Keto ‘Myths’ ‘Debunked’

(Melanie Armistead) #42

My main bout of alopecia happened when I was 6 (S-shaped patches all over my head) and I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism as the same time. Never had a repeat of the pattern, would just lose more hair than usual from time to time, so never really sure whether subsequent times of higher than usual loss was related to alopecia, thyroid disease (which turned out to be Hashimotos), psoriasis (which covered the lower half of my scalp), or something else.

Just know that I lose a lot less now (and it’s grown almost to my waist, so it’d be hard to miss)!

Was about to post then realised that some of the loss in the last 10 years could have been a side effect of the Methotrexate. But then, it was a problem on and off for many years before I started taking it too.

(Jeanne Wagner) #43

I was thinking it would be wonderful if Keto cures that condition. I don’t know anything about it though. I’m glad your hair has grown back.

(Melanie Armistead) #44

Yeah, way too many confounding variables to tell whether there was any direct effect with the alopecia, but the psoriatic arthritis and exercise-induced asthma both went away a few months after I switched to LCHF, and by that stage I’d been off all of my medication except thyroxine for 6 months (with no other major environmental or stress changes), so there’s nothing else that could be attributed to those two - they were definitely diet-related.

Those symptoms (along with the psoriasis) also come back pretty quickly when I eat ‘normal’ food - but I haven’t paid attention to how much hair I lose on a normal vs LC diet. Not really something I want to experiment with though!

(Richard Morris) #45

Intramyocellular fat (lipid droplets inside muscle cells) does indeed cause the cell to become insulin resistant. What causes those is the muscle cell NOT using fat for energy because insulin is high. It’s literally a self defense strategy for the cell to protect itself against high insulin outside the cell.

The cause is not eating fat, it’s eating sugar and starch and NOT burning the fat.

These guys are vegan propegandists. They have an agenda of making people eat fewer animals, and the health of humans is secondary.

(Ethan) #46

No eyebrows is a DMT1 thing, thyroid issue, Vitamin deficiency, or other autoimmune.

I know you find HIM creepy, which is why you bring up the eyebrows as creepy–and I don’t mean to defend him–but I have to sympathize. For the past 2.5 years, my son has spent half the time with no eyebrows. A small child isn’t creepy. He actually lost large patches of his head hair, all his body hair fuzz, and both his eyebrows at age 4. It lead us to find that he has Hashimoto thyroiditis, but that isn’t the cause of the hair loss. We’ve tried numerous treatments. It’s seasonal. He loses large parts of his hair every winter. It mostly grows back in the summer, but not always. He had only a partial eyebrow at one point come back. We currently think it may be a vitamin D deficiency.

(Ethan) #47

As per my previous post, my son has seasonal alopecia. He loses large spots of his hair every winter. We think its Vitamin D related. He also has Hashimoto’s, but not yet hypothyroidism.

(Melanie Armistead) #48

I also had chronically low vitamin D (not sure how long for as I think it was online tested once my arthritis was diagnosed) and was taking 100,000 to 200,000 iu of cholecalciferol every 3 months (and I could tell by the 2 1/2 month mark by my mood that I needed more). It can be made up by a compounding chemist with a prescription.

While I can’t tell whether low carb helped my alopecia, I can say for certain that it hasn’t had a negative impact on it. Also, my Vit D levels went from <20 to 70s.

I had a good friend at school who had alopecia totalis - she sometimes had short eyelashes but no other body hair whatsoever. Unfortunately we didn’t keep in touch afterwards so I don’t know whether she had other autoimmune issues :frowning:

(Justin Cain Hoffman ) #49

:joy::joy::joy:

(Saladman) #50

So many flaws and half truths in Cyrus’ talks… don’t know where to begin. Vegan animals rights propaganda at its finest. Watch this talk and learn the biochemistry that Cyrus clearly does not understand. Wonder what he learned at Berkeley earning a “nutritional biochemistry” PhD.

