Wanna get technical with me?

#1

I haven’t found facts or science on this anywhere. Thought I’d ask around here to see if anyone else has had experience with this.

Has anyone noticed that when your body makes glucose (protein, dawn effect, stress, whatever) it has a different impact on your ketones than carb glucose does?

Do you think it causes a lower insulin response than carbs do?

Also, this is so weird but I have higher ketones when I add more carbs to my diet. If I just have a bite of sweet potato or 3 slices of banana after a meal to satiate, my ketones go way higher than when I’m strict keto. I wonder if the "stress’ of no carbs (I’m lean, female and very active) might actually supress ketone production?
Anyone know anything about this or where to point me?

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #2

Protein is known to stimulate insulin secretion at half the rate at which carbohydrate does.

One thing to bear in mind about the stress response is that the cortisol release is intended to make quick energy available for immediate action; i.e., fight or flight. A simultaneous insulin release would defeat that.

Gluconeogenesis from protein is one of the liver’s many functions; my understanding is that it is inhibited by high levels of glucose in the blood, and so again would not occur if insulin were high.

I have no idea why your ketones are doing what they are doing in the cases you describe, but if you want my guess, it’s related to the explanation we give people that ketone levels drop as the body becomes more efficient at utilizing them: how about, instead, if you give the body glucose (here, in the form of carbohydrate) it turns to metabolizing that first, so the ketones the liver is producing go unused, until the glucose is taken care of? I don’t swear that this is the case; it’s merely a guess, which you are free to shoot down at your pleasure.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #3

There is also the phenomenon of “physiological insulin resistance” or (the term I prefer) “glucose sparing,” in which the serum glucose rises somewhat after a period of eating a ketogenic diet, and which people explain as the muscles’ refusing to take up glucose so that the brain and other organs that need some glucose can use it instead. This does not appear to be accompanied by a corresponding rise in insulin, nor by any change in HbA1C,