Ketogenic and GAPS Diets that manage the cause of disease, inflammation. Exercise that increase muscle with 15 mins. resistance training per week.
One study found that just 21 binge-drinking sessions could potentially produce early-stage liver disease.
In this study, a binge drinking session is classified as more than five drinks in two hours, and a drink is classified as 0.6 ounces of alcohol.
Continue reading “How Much Alcohol Would You Have to Drink Before Liver Damage“Depending on how much alcohol you drink, it can block fat burning for two days or more and most alcohol has added carbohydrates.
A carbohydrate is only four calories per gram and that will block your weight loss and that will block your ketosis. Ethanol, pure alcohol, has seven calories per gram.
But:
Continue reading “How Much Alcohol Will Stop Weight Loss and Ketosis?”Health benefits of exercise for the immune system:
1. Heightened immune surveillance.
Continue reading “How exercise affects your immune system.”This is an overview of how powerful fasting is for various parts of your body.
BRAIN- Fasting stimulates BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor). It is like Miracle Grow for the brain. BDNF helps repair and regenerate neurons. Fasting also helps with stress resistance, neurogenesis (nerve support cells), mitochondrial production, and reducing inflammation. It helps if there is damage as in Alzheimer’s, or Parkinson’s.
BRAIN FUNCTION- Fasting helps improve the number of mitochondria, the energy factories in all body cells including your brain. You will have better memory. You will be able to focus. You will have better cognitive function.
INFLAMMATION- Fasting decreases inflammation, which is deadly inflammation on the different parts of the body. There is nothing more powerful than fasting to handle inflammation.
Continue reading “How Fasting Benefits Your Body.”Here are some benefits of doing the Ketogenic Diet:
The common thread between doing the diet and doing intermittent fasting (IF) is that you have a lowered glucose and you also have lowered insulin.
But there are some very unique additional benefits that occur with fasting. When you do fasting you create an epigenetic effect. Epigenetics means above genes. So if you were born with bad genes or you had a gene that triggered a disease, those genes could be controlled epigenetically.
2. Autophagy. Autophagy is like getting the junk out of the trunk. All the dead cells all the damaged proteins in your body get recycled and turn into brand new cells. This is why you look younger when you start doing IF because you induce autophagy, which does a lot more than anti-aging but it’s just a cleaning process you’re recycling garbage through the body. That way that garbage doesn’t sit there and create inflammation and a lot of a lot of bad things.
Continue reading “Why Do You Need To Do The Ketogenic Diet And Intermittent Fasting At The Same Time?”My grandfather ate bread sugar, drank alcohol and smoked his entire life and he lived to be over 90 years old. I thought that if we consume these foods we’re supposed to die early. How do you explain that?
Dr. Berg explains, we are all born with different genes. Some people have highly robust genes that can withstand much more than others.
Other people develop metabolic issues early in life and are not able to consume unhealthy foods without them having a tremendously negative effect on their health.
It is possible to eat unhealthily and live a long life. However, very few people are able to do this without experiencing serious health consequences.
Continue reading “Why Do Some People Have A Bad Diet and Still Live a Long Life?”I was born with bad genes. There is nothing I can do. That is absolutely not true!
Only 5-10% of disease is caused by a genetic defect that has been passed on by your parents. It does not mean that you’re going to get that disease.
Thomas Seyfried, the expert in cancer, wrote a book, Cancer As A Metabolic Disease. He says when you see tumors in cancers you do see a lot of genetic mutations but those mutations, those alterations in genes are downstream.
They are symptoms NOT causes of the cancer.
They are symptoms of the damage in the mitochondria, the machinery where you are burning fuel. That is the first thing that gets damaged and then the mitochondria adapts to a different metabolism called fermentation.
Because the mitochondria has its own DNA and they are not protected like the DNA in the nucleus because they are outside the nucleus they are very susceptible to mutations and alterations in the DNA. That is probably one of the reasons why you see so many gene mutations in tumors and cancer.
Most gene mutations are not inherited; they are somatic mutations. Somatic mutations mean it is not inherited, but caused by your environment.
