#how does acetyl coa enter mitochondria

[justkidneying]

Arsenic poisoning is fun (not really) and the mechanism of how it kills you is cool (really).

There are two forms of arsenic: arsenite and arsenate. You can see the difference in the chemical structure below.

These two compounds do different things to your body, but they both kill you. I'll tell you how.

We'll look at arsenate first. Look how pretty it is. It looks almost like phosphate (PO4). The molecules in your body think it looks exactly like phosphate, so it is incorporated in a key reaction.

Glycolysis is the breakdown of glucose into a lot of shit, but the most important one is pyruvate. This is converted to acetyl-coA, which enters the citric acid cycle to become ATP (energy). One of the reactions in glycolysis turns glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate into 1,3-bisphosphoglycerate. The "bis" means it has two phosphates. But what's that? Arsenate looks the same as phosphate? Well, we'll just stick one of those onto G-3-P instead. This makes 1-arseno-3-phosphoglycerate, which is worthless. You can't use this to continue glycolysis. Looks like you won't be making any ATP...

You have other ways to make ATP, but not in red blood cells, you don't (they have no mitochondria). So guess what? THEY DIE! No RBCs = no oxygen to your tissues. So guess what? YOU DIE!

*extra note: you also can't use 1,3-bPG to make 2,3-bPG, which decreases the affinity of hemoglobin for oxygen. This means the oxygen won't leve Hb and go into your tissues, leading to cyanoisis.

What about arsenite? It inhibits pyruvate dehydrogenase. What does that do? It converts pyruvate to acetyl-coA. So, if you can't convert pyruvate to something useful, then this other enzyme (lactate dehydrogenase) comes along and converts it to lactate. This will also give you a little piss-poor amount of ATP through the conversion of NAD+ to NADH. The thing that makes this suck is that lactate is bad. It causes lactic acidosis. You die from lactic acidosis.

So anyways, now you know how arsenic (in the form of arsenate and arsenite) kills you. Not fun, but very cool.

[siva3155]

300+ TOP TCA CYCLE Objective Questions and Answers

TCA CYCLE Multiple Choice Questions :-

1. How many molecules of ATPs are synthesized per NADH oxidation? A. 1 B. 2 C. 3 D. 4 Answer: C 2. Why is the TCA cycle the central pathway of metabolism of the cell? A. It occurs in the center of the cell B. Its intermediates are commonly used by other metabolic reactions C. All other metabolic pathways depend upon it D. None of the above Answer: B 3. In what form does the product of glycolysis enter the TCA cycle? A. AcetylCoA B. Pyruvate C. NADH D. Glucose Answer: A 4. Malate-asparatate shuttle operates in A. lungs and liver B. heart and liver C. pancreas and liver D. none of these Answer: B 5. Oxidation of a molecule involves A. gain of electron B. loss of electron C. gain of proton D. loss of proton Answer: B 6. During cellular respiration, most of the ATP made, is generated by A. oxidative phosphorylation B. photophosphorylation C. glycolysis D. substrate-level phosphorylation Answer: A 7. Important function of cholesterol is to A. modulate fluidity B. enhance blood circulation C. prevent bile salts formation D. None of these Answer: B 8. To stop ATP synthesis which chemical is generally used? A. DNSA B. 2,4 dinitrophenol C. DDT D. None of the chemical can stop ATP synthesis Answer: B 9. The enzymes of the TCA cycle in a eukaryotic cell are located in the A. nucleus B. mitochondria C. plasma membrane D. lysosomal bodies Answer: B 10. Citric acid cycle occurs in A. cytoplasm B. mitochondria C. endoplasmic reticulum D. golgi bodies Answer: B

TCA CYCLE MCQs TCA CYCLE Objective type Questions with Answers 11. Most multi-cellular organisms obtain energy for the synthesis of ATP during oxidative phosphorylation from A. high energy phosphate compounds B. a proton gradient across the inner mitochondrial membrane C. a proton gradient across the cell membrane D. a proton gradient across the outer mitochondrial membrane Answer: B 12. Standard redox potential for a substance is measured under standard condition and is expressed as A. mili-Ampere B. Volt C. without unit D. Ohm Answer: B 13. Most of the enzymes of the citric acid cycle in a eukaryotic cell are located in the A. inner mitochondrial membrane B. cytosol C. mitochondrial matrix D. intermembrane space Answer: C 14. A positive redox potential means substance has A. lower affinity for electron B. higher affinity for electron C. lower affinity for proton D. higher affinity for proton Answer: B 15. The end product of glycolysis is pyruvate, which enters the citric acid cycle after being converted to A. acetic acid B. acetyl-CoA C. acetaldehyde D. none of these Answer: B 16. Energy that is released from glucose during respiration but not transferred to ATP bonds can be detected as A. CO2 B. AMP C. ADP D. heat Answer: D 17. Which of the following is involved in energy production? A. Generation of proton gradients across membranes B. Transport of electrons on organic molecules C. Conversion of compounds with high energy to those of low energy D. All of the above Answer: D 18. Which of the following enzyme does not take part in the TCA cycle? A. Citrate synthase B. Iso-citrate dehydrogenase C. Pyruvate dehydrogenase D. Malate dehydrogenase Answer: C 19. The first intermediate in TCA cycle is A. succinate B. fumerate C. citrate D. malate Answer: C 20. Cholesterol can be synthesized de novo in A. pancreas B. intestine C. liver D. cell membrane Answer: C 21. Which one of the following is not the intermediate of Kreb's cycle? A. Isocitrate B. Succinate C. Fumarate D. Stearate Answer: D 22. Which one is not the main protein in electron transport chain? A. NADH dehydrogenase B. Cytochrome bc1 complex C. Cytochrome oxidase D. Citrate synthease Answer: D 23. How many ATPs are produced during citric acid cycle? A. 10 B. 13 C. 12 D. 8 Answer: C 24. The FADH2 and NADH produced by the oxidation of one acetyl-CoA results in the synthesis of about- A. 3 ATPs B. 6 ATPs C. 11 ATPs D. 15 ATPs Answer: C 25. In eukaryotes, electron transport occurs in A. membranes and mitochondria B. endoplasmic reticulum C. cytoplasm D. all of the above Answer: A 26. The catabolism of sugars and fatty acids is similar because A. both of these compounds are funnelled through the TC A/citric acid cycle B. both of these compounds generate redox energy during catabolism C. both of these compounds generate chemical energy during catabolism D. all of the above Answer: A TCA CYCLE Questions and Answers pdf Download Read the full article

[imnoexpertblog]

Keto - Pt. 1

I have people asking me about Keto all the time. There is a lot to research and learn, I’m not going to lie. Because this is so research-heavy and something that is such a large life choice, I don't feel that I can paraphrase or play any of this down. So. In order to make sure I’m giving you 100% correct info, I will be telling you exactly what is on PerfectKeto.com. I would HIGHLY recommend this website to you if you are looking to go Keto but need to know more about it. I’m going to credit this entire blog post to Perfect Keto, honestly. I will give my personal experiences and opinion, though. This is going to be really in-depth, so get ready for some straight-up Keto knowledge. It’s a lot to take in, so skim if you like. There will be different parts to this blog for organization purposes. (All of the quoted material can be found at PerfectKeto.com but I am putting into three condensed blogs for you guys since I am asked about it so often).

**** First. What is KETO? ****

It’s short for Ketosis. What is KETOSIS? “Ketosis is the metabolic process of using fat as the primary source of energy instead of carbohydrates. This means your body is directly breaking down its fat stores as energy instead of slowly converting fat and muscle cells into glucose for energy. You enter ketosis when your body doesn’t have enough glucose (carbohydrates) available. The prime function of the ketogenic diet is to put the body in ketosis. Ketones are byproducts of the body breaking down fat for energy that occurs when carbohydrate intake is low.”

**** So, how does Ketosis even work? ****

“Step 1) Cutting Off Carbs When there isn’t a sufficient level of available glucose and glycogen levels are depleted, blood sugar and insulin levels decrease, and the body looks for an alternative source of fuel (fat). Step 2) Breaking Down Fats The body breaks down fats for energy. This process is known as beta-oxidation, where there is an increase in acetyl-CoA, which turns into acetoacetate. Acetoacetate then shifts to beta-hydroxybutyrate, the ketone body that floats around in your blood to then provide energy to the body and brain. Step 3) Using Ketosis Many people use ketosis for benefits like:     - Weightloss: When your body is using fat directly as a source of energy, you lose weight more readily because your body taps into your own fat stores for energy instead of the sugar you eat.     - Improved energy levels: Without surges of glucose, your body has more consistent energy levels because you can use your own body fat for energy (no sugar crashes or food comas).     - Increased mental focus: Fat is a more consistent source of energy, and preferred by the brain, meaning you don’t have ups and downs in energy and focus.     - Longevity and disease prevention: Ketosis has been shown to decrease inflammation, Alzheimers, and benefit cancer patients and diabetics.     - Increased physical performance: Ketosis uses oxygen more efficiently and avoids physical crashes of low blood sugar.”

Back up. Ketones? What? There are three types of ketones. “Acetoacetate (AcAc) – the first ketone created from breaking down fat. This then leads to the formation of Beta-hydroxybutyrate. Acetone is created spontaneously as a side product of acetoacetate via decarboxylation. Beta-Hydroxybutyrate (BHB) – Formed from the acetoacetate. Acetone – Created simultaneously as a side product of the acetoacetate.”

Why do our bodies use ketones? “Humans have always relied on ketones for energy when glucose sources were scarce (i.e. no fruits available during winter). It is a normal state of metabolism. In fact, most babies are born in a state of ketosis. However, with abundant sources of carbohydrate, people rarely access ketosis and it becomes a dormant metabolic pathway. Our ancestors likely had frequent periods of time when high carbohydrate food wasn’t immediately available. For this reason, our bodies are amazing at adapting to burning of ketones for fuel.”

**** Ketosis Benefits! ****

“Optimal nutrition is different for everyone, there is no “one-size-fits-all solution.” That being said, a whole-food based ketogenic diet provides most people benefits including: Decreased body fat Improved insulin sensitivity Improved memory and mental focus Physical Performance”

Breaking that down even further;

Weight Loss Benefits of Ketosis are… “Increased Fat Oxidation: In ketosis, your body burns dietary fat and your own body fat as its primary source of fuel. Hormone Regulation: Ketosis can help sustain weight loss by regulating hormones that affect weight. That means eating a ketogenic diet can help you avoid cravings for unhealthy foods, reducing the chance of gaining the weight back. Appetite Suppression: Feeling full, even on a weight loss diet means you can better listen to your body’s true hunger signals. Blood Sugar Regulation: Weight loss diets that include high carbohydrates can create blood sugar spikes that leave you feeling hungry again soon after eating—as well as tired and unfocused.”

Exercise Benefits of Ketosis are… “Preventing crashing when doing prolonged exercise Maintaining blood glucose Adapting the body to burning more fat, which helps the body preserve glycogen in the muscles Improving the function of mitochondria, enzymes, and fat usage to improve overall health and physical performance long-term. Using oxygen more efficiently, leading to better performance for endurance athletes.”

Mental Focus Benefits of Ketosis are… “An unbalanced diet can lead to lack of mental clarity, showing up as foggy brain, having a hard time remembering important facts, or struggling to stay focused on tasks. Ketones improve the efficiency and energy levels of the mitochondria, which produce energy for cells of the body and brain. Eating healthy fats is essential. Every single cell in our body needs fat to function, especially our brain cells. The brain is the fattiest organ, comprised of over 60% fat and prefers fat for fuel.”

Now that you have a little bit more of an idea about this so far, let’s dive into what the Keto diet is.

**** The Keto Diet ****

“The ketogenic diet is an approach to eating that is high fat (70-80%), moderate protein (20-25%) and low carb (5-10%). This is designed to induce the body into ketosis. The quality and types of foods are vitally important for crafting a nourishing ketogenic diet.”

“Carbohydrate Intake For most people, a range of 20-50 grams of carbohydrate intake per day is ideal for the keto diet. To get a visual understanding, see our post, What Does 30g of Carbs Look Like? Protein Intake Protein should be kept to adequate proportions. Eating too much protein is undesirable because our bodies have a metabolic process named gluconeogenesis. The way to figure out adequate protein levels is by using the Perfect Keto Macro Calculator. Fat Intake The remaining 70-75% of your calories come from fats. Since fat is the main source of nutrition on a ketogenic diet, it’s important to source high-quality, healthy fats."

"Optimal nutrition is intensely individual, it is not a one-size-fits-all prescription. Therefore, each persons macronutrient distribution will vary.”

There are different variations to Keto: "The Standard Ketogenic Diet(SDK) – Keto with the classic macronutrient splits. The Targeted Ketogenic Diet(TKD)  – Add carbs around exercise The Cyclical Ketogenic Diet(CKD) – Go in and out of ketosis in planned intervals The High-Protein Ketogenic Diet – Eat more protein than on the standard keto diet."

How do you know what amounts to eat of each thing? Use the calculator to see exact amount of carbs, fat, and protein you need to reach your goal weight through the ketogenic diet, whether you want to lose, gain, or maintain your weight.”

Now if you’re doing this, you have to test your ketones. “Testing your ketone levels is imperative in order to know if keto is working for you. Eating “keto” foods doesn’t automatically mean you are in ketosis. Ketosis is that it’s not just an idea, it is a measurable state of metabolism. Luckily this means we can test if our diet is adequately “ketogenic” to allow our bodies to enter ketosis. Excess carbs or protein can prevent ketosis. It’s a high fat diet, not just low carb.” There are 3 methods for measuring ketone levels, but I recommend urine testing. Especially if you’re just beginning. “Urine Testing – When ketone levels in your body increase past a useful point, they get excreted through urine. You can easily measure excess amounts of ketones with a urine strip. It’s easy to test at home, but not completely reliable. Blood Testing – You prick a finger and squeeze a drop of blood onto a test stick to test the amount of the ketone called Beta-Hydroxybutyrate in your blood. This is the most accurate method for testing your body’s ketone levels, but the most expensive. Breath Testing – You can measure the amount of acetone in your breath using a breath meter. This is the least reliable method of testing for ketosis.”

**** Safety is something to be aware of on this diet. ****

"Ketosis is a perfectly safe and natural metabolic state, but it is often confused with another, and highly dangerous, metabolic state called Ketoacidosis."

