Keto science basics

[H3ath3r]

Hello, I have a couple questions regarding the foundation of ketosis that seem simple but have come up in family debates. I have read numerous books and listened to probably hundreds of hours of podcasts and what I find is that I have a large picture with many big points but I’m missing the finer details. Part of the reason I am asking these questions is for conversations I’ve had with skeptics about high fat diets. Even though I know in many ways keto way of life is right, I have a hard time debating with non keto people.
Situation 1: I was speaking with a family member who follows a dietary program with supplements and carb cycling (her program stopped working and she is now low carb but says it’s not keto at all, so much to say on that lol), but she said anytime you burn fat you make ketones, and further concluded that the keto diet is unnecessary with high fats because you could be in ketosis without the high fat diet (I tested her blood and she has ketones with low fat diet; I know there are many reasons as to why this could be) (edit: she says she needs her complex carbohydrates and that a diet should be well balanced)

So obviously there is so much to say in rebuddle to this, but what I am missing is the simple point: any diet that induces ketosis is a ketogenic diet right? This is said in the intro to every 2 keto dudes podcast. From her low fat standpoint, a ketogenic diet can still be low fat. And perhaps her body is eating her own fat, or any number of scenarios, but is there anything straightforward and matter of fact I could bring up to her? When I start to offer a bunch of “it could be this… or what if it’s this…” it just seems to convince her more that she’s right; if I had the basic understanding of actual ketosis I’d have a stronger case is my point.

I do have some other foundational questions that I will go into depth in another post later but if anyone has some general insight or resources I would appreciate it. Like, what happens to glycogen stores long term after being ketogenic? I’ve heard they get replenished after some time being ketogenic. How are they used in ketosis and does the liver eventually replenish enough to have the same amount of glycogen as when it was sugar burning? Does your body use it as immediate fuel like when it was sugar burning or what does it do with the replenished glycogen? What happens to electrolytes long term keto, do we still shed them? And what did our ancestors or hunters and gatherers do about electrolytes? If we do better without access to food (fasting) like more clarity, higher human growth hormone, more energy and adrenaline, then why doesn’t our body help us with electrolyte scarcity similar to food scarcity?

Another question is about dietary fat vs body fat. Body fat is easily absorbed by the cells in the body without having to pass through the liver; do these readily convert to ketones? Ketones are produced by the liver though, so would it be fair to say ketones are from body fat not dietary fat? Even though dietary fat could become body fat. I would love a book, video or podcast that explains these processes and would appreciate any insight or references!
Thank you for reading the rant and for your time!

[atomicspacebunny]

Situation 1: I was speaking with a family member who follows a dietary program with supplements and carb cycling (her program stopped working and she is now low carb but says it’s not keto at all, so much to say on that lol), but she said anytime you burn fat you make ketones, and further concluded that the keto diet is unnecessary with high fats because you could be in ketosis without the high fat diet (I tested her blood and she has ketones with low fat diet; I know there are many reasons as to why this could be)

When I start to offer a bunch of “it could be this… or what if it’s this…” it just seems to convince her more that she’s right; if I had the basic understanding of actual ketosis I’d have a stronger case is my point.

She is absolutely correct, the type of ketosis you see on a high fat diet is a much deeper transcendence into a healing (autophagic) state…

Cutting down on sources of sugar intake whether it be from highly processed carbohydrates or actual combinations of different types of sugar (e.g. starch) is what ketosis actually is!

Low or high fat DOES NOT MATTER just as long your getting some dietary fat!

[Alecmcq]

There are lots of people on here way more qualified than me to answer your questions. But I am gonna give it a crack:

she said anytime you burn fat you make ketones, and further concluded that the keto diet is unnecessary with high fats because you could be in ketosis without the high fat diet (I tested her blood and she has ketones with low fat diet; I know there are many reasons as to why this could be) (edit: she says she needs her complex carbohydrates and that a diet should be well balanced)

My understanding is that it is the liver only that makes ketones. Your muscles can burn fat and not make ketones. The accepted definition of being in ketosis is having a ketone level above 0.5 mmol/l. Most/many people make ketones during their overnight fast so ketones are not reserved for people on a keto diet. But overnight low fat folks are very unlikely to get to ketosis ie over the 0.5 mark.

