People are different. I am still quite young, only 44 in the end of the months but I never noticed energy change. Sure, as a very little kid I had energy but I had low-ish energy when I was 15 and 25 and 43…
People can say “you do it wrong” but it doesn’t change that ketosis itself makes not much noticeable change in some of us. Some of us needs extra strictness and restrictions, elimination… Keto isn’t enough. I think we know this very well in this forum as we read enough stories.
And high-carb vs keto is vastly different from some pretty healthy low-carb vs keto. My big change happened when I went low-carb. Another when I tried carnivore. Low-carb -> ketosis, that wasn’t really noticeable. Maybe the fact I ate more fat before keto than on keto has some effect on things too?
And there are so many other factors. If we wished to compare the changes between 2 different persons, we should give them the same keto diet, at least… But their past matters too. If I change my keto to some other style of keto, I may have drastic changes. It happened.
amwassil
(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.)
#6
If that’s what you see, then you aren’t very observant. The world is currently in the depths of a trifecta of metabolic related disease: T2 diabetes, CVD and obesity. The entire world, not just USA, not just NA, not just Europe… Virtually every country in the world is experiencing the highest rates of obesity ever in their history.
Worldwide obesity has nearly tripled since 1975.
In 2016, more than 1.9 billion adults, 18 years and older, were overweight. Of these over 650 million were obese.
39% of adults aged 18 years and over were overweight in 2016, and 13% were obese.
Most of the world’s population live in countries where overweight and obesity kills more people than underweight.
38 million children under the age of 5 were overweight or obese in 2019.
Over 340 million children and adolescents aged 5-19 were overweight or obese in 2016.
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the number 1 cause of death globally, taking an estimated 17.9 million lives each year.
The “Diabesity” epidemic (obesity and type 2 diabetes) is likely to be the biggest epidemic in human history. Diabetes has been seriously underrated as a global public health issue and the world can no longer ignore “the rise and rise” of type 2 diabetes.
Some people are blessed by genetics to be able to eat a carb-heavy diet and never gain weight or develop diabetes their entire lives.
Open up any high school yearbook from the 50’s 60’s or 70’s. Obesity was rare and we didn’t eat keto. We ate 3 meals a day with rare snacks or processed foods. Oatmeal or bacon and eggs for breakfast. Sugary cold cereal was a treat in my house - not a staple. Same with sodas.
What got my attention 2+ years ago was the CDC claim that 1 in 3 Americans are pre-diabetic and 84% don’t know it and the percent is increasing. Those are terrible odds. The only thing so many people could have in common is diet. It doesn’t take much research to conclude that too much carbs is the culprit. I’ve learned to enjoy the food I eat now more than what I used to eat. Everything in my cart at checkout has only one ingredient, whole food, low carb. That doesn’t garrantee anything but probably improves my chance to avoid diabetes and probably some other things. Examine the evidence, make some choices. I know a few people who would rather die younger than give up their current favorite foods. My goal, stay healthy so I die at home instead of some nursing home.
Carbohydrate tolerance varies considerably from person to person. Dr. Phinney estimates that perhaps as many as 20% of the population might never need a ketogenic diet, despite a carb-rich diet that would have many of the rest of us in a diabetic coma. Dr. Phinney has also said that, while our ancestors’ diet throughout much of human evolution was ketogenic, it is not guaranteed that the current foods available to us are healthy if we were to eat ketogenically over the long term. We need more data.
There are a number of factors at play here. Dr. Phinney said in a private conversation at Ketofest 2019 that he is more and more convinced that systemic inflammation is the real culprit behind metabolic dysfunction, a view that I am starting to hear now from a number of other keto experts. If you are highly insulin sensitive for whatever reasons, you might well be able to handle a large carbohydrate load without ever developing metabolic disease, but it is hard to know who is likely to be permanently healthy, and who is likely to be healthy—but only for now. (The late Dr. Joseph Kraft was convinced from his study of diabetes that many, many people are actually diabetic a couple of decades before diagnosis by the standard criteria. He felt he could show from the results of certain tests which people were undiagnosed diabetics and which were not.)
As an example, I used to have the kind of metabolism that allowed me to eat whatever I wanted, but it shifted in my mid-thirties, and I ended up pre-diabetic and close to 300 lbs. over the next 25 years. To look at me at age 30, you would never have guessed my later problems. To look at me at age 55, you would never have guessed that I was always a skinny kid. To look at me today, you would say I desperately need a ketogenic diet, not seeing the 60-85 pounds I’ve lost, the reversal of all markers of pre-diabetes, my lowered blood pressure, and my completely normal lipid numbers. Sure, I’d like to lose another 60-80 pounds, but I’ll take what I’ve got, thanks.
While we cannot say with any certainty that eating a ketogenic diet will help stave off the onset of metabolic disease (there are plenty of thin people with visceral fat and metabolic dysfunction, after all, not to mention all the metabolically healthy obese people out there), what we can say for sure (because we have the data already) is that a well-formulated ketogenic diet can mitigate and sometimes even reverse the effects of metabolic disease.
