Origin & Work Of The Ketogenic Diet

There is a lot of controversy over the ketogenic diet and whether it’s healthy for both your body and heart functions. What are the costs and benefits? Is it good to do it long term? How is it healthy compared to other diets out there? This diet is becoming more and more popular and finding answers is essential when figuring out if it’s doing good or harm to our bodies. The keto diet is a diet that consists of a low carb (roughly 20-50 grams) and a high dose of fat intake (equivalent to about 90% of your total calorie allowance). Your body uses carbohydrates (glucose in the body) as a source of energy. The goal is to kick your body into ketosis in which the high fat content forces the body to use fats as the energy source. Ketosis is a normal response to starvation where your body uses other resources as energy when carbs aren’t available which could be why lifestyle is so popular. This suggests that the inhabitants of our ancestors didn’t have access much sustainable food so essentially they were hungry for periods of time because of the scarcity of available food. When you are a hunter/gatherer it can be difficult to find food and consume it, so the body turned on itself to feed until the individual had a successful meal. If that’s what our ancestors did, that must mean it’s good and that we should follow in their footsteps. But we aren’t primitive people, times have changed and we have changed.

There are so many new things about our physiology that have been presented that weren’t an issue back then. For example, what about those individuals with diabetes? In a person who has diabetes, ketones form when there aren’t enough carbs for energy, but this often occurs because there isn’t enough insulin available to help move carbs from the bloodstream to the cells to be used for energy. You might be thinking that it’s useful to burn fat for fuel. However, for diabetic individuals, ketosis can quickly become dangerous if it occurs due to a continued lack of insulin. In the absence of insulin, fat cells continue to release fat into circulation and the liver continues to pump out ketones. Ketones are acids so they lower the pH of the blood, making it acidic and potentially dangerous and possibly life-threatening. Diabetes is only one disease of many that could inadvertently affect the individual.

Another issue that can arise is the relation to renal problems. In a different study low protein diet supplements were administered by an essential amino acid—keto acid mixture for six to twelve months. Body weight decreased during the first three months. Arm muscle circumference fell, muscle mass also fell in several individuals. This diet may slow the decline in renal function in a proportion of patients. Low protein diets have been used for many years for symptomatic relief of uremic symptoms. In an attempt to improve the uremic state various combinations of essential amino acids and their keto acid analogues have been given as supplements to diets low in nitrogen. Recently it has been claimed that low protein diets may slow the progression of renal failure. The evidence for a protective effect of a low protein intake is striking in experimental renal failure produced in rats.

A number of reports have appeared which suggest there may be a similar effect in humans but to today there has been only one attempt at a prospective randomly allocated trial in human renal disease. This study reported that a very low protein diet supplemented by an essential amino acid/keto acid mixture appeared to slow or in some cases completely halt the progression of advanced renal failure. If decline in renal function can indeed be slowed, they would prove to be of enormous importance in both human and economic terms. Although the diet can severely hinder those who are diabetic or are at risk for it, it turns out that it might aide in other problems such as decrease the symptoms of renal failure. This could be a breakthrough in knowing more about the diet itself. But with so many pros and cons it is hard to know for sure if it is actually good for you, and also who it is good for. For example, what if you have a disease going on the diet might make things worse, or what if you were totally healthy but doing the diet brought in a new concern such as a weird allergy or a new disease that you didn’t even know you were at risk for. The problem with how new the diet is, is not knowing the answers to any of those questions. But as with any new thing that comes up in our world it starts with baby steps and if it deems workable then it progresses into something greater.

There are many studies that are being done to look at the effects of the diet both good and bad. One of many studies that was done included a group of obese individuals that went on the keto diet for twenty-four weeks, the results were that the diet helped the majority to lose weight fast and as it turned out, it also helped them to lower their blood sugar and cholesterol levels. This study showed that if you want to lose weight fast and reach healthy levels of cholesterol then this diet is for you. But an argument that can be made is that an obese individual can lose weight quickly if they just exercise right and eat adequate portions of food. It is much easier to see weight loss in a larger person rather than a smaller one. It was found that obese subjects with a high prevalence of diabetes lost more weight during six months on a carbohydrate-restricted diet than on a calorie- and fat-restricted diet. Which further suggests that obese individuals are more likely to show the weight loss. But there were many differences between the groups and the duration of the study.

Many studies were done for a relatively short period of time so the findings were minimal. This could be because of how new the diet is, so there isn't much evidence on the experiments in each study, And because it's so new we don't know much about the diet so it can be difficult to test. In years to come there will be more knowledge about the long term effects that the keto diet might have on your body. Also within every study it is difficult to determine the possibility that the diet was not done to the exact criteria of the study. This means that it was possible that the individuals did not consume the adequate amount of calories and carbohydrates that were required for their body mass in the trial. Of those people around that went on the keto diet, most people ate much less than they were supposed to and had difficulties staying under their required carb intake. Much of the time the people didn’t eat breakfast or lunch due to the lack of knowledge of what is good or bad in a sense that a certain food might have too many carbs and if the allowance is only 50 carbs a day they want to save those amounts for another meal that is perhaps more satisfactory.

