Origin & Work Of The Ketogenic Diet

There is a lot of controversy over the ketogenic diet and whether it’s healthy for both your body and heart functions. What are the costs and benefits? Is it good to do it long term? How is it healthy compared to other diets out there? This diet is becoming more and more popular and finding answers is essential when figuring out if it’s doing good or harm to our bodies. The keto diet is a diet that consists of a low carb (roughly 20-50 grams) and a high dose of fat intake (equivalent to about 90% of your total calorie allowance). Your body uses carbohydrates (glucose in the body) as a source of energy. The goal is to kick your body into ketosis in which the high fat content forces the body to use fats as the energy source. Ketosis is a normal response to starvation where your body uses other resources as energy when carbs aren’t available which could be why lifestyle is so popular. This suggests that the inhabitants of our ancestors didn’t have access much sustainable food so essentially they were hungry for periods of time because of the scarcity of available food. When you are a hunter/gatherer it can be difficult to find food and consume it, so the body turned on itself to feed until the individual had a successful meal. If that’s what our ancestors did, that must mean it’s good and that we should follow in their footsteps. But we aren’t primitive people, times have changed and we have changed. Origin & Work Of The Ketogenic Diet

There are so many new things about our physiology that have been presented that weren’t an issue back then. For example, what about those individuals with diabetes? In a person who has diabetes, ketones form when there aren’t enough carbs for energy, but this often occurs because there isn’t enough insulin available to help move carbs from the bloodstream to the cells to be used for energy. You might be thinking that it’s useful to burn fat for fuel. However, for diabetic individuals, ketosis can quickly become dangerous if it occurs due to a continued lack of insulin. In the absence of insulin, fat cells continue to release fat into circulation and the liver continues to pump out ketones. Ketones are acids so they lower the pH of the blood, making it acidic and potentially dangerous and possibly life-threatening. Diabetes is only one disease of many that could inadvertently affect the individual.

Another issue that can arise is the relation to renal problems. In a different study low protein diet supplements were administered by an essential amino acid—keto acid mixture for six to twelve months. Body weight decreased during the first three months. Arm muscle circumference fell, muscle mass also fell in several individuals. This diet may slow the decline in renal function in a proportion of patients. Low protein diets have been used for many years for symptomatic relief of uremic symptoms. In an attempt to improve the uremic state various combinations of essential amino acids and their keto acid analogues have been given as supplements to diets low in nitrogen. Recently it has been claimed that low protein diets may slow the progression of renal failure. The evidence for a protective effect of a low protein intake is striking in experimental renal failure produced in rats. Origin & Work Of The Ketogenic Diet

A number of reports have appeared which suggest there may be a similar effect in humans but to today there has been only one attempt at a prospective randomly allocated trial in human renal disease. This study reported that a very low protein diet supplemented by an essential amino acid/keto acid mixture appeared to slow or in some cases completely halt the progression of advanced renal failure. If decline in renal function can indeed be slowed, they would prove to be of enormous importance in both human and economic terms. Although the diet can severely hinder those who are diabetic or are at risk for it, it turns out that it might aide in other problems such as decrease the symptoms of renal failure. This could be a breakthrough in knowing more about the diet itself. But with so many pros and cons it is hard to know for sure if it is actually good for you, and also who it is good for. For example, what if you have a disease going on the diet might make things worse, or what if you were totally healthy but doing the diet brought in a new concern such as a weird allergy or a new disease that you didn’t even know you were at risk for. The problem with how new the diet is, is not knowing the answers to any of those questions. But as with any new thing that comes up in our world it starts with baby steps and if it deems workable then it progresses into something greater.

There are many studies that are being done to look at the effects of the diet both good and bad. One of many studies that was done included a group of obese individuals that went on the keto diet for twenty-four weeks, the results were that the diet helped the majority to lose weight fast and as it turned out, it also helped them to lower their blood sugar and cholesterol levels. This study showed that if you want to lose weight fast and reach healthy levels of cholesterol then this diet is for you. But an argument that can be made is that an obese individual can lose weight quickly if they just exercise right and eat adequate portions of food. It is much easier to see weight loss in a larger person rather than a smaller one. It was found that obese subjects with a high prevalence of diabetes lost more weight during six months on a carbohydrate-restricted diet than on a calorie- and fat-restricted diet. Which further suggests that obese individuals are more likely to show the weight loss. But there were many differences between the groups and the duration of the study.

Many studies were done for a relatively short period of time so the findings were minimal. This could be because of how new the diet is, so there isn’t much evidence on the experiments in each study, And because it’s so new we don’t know much about the diet so it can be difficult to test. In years to come there will be more knowledge about the long term effects that the keto diet might have on your body. Also within every study it is difficult to determine the possibility that the diet was not done to the exact criteria of the study. This means that it was possible that the individuals did not consume the adequate amount of calories and carbohydrates that were required for their body mass in the trial. Of those people around that went on the keto diet, most people ate much less than they were supposed to and had difficulties staying under their required carb intake. Much of the time the people didn’t eat breakfast or lunch due to the lack of knowledge of what is good or bad in a sense that a certain food might have too many carbs and if the allowance is only 50 carbs a day they want to save those amounts for another meal that is perhaps more satisfactory. Origin & Work Of The Ketogenic Diet

Another study was done using healthy, otherwise non-obese, individuals. What was found was that the individuals did lose some weight but in return they also lost some of their performance in their physical exercise. In other words, if you are not obese and you get on the keto diet, you’ll lose weight but you won’t perform as well when you do physical activity. Which doesn’t seem like a good trade off. Exercise is good for your body in a sense that we were made to move. Doing physical work on our bodies releases chemicals in our brain that make us happy and gives us an overall feeling of well being. We know that sitting the couch all day and not moving isn’t healthy for us and it creates stiffness in our joints and muscles and makes us feel groggy, so why would doing a diet that lessens our ability to exercise be good? Also, an adverse effect of the diet is that over time it would cause you to lose your appetite, so you would naturally lose weight by not eating because eating that much fat makes us feel yucky and uncomfortable.