Learn about KETO

 

To all the #ketohaters #ketoforbeginners #ketolife #iloveketo #ketoheros 

learn about Keto;

So what makes keto different than any other diet, and what are the health benefits? How is removing carbs from your diet any different than simply removing fat from your diet?!

Okay, here go...

First things first- keto is not a diet. It has nothing to do with restricting calories or exercising. At all. 

Wait, what?! 

Keto is actually a way of manipulating the master hormone that drives the energy managment system inside your body, called insulin. 

Um...okay...

Here is a simplified explanation of  how insulin works: 

You eat food --> Your pancreas pumps insulin as a response to the food you just ate --> The insulin removes the sugar from you blood and locks it away in your cells --> The insulin drops back down, and the pancreas waits until your next meal

(Yes, that is a very over -simplified explaination, but this isn't a science class).

So what does this have to do with getting fat?

Stick with me here... 

Humans, just like every other animal, evolved to store fat in the summer in order to survive the winter. Before the days of agriculture, we humans hunted and gathered all of our food (we actually did this for 99% of the time we have existed on Earth). For most of the year we primarily ate meat, fish, crustaceans, nuts and, well, bugs. Gross. 

Anyway, during the summer months, something really cool happened... free food literally hung from trees and bushes in the form of fruits and vegetables. So for a few of months out of the year, finding food was easy peasy lemon squeezy. 

Okay, who cares? Where are you going with this?

Well, our bodies evolved a neat system to take advantage of this free, easy-to-access energy we call carbohydrates. During these summer months, when we ate fruits, our bodies would switch from burning our primary fuel source, fat, to an alternative fuel source, glycogen. This is made possible by insulin and the pancreas that produces it. 

So how does it work?

Well, in a nutshell, when we eat glucose (sugar, wheat, corn, potatoes, whatever), our bodies pump out insulin to remove sugar from the blood and store it as fat. And because glucose is a simple form of energy, our bodies are more than happy to use it as a short-term energy source (so that our long-term energy source, fat, can be stored). In other words, insulin blocks the body from accessing its fat reserves whenever glucose is available as an energy source. Neat. 

Now back to prehistoric man... So our bodies evolved a way of switching fuel sources as a mechanism to store fat in the summer to use in the winter. Check. That system uses insulin. Check. Insulin stores fat. Check. 

So for 99% of human history, humans spent about 3/4 of the year living in a state of ketosis (wait, I thought that keto was just a fad diet?!). We only ate a high carb diet for a few months out of the year, which allowed us to store fat for the winter. Okay, cool. 

Fast forward a few millennia and what happened? We humans abruptly changed our diet, thanks to advances in agriculture. Now, instead of eating a steady diet of fatty meat, we eat a steady diet of wheat and corn, which means that our pancreases work overtime, day after day, year after year, pumping out insulin. 

So, what's the problem? 

The problem is that we never evolved to eat sooooooo much glucose. Our poor bodies aren't supposed to be exposed to that much insulin and over time, we get sick. And fat. Really, really fat. 

Sick, like how?

Insulin, like any other good thing, turns bad when there is too much of it in our bodies. We eventually build up a tolerance to it, called insulin resistance. What happens when you build up a tolerance for something? You need more and more of it to work. So that poor little pancreas of ours is forced to pump out more and more insulin to keep up. 

Sometimes the pancreas pumps and pumps and pumps but the little fella just can't keep up anymore. We call this type 2 diabetes. When the pancreas can't keep up, diabetics have to inject themselves with exogenous insulin, and the cycle keeps going, getting worse and worse until they pass away. Yikes!

Not a diabetic? 

Okay, so you don't have diabetes (neither do I) so why should you care? Well, high levels of insulin causes all sorts of nasty stuff, like high blood pressure, high triglycerides,  athlerclarosis and heart disease. And, quite frankly, the stuff makes you fat. So that's why we need to minimize the amount of insulin we produce. 

And cue the ketogenic diet. 

By eating a diet low in carbohydrates, we are naturally lowering the amount of insulin in our bodies. Lower insulin allows our bodies to access those fat stores we keep on our bellies. And butts. And thighs. 

Just as important as how we look, lower levels of insulin alsonimprove how we feel. People who eat a ketogenic diet long term experience better clarity, more energy, lower blood pressure, better cholesterol ratios (after a temporary increase) and a lower risk of heart disease (insulin is nasty stuff when it gets too high). There is even research that shows that certain cancers THRIVE on glucose, so eating a diet low in glucose may well help prevent *some* cancer.  

So eating keto has many health benefits, makes you skinny and reverses type 2 diabetes.  

#ketoon