To understand this further, epigenetics is an important term. It means above genetics.
Epigenetics explained:
Continue reading “How Much Of Your Health Or Disease Is Genetic?”Do you have an excessive waist circumference, high triglycerides, low HDL, fatty plaques in your arteries, hypertension etc.?
In Part One we covered points 1 to 3.
Topics Addressed:
In Part Two, we will discuss Nutritional Ketosis as a potent therapy to restore metabolic health.
Since 2012 we’ve learned about ketones in particular beta-hydroxybutyrate, which is the primary circulating ketone, as an epigenetic modulator of gene expression and a signalling agent. Eric Virgin’s science paper showed an increase in a whole array of antioxidant genes, as well as at the tissue level, protection from oxidative stress resulting from being in ketosis, in the range of nutritional ketosis.
Beta-hydroxybutyrate, which is produced by your liver while being in the state of ketosis, is an alternative source of fuel for the brain.
Ketogenic diets are anti-inflammatory.
There a couple papers showing on the ability of the Ketogenic diet to extend longevity.
There are hundreds of studies on low-carbohydrate ketogenic diets and obesity. They all show low carb diets do much better than low-fat diets.
One of the real problems is diabetes. Very well controlled one- year inpatient studies used the ketogenic diet to reverse type-2 diabetes in over half the patients in 3 months. Ninety percent of the people in the study prefer follow the Ketogenic diet long term.
Saturated Fat: Historically it has been villainized as being the cause of a lot of chronic disease. The most recent meta-analysis of dietary saturated fat and risk for heart disease shownoassociation. In fact you decrease saturated fat and replace it with carbs you actually increase your relative risk of having a coronary event.
If you look at studies that have actually measured saturated fatty acids levels in the body, whether that be in membranes or in the blood, and risk of heart disease, there is a very consistent association with higher risk for heart disease. So if you have more palmitic acid or total saturated fatty acids in your blood so you’re accumulating saturated fat that does increase your risk for heart disease and type-2 diabetes.
What contributes to accumulation of saturated fat in the body? It’s not dietary saturated fat. Carbs control lipid metabolism primarily through insulin. Carbohydrates in the diet have a big impact on how we process fat. We measured saturated fat levels. We always show saturated fat levels go down more on the ketogenic diet. So eat more saturated fat but actually have less in your body.
It seems counterintuitive but if you are eating Ketogenic diet you switch over to burning almost exclusively fat and ketones for fuel and that includes saturated fat.
If you’re eating saturated fat you have a nice marbled steak and getting a nice dose of saturated fat but if you typically eat that with potato or rice and a roll and dessert, you get the insulin response and you’re going to be more prone to store that saturated fat in your in your body.
See the image of Diary Matrix – You are what you save from what you eat.
On the other hand if you have some non-starchy vegetables, hold the potato and maybe even add some steak butter to the steak suddenly you’re in a different metabolic state. Insulin muted dramatically and you’re continuing to burn fat. It’s very hard to imagine saturated fat having any harmful effects in the body if it’s promptly being converted to co2 and water, which is essentially happening on a ketogenic diet.
The point is: the processing of saturated fat in the body is highly dependent on the carbs that are consumed with it.
Really carbohydrates control lipid metabolism at that level. At the level of the individual, it is the level of carb tolerance a person has. If you’re more carb intolerant you’re going to be more prone to that storing that fat and then a person who’s more carb tolerant.
For athletes, we are challenging that carbs they need carbs. Now a lot of athletes within the ultra endurance community are adopting this and surpassing their own records. While being on the Ketogenic diet, ninety percent of their fuel came from fat.
In the last Tour de France it became known that the first and second place finishers were low carb athletes.
For more information on athlete improving their performance please watch the video link below.
See the image of the Potential Benefits of the Keto-Adapted State
Keto adaptation changes the body in profound ways. There are a lot of changes going on metabolically and physically and physiologically within humans as they adapt to a ketogenic diet.
The main point is we are eating too many carbs. Get the carbs down to a level below which people can tolerate them and maintain health. Ketogenic diets have some unique benefits and a lot of this may be attributed to ketones.
