This Will Strip Fat Faster Than Anything! Dr Benjamin Bikman, The Insulin Doctor

so let's talk about ketosis and ketones um the diet the keto diet is becoming increasingly popular from what I've seen it's actually the diet that I'm on at the moment how does that play into everything we've talked about yeah yeah so it it this is an opportunity for me to do a little bit of um bi nutrient biochemistry or a little discussion of metabolism so that people appreciate what ketones even are and where they come from so the the entirety of the human body is a metabolic hybrid in that the body is largely burning fuel

from two sources it is burning blood glucose or sugar blood sugar or it's burning fat those are the two main fuels for the body by extension now the brain was an exception the brain is glucose or ketones and but I'll get to where the ketones come from the rest of the body isn't really relying on ketones as much it's fats or glucose or blood sugar insulin is what decides which fuel is used so as much as the metabolic engine has two fuel sources insulin will decide which one is opened and which one is closed if

insulin is high the body is sugar burning and you can measure this in the whole body level by measuring the amount of O uh oxygen and CO2 that the body is producing because different biochemistry or the burning of the fuels will produce a different amount of CO2 so if I'm burning glucose I might be producing more CO2 yes yeah so we could hook you up to something called an indirect calor imeter and measure that your rer the respiratory exchange ratio the balance between CO2 and oxygen would go higher so we we increase your insulin like

if I infused you with insulin in the next few minutes we would see that your reer would go up and we'd say boy you're sugar burning or we allow insulin to come down and then the reer goes down which is reflective of fat burning so it's insulin that determines whether the body is sugar burning or fat burning now when insulin has been low for about 16 or so hours something interesting starts happening at the liver so the liver with insulin being low is burning a lot of fat including its own fat that the liver can

store the liver can store fat but also fat coming from fat cells because if insulin is low the fat cells are just leaking out fat to be burned by the body and because insulin is low the liver keeps burning it and the liver essentially Burns continues to burn so much fat that it it fills its own needs it meets its own needs and says to itself hey I don't need to keep burning fat I have all the energy I need I'm I'm doing great but it can't stop burning fat because insulin is low and if

insulin stays low fat burning keeps going and so because the body doesn't have enough glucose well it's acting yes so in this sense it's doing it to help replace the glucose that isn't coming in that's the value of the Ketone so as the liver is continuing to burn fat it essentially gets to a point of fat burning where it's burning more fat than it needs and that excess if you will is what becomes ketones so ketones are kind of a metabolic release valve for the liver cell to say I I can't I don't know what

to do with all this fat burning okay I know what I'm going to do there's not a lot of glucose coming in and so the brain may start to get hungry so I'm going to start making ketones and so ketones are nothing more than a product of a lot of fat burning and anyone who even fasts for 24 hours you wake up that next morning you're in some degree of ketosis lest anyone think it's an extreme thing people are going in and out of ketosis ideally often now why do I say ideally it's because ketones

are as we've already outlined perhaps the best fuel for the brain the brain thrives on ketones you can take a person with early stage Alzheimer's disease and have them go through a series of cognitive tests and they do horribly on them like one example is you ask the patient with Alzheimer's to draw the face of an analog clock a circle with 1 2 through 12 and then some hands on it and it is utter chaos this is published reports you then put them into ketosis ask them can you please draw the face of a clock

it's still sloppy but it is absolutely the face of a clock you ask them when they're not in ketosis to try to tie their shoelaces they can't think through the puzzle of tying the shoelaces ask them to do it again when they're in ketosis all of a sudden they can tie their shoelaces more than that they can get themselves dressed all of these are published case reports it's just my long-winded way of saying the brain thrives when it has ketones as a fuel source but the benefits don't stop there my lab published a report finding

that when humans were in ketosis which is just a term for ketones being elevated we pulled out small pieces of belly fat and measured the metabolic rate of that belly fat and we found that in ketosis the metabolic rate of that belly fat was three times higher than when the people were not in ketosis what does that mean yeah so that means that the fat was suddenly behaving in a much more energetic way that fat tissue has a very low metabolic rate and then all of a sudden when the ketones came into them they started

getting much more active and they started burning more energy which is going to be very helpful for someone who wants to lose fat if your fat cells now have a three Times Higher metabolic rate that means that the fat cells are starting to act a little bit more like your muscle cells and they're just burning more energy so does that mean that I'm going to lose fat faster what do that mean absolutely and that is what happens there are very well done controlled studies to show that if you control for all calories when a human

