Month: August 2018

I watched this video and immediately connected with this Doctor for obvious reasons. If only more experts would get it like this guy does.

Low carb from a Doctors Perspective

I feel the need to make a blog post about this just to highlight all the similarities in our philosophies and I want to point out some of the things he shows but doesn’t address.

1. We need to drop the CICO mentality.

He has a patient speak in the beginning. She is listening to the eat less and move more advice and eating low calorie and working out 6 days a week. She is not losing any weight. Now most experts would say she is cheating and lying. I don’t believe that to be the case. I’ve seen it too many times. Not everyone that diets is a liar. Even though the famous starch based Diet proponent Dr. Macdougall would say this is the case. Nasty man.

Here is the problem with that. She is eating less which is causing her body to slow metabolism to save her from starvation. Natural response that has been proven to be the case again and again in studies like The Biggest Loser Follow up done by the NIH. Every contestant showed a dramatic reduction in metabolic rate with prolonged caloric restriction. The big problem here is that as soon as they eat even a little more than the small amount they were eating they quickly gain weight back.

To add insult to injury, the client in the video was exercising like crazy. One thing that exercise is great for is making you efficient. If your body needs to do a given amount of work and it has to do so with a given amount of food energy it will do it and it will get very efficient at doing it with that amount of energy. Unfortunately this comes at a price. Your body will get used to doing this amount of work with a set amount of energy and it will slow caloric expenditure on other body processes to allow the energy to be dedicated to exercise. This is the exact same thing as slowing metabolic rate.

Now you add together the slowed metabolism from caloric restriction and the slowed energy expenditure to account for energy for exercise and you have a recipe for easy weight gain. Eat a little more or exercise a little less and the weight comes barrelling back on. If you had done nothing in the first place but eat 2,000 calories and not exercise at all you would have been immensely better off than eating 1200 cals and working out. After a few months of this you could eat 1500 cals and exercise 5 days a week instead of 6 and gain weight. Who hasn’t been there? I know I have.

2. Protein has a significant insulin response that lasts longer than carbs or fat.

At 5:34 in the video he posts a graph of insulin response to macros. You will see that yes, carbs have the largest spike but protein has a significant one as well. Halfway between that of fat, yes fat has a response, and carbs. What is most important to notice is that the spike from protein trails out way longer than that of carbs. Protein takes longer to process than either of these so the insulin stays elevated longer. This is counter productive to our goal of getting insulin back to baseline as quick as possible. This is the reason I advise keeping protein just to what we need and no more.

I would be very interested to see this graph on fiber as fiber takes even loner to process than protein as it slows gastric emptying. I suspect it would be similar to the protein but slightly higher for longer.

3. He understands how fat storage works and that it is actually easier for glucose to be stored as fat than it is to store fat as fat.

He goes into this at about 9 minutes into the video. In order for fat to be stored as fat it has to first be enzymatically cleaved apart. The Glycerol backbone has to be removed with an enzyme, LPL (Lipoprotein Lypase), then the fatty acids can be packed into the cell then it has to be recombined with the glycerol inside the cell. Glucose, with the help of insulin can be packed into the fat cell directly through the glut 4 transport where it turns to glycerol to be combined with the fatty acids to form trigs again. Which process is more costly?

4. He knows that insulin can create new fat cells when you have reached your limit genetically.

This is why many diabetics gain weight quickly when they start taking insulin. At 11 minutes he starts talking about something I made a post on awhile back on. Lipohypertrophy. This happens to diabetics that inject insulin in the same spots repeatedly. They get masses of fat building up in that area. What more proof do we need that insulin makes us fat? It can literally create masses of fat where you inject it.

5. This one is something I believe him to be incorrect about. Insulin resistance is not caused by over stimulation of insulin, spiking it too many times a day, but rather it is caused by our genetic ability to create new fat cells or to grow our fat cells large.

At 14 minutes he speaks about this. What I and many others are now starting to believe is that insulin resistance starts when the fat cells either reach their limit of fat storage or you reach your genetic threshold for fat cell creation. This causes the cells not to react to insulin as they are now full and no longer want to accept any new storage.

What causes me to believe this is because when the person starts to become insulin resistant they tend to stabilize in weight. They no longer gain but their begin having massive complications from the high blood sugar. They are tehn given drugs to better manage their glucose and this helps for some time. Then they are given insulin and the trouble begins. At this point the person tends to start putting on weight again. This is because the insulin has the ability to grow new fat cells. This is actually how fat cells are made in a lab. Using insulin. This is evident by the aove point on lipohypertrophy.