Ketosis vs Ketoacidosis "Ketosis: The metabolic state when fat is the primary energy source instead of carbohydrates. Ketosis is a perfectly normal state of human metabolism. Without ketosis, all humans would have died many thousands of years ago in times of carbohydrate shortages, such as winter and drought. Diabetic Ketoacidosis (DKA): A dangerous metabolic state that is most commonly seen in people with type 1 diabetes and sometimes type 2 diabetics if they aren’t properly managing their insulin and diet. The condition can be deadly if untreated."

Other Side Effects of Ketosis "Dehydration: Transitioning to ketosis is frequently a dehydrating process. This is because: -Glycogen and carbs are stored in the body with water. It takes 4 grams of water to store a gram of glycogen. As you deplete glycogen, you will lose water. -High insulin levels cause water retention by inhibiting sodium excretion. The ketogenic diet lowers insulin levels, allowing excess fluid to be released."

"Other temporary symptoms are byproducts of dehydration and low carbohydrate levels while your body is still trying to use carbohydrates as its primary energy source, including: Headaches Lethargy Nausea Brain fog Stomach pain Low motivation"

These symptoms often pass once the body has switched into ketosis. I had Keto-Flu for a few days the first time I went into Ketosis. It definitely passed, though.

**** Remedies to Ketosis Side Effects ****

Drinking lots of water to counteract dehydration Adding salt and electrolytes Time. Often your body just needs to get used to low carbohydrate levels and switch into ketosis. Eating more fat. Higher proportions of fat in your diet will help getting into ketosis. Taking exogenous ketones (you can find them and what they are on the website). Taking supplements containing ketones helps boost your body into ketosis much faster.

Man. That was a bunch of stuff, wasn't it? Every part of this is important though, or I wouldn't include it. Part 2 will consist of a lot more specifics on the diet. 

[fishermariawo]

The Definitive Guide to Keto

I use my Los Angeles surroundings as a barometer for changes in the mainstream approach to health, and it holds up quite well. Silicon Valley can claim to be the cradle of technology, but L.A. is definitely the cradle of diet and fitness trends; and the latest is most definitely keto. At the local cafe where every species of Malibu fitness enthusiast gathers to gossip and fuel up, I’m seeing fewer gels and energy bars, and way more butter coffees and discarded packets of the new powdered ketone supplement products.

Sure enough, keto is entering into mainstream health consciousness everywhere. Google searches for “ketogenic diet” are at an all-time high. The stream of keto-related email queries and comments I receive has seen a major uptick. And early this year, a major publisher approached me with a keto book proposal, which I accepted. I dove headlong into a total immersion/participatory journalism experience where I walked my talk, and pricked my finger for blood tests enough times to get a little scar tissue going, for the past several months. The book is called The Keto Reset Diet and it’s coming out October 3rd. This is a comprehensive presentation to educate you on the science and benefits of ketone burning and to give you step-by-step guidance to go keto the right away, avoiding the common setbacks that happen when many adopt an ill-advised approach to something as delicate and rigorous as nutritional ketosis. You can pre-order a copy from major retailers right now. We are also filming a comprehensive online multimedia educational course to give you a guided immersion experience that will be available in 2018.

Meanwhile, it’s definitely time to do a Definitive Guide….

To understand ketogenic diets, you must understand the conditions that promote ketosis. And to do that, you must understand how our bodies beta-oxidize fatty acids for energy.

Fatty acids are broken down into acetyl-CoA.

Acetyl-CoA combines with oxaloacetate.

The acetyl-CoA/oxaloacetate duo starts the Krebs cycle.

The Krebs cycle produces ATP, the body’s energy currency.

Congratulations. You’ve just turned fat into energy.

Where does ketosis come in?

If the supply of acetyl-CoA exceeds the supply of oxaloacetate, the liver converts any excess acetyl-CoA into ketone bodies. These ketone bodies are an “alternative” energy source for the brain and body. 

Both carbohydrates and protein provide oxaloacetate to the liver, so both carbohydrates and protein can prevent ketone production or knock you out of ketosis. Carbohydrates also elevate insulin, which blocks the release of body fat and reduces the amount of fatty acids making their way to the liver for conversion into ketones. A ketogenic diet, then, is one that limits carbohydrate and, to a lesser extent, protein.

Ketosis occurs in certain instances without any dietary change at all:

Extreme physical exertion that depletes liver glycogen (total around 100 grams) and depletes around half of stored muscle glycogen (total around 400-500 grams)

Fasting for significant time period (at least 24 hours for most people)

Starvation or significant restriction in total calories for a signification time period

In all of these conditions, there’s a common ketogenic thread: liberation of body fat in excess of that which we can beta-oxidize. Any fat that isn’t beta-oxidized for energy will convert to ketones.

In one sense, ketosis is a stop-gap solution for situations where you’re burning huge amounts of body fat, like during a famine. Why would I want to mimic abject starvation if there’s all this food around?

Grocery stores are an evolutionary aberration. The constant drip of glucose into our blood is a modern luxury. For most of human history, if we wanted carbs, we had to climb a tree and extricate a bee’s nest, spend hours digging tubers, or wait around for the wild fruit to ripen. We are adapted to periods of low food availability, and, especially, low glucose availability.

Plus, humans are remarkably good at slipping into ketosis. Whereas for most other animals ketosis is difficult to achieve, a human will be mildly ketotic just waking up from a full night’s sleep. Heck, breastfed babies spend much of their time in ketosis despite drinking nutritionally balanced breastmilk. We’re clearly meant to produce and utilize ketones from time to time, and it’s safe to assume that mimicking this ancestral milieu provides adaptive benefits.

Let’s go over some of the major ones.

Adaptive Benefits of Ketosis Treatment for Major Disease States

The ketogenic diet first emerged as a tool for clinicians to treat their patients with epilepsy. It was—and remains—the only thing with the consistent ability to prevent seizures. Whether it’s Thai kids with intractable epilepsy, Scandinavian kids with therapy-resistant epilepsy, or adults with refractory epilepsy, ketogenic diets just work.

Ketosis improves epilepsy via several mechanisms.

It increases conversion of glutamate into glutamine into GABA, reducing neuronal excitability.

It increases antioxidant status in the neuronal mitochondria, improving their function.

It reduces free radical formation in neurons, a likely cause of seizures.

These effects on neuronal function and health, along with the ability of aging or degenerating brains to accept and utilize ketone bodies, also have implications for other brain conditions, like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, bipolar disorder, and many psychiatric disorders.

Ketogenic diets aren’t just beneficial for brain disorders, though.

A Spanish ketogenic diet (keto with wine, basically) cured people of the metabolic syndrome and improved health markers of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Over 92% of subjects improved their liver health; 21% resolved it entirely.

In cancer patients, a keto diet preserves lean mass and causes fat loss. Many researchers are exploring the use of ketogenic diets in preventing and treating cancer, although results are very preliminary.

Cognitive Function

Since ketosis can help with major brain disorders, many have wondered whether it can improve cognitive function in otherwise healthy people. Unfortunately, researchers haven’t studied the nootropic effects of ketogenic diets in healthy people—yet. They have looked at people with “milder” cognitive deficits, though, finding some promising effects.

In mild cognitive decline, a ketogenic diet improves memory.

In type 1 diabetics who experience reduced cognitive function when their blood sugar is low, increasing ketone production via medium chain triglycerides (found in coconut oil) restores it.

In adults with bad memory, adding ketones improves cognition. The higher the serum ketones, the better the scores.

In older adults, a very low-carb diet improves memory. Again, higher ketones predicts bigger improvements.

Anecdotes abound of people with intact cognitive function going on ketogenic diets and experiencing huge benefits to their mental performance. I’ve been experimenting with more protracted ketosis for some time now, and I can add my hat to the pile. What could be going on?

It may clear up brain fog, that enemy of clear thinking, by clearing ammonia from the brain and upregulating conversion of glutamate into GABA.

It definitely increases brain energy production by increasing mitochondrial biogenesis in the brain. More mitochondria, more energy production.

It tends to produce a sense of euphoria. If you can parlay that into productivity instead of getting caught up in the sensation, your mental output will increase. A cup of strong coffee helps here.

Physical Performance

Being keto-adapted has several advantages for anyone interested in physical performance.

It increases energy efficiency. At any given intensity, a keto-adapted athlete burns more fat and less glycogen than a sugar-burning athlete. Long-term elite keto athletes can burn up to 2.3 times more fat at peak oxidation and 59% more fat overall than non-keto athletes, and they do it at higher intensities. They remain in the predominantly fat-burning zone at 70% of VO2max, whereas non-keto athletes switch over from predominantly fat burning to a spike in sugar-burning at 54.9% VO2max.

It spares glycogen. Glycogen is high-octane fuel for intense efforts. We store it in the muscles and liver, but only about 2400 calories-worth—enough for a couple hours of intense activity at most. Once it’s gone, we have to carb up to replenish it. Keto-adaptation allows us to do more work using fat and ketones for fuel, thereby saving glycogen for when we really need it. Since even the leanest among us carry tens of thousands of calories of body fat, our energy stores become virtually limitless on a ketogenic diet.

It builds mitochondria. Mitochondria are the power plants of our cells, transforming incoming nutrients into ATP. The more mitochondria we have, the more energy we can utilize and extract from the food we eat—and the more performance we can wring out of our bodies. Ketosis places new demands on our mitochondria, who adapt to the new energy environment by increasing in number.

Fat Loss

Although keto is not a classical weight loss diet, it can certainly help a person lose body fat. After all, to generate ketones without eating ketogenic precursors, you have to liberate stored body fat.

But that’s not the main mechanism for ketogenic fat loss. Ketosis isn’t “magic”—it doesn’t melt body fat away. Instead, it works for many of the same reasons a standard low-carb Primal way of eating works: by reducing insulin, increasing mobilization of stored body fat, and decreasing appetite.

Ketosis suppressing appetite may be the most important feature. The overriding drive to eat more food is the biggest impediment to weight loss, and it’s the reason why most diets fail. When people attempt to eat less food despite wanting more, they butt up against their own physiology. Few win that battle.

Ketogenic dieting avoids this issue altogether, suppressing the increase in hunger hormones that normally occurs after weight loss.

Ketogenic diets are especially effective for massive weight loss. If you have a ton of weight to lose, aiming for ketosis could help you lose body fat. Again, not because of any inherent fat-burning quality of the ketones, but because in order to make ketones you must liberate stored body fat.

Many diets work in the short-term and fail in the long run. Weight loss isn’t worth anything if you can’t keep it off. Ketogenic diets appear to be good for long-term maintenance of weight loss, at least compared to low-fat diets.

How to Do It Right

I’ll have more details in The Keto Reset Diet book, but there are right ways and wrong ways to do keto. What’s wrong or right is contextual, of course. It depends on several factors.

If you’re part of a small group that uses keto to keep seizures at bay, or treat serious neurological diseases, you’ll want to diligently maintain high blood ketone levels. That means sticking to very-low-carb (5-10% of calories) and low/moderate protein (10-15% of calories). But even then, modified ketogenic diets with slightly higher carbs and relaxed protein intakes are also effective against epilepsy.

If you’re doing keto for general health or weight loss, you can handle more protein and still remain in ketosis. Protein will help stave off the muscle loss, and, because calories are reduced, you can handle a bit more protein without interfering with ketosis. An older ketogenic diet study in obese subjects shows that 50% protein diets are highly ketogenic as long as calories are kept low. And in another study, subjects eating a weight-maintaining ketogenic diet ate up to 129 grams of protein without leaving ketosis (129 grams is fairly high).

If you’re trying to lose weight, artificially boosting ketones won’t accelerate the process. Higher ketones do not enhance fat loss, but they may indicate it’s taking place.

How to Make Keto Work

Ketogenic dieting is a big jump for some people. You’re literally switching over to a new metabolic substrate. That can take some getting used to. Make sure you are well-prepared with a Primal-aligned eating pattern in place for ideally several months before you ponder a journey into nutritional ketosis.

Make a minimum commitment to six weeks of nutritional ketosis. The first three weeks will be the most difficult as you transition to new fuel sources, but then you can expect breakthroughs. Some serious athletes may experience a temporary performance dip in the early weeks, but then will come back strong after 4 weeks and beyond. Once you get to the six-week mark, the metabolic machinery is in place, and it’s hard to reverse the adaptation. Extra mitochondria don’t just disappear.

Get plenty of electrolytes. You’ll want lots of sodium, magnesium, and potassium. Try 4.5 grams sodium (about 2 teaspoons of fine salt or a little under 3 teaspoons of kosher salt), 300-400 mg magnesium, and 1-2 grams of potassium each day on top of your normal food. Going keto really flushes out water weight, and tons of electrolytes leave with it.

Eat fat, but don’t be crazy about it. Just because a ketogenic diet is a high-fat diet doesn’t mean you should eat ungodly amounts of fat. Being ketogenic is more about not eating carbohydrates than it is eating as much fat as you possibly can.

Eating extra fat in the first 4-7 days can accelerate keto-adaptation by increasing AMPK signaling. Dial it down after.

Lift heavy things. A common criticism of ketogenic diets is that they cause loss of lean mass. This isn’t totally unfounded. If your ketogenic diet reduces appetite so much that you undereat, you might lose muscle. If you’re on a super-low-protein ketogenic diet, you might lose muscle. Lifting weights prevents these issues by sending an anabolic signal to your muscles and allowing the consumption of more protein without hampering ketosis. 

Do lots of low level aerobic activity. Walk, hike, jog, cycle, row. Keep things in the aerobic HR zone (under 180 minus age in heart beats per minute), and you’ll increase your utilization of body fat, which will speed up ketone production and adaptation.

Eat vegetables. The vast majority of vegetables are keto-friendly. Not only do they provide important micronutrients and phytonutrients, they provide negligible amounts of carbohydrates.

Eat berries. Raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, and blueberries are all quite low in glycemic load and extremely high in phytonutrients. While eating a flat of strawberries isn’t very ketogenic, a large bowlful won’t knock you out.

Eat fiber. Many people on ketogenic diets tend to ignore or malign fiber. That’s a mistake. First, fiber doesn’t digest into glucose. It doesn’t “count.” Second, fiber feeds your gut biome, providing fermentable substrate for your gut bacteria to turn into beneficial short chain fatty acids and to provide support to your immune system.

