In mice, though there is some human data that agrees with this. Hat tip to Nick Norwitz on the Threads program. Only have the Abstract. The rest of the study is behind a firewall.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42255-024-01072-1
One possible reason why ketogenic diets can work to reduce weight – you don’t absorb as many calories (you poop out more calories). Or maybe you can stay the same weight while eating more.
Not sure how much it increases TUDCA, but that may be a lot of the “magic” when it comes to Keto and healing guts, livers, digestion etc. I’ve been taking it for years to keep my liver happy-er from the beating I give it with other crap I take. I know it can help metabolisms, but reduced caloric absorption doesn’t really make sense either. I’ve definitely never heard of weight loss from it, and it the bodybuilding world people take a LOT of it!
Almost wonder if the reduced calorie absorption is from the super low insulin levels.
I don’t know. When Nick Norwitz introduced this on Threads, he said is was “known” that keto had a caloric “advantage” over other diets, for reasons like this.
I’ve come to realize that the human body is incredibly complex and we really don’t know as much as we think we know about it. Back when I started keto, it was “eat less, exercise more”, and likely still is. Yet when I finally transitioned to keto for good, I reduced my exercise, ate as much as I wanted, and lost quite a bit of weight. Obviously, “eat less, exercise more” isn’t 100% reliable.
I’ve also wondered if some people are able to absorb a higher percentage of what they eat? In the book Burn, Herman Pontzer says that maybe 95% of what you eat is actually absorbed. I wonder if some people only get 90% and some get near 100%? And I know after eating things like corn on the cob and blueberries, I’m not absorbing these anywhere near 100%.
And then, as you stated, you start changing the biome/correcting your gut, and it’s really tough to figure out what’s happening.
I’ve been drinking raw milk for a while now, maybe 6 ounces or so (I don’t measure it and use different jars) daily. Everyone goes on about how “dairy” is “inflammatory” or “causes” “insulin resistance”, but I’ve been slowly losing weight and am at my lowest weight since I was really into a ton of fasting. There is a theory that raw milk helps the gut, and maybe that’s the case?
For bodybuilders, I never know what do with them. Ted Naiman used to say “we should be doing what body builders do!”, but as a former body builder, I did a ton of stuff that I’m not sure is useful . Heck, when I was 16, I went on a diet of all tuna for multiple days. And I can’t tell you how many before-workout and after-workout energy/protein drinks I drank. And how I HAD to eat within a certain time after working out, or else I wouldn’t get Huuuuuuge. (Which I didn’t, because I really don’t have the genetics for that. And I never did drugs for body building.) If you want to be a body builder, maybe see what they are doing. If you’re not a body builder, I’m not sure how much of what they are doing translates over.
For instance, I’ll do a 1-1.5 hour body weight workout, don’t take in anything but coffee and tea around then, and eat about 3 hours after finishing. I’m sure most body builders would tell me that’s completely wrong.
Yup! I think it’s one of the many things that since it’ll never be actually studied, we’ll never know. What sucks is it’s a hard one to argue to somebody that’s never done keto (correctly) and also where that moving line of the calories vs the hormones vs who knows whats else changes stuff. On one end like when I did Atkins originally in 2007, I measured nothing other than the veggies that Dr A. told us to, and the weight was flying off at light speed, but I was also in my mid 20’s so we all know even when we’ve fattened ourselves up and think we’re screwed, being in your 20’s counts for a lot for damage control.
Then in my mid 30’s when I got to repeat that because I’m a moron, I definetly had to watch the cals, because I lost, then started gaining again from over eating, still 100% clean Keto at that point. But I still can’t ignore even with how fast fat cals add up, it definitely seems to have less of an effect.
The only was I’ve ever been able to (slightly) make people understand is using my Flex Fuel truck as the analogy. It’s MPG, HP, Torque, Acceleration rate, top speed (on paper) all make the assumption it’s running on Gas, which mine almost never does, I either run it on E85, or sometimes on E15, so all those numbers, all that math they did no longer applies, doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but I’m not using the “normal” fuel that most people would put in it. Just like us, once the computer detects E85 in there it starts changing everything, the Fuel Mixture rates, The Oxygen sensor tweaks itself, the timing adapts, the trucks literal metabolism makes a ton of changes so the truck runs correctly on a different fuel source.
Raw milk was made me realize that both my “Lactose Intolerant” diag’s were BS! Absolutely helped my gut, which was crap as a hole.
Agreed on the bodybuilding, I’ve always seen the Keto argument almost the same, aside from the stupid stuff like the workout being in the trash if your protein shake came in at minute 31 post workout instead of within the “anabolic window” LOL. BUT, when people bash the old school Bro’s and use “Bro Science” like it’s a negative, they ignore that they figured out a LOT of stuff, that we now know is true, they couldn’t explain why half of it worked, but they knew that it did!
Phinney says there are data to show that the metabolic rate increases on a ketogenic diet. This is likely due to the lowering of insulin levels required to get into ketosis.
Bikman says it is well-known that insulin decreases the metabolic rate. This was first observed in Type I diabetics before the advent of insulin treatments, a century ago. Without treatment, their metabolic rate was too high for them to avoid starving to death. Insulin slowed their metabolism to a sustainable level. It’s also why people who are insulin-resistant/hyperinsulinaemic have much lower metabolic rates.
So … Did they still starve even if they were on a carnivore diet, which presumably would have stimulated little or no insulin production?
Interestingly, a ketogenic diet was one of the standard treatments for Type I diabetes, until the advent of insulin therapy in 1923. And yes, the diet kept patients alive longer, but they still starved to death in the end, from lack of insulin.
Insulin is a very powerful hormone, and we need a small amount of it circulating in our blood in order to stay alive. We just don’t need nearly as much as we have when we eat a high-carb diet. That level of insulin causes damage.
As Professor Bikman points out, calling Type II diabetes “diabetes” is really a misnomer. The confusion started because originally it wasn’t noticed until glucose started getting out of control. Today, we know that Type I diabetes is an auto-immune disease caused by damage when the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas are attacked by the immune system. Type II diabetes is a condition caused by an excess of insulin, the result of a diet that is too rich in glucose (in other words, carbohydrate). So they are very different diseases.
Unfortunately, this glucose-centric thinking still obtains, and the official diagnosis of Type II diabetes requires glycaemia to start getting out of control. The late diabetologist Joseph Kraft used to argue that the disease started decades before glucose control began to slip. Unfortunately, we didn’t really understand the role of hyperinsuliinaemia in Type II diabetes until the Nobel-prize-winning work of Berson and Yalow in the 1960’s allowed us to actually measure serum insulin. They were the first to work out the role of insulin in fat-storage and other energy-storing processes in the body.