so let's talk about ketosis and ketones um the diet the keto diet is becoming increasingly popular from what i've seen it's actually the diet that i'm on at the moment how does that play into everything we've talked about yeah yeah so it this is an opportunity for me to do a little bit of um nutrient biochemistry or a little discussion of metabolism so that people appreciate what ketones even are and where they come from. So the entirety of the human body is a metabolic hybrid in that the body is largely burning fuel from two sources. It is burning blood glucose or sugar, blood sugar, or it's burning fat.
Those are the two main fuels for the body by extension. Now, the brain was an exception. The brain is glucose or ketones, but I'll get to where the ketones come from. The rest of the body isn't really relying on ketones as much. It's fats or glucose.
or blood sugar. Insulin is what decides which fuel is used. So as much as the metabolic engine has two fuel sources, insulin will decide which one is opened and which one is closed.
If insulin is high, the body is sugar burning. And you can measure this in the whole body level by measuring the amount of oxygen and CO2 that the body is producing. Because different biochemistry or the burning of the fuels will produce a different amount of CO2.
So if I'm burning glucose, I might be producing more CO2? Yes. Yeah, so we could hook you up to something called an indirect calorimeter and measure that your RER, the respiratory exchange ratio, the balance between CO2 and oxygen, would go higher.
So we increase your insulin. Like if I infused you with insulin, in the next few minutes, we would see that your RER would go up and we'd say, boy, you're sugar burning. Or we allow insulin to come down and then the RER goes down, which is reflective of fat burning. So it's insulin that determines whether the body is sugar burning or fat burning.
Now, when insulin has been low for about 16 or so hours, something interesting starts happening at the liver. So the liver, with insulin being low, is burning a lot of fat, including its own fat that the liver can store. The liver can store fat, but also fat coming from fat cells. Because if insulin is low, the fat cells are just leaking out fat to be burned by the body.
And because insulin is low, the liver keeps burning it. And the liver essentially burns, continues to burn so much fat that it fills its own needs. It meets its own needs and says to itself, hey, I don't need to keep burning fat.
I have all the energy I need. I'm doing great. But it can't stop burning fat because insulin is low. And if insulin stays low, fat burning keeps going. And so...
Because the body doesn't have enough glucose. Well, it's acting... So in this sense...
It's doing it to help replace the glucose that isn't coming in. That's the value of the ketone. So as the liver is continuing to burn fat, it essentially gets to a point of fat burning where it's burning more fat than it needs.
And that excess, if you will, is what becomes ketones. So ketones are kind of a metabolic release valve for the liver cell to say, I can't, I don't know what to do with all this fat burning. Okay, I know what I'm going to do. There's not a lot of glucose coming in. And so the brain may start to get hungry.
so I'm going to start making ketones. And so ketones are nothing more than a product of a lot of fat burning. And anyone who even fasts for 24 hours, you wake up that next morning, you're in some degree of ketosis. Lest anyone think it's an extreme thing.
People are going in and out of ketosis, ideally, often. Now, why do I say ideally? It's because ketones are, as we've already outlined, perhaps the best fuel for the brain. The brain thrives on ketones.
You can take a person with early stage Alzheimer's disease and have them go through a series of cognitive tests and they do horribly on them. Like one example is you ask the patient with Alzheimer's to draw the face of an analog clock, a circle with one, two through 12, and then some hands on it. And it is utter chaos.
This is published reports. You then put them into ketosis, ask them, can you please draw the face of a clock? It's still sloppy, but it is absolutely the face of a clock. You ask them when they're not in ketosis to try to tie their shoelaces, they can't think through the puzzle of tying the shoelaces. Ask them to do it again when they're in ketosis, all of a sudden they can tie their shoelaces.
More than that, they can get themselves dressed. All of these are published case reports. It's just my long-winded way of saying the brain thrives when it has ketones as a fuel source. But the benefits don't stop there. My lab published a report finding that when humans were in ketosis, which is just a term for ketones being elevated, we pulled out small pieces of belly fat and measured the metabolic rate of that belly fat.