Everybody’s carb tolerance is different. You’ve got to find that level of carb intolerance works. It might be a carb level below which you’re in ketosis but not everybody needs to be in ketosis. It might be a carb level below, which you keep all the signs and symptoms of metabolic syndrome at bay.
Personalized nutrition really needs to focus on is getting the carbs right.
Summary:
Consumption of carbs at levels that exceed a person’s ability to directly oxidize is the driving force behind the obesity/diabetes epidemics.
Ketogenic diets are uniquely potent at restoring metabolic health
What is optimal carb level?
A level below which:
See the Image of the Summary.
This Post has been condensed from the original: Ketones: From Toxic to Therapeutic to Ergogenic with Jeff S. Volek, PhD, RD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRoifq_lWZA
Disclaimer: The content of this email or Post is not intended for the treatment or prevention of disease, nor as a substitute for medical treatment, nor as an alternative to medical advice. Use of recommendations is at the choice and risk of the reader.
I invite you to Follow my Blog, Facebook or be added to my email distribution list. My focus is to maximize my physical performance and mental clarity, body composition, and most importantly overall health with a wholesome diet and exercise.
I will bring you compelling articles on Ketogenic and GAPS diets, the Super Slow High-Intensity Exercise Program and supplements.
To follow my Blog, please click the Follow button to receive an email when the next posting is available. Hint: You may have to click the Accept and Close button before follow is available.
I thrive on feedback. Please let me know that you like the Post by clicking Like, or Commenting on the content.
If you wish to contact me by Email, please email lpolstra@bell.net using this form.
May you Live Long Healthy.
Yours truly,
Lydia Polstra
Do you have an excessive waist circumference, high triglycerides, low HDL, fatty plaques in your arteries, hypertension etc.?
Topics Addressed:
The 2015 guidelines it demonized saturated fat and still promoting relatively high carbohydrate diets as a result we have an obesity and diabetes epidemic.
The diet heart hypothesis is if you over consume fat in particular saturated fat it raise your cholesterol and raise your heart disease.
The unintended consequences of this obsession with fat in this country and decreasing fat resulted in turn with an over consumption of carbohydrate. It’s this excessive amount of carbohydrate that people are eating that are leading to an alternative problem of metabolic syndrome or pre-diabetes which puts a lot of people on the fast path to developing type 2 diabetes which in turn increases risk for heart disease. The more carbs you eat the more you suppress your own body’s ability to access and utilize fat for fuel.
Following the guidelines has resulted in added sugars and a lot of processed starches and grains and cereals. That consumption is the primary cause of the obesity and diabetes epidemic, most non-commutable chronic disease and probably driving cancer too.
Dr. Volek is most interested in diabetes in part because of the statistics on diabetes and prediabetes published in JAMA in2016. It showed that one half of adults in the U.S. have pre-diabetes.
The general consensus among the healthcare industry and physicians is that diabetes is a chronic progressive disease that it can’t be reversed and that is not the case. It’s caused by over consumption of carbohydrate, it can be reversed by bringing carbohydrate down into an appropriate range, which for many diabetics means a ketogenic diet.
Metabolism: When we eat a typical meal that has carbohydrate in it, that meal may have easily a hundred grams of carbs in it. That is about ten times what we have in our blood. We only have one to two teaspoons of blood sugar and throughout our entire circulatory system. The body has ways to dispose of that glucose and if you’re processing that carb meal in a healthy way the majority of that glucose gets taken up into skeletal muscle through an insulin mediated process and it gets oxidized eventually. It may be temporarily stored as glycogen but we have a finite capacity to store glycogen.
What happens if your insulin resistance though?The primary characteristic many tests are based on is insulin mediated glucose uptake into cells. If you can’t get the glucose into muscle where does it go? The only other pathway that glucose can be metabolized is into fat. That happens in the liver, so if you are insulin resistant the majority of carbohydrates that you’re consuming actually takes an alternative path where a greater proportion of it gets converted to saturated fat. It gets packaged into a VLDL particle and released into the blood. What you see in type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes, you see not just higher triglycerides in the blood but if you look at the composition of those VLDL particles they’re enriched in saturated fatty acids. A lot of that gets de-saturated to a 16:1 or palmitoleic acid. That is highly associated with risk for diabetes and other chronic problems.