How to Know if You’re Ketogenic

You can test your blood, urine, or breath ketones. There are drawbacks to each, and unless you have a medical condition necessitating a specific level of ketones, obsessive testing may be unnecessary/unwise/expensive. Forget the inexpensive urine strips, as they measure only what you excrete, not what you are making and burning.

Once you’re keto-adapted and naturally good at burning fat, the ketone measuring devices might not put up impressive numbers. That’s because, after weeks in ketosis, you have built enough metabolic machinery in your muscles that they run extremely well on free fatty acids and don’t require much additional fuel from glucose or ketones. You’re still making ketones, since your brain can’t run on fatty acids and needs them to offset the glucose that isn’t coming, but your muscles no longer require them. Many people who have been in long term ketosis can get by quite nicely on 20-30 net grams of carbs a day and might only show .4 or .7 millimolar ketones on a blood test, but they have plenty of energy from burning free fatty acids and maintain muscle mass on relatively fewer calories than when they were dependent on carbs. Few people understand this, but it’s a major benefit of keto-adaptation. You might even say that ketogenic diets are ultimately about becoming free fatty acid-adapted.

Instead of objective numbers, I prefer to go by symptoms and signs. Since you’re trying to divine what works best for you, relying on the subjective signs and symptoms you experience is perfectly legitimate. These include:

Reduced urge to snack: Being ketone-adapted means you’re less reliant on outside calories.

Steady energy: When I’m feeling full of relaxed energy, calm but not sleepy, I know I’m in ketosis.

You may have heard talk about the dreaded ketone breath, caused by the presence of the metabolite acetone (the breakdown product of the ketone bodies acetoacetate and beta-hydroxybutyrate). A sweet and fruity odor to your exhalations is a reliable indicator that you are in a state of ketosis, but it’s also a likely indicator that you are not yet super efficient at burning ketones. Don’t worry, that will come in short order.

So, are carbs out forever? What if you want to incorporate carbs for high intensity performance while maintaining the benefits of ketosis?

First of all, it may not make much of a difference if you’re just strength training. A series of recent studies looked at the effects of introducing carbs into a ketogenic diet in resistance trained adults, finding little to no benefit.

Carbs likely will help certain populations, namely CrossFitters, sprinters, and anyone else engaged in intense glycolytic work. But even then, being keto-adapted reduces the amount of glycogen you’ll use for a given intensity —so err on the side of fewer carbs and eat only as many as you actually earn.

There are two basic ways to construct a ketogenic diet that includes carbs: with one big weekly carb load (the classic CKD) or multiple smaller carb loads adjacent to training sessions (often called the targeted ketogenic diet, or TKD).

On a CKD, you spend the majority of the week and your workouts in ketosis and devote a day or a pair of days to eat lots of carbs. You might be ketogenic Monday through Friday, exercising all the while and capping the work week off with a really intense glycogen-depleting training session, then go..

[cristinajourdanqp]

The Definitive Guide to Keto

I use my Los Angeles surroundings as a barometer for changes in the mainstream approach to health, and it holds up quite well. Silicon Valley can claim to be the cradle of technology, but L.A. is definitely the cradle of diet and fitness trends; and the latest is most definitely keto. At the local cafe where every species of Malibu fitness enthusiast gathers to gossip and fuel up, I’m seeing fewer gels and energy bars, and way more butter coffees and discarded packets of the new powdered ketone supplement products.

Sure enough, keto is entering into mainstream health consciousness everywhere. Google searches for “ketogenic diet” are at an all-time high. The stream of keto-related email queries and comments I receive has seen a major uptick. And early this year, a major publisher approached me with a keto book proposal, which I accepted. I dove headlong into a total immersion/participatory journalism experience where I walked my talk, and pricked my finger for blood tests enough times to get a little scar tissue going, for the past several months. The book is called The Keto Reset Diet and it’s coming out October 3rd. This is a comprehensive presentation to educate you on the science and benefits of ketone burning and to give you step-by-step guidance to go keto the right away, avoiding the common setbacks that happen when many adopt an ill-advised approach to something as delicate and rigorous as nutritional ketosis. You can pre-order a copy from major retailers right now. We are also filming a comprehensive online multimedia educational course to give you a guided immersion experience that will be available in 2018.

Meanwhile, it’s definitely time to do a Definitive Guide….

To understand ketogenic diets, you must understand the conditions that promote ketosis. And to do that, you must understand how our bodies beta-oxidize fatty acids for energy.

Fatty acids are broken down into acetyl-CoA.

Acetyl-CoA combines with oxaloacetate.

The acetyl-CoA/oxaloacetate duo starts the Krebs cycle.

The Krebs cycle produces ATP, the body’s energy currency.

Congratulations. You’ve just turned fat into energy.

Where does ketosis come in?

If the supply of acetyl-CoA exceeds the supply of oxaloacetate, the liver converts any excess acetyl-CoA into ketone bodies. These ketone bodies are an “alternative” energy source for the brain and body. 

Both carbohydrates and protein provide oxaloacetate to the liver, so both carbohydrates and protein can prevent ketone production or knock you out of ketosis. Carbohydrates also elevate insulin, which blocks the release of body fat and reduces the amount of fatty acids making their way to the liver for conversion into ketones. A ketogenic diet, then, is one that limits carbohydrate and, to a lesser extent, protein.

Ketosis occurs in certain instances without any dietary change at all:

Extreme physical exertion that depletes liver glycogen (total around 100 grams) and depletes around half of stored muscle glycogen (total around 400-500 grams)

Fasting for significant time period (at least 24 hours for most people)

Starvation or significant restriction in total calories for a signification time period

In all of these conditions, there’s a common ketogenic thread: liberation of body fat in excess of that which we can beta-oxidize. Any fat that isn’t beta-oxidized for energy will convert to ketones.

In one sense, ketosis is a stop-gap solution for situations where you’re burning huge amounts of body fat, like during a famine. Why would I want to mimic abject starvation if there’s all this food around?

Grocery stores are an evolutionary aberration. The constant drip of glucose into our blood is a modern luxury. For most of human history, if we wanted carbs, we had to climb a tree and extricate a bee’s nest, spend hours digging tubers, or wait around for the wild fruit to ripen. We are adapted to periods of low food availability, and, especially, low glucose availability.

Plus, humans are remarkably good at slipping into ketosis. Whereas for most other animals ketosis is difficult to achieve, a human will be mildly ketotic just waking up from a full night’s sleep. Heck, breastfed babies spend much of their time in ketosis despite drinking nutritionally balanced breastmilk. We’re clearly meant to produce and utilize ketones from time to time, and it’s safe to assume that mimicking this ancestral milieu provides adaptive benefits.

Let’s go over some of the major ones.

Adaptive Benefits of Ketosis Treatment for Major Disease States

The ketogenic diet first emerged as a tool for clinicians to treat their patients with epilepsy. It was—and remains—the only thing with the consistent ability to prevent seizures. Whether it’s Thai kids with intractable epilepsy, Scandinavian kids with therapy-resistant epilepsy, or adults with refractory epilepsy, ketogenic diets just work.

Ketosis improves epilepsy via several mechanisms.

It increases conversion of glutamate into glutamine into GABA, reducing neuronal excitability.

It increases antioxidant status in the neuronal mitochondria, improving their function.

It reduces free radical formation in neurons, a likely cause of seizures.

These effects on neuronal function and health, along with the ability of aging or degenerating brains to accept and utilize ketone bodies, also have implications for other brain conditions, like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, bipolar disorder, and many psychiatric disorders.

Ketogenic diets aren’t just beneficial for brain disorders, though.

A Spanish ketogenic diet (keto with wine, basically) cured people of the metabolic syndrome and improved health markers of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Over 92% of subjects improved their liver health; 21% resolved it entirely.

In cancer patients, a keto diet preserves lean mass and causes fat loss. Many researchers are exploring the use of ketogenic diets in preventing and treating cancer, although results are very preliminary.

Cognitive Function

Since ketosis can help with major brain disorders, many have wondered whether it can improve cognitive function in otherwise healthy people. Unfortunately, researchers haven’t studied the nootropic effects of ketogenic diets in healthy people—yet. They have looked at people with “milder” cognitive deficits, though, finding some promising effects.

In mild cognitive decline, a ketogenic diet improves memory.

In type 1 diabetics who experience reduced cognitive function when their blood sugar is low, increasing ketone production via medium chain triglycerides (found in coconut oil) restores it.

In adults with bad memory, adding ketones improves cognition. The higher the serum ketones, the better the scores.

In older adults, a very low-carb diet improves memory. Again, higher ketones predicts bigger improvements.

Anecdotes abound of people with intact cognitive function going on ketogenic diets and experiencing huge benefits to their mental performance. I’ve been experimenting with more protracted ketosis for some time now, and I can add my hat to the pile. What could be going on?

It may clear up brain fog, that enemy of clear thinking, by clearing ammonia from the brain and upregulating conversion of glutamate into GABA.

It definitely increases brain energy production by increasing mitochondrial biogenesis in the brain. More mitochondria, more energy production.

It tends to produce a sense of euphoria. If you can parlay that into productivity instead of getting caught up in the sensation, your mental output will increase. A cup of strong coffee helps here.

Physical Performance

Being keto-adapted has several advantages for anyone interested in physical performance.

It increases energy efficiency. At any given intensity, a keto-adapted athlete burns more fat and less glycogen than a sugar-burning athlete. Long-term elite keto athletes can burn up to 2.3 times more fat at peak oxidation and 59% more fat overall than non-keto athletes, and they do it at higher intensities. They remain in the predominantly fat-burning zone at 70% of VO2max, whereas non-keto athletes switch over from predominantly fat burning to a spike in sugar-burning at 54.9% VO2max.

It spares glycogen. Glycogen is high-octane fuel for intense efforts. We store it in the muscles and liver, but only about 2400 calories-worth—enough for a couple hours of intense activity at most. Once it’s gone, we have to carb up to replenish it. Keto-adaptation allows us to do more work using fat and ketones for fuel, thereby saving glycogen for when we really need it. Since even the leanest among us carry tens of thousands of calories of body fat, our energy stores become virtually limitless on a ketogenic diet.

It builds mitochondria. Mitochondria are the power plants of our cells, transforming incoming nutrients into ATP. The more mitochondria we have, the more energy we can utilize and extract from the food we eat—and the more performance we can wring out of our bodies. Ketosis places new demands on our mitochondria, who adapt to the new energy environment by increasing in number.

Fat Loss

Although keto is not a classical weight loss diet, it can certainly help a person lose body fat. After all, to generate ketones without eating ketogenic precursors, you have to liberate stored body fat.

But that’s not the main mechanism for ketogenic fat loss. Ketosis isn’t “magic”—it doesn’t melt body fat away. Instead, it works for many of the same reasons a standard low-carb Primal way of eating works: by reducing insulin, increasing mobilization of stored body fat, and decreasing appetite.

Ketosis suppressing appetite may be the most important feature. The overriding drive to eat more food is the biggest impediment to weight loss, and it’s the reason why most diets fail. When people attempt to eat less food despite wanting more, they butt up against their own physiology. Few win that battle.

Ketogenic dieting avoids this issue altogether, suppressing the increase in hunger hormones that normally occurs after weight loss.

Ketogenic diets are especially effective for massive weight loss. If you have a ton of weight to lose, aiming for ketosis could help you lose body fat. Again, not because of any inherent fat-burning quality of the ketones, but because in order to make ketones you must liberate stored body fat.

Many diets work in the short-term and fail in the long run. Weight loss isn’t worth anything if you can’t keep it off. Ketogenic diets appear to be good for long-term maintenance of weight loss, at least compared to low-fat diets.

How to Do It Right

I’ll have more details in The Keto Reset Diet book, but there are right ways and wrong ways to do keto. What’s wrong or right is contextual, of course. It depends on several factors.

If you’re part of a small group that uses keto to keep seizures at bay, or treat serious neurological diseases, you’ll want to diligently maintain high blood ketone levels. That means sticking to very-low-carb (5-10% of calories) and low/moderate protein (10-15% of calories). But even then, modified ketogenic diets with slightly higher carbs and relaxed protein intakes are also effective against epilepsy.

If you’re doing keto for general health or weight loss, you can handle more protein and still remain in ketosis. Protein will help stave off the muscle loss, and, because calories are reduced, you can handle a bit more protein without interfering with ketosis. An older ketogenic diet study in obese subjects shows that 50% protein diets are highly ketogenic as long as calories are kept low. And in another study, subjects eating a weight-maintaining ketogenic diet ate up to 129 grams of protein without leaving ketosis (129 grams is fairly high).

If you’re trying to lose weight, artificially boosting ketones won’t accelerate the process. Higher ketones do not enhance fat loss, but they may indicate it’s taking place.

How to Make Keto Work

Ketogenic dieting is a big jump for some people. You’re literally switching over to a new metabolic substrate. That can take some getting used to. Make sure you are well-prepared with a Primal-aligned eating pattern in place for ideally several months before you ponder a journey into nutritional ketosis.

Make a minimum commitment to six weeks of nutritional ketosis. The first three weeks will be the most difficult as you transition to new fuel sources, but then you can expect breakthroughs. Some serious athletes may experience a temporary performance dip in the early weeks, but then will come back strong after 4 weeks and beyond. Once you get to the six-week mark, the metabolic machinery is in place, and it’s hard to reverse the adaptation. Extra mitochondria don’t just disappear.

Get plenty of electrolytes. You’ll want lots of sodium, magnesium, and potassium. Try 4.5 grams sodium (about 2 teaspoons of fine salt or a little under 3 teaspoons of kosher salt), 300-400 mg magnesium, and 1-2 grams of potassium each day on top of your normal food. Going keto really flushes out water weight, and tons of electrolytes leave with it.

Eat fat, but don’t be crazy about it. Just because a ketogenic diet is a high-fat diet doesn’t mean you should eat ungodly amounts of fat. Being ketogenic is more about not eating carbohydrates than it is eating as much fat as you possibly can.

Eating extra fat in the first 4-7 days can accelerate keto-adaptation by increasing AMPK signaling. Dial it down after.