6. Another item I don’t particularly like. Not everyone can be 100% right I guess. 🙂

He talks about the appetite supression of ketones like it is a way to cut calories despite the fact that he dismissed it above. It is like he felt the need to somehow make ketosis fit the model. The reduction in appetite is not a benefit of keto and is not meant to help you eat less. It is because ketosis is a hack. It tricks our body into thinking we are starving. I wrote these articles addressing this:

Eating to Satiety is misunderstood

Listening to your body is great if you understand it’s language

Not being hungry is not a benefit

7. He believes in experimenting to see the effects foods have on ketones.

He talks about this at 24 minutes.

Experimenting is the best way to learn how your body works. Having someone who knows how to interpret the data is even better. 🙂

8. He understands how bad fructose is and how sweet effects the brain.

25 minutes in he discusses the issues with fructose.

Fructose is far sweeter than glucose thus is more addictive and it only gets processed in the liver which cause the mitochondria in the liver to be over taxed which can result in fatty liver. It also creates far more glycation end products which are highly inflammatory. Berries are not good for you.

9. The most important reason why I think Dr. Paul Mason is likely the best Low carb Doctor out there today!!!

SWEETENERS DO NOT GET A FREE PASS!!!!!

21:45 Dr. Mason starts getting into why we need to stop with the sweeteners. Thank you lord I am not the only one who gets this!! 🙂

This is the post I wrote way back.

Sweeteners are not for weight loss

I highly recommend watching or reading anything else Dr. Mason has out there. He is so far the most together Doctor nutrition wise I have seen. Way to go.

Keto ON!

Coach Jack

If you want to get your Ketogenic Diet back to a place of Common Sense and learn how to heal your metabolism you can get personalized coaching from Coach Jack.

Check the details here:

Personalized Coaching with Coach Jack

I don’t want to name the Doctor who did this but he as a podcast where he did a 3 week experiment of 1 week of water only fasting sandwiched between 2 weeks of keto. He was doing it because he wanted to see if he could see any markers of autophagy.

Since he is a doctor he can take all of his own blood and get as many tests done as he likes. Here are the baseline results as well as following each phase.

He mentions what I see as a standout detriment to fasting but glazes over it for some reason. This troubles me that he does not see this as a huge issue. He skips past it and just takes away from it that he lost weight. Wonderful. Weight loss at the expense of many other important things.

These are the two very important issues I would have addressed and is the entire reason I don’t want people fasting or restricting calories as both things happen in both situations. Women especially should take note of this as they are most susceptible to one of these issues.

1. Thyroid Function

This is the one women should really be aware of. The levels dropped slightly during the keto week but knowing this Doc he was likely caloric restricting since he is really into only eating one meal a day and mentioned in the podcast that he often forgot to eat at all during the keto week. Look at his levels after the week of fasting. Just one week.

Free T3 dropped from 3.7 at baseline to 2.5 after 1 week keto and then again to 1.8 after the fasting. The free T3 went back up to an acceptable 2.9 after the final week of keto. Likely he ate more during this week than the first keto week which is typical after a week of not eating. The body ends up trying to recoup.

This is the one that really jumps out.

Reverse T3 skyrockets from 17 after the keto week, which was only a mild jump from 11 baseline, to 38 after fasting!!!! When reverse T3 goes up it blocks the receptors for the active thyroid hormone to get into cells making any active T3 you have completely useless and causes your metabolism to take a long walk off a short pier. This is a big BIG red flag. Women are already suffering enough with thyroid issues today from years of crazy restricted diets and now “experts” are telling them to fast which is clearly devastating to the thyroid function. Keep in mind as well this is a very healthy man we are looking at here. Imagine what this does to an already metabolically damaged person! The reverse T3 reverts back to an acceptable 14 after the last week of keto.

Nobody should be doing this to themselves. Especially not women who already have a damaged metabolism and terrible thyroid issues. Absolutely crazy. What is crazier is that this Doc does not see this!

2. Sex hormones (Testosterone)

Now this will likely have the same effect on women and their estrogen but I can only speak to testosterone here as that is all that we have to discuss in the test since the Doc in question is a man.

Keto Week: Test actually takes a pretty big jump in the keto week. 764 to 920! I already knew this to be true since I was on hormone replacement for years before I went really strict keto and was able to completely come off.

