Six common beliefs addressed, Part 181

1. On “keto” you have to stay under a certain amount of protein macros and you should do the same on carnivore. 

On a classic ketogenic protocol, for the treatment of intractable epilepsy or neurodegenerative conditions, protein macros are monitored and kept under a certain amount to minimize the body converting protein into glucose, a completely natural and normal process that is highly regulated. Since chronic ketone presence is a strong signal to the body that it is "starving", it tends to ramp up its stress response and convert itself and everything that's eaten into glucose at a higher rate than normal. This stress response will reduce ketone production.

The people on classic ketogenic diets need ketones because that's what they are forcing their brain to use for fuel in order to prevent symptoms. This is precisely why classic ketogenic protocols need to be monitored by a healthcare provider to ensure that the person does not lose lean body mass, develop a deficiency and/or gain weight. Classic ketogenic protocols are not only protein restricted but calorically restricted as well. They are very difficult diets to follow without professional guidance.

Ketogenic protocols for the treatment of overweight/obesity and/or metabolic dysfunction do not restrict protein. These diets induce ketosis through the severe restriction of carbohydrate. Protein macros are followed to ensure you are getting enough protein, since most people do not.

The reason protein does not have to be restricted is because protein is not a macronutrient of concern as it is not the cause of overweight/obesity and/or metabolic dysfunction. Having chronic ketone presence is also not the goal of these protocols because lack of ketones is not the cause of overweight/obesity and or metabolic dysfunction so their presence is not the cure.

Now a lot of people tend to take this information to mean they can eat all the meat they want, since it’s "protein" but meat is not just protein. It is also fat. For this reason, though protein on its own is not restricted, protein as meat is, since you can easily go over your fat macros depending on the type and cut of meat you are consuming. You have to calculate the protein to fat content in your chosen cut of meat when following carnivore, to ensure you are getting enough protein and not too much fat.

2. Too much protein will stall weight loss.

There is no such thing as "too much protein" but there is such a thing as too much fat, which usually comes with the protein. For this reason, you have to make sure you track your macros carefully and stick to your fat macro allotment.

People with metabolic syndrome who have hyperglucagonemia make a lot of sugar after eating anything, including protein, which could stall their weight loss for a period of time until this condition normalizes. This condition only normalizes once you can regain insulin/leptin sensitivity and function. Restricting protein achieves neither.

3. Red meat "stays in your system" for 2 weeks.

False. The body uses protein to build itself, so technically meat "stays in your system" until you are dead.

4. Some low carb doctors discuss cancer because some of their patients have gone into remission. 

No one knows exactly what causes cancer to go into remission or why remission occurs to some people and not others. So far, studies suggest that a person’s initial immune response, to the cancer, has a lot to do with their remission outcome.

Many conventional doctors have had their patients go into remission. In fact, the bulk of cancer patients in remission have done so using conventional treatments. Anyone can go into cancer remission and anyone can also die from cancer. Like I mentioned above, your immune response appears to be the main determiner of this and you have no control over it.

As of this post, no cure for cancer has been discovered. We know of some risk factors for certain cancers but, again, they have not been proven to be linearly causative. So a low carb doctor boasting that he has some cancer patients in remission is completely meaningless as any doctor can boast that.

5. "Certain bacteria” causes obesity.

No. What causes obesity is not a mystery. It is well known that obesity is caused by metabolic dysfunction through blood glucose dysregulation which ultimately deteriorates insulin function and leptin expression. This not only leads to overweight/obesity but eventually to diabetes. The accumulation of high body fat, caused by metabolic syndrome, is the result of a complex hormonal interplay exacerbated by certain lifestyle factors, of which there are many.

So, the debate as to what causes obesity has long been settled but for some odd reason, it appears to not have reached the masses. Very few people understand obesity, which is a shame considering that obesity is now at epidemic levels. You can not treat what you don’t understand. I believe it is this lack of understanding that has allowed obesity to spread, unabated, and made it easier for charlatans to sell you “magical cures”.