Most people are consuming carbohydrates above their tolerance. The result is metabolic syndrome. The signs are: excessive waist circumference, high triglycerides, low HDL, fatty plaques in the arteries, hypertension etc.
Please see the image of the insulin resistance continuum.
The insulin resistance is as a form of carbohydrate intolerance. It’s a continuum where people on the far end of the spectrum, that are carb tolerant, may be able to tolerate very low-fat high-carbohydrate diets and remain insulin sensitive and there’s other people at the other end of the continuum and a whole lot of people in between. It even changes over the lifespan, as we get older and enter into middle-age and beyond tolerate carbs less effectively so we’re more carb intolerant.
If you’re burning fat you don’t rely on insulin. Burning fatty acids and ketones are independent of insulin. It is a healthier fuel to be burning the vast majority of time. The more carbs you eat the more you inhibit fat burning and you become dependent carbs as your primary fuel source.
There is nothing comes close to a ketogenic diet in terms of enhancing the body’s ability to burn fat and ketones.
The body has developed this system to be able to maintain perfect inner organs fuel exchange in the context of low carbohydrate availability. The term I (Volek) like to use is keto-adaptation to describe this process of switching all the cellular machinery over to being able to accommodate fatty acid as the primary fuel and ketones.
There’s a lot of health benefits associated with keto-adaptation. Obesity, chronic diseases, neurological conditions and cancer are much easier to manage with the ketogenic diet. Type-2 diabetes can be reversed with the ketogenic diet.
What is the ketogenic diet?
See the slide of how it differs from other low carb diets.
It is low in carbohydrate. Carbohydrates are probably the primary macronutrient that drives ketosis but protein is also anti Ketogenic. A ketogenic diet is limited in carbs and protein. Fat doesn’t really factor in that much in terms of inducing ketosis so fat can be high it can be low it can be moderate depending on if weight loss or weight maintenances is desired. The Ketogenic diet is very tasty and very satiating.
What does the ketogenic diet look like in terms of macronutrients?
Please see the image of where calories come from.
Carbs are 5% up to 10% of your calories if you trying to loose weight. Make sure you are getting 10-15 grams of non-starchy vegetables, and one or two ounces and nuts will give another 5-10 grams and even some fruits such as berries, avocados or tomatoes. The limit of what induces ketosis is highly variable, diabetics need to be generally closer to 30 or 35 or 40 grams of carbs, whereas some athletes can have more. (One gram of carbs is 4 calories). It is best to measure ketones to know because there’s no magic number here that works for everyone.
Please see the image of Ketone levels.
The real key here is the numbers if you’re eating carbs above 50 grams of carbs for most people you’re likely not more than point to maybe point 1 millimolar in the blood. It might be a bit higher after an overnight fast.
Nutritional ketosis (very low-carb diet) ranges from1 up to 5 millimolar.
Working with your doctor, Type 1 diabetics may reduce the levels of insulin required.
When you’re in ketosis the brain can extract about two-thirds of its energy from ketones and is protected from low blood sugar.
Next week we will continue with point four Nutritional Ketosis as a potent therapy to restore metabolic health
This Post has been condensed from the original: Ketones: From Toxic to Therapeutic to Ergogenic with Jeff S. Volek, PhD, RD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRoifq_lWZA
Disclaimer: The content of this email or Post is not intended for the treatment or prevention of disease, nor as a substitute for medical treatment, nor as an alternative to medical advice. Use of recommendations is at the choice and risk of the reader.
I invite you to Follow my Blog, Facebook or be added to my email distribution list. My focus is to maximize my physical performance and mental clarity, body composition, and most importantly overall health with a wholesome diet and exercise.
I will bring you compelling articles on Ketogenic and GAPS diets, the Super Slow High-Intensity Exercise Program and supplements.
