Changing Carbs, is it good?

(Nicolas) #1

So… Im done with Broccoli and Avocados, I got bored.

So I changed to tomatoes and onion, I love that salad, with 3 table spoons of olive oil extra virgin (REAL olive oil).

this is the amount daily (Aproximate)
image

Is it okay? because the total amount depends really from the size of the tomato.

I know Im doing more than 20gr but at least is not processed carbs, and when I was eating Broccoli with Avocado the total carbs was 25gr and was on Ketosis. Would those foods and that amount of Total/net would kick me out of Ketosis?

EDIT: The amounts of Carbs I took them from the USDA page, to at least have some reference.

#2

Most likely not going to be an issue.

(Bob M) #3

I usually eat tomatoes when they’re in season. (Try to avoid eating them out of season, though will do that rarely too.)

(Nicolas) #4

Welp… I measured my BG and Ketones 1 hour after eating, Did not checked before eating tho, and I was 80 and 0.2 Ketones, so I will need to make more measurements but something kicked me out of ketosis and I ate 1 chicken breast, salad with 281 gr Of tomato, 48 gr onion (15.38 gr of Carbs) and 1 boiled egg.

Either to my body is not that keto friendly OR the olive oil is not that pure, so many confounding variables.

(Bob M) #5

Don’t get too excited. Those are my ketone values all the time, at least in the morning (they get higher at night).

If you are concerned, measure a few times a day, and before and after an “event”. I used to measure before and after exercise, for instance, though you could use a meal too.

Ketones depend on way more than just one meal.

(Nicolas) #6

Ok, I measured again 3 hours later the last measure, and I was at 1.3 Ketones, 68 mg/dl (Hypo).

So… yeah, it’s going back to normal…

(Bob M) #7

Also, don’t trust the meters as far as you can throw them. They suck. All of them. If you get a weird result, use a different finger and a new strip.

Is 68 blood sugar? That’s pretty low.

(Nicolas) #8

Yes man, is pretty low, since I started this way of life (not the first 2 weeks) but after it my BG goes very low, one day, after jogging it went to 52!.

I use some things to avoid a lot of sugar on blood, like taking ACV organic and Cinammon with my Coffee, but I dont know, Im gonna make some blood studies after this pandemic and tell the doctor this, usually this was not a problem when I was eating crap

(Bob M) #9

I would try avoiding those for now and see what happens.

For me, my blood sugar tends to go up with exercise, but I’ve been doing this almost 7 years. I didn’t start taking data for a while into it.

I would ignore “hypo” limits, as they don’t really apply to people who are on low carb UNLESS you actually feel bad. I’ve seen people with blood sugar in the 30s or so, after fasting for a while. But they felt fine.

If you feel bad with that blood sugar, that’s a different story. If it’s low and you feel OK, then it probably is OK.

What should happen (at least over time) is that as your blood sugar goes down, your ketones should go up to compensate. See if that happens.

(Nicolas) #10

Yes, that definitely happens, I posted this already but look:
image

So yep, It goes up, it does not go up that high now after 1 month (Which may be a possible hint of fat adaptation? using the ketones on the body to fuel the body?) but it happens.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #11

That doesn’t seem to be a problem, as long as there are ketones to pick up the slack. The red blood corpuscles require glucose to live, because they have no mitochondria, but the only other organ that appears to require glucose is the brain, and it can do just fine on very little glucose, it appears. (There may well be other glucose-dependent organs in the human body that I don’t know about, so please feel free to name them in a post, if you’d be so kind.)

Cahill’s group in the the 1960’s drove down the glucose in their fasting subjects to levels that would ordinarily cause coma or even death, but the subjects, who were in fasting ketosis, were fine. So the amount of glucose the body absolutely requires, however much that may be, appears to be quite low.

#12

Guacamole?

(Nicolas) #13

Well, I ate them for 1 month and 3 weeks, Im gonna recycle the keto friendly carbs every so often.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #14

Just bear in mind that β-hydroxybutyrate circulating in the bloodstream gives no indication of how much the liver is producing in the way of ketone bodies, nor how much is being consumed. Serum β-hydroxybutyrate is just the gap between the other two figures.