The key point about the keto diet is that we are burning fat in preference to carbs. The marker of this activity is the making of ketones. So making ketones is not the goal here, it is the marker. Because the goal of this diet is to burn fat, then eating a high fat diet is necessary. By definition a low fat diet is not ketogenic. Ketogenic means burning fat. You can’t burn the majority of your calories as fat with a low fat diet. Period.

If she believes in a well balanced diet, does that also include a balanced quantity of arsenic, and chairs and granite? “A well balanced diet” is a meaningless phrase. You can tell your friend she does not need to eat any carbs: they are not essential in the formal sense of that word. But you do need protein and fat: they are essential.

what happens to glycogen stores long term after being ketogenic? I’ve heard they get replenished after some time being ketogenic. How are they used in ketosis and does the liver eventually replenish enough to have the same amount of glycogen as when it was sugar burning? Does your body use it as immediate fuel like when it was sugar burning or what does it do with the replenished glycogen?

I am not 100% sure exactly what happens to glycogen stores, but my understanding is that they are maintained at normal levels by the body: it converts fats, including triglycerides, to glycogen to fuel muscles. I think this is known as the Krebbs cycle, others pls correct me if I have got this wrong or incomplete.

What happens to electrolytes long term keto, do we still shed them? And what did our ancestors or hunters and gatherers do about electrolytes? If we do better without access to food (fasting) like more clarity, higher human growth hormone, more energy and adrenaline, then why doesn’t our body help us with electrolyte scarcity similar to food scarcity?

A keto diet is generally lower in salt and electrolyte intake than the SAD diet, hence we need to make sure we keep our electrolytes up. Why doesn’t the body do a better job at protecting us against electrolyte shortages, I actually think it does. Most people can take low to no electrolytes for a long time with few issues. I don’t think primeval man worried too much about being a bit “off”.

Ketones are produced by the liver though, so would it be fair to say ketones are from body fat not dietary fat?

No, ketones can be made from either body fat or dietary fat. But don’t get blinded by ketone creation. They are just a marker for what we want: to burn fat. Ketones are a marker, not the centrel goal.

I would appreciate others feedback, agreements, disagreements, corrections, whatever. I do not see myself as an expert here, but have been learning the science of keto for the last year or so.

[David_Stilley]

And what did our ancestors or hunters and gatherers do about electrolytes?

I have asked myself this question many times.

[David_Stilley]

A keto diet is generally lower in salt and electrolyte intake than the SAD diet, hence we need to make sure we keep our electrolytes up.

It seems to me that the keto diet is much higher in sodium, without filling up on bread and sweet foods. Our sodium requirements are higher which is why we take salt above what we put in our food usually.

It’s been my understanding that in the absence of carbohydrates our bodies don’t retain salt as well. It gets flushed out quicker by the kidneys along with H2O and this is why we need to be more diligent about hydration and electrolytes.

[Jacymac]

My theory is that drinking river water, as they would have done, gives significantly more minerals than the tap or bottled water we drink.

[atomicspacebunny]

And what did our ancestors or hunters and gatherers do about electrolytes?

I have asked myself this question many times.

I can assure you our ancestors were not eating fructose mixed with sucrose which displaces electrolytes (an artificial/synthetic metabolism?) and causes dybiosis of the gut flora microbes and other severe metabolic dysregulation.

The electrolyte imbalances (dysbiosis) have to be re-adjusted from the withdrawal (over a period of time) of the un-natural mixture of sugars (then the need to supplement the biggest three which are sodium, potassium and magnesium diminishes and returns to normal).

Our ancestors were not taking starch from corn and turning into glucose then mixing it with sucrose outside the body like a fly digesting its food outside the body?

Almost every thing you buy world-wide now days at your local grocery store, quicky mart has this fructose-sucrose mixture.

Here is my poke at an analogy:

If you take any compound or substance naturally occurring in nature and try to duplicate what your body is going to do with it in a laboratory (unnaturally/inorganically inter-combining substances and compounds), your changing all the metabolic and physiochemistry pathways in the the body and what your body is going to do with it? (the bodies metabolism gets confused) i.e. pre-processing food before it hits your digestive tract? e.g. other humans monkeying around with trying to pre-digest food for us in a laboratory outside the body? Then the pharmaceutical industry has to come-in and try to undue/unwind the damage?

[CarlKeller]

And what did our ancestors or hunters and gatherers do about electrolytes?

I have asked myself this question many times.

I suppose it could be argued that we did supplement our electrolytes with salt. I’ve always found it fascinating that many animals gravitate to natural and manmade salt licks… cattle, deer, fox, sheep, elephants and sheep (to name a few). So it wouldn’t be false to say that some animals supplement too!