And we found that in ketosis, the metabolic rate of that belly fat was three times higher than when the people were not in ketosis. What does that mean? Yeah, so that means that the fat was suddenly behaving in a much more energetic way.
That fat tissue has a very low metabolic rate. And then all of a sudden, when the ketones came into them, they started getting much more active and they started burning more energy, which is going to be very helpful for someone who wants to lose fat. If your fat cells now have a three times higher metabolic rate, that means that the fat cells are starting to act a little bit more like your muscle cells and they're just burning more energy.
So does that mean that I'm going to lose fat faster? Yes, absolutely. And that is what happens.
There are very well done controlled studies to show that if you control for all calories, when a human is in ketosis, their metabolic rate goes up. Your whole body is just burning more. It's just everything's kind of been turned on a little more.
The furnace of the metabolism has just been, it has a little more fuel kind of stoking the fire. So ketones will increase metabolic rate of fat tissue. We found a paper that we published documenting how we took muscle cells and kind of insulted the muscle cells to determine how tough the muscle cells were. When we incubated the muscle cells with ketones, they were much more resistant to injury. So the ketones act to protect muscle tissue.
And in a way, that is reflective of a function of ketones. Ketones are a defender of muscle. Ketones are basically the way to tell the brain, saying brain. You think you need a lot of glucose, and if you don't get enough glucose, you would start stripping the protein from muscle to turn it into glucose. But I'm here as a ketone, so you can eat me instead and leave the muscle alone.
So we published, again, a direct report finding that ketones actually make muscle more resistant to injury. And this could be why you're seeing more and more elite athletes using ketones as an actual ergogenic aid or like a supplement to help them better. Be better.
So at my university, at BYU, just this year, our men's and women's cross-country team took the national championships, the best college runners in the nation. Pretty impressive. One of the things they do is they take these ketone drinks before they train and before they race.
Some more and more of the Tour de France teams take ketone supplements because it is just another fuel. It is something that the body can burn. that we always say, well, once you start running out of glucose, you're going to bonk or you're going to hit the wall.
Well, what if you don't really use glucose because you're burning a lot of fat and a lot of ketones instead, and that keeps your glucose kind of untouched, or you're not relying on the glucose? And we see this in humans. If there's a human that has adapted to a ketogenic diet, they burn fat at a higher rate than was ever thought humanly possible, that that fat is basically fueling all of their muscle. movement during the exercise session rather than relying predominantly on glucose.
The body has adapted. It's burning fat for fuel, and when available, it's burning ketones for fuel, and it's leaving the muscle as sort of a last resort when it really needs a big kick. I've seen these keto drinks. Yes.
They're almost like little shots. Well, there's a bunch of different types. If you look at the spectrum of ketones, on one end you have the cheapest, most readily available, although less effective, called ketone salts. where it takes a molecule of ketone and binds it to a mineral like calcium or magnesium.
Not as effective, and it's a lot of minerals, so people will find that they may get a lot of plaque on their teeth, maybe increased risk of kidney stones, so it comes with some consequences. Then you have the ketone ester, which often comes in shots. Then you have the bioidentical BHB or the bioidentical ketone.
One company, which is Original Ketone, they make it. Now, these ones are more effective. You take a little bit of these and you will get an increase in ketones.
They're a little more expensive too. But as the space is becoming more competitive, the price is coming down. And what exactly does it do? So if I took a shot of a bio-identical ketone drink, what would go on in my body and how would that impact my cognitive performance or athletic performance? Yeah, yeah.
So it would result, so you're drinking it in, you're immediately absorbing it from your gut. So if you were not in ketosis, let's say you had... And I'm not encouraging people to do this.
You had just eaten two bagels and a cup of sugary coffee. You're no ketones, undetectable. Because insulin has come up, it's inhibited ketone production.
And then you drink a shot of the ketone. Within an hour, we would detect your ketones. They would have gone up maybe to one millimolar, which is a pretty significant bump.
Yeah. And they're capable of that kind of movement. And maybe you do so because you're thinking, I really need to be sharp right now. Would that make me sharper?