What hasn't been settled with obesity is its treatment. This is because of the complex hormonal interplay, which I mentioned above, which is extremely difficult to reverse. This is because obesity is a metabolic adaptation and not a real “disease” so there technically is nothing to "cure". Your body is doing exactly what it's suppose to do under the conditions it's been subjected to.

There are microbiome changes seen in the overweight/obese and this is mostly related to diet type and immune function. High body fat affects the immune system. But no, bacteria itself does not make you obese. To be obese you need poor functioning and abnormal insulin which affects leptin expression and in turn deteriorates proper metabolic function over time.

6. The American Diabetes Association (ADA) refuses to tell people that they can “reverse their diabetes”.

This is because, as of this writing, there is no “cure” for diabetes. The ADA has a lot of issues in its organization but quackery isn't one of them. The most the person with diabetes can hope for is remission but long term remission has still been difficult to acquire for most.

I am sure that you may have heard a low carb doctor say he can "reverse your diabetes" but he simply cannot. He can only lower your blood glucose but so can I. On this blog, low blood glucose is not reversal of diabetes. That is the mistake conventional medicine makes when they diagnose diabetes with simply high blood glucose. Their treatment, which is to lower your blood glucose, hasn't really made much of a difference has it? Of course not. That is because diabetes is not a disease of high blood glucose. This means diabetes reversal is not acquired through lower blood glucose.

We stay away from the blood glucose seesaw on this blog. Diabetes is a very complex metabolic dysfunction that involves multiple energy regulating systems in the body. It is extremely difficult to put into remission so avoiding getting diabetes, in the first place, should always be the first course of action. This is why you are never too healthy to follow a healthy lifestyle.

Six common beliefs addressed, Part 172

1. The body does not know how much glucose to make during stress.

This is correct, but only of people with metabolic syndrome/diabetes. 

Metabolic syndrome/diabetes is when you do not have proper blood glucose regulation. This means you make too much blood glucose when you don't have to and too little when you do. This causes erratic lows and highs in blood glucose, with large disparities between the two. 

When you have metabolic syndrome/diabetes and suffer from an injury, illness, dehydration, strenuous exercise, hormonal imbalances, etc. you will produce glucose at an exaggerated rate through an over expressed adrenal stress response. It is this response that eventually drives the condition and progresses it over time.

2. I use to be able to eat oregano but now if I try it, I get gastroparesis and it triggers my seizures. 

Stay away from oregano if it is causing you this type of distress.

Herbs can have some powerful compounds in them. They have been used medicinally for millennia so you have to be careful of what affect they may produce in you. These effects can change over time so just because something didn't cause you any harm in the past, does not mean it will remain that way in the future. Our body's chemistry changes over time, especially when your entire diet changes.

3. Only thin people should give recommendations and advice to the overweight/obese.

The problem with these overweight/obese low carb advocates is not their weight. The problem is their lies and the continuous promotion of misinformation just for the sake of making money. Those are two very different things. You can be overweight/obese and still talk about overweight/obesity. Remember, there is no known cure for overweight/obesity, so anyone who speaks about it is not suppose to be selling you a "cure". If they are, they are a scammer/quack. 

So their weight is not the problem, as long as they are not misguiding people for their own personal financial gain. The battle of the bulge is something we are all dealing with in this sphere. Just because you know what causes overweight/obesity, does not mean you can change it in yourself or anyone else. In fact, if you truly know what causes overweight/obesity you would know for certain that you can't change it in yourself or anyone else.

You can't say that only thin people can speak on overweight/obesity because we already have that. They are called the diet industry, which is completely overrun by thin, obesity resistant, athletic types that have no clue what obesity is or its mechanism. People who were once obese and then became thin are not the only ones who have dibs on speaking about this subject because that's saying that they have some "magical" cure, which they only know about. That's not true. They were at the mercy of their blood glucose regulation and how it reacted to treatment.