Dr. Ted Naiman - ‘Insulin Resistance’

The above video by Dr. Ted Naiman has a more detailed, more compelling biochemical explanation of insulin resistance, hyperglycemia, and hypertriglyceridemia. Start watching at ~19 minutes if you are pressed for time. A plant based diet that is very low fat does lead to fat loss and prevention of fat accumulation (b/c it is not available to accumuldate). BUT, a high fat, low carb diet ALSO leads to all the benefits that Cyrus mentions — anyone whose been on a keto or low carb diet (<50-75g/day) for a few weeks sees immediate results. However, Cyrus’ claims of long term harm of low carb are NOT evidence based! He sites no studies, just speaks in platitudes. Ignorant at best, deceptive at worst. His interpretation of the biochemistry is incorrect. Naiman nails it… Cyrus is a vegan animal rights guy. They don’t follow the science to its logical conclusion; their philosophy drives their interpretation… his explanation off “insulin resistance” is not an explanation at all! He never answers why. Naiman’s talk makes more sense, and explains biochemically (see Malonyl CoA) why both a very low carb, high fat diet and a very high carb, low fat diet are efficacious (“efficacious” is distinct from the term “effective”) for weight loss. We in this chat room prefer the low carb.

(Saladman) #51

I suffered thru 23 mins of pitiful half truths and aweful understanding of biochemistry as well as random conclusion from uncited sources and claims of all sorts of ills from long term ketogenic diet. Maddening how disingenuous and flawed this is. The devil is in the details. He glosses over the details w straw man arguments. I’m done listening to him and Greger and Barnard and the rest of them. I’ve lost respect for them as scientists. The JAMA article published this week demonstrates both diets are equally safe and effective (although this study is not truly high fat as average fat cal intake was 48% in high fat group and 30% in low fat group. It was not extreme enough. We need more studies.

(Saladman) #52

Here the abstract for the JAMA study

(Ethan) #53

We’ve established that this crap study does not show the effects of a low-fat diet vs. those of a low-carb diet. It shows what people will do when you give them one of the diets and then tell them after 2 months that they don’t need to adhere to it.

#54

it is quite a well produced video with a clear and eloquent speaker who is bright enough to have completed a PhD (1).

He presents lots of clear, beneficial facts about the ketogenic diet in the first 2 and a half minutes.

“Insulin Priority Hierarchy”… Is a point of view statement. Insulin partitions glucose from the blood to energy storage in preference to fatty acids and amino acids. Fair enough. The observation could be because the glucose is valuable to the body, so it gets priority to be stored as glycogen initially. Fair enough… for a metabolically healthy person. But he is talking about this in the context of diabetes, as he mentioned a few times in the introduction. In the case of a diabetic person the insulin is trying to deal with a toxin. The blood glucose dose is damagingly high. This is a changed situation. Now insulin secreted in high amounts is trying to reduce the potentially toxic high glucose blood levels. The priority is to remove a toxin rather than to store an essential energy nutrient.

I wonder how the other myths play out?

“Open any biology text book…” Once data and dogma find its way into a biology text book, even with the latest edition, we are reading a 5 to 10 year old history text. Contemporary ketogenic eaters understand the risks of current dietry dogma, as we are in the thick of it, but also the greater risks of debunked decades old scientific dogma. A biology or physiology text book is an excellent repository of accumulated knowledge. A lot of it is truth, and an equal amount is false. The challenge is working out where what one is reading lands.

I do enjoy these videos and articles that challenge our thinking. We get to test our beliefs against another set of ideas that may be better.

Now back to the video to give it a due hearing, rather than early dismissal. And it looks like I’ve got a bit of reading to get through in this thread.

  1. Whoa, Dr. Khambatta is. PhD in nutritional biochemistry and a type 1 diabetic! definitely worth hearing what he has to say from his experiences and studies :slight_smile: https://www.masteringdiabetes.org/about/
(Margie) #55

:joy::smiley::smile:

#56

Awesome. That was an excellent presentation. I’ll be staying ketogenic.