Well, that's where we have to speculate. There's no... My lab published animal evidence suggesting that, yes, indeed, it makes you sharper.
That we had these animals navigate mazes and recognize objects. And when the animals were on a ketogenic diet, they were much sharper. They were much quickly, much better at solving problems and remembering solutions to previous problems.
It's one of the, I ask this in particular because as my team know, because I've said it to them a lot over the last couple of weeks since I've been on the keto diet and I've been literally pricking my finger to check. Yeah, confirming. Yeah, my keto levels and the highest I've gotten to is like 2.5. Which is high. Is it high?
That's not problematic. Right. I mean that is just proof positive that you're in ketosis, which itself is proof positive that you're burning a lot of fat.
Yeah. And three, that your insulin levels are low. Fat dropped off my body like I've never seen in my life. Exactly.
Yeah, it's crazy. So the power there is, like, if you'll allow me to kind of springboard off of that comment, the power of, so if someone is listening to this and they're thinking, okay, I need to shrink my fat cells. Yeah. Unfortunately, they don't realize that there's two variables to what caused their fat cells to grow in the first place.
They have no awareness of the value of insulin in this formula. All they do is pay attention to the calories. And so the average individual is. looking down the road of this fat cell shrinking journey, and they're thinking, okay, what I have to do is just cut my calories. And what do they do to cut their calories?
They do the exact wrong thing. And before I even answer that, let me just present the scenario. Let's imagine that Stephen and I, everyone listening is invited. Stephen and I are hosting a buffet. We have the world's best chefs.
It is going to be a table filled with the most delicious foods you can imagine. You're in our invitation. We say, come hungry.
Because you're going to want to try a little bit of everything. Everyone listening, ask yourselves, what would you do to come as hungry as possible? You'd probably do two things. Or think, how did you go to your Thanksgiving or your Christmas dinner as hungry as possible? You would eat a little less in some period of time before the event, and you would exercise a little more.
And it would work. You would be very hungry. That's why the traditional advice given for weight loss doesn't work.
Because we tell people, eat less. Exercise more. Sure, you maybe lose a little bit of weight in the short term, but all that does, you've given them the perfect recipe to promote hunger. And hunger always wins.
As a good example, in the U.S. we have a game show, maybe there was some version of this in the U.K. called The Biggest Loser. It was essentially who can lose the most weight. And it was through a punishing regimen of caloric restriction.
Eat less, exercise more. That is like the perfect embodiment of that approach. They were starving and they were...
exercising to insane degrees. And oh my goodness, did they lose a lot of weight. And yet you never see them again. They don't do a reunion tour five years or 10 years later because they gain it all back.
Do you know they gain it all back? They do. In fact, a paper published in the U.S. from the National Institutes of Health documented not only the degree to which they gain weight back, but also how it almost literally breaks their metabolism, that normally a person's metabolic rate is connected to their body mass. A bigger body has a higher metabolic rate.
A smaller body has a lower metabolic rate. This is just human physiology. And no surprise, when someone loses weight, there's less of body, and so metabolic rate goes down.
As they gain weight back, metabolic rate will typically go back up as well, except for the contestants and the biggest loser. They started with a high metabolic rate because of a high body fat level. They lost a substantial amount of weight.
No surprise, metabolic rate went down substantially. But this is such a dramatic change that as they started gaining weight back, metabolic rate did not come back with it. It stayed lower than it should have. Normally, it's connected sort of one-to-one.
Wherever body weight is going, metabolic rate is going, except in these people. That method of dramatic weight loss through such severe restriction, which is based purely on the caloric theory of obesity, leads to significant hunger. So no surprise. If a person's attempting to shrink their fat cells or lose weight, if the first step is, I'm going to cut my calories, and they don't address their high insulin, they're never going to lose weight in the long run. They're going to step right back to where they were.
Because if they start cutting calories, but insulin is still high, that's going to make them very hungry. Because insulin wants to be storing energy. A professor from Harvard named David Ludwig found this.