Again, there is no known cure for overweight/obesity. There are only interventions that might or might not work for each individual. The length of time that they might work will also vary. Overweight/obesity is a lifetime problem. Once the ball gets rolling, it's very difficult to stop it.

So you shouldn't discredit someone who is overweight/obese simply because they are overweight/obese. You discredit them when they are full of BS. You also cannot assume that their diet is incorrect either because many things besides diet contribute to overweight/obesity. In other words, you can't fault the person who is doing everything right and is still having an issue with body fat. But you can blame the person who insists on doing everything wrong and is still having an issue with body fat.

4. If someone eats a potato and their blood glucose does not rise, it means they have stabilized or "reversed" their Type II diabetes.

This false belief goes to show how the low carb community is misinforming their followers at the detriment of their health.

I have explained before how diabetes is not a "disease of high blood glucose" but a metabolic adaptation towards high blood glucose caused by abnormalities in insulin function. This means you can easily and temporarily manipulate your blood glucose numbers through the foods you eat. I want everyone to keep in mind that there is a window during the "disease" process when this is still able to be done but there comes a time when this is no longer possible and blood glucose will no longer respond to what you eat, as the dysfunction becomes primarily "stress hormone driven". You cannot reverse the metabolic adaptation of diabetes using temporary methods such as the "foods you eat". Diabetes is not controlled through individual food items, but by having an overall dietary protocol and lifestyle to match.

Eating a potato and not seeing blood glucose rise is not indicative of anything. It doesn't mean you do not have diabetes nor does it mean you do. Individual and singular blood glucose readings are meaningless when it comes to metabolic dysfunction. You can easily manipulate what the reading will be by simply eating a very small amount of potato or a red potato, rather than a baking potato, or a potato with butter on it, rather than plain, or a potato on its own instead of accompanied with other foods, etc. The effects of the potato are not indicative of the progression of your dysfunction. The abnormality continues, even with a minimal to no rise in blood glucose from a potato.

Diabetes is not a disease of what happens to your blood glucose after eating a potato. Diabetes is a disease of poor blood glucose regulation which deteriorates insulin function over time and under expresses leptin causing the storing and sparing of body fat. It is an adaptation towards starvation because metabolism starts to do everything as if it was starving, including the sparing of glucose for the creation of more fat (insulin resistance).

So instead of focusing on what your glucose reading is after eating a potato, you should focus on an over all anti obesogenic lifestyle that will stop the onslaught to your body and give it a chance at reversal.

5. If you go carnivore, it can change your microbiome in a way that would cause you to be unable to eat plant foods again if you ever decide to in the future.

No. A person's microbiome is very individualized, like a fingerprint. Our microbiomes are very difficult to change, as many factors contribute to which organisms thrive in us and which don't. Colonies of bacteria, temporarily increase and decrease due to diet changes and other factors but never enough to cause long term issues unless a very unusual circumstance occurs like being on a long term antibiotic, which can result in certain gastrointestinal disorders. Simply not eating vegetables is not enough to cause any major changes in a person's microbiome.

When I was a little kid, I was playing in a pool and decided that it was a good idea to drink pool water for about an hour straight. I had massive gastrointestinal issues but after a few weeks, my microbiome returned to what it had always been. We are the bacteria inside of us so just like we can't rearrange our face easily, as it would take an extreme intervention like surgery, our microbiomes are also resistant to change unless an extreme intervention occurs.

What can make you intolerant, to the reintroduction of vegetables, is a lack of enzymes to break them down but those are built back up in a short time.

6. The "keto" diet has been a failure for most people.

Because "keto", as it's been marketed, is exactly the same as the Standard American Diet (SAD).

SAD consists of a combination of carbs, salt, sugar and fat. "Keto" consists of a combination of salt, artificial sugar and fat. On "keto" carbs are dropped but they are replaced with even more fat. So, in the end, these diets cancel themselves out and become the exact same thing. When you do the same things, you acquire the same results.