Lift heavy things. A common criticism of ketogenic diets is that they cause loss of lean mass. This isn’t totally unfounded. If your ketogenic diet reduces appetite so much that you undereat, you might lose muscle. If you’re on a super-low-protein ketogenic diet, you might lose muscle. Lifting weights prevents these issues by sending an anabolic signal to your muscles and allowing the consumption of more protein without hampering ketosis. 

Do lots of low level aerobic activity. Walk, hike, jog, cycle, row. Keep things in the aerobic HR zone (under 180 minus age in heart beats per minute), and you’ll increase your utilization of body fat, which will speed up ketone production and adaptation.

Eat vegetables. The vast majority of vegetables are keto-friendly. Not only do they provide important micronutrients and phytonutrients, they provide negligible amounts of carbohydrates.

Eat berries. Raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, and blueberries are all quite low in glycemic load and extremely high in phytonutrients. While eating a flat of strawberries isn’t very ketogenic, a large bowlful won’t knock you out.

Eat fiber. Many people on ketogenic diets tend to ignore or malign fiber. That’s a mistake. First, fiber doesn’t digest into glucose. It doesn’t “count.” Second, fiber feeds your gut biome, providing fermentable substrate for your gut bacteria to turn into beneficial short chain fatty acids and to provide support to your immune system.

How to Know if You’re Ketogenic

You can test your blood, urine, or breath ketones. There are drawbacks to each, and unless you have a medical condition necessitating a specific level of ketones, obsessive testing may be unnecessary/unwise/expensive. Forget the inexpensive urine strips, as they measure only what you excrete, not what you are making and burning.

Once you’re keto-adapted and naturally good at burning fat, the ketone measuring devices might not put up impressive numbers. That’s because, after weeks in ketosis, you have built enough metabolic machinery in your muscles that they run extremely well on free fatty acids and don’t require much additional fuel from glucose or ketones. You’re still making ketones, since your brain can’t run on fatty acids and needs them to offset the glucose that isn’t coming, but your muscles no longer require them. Many people who have been in long term ketosis can get by quite nicely on 20-30 net grams of carbs a day and might only show .4 or .7 millimolar ketones on a blood test, but they have plenty of energy from burning free fatty acids and maintain muscle mass on relatively fewer calories than when they were dependent on carbs. Few people understand this, but it’s a major benefit of keto-adaptation. You might even say that ketogenic diets are ultimately about becoming free fatty acid-adapted.

Instead of objective numbers, I prefer to go by symptoms and signs. Since you’re trying to divine what works best for you, relying on the subjective signs and symptoms you experience is perfectly legitimate. These include:

Reduced urge to snack: Being ketone-adapted means you’re less reliant on outside calories.

Steady energy: When I’m feeling full of relaxed energy, calm but not sleepy, I know I’m in ketosis.

You may have heard talk about the dreaded ketone breath, caused by the presence of the metabolite acetone (the breakdown product of the ketone bodies acetoacetate and beta-hydroxybutyrate). A sweet and fruity odor to your exhalations is a reliable indicator that you are in a state of ketosis, but it’s also a likely indicator that you are not yet super efficient at burning ketones. Don’t worry, that will come in short order.

So, are carbs out forever? What if you want to incorporate carbs for high intensity performance while maintaining the benefits of ketosis?

First of all, it may not make much of a difference if you’re just strength training. A series of recent studies looked at the effects of introducing carbs into a ketogenic diet in resistance trained adults, finding little to no benefit.

Carbs likely will help certain populations, namely CrossFitters, sprinters, and anyone else engaged in intense glycolytic work. But even then, being keto-adapted reduces the amount of glycogen you’ll use for a given intensity —so err on the side of fewer carbs and eat only as many as you actually earn.

There are two basic ways to construct a ketogenic diet that includes carbs: with one big weekly carb load (the classic CKD) or multiple smaller carb loads adjacent to training sessions (often called the targeted ketogenic diet, or TKD).

On a CKD, you spend the majority of the week and your workouts in ketosis and devote a day or a pair of days to eat lots of carbs. You might be ketogenic Monday through Friday, exercising all the while and capping the work week off with a really intense glycogen-depleting training session, then go..

[watsonrodriquezie]

The Definitive Guide to Keto

I use my Los Angeles surroundings as a barometer for changes in the mainstream approach to health, and it holds up quite well. Silicon Valley can claim to be the cradle of technology, but L.A. is definitely the cradle of diet and fitness trends; and the latest is most definitely keto. At the local cafe where every species of Malibu fitness enthusiast gathers to gossip and fuel up, I’m seeing fewer gels and energy bars, and way more butter coffees and discarded packets of the new powdered ketone supplement products.

Sure enough, keto is entering into mainstream health consciousness everywhere. Google searches for “ketogenic diet” are at an all-time high. The stream of keto-related email queries and comments I receive has seen a major uptick. And early this year, a major publisher approached me with a keto book proposal, which I accepted. I dove headlong into a total immersion/participatory journalism experience where I walked my talk, and pricked my finger for blood tests enough times to get a little scar tissue going, for the past several months. The book is called The Keto Reset Diet and it’s coming out October 3rd. This is a comprehensive presentation to educate you on the science and benefits of ketone burning and to give you step-by-step guidance to go keto the right away, avoiding the common setbacks that happen when many adopt an ill-advised approach to something as delicate and rigorous as nutritional ketosis. You can pre-order a copy from major retailers right now. We are also filming a comprehensive online multimedia educational course to give you a guided immersion experience that will be available in 2018.

Meanwhile, it’s definitely time to do a Definitive Guide….

To understand ketogenic diets, you must understand the conditions that promote ketosis. And to do that, you must understand how our bodies beta-oxidize fatty acids for energy.

Fatty acids are broken down into acetyl-CoA.

Acetyl-CoA combines with oxaloacetate.

The acetyl-CoA/oxaloacetate duo starts the Krebs cycle.

The Krebs cycle produces ATP, the body’s energy currency.

Congratulations. You’ve just turned fat into energy.

Where does ketosis come in?

If the supply of acetyl-CoA exceeds the supply of oxaloacetate, the liver converts any excess acetyl-CoA into ketone bodies. These ketone bodies are an “alternative” energy source for the brain and body. 

Both carbohydrates and protein provide oxaloacetate to the liver, so both carbohydrates and protein can prevent ketone production or knock you out of ketosis. Carbohydrates also elevate insulin, which blocks the release of body fat and reduces the amount of fatty acids making their way to the liver for conversion into ketones. A ketogenic diet, then, is one that limits carbohydrate and, to a lesser extent, protein.

Ketosis occurs in certain instances without any dietary change at all:

Extreme physical exertion that depletes liver glycogen (total around 100 grams) and depletes around half of stored muscle glycogen (total around 400-500 grams)

Fasting for significant time period (at least 24 hours for most people)

Starvation or significant restriction in total calories for a signification time period

In all of these conditions, there’s a common ketogenic thread: liberation of body fat in excess of that which we can beta-oxidize. Any fat that isn’t beta-oxidized for energy will convert to ketones.

In one sense, ketosis is a stop-gap solution for situations where you’re burning huge amounts of body fat, like during a famine. Why would I want to mimic abject starvation if there’s all this food around?

Grocery stores are an evolutionary aberration. The constant drip of glucose into our blood is a modern luxury. For most of human history, if we wanted carbs, we had to climb a tree and extricate a bee’s nest, spend hours digging tubers, or wait around for the wild fruit to ripen. We are adapted to periods of low food availability, and, especially, low glucose availability.

Plus, humans are remarkably good at slipping into ketosis. Whereas for most other animals ketosis is difficult to achieve, a human will be mildly ketotic just waking up from a full night’s sleep. Heck, breastfed babies spend much of their time in ketosis despite drinking nutritionally balanced breastmilk. We’re clearly meant to produce and utilize ketones from time to time, and it’s safe to assume that mimicking this ancestral milieu provides adaptive benefits.

Let’s go over some of the major ones.

Adaptive Benefits of Ketosis Treatment for Major Disease States

The ketogenic diet first emerged as a tool for clinicians to treat their patients with epilepsy. It was—and remains—the only thing with the consistent ability to prevent seizures. Whether it’s Thai kids with intractable epilepsy, Scandinavian kids with therapy-resistant epilepsy, or adults with refractory epilepsy, ketogenic diets just work.

Ketosis improves epilepsy via several mechanisms.

It increases conversion of glutamate into glutamine into GABA, reducing neuronal excitability.

It increases antioxidant status in the neuronal mitochondria, improving their function.

It reduces free radical formation in neurons, a likely cause of seizures.

These effects on neuronal function and health, along with the ability of aging or degenerating brains to accept and utilize ketone bodies, also have implications for other brain conditions, like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, bipolar disorder, and many psychiatric disorders.

Ketogenic diets aren’t just beneficial for brain disorders, though.

A Spanish ketogenic diet (keto with wine, basically) cured people of the metabolic syndrome and improved health markers of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Over 92% of subjects improved their liver health; 21% resolved it entirely.

In cancer patients, a keto diet preserves lean mass and causes fat loss. Many researchers are exploring the use of ketogenic diets in preventing and treating cancer, although results are very preliminary.

Cognitive Function

Since ketosis can help with major brain disorders, many have wondered whether it can improve cognitive function in otherwise healthy people. Unfortunately, researchers haven’t studied the nootropic effects of ketogenic diets in healthy people—yet. They have looked at people with “milder” cognitive deficits, though, finding some promising effects.

In mild cognitive decline, a ketogenic diet improves memory.

In type 1 diabetics who experience reduced cognitive function when their blood sugar is low, increasing ketone production via medium chain triglycerides (found in coconut oil) restores it.

In adults with bad memory, adding ketones improves cognition. The higher the serum ketones, the better the scores.

In older adults, a very low-carb diet improves memory. Again, higher ketones predicts bigger improvements.

Anecdotes abound of people with intact cognitive function going on ketogenic diets and experiencing huge benefits to their mental performance. I’ve been experimenting with more protracted ketosis for some time now, and I can add my hat to the pile. What could be going on?

It may clear up brain fog, that enemy of clear thinking, by clearing ammonia from the brain and upregulating conversion of glutamate into GABA.

It definitely increases brain energy production by increasing mitochondrial biogenesis in the brain. More mitochondria, more energy production.

It tends to produce a sense of euphoria. If you can parlay that into productivity instead of getting caught up in the sensation, your mental output will increase. A cup of strong coffee helps here.

Physical Performance

Being keto-adapted has several advantages for anyone interested in physical performance.

It increases energy efficiency. At any given intensity, a keto-adapted athlete burns more fat and less glycogen than a sugar-burning athlete. Long-term elite keto athletes can burn up to 2.3 times more fat at peak oxidation and 59% more fat overall than non-keto athletes, and they do it at higher intensities. They remain in the predominantly fat-burning zone at 70% of VO2max, whereas non-keto athletes switch over from predominantly fat burning to a spike in sugar-burning at 54.9% VO2max.

It spares glycogen. Glycogen is high-octane fuel for intense efforts. We store it in the muscles and liver, but only about 2400 calories-worth—enough for a couple hours of intense activity at most. Once it’s gone, we have to carb up to replenish it. Keto-adaptation allows us to do more work using fat and ketones for fuel, thereby saving glycogen for when we really need it. Since even the leanest among us carry tens of thousands of calories of body fat, our energy stores become virtually limitless on a ketogenic diet.

It builds mitochondria. Mitochondria are the power plants of our cells, transforming incoming nutrients into ATP. The more mitochondria we have, the more energy we can utilize and extract from the food we eat—and the more performance we can wring out of our bodies. Ketosis places new demands on our mitochondria, who adapt to the new energy environment by increasing in number.

Fat Loss

Although keto is not a classical weight loss diet, it can certainly help a person lose body fat. After all, to generate ketones without eating ketogenic precursors, you have to liberate stored body fat.

But that’s not the main mechanism for ketogenic fat loss. Ketosis isn’t “magic”—it doesn’t melt body fat away. Instead, it works for many of the same reasons a standard low-carb Primal way of eating works: by reducing insulin, increasing mobilization of stored body fat, and decreasing appetite.

Ketosis suppressing appetite may be the most important feature. The overriding drive to eat more food is the biggest impediment to weight loss, and it’s the reason why most diets fail. When people attempt to eat less food despite wanting more, they butt up against their own physiology. Few win that battle.

Ketogenic dieting avoids this issue altogether, suppressing the increase in hunger hormones that normally occurs after weight loss.

Ketogenic diets are especially effective for massive weight loss. If you have a ton of weight to lose, aiming for ketosis could help you lose body fat. Again, not because of any inherent fat-burning quality of the ketones, but because in order to make ketones you must liberate stored body fat.

Many diets work in the short-term and fail in the long run. Weight loss isn’t worth anything if you can’t keep it off. Ketogenic diets appear to be good for long-term maintenance of weight loss, at least compared to low-fat diets.

How to Do It Right

I’ll have more details in The Keto Reset Diet book, but there are right ways and wrong ways to do keto. What’s wrong or right is contextual, of course. It depends on several factors.

If you’re part of a small group that uses keto to keep seizures at bay, or treat serious neurological diseases, you’ll want to diligently maintain high blood ketone levels. That means sticking to very-low-carb (5-10% of calories) and low/moderate protein (10-15% of calories). But even then, modified ketogenic diets with slightly higher carbs and relaxed protein intakes are also effective against epilepsy.

If you’re doing keto for general health or weight loss, you can handle more protein and still remain in ketosis. Protein will help stave off the muscle loss, and, because calories are reduced, you can handle a bit more protein without interfering with ketosis. An older ketogenic diet study in obese subjects shows that 50% protein diets are highly ketogenic as long as calories are kept low. And in another study, subjects eating a weight-maintaining ketogenic diet ate up to 129 grams of protein without leaving ketosis (129 grams is fairly high).

If you’re trying to lose weight, artificially boosting ketones won’t accelerate the process. Higher ketones do not enhance fat loss, but they may indicate it’s taking place.

How to Make Keto Work

Ketogenic dieting is a big jump for some people. You’re literally switching over to a new metabolic substrate. That can take some getting used to. Make sure you are well-prepared with a Primal-aligned eating pattern in place for ideally several months before you ponder a journey into nutritional ketosis.

Make a minimum commitment to six weeks of nutritional ketosis. The first three weeks will be the most difficult as you transition to new fuel sources, but then you can expect breakthroughs. Some serious athletes may experience a temporary performance dip in the early weeks, but then will come back strong after 4 weeks and beyond. Once you get to the six-week mark, the metabolic machinery is in place, and it’s hard to reverse the adaptation. Extra mitochondria don’t just disappear.

Get plenty of electrolytes. You’ll want lots of sodium, magnesium, and potassium. Try 4.5 grams sodium (about 2 teaspoons of fine salt or a little under 3 teaspoons of kosher salt), 300-400 mg magnesium, and 1-2 grams of potassium each day on top of your normal food. Going keto really flushes out water weight, and tons of electrolytes leave with it.

Eat fat, but don’t be crazy about it. Just because a ketogenic diet is a high-fat diet doesn’t mean you should eat ungodly amounts of fat. Being ketogenic is more about not eating carbohydrates than it is eating as much fat as you possibly can.

Eating extra fat in the first 4-7 days can accelerate keto-adaptation by increasing AMPK signaling. Dial it down after.

Lift heavy things. A common criticism of ketogenic diets is that they cause loss of lean mass. This isn’t totally unfounded. If your ketogenic diet reduces appetite so much that you undereat, you might lose muscle. If you’re on a super-low-protein ketogenic diet, you might lose muscle. Lifting weights prevents these issues by sending an anabolic signal to your muscles and allowing the consumption of more protein without hampering ketosis. 

Do lots of low level aerobic activity. Walk, hike, jog, cycle, row. Keep things in the aerobic HR zone (under 180 minus age in heart beats per minute), and you’ll increase your utilization of body fat, which will speed up ketone production and adaptation.

Eat vegetables. The vast majority of vegetables are keto-friendly. Not only do they provide important micronutrients and phytonutrients, they provide negligible amounts of carbohydrates.

Eat berries. Raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, and blueberries are all quite low in glycemic load and extremely high in phytonutrients. While eating a flat of strawberries isn’t very ketogenic, a large bowlful won’t knock you out.

Eat fiber. Many people on ketogenic diets tend to ignore or malign fiber. That’s a mistake. First, fiber doesn’t digest into glucose. It doesn’t “count.” Second, fiber feeds your gut biome, providing fermentable substrate for your gut bacteria to turn into beneficial short chain fatty acids and to provide support to your immune system.

How to Know if You’re Ketogenic

You can test your blood, urine, or breath ketones. There are drawbacks to each, and unless you have a medical condition necessitating a specific level of ketones, obsessive testing may be unnecessary/unwise/expensive. Forget the inexpensive urine strips, as they measure only what you excrete, not what you are making and burning.

Once you’re keto-adapted and naturally good at burning fat, the ketone measuring devices might not put up impressive numbers. That’s because, after weeks in ketosis, you have built enough metabolic machinery in your muscles that they run extremely well on free fatty acids and don’t require much additional fuel from glucose or ketones. You’re still making ketones, since your brain can’t run on fatty acids and needs them to offset the glucose that isn’t coming, but your muscles no longer require them. Many people who have been in long term ketosis can get by quite nicely on 20-30 net grams of carbs a day and might only show .4 or .7 millimolar ketones on a blood test, but they have plenty of energy from burning free fatty acids and maintain muscle mass on relatively fewer calories than when they were dependent on carbs. Few people understand this, but it’s a major benefit of keto-adaptation. You might even say that ketogenic diets are ultimately about becoming free fatty acid-adapted.

Instead of objective numbers, I prefer to go by symptoms and signs. Since you’re trying to divine what works best for you, relying on the subjective signs and symptoms you experience is perfectly legitimate. These include:

Reduced urge to snack: Being ketone-adapted means you’re less reliant on outside calories.

Steady energy: When I’m feeling full of relaxed energy, calm but not sleepy, I know I’m in ketosis.

You may have heard talk about the dreaded ketone breath, caused by the presence of the metabolite acetone (the breakdown product of the ketone bodies acetoacetate and beta-hydroxybutyrate). A sweet and fruity odor to your exhalations is a reliable indicator that you are in a state of ketosis, but it’s also a likely indicator that you are not yet super efficient at burning ketones. Don’t worry, that will come in short order.

So, are carbs out forever? What if you want to incorporate carbs for high intensity performance while maintaining the benefits of ketosis?

First of all, it may not make much of a difference if you’re just strength training. A series of recent studies looked at the effects of introducing carbs into a ketogenic diet in resistance trained adults, finding little to no benefit.

Carbs likely will help certain populations, namely CrossFitters, sprinters, and anyone else engaged in intense glycolytic work. But even then, being keto-adapted reduces the amount of glycogen you’ll use for a given intensity —so err on the side of fewer carbs and eat only as many as you actually earn.

There are two basic ways to construct a ketogenic diet that includes carbs: with one big weekly carb load (the classic CKD) or multiple smaller carb loads adjacent to training sessions (often called the targeted ketogenic diet, or TKD).

On a CKD, you spend the majority of the week and your workouts in ketosis and devote a day or a pair of days to eat lots of carbs. You might be ketogenic Monday through Friday, exercising all the while and capping the work week off with a really intense glycogen-depleting training session, then go..

[milenasanchezmk]

The Definitive Guide to Keto

I use my Los Angeles surroundings as a barometer for changes in the mainstream approach to health, and it holds up quite well. Silicon Valley can claim to be the cradle of technology, but L.A. is definitely the cradle of diet and fitness trends; and the latest is most definitely keto. At the local cafe where every species of Malibu fitness enthusiast gathers to gossip and fuel up, I’m seeing fewer gels and energy bars, and way more butter coffees and discarded packets of the new powdered ketone supplement products.

Sure enough, keto is entering into mainstream health consciousness everywhere. Google searches for “ketogenic diet” are at an all-time high. The stream of keto-related email queries and comments I receive has seen a major uptick. And early this year, a major publisher approached me with a keto book proposal, which I accepted. I dove headlong into a total immersion/participatory journalism experience where I walked my talk, and pricked my finger for blood tests enough times to get a little scar tissue going, for the past several months. The book is called The Keto Reset Diet and it’s coming out October 3rd. This is a comprehensive presentation to educate you on the science and benefits of ketone burning and to give you step-by-step guidance to go keto the right away, avoiding the common setbacks that happen when many adopt an ill-advised approach to something as delicate and rigorous as nutritional ketosis. You can pre-order a copy from major retailers right now. We are also filming a comprehensive online multimedia educational course to give you a guided immersion experience that will be available in 2018.

Meanwhile, it’s definitely time to do a Definitive Guide….

To understand ketogenic diets, you must understand the conditions that promote ketosis. And to do that, you must understand how our bodies beta-oxidize fatty acids for energy.

Fatty acids are broken down into acetyl-CoA.

Acetyl-CoA combines with oxaloacetate.

The acetyl-CoA/oxaloacetate duo starts the Krebs cycle.

The Krebs cycle produces ATP, the body’s energy currency.

Congratulations. You’ve just turned fat into energy.

Where does ketosis come in?

If the supply of acetyl-CoA exceeds the supply of oxaloacetate, the liver converts any excess acetyl-CoA into ketone bodies. These ketone bodies are an “alternative” energy source for the brain and body. 

Both carbohydrates and protein provide oxaloacetate to the liver, so both carbohydrates and protein can prevent ketone production or knock you out of ketosis. Carbohydrates also elevate insulin, which blocks the release of body fat and reduces the amount of fatty acids making their way to the liver for conversion into ketones. A ketogenic diet, then, is one that limits carbohydrate and, to a lesser extent, protein.

Ketosis occurs in certain instances without any dietary change at all:

Extreme physical exertion that depletes liver glycogen (total around 100 grams) and depletes around half of stored muscle glycogen (total around 400-500 grams)

Fasting for significant time period (at least 24 hours for most people)

Starvation or significant restriction in total calories for a signification time period

In all of these conditions, there’s a common ketogenic thread: liberation of body fat in excess of that which we can beta-oxidize. Any fat that isn’t beta-oxidized for energy will convert to ketones.

In one sense, ketosis is a stop-gap solution for situations where you’re burning huge amounts of body fat, like during a famine. Why would I want to mimic abject starvation if there’s all this food around?

Grocery stores are an evolutionary aberration. The constant drip of glucose into our blood is a modern luxury. For most of human history, if we wanted carbs, we had to climb a tree and extricate a bee’s nest, spend hours digging tubers, or wait around for the wild fruit to ripen. We are adapted to periods of low food availability, and, especially, low glucose availability.

Plus, humans are remarkably good at slipping into ketosis. Whereas for most other animals ketosis is difficult to achieve, a human will be mildly ketotic just waking up from a full night’s sleep. Heck, breastfed babies spend much of their time in ketosis despite drinking nutritionally balanced breastmilk. We’re clearly meant to produce and utilize ketones from time to time, and it’s safe to assume that mimicking this ancestral milieu provides adaptive benefits.

Let’s go over some of the major ones.

Adaptive Benefits of Ketosis Treatment for Major Disease States

The ketogenic diet first emerged as a tool for clinicians to treat their patients with epilepsy. It was—and remains—the only thing with the consistent ability to prevent seizures. Whether it’s Thai kids with intractable epilepsy, Scandinavian kids with therapy-resistant epilepsy, or adults with refractory epilepsy, ketogenic diets just work.

Ketosis improves epilepsy via several mechanisms.

It increases conversion of glutamate into glutamine into GABA, reducing neuronal excitability.

It increases antioxidant status in the neuronal mitochondria, improving their function.

It reduces free radical formation in neurons, a likely cause of seizures.

These effects on neuronal function and health, along with the ability of aging or degenerating brains to accept and utilize ketone bodies, also have implications for other brain conditions, like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, bipolar disorder, and many psychiatric disorders.

Ketogenic diets aren’t just beneficial for brain disorders, though.

A Spanish ketogenic diet (keto with wine, basically) cured people of the metabolic syndrome and improved health markers of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Over 92% of subjects improved their liver health; 21% resolved it entirely.

In cancer patients, a keto diet preserves lean mass and causes fat loss. Many researchers are exploring the use of ketogenic diets in preventing and treating cancer, although results are very preliminary.

Cognitive Function

Since ketosis can help with major brain disorders, many have wondered whether it can improve cognitive function in otherwise healthy people. Unfortunately, researchers haven’t studied the nootropic effects of ketogenic diets in healthy people—yet. They have looked at people with “milder” cognitive deficits, though, finding some promising effects.

In mild cognitive decline, a ketogenic diet improves memory.

In type 1 diabetics who experience reduced cognitive function when their blood sugar is low, increasing ketone production via medium chain triglycerides (found in coconut oil) restores it.

In adults with bad memory, adding ketones improves cognition. The higher the serum ketones, the better the scores.

In older adults, a very low-carb diet improves memory. Again, higher ketones predicts bigger improvements.

Anecdotes abound of people with intact cognitive function going on ketogenic diets and experiencing huge benefits to their mental performance. I’ve been experimenting with more protracted ketosis for some time now, and I can add my hat to the pile. What could be going on?

It may clear up brain fog, that enemy of clear thinking, by clearing ammonia from the brain and upregulating conversion of glutamate into GABA.

It definitely increases brain energy production by increasing mitochondrial biogenesis in the brain. More mitochondria, more energy production.

It tends to produce a sense of euphoria. If you can parlay that into productivity instead of getting caught up in the sensation, your mental output will increase. A cup of strong coffee helps here.

Physical Performance

Being keto-adapted has several advantages for anyone interested in physical performance.

It increases energy efficiency. At any given intensity, a keto-adapted athlete burns more fat and less glycogen than a sugar-burning athlete. Long-term elite keto athletes can burn up to 2.3 times more fat at peak oxidation and 59% more fat overall than non-keto athletes, and they do it at higher intensities. They remain in the predominantly fat-burning zone at 70% of VO2max, whereas non-keto athletes switch over from predominantly fat burning to a spike in sugar-burning at 54.9% VO2max.

It spares glycogen. Glycogen is high-octane fuel for intense efforts. We store it in the muscles and liver, but only about 2400 calories-worth—enough for a couple hours of intense activity at most. Once it’s gone, we have to carb up to replenish it. Keto-adaptation allows us to do more work using fat and ketones for fuel, thereby saving glycogen for when we really need it. Since even the leanest among us carry tens of thousands of calories of body fat, our energy stores become virtually limitless on a ketogenic diet.

It builds mitochondria. Mitochondria are the power plants of our cells, transforming incoming nutrients into ATP. The more mitochondria we have, the more energy we can utilize and extract from the food we eat—and the more performance we can wring out of our bodies. Ketosis places new demands on our mitochondria, who adapt to the new energy environment by increasing in number.

Fat Loss

Although keto is not a classical weight loss diet, it can certainly help a person lose body fat. After all, to generate ketones without eating ketogenic precursors, you have to liberate stored body fat.

But that’s not the main mechanism for ketogenic fat loss. Ketosis isn’t “magic”—it doesn’t melt body fat away. Instead, it works for many of the same reasons a standard low-carb Primal way of eating works: by reducing insulin, increasing mobilization of stored body fat, and decreasing appetite.

Ketosis suppressing appetite may be the most important feature. The overriding drive to eat more food is the biggest impediment to weight loss, and it’s the reason why most diets fail. When people attempt to eat less food despite wanting more, they butt up against their own physiology. Few win that battle.

Ketogenic dieting avoids this issue altogether, suppressing the increase in hunger hormones that normally occurs after weight loss.

Ketogenic diets are especially effective for massive weight loss. If you have a ton of weight to lose, aiming for ketosis could help you lose body fat. Again, not because of any inherent fat-burning quality of the ketones, but because in order to make ketones you must liberate stored body fat.

Many diets work in the short-term and fail in the long run. Weight loss isn’t worth anything if you can’t keep it off. Ketogenic diets appear to be good for long-term maintenance of weight loss, at least compared to low-fat diets.

How to Do It Right

I’ll have more details in The Keto Reset Diet book, but there are right ways and wrong ways to do keto. What’s wrong or right is contextual, of course. It depends on several factors.

