What is Keto diet (2023) – Is it good for you
What is Keto diet – healthy? table of content, Ketogenic diet , How it works, History of keto diet, weight loss, cancer, heart disease, Acne , Diabetes, Diet with care
What is the Keto diet – healthy? Table of content, Ketogenic diet, How it works, History of the keto diet, weight loss, cancer, heart disease, Acne, Diabetes, Diet with care
The ketogenic diet, “keto,” is a low-carb diet.
Some of you may cringe😬 and have your points: it’s just one more fad diet, too restrictive, difficult to maintain, and has many health concerns.
But let’s start by understanding what this way of eating is.
In our body, we have two types of fuels: sugar & fat, and our body can efficiently work on any of them.
The primary fuel is sugar(glucose), which we get from most of the foods we eat: – grains, pulses, and vegetables (fruits contain other sugar called fructose, which is slightly different, but later about it).
We have stored sugar in our liver and skeletal muscles as glycogen, which we use when we don’t have food for some time.
The second fuel is fat, which our body doesn’t give up so freely; it’s a stored fuel in case of more prolonged fasting. To use fat as fuel, the body should use up all blood sugar and glycogen stored in the liver.
An example of a person using fat as a fuel when we lose weight: we eat fewer calories, get some physical activity, tap into our fat depo, and burn fat.
But to get and stay in a state called “ketosis,” when we o use fats as a primary fuel, we need not only use all of our blood glucose and glycogen but keep our carbohydrates intake very low daily.
How It Works
When you eat less than 20-50 grams of carbs daily (depending on person to person), your body eventually runs out of fuel (blood sugar). This typically takes 3 to 4 days. Then you’ll start to break down fat for energy, which is called ketosis. So technically, the KETOGENIC diet is high fat, low carb, moderate protein diet.
HISTORY OF THE KETO DIET
Dietary adjustments and fasting were used for the treatment of epilepsy (a disease of the nervous system when a person gets convulsions/seizures) long before 500 B.C. In the 1920s, modern physicians noticed that when people fasted for a long time(30 and more days), they didn’t have episodes of seizures during this time. This effect was observed in up to 90% of children’s cases and up to 50-60% in older patients.
At that time, choice of anti-convulsants was limited, and the ketogenic diet was widely used for the treatment of such cases until new effective anti-convulsants were discovered and ketogenic diet use went way down….but as our poor eating habits and unhealthy food choices led to growing obesity people are in search of new effective weight loss strategies. Then Keto comes back into the picture. By 2020 it was the most popular diet for weight loss, but also highly criticized and got a bad reputation.
Weight Loss
The ketogenic diet’s “side effect” is that it may help you to lose more weight in the first 3 to 6 months than some other diets. It may be because it takes more calories to change fat into energy than it does to change carbs into energy. It’s also possible that a high-fat diet satisfies you more, so you eat less, but that has yet to be proven. Plus, you don’t feel that hungry for a longer period of time, like you do on a regular diet, and you always have enough fuel you can use( there are thousands of calories stored in the fat deposits of our body). In contrast, we can store only about 2000 calories as glycogen in our muscles and liver.
Cancer
Insulin is a hormone that lets your body use or store sugar as fuel. Ketogenic diets make you burn through this fuel quickly, so you don’t need to store it. It means your body needs and makes less insulin. Those lower levels may help protect you against some kinds of cancer or even slow the growth of cancer cells. More research is needed on this, though.
Heart Disease
It seems strange that a diet that calls for more fat can raise “good” cholesterol and lower “bad” cholesterol, but ketogenic diets are linked to just that. The lower levels of insulin that result from these diets can stop your body from making more cholesterol. That means you’re less likely to have high blood pressure, hardened arteries, heart failure, and other heart conditions.
Acne
Carbohydrates have been linked to this skin condition, so cutting down on them may help. And the drop in insulin that a ketogenic diet can trigger may also help stop acne breakouts. (Insulin can cause your body to make other hormones that bring on outbreaks.) Still, more research is needed to determine exactly how much effect, if any, the diet actually has on acne.
Diabetes
Low-carb diets help keep your blood sugar lower and more predictable than other diets. But when your body burns fat for energy, it makes compounds called ketones. If you have diabetes, particularly type 1, too many ketones in your blood can make you sick. So it’s very important to work with your doctor on any changes in your diet.
Other Nervous System Disorders
These affect your brain and spine, as well as the nerves that link them together. Epilepsy is one, but others may be helped by a ketogenic diet as well, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and sleep disorders. Scientists aren’t sure why, but the ketones your body makes when it breaks down fat for energy help protect your brain cells from damage.
Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS)
This is when a woman’s ovaries get larger than they should be, and tiny fluid-filled sacs form around the eggs. High levels of insulin can cause it. Ketogenic diets, which lower both the amount of insulin you make and the amount you need, may help treat it, along with other lifestyle changes, like exercise and weight loss.
Exercise
A ketogenic diet may help endurance athletes — runners and cyclists, for example — when they train. Over time, it helps your muscle-to-fat ratio and raises the amount of oxygen your body is able to use when it’s working hard. But while it might help in training, other diets may work better for peak performance.
Side Effects
The more common ones aren’t usually serious: you might have constipation, indigestion, and heaviness in your stomach after meals due to high-fat content. Much less often, low-carb diets can lead to kidney stones. Other side effects can include the “keto flu” due to electrolyte imbalance. Symptoms may include headache, giddiness, weakness, and irritability and can be easily treated with more salts in your diet. In the initial stages of starting the keto diet, you may have bad breath and increased fatigue.
Diet With Care
When your body burns it fat stores, it can be hard on your kidneys.
And starting a ketogenic diet -or going back to a normal diet afterward — can be tricky if you’re obese because of other health issues you’re likely to have, like diabetes, a heart condition, or high blood pressure. If you have any of these conditions, make diet changes slowly and only with the guidance of your doctor.