is in ketosis their metabolic rate goes up your body your whole body is just burning more um it it's just everything's kind of been turned on a little more the the the the furnace of the metabolism is just been it's have a little more fuel kind of stoking the fire so ketones will increase metabolic rate of fat tissue we found a paper that we published documenting how we took muscle cells and kind of insulted the muscle cells to determine how tough the muscle cells were when we incubated the muscle cells with ketones they were much

more resistant to injury so the ketones act to protect muscle tissue and in a way that is reflective of a function of ketones KET Kon are a defender of muscle ketones are basically the way to tell the brain saying brain you think you need a lot of glucose and if you don't get enough glucose you would start stripping the protein from muscle to turn it into glucose but I'm here as a ketone so you can eat me instead and not and leave the muscle alone so we published again a direct report finding that ketones actually

make Muscle more resistant to injury and this could be why you're seeing more and more Elite athletes using ketones as an actual ergogenic Aid or like a supplement to help them better be better so at my University at BYU just this year our men's and women's cross country team took the national championships the best college runners in the nation pretty impressive one of the things they do is they take these Ketone drinks before they train and before they they race some more and more of the torto France teams take Ketone supplements because it is just

another fuel it is something that the body can burn that we always say well if once you start running out of glucose you're going to Bonk you're going to hit the wall well what if you don't really use glucose because you're burning a lot of fat and a lot of ketones instead and that keeps your glucose kind of untouched or you're not you're not relying on the glue and we see this in humans if there's a human that is adapted to a ketogenic diet they burn fat at a higher rate than was ever thought humanly

possible that that fat is basically fueling all of their muscle movement during the exercise session rather than relying predominantly on glucose the body has adapted it's burning fat for fuel and when available it's burning ketones for fuel and it's leaving the muscle as sort of a last resort when it really needs a big kick I've seen these keto drinks little they're almost like little shots well there's a bunch of different types if you look at the Spectrum of ketones you on one end you have the cheapest most readily available although less effective called Ketone salt

where it takes a molecule of Ketone and binds it to a mineral like calcium or magnesium um not as effective and it's a lot of mineral so people will find that they might get a lot of plaque on their teeth yeah maybe increased risk of kidney stones so comes with some consequences then you have the Ketone eser which often comes in shots yeah then you have the bioidentical BHB or the bioidentical Ketone one company which is original Ketone um they make it now these ones are more effective you take a little bit of these and

you will get an increase inreasing ketones they're a little more expensive too but as the space is becoming more competitive the price is coming down and what exactly does it do so if I took a shot of a bio identical Ketone drink what would go on in my body and how would I how would that impact my cognitive performance or athletic performance yeah yeah so it would result so you're drinking it in you're immediately absorbing it from your gut yeah so if you were not in ketosis let's say you had and I'm not encouraging people

to do this you had just eaten two Bagels and a cup of sugary coffee you're no ketones undetectable cuz insulin has come up it's inhibited Ketone production and then you drink a shot of the Ketone within an hour we would detect your ketones they would have gone up maybe to one Miller which is a pretty significant bump yeah and they're capable of that kind of movement and maybe you do so because you're thinking I really need to be sharp right now would that make me sharper well that's where we have to speculate there's no I

my lab published animal evidence suggesting that yes indeed it makes you sharper that we had these animals navigate mazes and recognize objects and when the animals were on a ketogenic diet they were much sharper they were much quickly much better at solving problems and remembering solutions to previous problems it's one of the I ask this in particular because as my team know because I've said it to them a lot over the last couple of weeks since I've been on the keto diet and I've been literally pricking my finger to check confirming yeah my keto levels

and the highest I've gotten to is like 2.5 which is high is it high that's not problematic I mean that is just proof positive that you're in ketosis which itself is proof positive that you're burning a lot of fat yeah and three your insulin levels are low fat dropped off my body like I've never seen in my life exactly yeah it's crazy so the power there is I like if you'll allow me to kind of springboard off of that comment the power of so so if someone is listening to this and they're thinking okay I