If you’re part of a small group that uses keto to keep seizures at bay, or treat serious neurological diseases, you’ll want to diligently maintain high blood ketone levels. That means sticking to very-low-carb (5-10% of calories) and low/moderate protein (10-15% of calories). But even then, modified ketogenic diets with slightly higher carbs and relaxed protein intakes are also effective against epilepsy.

If you’re doing keto for general health or weight loss, you can handle more protein and still remain in ketosis. Protein will help stave off the muscle loss, and, because calories are reduced, you can handle a bit more protein without interfering with ketosis. An older ketogenic diet study in obese subjects shows that 50% protein diets are highly ketogenic as long as calories are kept low. And in another study, subjects eating a weight-maintaining ketogenic diet ate up to 129 grams of protein without leaving ketosis (129 grams is fairly high).

If you’re trying to lose weight, artificially boosting ketones won’t accelerate the process. Higher ketones do not enhance fat loss, but they may indicate it’s taking place.

How to Make Keto Work

Ketogenic dieting is a big jump for some people. You’re literally switching over to a new metabolic substrate. That can take some getting used to. Make sure you are well-prepared with a Primal-aligned eating pattern in place for ideally several months before you ponder a journey into nutritional ketosis.

Make a minimum commitment to six weeks of nutritional ketosis. The first three weeks will be the most difficult as you transition to new fuel sources, but then you can expect breakthroughs. Some serious athletes may experience a temporary performance dip in the early weeks, but then will come back strong after 4 weeks and beyond. Once you get to the six-week mark, the metabolic machinery is in place, and it’s hard to reverse the adaptation. Extra mitochondria don’t just disappear.

Get plenty of electrolytes. You’ll want lots of sodium, magnesium, and potassium. Try 4.5 grams sodium (about 2 teaspoons of fine salt or a little under 3 teaspoons of kosher salt), 300-400 mg magnesium, and 1-2 grams of potassium each day on top of your normal food. Going keto really flushes out water weight, and tons of electrolytes leave with it.

Eat fat, but don’t be crazy about it. Just because a ketogenic diet is a high-fat diet doesn’t mean you should eat ungodly amounts of fat. Being ketogenic is more about not eating carbohydrates than it is eating as much fat as you possibly can.

Eating extra fat in the first 4-7 days can accelerate keto-adaptation by increasing AMPK signaling. Dial it down after.

Lift heavy things. A common criticism of ketogenic diets is that they cause loss of lean mass. This isn’t totally unfounded. If your ketogenic diet reduces appetite so much that you undereat, you might lose muscle. If you’re on a super-low-protein ketogenic diet, you might lose muscle. Lifting weights prevents these issues by sending an anabolic signal to your muscles and allowing the consumption of more protein without hampering ketosis. 

Do lots of low level aerobic activity. Walk, hike, jog, cycle, row. Keep things in the aerobic HR zone (under 180 minus age in heart beats per minute), and you’ll increase your utilization of body fat, which will speed up ketone production and adaptation.

Eat vegetables. The vast majority of vegetables are keto-friendly. Not only do they provide important micronutrients and phytonutrients, they provide negligible amounts of carbohydrates.

Eat berries. Raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, and blueberries are all quite low in glycemic load and extremely high in phytonutrients. While eating a flat of strawberries isn’t very ketogenic, a large bowlful won’t knock you out.

Eat fiber. Many people on ketogenic diets tend to ignore or malign fiber. That’s a mistake. First, fiber doesn’t digest into glucose. It doesn’t “count.” Second, fiber feeds your gut biome, providing fermentable substrate for your gut bacteria to turn into beneficial short chain fatty acids and to provide support to your immune system.

How to Know if You’re Ketogenic

You can test your blood, urine, or breath ketones. There are drawbacks to each, and unless you have a medical condition necessitating a specific level of ketones, obsessive testing may be unnecessary/unwise/expensive. Forget the inexpensive urine strips, as they measure only what you excrete, not what you are making and burning.

Once you’re keto-adapted and naturally good at burning fat, the ketone measuring devices might not put up impressive numbers. That’s because, after weeks in ketosis, you have built enough metabolic machinery in your muscles that they run extremely well on free fatty acids and don’t require much additional fuel from glucose or ketones. You’re still making ketones, since your brain can’t run on fatty acids and needs them to offset the glucose that isn’t coming, but your muscles no longer require them. Many people who have been in long term ketosis can get by quite nicely on 20-30 net grams of carbs a day and might only show .4 or .7 millimolar ketones on a blood test, but they have plenty of energy from burning free fatty acids and maintain muscle mass on relatively fewer calories than when they were dependent on carbs. Few people understand this, but it’s a major benefit of keto-adaptation. You might even say that ketogenic diets are ultimately about becoming free fatty acid-adapted.

Instead of objective numbers, I prefer to go by symptoms and signs. Since you’re trying to divine what works best for you, relying on the subjective signs and symptoms you experience is perfectly legitimate. These include:

Reduced urge to snack: Being ketone-adapted means you’re less reliant on outside calories.

Steady energy: When I’m feeling full of relaxed energy, calm but not sleepy, I know I’m in ketosis.

You may have heard talk about the dreaded ketone breath, caused by the presence of the metabolite acetone (the breakdown product of the ketone bodies acetoacetate and beta-hydroxybutyrate). A sweet and fruity odor to your exhalations is a reliable indicator that you are in a state of ketosis, but it’s also a likely indicator that you are not yet super efficient at burning ketones. Don’t worry, that will come in short order.

So, are carbs out forever? What if you want to incorporate carbs for high intensity performance while maintaining the benefits of ketosis?

First of all, it may not make much of a difference if you’re just strength training. A series of recent studies looked at the effects of introducing carbs into a ketogenic diet in resistance trained adults, finding little to no benefit.

Carbs likely will help certain populations, namely CrossFitters, sprinters, and anyone else engaged in intense glycolytic work. But even then, being keto-adapted reduces the amount of glycogen you’ll use for a given intensity —so err on the side of fewer carbs and eat only as many as you actually earn.

There are two basic ways to construct a ketogenic diet that includes carbs: with one big weekly carb load (the classic CKD) or multiple smaller carb loads adjacent to training sessions (often called the targeted ketogenic diet, or TKD).

On a CKD, you spend the majority of the week and your workouts in ketosis and devote a day or a pair of days to eat lots of carbs. You might be ketogenic Monday through Friday, exercising all the while and capping the work week off with a really intense glycogen-depleting training session, then go..

[sportsandfitnessinfo]

New Post has been published on http://fitnessandhealthpros.com/fitness/5-obscure-nutrients-why-we-need-them-and-how-grok-got-them/

5 Obscure Nutrients: Why We Need Them and How Grok Got Them

Everyone reading this knows about the macronutrients. You’re all eating enough protein, fat, carbs, and the various sub-categories, like fiber, omega-3s, MUFAs, SFAs, linoleic acid, and so on. You know the major micronutrients, like magnesium, calcium, vitamin B12, and most of the minor (but still vital) ones, like plant polyphenols, iodine, and vitamin K2. Today I’ll be talking about the truly obscure nutrients. The ones health food hipsters were super into like, five years ago (“I’m taking beta-1,3-glucan, you probably haven’t heard of it, there’s only one group at Hokkaido University doing any research, you can only get it off the DarkNet using bitcoins”). The ones Grok was super into like, 50,000 years ago.

What are they, what do they do for us, and, if they’re so great, how did Grok obtain them?

Beta-glucans

Beta-glucans are fibrous carbohydrates that make up the cell walls of certain organisms. They’re found in oats, yeasts, and—most relevant to you—mushrooms. Rather than just provide colonic bulk or prebiotic substrate, what makes beta-glucans so uniquely attractive is their ability to modulate the immune system.

Given to critically-ill patients on enteral feeding, they reduced CRP and improved immune function.

They may improve the immune system’s ability to fight tumors.

According to a recent survey of wild and cultivated mushrooms, both types contain appreciable levels of beta-glucans. Were our hunter-gatherer ancestors eating mushrooms? Almost certainly. Recent research into dental residues found that Neanderthals living in Spain ate gray shag mushrooms. They may even have used mushrooms for their medicinal properties, as gray shag contains an antimicrobial protein.

Phosphatidylserine

One of the hardest words in the English language to type, phosphatidylserine is probably my favorite stress-fighter. The body doesn’t make much of it and stress depletes what little we have. PS works on both mental and physical stress, improving mood and blunting cortisol after physical exercise. (And, yes, it’s why I include PS in Primal Calm.) Older folks in particular seem to benefit from PS, enjoying boosts to memory and cognitive function. Kids with ADHD show better attention when given PS, especially paired with fish oil.

After refined soy lecithin, an industrial product Grok never would have had access to, the best source of PS is ruminant brain. If that sounds like an arcane, unrealistic food source, guess again. Before we were top hunters, we scavenged. We ate the stuff the top carnivores couldn’t, like load-bearing bones and heads, both of which we’d shatter with rocks to obtain the marrow and brains inside. After brain, which is no longer available due to Mad Cow disease worries, the best sources are cold water mackerel, herring, and chicken hearts. A 100 gram (3.5 oz) serving of any of them will give you between 400-700 mg of PS, which matches or exceeds the dosages used in the studies.

Inositol

To give you an idea of inositol’s importance, it used to be called vitamin B8. To give you explicit details of insoitol’s importance, I’ll discuss some research.

High dose inositol can reduce anxiety, even comparing favorably with some pharmaceuticals. It can also reduce insulin resistance and improve fertility in women with PCOS.

If you’ve got the right gut bacteria—and since Grok spent his entire life immersed in a decidedly un-sterile world of dirt and bugs and animal guts, he likely did—you can even convert phytic acid into inositol. Or, rather, they can. That means nuts and seeds effectively become good sources of inositol, provided you train your gut bacteria to make the conversion.

Beta-alanine/Carnosine

Carnosine is woefully underrated. Found abundantly in meat, it’s a combo of the amino acids beta-alanine and histidine. We can synthesize it in our bodies, but in-house synthesis isn’t always up to par. And if it is, adequate isn’t always optimal.

High levels of carnosine are linked to muscle endurance and it acts as an antioxidant in the brain. There’s something called chicken extract that can enhance mood and reduce anxiety, and speed up recovery from stress-related fatigue, and it’s basically a carnosine supplement.

There’s some evidence that taking beta-alanine as a precursor is more effective at increasing muscle carnosine content than taking carnosine itself. We can absorb carnosine, but it doesn’t seem to increase serum levels. Beta-alanine is one of the fitness supplements with the most support in the literature. If you can get past the pins and needles feeling it provokes, beta-alanine can provide:

Either way, you could just eat meat, the ultimate source of both beta-alanine and pre-formed carnosine. People with a history of athletics have higher muscle carnosine levels than non athletes, and researchers suspect this might be due to the former’s higher meat intakes.

Alpha-Lipoic Acid (ALA)

ALA is created in the mitochondria (especially liver mitochondria) to assist in the creation of various mitochondrial enzymes and Acetyl-COA, which we need to metabolize fats, protein, and carbohydrates. In short, we use ALA to produce cellular energy and maintain cellular function. It’s extremely important.

Yes, we make it. We can still use some extra, some of us more than others.

Diabetics: ALA has also been shown to prevent the descent from glucose intolerance into full-blown type 2 diabetes and increase insulin sensitivity in type 2 diabetics. It may even reduce diabetic neuropathic pain.

Oxidative stress: In patients with metabolic syndrome and endothelial dysfunction, 300 mg/day reduced several markers of inflammation and improved vasodilation. In healthy exercising men, it reduced lipid peroxidation and increased glutathione.

Kidney has between 3-4 mcg of ALA for every gram. Liver, around 1-2 mcg/g and beef heart, about 1 mcg/g. Spinach, tomato, and broccoli are the best sources of ALA in the vegetable kingdom. If you try to get ALA through food, you’re looking at a dose far smaller than you’d get through supplementation, and far smaller than the doses used in research. Then again, the amount of oxidative stress we face as modern humans is unprecedented, whether it’s from the diets we eat, the psychological stress we undergo, the exercise we don’t get, the lack of sleep, the absence of meaning, the loneliness, the disjointed manner in which so many of us lead our lives. Hunter-gatherers by and large didn’t have these problems. They had other problems, more immediate ones. But they weren’t bogged down by the chronic oxidative stress that requires supplementation.

You’ve probably noticed that the research I cite to support the importance of these obscure nutrients almost always uses supplemental doses unachievable through natural sources. Does this mean we can’t benefit from taking them?

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate a wider variety of plants, all wild. Wild plants are exposed to more environmental stressors than domesticated plants. To stay robust and survive, the wild plants produce higher levels of polyphenols. They were effectively consuming superfoods in every bite. Supplements can play that role.

Our ancestors lived lives punctuated by short bouts of extreme stress. If they survived, they were more resistant to future stressors, with less inflammation. We don’t have that. We have chronic stress that breaks us down, makes us more vulnerable to future stressors, with more inflammation. If we want similar stress resistance, we must manufacture it and then make sure we get ample recovery time, all while getting a handle on the chronic stress. Supplements can help with that.

Our ancestors likely didn’t deal with the kind of existential crises and psychosocial stress we embroil ourselves in. They break us down and deplete reserves of critical nutrients required for stress resistance. Supplements can replenish them.

If I’ve done my job, you’ll be rushing out in the next few hours to grab chicken hearts, kidneys, almonds and Brazil nuts from the grocery store and forage for mushrooms out in the woods. Right?

Thanks for reading, everyone.

What are your favorite nutrients that few people know about (or ones you’d like me to write about in the future)? What vitamin, mineral, or phytonutrient were you taking before it was cool? Take care.

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Originally at :Mark's Daily Apple Written By : Mark Sisson

#Grok, #Need, #Nutrients, #Obscure, #Them #Fitness

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5 Obscure Nutrients: Why We Need Them and How Grok Got Them

Everyone reading this knows about the macronutrients. You’re all eating enough protein, fat, carbs, and the various sub-categories, like fiber, omega-3s, MUFAs, SFAs, linoleic acid, and so on. You know the major micronutrients, like magnesium, calcium, vitamin B12, and most of the minor (but still vital) ones, like plant polyphenols, iodine, and vitamin K2. Today I’ll be talking about the truly obscure nutrients. The ones health food hipsters were super into like, five years ago (“I’m taking beta-1,3-glucan, you probably haven’t heard of it, there’s only one group at Hokkaido University doing any research, you can only get it off the DarkNet using bitcoins”). The ones Grok was super into like, 50,000 years ago.