The whole thing is marketing via a social media route and I fell for it, like we all did, not all the way (Dr. Khambatta is not my paid health coach), but I did look up who he was and what he was on about, which exposed me to what he was selling.

i can understand his earnest presentation and pushing the boundaries of truth because he has a financial stake in his arguments as much as he has a health message to present ‘for the good of society’.

Dr. Khambatta PhD did not do a very good job at debunking very much. He seems to be a smart fellow evidenced by his eloquence. So I wonder if he courts controversy as a form of advertising?

He did reinforce and reiterate many of the benefits of the ketogenic diet for diabetics.

He made some good points about more research is required. Things like: the ketogenic diet needs to be tested in larger populations over longer periods of time.

I loved how he tried to manipulate the idea of a ketogenic diet being a high protein diet. That would be an essential political maneuver to get the vegan/ vegetarian opinion bloc over to his point of view as he intertwined the protein and fats in the keto food pyramid graphic (hmmm, must be like that standard diet pyramid that failed) as animal based.

There were good points: that higher carbohydrate diets in the presence of high fat are detrimental. And that the presence of a high fat diet (that must include carbs from his point of view) was detrimental. A conclusion we could reach there is that choosing either high fat low carb, or high carb low fat, is a better choice for people who metabolically do poorly on standard dietary guidelines that prescribe “balance”.

The ketogenic diet isn’t for everyone. Some fellow human beings will do much better with their health on very low fat, high carb diets. That includes some diabetics. The key is to find your own way away from a diet that is bad for you.

The glucose tolerance testing part was hilarious and mischievous. Claiming that a low blood insulin is not indicative (enough) of increased insulin sensitivity. As a PhD in nutritional biochemistry you would think he would know what happens to the results of giving a fat adapted ketogenic eater a standard blood glucose tolerance test? He would know the GLUT transporters are physiologically reduced, down regulated, on skeletal muscle so the uptake of glucose would be impaired in that challenge giving higher curve. The mischief making is that he would probably know that and is presenting a non-level playing field and test by which to gauge insulin sensitivity.

It is definitely a beneficial exercise to watch the video, plenty of erroneous assertions based on flawed logic (like biological text books) mixed in with truth and opinion ( like a forum post, or a Big Mac*). Unfortunately it could bamboozle many people, hopefully enough so, that they do their own research.

  • Maybe not the Big Mac. But a Big Mac, allegedly, does have some nutritious elements to it. And, if deconstructed carefully, those healthy components can be accessed. Just like people should do with any nutrition marketing, social media engineered, presentation.
(TJ Borden) #57

That was actually done, the data just wasn’t logged well because the participants lived in caves and only learned to write towards the end of the study.

However, the lack of species extinction over several hundred thousand years with the near total absense of carbs seems reasonably conclusive that a ketogenic way of eating is safe long term. :grin:

(TJ Borden) #58

I have yet to hear of anyone reversing diabetes following that approach. It is, however, very effective in causing diabetes. At least it worked for me.

(Cheryl Meyers) #59

My thought exactly–he doesn’t look very healthy.

#60

True TJ. The ketogenic diet does initially reverse T2D as is common knowledge in the community, and even acknowledged by Dr. Khambatta (but he is worried about our health over the longer term).

He is a type 1 diabetic that through a very low fat approach that has increased his insulin sensitivity to his injectable insulin, has found a way to live a healthier life compared to diabetic sufferers trying to cope on the standard nutritional recommendations. It’s unlikely he will cure his diabetes through diet, not unless his original diagnosis is wrong. He has found a pretty good way to cope and is sharing his considerable (PhD) knowledge to benefit others.

Unfortunately his dogmatic approach, which hopefully makes us question our own, may not provide an optimal approach to diabetic treatment management, as he seems to be fearfully against trying or fully investigating a ketogenic approach.

#61

Interesting judgement. Slippery footing. What if Dr. Khambatta is SLOHI*?

@richard Did you look like the healthiest participant when the three people were tested for metabolic health at the recent Perth conference?

*Sick Looking Outside Healthy Inside :wink: