Keto Clarity: Your Definitive Guide to the Benefits of a Low-Carb, High-Fat Diet (13 page)

Most of my clients are just amazed at how great they feel. And unlike with other diets, you aren’t starving all day long and battling cravings. You get to eat tasty, full-fat foods and don’t get any cravings. There is a sense of freedom for most people since they no longer think about food all day, as they used to on low-fat diets.

– Maria Emmerich

It wasn’t until Dr. Wolver hit middle age herself that she realized why her patients were so unsuccessful on the low-fat diet. She suddenly found, she said, that “my own advice didn’t even work for me!”

“Despite my adherence to a low-fat diet and exercise, every time I got on the scale I weighed more,” Dr. Wolver explained. “That’s when I first started thinking the advice I had been giving might actually be wrong.”

She attempted to cut calories and reduce her fat intake, but it just didn’t work. In fact, Dr. Wolver even decided to go on a low-carb diet, but she combined that with a low-fat diet, with predictable results. “I was hungry all of the time,” she recalled. “That was no good because I couldn’t stick with it.”

Counting calories is likely not very helpful for most people. On a ketogenic diet you will be less hungry and your improved brain function will guide you in the amount of food you should be eating. Isn’t it marvelous to have your brain back?

– Dr. Bill Wilson

But Dr. Wolver had an epiphany when she heard physician and researcher Dr. William S. Yancy, Jr., give a talk entitled “Taking the Fat Out of the Fire,” in which he discussed the health benefits of a low-carb, high-fat, ketogenic approach to nutrition. She “was hooked.” Dr. Wolver immediately began putting herself into a state of ketosis and the weight poured off and stayed off, and all without the intense hunger she had previously experienced. These days, she uses herself as a prime example for her patients of how ketogenic diets can help them with their weight and health issues.

“I now teach this to my patients and have had overwhelming success ‘reversing’ many of the conditions I spent years simply managing before,” Dr. Wolver said. “I have taken patients off their insulin, blood pressure medications, and CPAP machines while watching their cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood sugar numbers improve.”

I have seen mood stabilization, reduced or eliminated depression, reduced or eliminated anxiety, improved cognitive functioning, greatly enhanced and evened-out energy levels, cessation of seizures, improved overall neurological stability, cessation of migraines, improved sleep, improvement in autistic symptoms, improvements with PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome), improved gastrointestinal functioning, healthy weight loss, cancer remissions and tumor shrinkage, much better management of underlying previous health issues, improved symptoms and quality of life in those struggling with various forms of autoimmunity (including many with type 1 and 1.5 diabetes), fewer colds and flus, total reversal of chronic fatigue, improved memory, sharpened cognitive functioning, and significantly stabilized temperament. And there is quality evidence to support the beneficial impact of a fat-based ketogenic approach in all these types of issues.

– Nora Gedgaudas

Dr. Wolver says these kind of results make using a ketogenic therapeutic approach worth it despite the general negativity about low-carb, high-fat diets.

“This is the most fun I have had in my career practicing medicine,” she shared. “I just wish it hadn’t taken me twenty-five years to figure this out.”

The same could be said about Dr. Lowell Gerber, a cardiologist from Freeport, Maine, who went through a similar epiphany about nutrition in his own life that has revolutionized the way he looks at his patients.

When Dr. Gerber himself began packing on the pounds, he realized, just as Dr. Wolver did, that he was wrong when he pushed a low-fat diet on his patients all those years and then accused them of lying about following it because they were gaining weight and seeing worse cardiac risk factors. Dr. Gerber is now ashamed of the arrogance he displayed in shaming his patients.

“It was an unnerving realization that my patients were not ignoring my advice,” he admitted. “When I [tried a low-fat diet] myself, the truth was facing me. The low-fat diet just did not work for them, or for me.”

[In Dr. Atkins’ clinic, we] made it clear to our patients that this was not a low-fat diet. Natural fats were an important part of the plan.

– Jackie Eberstein

This sent Dr. Gerber on a personal investigation into what went wrong. He started looking at all the evidence for a low-carb, high-fat, ketogenic diet and began implementing it into his own lifestyle in 2009. After seeing its positive effects on his own weight and health and that of members of his family who became keto-adapted, Dr. Gerber started recommending it to his patients with obesity, pre-diabetes, type 1 and type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, abnormal cholesterol readings, polycystic ovary syndrome, and metabolic syndrome.

Even among those who are open-minded or even enthusiastic about ketosis, Dr. Gerber explains, ketones are usually seen only as an alternative fuel source when glucose availability is limited—most do not understand their broader therapeutic role. But the health benefits ketones provide is something that Dr. Gerber has seen many times in his patients.

“Ketones upregulate the NRf2 pathway, which modulates many genes involved with inflammation and cell function,” he noted. “For example, the genes regulating pro-inflammatory cytokines are downregulated, resulting in less [inflammation], and the gene regulating IL-10, an anti-inflammatory cytokine, is upregulated.”

What this means is that eating a ketogenic diet lowers inflammation naturally, without the use of prescription medications such as statins. It’s this inflammation that is the true culprit in heart disease, and the fact that ketosis reduces systemic inflammation is further evidence supporting the use of a low-carb, high-fat diet for improving heart health.

Ketosis reduces systemic inflammation as long as blood glucose is also lowered. Having higher levels of ketones with simultaneously higher levels of blood glucose would be unhealthy. Most of the side effects encountered on a ketogenic diet occur when blood glucose levels remain elevated. Indeed, insulin insensitivity, elevated blood glucose, and dyslipidemia will result from excessive consumption of the ketogenic diet.

– Dr. Thomas Seyfried

Dr. Gerber connected the dots when he began digging deeper into the role of ketosis. “So [a] low-carbohydrate, high-fat, ketogenic diet may have multiple beneficial effects, in addition to its role as an alternative fuel source, preferred by the heart, muscle, and brain,” he concluded.

In fact, rather than immediately putting his cardiac patients with high cholesterol—including patients with the genetic form of heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia (which simply means a predisposition for high cholesterol passed on by one parent)—on a statin drug, he instead prescribes a ketogenic diet to “stabilize and perhaps reverse existing plaque” in their arteries. He monitors this through regular checkups on their blood markers and CT scans of the heart. Dr. Gerber is “eliminating the need for statins” in even his most high-risk patients because of the anti-inflammatory effect of ketosis.

“The toxicity of statins, including myopathy, cognitive decline, sexual dysfunction, cataracts, skin cancer, and diabetes, are all avoided while improving the patient outcome,” he reported. “The low-carbohydrate, high-fat, ketogenic diet is the foundation of it all.”

It is not ketones that I generally follow when patients are on my diet. I prefer to follow those markers that also change during calorie restriction, even though my diet doesn’t restrict calories. I wrote a paper that showed that patients on my low-carb, high-fat diet had changes in laboratory parameters that almost exactly simulated the changes seen in calorie restriction. These markers essentially indicate both a high affinity and ability to burn fatty acids and ketones, not glucose, as one’s primary fuel. These markers include significant reductions in blood serum insulin, leptin, triglycerides, and free T3 from initial baseline. One would also see an increase in the size of LDL particles. However, historically, I’ve done this mostly to appease a person’s cardiologist and keep them off of cholesterol-lowering drugs.