa who eat nothing but meat and
and blood and milk we have that's a very very low carb that's basically a
ketogenic diet we've had Eskimos the Inuit that have lived for as long as
they have existed on basically a ketogenic diet year-round they have no
long-term health issues they have no cardiovascular disease they have no
major health issues so I just wanted to add my my perspective on things I have
been on either a low-carb or a ketogenic diet for the last five years I'm not
overweight I don't do it for those reasons I do it because carbohydrates
create disease and today we have a population depending on how you define
insulin resistance by the strict medical definition we have maybe 50 60 % of the
population being insulin resistant but if you start looking at how many people
are not at optimum levels of insulin and insulin sensitivity if your A1c starts
to creep up in the 5.4 5.5 range we have basically 80-90 % of the population here
is insulin resistant and that is what's driving all the generative disease
everything that they talk about with cardiovascular disease and stroke and
diabetes and metabolic syndrome and syndrome X and all these different
things they're all based on insulin resistance and it's not a rare
thing it's almost all of us so in that context I wanted you to take take
another look at the ketogenic diet. Is it for everybody? No, I don't think so I
think that if you're not insulin resistant or if you just moderately
insulin resistant then I think you do fine on a low-carb diet just reducing
your carbohydrates until you get back to a species-appropriate level I think
you'll do great but I think for anyone whose insulin
resistance I think that would be the best thing that you can do for yourself
and if you have a more severe condition of some sort like autoimmunity or leaky
gut or diabetes etc etc then I would suggest that you take a serious look at
this and that you also include some intermittent fasting so that you can
start taking benefits of this incredible mechanism called
autophagy. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoy this sort of content make sure
that you subscribe and hit the notification and again this channel is
for people to learn what health is it's to save lives it's to understand the
bigger picture of what we're doing so that we can end or at least reduce this
suffering we can't change people but we can inform them and let them make their
own choices so help us in that process and until next time thanks for watching