need to shrink my fat cells yeah unfortunately they don't realize that there's two variables to what caused their fat cells to grow in the first place they have no awareness of the value of insulin in this in this um um formula all they do is pay attention to the calories and so the average individual is looking down the road of this fat cell shrinking journey and they're thinking okay what I have to do is just cut my calories and what do they do to cut their calories they do the exact wrong thing and before I

even answer that let me just present the scenario let's imagine that stepen and I everyone listening is invited step and I are hosting a buffet we have the world's best chefs it is going to be a table filled with the most delicious food you can imagine you're in our invitation we say come hungry cuz you're going to want to try a little bit of everything everyone listening ask yourselves what would you do to come as hungry as possible you'd probably do two things or think how did you go to your Thanksgiving or your your Christmas

dinner as hungry as possible you would eat a little less in some period of time before the event and you would exercise a little more and it would work you you would be very hungry that's why the traditional advice given for weight loss doesn't work because we tell people eat less exercise more sure you maybe lose a little bit of weight in the short term but all that does you've given them the perfect recipe to promote hunger and hunger always wins as a good example uh in the US we have a game show maybe there

was some version of this in the UK called The Biggest Loser it was essentially who can lose the most weight and it was through a punishing Regiment of caloric restriction eat less exercise more that is like the perfect embodiment of that approach they were starving and they were exercising to insane degrees and oh my goodness did they lose a lot of weight and yet you never see them again they don't do a reunion tour 5 years or 10 years later because they gain it all back do do you know they gain it all back they

do in fact a paper published in the US from the National Institutes of Health documented not only the degree to which they gain weight back but also how it almost literally breaks their metabolism then normally a person's metabolic rate is connected to their body mass a bigger body has a higher metabolic rate a smaller body has a lower metabolic rate this is just human physiology and no surprise when someone loses weight there's less of body and so metabolic rate goes down as they gain weight back metabolic rate will typically go back up as well except

for the contestants and The Biggest Loser they started with a high metabolic rate because of a high body fat level they lost a substantial amount of weight no surprise metabolic rate went down substantially but it this is such a dramatic change that as they started gaining weight back metabolic rate did not come back with it it stayed lower than it should have normally it's connected sort of one to one wherever body weight is going metabolic rate is going except in these people that method of dramatic weight loss through such severe restriction which is based purely

on the caloric theory of obesity leads to such leads to significant hunger so no surprise if a person's attempting to shrink their fat cells or lose weight if the first step is I'm going to cut my calories and they don't address their High insulin they're never going to lose weight in the long run they're going to step right back to where they were because if they start cutting calories but insulin is still high that's going to make them very hungry because insulin wants to be storing energy a do a professor from Harvard named David lwig

found this if you have people eating a lower calorie meal that spikes their insulin it makes them much hungrier than a lower calorie meal that doesn't Spike insulin so that's the key anyone listening if you're thinking I need to be on a fat cell shrinking Journey let the first step of that journey be I'm going to lower my insulin which means which means I'm going to control my carbohydrates I'm going to stop eating carbohydrates that come from bags and boxes with barcodes and while I am restricting those carbohydrates I'm going to focus more on protein

and fat so control carbs prioritize protein and don't fear the fat that comes with those proteins fat and protein together is a a a miraculous combination of helping you feel full and it is literally giving everything you need there are such things as essential proteins there are such things as essential fats so focus on those and that will be the key to helping insulin come down then as you have found you haven't and when you're hungry eat if you're not hungry don't eat but what the person will find as they're lowering their insulin all while

their metabolic rate is going up they're learning how to burn their own fat for fuel because remember the metabolic hybrid that metaphor that if you want to lose fat you need to burn fat you're not going to lose fat if you're always burning glucose it's fat that you need to burn and as you start burning more fat you realize that it's like the hump on a camel that hump exists because it is a big source of fat for that animal to be using its own fat for energy we have our own version of that so

where the you think about the average individual who's chubby they have hundreds of thousands of calories waiting to be burned in those fat cells it's just that their chronically elevated insulin is never letting them burn it and so as the person starts making these changes in their diet to lower insulin they now can finally start relying on their own fat for fuel so it's no surprise that their hunger starts to come down let that be the natural way in which you're controlling your calories don't control your calories because you're forcing yourself to be hungry and

eat less control your calories because you simply aren't hungry so I have to I'll overlay this with my own sort of anecdotal experience so I every year do aeto diet for usually for about 8 weeks this time it's going to go on for a little bit longer um in the reason in part why it's going to go on a little bit longer as I've just learned more about what's going on in my body and also because I podcast now and do a lot of speaking on stage and those kinds of things I see tremendous variance