On the other hand, the three ketone bodies, β-hydroxybutyrate, acetoacetate, and acetone, are all used as signaling hormones as well as substrates for metabolism, so having a certain amount in circulation is not a bad thing. I just hate to see people get all worked up about what their levels are, since the relationship between serum ketone values, metabolic health, and fat loss is neither direct nor simple.

(Nicolas) #15

Well ok, is not that simple, so we can go down as nihilistic and damn ourselves that we can´t at least have an idea or we can at least have some idea (which would be my preferred path).

We know a couple of things:

  1. The apparatus is not 100% reliable.
  2. USDA gives aproximates, as food we consume is not 1 on 1 with the charts.
  3. The apparatus gives a measurement of 1 type of ketone body, but not all of them.

Even with all these things in mind, and maybe even more, the Keto “diet” or way of life must have an identity in itself, which is Ketosis, and if you are not in ketosis you are not doing this way of life (And better yet, being in ketosis with your own fat if you need to lose some pounds).

All these measurements and things we do, is because we are terrified of not having a ceiling and a floor, we dislike chaos, we need to feel we have an idea of what’s going on.

I know this sounds so methapysical, but I think people like measurements because of that, the same goes when people weight (“do it at this hour!”, “Use the scale but also a measurement tape!”, “Weight yourself at the same hour!”, “After going to the bathroom!”) etc.

Is like, is human nature to at least have some idea if what they are doing is ok, usually some people rely on others to know if they are doing things right, others prefer to know themselves if they are doing things right. If there is something as “right”, right?

#16

I am not terrified of not having a ceiling but I am afraid of high blood glucose because of the physical damage associated…and I cannot test my blood insulin levels, so glucose is a work around to help me avoid losing a leg.

(Ellenor Bjornsdottir) #17

There’s not that many harnessable kcals in fibre…

(Ellenor Bjornsdottir) #18

Irrelevant. At steady state, the gap you speak of is proportional to the amount of b-OHB being used in the entire system.

It’s also simply not rational. Would you assume that a blood sugar of 1.5 mmol/L was necessarily because the tissues are just using a lot of sugar? No. Is that possible? I guess, what with insulin and such.

Blood sugar is such a gap value, and yet it’s only extremely rarely zero. Sure, ketones are not necessary to live like glucose is (shocker, I’m saying this on a keto forum as someone who thinks people should be on a low carb diet, but I’m saying that ketones aren’t necessary) and they are repressed much more powerfully by normal-people amounts of insulin than are glucose levels, but still, amount in the blood surely represents usage, no?

(Allie) #19

Why not just have different carb sources constantly rather than staying with two at a time? Variety is good for our bodies and our minds.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #20

I think we are talking at cross-purposes, here. People worry that they are not producing enough ketones, and I’m trying to reassure them that they could be producing lots and using lots and not know it. The circulating levels of the ketone bodies don’t measure production or use—we have no way of measuring that, unfortunately. There are people walking around with levels of β-hydroxybutyrate below Phinney’s and Volek’s minimum for “nutritional ketosis,” but they have to be producing ketones, because they are (a) not eating carbohydrate and (b) still alive.

The same is actually true of serum glucose. The amount registering on a blood metre is not a particularly good indicator of how much the body is actually using. We know that serum glucose rises to meet anticipated need, and falls again when the need is over. We can use respiratory quotient to estimate the proportion of energy use from glucose and from fat and ketones, but that’s about it, short of locking people up in a metabolic chamber.

I see no reason to expect serum β-hydroxybutyrate to be any different. In a metabolism adapted to fat burning, there are two primary metabolic substrates in use: fatty acids, and ketone bodies (i.e., partially metabolised fatty acids). The difference between glucose and fat, on the one hand, and ketone bodies, on the other, is that the ketone bodies are also powerful hormones, not just metabolic substrates.

Saying that “ketones are not necessary to live” therefore needs to be qualified. In the absence of dietary glucose (i.e., carbohydrate), ketones and fatty acids are in reality quite necessary, both as an energy source and for their important epigenetic effects. I simply don’t consider it worthwhile to worry too much about the readings on a metre, since our focus then tends to become manipulating the reading, rather than staying healthy overall. Our ancestors somehow managed to survive quite nicely without knowing about glucose and β-hydroxybutyrate, after all.