What are they, what do they do for us, and, if they’re so great, how did Grok obtain them?

Beta-glucans

Beta-glucans are fibrous carbohydrates that make up the cell walls of certain organisms. They’re found in oats, yeasts, and—most relevant to you—mushrooms. Rather than just provide colonic bulk or prebiotic substrate, what makes beta-glucans so uniquely attractive is their ability to modulate the immune system.

Given to critically-ill patients on enteral feeding, they reduced CRP and improved immune function.

They may improve the immune system’s ability to fight tumors.

According to a recent survey of wild and cultivated mushrooms, both types contain appreciable levels of beta-glucans. Were our hunter-gatherer ancestors eating mushrooms? Almost certainly. Recent research into dental residues found that Neanderthals living in Spain ate gray shag mushrooms. They may even have used mushrooms for their medicinal properties, as gray shag contains an antimicrobial protein.

Phosphatidylserine

One of the hardest words in the English language to type, phosphatidylserine is probably my favorite stress-fighter. The body doesn’t make much of it and stress depletes what little we have. PS works on both mental and physical stress, improving mood and blunting cortisol after physical exercise. (And, yes, it’s why I include PS in Primal Calm.) Older folks in particular seem to benefit from PS, enjoying boosts to memory and cognitive function. Kids with ADHD show better attention when given PS, especially paired with fish oil.

After refined soy lecithin, an industrial product Grok never would have had access to, the best source of PS is ruminant brain. If that sounds like an arcane, unrealistic food source, guess again. Before we were top hunters, we scavenged. We ate the stuff the top carnivores couldn’t, like load-bearing bones and heads, both of which we’d shatter with rocks to obtain the marrow and brains inside. After brain, which is no longer available due to Mad Cow disease worries, the best sources are cold water mackerel, herring, and chicken hearts. A 100 gram (3.5 oz) serving of any of them will give you between 400-700 mg of PS, which matches or exceeds the dosages used in the studies.

Inositol

To give you an idea of inositol’s importance, it used to be called vitamin B8. To give you explicit details of insoitol’s importance, I’ll discuss some research.

High dose inositol can reduce anxiety, even comparing favorably with some pharmaceuticals. It can also reduce insulin resistance and improve fertility in women with PCOS.

If you’ve got the right gut bacteria—and since Grok spent his entire life immersed in a decidedly un-sterile world of dirt and bugs and animal guts, he likely did—you can even convert phytic acid into inositol. Or, rather, they can. That means nuts and seeds effectively become good sources of inositol, provided you train your gut bacteria to make the conversion.

Beta-alanine/Carnosine

Carnosine is woefully underrated. Found abundantly in meat, it’s a combo of the amino acids beta-alanine and histidine. We can synthesize it in our bodies, but in-house synthesis isn’t always up to par. And if it is, adequate isn’t always optimal.

High levels of carnosine are linked to muscle endurance and it acts as an antioxidant in the brain. There’s something called chicken extract that can enhance mood and reduce anxiety, and speed up recovery from stress-related fatigue, and it’s basically a carnosine supplement.

There’s some evidence that taking beta-alanine as a precursor is more effective at increasing muscle carnosine content than taking carnosine itself. We can absorb carnosine, but it doesn’t seem to increase serum levels. Beta-alanine is one of the fitness supplements with the most support in the literature. If you can get past the pins and needles feeling it provokes, beta-alanine can provide:

Improved muscle endurance.

More anaerobic (sprints, high intensity output) capacity.

More lean mass (perhaps by increasing the amount of work you’re able to complete).

Either way, you could just eat meat, the ultimate source of both beta-alanine and pre-formed carnosine. People with a history of athletics have higher muscle carnosine levels than non athletes, and researchers suspect this might be due to the former’s higher meat intakes.

Alpha-Lipoic Acid (ALA)

ALA is created in the mitochondria (especially liver mitochondria) to assist in the creation of various mitochondrial enzymes and Acetyl-COA, which we need to metabolize fats, protein, and carbohydrates. In short, we use ALA to produce cellular energy and maintain cellular function. It’s extremely important.

Yes, we make it. We can still use some extra, some of us more than others.

Diabetics: ALA has also been shown to prevent the descent from glucose intolerance into full-blown type 2 diabetes and increase insulin sensitivity in type 2 diabetics. It may even reduce diabetic neuropathic pain.

Oxidative stress: In patients with metabolic syndrome and endothelial dysfunction, 300 mg/day reduced several markers of inflammation and improved vasodilation. In healthy exercising men, it reduced lipid peroxidation and increased glutathione.

Kidney has between 3-4 mcg of ALA for every gram. Liver, around 1-2 mcg/g and beef heart, about 1 mcg/g. Spinach, tomato, and broccoli are the best sources of ALA in the vegetable kingdom. If you try to get ALA through food, you’re looking at a dose far smaller than you’d get through supplementation, and far smaller than the doses used in research. Then again, the amount of oxidative stress we face as modern humans is unprecedented, whether it’s from the diets we eat, the psychological stress we undergo, the exercise we don’t get, the lack of sleep, the absence of meaning, the loneliness, the disjointed manner in which so many of us lead our lives. Hunter-gatherers by and large didn’t have these problems. They had other problems, more immediate ones. But they weren’t bogged down by the chronic oxidative stress that requires supplementation.

You’ve probably noticed that the research I cite to support the importance of these obscure nutrients almost always uses supplemental doses unachievable through natural sources. Does this mean we can’t benefit from taking them?

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate a wider variety of plants, all wild. Wild plants are exposed to more environmental stressors than domesticated plants. To stay robust and survive, the wild plants produce higher levels of polyphenols. They were effectively consuming superfoods in every bite. Supplements can play that role.

Our ancestors lived lives punctuated by short bouts of extreme stress. If they survived, they were more resistant to future stressors, with less inflammation. We don’t have that. We have chronic stress that breaks us down, makes us more vulnerable to future stressors, with more inflammation. If we want similar stress resistance, we must manufacture it and then make sure we get ample recovery time, all while getting a handle on the chronic stress. Supplements can help with that.

Our ancestors likely didn’t deal with the kind of existential crises and psychosocial stress we embroil ourselves in. They break us down and deplete reserves of critical nutrients required for stress resistance. Supplements can replenish them.

If I’ve done my job, you’ll be rushing out in the next few hours to grab chicken hearts, kidneys, almonds and Brazil nuts from the grocery store and forage for mushrooms out in the woods. Right?

Thanks for reading, everyone.

What are your favorite nutrients that few people know about (or ones you’d like me to write about in the future)? What vitamin, mineral, or phytonutrient were you taking before it was cool? Take care.

[fishermariawo]

5 Obscure Nutrients: Why We Need Them and How Grok Got Them

Everyone reading this knows about the macronutrients. You’re all eating enough protein, fat, carbs, and the various sub-categories, like fiber, omega-3s, MUFAs, SFAs, linoleic acid, and so on. You know the major micronutrients, like magnesium, calcium, vitamin B12, and most of the minor (but still vital) ones, like plant polyphenols, iodine, and vitamin K2. Today I’ll be talking about the truly obscure nutrients. The ones health food hipsters were super into like, five years ago (“I’m taking beta-1,3-glucan, you probably haven’t heard of it, there’s only one group at Hokkaido University doing any research, you can only get it off the DarkNet using bitcoins”). The ones Grok was super into like, 50,000 years ago.

What are they, what do they do for us, and, if they’re so great, how did Grok obtain them?

Beta-glucans

Beta-glucans are fibrous carbohydrates that make up the cell walls of certain organisms. They’re found in oats, yeasts, and—most relevant to you—mushrooms. Rather than just provide colonic bulk or prebiotic substrate, what makes beta-glucans so uniquely attractive is their ability to modulate the immune system.

Given to critically-ill patients on enteral feeding, they reduced CRP and improved immune function.

They may improve the immune system’s ability to fight tumors.

According to a recent survey of wild and cultivated mushrooms, both types contain appreciable levels of beta-glucans. Were our hunter-gatherer ancestors eating mushrooms? Almost certainly. Recent research into dental residues found that Neanderthals living in Spain ate gray shag mushrooms. They may even have used mushrooms for their medicinal properties, as gray shag contains an antimicrobial protein.

Phosphatidylserine

One of the hardest words in the English language to type, phosphatidylserine is probably my favorite stress-fighter. The body doesn’t make much of it and stress depletes what little we have. PS works on both mental and physical stress, improving mood and blunting cortisol after physical exercise. (And, yes, it’s why I include PS in Primal Calm.) Older folks in particular seem to benefit from PS, enjoying boosts to memory and cognitive function. Kids with ADHD show better attention when given PS, especially paired with fish oil.

After refined soy lecithin, an industrial product Grok never would have had access to, the best source of PS is ruminant brain. If that sounds like an arcane, unrealistic food source, guess again. Before we were top hunters, we scavenged. We ate the stuff the top carnivores couldn’t, like load-bearing bones and heads, both of which we’d shatter with rocks to obtain the marrow and brains inside. After brain, which is no longer available due to Mad Cow disease worries, the best sources are cold water mackerel, herring, and chicken hearts. A 100 gram (3.5 oz) serving of any of them will give you between 400-700 mg of PS, which matches or exceeds the dosages used in the studies.

Inositol

To give you an idea of inositol’s importance, it used to be called vitamin B8. To give you explicit details of insoitol’s importance, I’ll discuss some research.

High dose inositol can reduce anxiety, even comparing favorably with some pharmaceuticals. It can also reduce insulin resistance and improve fertility in women with PCOS.

If you’ve got the right gut bacteria—and since Grok spent his entire life immersed in a decidedly un-sterile world of dirt and bugs and animal guts, he likely did—you can even convert phytic acid into inositol. Or, rather, they can. That means nuts and seeds effectively become good sources of inositol, provided you train your gut bacteria to make the conversion.

Beta-alanine/Carnosine

Carnosine is woefully underrated. Found abundantly in meat, it’s a combo of the amino acids beta-alanine and histidine. We can synthesize it in our bodies, but in-house synthesis isn’t always up to par. And if it is, adequate isn’t always optimal.

High levels of carnosine are linked to muscle endurance and it acts as an antioxidant in the brain. There’s something called chicken extract that can enhance mood and reduce anxiety, and speed up recovery from stress-related fatigue, and it’s basically a carnosine supplement.

There’s some evidence that taking beta-alanine as a precursor is more effective at increasing muscle carnosine content than taking carnosine itself. We can absorb carnosine, but it doesn’t seem to increase serum levels. Beta-alanine is one of the fitness supplements with the most support in the literature. If you can get past the pins and needles feeling it provokes, beta-alanine can provide:

Improved muscle endurance.

More anaerobic (sprints, high intensity output) capacity.

More lean mass (perhaps by increasing the amount of work you’re able to complete).

Either way, you could just eat meat, the ultimate source of both beta-alanine and pre-formed carnosine. People with a history of athletics have higher muscle carnosine levels than non athletes, and researchers suspect this might be due to the former’s higher meat intakes.

Alpha-Lipoic Acid (ALA)

ALA is created in the mitochondria (especially liver mitochondria) to assist in the creation of various mitochondrial enzymes and Acetyl-COA, which we need to metabolize fats, protein, and carbohydrates. In short, we use ALA to produce cellular energy and maintain cellular function. It’s extremely important.

Yes, we make it. We can still use some extra, some of us more than others.

Diabetics: ALA has also been shown to prevent the descent from glucose intolerance into full-blown type 2 diabetes and increase insulin sensitivity in type 2 diabetics. It may even reduce diabetic neuropathic pain.

Oxidative stress: In patients with metabolic syndrome and endothelial dysfunction, 300 mg/day reduced several markers of inflammation and improved vasodilation. In healthy exercising men, it reduced lipid peroxidation and increased glutathione.

Kidney has between 3-4 mcg of ALA for every gram. Liver, around 1-2 mcg/g and beef heart, about 1 mcg/g. Spinach, tomato, and broccoli are the best sources of ALA in the vegetable kingdom. If you try to get ALA through food, you’re looking at a dose far smaller than you’d get through supplementation, and far smaller than the doses used in research. Then again, the amount of oxidative stress we face as modern humans is unprecedented, whether it’s from the diets we eat, the psychological stress we undergo, the exercise we don’t get, the lack of sleep, the absence of meaning, the loneliness, the disjointed manner in which so many of us lead our lives. Hunter-gatherers by and large didn’t have these problems. They had other problems, more immediate ones. But they weren’t bogged down by the chronic oxidative stress that requires supplementation.

You’ve probably noticed that the research I cite to support the importance of these obscure nutrients almost always uses supplemental doses unachievable through natural sources. Does this mean we can’t benefit from taking them?

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate a wider variety of plants, all wild. Wild plants are exposed to more environmental stressors than domesticated plants. To stay robust and survive, the wild plants produce higher levels of polyphenols. They were effectively consuming superfoods in every bite. Supplements can play that role.

Our ancestors lived lives punctuated by short bouts of extreme stress. If they survived, they were more resistant to future stressors, with less inflammation. We don’t have that. We have chronic stress that breaks us down, makes us more vulnerable to future stressors, with more inflammation. If we want similar stress resistance, we must manufacture it and then make sure we get ample recovery time, all while getting a handle on the chronic stress. Supplements can help with that.

Our ancestors likely didn’t deal with the kind of existential crises and psychosocial stress we embroil ourselves in. They break us down and deplete reserves of critical nutrients required for stress resistance. Supplements can replenish them.

If I’ve done my job, you’ll be rushing out in the next few hours to grab chicken hearts, kidneys, almonds and Brazil nuts from the grocery store and forage for mushrooms out in the woods. Right?

Thanks for reading, everyone.

What are your favorite nutrients that few people know about (or ones you’d like me to write about in the future)? What vitamin, mineral, or phytonutrient were you taking before it was cool? Take care.