Fasting week: Test takes a nose dive down to 539! In just one week of fasting. This means his body almost stopped making any new testosterone!!! How crazy is that? He didn’t see a problem with doing this to himself!!!

Keto Week 2: Test jumps back up to 843 which is still higher than his baseline of 764. Keto is a powerful stimulator of test. Got to love that.

So one week of fasting sent his testosterone levels plummeting into a range where he would be a candidate for hormone replacement. If there is anything that will kill a mans ability to lose weight it is poor test levels. Yet again, he did something fairly catastrophic to his hormones and metabolism yet glossed over it because the scale showed a lower number. Of course it did. He likely dropped the majority of that in water. I would bet a dollar to a dime that he gains every pound of the weight back within 2 weeks.

In the end he wanted to see markers of autophagy. Did he? Hard to say. He only had guesses of maybe. Was the maybe of increased autophagy worth what he did to himself in that week? I say a massive NOPE. That is just me though.

Keto On!

Coach Jack

If you want to get your Ketogenic Diet back to a place of Common Sense and learn how to heal your metabolism you can get personalized coaching from Coach Jack.

Check the details here:

Personalized Coaching with Coach Jack

The thing everybody worries about is going to the doctor and having them freak out because your LDL is high. This has happened to me many times. There is a fun game that I like to play with my doctor to get her to leave me alone about my cholesterol. It is called “What will my LDL be today?”

It is a really fun game. I eat a certain way for a week or two and go in and ask for a blood test. She gives me a requisition and I go and get the test done. 3 weeks later I get the results. The LDL is high at 5.4ish. This is high for Canadians and my doctor recommends a statin at this point.

Here is my first test where I was eating keto at 90% fat intake:

She says “I am going to give you 6 months to change your diet and come back with a better result or I want you to start taking a statin.”

I say “Better yet, give me another requisition. I will change my diet for two weeks and have another test and come back and see you.”

She says “What will that do? It takes months for diet to affect your LDL.”

I say “Well actually it doesn’t. It takes 3-4 days of eating to completely change your lipid profile. Just give me the req and call me when it is in.I predict I will have an LDL of about half, HDL will be lower, and my trigs will be slightly higher. Also I will predict my potassium will be lower.” I was only getting about 1200mg potassium per day at that point and I had a theory that it was high because I was getting so little and the blood was pulling more from the cells to make up for it. If I consumed more it would lower the blood level.

She wrote my predictions in my file and reluctantly she gives me the req. 3 weeks later I get a call from the secretary to come back. I go in to see the doctor and she was dumbfounded.

This was my second test 2 weeks after changing my diet. I could have done less but I was doing this with an experiment that required 2 weeks of high carb eating.

My predictions came back exactly as I said but my LDL was actually 60% lower than it was. 🙂

Doctor: “What on earth did you do? Have someone else take the test for you.”

Me: “Nope. I just changed my diet from a fat based diet to a carb based diet. Since LDL is a fat transport device it stands to reason that if I eat fat I have more LDL and if I eat no fat I will require less of these transports. Right?”

Doctor: “This makes no sense.”

Me: “That is because everything you were taught about lipids is completely wrong. Check out this blog.”

I gave her the website to visit Dave Feldman’s Blog. Cholesterol Code

She looked at me with a look of dismay.

Doctor: “I am not sure what to do with you at this point.”

Me: “Nothing. I appreciate the test reqs though. I highly suggest you read everything on that page. It will blow your mind.”

This is a prime example of why LDL cannot be used as a marker to make a decision on taking a drug that could have serious life altering side effects. It just doesn’t make sense. Anything you can change that dramatically with 2 weeks of eating is not something that is of any concern.

Now if you have high insulin, uncontrolled diabetes or just generally a poor diet and lots of other markers then perhaps you can take it into consideration. The sad fact is that I am an extremely fit and active person in perfect health with the exception on a single marker and I was told I would have to take a statin. It just doesn’t make good sense. It doesn’t make Common Sense.

Keto On!

Coach Jack

If you want to get your Ketogenic Diet back to a place of Common Sense and learn how to heal your metabolism you can get personalized coaching from Coach Jack.

Check the details here:

Personalized Coaching with Coach Jack

Eating to satiety is an interesting concept. It is only a concept that has become something to even consider in our society of excess. The concept was completely foreign to us for the entirety of our millions of years of evolution. why is it important now? How do we even know what satiety means?

