16:8 Fasting - Glucose 74 - Ketone 5.6 - Is it safe?

(Butter Withaspoon) #21

Diet Doctor podcast of 24 March is an in depth look at ketone measuring, in case that’s helpful.
Dr Bret Scher interviews Trey Suntrup PhD. They reference a new study comparing measuring techniques

(David Jones) #22

Pretty high level of ketones for being in ketosis a while. HIT while fasting or in ketosis you really need to think about that. Anaerobic while in ketosis, where do you think the glucose comes from? Sure the muscles convert glycogen via adrenaline but at what cost? No magic, the body is willing to burn muscle. Have you ever bonked yet? A hot shower after HIT can trigger an insulin reaction (just like T2D’s) shaky on the edge of blackout usually within 30 minute and last only 5-10 minutes as you get slammed with adrenaline to save you from crashing from low blood sugar, that is unless you have adrenal fatigue (from severe over training).

One thing that I have found over the 3 years that I have been doing keto is that there are plenty of edge cases.
euglycemic diabetic ketoacidosis. (rare)
Ketone induced SVT’s (Polar H10 using EliteHrv to record RR data during workout, great tool with Kubios Hrv app)
Glucagon deficiencies
Delayed Glucagon inhibit via Insulin
Physiologic Insulin resistance - usually only after you are fully adapted, muscles start to resist glucose
…

Don’t get me wrong keto is an awesome tool but make sure you know the other half of the story that’s never discussed.

Just curios, are you using MCT or Esters?

(David Jones) #23

It was surprising for me to find out that it take an average of a month for a persons brain to learn to use ketones again. Very interesting studies for using ketones for people with brain damage and other issues. Normally they use glucose for a PET scan but that doesn’t work very well for people that are IR or T2D’s.
With a PET scan what looks like Severe TBI with glucose becomes alive with ketones. Truly amazing.

Similar to kidneys adapting to recover ketones vs passing them in urine. (some people months)

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #24

Euglycaemic ketoacidosis is, as you say, very rare. The causes are generally certain medications (such as SGLT-2 inhibitors). Euglycaemic ketoacidosis is also sometimes seen in women who eat a ketogenic diet and try to fast while pregnant or lactating. The problem is not the ketogenic diet, it is the fasting that can bollix things up. But once the baby is weaned, the woman can go back to fasting with no worries. The term “eugclycaemic” simply means that in this case the blood glucose level is normal; in diabetic ketoacidosis, blood glucose is elevated as well as ketones.

Glucagon and insulin, being secreted in adjacent cells in the pancreas, inhibit each other, depending on conditions. In conditions of low carbohydrate intake, glucagon and insulin are secreted in equal amounts and the insulin/glucagon ratio is low, which favours ketogenesis and fatty acid metabolism. In conditions of high carbohydrate intake, insulin secretion is elevated, while glucagon remains low; thus the insulin/glucagon ratio rises and inhibits ketogenesis and promotes glucose metabolism.

Prof. Ben Bikman, in a recent interview, was inveighing against the term physiological insulin resistance, because it’s not that the muscle is resisting insulin, it’s resisting taking in glucose. The idea being, of course, that the glucose is thereby spared for the use of those cells that must have it. The muscles also resist taking in ketones, preferring fatty acids in their place, and sparing the ketones for the use of the brain and heart, which really thrive on them. The term “adaptative glucose sparing” is probably more accurate as a description.

(Jane) #25

I had a mandatory OSHA physical since I worked in a chemical plant and was
8 months pregnant.

I could not fast for the bloodwork as the baby was sucking everything I had at that point and I would get the shakes if I didn’t eat as soon as I got up.

The quack doc complimented me on my low “fasting blood sugars” and I laughed and said I definitely wasn’t fasting! I ate right before my blood was drawn.

On the follow-up exam he went through his checklist - stand on one leg. “No, I am not doing that”. Touch your toes. “I can’t see my toes”. Idiot.

(Bob M) #26

That’s funny, Jane!

I listened to a podcast where the woman had migraines. She was pro-keto, because she believed migraines where partially or completely caused by the brain’s inability to use glucose and therefore was lacking fuel. She created an exogenous ketone so that she could give that to people, and said it worked wonders. She advocates keto, but can’t test it (too many variables). And not everyone wants to go keto.

As for low ketones, it’s not clear to me why some get these and some don’t. Amount (or possibly type?) of protein might play a role, but I could never adequately test that. I found the testing equipment lacking (would get multiple different values for two devices, even from the same manufacturer). If I don’t know whether I’m 0.4 or 0.8 mmol/l, that makes a test difficult.

And now I’m basically near zero, so a test is even harder.

I do wonder about cancer and general health, though. The GKI for instance. I never get a good value on the GKI unless I take the test at night. Otherwise, my blood sugar is too high and ketones too low. Does that mean I’m more susceptible to cancer?

What if ketones really do improve mood or lessen inflammation? Does my lack of ketones mean I have worse “mood” or higher inflammation? I don’t think that’s true, but who knows?

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #27

There are ways of measuring some of these things. For example, if your CRP, ferritin, and white blood corpuscle count are all high, then you have some systemic inflammation, though what might have caused it would be the question. Ketones do seem to help people with depression, for whatever reason, and eating a well-formulated diet to satiety is surely more likely to help more tryptophan get into the brain, to be made into serotonin. GKI is the invention of Dr. Annette Boswell, isn’t it? I haven’t heard any oncologists talk about it. Dr. Thomas Seyfried, the big promoter of the idea of cancer as a metabolic disease, seems to be more concerned with dietary glucose, and elevated serum glucose levels, not GKI. If our notion of increased efficiency of ketogenesis after ketoadaptation has any merit, then I would expect it to be difficult to achieve a high GKI at that point.

It is possible that GKI is more relevant to carb-burners diagnosed with cancer who then need to go keto, than it is to people who are already keto and not diagnosed with cancer. Keto cannot be a cure-all for cancer, in any case, since it has been with us since classical antiquity. The great increase in cancer rates (like the great increase in Type II diabetes), and most especially in the rates of certain types of cancers, seems to be related to the amount of refined sugars and refined grains in the diet. And the introduction of seed oils into the food supply has most likely exacerbated the problem.