in my ability for my brain to articulate what I want to say the same way it's like it's absurd yes I I was saying this the other night to the the team that with me here in Los Angeles and I've tried to say it to so many people as someone that can spend nine hours a day trying to think of the next question to ask or trying to remember the research or on stage in front of a thousand people trying to deliver a story or a point I get to see variant which I've never able

to explain yeah um where some days I'll go up on stage I'll be in a podcast and it's like my brain and my mouth aren't connected and then on other days specifically when I started doing ketosis or having a ketogenic diet it just flows yeah it just flows so well and I was saying to my team it feels like I'm looking at the world like this these days like I've got this intense for anyone that can't see me I just stretched my eyes but like I've got this intense focus on the world um the other

thing I've noticed with my diet is I I get hungry but not like I used to get hungry and then very quickly after I start eating I stoph I don't seem to be like doing like these I used to kind of binge a little bit yeah I used to have like a longer eating sessions and my Hunger goes very quickly um I also found that I didn't have these like fluctuating energy levels throughout the day I don't crash anymore I used to get like slumps yeah for sure and I don't slump anymore and then the

other thing which a lot of people care mostly about is the the fats select belly fat I have never seen anything that has stripped belly fat off me faster and I'm talking in a matter of weeks that I could you know count on one hand yeah than doing the ketogenic diet and if I I could literally show a picture of my scales because I have these digital scales on the screen and it's just trundling along and then there's this Cliff Edge where it goes directly down and it and so much so actually that one of

my concerns with a ketogenic diet is how the hell do I keep my muscle oh that's a great question because my girlfriend to her credit when I did ketosis the first time she was like I've never ever seen you look like this when I took my top off but also it was quite clear that my my muscles had got smaller I was lean as but my muscles were small yeah so with with with caution this time I did ketosis again and I've been thinking how the do I keep my muscles yeah yeah okay so first

of all let me just add a hearty amen I'm an advocate of a ketogenic diet although it can be apply differently across different people but I would say anyone would benefit from having some modest period of time of elevated ketones at least in some portion of the day now how do you maintain muscle mass in the midst of such obvious weight loss I can only speculate now there are peer-reviewed studies that I can cite which do support the idea that a human can be on autogenic diet and have a total maintenance of muscle and strength

that is published so we know it's possible although that isn't that doesn't seem to be what happened with you I would suspect that there were two things two things happening possibly now I'm speculating here and I'm pretending to be your coach or your expert here one could have been that you had relatively lower energy during your workouts because of a slight degree of dehydration and then the other one would be calories which I'll come back to in a moment I just wanted to put it out there so when insulin comes down one of the other

one of the many effects in the body body is that another hormone comes down called aldosterone which is one we've never invoked yet but low insulin leads to lower aldosterone when aldosterone comes down the kidneys become much uh begin to eliminate salt and water much more rapidly now that's not problematic but it does mean that a person does have to focus more on hydration and salts so if someone's going on this strategy and they exercise fairly often you need to be much more focused on your hydration literally drinking more because you will be urinating more

which is partly why people's blood pressure gets so good so quickly and just to pause on that point there if if someone is on one or two blood pressure medications and they adopt a ketogenic diet they usually have to stop their medications within two days because their blood pressure goes to normal so quickly that if they stay on the medication they're going too low so one could be that you were actually working out a little less intensely because of the dehydration but then two it's possible that you were eating too few calories to actually maintain

muscle muscle is a hungry organ it is metabolically expensive for the body to keep that muscle on and as you start to get leaner and leaner it gets harder and harder for the body to defend that muscle in fact that's the difference between fasting and starvation the longest known evidence of a fast was a man in the UK K who fasted for 384 days literally not eating or drinking a single calorie he was under medical supervision getting vitamins and minerals and water and he was went to live on went on to live a perfectly healthy

life um so but what was the difference why was that not starvation starvation is when you run out of fat so you might have gotten to the point of so lean that you didn't have enough fat to burn to make enough ketones to fuel the brain if you don't have enough fat to burn to make enough of ketones and the brain is saying all right well I wanted to switch to ketones so that I could spare the glucose but I can't there's not enough ketones here so I have to rely 100% on glucose but if