To some satiety means until they don’t feel ravenous anymore. Some people it means until they are stuffed so much they can’t put anything else in. The meaning also changes based on what you are eating. Is satiety the same level when you are eating something you crave like cake or ice cream as it is when you are eating brussell sprouts? I highly doubt it is. I know for me I will stop eating meat long before I will stop eating cinnamon buns. I will stop eating kale a hell of a lot sooner than I will stop eating bacon. Was I satiated in all instances? Yes but not because I got enough nutrition or because my stomach was full. In the case of cinnamon buns I will only be satiated when I can’t possibly fit anything else in my stomach but in the case of kale I will be satiated when I am no longer feeling hunger pains but with as little of the kale as I have to eat to make that happen. Why? Because satiation is decided more by the brain/pleasure center than the stomach.

The current definition of satiety never came into play until we had the option to turn down or accept foods that pleasured us. In the entire history of the human race it has been but a blink of an eye that we had much of a choice in what or when when we ate. Can you imagine a paleo man taking down a mammoth and eating a couple bites and tossing the rest because he was satiated? No, he would have gorged himself with as much as he could stuff in. Likely he would have eaten until he was nearly sick because who knows when the next feeding would be. Likely once he was stuffed he would drag the rest back to the cave and continue feeding pretty much constantly until it was gone since there was no way to store it and he would not want to waste it. The idea of over eating was not even in his mind. Today we always know we are going to have food so we obsess over how much to eat, at what time and what is too much and let our desire over what we like and don’t like control how much we nourish ourselves. If we love what we are eating we will gorge ourselves until stuffed but if it is something we don’t really enjoy, we barely consume any. This is clear when I go eat with people. I have gone to eat with people many times who I work with. They constantly tell me they can’t eat as much as they should yet if we go eat at a nice restaurant they eat as much in one meal as they should in a whole day. We all know this to be the case. I could eat 2,000 calories of cake in one sitting with no issues but if I tried to do that with eggs there is no way. That is reality.

To see examples of natural eating I just have to look at my cats. They never really know when I am going to feed them because I don’t allow them to free feed. They will eat as much as I give them. If I give them too much they will literally eat until they vomit. Every time. They don’t really know what it is to turn down food or have food preference either because they get the same food every day and have since they were kittens. Now if I let them free feed they will way over consume because they aren’t using their intellect to dictate how much to eat. They are just using instinct and will keep eating because they are driven to by nature because they don’t know when this fee for all will end and they may have to be hungry again. Eventually though they will start to instinctively know that they will always have food and start to slow their eating. They might gain a bit of weight initially but it will taper off and they will maintain their weight. Especially since I only feed them a raw diet that mimics their ancestral one that contains just what a carnivore would eat. One thing they will never do though is eat too little. They will always eat slightly more than what I feed them based on their weight requirement. I’ve seen this time and time again. That is what instinctual eating is. Humans seem to have lost this ability with the evolved brain.

How is this different from people eating fat to satiety you ask? Well here is the reality of all of this.

Eating 80% plus of fat in the diet every single day is not likely our natural diet. Being in a state of ketosis is likely a state we spent a lot of time in but the reality of this is, when eating just hunted and gathered foods it is unlikely that we got this much fat. It was more likely 60-70% fat at best. If you are eating less fat and more protein and carbs you are getting dramatically different signalling. The signalling we are getting when eating 80% or more fat is similar to the signalling we get in starvation where we are consuming body fat. The body sees this high of fat intake exactly the same as starvation because the end chemical result is the same. A large pool of fat energy with a small pool of carbohydrate or protein energy. This produces a certain state of compounds in the body that looks identical to what happens when we are starving or fasting.

So what happens in starvation?

1. hunger goes away so we can focus and hunt without being plagued by hunger pangs. A distracted hunter is a poor hunter and a poor hunter is a dead hunter.
2. Energy and focus goes up as cortisol and epinephrine rise to provide energy to be able to hunt for survival.
3. Metabolism starts to slow in order to preserve lean mass.

You will notice though if you eat high fat and make yourself actually eat until you are physically full, meaning a reasonable amount of calories per meal (like 1/3 of your TDEE) and you can feel your tummy being a little tight, but not until you have to vomit that with time you will actually start feeling hungry before meals and you will have no problem eating to TDEE. You may have to work your way up to it by gradually increasing food intake day by day so you don’t feel sick but eventually it will be no problem. This is because once your body starts understanding that there is no deficit of energy it will start to normalize the starvation signalling and allow you out of the preservation mode. It just take some time to get there.