Six common beliefs addressed, Part 4

1. Should you keep "autophagy" up-regulated all of the time?

Though this complex subject does not pertain to obesity or metabolic health, it is often asked about, so I will briefly discuss it here in a very simplified way.

The body only exists in two states, the fed state or the fasted state. Very different biological systems are triggered during these two states. If the body is receiving new “building” materials through feeding, it stops or slows down the “clearing” of old materials, (e.g.: damaged cell organelles, unused proteins). This process reverses during fasting and the body ramps up the clearing of these old materials. Clearing of these old cellular materials is called autophagy.

Autophagy is induced by a broad range of stressors, of which fasting is only one. When we sleep, we are in a fasted state and autophagy kicks in. This happens every night. Autophagy also occurs during exercise. If the body did not have a way of cleaning out damaged and dead cells, it would not be able to rebuild itself, so we are always in some state of autophagy. The difference in the effectiveness of autophagy is not whether it occurs or not, but how long it can be sustained. We evolved to endure periods of short fasting, so the body works best when it is allowed these fasting periods and therefore adequate periods of autophagy. The body becomes unhealthy when it is chronically limited in these periods of being able to “clean” itself. If you are eating for most of the day, you are not allowing the body to have adequate periods of autophagy.

There is a debate as to how long the process of autophagy should last in order to be effective, since there are also different types of autophagy. Though we know the time frame that triggers autophagy in mice, it is still unknown how it translates to humans. But, the consensus is that a 16–18 hour fast is enough time to get the benefits of being in autophagy. Too much autophagy is just as bad as too little, and much more has to be learned before definitive, concrete advice can be given about this topic.

2. Should you keep MTOR (Mammalian Target Of Rapamycin) down-regulated all of the time?

Just like autophagy, this is another topic that has been hijacked, oversimplified and taken out of context, by the low carbohydrate community, in order to advance their own agenda. The people who have been studying these subjects, their entire life, should be mortified at how their topics of research are now being thrown around the internet and incorrectly applied to all kinds of stupidity. Again, MTOR and autophagy are irrelevant to improving your metabolism. These topics belong to studies of longevity, in a clinical and research setting, not weight loss.

MTOR is a nutrient sensor and it is not just activated by protein exclusively. It is more sensitive to protein, than other macronutrients, but other macronutrients activate it as well. MTOR needs to be activated in all of us, since it cannot be suppressed forever. Without MTOR, you would not be able to rebuild your body. The human body is not static. It is in a constant state of breakdown and repair. Though excessive unregulated growth is not a good thing, for an adult, targeted regulated growth, certainly is.

The only thing you need to know about MTOR, is that just like insulin, it should occur in pulses. There are times when MTOR should be activated and other times that it should not, so that the body remains in homeostasis. This pulse activation is done through intermittent fasting.

MTOR and autophagy are usually talked about in the context of cancer. Cancer is a very complicated, multifactorial disease and its start all and end all is not MTOR and/or autophagy. If you are seeking to implement a healthier lifestyle and diet to enhance your cancer treatment, please discuss and research all of your options with a cancer specialist and not some "low carb" doctor or guru on the internet. I do not recommend, suggest nor condone decisions about cancer treatment to be based on some armchair "oncologists" interpretation and misguided ideas of what causes it. Only a cancer specialist, that has been researching and studying cancer extensively, can correctly interpret the nuances that can make all of the difference in its treatment.

The internet is a great resource for becoming knowledgeable of new studies, research and therapies, but implementation of them requires the consultation of an expert. Do not ever make decisions on how to treat a disease, as serious as cancer, on your own.

3. Do I need to feed my gut microbiome in order to be healthy?

Everyone's microbiome is as diverse as their fingerprints and it’s not static, but constantly changing. Science hasn't even begun to identify all of the influences that the human microbiome has on the body and its different systems. So, as far as metabolic syndrome is concerned, which is what we deal with on this blog, a lot more has to be known about this subject before definitive advice can be given on it. You can put metabolic syndrome in remission, without having a single iota of knowledge about the microbiome, so there is no need to get caught up on such a complex subject that so little is known about. What we do know, as of now, is that the bacteria in your gut is responsible for several nutrient conversions, which are necessary for overall health.