you're not eating glucose now the body has to start stripping the protein from muscle and it sends those amino acids to the liver then the liver is so capable it will turn those amino acids into glucose so it turns my muscle into glucose to feed the brain so my comment then getting finally getting my answer is in your version of a ketogenic diet with your level of muscle mass and your inherent metabolic rate based on your body size and your activity you probably ought to eat more fat I wasn't actually doing the blood test at

that point I'm doing it this time around but I wasn't doing the blood test so I could actually see my keto levels yeah so maybe I wasn't even in ketosis because I wasn't having enough you might have been but it could have been that you were simply not eating enough calories I have to so this is an instance where that's what I'm trying to do this time I'm trying to every time you're making a steak put butter on there and when you're drinking a cup of coffee as crazy as it sounds I drink yba M

every morning I will put a big dab of butter like a big dab of butter in my tea and I'm sipping on it while the world's still asleep and the kids are haven't woken up yet and so I know because I want to keep my muscle as a guy who's almost 50 um I I find that when during my strict ketogenic phase and I'm currently in it as well every January I go to kind of a carnivore diet to and I mostly do it to one lean down but also to check any addictions and habits

I don't like feeling addicted to things and and my wife will comment and even as an almost 50-year-old it's fun to see my six-pack coming I don't want to lose my mass my muscle mass because you have to work so hard to get it yeah and what I find is if I increase my fat I always get plenty of protein but if I increase my fat content I have an easier time maintaining my bulk are there any downsides of following a ketogenic diet we need to be aware of the only downside I can articulate so

in fact I didn't even finish because I distracted myself mentioning some of the benefits of ketones but ketones are further anti-inflammatory like they directly reduce inflammation in the body by inhibiting inflammatory processes and they also improve antioxidant defenses so it helps reduce oxidative stress so ketones do have benefits that go beyond even what we've taken the time to articulate if there's any negative to a ketogenic diet it could be that you start you acutely or you temporarily become less metabolically flexible now that's me invoking a term we haven't brought up yet but metabolic flexibility is

is a term to refer to the body's ability to when it eats glucose to burn glucose when it's not eating glucose it burns fat so you're shifting between the two metabolic fuels that we outlined earlier when someone has been adhering to a ketogenic diet for some time it's almost as if their body is stuck in fat burning mode and that if you and I being in such adapted ketogenic State as we are if we were to go to lunch and eat two bagels and a sugary drink it would take us a very long time to

clear that glucose from our blood um much longer than otherwise like let's say we go out with the production team they're eating a normal higher carb diet all things equal same body size same activity their glucose levels would come up and down in 90 minutes for perhaps yours in mine may take 180 minutes to come back down so the person may say well gosh Stephen and Ben are no longer burning glucose very well and that's true in that one moment um our bodies had almost forgotten what it was like to burn a bunch of glucose

because we had adapted to fat burning so what about the gut microbiome oh yeah because because I told someone who is a nutritionist that I was doing a keto diet at the moment and they said oh you're poor gut ah yes well what a naive um thing to say if I may gently reprimand your friend there's no evidence to support that there's any harmful change in the microbiome in fact a paper was just published that looked at a man who went from a normal omnivorous human diet with abundant plant matter to a purely carnivorous diet

literally zero carb and they documented precisely no change in his microbiome none whatsoever but is he eating plants no well he had been eating plants so the case study was a person eating a normal diet of of plants and meat a normal omnivore diet and AD and then looked at the microbiome and then adapted to a purely carnivorous diet purely meat and the microbiome didn't change at all what's the time period months I think the problem with the microbiome the reason I don't take microbiome research too seriously as a scientist is that it is a

big black box you you you came from the UK to London uh to to to LA to California if we took a microbiome sample analysis of your time in the UK now it would be different now even though you're eating the same but you're drinking different water you're breathing different air things I was just on a plane from Utah to California give me a day or so I would have some sort of shift in my microbiome so the microbiome can change in response to all kinds of things the idea that you somehow have decimated your

microbiome because you aren't eating is absolutely false that is that is completely false now there might be a change in some of the population of your microbiome more of one less of another but there's no evidence to suggest that's problematic your microbiome is intact those bacteria do not die they're just simply metabolizing other things maybe they're relying more on short chain fatty acids maybe they're relying more on amino acids they're not eating as they're not eating fiber but there's still stuff in the meat or the eggs that the microbiome will eat eat but if if