Now if this form of keto is not our natural diet why do we not just eat more meat and less fat? Well that is a great question. The answer is because this natural diet was never intended to make anyone lose weight. It was great at helping people maintain weight or even gain it but losing weight in those times meant death. Today it is a goal. Eating this ancestral way in these times of abundance will result in eating too much protein, too many carbs and not enough fat as that is the food environment and that is how we are wired. It was not the case then. Food was harder to come by and bad food was especially hard to come by. The possibility of binging on pizza was pretty low. The possibility of binging on anything for long enough to have any significant impact was pretty low. Now if you are already at a weight you are comfortable with and weight loss is not a goal then you can certainly eat more protein and likely you will find it much easier to eat more food when you eat more protein. Protein does not blunt the hunger signalling like super high fat does so you can easily consume more food. There lies the rub. If you eat more food while eating more protein you will run the risk of over consuming. Now if you incorporate a little new age thought process and control into your eating you could potentially mitigate this the weight gain but if your goal is to lose weight then eating higher fat is still the way to go.

Again, this is if you are at a stable weight so keep this in mind. If you want to eat more naturally and not have to track this can be done but because of our constant food availability there is a huge chance that we will naturally over consume. To bypass this you can use a technique called Time Restricted feeding. This is simply eating until completely full, 2 or 3 times a day but within a small eating window. The optimal window for weight maintenance is 10-12 hours. It may be possible to lose weight free feeding protein, fat, and even some carbs in a window as small as 8-9 hours but personally I have not seen this to be the case in anyone. I have seen people able to maintain weight very well this way though. Doing this will allow ample time for the body to reset all of its functions, digest all the food and be at a state of low insulin long enough to keep weight stable. Keep in mind though that all of this is dramatically controlled by our circadian rhythm which dictates when we are insulin sensitive and when we are insulin resistant. It is best followed if you start your window as soon as you wake up and end it as early in the day as you can. I discuss this more in the article below.

Insulin Sensitivity Determines Optimal Eating Times

The moral of the story is that eating to satiety is a matter of preference these days when this is not how we evolved. Preference was eating as much as you could so you wouldn’t die. Now it is wether we get pleasure from the food or not. Times have changed dramatically. We have to really reconsider what satiety means and what is optimal for health. Allowing us to be tricked by our hormone signals is not optimal. It causes us to under eat and under nourish. This kills the metabolism. We have to be smarter and recognize that we are playing a game with our bodies doing this keto thing. It is great for weight loss but it is a trick. We were never designed to lose weight. We were hard wired to gain it actually. Gaining weight was protective in our evolution. If we want to play this game we have to do it intelligently. We have to understand the impact of the satiety/starvation malfunction and learn to over ride it to ensure we keep a strong and healthy metabolism. That is the advantage of the large brain we have evolved. We can play smart and not just by instinct.

Keto On!

Coach Jack

If you want to get your Ketogenic Diet back to a place of Common Sense and learn how to heal your metabolism you can get personalized coaching from Coach Jack.

Check the details here:

Personalized Coaching with Coach Jack

Oxalates steal minerals—iron, calcium, magnesium, zinc—that your body needs. Resulting mineral deficiencies cause growth, reproductive, bone, and other problems. They also corrode digestive system linings, causing leaky gut or other gastrointestinal diseases. Needle-shaped oxalate crystals are known to perforate mucus membrane cells.

So what are they and where do they come from? Well I sort of gave it away in the title but yes, they come from plants. Plants create Oxalates from the vitamin C they produce and they make them for several reasons:

1. protecting them from excess calcium in soils,
2. harming insects that try to eat them,
3. storing calcium in seeds for germination,
4. providing structural support,
5. improving shade tolerance,
6. defending against fungal infection, and others.

The one that stands out the most to me is “harming insects that try to eat them.”

We are also trying to eat them. Since plants can’t run like animals they have to develop other ways to survive and they do it through chemical warefare.

The body cannot break down Oxalates so it tries to excrete them. Unfortunately as the body tries to excrete them, they can migrate into other tissues like joints and especially the kidneys as they try to filter them. Oxalates are the major contributor to kidney stones. Crystal accumulation can also cause more generalized problems, such as overall malaise, poor concentration, joint stiffness, swelling, muscle pain, gastritis, tendonitis, or other inflammatory conditions. There are a number of studies demonstrating that oxalate exposure can cause damage even when micro-crystals don’t develop or persist.