To follow my Blog, please click the Follow button to receive an email when the next posting is available. Hint: You may have to click the Accept and Close button before follow is available.
I thrive on feedback. Please let me know you are interested in the content by clicking Like, Commenting or sending me a message or email about the Post.
If you wish to contact me by Email, please email lpolstra@bell.net using this form.
May you Live Long Healthy.
Yours truly,
Lydia Polstra
This Post is the Transcript from the Video,
Do Calories Matter? Is a Calorie a Calorie? (Science of Weight Gain). Here is the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcMBm-UVdII
Why does Bill Gates have so much money? Because he earned more money than he spent.
Why did Basketball Team X win the big game? They scored more points than Team Y.
Why is Pete fat?”
The typical answer is that more calories went in than out. Calorie counting may induce weight loss, but why would you care about that?
Losing 10 pounds is great, but wouldn’t you want to know where that 10 lbs. came from?Was it bone, muscle or fat? Then, if it’s fat, which is what most of us want to lose, is it subcutaneous fat or visceral fat?
Pediatric Endocrinologist Robert Lustig points out in his book “Fat Chance” that several studies show that the amount of subcutaneous fat you have, the fat under your skin, correlates with increased longevity; Whereas visceral fat, the fat around your organs that gives you a big belly, promotes inflammation and causes several health detriments meaning the difference between dying early in your fifties or living into your eighties or longer.
A pound of fat being 3500 calories is usually the piece of data we’re provided with to help us create our weight loss goals. For example if you create a deficit of 500 calories per day, then in a week you will lose a pound of fat. But why would the body choose to discard fat first when you restrict calories?
Decreasing your energy intake is interpreted by your body as you being in a situation where less energy (food) is available. Thus, it will do what it can to keep the stored energy it has and slow down processes that spend energy.
Muscle is a relatively energy expensive tissue while one of fat’s functions is to serve as a place for energy storage. So the body would want to preserve the fat and break down the muscle, to conserve as much energy as it can.And that’s what it does. Through a process called gluconeogenesis, “new glucose making,” muscle is broken down into glucose, which can be used for energy.
So now you have successfully reduced your weight by going into a caloric deficit, but now it’s even harder to maintain a caloric deficit and lose more weight because your resting energy expenditure is now less due to having lost muscle.
Jonathan Bailor points out in his book “The Calorie Myth” that “Studies show that up to 70 percent of the nonwater weight lost when people are eating less comes from burning muscle – not body fat. Only after it’s cannibalized this muscle will our body burn fat.”
So your calorie restrictive diet may actually reduce your weight as you intended, but the weight isn’t necessarily coming off from where you’d like it to, and this whole process becomes an uphill battle.
Restricting calories without modifying the composition of your diet will cause your body to lower energy expenditure and increase hunger to provoke you to get back to your normal energy intake.
“Eat less and exercise,” the typical advice for weight loss, is a strategy fueled mainly by willpower. Hunger and lowered energy expenditure is going to set you up to where the last thing your body wants to do is exercise.
Alright, maybe it’s more simple to look at how people get too fat in the first place. Surely to get fat, one has to eat too much. But what causes that excessive eating?
We have very sensitive receptors in our body that let us know when it is too hot, too cold, when we’re thirsty, et cetera. What would cause someone to eat past the point of satiety so much and so frequently that they become overweight or obese?
Of course small fluctuations in weight throughout the year is not unnatural. But when people get significantly overweight or obese over time through overeating, surely something is significantly wrong with the way their body processes food and the way their hunger and satiety receptors work.
So what “calories in calories out” isn’t explaining is why some people’s bodies will just raise energy expenditure in response to eating too much, keeping them thin while other people get fat. Just because you eat extra calories doesn’t mean they have to be stored, they could just be burned off automatically.
The medical journal QJM reports, “Food in excess of immediate requirements… can easily be disposed of, being burnt up and dissipated as heat. Did this capacity not exist, obesity would be almost universal.”
So why is it that obese people don’t automatically dispose of calories, experience intense lethargy, and have voracious appetites despite having massive amounts of energy available in the form of fat on their body?