Another study was done using healthy, otherwise non-obese, individuals. What was found was that the individuals did lose some weight but in return they also lost some of their performance in their physical exercise. In other words, if you are not obese and you get on the keto diet, you’ll lose weight but you won’t perform as well when you do physical activity. Which doesn’t seem like a good trade off. Exercise is good for your body in a sense that we were made to move. Doing physical work on our bodies releases chemicals in our brain that make us happy and gives us an overall feeling of well being. We know that sitting the couch all day and not moving isn’t healthy for us and it creates stiffness in our joints and muscles and makes us feel groggy, so why would doing a diet that lessens our ability to exercise be good? Also, an adverse effect of the diet is that over time it would cause you to lose your appetite, so you would naturally lose weight by not eating because eating that much fat makes us feel yucky and uncomfortable.

So, now we have a loss in exercise performance and a loss in appetite. These things are essential for our bodies to run smoothly and to reduce complications and problems in the future, our bodies need both exercise and healthy foods to thrive. This could also tie into the idea of not eating could be due to a lack of knowledge on what foods contain how many calories and carbs as mentioned above. The idea of eating a high fat breakfast does not sound appetizing plus, it probably isn’t a good start for your metabolism to start your day. The changes in calcium and phosphate metabolism was found interesting in another study that took place. The individuals were accompanied by a small rise in calcium. Previously it has been reported that patients may develop hypercalcemia with a similar diet. But this fall may have been related to an improved calcium intake from the keto acid salts, the total amount consumed by our patients was small. This finding could be debunked as a side effect of the keto acids themselves and not that of the rise in calcium was from the body that produced it.

Studies like this one prove the continuation of studies to be rather difficult in a sense that it’s hard to account for all variables and determining the relationships between the diet itself and the side effects it could have on the study personnel. In all the studies that were found it turns out that the keto diet had a much higher weight loss than that of other diets. A theory about why the ketogenic diet works so quickly is that depleting your glycogen storage assists in losing water weight.2 This is due because there is a one-to-two ratio between glycogen and water. Getting rid of the glycogen would in turn get rid of a lot of water stored in the body. But that still begs the question, for how long is it good for you? Compared with a low-fat diet, a low-carbohydrate diet program had better participant retention and greater weight loss. During active weight loss, cholesterol level increased more with the low-carbohydrate diet than with the low-fat diet. According to this, doing a high fat diet is bad for you cholesterol levels.

A ketogenic diet can also be low in fiber, vitamins and minerals, since whole grains, legumes, fruit and a number of vegetables are off-limits due to their carb content. Children have always been taught to follow the food pyramid (or my plate or whatever it is now) to eat a healthy, balanced meal with correct portion sizes. This involves eating a variety of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, low-fat dairy, skinless poultry and non-fried fish, nuts and legumes, and limiting red meat, saturated fat and sweets. These are required for a heart healthy diet. All these foods are necessary to give our bodies the right vitamins and minerals it needs to grow. But restricting those foods would severely impact the availability of those essential vitamins and minerals to our bodies. Many people on the keto diet require taking supplements to give their bodies what they need. Future studies evaluating long-term cardiovascular outcomes are needed before a carbohydrate-restricted diet can be endorsed. No study that was found lasted longer than a few years and there were very controlled groups who varied by a lot.

As mentioned earlier any diet has its own variables that have a wide range of differences, so this can also make it hard to determine what is related to the study and what is a simple environment factor. But through the future years there should be a better understanding about what factors play a role in the keto diet and how to improve the diet itself so that it can be more safe and healthy to do. Everything that we do and everything that we try for the first time is just that, a first. It doesn’t have to be big but it has to be something. And us humans are always trying to improve our lifestyle and our health to make life not only healthier but better in ways that are faster and easier. Whether we do the keto diet for our own selfish gains or if we do it to better our health somehow, we should do what is best for us. Each individual person is different and therefore requires a different set of necessities. This includes what our bodies needs to live and what are healthy levels of things such as cholesterol or blood pressure.

So is the ketogenic diet worth it? Well the problem is, is that there isn’t enough information to say either yes or no. The durations of any study that was found was not long enough to determine the overall costs and benefits of doing the diet. Yes it may help you to lose weight quickly but in the long run it might not be so healthy because of it’s tendencies to restrict your necessary intake of vitamins and minerals and the encouragement to do physical activity. Although doing this diet would yield higher results over any other diet that was looked at, I believe that it could be a fast and temporary solution but only for a short period of time of maybe a few months. But over long periods of time, it could have potential adverse effects on your body.