So what foods are highest and lowest in Oxalates?

HIGH OXALATE

Beans, grains, bran, seeds (sesame, poppy, and other seeds), peanuts, almonds and other nuts, Swiss chard, spinach, beets, potatoes, sweet potatoes, chocolate, rhubarb, figs, kiwi, blackberries, and seasonings including black pepper, cumin, and turmeric are all high in oxalates.

LOW OXALATE

Meats, dairy, eggs, other non-plant foods, and fats and oils of all types. Yay!

Many vegetables, including arugula, avocado, bok choy, cabbage, cauliflower, cilantro, garlic, kohlrabi, lettuce, mustard greens, mushrooms and onions, are low in oxalates and also low in Lectins. Read abut Lectins below.

Lectins – The other plant danger

Why medical testing doesn’t diagnose this

There is no sure way to detect oxalate poisoning and when the testing is done it is usually invasive or inconclusive or both. Doctors just aren’t really well versed in interpreting the results. We need some better studies to develop ways of testing before a reliable screening process can be developed. These are the current methods:

Biopsy

Testing for oxalates may use bone, skin, or kidney samples obtained through biopsy. Bone samples are considered the most reliable source, because of oxalic acid’s high affinity for calcium and because oxalate levels normally fluctuate less in bones than in other tissues. Kidney biopsies are reserved for cases with strong clinical evidence of advanced kidney failure. Invasive bone or skin biopsies are used rarely, typically in critical cases when excessive internal production of oxalate is suspected.

Blood and Urine Tests

Long-standing technical difficulties have made reliably measuring oxalate in blood and urine unreliable, causing doctors to look elsewhere to explain disease (and even to ignore the problem of oxalates entirely). Since the 1990s, modern technical advances have made it possible to accurately measure oxalate in urine, but the ability to detect oxalates still hasn’t changed the medical habit of ignoring oxalate in the body, even for patients with oxalate kidney stones.

Accurate tests require training, skill, and use of proper protocols, not just during the testing of samples, but in collecting and handling them. On the rare occasions when urinary oxalate is measured, it’s assayed (analyzed) badly—most often due to inadequate handling and workup of the urine sample prior to actual measurement.

Very few medical offices are equipped with the knowledge, training, and skill to successfully conduct this specialized testing.

So if testing is not going to work how do we determine if they are affecting us? Easy. Remove them from your diet and see how you feel. That is pretty easy.

As always, everything I talk about is best practice. Obviously life has to happen and we are all in control of our own. If you don’t feel that Oxalates are a problem for you then please keep eating the foods containing them. If you feel you might benefit from trying to cut them out, what do you have to lose? But please, do not start yelling on the group how I am terrible because I am telling you that you cannot have almonds. It is your life and your health. You are in control. I am just here to try and help guide you.

Keto ON!

Coach Jack

If you want to get your Ketogenic Diet back to a place of Common Sense and learn how to heal your metabolism you can get personalized coaching from Coach Jack.

Check the details here:

Personalized Coaching with Coach Jack

Like many other “Nutritional Experts”, Mary Vance has a very limited understanding of human physiology and loves to use her misinterpretations of the science to show how potentially “Dangerous” keto can be. Just so you know, Mary Vance is a Holistic Nutritional Consultant, not a Nutritionist. She has the same education as I am currently enrolled in.

This is her Article.

The Dark Side of Keto

Here is a point by point rebuttal to her many error filled points. Mary’s comments are in Bold.

For example, a doctor colleague of mine mentioned the following:
“I have a patient who’s been on a ketogenic diet for 7 months. She lost 14 stubborn pounds of body fat, her brain is clear, and her carb cravings are gone. She wants to continue this plan, BUT her LDL cholesterol went from 119 to 253. Total cholesterol from 199 to 355. HsCRP from 0.21 to 3.0.

If you don’t speak lab work, it means this person is showing a major spike in inflammation. It’s confusing because she feels great, but her body is showing a dramatic elevation in inflammatory markers like LDL and CRP. And these results are not uncommon in those on a ketogenic diet.

This shows a basic lack of understanding of several things.