If you eat the right foods, the human body develops and protects its own unique microbiome. This is where the importance of animal products comes in. Your gut is only as healthy as your stomach. The key to a healthy microbiome begins in the proper digestion and breakdown of food in the stomach. You must keep your hydrochloric digestive system healthy by preventing it from becoming a fermentation vat, through the consumption of copious amounts of plant material. Fermentation disrupts your stomach's PH. If food is entering your small intestine unbroken, because of low stomach acid, and covered to bacteria that's not supposed to be there, because it was produced in the stomach through fermentation, you will develop problems. This is not to mention all of the indigestible plant proteins and ruffage, entering the small intestine, which does nothing but inflame and irritate the gut wall. Reduce the intake of plants in order to have a healthier digestive system.

The different types of fats found in animal products will feed and preserve your gut flora. The elimination of foods that disrupt and cause imbalances in the microbiome, like sugar, grains and excess fiber, will allow the body to protect and maintain a healthy microbiome.

4. Am I eating to satiety if I eat all of my carefully measured food portions?

Eating to satiety doesn't mean eating your food in restricted sized plates or measuring your food using the palm of your hand. Remember the old mantra of "never eat more than the size of your fist"? A lot of good that's done. The average fast food hamburger would fit that criteria and so would a candy bar.

Satiety is eating until your stomach expands and you don't leave the table hungry. You should be eating at meal times only. Once that meal time is over, you're done. You will not be able to eat again, until your next meal time. Make sure the food you choose does not interfere in proper blood glucose regulation. Do not eat any macronutrient in isolation, as this will disrupt satiety signals.

Do not save food "for later", unless it's for your next meal time. Do not depend on a "snack" to make up for not eating enough during meal times. All of those practices effect blood glucose homeostasis which in turn disrupts insulin function. You want to eat enough, so that you are able to stop eating for an adequate period of time afterwards and your blood glucose does not take a hit.

5. Should I eat at my meal times, even if I am not hungry? 

If you are not hungry during your meal times, don't eat. Wait and eat on your next meal time. If you become hungry during your fasting time, because you didn't eat during your meal time, don't eat. Wait and eat on your next meal time. If you are only doing 12-18 hour daily fasts, this shouldn't be a problem. 

With time you will become more aware of your body's circadian rhythms, when it comes to hunger, and this will no longer be a common occurrence. You will also have more predictable hunger times, as you accustom your body to eating at meal times only and you never eat erratically. 

6. Isn't it the reduction of calories, in low carbohydrate diets, that makes them work?

On this blog we do not describe "energy balance" through the scope of counting calories. Rather, we focus on blood glucose regulation because it is the only metric that has consistently been linked to obesity in all the obesity research done thus far. This has been regardless of calories or diet followed, though both of these affect blood glucose in specific ways. 

Low carbohydrate diets profoundly effect blood glucose regulation because they prevent more glucose from coming in through diet. This is turn helps regulate insulin better and prevents/reduces insulin resistance. Regulating insulin is vital for metabolic health because unregulated insulin causes blood glucose to drop too low during fasting and insulin becomes over expressed in the fat mass as the body builds resistance to it. 

Humans are terrible at balancing energy themselves, but a healthy metabolism is great at it. When metabolism is working as it should, you will have predictable and normal periods of satiety and hunger. The body will not excessively store fat and it will burn enough fat to maintain a healthy weight. 

How many calories consumed are irrelevant. What really matters is how many calories our bodies are allowed to burn. That allowance only occurs by lowering insulin expression so that leptin works as it should. You will only be able to sustain a caloric deficit, on your plate, if you make up for it with calories from body fat.