Keto Clarity: Your Definitive Guide to the Benefits of a Low-Carb, High-Fat Diet (26 page)

When people are keto-adapted, they tend to have more beta-hydroxybutyrate in the blood and excrete less acetoacetate in the urine. Over time, as beta-hydroxybutyrate becomes a more important substrate for energy production, the body makes less acetoacetate and more beta-hydroxybutyrate. This is the reason that urinary ketone strips are unreliable when tracking nutritional ketosis.

– Dr. Zeeshan Arain

Once you realize that switching from burning sugar to burning fat means that acetoacetate may no longer show up on these urine ketone testing strips, then you can feel confident that every area of your body, from your brain to your blood, is being nourished by the ketone bodies they prefer as fuel—no matter what the urine test strips show. Keep your carbohydrate and protein intake at your personal tolerance levels and you’ll stay in the glorious state of ketosis where beta-hydroxybutyrate reigns supreme. If you want to know how well you are doing at creating ketones in the blood, you can measure beta-hydroxybutyrate using the blood ketone meters we talked about in chapter 8.

3. Not eating enough saturated and monounsaturated fats

Healthy, natural dietary fat is tremendously beneficial to the immune system, especially in foods like pastured butter, grass-fed cultured ghee, and coconut oil. These, along with certain poultry fats, contain antiviral and antimicrobial substances that can help directly support your immune function. An effective state of ketosis also is profoundly anti-inflammatory, helps to curb free radical activity, and supports antioxidant activity.

– Nora Gedgaudas

In chapter 7, we underlined the critical importance of eating fat, especially saturated and monounsaturated fats. When you reduce your carbohydrate intake, the macronutrient that needs to go up in response is fat. One of the lingering arguments made by the low-fat propaganda machine that’s been working for over three decades is the idea that dietary fat is harmful, that it will clog your arteries and make you fat. We believe these things because we’ve had them hammered into our heads again and again as the gospel truth for most of our lives. And if a lie is repeated often enough, people will begin to believe it. That’s exactly what has happened with the vilification of dietary fat, most notably saturated fat.

I find it astounding that many of my immediate physician and cardiologist colleagues cling to the outdated belief that total and/or saturated fat intake are somehow related to heart disease risk. Reassessment of the data used to justify such arguments, as well as more recent clinical studies, demonstrates that total and saturated fat intake have nothing to do with heart-disease risk.

– Dr. William Davis

So it’s probably not a huge surprise that many people who begin a low-carb diet simultaneously cut their fat intake as well. They erroneously think that if low-carb is good, then low-fat
and
low-carb must be better. That’s a fatal error if your goal is to get into a state of nutritional ketosis and experience all the benefits it has to offer you. In fact, eating more fat is one of the best ways to stave off the hunger and cravings, especially for carbohydrates, that come when you begin a low-carb diet.

Even if you think you’re already eating a pretty good amount of quality, whole-food sources of fat, you may need to ramp it up a bit more. Before my yearlong nutritional ketosis experiment, my diet was probably around 60 to 65 percent fat. By any definition, that’s a high-fat diet. As it turned out, though, I needed to bump that up even more, until 80 to 85 percent of my calories came from dietary fat. Combined with keeping my carbs to my personal tolerance and protein to my individual threshold, this got my body to begin creating ketones at the right levels for weight and health benefits.

On a low-carb, high-fat, ketogenic diet, the presence of ketones in the body signals the metabolism of fatty acids as an energy source, either directly or indirectly, via the production and burning of ketones as fuel. This to me is essential for the best health you could possibly have.

– Dr. Ron Rosedale

We share recipes and a meal plan in chapters 20 and 21 to show you what a high-fat diet like this looks like, but overall it’s pretty simple: consume more butter, coconut oil, sour cream, cream cheese, full-fat meats, full-fat cheese, avocados, full-fat Greek yogurt, and more! Get creative, and don’t fear the fat. While you may not need to get 80 to 85 percent of your calories from fat, as I do, you’d be surprised how adding just a bit more fat to your diet can make all the difference in reaching therapeutic levels of nutritional ketosis, gaining the amazing health benefits that come with it, and shedding pounds.

DOCTOR’S NOTE FROM DR. ERIC WESTMAN: Low-carb, low-fat diets (like
the South Beach Diet
, for example) were a marketing maneuver to combine the low-carb diet with the low-fat diet—but it doesn’t make physiological sense. The time-honored low-carb, ketogenic diet, like the one used by Dr. Atkins in his clinic for thirty-five years, was always a low-carb diet that was simultaneously high in fat.

4. Eating too often or too much

The biggest nutritional lie I see is that you need to eat six to seven meals a day for optimal strength and fat-burning. This pattern of eating is time-consuming, impractical, and not supported by the science. Personally, I have been able to maintain the same level of mental energy, physical energy, and strength after reducing my meal frequency from six to seven meals a day to two meals a day. Eating less often by eating satiating, ketogenic meals is liberating because it reduces preoccupation with food, preparation, cleaning up, carrying food around, and stressing out in situations where you can’t eat every two to three hours. Shifting the macronutrient ratio of your diet to less carbohydrate and much more fat has a profound satiating and protein-sparing effect.

– Dr. Dominic D’Agostino

While calories are certainly a controversial subject when it comes to the ketogenic diet, it could be argued that being aware of how much and how often you are eating can make a difference when you are trying to get into ketosis. So do calories count?

Well, yes and no. Yes, it is indeed possible to eat beyond satiety and consume more food than you really need. When this happens, more than likely you are pushing your carbohydrate and protein intake well beyond the point where your body can use them properly, stoking hunger and cravings and making you unable to feel satisfied with the proper amount of food. We keep coming back to the idea of keeping carbohydrates and protein at the point of your personal tolerance and individual threshold because this is what will make you most successful on your ketogenic journey.

As I learned when I experimented with nutritional ketosis, some truly remarkable things begin to happen to your body once you become keto-adapted: hunger is completely zapped, you may forget to eat, and you feel energized and alert while going many hours between meals. Your body is quite literally “eating” stored body fat all day long while your brain is being fueled efficiently by the ketone bodies you are producing. So while we have become conditioned to think that we must eat at specified times throughout the day, maybe we don’t.

We tend to underestimate portion sizes, and often there are “hidden carbs” in meals eaten outside the home. In some people, consuming too much protein can prevent ketosis as well, although this is highly individualized. Measuring foods accurately and tracking your macronutrient and ketone levels for a few days can give you great information to use in formulating your diet to include the right amount of carbohydrates and protein for your own specific needs.

– Franziska Spritzler

There’s this idea promoted by our culture that we need to be eating in a pattern that goes something like this: breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, snack, midnight snack. Can I just tell you how utterly ridiculous and unnecessary this is when you are no longer addicted to carbohydrates? Was the Eleventh Commandment God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai, “Thou shalt eat at least three times a day?” You’d think it was, considering how many people believe there is such a thing as mealtimes.

When you start to burn fat for fuel and produce ketones, it’s very possible to feel completely satisfied and energized on one, maybe two meals a day. Some people may argue that this promotes an eating disorder or some such nonsense. But why should you eat more food than you need or eat when you’re not hungry and your body is doing perfectly well using ketones as an alternative fuel source? There’s no need to eat between meals when you’re in ketosis; just eat to satiety at each meal and don’t eat again until you’re hungry.

[In the Atkins Clinic,] the only caution we gave patients about eating low-carb, high-fat was to eat until they were satisfied, not stuffed.