What is particularly interesting about this is that the satiety hormone, Leptin, is secreted by your fat cells. So if we are to assume that a calorie is a calorie and the type of food you eat does not have any peripheral effects… like disrupting the hormonal environment of the body, then fat people should have less of an appetite than leaner people.
We would need to assume that all overweight people have something like a gene defect that screws up their hormones, leading to this dysfunctional situation where the brain is constantly being told to eat more food despite having plenty of stored energy available on the body.
Robert Lustig explains that only 2 percent of morbid obesity is explained by genes.
“Researchers worldwide have scanned the human genome and have identified thirty-two genes that are associated with obesity in the general population. Altogether, these genes explain a total of 9 percent of obesity. And even if one person had every single bad gene variation, it would account for only about 22 pounds –hardly enough to explain our current obesity pandemic.”
So when people get fat, they are of course for some reason or another, taking in much more calories than they need to. But, their body for some reason chooses to use nearly all these extra calories for body fat accumulation at the expense of muscle.
Dr. Doug McGuff, emergency doctor and exercise expert said: “And I always had it in my head that the morbidly obese were probably pretty well muscled underneath all that because effectively they’re lifting weights all the time. But it’s not the case – their muscles are extraordinarily atrophied. Your external oblique muscle that ought to be you know as thick as a piece of steak, in these people it’s paper thin and stretched to the point of bursting. Because they are having nutrient partitioning that doesn’t allow energy to go anywhere but the body fat. So they are literally starving inside an encasement of blubber.”
A good example for understanding why the body uses calories in different ways is puberty: During puberty, young men and women develop bigger appetites, and that extra energy is put towards developing things like sex organs and making their bodies larger in general. But young men put on a lot of muscle during this phase whereas young women put on more fat. You might attribute this to the fact that young men are more likely to play sports, but the way fat is distributed is very different between the two genders.
Most guys are not gonna find their pants are getting tighter due to butt and hip fat. This is the effect of several hormones, particularly one named insulin. Insulin is an anabolic hormone – it’s known as the energy storage hormone, or sometimes the “fat storage hormone” – one of its jobs is directing how the food you take in will be stored. And, puberty is associated with a higher than normal secretion of insulin.
A very clear illustration of insulin’s fat accumulation abilities is the side effect some diabetes patients experience where they develop a mound of fat at the site where they frequently inject their insulin. This is called lipohypertrophy. So understanding how food affects hormones would be better for weight management than understanding how many calories are going in and out of your body.
Other than insulin, worthwhile hormones to look at are Leptin and Hormone sensitive lipase:
So the ideal situation is to have high levels of leptin so you are not hungry all the time, and you would want lower levels of insulin so your body doesn’t store too much energy, and you would want hormone sensitive lipase to be activated so it would break down body fat. Losing body fat while not being hungry would be the ideal situation, right?
The problem with calories in calories out is it doesn’t tell you anything about how to achieve this preferred hormonal situation. But, paying attention to how much of and what kinds of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates are in your meals will tell you much more about how your hormones are going to respond.
May you Live Long Healthy.
Yours truly,
Lydia Polstra
Email: lpolstra@bell.net
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/2healthyhabits/
Blog: https://2healthyhabits.wordpress.com
Disclaimer: The content of this email or Post is not intended for the treatment or prevention of disease, nor as a substitute for medical treatment, nor as an alternative to medical advice. Use of recommendations is at the choice and risk of the reader.
I invite you to Follow my Blog, Facebook or be added to my email distribution list. My focus is to maximize my physical performance and mental clarity, body composition, and most importantly overall health with a wholesome diet and exercise.
I will bring you compelling articles on Ketogenic and GAPS diets, the Super Slow High-Intensity Exercise Program and supplements.
To follow my Blog, please click the Follow button to receive an email when the next posting is available. Hint: You may have to click the Accept and Close button before follow is available.
I thrive on feedback. Please let me know you are interested in the content by clicking Like, Commenting or sending me a message or email about the Post.
If you wish to contact me by Email, please email lpolstra@bell.net
2HealthyHabits 