[atomicspacebunny]

That makes me think about salt licks used for live-stock (which can cause heme iron poisoning and a bunch of dead cattle) because the ground soil starts becoming depleted of its naturall trace minerals and now rare trace elements from once ancient sea beds (the habitable land mass we live on now) which gets sucked up by the plants in micron particulates and into our veggies, grass, forage and vegetation the animals and humans eat.

[David_Stilley]

Okay I agree with you but it seems likely that consumption of natural salts would be limited to coastal areas or natural deposits in land from changing geography over millennia such as in Utah, The Himalayas and other such regions. Even in the absence of the sugars that you mentioned sodium and magnesium would be lacking for most hunter gather groups globally. Strict Paleo eaters trying to replicate the caveman diet don’t use salt for this reason.

[anon2571578]

Strict Paleo eaters trying to replicate the caveman diet don’t use salt for this reason.

Seems like a pretty silly idea, considering that chances are, if an early human couldn’t find access to salt, they more than likely died, and probably pretty terrible deaths, too. All creatures that come from the sea need salt.

Indigenous people across the planet who don’t live on the coasts found ways to collect salt, and there’s a reason it’s one of the earliest industries and was so prized during trading. We have always needed it to survive.

[David_Stilley]

@anon2571578 I agree but salt was often expensive or hard to come by so I think many people did without for periods of time. About the Paleo no salt concept I agree, just what I read while researching dietary changes for myself. Honestly it steered me away from the idea of going Paleo!

[anon2571578]

That’s just what’s needed, someone on Paleo dropping into a coma because they ignored 100 million years of evolution that compels us to seek out salt.

[atomicspacebunny]

I often wonder that myself, if the hunter gatherers or paleo peeps collected salt crystals, perhaps learned from watching animals.

For example in the jungles of South America they carry bags of salt rock too keep hundreds of blood sucking/seeking (they detect blood) leeches (that appear to fly or fall from tree branches or hang on leaves) from attaching themselves to the skin, they tend to stay away from the salt bag because it kills them instantly not sure how old of a practice this is? They appear to sense the salt and scatter!

[Taka]

Norwegians have traditionally cooked fish in sea water. Used to be the best fish you could get. In some cultures it seems that honey may have been used when salt wasn’t available (don’t have scientific sources on this). Makes sense, really.

And Gandhi walked to the ocean to make salt the trasitional way. I only truly understood the importance of this protest after going keto.

I don’t really think anyone knows when salt making was actually created. But people have definitely used salt from any source they could find, since the beginning. Unless the earliest diets were fruit heavy.

[PaulL]

. . . Situation 1: I was speaking with a family member who follows a dietary program with supplements and carb cycling (her program stopped working and she is now low carb but says it’s not keto at all, . . . but she said anytime you burn fat you make ketones, and further concluded that the keto diet is unnecessary with high fats because you could be in ketosis without the high fat diet

A ketogenic diet is one that allows serum insulin to drop low enough for enough hours of the day to enable ketogenesis to occur in the liver. Ketone bodies are partial metabolites of fatty acids, which can be used by many cells for energy (ketolysis) in place of glucose (glycolysis). The key is that carbohydrate intake must be low enough to avoid raising serum glucose and insulin, or ketogenesis will not take place.

Although people sometimes use the terms “low-carb, high-fat” and “ketogenic” to mean different levels of carbohydrate intake, any diet that allows ketogenesis to take place is a ketogenic diet. Ketogenesis resulting in serum β-hydroxybutyrate of 0.5 mmol/dL or above, is considered “nutritional ketosis.” There is no particular advantage to having ketone levels higher than that, under most circumstances.

Technically speaking, your family member is correct; what determines ketosis is not the amount of fat eaten, but the amount of carbohydrate not eaten, because carbohydrate turns to glucose in the bloodstream and too much of it elevates insulin.

Practically speaking, however, your family member is wrong, because it is very hard to survive on protein alone, and protein and fat are usually found in foods together, so eating one without the other is not easy.

edit: she says she needs her complex carbohydrates and that a diet should be well balanced)

I suppose it depends on what one means by well-balanced. Carbohydrate in the quantities commonly consumed on the standard American diet (SAD) is toxic; does a “well-balanced” diet include toxic levels of anything?

. . . perhaps her body is eating her own fat . . .