If you have people eating a lower calorie meal that spikes their insulin, it makes them much hungrier than a lower calorie meal that doesn't spike insulin. So that's the key. Anyone listening, if you're thinking I need to be on a fat cell shrinking journey, let the first step of that journey be, I'm going to lower my insulin. Which means?
Which means I'm going to control my carbohydrates. I'm going to stop eating carbohydrates that come from bags and boxes with barcodes. And while I am restricting those carbohydrates, I'm going to focus more on protein and fat.
So control carbs, prioritize protein, and don't fear the fat that comes with those proteins. Fat and protein together is a miraculous combination of helping you feel full. And it is literally giving everything you need.
There are such things as essential proteins. There are such things as essential fats. So focus on those. And that will be the key to helping insulin come down.
Then as you have found, you haven't, and when you're hungry, eat. If you're not hungry, don't eat. But what the person will find is they're lowering their insulin all while their metabolic rate is going up.
They're learning how to burn their own fat for fuel because remember the metabolic hybrid, that metaphor that if you want to lose fat, you need to burn fat. You're not going to lose fat if you're always burning glucose. It's fat that you need to burn.
And as you start burning more fat, you realize that it's like the hump on a camel. That hump exists because it is a big source of fat for that animal to be using its own fat for energy. We have our own version of that.
You think about the average individual who's chubby. They have hundreds of thousands of calories waiting to be burned in those fat cells. It's just that they're chronically elevated insulin.
is never letting them burn it. And so as the person starts making these changes in their diet to lower insulin, they now can finally start relying on their own fat for fuel, so it's no surprise that their hunger starts to come down. Let that be the natural way in which you're controlling your calories.
Don't control your calories because you're forcing yourself to be hungry and eat less. Control your calories because you simply aren't hungry. So I have to, I'll overlay this with my own sort of anecdotal experience. So I, every year do a keto diet for usually for about eight weeks. This time it's going to go on for a little bit longer.
And the reason in part why it's going to go on a little bit longer is I've just learned more about what's going on in my body. And also because I podcast now and do a lot of speaking on stage and those kinds of things, I see tremendous variance in my ability for my brain to articulate what I want to say. I feel the same way.
It's like, it's absurd. I was saying this the other night to the the team that with me here in los angeles and i've tried to say it to so many people as someone that can spend nine hours a day trying to think of the next question to ask or trying to remember the research or on stage in front of a thousand people trying to deliver a story or a point i get to see variants which i've never been able to explain yeah um where some days i'll go up on stage i'll be in a podcast and it's like my brain and my mouth aren't connected and then on other days specifically when i started doing ketosis or having a ketogenic diet it just flows yeah it just flows so well and i was saying to my team it feels like i'm looking at the world like this these days like i've got this intense for anyone that can't see me i just stretched my eyes like i've got this intense focus on the world and the other thing i've noticed with my diet is i i get hungry but not like i used to get hungry and then very quickly after i start eating i stop i don't seem to be like doing like these i used to kind of binge a little bit yeah i used to have like longer eating sessions and my hunger goes very quickly um i also found that i didn't have these like fluctuating energy levels throughout the day i don't crash anymore i used to get like slumps oh for sure and i don't slump anymore and then the other thing which a lot of people care mostly about is the the fat so like belly fat i have never seen anything that has stripped belly fat off me faster and i'm talking in a matter of weeks that i could yeah you know, count on one hand than doing the ketogenic diet. And if I could literally show a picture of my scales, because I have these digital scales on the screen, and it's just trundling along. And then there's this cliff edge where it goes directly down.
And so much so actually that one of my concerns with the ketogenic diet is how the hell do I keep my muscle? Oh, that's a great question. Because my girlfriend, to her credit, when I did ketosis the first time, she was like, I've never ever seen you look like this.
when I took my top off. But also, it was quite clear that my muscles had got smaller. I was lean as fuck, but my muscles were smaller.
So with caution this time, I did ketosis again, and I've been thinking, how the fuck do I keep my muscles? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
So first of all, let me just add a hearty amen. I'm an advocate of a ketogenic diet, although it can be applied differently across different people. But I would say anyone would benefit from having some modest period of time of elevated ketones, at least in some portion of the day.
Now, how do you maintain muscle mass in the midst of such obvious weight loss? I can only speculate. Now, there are peer-reviewed studies that I can cite which do support the idea that a human can be on a ketogenic diet and have a total maintenance of muscle and strength.
That is published. So we know it's possible, although that doesn't seem to be what happened with you. I would suspect that there were two things.
Two things happening, possibly. Now, I'm speculating here, and I'm pretending to be your coach or your expert here. One. It could have been that you had relatively lower energy during your workouts because of a slight degree of dehydration. And then the other one would be calories, which I'll come back to in a moment.
I just wanted to put it out there. So when insulin comes down, one of the many effects in the body is that another hormone comes down called aldosterone, which is one we've never invoked yet. But low insulin leads to lower aldosterone.
When aldosterone comes down, the kidneys begin to eliminate salt. and water much more rapidly. Now that's not problematic, but it does mean that a person does have to focus more on hydration and salts. So if someone's going on this strategy in the exercise fairly often, you need to be much more focused on your hydration, literally drinking more because you will be urinating more, which is partly why people's blood pressure gets so good so quickly.
And just to pause on that point, there are if someone is on one or two blood pressure medications and they adopt a ketogenic diet, they usually have to stop their medications within two days because their blood pressure goes to normal so quickly that if they stay on the medication, they're going too low. So one could be that you were actually working out a little less intensely because of the dehydration. But then two, it's possible that you were eating too few calories to actually maintain muscle. Muscle is a hungry organ. It is metabolically expensive for the body to keep that muscle on.
And as you start to get leaner and leaner, it gets harder and harder for the body to defend that muscle. In fact, that's the difference between fasting and starvation. The longest known evidence of a fast was a man in the UK who fasted for 384 days, literally not eating or drinking a single calorie. He was under medical supervision, getting vitamins and minerals and water, and he went to live on. went on to live a perfectly healthy life.
So, but what was the difference? Why was that not starvation? Starvation is when you run out of fat.
So you might have gotten to the point of so lean that you didn't have enough fat to burn to make enough ketones to fuel the brain. If you don't have enough fat to burn to make enough ketones and the brain is saying, all right, well, I wanted to switch to ketones so that I could spare the glucose, but I can't. There's not enough ketones here, so I have to rely 100% on glucose.
But if you're not eating glucose, now the body has to start stripping the protein from muscle. And it sends those amino acids to the liver. Then the liver is so capable, it will turn those amino acids into glucose.
So it turns my muscle. Into glucose to feed the brain. So my comment then, finally getting to my answer is, in your version of a ketogenic diet, with your level of muscle mass, And your inherent metabolic rate based on your body size and your activity, you probably ought to eat more fat.
I wasn't actually doing the blood tests at that point. I'm doing it this time around, but I wasn't doing the blood tests. So I can actually see my keto levels.
So maybe I wasn't even in ketosis because I wasn't having enough fat. You might have been, but it could have been that you were simply not eating enough calories. So this is an instance where...
That's what I'm trying to do this time. So eat more fat. Like every time you're making a steak. Put butter on there.
And when you're drinking a cup of coffee, as crazy as it sounds, I drink yerba mate every morning. I will put a big dab of butter, like a big dab of butter in my tea. And I'm sipping on it while the world's still asleep and the kids haven't woken up yet. And so I know because I want to keep my muscle. As a guy who's almost 50, I find that during my strict ketogenic phase, and I'm currently in it as well, every January I go to kind of a carnivore diet.
And I mostly do it to... one, lean down, but also to check any addictions and habits. I don't like feeling addicted to things.
And my wife will comment. And even as an almost 50-year-old, it's fun to see my six-pack coming. I don't want to lose my mass, my muscle mass, because you have to work so hard to get it. And what I find is if I increase my fat, I always get plenty of protein. But if I increase my fat content, I have an easier time maintaining my bulk.