1. It is not at all common for HsCRP to rise on keto. It is actually incredibly uncommon and a sign that the patient is doing something wrong or eating a food that is inflammatory to them. Not that keto is inflammatory as it has been well documented that it is the complete opposite.
2. LDL is not an inflammatory marker. It is a sign of increased fat energy transport.

The ketogenic diet is low fiber because of the strict carb restriction, and many people suffer constipation as a result after transitioning to keto. Fiber deficiencies harm our guts and the population of friendly bacteria, your microbiome.

This is pure opinion. Constipation is not that common with keto and it is more often than not a situation of low electrolytes or magnesium and nothing to do with fiber. There is no real definitive evidence that fiber is beneficial to gut health and lots of data showing that it is not needed at all and that people with gut issues often see a dramatic improvement when fiber is completely removed. There is no such things as a “Fiber deficiency” since for something to be a deficiency it has to cause a clear associated disease when it is lacking in the diet. Like Rickets. That is a disease caused by Vitamin D deficiency. It is verifiable. There is no verifiable disease associated with a lack of fiber in the diet and actually, the opposite is true. As I stated above, there is lots of data showing improvement in health when fiber is removed.

High fat diets can adversely affect your beneficial gut bacteria. They need plenty of plants to thrive, and if they don’t get fed, they die. Reduced gut bug population could mean trouble in the long run.

More conjecture and fiction. There is no evidence that gut bacteria dies when not eating plants. I go a year sometimes without eating plants and then switch on a dime to 14 days eating nothing but plants. The first couple days I have some bloating and gastro issues but after a short adjustment I can digest and handle the plants easily. No evidence what so ever that not eating plants and eating high fat can have any long term negative impact on gut health. The microbiome is severely misunderstood and from what I can see it is very adaptive and bacteria can be adjusted very quickly to adapt to changes in the diet. one thing is very clear. Removing all plants has been shown to dramatically reduce gut issues. The idea that plants are necessary to maintain gut health seems silly. If you have to eat something to maintain bacteria in the gut maybe that bacteria and that food is not all that beneficial.

Staying on keto for a long time may lead to kidney stones, liver issues, high cholesterol, constipation, slowed growth (in young people), and bone fractures. (source) This study shows that a high fat ketogenic diet caused insulin resistance in mice.

More and more lies and misconceptions. In one breath she says there are no long term studies on keto then in the next all of a sudden she has some magical proof that long term keto may lead to all of these issues? What did I miss? Initially people may see an uptick of kidney stones with keto as levels of urea change but as you adapt the levels adjust and normalize. There are no long term evidence that keto has an y impact on stones. Stones are created from oxidative stress and that is caused by high carbohydrate consumption and not keto.

There is no evidence of any “Liver issues” from the mysterious long term studies that didn’t exist but now she is quoting.

Cholesterol is a non issue. LDL anyway. Some see an increase but just as many or more see a decrease. More see an increase in HDL and decrease in trigs which is a much better marker than LDL will ever be.
Slowed growth only was a factor in early ketogenic therapies on children that were fed a 90% fat diet consisting of poor quality proteins and shitty plant oils and not healthy real foods.

Bone fractures come from poor nutrition. Not keto. You can have poor nutrition in any diet and again, this comes from early therapeutic keto diets on children using poor quality liquid diets.

That study showing hepatic insulin resistance in mice is idiotic. They saw insulin resistance in the liver yet the weight was not negatively impacted and total levels of insulin and glucose where better on the KD diet. Does that make sense? If there were signs of insulin resistance in the liver that is fine. You don’t need to be storing fat in the liver in any significant amount anyway. If total body insulin and glucose levels are positively impacted then it may just be a normal physiological mechanism causing the liver insulin resistance. The muscle also become selectively insulin resistant every night. Is that an issue? Nope. Also, we are not mice.

The Paleo Mom has an excellent article here documenting adverse reactions (unwanted or dangerous reaction) and supportive scientific literature on keto diet dangers.

The Paleo Mom is protecting her brand. Nothing more. She selects studies on incredibly sick children being treated with a liquid ketogenic diet consisting of 90% fat, mostly from vegetable oils and poor quality proteins, and uses this as proof that keto has all these dangers for the general population eating real foods. This is a pathetic attempt to sway people away from an incredibly valuable way to become more metabolically healthy. It is a shame people like to use science to bend the truth to suite their own agenda.

So while on one hand Mary Vance seems to say Keto might be good for a couple things, it is a back handed compliment followed by a dramatic drama filled attempt to sway people away from it. Unfortunate.