if eating lots of plants does give me a more diverse gut microbiome then if I stop eating plants I'm going to have a less divers microbiome yeah but but Stephen but even then there's a bit of an assumption built into the question because it's do we know that the microbiome will be less diverse the case study I just mentioned found that in this one single man it didn't change his microbiome at all it was the exact same populations in all the same proportions because isn't the aren't the plants like feeding the bacteria yeah yeah so

the the fiber is so fiber will but again it's not that's not the only thing bacteria can eat bacteria can eat fats bacteria can eat amino acids they can eat glutamine for example they um they can even meat will have a little bit of glucose in it where the muscle has something called glycogen and so there's you know Trace Amounts of glucose and even the meat that you're eating so I do not look at the argu that you know you're destroying your microbiome that has no that has no scientific support you may be changing your

microbiome but who's to say that's a bad change maybe it's a better change you certainly are feeling better you're thinking better you're getting leaner your insulin sensitivity is improved cognition is improved I would argue if there is a change in your microbiome it's probably one that's for the best and no one can prove that wrong as much as I just stated that comment in a speculative fashion it's speculative because there's no evidence this is why I look at the microbiome and just say yeah it appears to matter but in ways that we don't know but

the the you agree with the argument that if I sat here now and I ate a wide range of plants for the next let's say six months when you analyzed my gut microbiome it would be much more diverse I'm not agreeing to that I don't know if that's true um and again I would cite that one case report I just mentioned now which is the a man who did this they reported that the microbiome was identical that there was no significant change that that's just one man though it was one man it was a case

report which is not a randomized clinical study so um but even still I with my speculation um heavily handed here I would say probably more plants would result in a more diverse microbiome but I would say but then the next step is a harder one which is is that good or bad I don't know maybe all you're doing is promoting the growth of bacteria that make more gas because they're fermenting the fiber and you just have more flatulence as a result of it people dietitians will say well a diverse microbiome is a good microbiome well

prove it h how do we know that how can you prove that to me as a basic scientist I want to see the hard evidence because what I can improve is that we can take humans who are overweight and diabetic and hypertensive eating a standard American or Global diet and put them under a ketogenic diet which is going to be a much simpler diet and yet every clinical marker gets better and so if someone were to say yeah but sure you've reversed your diabetes and your hypertension but you're poor microbiome I would say well I

don't care about my microbiome I care about the human and so if there's less diversity but every single clinical marker has gotten better perhaps more diversity is not what we want in our bacteria and I'm speculating but s is the person who states that yes I I'm not aware of um research that links the two um but I I could always have a look but um I would I I was always under the assumption that a more diverse microbiome is a healthier person yeah I don't know yeah but but do you do you feel healthier

now um feel healthier I certainly feel and it's only been a short amount of time so I don't know what what my health might look like if I'd done this for like two years right because then there could be a really sort of deeper change to um I know people done for more than two years and they're they're great because some of the some of the changes that occur in our health take time now you you show this a lot in your work with insulin resistance that if you're insulin resistance for 10 years your brain

I think I read in your work is like it ages it ages by an additional two years is yeah it accelerates the Aging and I wonder the same thing with like my gut microbiome if I'm if my gut microbiome is not diverse so I have a very sort of um narrow diet or you know I'm not getting not eating my plants could it take me a couple of years to really understand the net negative impact that that has on my overall health it it's entirely possible yeah yeah I would just I would just ask that

we be careful with the assumptions that if there is an an increase in diversity with more plant matter that's an if um is that change beneficial are the bacteria that we're now promoting the growth of are they better for us or are they just bacteria that exist in order to handle more fiber and again the outcome being that perhaps it's just making more gas um you know the more plants you eat the more gas you have to produce by fermenting more fiber what if those bacteria are only existing to just eat the fiber and not

actually improve the human host at all so ketosis possible to live in a it's I think one of the important points on ketosis is when I do my blood keto test I fluctuate wildly after I've gone for a run my Ketone levels are super high sometimes later at night I'm just on the verge of ketosis sometimes um and I think that's interesting because we don't have to live in this necessarily deep state of ketosis the whole time we can fluctuate a little bit and maybe my thought on it is that a person would benefit from