Are there any downsides of following a ketogenic diet that we need to be aware of? The only downside I can articulate, so in fact, I didn't even finish because I distracted myself, mentioning some of the benefits of ketones, but ketones are further anti-inflammatory. Like they directly reduce inflammation in the body by inhibiting inflammatory processes. And they also improve antioxidant defenses, so it helps reduce oxidative stress.
So ketones do have benefits that go beyond even what we've taken the time to articulate. If there's any negative to a ketogenic diet, It could be that you start, you acutely or you temporarily become less metabolically flexible. Now, that's me invoking a term we haven't brought up yet. But metabolic flexibility is a term to refer to the body's ability to, when it eats glucose, to burn glucose.
When it's not eating glucose, it burns fat. So you're shifting between the two metabolic fields that we outlined earlier. When someone has been adhering to a ketogenic diet for some time, it's almost as if their body is stuck in fat-burning mode. And that if you and I, being in such adapted ketogenic state as we are, if we were to go to lunch and eat two bagels and a sugary drink, it would take us a very long time to clear that glucose from our blood. much longer than otherwise.
Like, let's say we go out with the production team. They're eating a normal, higher-carb diet. All things equal, same body size, same activity.
Their glucose levels would come up and down in 90 minutes, perhaps. Yours and mine may take 180 minutes to come back down. So the person may say, well, gosh, Stephen and Ben are no longer burning glucose very well. And that's true. In that one moment, our bodies had almost forgotten.
what it was like to burn a bunch of glucose because we had adapted to fat burning. So what about the gut microbiome? Oh, yeah.
Because I told someone who is a nutritionist that I was doing a keto diet at the moment, and they said, oh, your poor gut. Ah, yes. Well, what a naive thing to say, if I may gently reprimand your friend. There's no evidence to support that there's any harmful change in the microbiome. In fact, a paper was just published.
that looked at a man who went from a normal omnivorous human diet with abundant plant matter to a purely carnivorous diet, literally zero carb, and they documented precisely no change in his microbiome. None whatsoever. But is he eating plants? No.
Well, he had been eating plants. So the case study was a person eating a normal diet of plants and meat, a normal omnivore diet, and then looked at the microbiome and then adapted to a purely carnivorous diet. purely meat and the microbiome didn't change at all what's the time period months i think the problem with the microbiome the reason i don't take microbiome research too seriously as a scientist is that it is a big black box you you came from the uk to london to to la to california if we took a microbiome sample analysis of your time in the uk now it would be different now even though you're eating the same but you're drinking different water You're breathing different air. I was just on a plane from Utah to California.
Give me a day or so, I would have some sort of shift in my microbiome. So the microbiome can change in response to all kinds of things. The idea that you somehow have decimated your microbiome because you aren't eating fiber is absolutely false.
That is completely false. Now, there might be a change in some of the population of your microbiome, more of one, less of another. But there's no evidence to suggest that's problematic.
Your microbiome is intact. Those bacteria do not die. They're just simply metabolizing other things.
Maybe they're relying more on short-chain fatty acids. Maybe they're relying more on amino acids. They're not eating fiber, but there's still stuff in the meat or the eggs that the microbiome will eat.
But if eating lots of plants does give me a more diverse gut microbiome, then if I stop eating plants, I'm going to have a less diverse gut microbiome. Yeah, but... But Stephen, but even then there's a bit of an assumption built into the question because it's, do we know that the microbiome will be less diverse?
The case study I just mentioned found that in this one single man, it didn't change his microbiome at all. It was the exact same populations in all the same proportions. Because aren't the plants like feeding the bacteria? Yeah. So the fiber is.
So fiber will. But again, that's not the only thing bacteria can eat. Bacteria can eat fats.
Bacteria can eat amino acids. They can eat glutamine, for example. Even meat will have a little bit of glucose in it, where the muscle has something called glycogen. And so there's trace amounts of glucose in even the meat that you're eating.
So I do not look at the argument that you're destroying your microbiome. That has no scientific support. You may be changing your microbiome. But who's to say that's a bad change?
Maybe it's a better change. You certainly are feeling better. You're thinking better. You're getting leaner. Your insulin sensitivity's improved.
Cognition's improved. I would argue if there is a change in your microbiome, it's probably one that's for the best. And no one can prove that wrong. As much as I just stated that comment in a speculative fashion, it's speculative because there's no evidence.
This is why I look at the microbiome and just say, yeah, it appears to matter, but in ways that we don't know. But you agree with the argument that if I sat here now and I ate... a wide range of plants for the next, let's say, six months, when you analyzed my gut microbiome, it would be much more diverse. I'm not agreeing to that.
Really? I don't know if that's true. And again, I would cite that one case report I just mentioned now, which is a man who did this, they reported that the microbiome was identical, that there was no significant change. That's just one man, though?
It was one man. It was a case report, which is not a randomized clinical study. So... But even still, with my speculation heavily handed here, I would say probably more plants would result in a more diverse microbiome.
But I would say, but then the next step is a harder one, which is, is that good or bad? I don't know. Maybe all you're doing is promoting the growth of bacteria that make more gas because they're fermenting the fiber and you just have more flatulence as a result of it.
People, dieticians will say, well, a diverse microbiome is a good microbiome. Well, prove it. How do we know that?
How can you prove that to me as a basic scientist? I want to see the hard evidence because what I can prove is that we can take humans who are overweight and diabetic and hypertensive, eating a standard American or global diet, and put them onto a ketogenic diet, which is going to be a much simpler diet, and yet every clinical marker gets better. And so if someone were to say, yeah, but sure, you've reversed your diabetes and your hypertension, but your poor microbiome.
I would say, well, I don't care about my microbiome. I care about the human. And so if there's less diversity, but every single clinical marker has gotten better, perhaps more diversity is not what we want in our bacteria.
And I'm speculating, but so is the person who states that. Yes, I'm not aware of research that links the two, but I could always have a look. But. I would, I was always under the assumption that a more diverse microbiome is a healthier person.
Yeah. And I don't know. Yeah. But, but do you, do you feel healthier now?
Um, feel healthier. I certainly feel, and it's only been a short amount of time. So I don't know what, what my health might look like if I'd done this for like two years. Right.
Cause then there could be a really sort of deeper change to, um, I know people who've done it for more than two years and they're, they're great. Because some of the, some of the changes that occur in our health take time now you you show this a lot in your work with insulin resistance that if your insulin resistance for 10 years your brain i think i read in your work is like it ages it ages by an additional two years yeah yeah it accelerates the aging and i wonder the same thing with like my gut microbiome if i'm if my gut microbiome is not diverse so i have a very sort of um narrow diet or you know i'm not getting not eating my plants you Could it take me a couple of years to really understand the net negative impact that that has on my overall health? It's entirely possible. Yeah, yeah.
I would just ask that we be careful with the assumptions that if there is an increase in diversity with more plant matter, that's an if. Is that change beneficial? Are the bacteria that we're now promoting the growth of, are they better for us?
Or are they just bacteria that exist in order to handle more fiber? And again, the outcome being that perhaps it's just making more gas. You know, the more plants you eat, the more gas you have to produce by fermenting more fiber.
What if those bacteria are only existing to just eat the fiber and not actually improve the human host at all? So ketosis, possible to live in a... I think one of the important points on ketosis is when I do my blood keto test, I fluctuate wildly.
After I've gone for a run, my ketone levels are super high. Sometimes later at night, I'm just on the verge of ketosis sometimes. And I think that's interesting because we don't have to live in this necessarily deep state of ketosis the whole time. We can fluctuate a little bit.
Yeah, yeah. My thought on it is that a person would benefit from some state of ketosis on a frequent basis if for no other reason than to really give the brain a heavy dose of just straight energy. Not that everyone needs to be as strict as perhaps you and I are being at the moment, but I would say the more a person has a disorder or a disease that benefits from ketosis, the more than they ought to focus on it.
