HIGH PROTEIN VS HIGH HEALTHY FAT - KETOGENIC DIET (PART 1)
When it comes to eating a healthy diet, I’ve been following biochemical principles for years (how the body function at the cellular level) in recommending the best diet for my clients. If you follow my posts, you already know that I support eating healthy fats… and lots of them with exceptions for certain conditions.
Recommending a high healthy fat, moderate protein, and low carbohydrate diet is the approach I most often recommend to my clients. This approach offers the best overall metabolically balanced approach where I have seen the most successes in addressing various health conditions from cancer, auto-immune conditions, heart diseases, blood sugar control, blood pressure control, menopause, and other hormone dysfunctions, fat loss, and many more.
Aging can be considered to be a competition between damage and repair of damage at the cellular level. If we could repair as quickly as the damage is occurring we would live forever. Oxidation is what makes us age/degenerate and when you hear about “antioxidants”, these are meant to stop the oxidative process from happening….and I would say….sarcastically….the best antioxidant is to not breathe. In the food industry, they call food that oxidizes, “going rancid”. When glucose, protein, and DNA together go bad, it’s called “caramelization”. So with age, we go rancid and caramelize….that’s the how!
“Repairing damage” is where we can apply diet principles to slow it down. All lives have mechanisms within themselves to repair and protect. Something has to keep it all together and the most important metabolic pathway is called the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) and it decides IF cells mutate/multiply or if it will repair.
Excessive protein intake in your diet shuts down autophagy and increases cancer risk by stimulating mTOR. Hence, eating large amounts of protein is one of the quickest ways to shut down autophagy, which prevents your body from effectively cleaning out debris inside damaged cells and “repairing the damage”. According to Dr. Rosedale, even if you do everything else right by keeping glucose and insulin low, your mTOR would still be elevated if you eat too much protein.
It isn’t ketogenesis, really, that we’re after,” it’s fat burning. They’re not the same. You can have a ketogenic diet by eating lots of protein. It isn’t the ketones, necessarily, that gives you the benefit, it’s the fact that you’re burning fat, and the ketones are a by-product. So you have to specify if you’re going to promote a ketogenic diet that is a high-fat ketogenic diet or high protein ketogenic diet. It’s really the burning of fat that’s of benefit. As a result, you’ll get ketones that your brain needs. A ketogenic diet is a healthy diet, but not because it’s ketogenic but because it’s an indication that you’re burning fat as your main source of energy and producing very low unhealthy by-products and low mTOR stimulation. Cyclical ketosis is by far the best approach to overall health. This is applied after a few weeks to a couple of months in ketosis where you drop in and out of ketosis by adding quality carbohydrates found mainly in fibrous vegetables, low sugar fruits and the occasional complex vegetable.
There are many Ketogenic Facebook Group encouraging daily consumption of bacon, sausages, full-fat dairy cream, 12oz steaks dripping with butter, and large amounts of cheeses, which I would not support as healthy guidelines. If you’re looking for guidance on how to incorporate healthy diet principles by using scientifically proven methods to regaining your health, please contact me to book a consult.
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Marie-Josée Brown, CHCP, ROHP www.ascendnl.com mjbrown@ascendnl.com 1-709-728-3001