Ketogenic Diets

By Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS aka “The Nutrition Myth Buster”™

A lot of people think of ketogenic diets as high protein diets, but they’re actually not, they’re high fat diets. Why would anybody go on a high fat diet? When you reduce carbs to this low an amount, your body is forced to burn fat for fuel. There’s very little glucose in your blood stream, and the body has to go to an alternative fuel source.

So many good things happen when you burn fat as opposed to sugar. You have more energy, fewer cravings, you don’t have the blood sugar roller coaster, and you almost always lose weight, sometimes pretty rapidly. Burning fat when you don’t have any carbs in your system creates this alternative fuel source called ketones. The ketogenic diet generates a state called ketosis and you lose weight because your body is producing these ketones from fat from your diet, sure, but also from your hips, butt and thighs. That’s the ATM machine for fat! You’re going to use that for fuel, and you’re going to lose body fat.

For many years, people thought ketogenic diets were really hard to stay on, and that they were probably unhealthy because of all that fat. Think again. We’ve known for a long time that ketogenic diets are used as a treatment for childhood epilepsy; they use ketogenic diets right now at Johns Hopkins. In epilepsy, we learned at this conference, the brain is basically starving for sugar. It needs energy, and the brain cells are basically saying, “Feed me”. They’re going nuts and they start to spasm and that’s a very non-technical way to explain epilepsy. When your body’s producing ketones, the brain loves them; it will run all day on ketones. So will the heart. So will the muscles.

As we learned at the conference, ketogenic diets are also being investigated for cancer. Remember, cancer cells feed on sugar, that’s their only fuel. Ketogenic diets are also being investigated for MS. There’s this wonderful doctor named Terry Wahl’s who had MS, and it was so serious that she was in a reclining wheelchair. She gives these TED lectures now. She’s created this protocol all about ketogenic diets; look up the Wahl’s protocol. Ketogenic diets are also being investigated for cognitive and neural impairment among other things.

What was really interesting at this conference was how many top athletes are using ketogenic diets. They’re running on fat! When Natural Health Sherpa sent me and Dr. Raffelock down to the conference, we came back very jazzed because we’re going to be starting work soon on a whole new exciting project harnessing the power of the ketogenic diet. For now, you can read a lot about ketogenic diets online, a great place you might want to start is the blog of Dr. Peter Attia called The Eating Academy.

We’re beginning to see the whole establishment that’s been built around “low-fat” crumbling and finding out that the guidelines for fat consumption were never based on science in the first place. New studies are questioning the cholesterol hypothesis and absolving saturated fat of any role in heart disease. I think you’re going to see a big shift in attitudes about fat in general and about high-fat diets especially among people like the folks on Metabolic Mastery who stay ahead of the curve. Read about this, follow all the health news and listen to us. I’m writing a book about high-fat diets right now with the esteemed Dr. Steven Masley out in January, and we’re going to be doing a version of a high fat diet in our next program for Natural Health Sherpa. On a ketogenic diet you can lose body fat, increase energy, and if the emerging work pans out, you may also reduce the risk of certain diseases, and maybe even improve your athletic performance!

By Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS aka “The Nutrition Myth Buster”™

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