The reason for the panic you see in your Google research is that the bad effects doctors are accustomed to panicking over are seen in carb-burning patients, not in ketotic ones. The panic is reasonable—where carb-burning patients are concerned. But do people in ketosis need to worry? After all, you have no symptoms of low blood sugar, so I’m not clear what your reason is for believing you have a problem.
George Cahill, author of the study, “Starvation in Man,” did an experiment on some of his fasting subjects, in which his team used a euglycaemic hyperinsulinaemic clamp to drive the subjects’ serum glucose down to levels even lower than what you are measuring. Since the subjects had been fasting for several days at that point, their ketones were elevated, and they suffered no ill effects from serum glucose levels that would normally lead to hypoglycaemic shock, coma, and possibly death. This was a highly unethical thing to attempt, as the researchers realised afterwards, but the experience was instructive and indicates that ketones are sufficient to feed the brain in the absence of glucose.
In fact, Prof. Benjamin Bikman, a specialist in bio-energetics who has done a lot of research into human metabolism, goes so far as to say that the brain may very well need no glucose at all, given an abundance of ketones in the system. At any rate, he says, he can find no evidence to show that the brain actually does have an absolute need for glucose—and so far, he says, no one has been able to meet his challenge to produce such evidence. His hunch by no means constitutes proof, of course, but if a researcher of his stature feels there is reason to question the received wisdom, it is an indication that perhaps the received wisdom is possibly not as solid as we have hitherto supposed.