some state of ketosis on on a frequent basis if for no other reason than to really give the brain a heavy dose of just straight energy um not that everyone needs to be as strict as perhaps you and I are being at the moment um but I would say the more a person has a disorder or a disease that benefits from ketosis the more than they ought to focus on it like if someone has type two diabetes if they adopt a ketogenic diet they will be off all of their diabetes medications in months all of

them if someone has epilepsy if they or migraine headaches if some of the from 19 13 I think was the first published report on this if there's someone who suffers from migraines as long as they're in ketosis they may never have another migraine again I mean it is completely Curative or preventative for the disorder same with epilepsy that many forms of epilepsy so depending on the person they would benefit from being in ketosis forever for everyone else who's just sort of a normal individual who wants to be lean and keep their brain healthy and happy

Etc I would say it's generally prudent to just control your carbs be mindful of the type of carbohydrate you're eating and as I said earlier just try to focus on the carbs that don't come from bags and boxes with barcodes I'm actually quite liberal in my view when it comes to whole fruits and vegetables I'd say eat them enjoy them liberally but then also make sure you're getting some good protein and fat because there's no such thing as an essential carbohydrate that sounds controversial but humans do not need we have no requirement for carbohydrate we

do have requirement for fat and protein what about artificial sweetness because one of the things that I am tempted by when I'm on a ketosis diet is like the soda zeros of the world or the diet sodas of the world what impact does that have on my insulin levels Etc yeah great question there is such a breath of of diversity when it comes to sweeteners from artificial to natural to another rare sugar more and more you know these all these random I'm not random but a very broad spectrum of molecules that we have developed or

found that taste like sugar but don't have the effect of sugar so on on the good end are things like that have been shown to have no insulin effect and so you know I appreciate everyone listening letting me kind of stay with that as my framework because people are going to go on and criticize all kinds of other things about other sweeteners and that's just too broad that's a topic for a a whole book with regards to just insulin on the good end where they have no effect it would be one as common as aspartame

so like diet drinks not the zero drinks but the diet drinks will have aspartame as the sweetener is it a difference there is a difference and I'll get to that other one in a moment so I should be having diet instead of zero well I personally go to diet rather than zero um but that's because Aspartame is the sole sweetener in the zero in the the diet rather and it has no effect on insulin so to arrol sorry arrol is a little right around Aspartame is generally a good one but monk fruit extract Stevia and

especially allulose those are inert when it comes to insulin you know alose Stevia monk fruit extract um aspartame no effect orthol no effect but arrol that ending o is reflective of a class of sweetener called the sugar Al alcohol and that does not mean it's alcoholic that just refers to the actual chemical structure that puts it in the alcohol family once you get into the sugar alcohols you start to get a little problematic where Athol is a good one en xylitol is generally a good one but then you get to things like malol and manitol

and they do have an insulin effect and what what's what kind of foods have those yeah so often like you can get manatal in like artificially sweetened chocolate sometimes for reasons that I don't I don't know why the food formulator puts them in some things and not other things the the problem I chuckle because it becomes so apparent with some of those artificial sweeteners like the sugar alcohols is that as you eat them you taste it sweet in your mouth and it doesn't have any caloric value in the body because it stays in the intestines

uh and this is something that is largely unique to the sugar alcohols where as it stays in the intestines it starts pulling in water from the body which starts to create a fairly inconvenient degree of flatulence and diarrhea and so a person will know if they've eaten too many of those types of sweeteners because their intestines will tell them so so but also on that Spectrum kind of in the middle is the one that's in the zero drinks which is one called sucralose and while sucrose is generally not a problem with insulin it is a

sweetener that has been shown to cross the bloodb brain barrier and so the reason I avoid the zero drinks and refer or go to the diet drinks is that aspartame does No Such Thing aspartame just gets divided into amino acids we just digest it and absorb amino acids sucralose will go can cross the bloodb brain barrier and I don't know what it's doing there but I don't want it there and so I avoid the zero drinks because I don't want that sweetener but but personally and when I'm adhering to this diet a diet soda is

my actual Indulgence where I want something sweet um and yet I don't want the Metabolic Effect of it this is the most crazy startat you'll ever hear 93.3% of you that watch this channel frequently haven't yet hit the Subscribe button so if you liked this clip and if you like what we do here please can you do me a favor and hit that subscribe button and in return I promise you I will do everything I can from now until forever to make this channel better and better and better thank you