This is generally what happens, when someone with excess stores of fat embarks on a well-formulated ketogenic diet. As long as insulin remains chronically high, we cannot access any of the fat stored in our fat tissue; but once insulin drops low enough for long enough, the fat cells can release all that lovely fat for our muscles to metabolize. Several weeks after we enter nutritional ketosis, our muscles adapt to using fatty acids for their fuel, and they will even pass up ketones in favor of fat. And the low insulin also lets the hormonal signals get through to the brain again to tell it that we have plenty of fat to use, so we don’t need to eat, which helps keep our hunger under control. As long as we have excess fat stored away, our body will set our appetite to a level that will allow it to burn both the fat in our fat cells and the fat in our food.

. . . what happens to glycogen stores long term after being ketogenic?

When we start a ketogenic diet, there is very little glucose coming in, so the muscles use up the glycogen and glucose in their cells and start using ketone bodies. Eventually, they adapt to using fat and will refuse ketones and glucose, to save them for the red blood cells and other organs that need them. In the absence of dietary glucose (i.e., carbohydrate), the liver makes just enough glucose to meet the needs of those cells. Unless serum glucose is abnormally high (which it usually is, on the SAD), we have about one U.S. tablespoon of glucose circulating in our blood at any given time. The glycogen store of someone who has been keto long enough is kept at the same level as that of someone whose metabolism is primarily glycolytic. Neither the liver nor the muscles will retain the formerly toxic level of glycogen that they had been forced to retain on the previous high-carbohydrate diet.

What happens to electrolytes long term keto, do we still shed them?

The only real difference between sugar-burners and fat-burners is that in the absence of dietary carbohydrate, the kidneys return to excreting sodium at their normal higher level (carbohydrate and insulin cause the kidneys to hold on to sodium and water). We have to work a bit harder to keep our salt intake up, but the good news is that a sufficient salt intake generally keeps potassium, magnesium, and calcium balanced, as well. Very few people on a well-formulated ketogenic diet need to supplement their electrolytes; they get enough from their food.

Salt has historically been very important to the human race. The Romans gave their soldiers a salt allowance (the source of the word “salary”). Hunter-gatherers always knew where the nearest salt lick was. Jesus Christ mentioned the importance of salt as a metaphor in one of his sermons. And so forth.

Body fat is easily absorbed by the cells in the body without having to pass through the liver; do these readily convert to ketones?

Ketones are an intermediate product of the metabolism of fatty acids. They are produced only in the liver. The muscle cells use metabolic pathways that take the fatty acids directly; once we are fat-adapted, they don’t wait for the liver to give them ketones, they run the fatty acids all the way through the cycle and generate ATP (adenosine tri-phosphate) for use as energy throughout the cell. Any ketone bodies produced during this process are immediately converted on down the pathway; they are not shared with other cells.

Dietary fat gets sent directly to the liver, where it is packed into lipoproteins called chylomicrons, which distribute the energy throughout the body in the form of triglycerides (three fatty acids attached to a glycerol backbone). Dietary carbohydrate gets converted into palmitic acid and the palmitate is then formed into triglycerides and packed into VLDL particles and sent to the fat tissue for storage (which is why carbohydrate makes us fat). (Fatty acids don’t dissolve in water, so they have to be ferried through the blood inside lipoproteins.) Your LDL is the remains of what started out as VLDL when it left the liver. I am blocking at the moment on how the fat from our fat tissue gets handled (and I just re-watched a video on it yesterday—so much for keto clarity, lol!), but perhaps someone else will come along and describe that process.

[Alecmcq]

@PaulL, I always learn so much reading what you say. Brilliant stuff. Thank you!

[Regina]

Once you are fat-adapted (it took me ten months), you can have cheat days a few times a month, and still be at maintenance. I think the problem here is that forum members are saying you are fat-adapted at six to eight weeks. Wrong! It can take months to years. Trust me, I am still starving. Getting a bit better about skipping meals, but not really.

[Regina]

Forum members are not scientists

[Ruina]

the problem here is that forum members are saying you are fat-adapted at six to eight weeks. Wrong! It can take months to years.

I do think this gets over-simplified. My understanding is that fat-adaption starts at 6-8 weeks and takes months to years before you are fully fat adapted. After the first couple months you are well enough adapted that you have energy to exercise again and see other benefits. But it isn’t just an on/off thing. Your body gets progressively better at using fat for fuel. I’ve been keto for 10 months, and I’m still seeing small, incremental improvements.