Thanks for a thought-provoking question. I think the best we can say at this point is that a ketogenic diet is a pretty good thing for most people, that some people really need it, and that some others probably do not. Metabolic and nutrition research are so difficult to do that we may never be able to gather the data necessary to say much more than that. I doubt anyone needs carbohydrate in their diet, but it is clear that many people can tolerate a carbohydrate-rich diet, even though many others cannot.
amwassil
(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.)
#10
And, the new elephant in the room: seed oils and PUFA ω6/3 ratio.
The following video was first offered here for our delectation:
Some people are thriving on high-carb and feels awful on low-carb, I know this much. A part of them surely need much carbs as they can’t tolerate huge amounts of fat (I don’t mean 200g but significantly more. people with huge energy needs but not being able to live mostly on fat without problems)… At least it sounds believable to me. My SO can’t even try low-carb as most fatty low-carb meals leave him feeling so bad he won’t try such ones again for years. We never will know what would he do on a low-carb diet long term (not okay short term is pretty normal, that says nothing. even I felt awful on keto right out of high-carb and it was great and smooth when I tried again later). Theoretically, as a seemingly very healthy person, he is supposed to be tolerate low-carb… Maybe some people are different but the healthy human body should be fine in ketosis. Eventually. I very rarely hear about people who do keto for months and keep feeling awful. Of course, most people don’t even try keto, the majority of the people who feels great on their carby diet has little reason to try it…
Well, if memory serves me, the ketogenic diet was a method by which physicians in the 1920’s would treat epilepsy. There are medications that exist now which control the seizures, but the diet itself had been effective back in the day.
edit. I started writing this reply around 530 am. Just got home from work and saw that I had forgotten to post it.
amwassil
(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.)
#13
The ‘nutshell’ history:
More from Dr Phinney’s observations on indigenous diets:
A form of ketogenic diet is still used to treat epileptics to this day, since not all of them benefit from medication. The diet for seizure-prevention, however, is so low in protein and so high in fat, that it has caused problems in many growing children. (This is why people think keto is bad for children. But a properly formulated non-epileptic keto diet provides enough protein for growing children.)
It is also caused by excessive carbohydrate intake in many people.
Insulin resistance and personal fat threshold are two conditions to research.
As @amwassil Michael noted the industrial seed oils and their participation in creating an inflamed body state through the generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) when the mitochondria attempt to process them into cellular energy are a focus at the moment.
Dr Cate Shanahan spoke about the seed oils recently on the Peak Human podcast.
I’m 2023 days in and feel the same way. There were times when eating the standard recommended diet I thought I was healthy. But I didn’t know. Really, I was just not sick. On this way of eating I can understand what it is like not to be hungry. I can work all day on passion inspired projects without feeling tired, I feel energised. Some aches and pains I didn’t realise I had, as they were part of the ‘normal’, went away, and that’s how I identified them…
This is the key part to your post. n = 1. You have found that it benefits you. Work with that and congratulations. KCKO
I am Keto, also know as the “Historically Human Appropriate Diet”, because I am a T2 Diabetic. T2 is caused by sustained consumption of unnatural high glycemic carbohydrates that are not found in nature. This is also known as the SAD diet (Standard American Diet). “Healthy Carbs”, of which there is no such thing, is what did me in. I though I was doing the right thing, but I did not realize that that bowl of brown rice was the worse that eating a bowl of table sugar.
With the help of a bit of Vanadyl Sulfate and Mark Sison’s advice, I have been entirely drug free (any drug) for the last eight years. This morning’s blood glucose was 89 mg/dL.
I got word two weeks ago that an acquaintance’s brother with T2, who did the Drugs, Carbs, and Allopaths route, had died in surgery to cut his legs off.
So to make a long story short, okay maybe not, if I do not stay on the “Historically Human Appropriate Diet”, I will die.
Oh, after three weeks of withdrawal (it was weird), my sense of taste returned. I thought I was losing it because old age sucks , but it was part of the addition. I am eating brussels sprouts and salmon as I write this. I am in hog heaven! My major problem with Keto is that the food tastes SO GOOD, I EAT TOO MUCH.
I’m sure the answer is very complicated but A simplified answer that I’ve heard Floated around: people with normal metabolic processes can eat carbs whereas people with messed up metabolic system’s can’t. Makes sense.
amwassil
(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.)
#21
@Liz_Carr Do you think people are born with ‘messed up metabolic systems’? Aside from a small percentage with genetic malfunctions from birth, I think most folks are born with relatively ‘normal’ metabolic systems. As I noted above we are in the midst of a world-wide epidemic of related metabolic diseases whose common element is eating high amounts of carbs and possibly (and probably) high amounts of seed oils. The victims of this epidemic don’t have problems because they have ‘messed up’ metabolic systems, they have messed metabolic systems because they ate too much of the wrong stuff for years or decades.
I’d tweak this a little to to make the direction of causality clearer: Most people are vulnerable to carbohydrate and end up with messed-up metabolic systems from eating too much, whereas a certain percentage of the population can handle the high carb load without problems.
Dr. Phinney’s guess is that the latter group might be as much as 20% of the population. As long as people in the former group don’t eat too much carbohydrate, their blood work is indistinguishable from that of people in the latter group, and unfortunately there is no way to predict which group we belong to, until our metabolism gets messed up from the carb load.
Paul’s answers.
KCKO