Like if someone has type 2 diabetes, if they adopt a ketogenic diet, they will be off all of their diabetes medications in months, all of them. If someone has epilepsy or migraine headaches, from 1913, I think, was the first published report on this. If there's someone who suffers from migraines, as long as they're in ketosis, they may never have another migraine again. I mean, it is completely curative or preventative for the disorder.
Same with epilepsy, that many forms of epilepsy. So depending on the person, they would benefit from being in ketosis forever. For everyone else who's just sort of a normal individual who wants to be lean and keep their brain healthy and happy, et cetera, I would say it's generally prudent to just control your carbs, be mindful of the type of carbohydrate you're eating. And as I said earlier, just try to focus on the carbs that don't come from bags and boxes with barcodes. I'm actually quite liberal in my view when it comes to whole fruits and vegetables.
I'd say eat them, enjoy them liberally, but then also make sure you're getting some good protein and fat because there's no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. That sounds controversial, but humans do not need, we have no requirement for carbohydrate. We do have requirement for fat and protein. What about artificial sweetness? Yeah.
One of the things that I am tempted by. when I'm on a ketosis diet is like the soda zeros of the world or the diet sodas of the world. What impact does that have on my insulin levels, et cetera? Yeah, great question.
There is such a breadth of diversity when it comes to sweeteners, from artificial to natural to another rare sugar, more and more. You know, there's all these random, not random, but a very broad spectrum of molecules that we have developed or found that taste like sugar. but don't have the effect of sugar.
So on the good end are things like that have been shown to have no insulin effect. And so, you know, I appreciate everyone listening, letting me kind of stay with that as my framework, because people are going to go on and criticize all kinds of other things about other sweeteners. And that's just too broad.
That's a topic for a whole book. With regards to just insulin on the good end where they have no effect, it would be one as common as aspartame. So like diet drinks. Not the zero drinks, but the diet drinks will have aspartame as the sweetener.
Is there a difference? There is a difference. And I'll get to that other one in a moment. So I should be having diet instead of zero?
Well, I personally go to diet rather than zero. But that's because aspartame is the sole sweetener in the diet, rather. And it has no effect on insulin.
So too erythritol. Sorry, erythritol is a little right around. Aspartame is generally a good one.
But monk fruit extract. stevia, and especially allulose, those are inert when it comes to insulin. You know, allulose, stevia, monk fruit extract, aspartame, no effect. Erythritol, no effect. But erythritol, that ending OL, is reflective of a class of sweetener called a sugar alcohol.
And that does not mean it's alcoholic. That just refers to the actual chemical structure that puts it in the alcohol family. Once you get into the sugar alcohols, you start to get a little...
problematic. Where erythritol is a good one, enzylatol is generally a good one, but then you get to things like maltitol and mannitol, and they do have an insulin effect. And what kind of foods have those?
Yeah, so often you can get mannitol in artificially sweetened chocolate sometimes, for reasons that I don't know. I don't know why the food formulator puts them in some things and not other things. The problem, I chuckle because it becomes so apparent, with some of those artificial sweeteners. like the sugar alcohols, is that as you eat them, you taste it sweet in your mouth, and it doesn't have any caloric value in the body because it stays in the intestines.
And this is something that is largely unique to the sugar alcohols, whereas it stays in the intestines, it starts pulling in water from the body, which starts to create a fairly inconvenient degree of flatulence and diarrhea. And so a person will know if they've eaten too many of those types of sweeteners because their intestines will tell them so. So, but also on that spectrum, kind of in the middle, is the one that's in the zero drinks, which is one called sucralose. And while sucralose is generally not a problem with insulin, it is a sweetener that has been shown to cross the blood-brain barrier.
And so the reason I avoid the zero drinks and refer or go to the diet drinks is that Aspartame does no such thing. Aspartame just gets divided into amino acids. We just digest it and absorb amino acids. Sucralose will go, can cross the blood-brain barrier, and I don't know what it's doing there, but I don't want it there.
And so I avoid the zero drinks because I don't want that sweetener. But personally, when I'm adhering to this diet, diet soda is my actual indulgence, where I want something sweet, and yet I don't want the metabolic effect of it. This is the most crazy stat you'll ever hear.
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