[milenasanchezmk]

5 Obscure Nutrients: Why We Need Them and How Grok Got Them

Everyone reading this knows about the macronutrients. You’re all eating enough protein, fat, carbs, and the various sub-categories, like fiber, omega-3s, MUFAs, SFAs, linoleic acid, and so on. You know the major micronutrients, like magnesium, calcium, vitamin B12, and most of the minor (but still vital) ones, like plant polyphenols, iodine, and vitamin K2. Today I’ll be talking about the truly obscure nutrients. The ones health food hipsters were super into like, five years ago (“I’m taking beta-1,3-glucan, you probably haven’t heard of it, there’s only one group at Hokkaido University doing any research, you can only get it off the DarkNet using bitcoins”). The ones Grok was super into like, 50,000 years ago.

What are they, what do they do for us, and, if they’re so great, how did Grok obtain them?

Beta-glucans

Beta-glucans are fibrous carbohydrates that make up the cell walls of certain organisms. They’re found in oats, yeasts, and—most relevant to you—mushrooms. Rather than just provide colonic bulk or prebiotic substrate, what makes beta-glucans so uniquely attractive is their ability to modulate the immune system.

Given to critically-ill patients on enteral feeding, they reduced CRP and improved immune function.

They may improve the immune system’s ability to fight tumors.

According to a recent survey of wild and cultivated mushrooms, both types contain appreciable levels of beta-glucans. Were our hunter-gatherer ancestors eating mushrooms? Almost certainly. Recent research into dental residues found that Neanderthals living in Spain ate gray shag mushrooms. They may even have used mushrooms for their medicinal properties, as gray shag contains an antimicrobial protein.

Phosphatidylserine

One of the hardest words in the English language to type, phosphatidylserine is probably my favorite stress-fighter. The body doesn’t make much of it and stress depletes what little we have. PS works on both mental and physical stress, improving mood and blunting cortisol after physical exercise. (And, yes, it’s why I include PS in Primal Calm.) Older folks in particular seem to benefit from PS, enjoying boosts to memory and cognitive function. Kids with ADHD show better attention when given PS, especially paired with fish oil.

After refined soy lecithin, an industrial product Grok never would have had access to, the best source of PS is ruminant brain. If that sounds like an arcane, unrealistic food source, guess again. Before we were top hunters, we scavenged. We ate the stuff the top carnivores couldn’t, like load-bearing bones and heads, both of which we’d shatter with rocks to obtain the marrow and brains inside. After brain, which is no longer available due to Mad Cow disease worries, the best sources are cold water mackerel, herring, and chicken hearts. A 100 gram (3.5 oz) serving of any of them will give you between 400-700 mg of PS, which matches or exceeds the dosages used in the studies.

Inositol

To give you an idea of inositol’s importance, it used to be called vitamin B8. To give you explicit details of insoitol’s importance, I’ll discuss some research.

High dose inositol can reduce anxiety, even comparing favorably with some pharmaceuticals. It can also reduce insulin resistance and improve fertility in women with PCOS.

If you’ve got the right gut bacteria—and since Grok spent his entire life immersed in a decidedly un-sterile world of dirt and bugs and animal guts, he likely did—you can even convert phytic acid into inositol. Or, rather, they can. That means nuts and seeds effectively become good sources of inositol, provided you train your gut bacteria to make the conversion.

Beta-alanine/Carnosine

Carnosine is woefully underrated. Found abundantly in meat, it’s a combo of the amino acids beta-alanine and histidine. We can synthesize it in our bodies, but in-house synthesis isn’t always up to par. And if it is, adequate isn’t always optimal.

High levels of carnosine are linked to muscle endurance and it acts as an antioxidant in the brain. There’s something called chicken extract that can enhance mood and reduce anxiety, and speed up recovery from stress-related fatigue, and it’s basically a carnosine supplement.

There’s some evidence that taking beta-alanine as a precursor is more effective at increasing muscle carnosine content than taking carnosine itself. We can absorb carnosine, but it doesn’t seem to increase serum levels. Beta-alanine is one of the fitness supplements with the most support in the literature. If you can get past the pins and needles feeling it provokes, beta-alanine can provide:

Improved muscle endurance.

More anaerobic (sprints, high intensity output) capacity.

More lean mass (perhaps by increasing the amount of work you’re able to complete).

Either way, you could just eat meat, the ultimate source of both beta-alanine and pre-formed carnosine. People with a history of athletics have higher muscle carnosine levels than non athletes, and researchers suspect this might be due to the former’s higher meat intakes.

Alpha-Lipoic Acid (ALA)

ALA is created in the mitochondria (especially liver mitochondria) to assist in the creation of various mitochondrial enzymes and Acetyl-COA, which we need to metabolize fats, protein, and carbohydrates. In short, we use ALA to produce cellular energy and maintain cellular function. It’s extremely important.

Yes, we make it. We can still use some extra, some of us more than others.

Diabetics: ALA has also been shown to prevent the descent from glucose intolerance into full-blown type 2 diabetes and increase insulin sensitivity in type 2 diabetics. It may even reduce diabetic neuropathic pain.

Oxidative stress: In patients with metabolic syndrome and endothelial dysfunction, 300 mg/day reduced several markers of inflammation and improved vasodilation. In healthy exercising men, it reduced lipid peroxidation and increased glutathione.

Kidney has between 3-4 mcg of ALA for every gram. Liver, around 1-2 mcg/g and beef heart, about 1 mcg/g. Spinach, tomato, and broccoli are the best sources of ALA in the vegetable kingdom. If you try to get ALA through food, you’re looking at a dose far smaller than you’d get through supplementation, and far smaller than the doses used in research. Then again, the amount of oxidative stress we face as modern humans is unprecedented, whether it’s from the diets we eat, the psychological stress we undergo, the exercise we don’t get, the lack of sleep, the absence of meaning, the loneliness, the disjointed manner in which so many of us lead our lives. Hunter-gatherers by and large didn’t have these problems. They had other problems, more immediate ones. But they weren’t bogged down by the chronic oxidative stress that requires supplementation.

You’ve probably noticed that the research I cite to support the importance of these obscure nutrients almost always uses supplemental doses unachievable through natural sources. Does this mean we can’t benefit from taking them?

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate a wider variety of plants, all wild. Wild plants are exposed to more environmental stressors than domesticated plants. To stay robust and survive, the wild plants produce higher levels of polyphenols. They were effectively consuming superfoods in every bite. Supplements can play that role.

Our ancestors lived lives punctuated by short bouts of extreme stress. If they survived, they were more resistant to future stressors, with less inflammation. We don’t have that. We have chronic stress that breaks us down, makes us more vulnerable to future stressors, with more inflammation. If we want similar stress resistance, we must manufacture it and then make sure we get ample recovery time, all while getting a handle on the chronic stress. Supplements can help with that.

Our ancestors likely didn’t deal with the kind of existential crises and psychosocial stress we embroil ourselves in. They break us down and deplete reserves of critical nutrients required for stress resistance. Supplements can replenish them.

If I’ve done my job, you’ll be rushing out in the next few hours to grab chicken hearts, kidneys, almonds and Brazil nuts from the grocery store and forage for mushrooms out in the woods. Right?

Thanks for reading, everyone.

What are your favorite nutrients that few people know about (or ones you’d like me to write about in the future)? What vitamin, mineral, or phytonutrient were you taking before it was cool? Take care.

[watsonrodriquezie]

5 Obscure Nutrients: Why We Need Them and How Grok Got Them

Everyone reading this knows about the macronutrients. You’re all eating enough protein, fat, carbs, and the various sub-categories, like fiber, omega-3s, MUFAs, SFAs, linoleic acid, and so on. You know the major micronutrients, like magnesium, calcium, vitamin B12, and most of the minor (but still vital) ones, like plant polyphenols, iodine, and vitamin K2. Today I’ll be talking about the truly obscure nutrients. The ones health food hipsters were super into like, five years ago (“I’m taking beta-1,3-glucan, you probably haven’t heard of it, there’s only one group at Hokkaido University doing any research, you can only get it off the DarkNet using bitcoins”). The ones Grok was super into like, 50,000 years ago.

What are they, what do they do for us, and, if they’re so great, how did Grok obtain them?

Beta-glucans

Beta-glucans are fibrous carbohydrates that make up the cell walls of certain organisms. They’re found in oats, yeasts, and—most relevant to you—mushrooms. Rather than just provide colonic bulk or prebiotic substrate, what makes beta-glucans so uniquely attractive is their ability to modulate the immune system.

Given to critically-ill patients on enteral feeding, they reduced CRP and improved immune function.

They may improve the immune system’s ability to fight tumors.

According to a recent survey of wild and cultivated mushrooms, both types contain appreciable levels of beta-glucans. Were our hunter-gatherer ancestors eating mushrooms? Almost certainly. Recent research into dental residues found that Neanderthals living in Spain ate gray shag mushrooms. They may even have used mushrooms for their medicinal properties, as gray shag contains an antimicrobial protein.

Phosphatidylserine

One of the hardest words in the English language to type, phosphatidylserine is probably my favorite stress-fighter. The body doesn’t make much of it and stress depletes what little we have. PS works on both mental and physical stress, improving mood and blunting cortisol after physical exercise. (And, yes, it’s why I include PS in Primal Calm.) Older folks in particular seem to benefit from PS, enjoying boosts to memory and cognitive function. Kids with ADHD show better attention when given PS, especially paired with fish oil.

After refined soy lecithin, an industrial product Grok never would have had access to, the best source of PS is ruminant brain. If that sounds like an arcane, unrealistic food source, guess again. Before we were top hunters, we scavenged. We ate the stuff the top carnivores couldn’t, like load-bearing bones and heads, both of which we’d shatter with rocks to obtain the marrow and brains inside. After brain, which is no longer available due to Mad Cow disease worries, the best sources are cold water mackerel, herring, and chicken hearts. A 100 gram (3.5 oz) serving of any of them will give you between 400-700 mg of PS, which matches or exceeds the dosages used in the studies.

Inositol

To give you an idea of inositol’s importance, it used to be called vitamin B8. To give you explicit details of insoitol’s importance, I’ll discuss some research.

High dose inositol can reduce anxiety, even comparing favorably with some pharmaceuticals. It can also reduce insulin resistance and improve fertility in women with PCOS.

If you’ve got the right gut bacteria—and since Grok spent his entire life immersed in a decidedly un-sterile world of dirt and bugs and animal guts, he likely did—you can even convert phytic acid into inositol. Or, rather, they can. That means nuts and seeds effectively become good sources of inositol, provided you train your gut bacteria to make the conversion.

Beta-alanine/Carnosine

Carnosine is woefully underrated. Found abundantly in meat, it’s a combo of the amino acids beta-alanine and histidine. We can synthesize it in our bodies, but in-house synthesis isn’t always up to par. And if it is, adequate isn’t always optimal.

High levels of carnosine are linked to muscle endurance and it acts as an antioxidant in the brain. There’s something called chicken extract that can enhance mood and reduce anxiety, and speed up recovery from stress-related fatigue, and it’s basically a carnosine supplement.

There’s some evidence that taking beta-alanine as a precursor is more effective at increasing muscle carnosine content than taking carnosine itself. We can absorb carnosine, but it doesn’t seem to increase serum levels. Beta-alanine is one of the fitness supplements with the most support in the literature. If you can get past the pins and needles feeling it provokes, beta-alanine can provide:

Improved muscle endurance.

More anaerobic (sprints, high intensity output) capacity.

More lean mass (perhaps by increasing the amount of work you’re able to complete).

Either way, you could just eat meat, the ultimate source of both beta-alanine and pre-formed carnosine. People with a history of athletics have higher muscle carnosine levels than non athletes, and researchers suspect this might be due to the former’s higher meat intakes.

Alpha-Lipoic Acid (ALA)

ALA is created in the mitochondria (especially liver mitochondria) to assist in the creation of various mitochondrial enzymes and Acetyl-COA, which we need to metabolize fats, protein, and carbohydrates. In short, we use ALA to produce cellular energy and maintain cellular function. It’s extremely important.

Yes, we make it. We can still use some extra, some of us more than others.

Diabetics: ALA has also been shown to prevent the descent from glucose intolerance into full-blown type 2 diabetes and increase insulin sensitivity in type 2 diabetics. It may even reduce diabetic neuropathic pain.

Oxidative stress: In patients with metabolic syndrome and endothelial dysfunction, 300 mg/day reduced several markers of inflammation and improved vasodilation. In healthy exercising men, it reduced lipid peroxidation and increased glutathione.

Kidney has between 3-4 mcg of ALA for every gram. Liver, around 1-2 mcg/g and beef heart, about 1 mcg/g. Spinach, tomato, and broccoli are the best sources of ALA in the vegetable kingdom. If you try to get ALA through food, you’re looking at a dose far smaller than you’d get through supplementation, and far smaller than the doses used in research. Then again, the amount of oxidative stress we face as modern humans is unprecedented, whether it’s from the diets we eat, the psychological stress we undergo, the exercise we don’t get, the lack of sleep, the absence of meaning, the loneliness, the disjointed manner in which so many of us lead our lives. Hunter-gatherers by and large didn’t have these problems. They had other problems, more immediate ones. But they weren’t bogged down by the chronic oxidative stress that requires supplementation.

You’ve probably noticed that the research I cite to support the importance of these obscure nutrients almost always uses supplemental doses unachievable through natural sources. Does this mean we can’t benefit from taking them?

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate a wider variety of plants, all wild. Wild plants are exposed to more environmental stressors than domesticated plants. To stay robust and survive, the wild plants produce higher levels of polyphenols. They were effectively consuming superfoods in every bite. Supplements can play that role.

Our ancestors lived lives punctuated by short bouts of extreme stress. If they survived, they were more resistant to future stressors, with less inflammation. We don’t have that. We have chronic stress that breaks us down, makes us more vulnerable to future stressors, with more inflammation. If we want similar stress resistance, we must manufacture it and then make sure we get ample recovery time, all while getting a handle on the chronic stress. Supplements can help with that.

Our ancestors likely didn’t deal with the kind of existential crises and psychosocial stress we embroil ourselves in. They break us down and deplete reserves of critical nutrients required for stress resistance. Supplements can replenish them.

If I’ve done my job, you’ll be rushing out in the next few hours to grab chicken hearts, kidneys, almonds and Brazil nuts from the grocery store and forage for mushrooms out in the woods. Right?

Thanks for reading, everyone.

What are your favorite nutrients that few people know about (or ones you’d like me to write about in the future)? What vitamin, mineral, or phytonutrient were you taking before it was cool? Take care.