The ketogenic diet is seeing a resurgence of late. I say resurgence because it is likely the diet we ate as early humans evolved to be what we are today. So, unlike the characterization many give it — a trendy diet with no long-term studies of what it will do to you — it is likely that we are here because of the ketogenic diet. Although, way back then, it was just called eating.
How to Start a Keto Diet: A Detailed Keto Diet Plan for Beginners
This is an interesting presentation by Dr Michael Eades that explains the evidence that we evolved on a low-carb, meat-based diet. Note: I use keto and low-carb somewhat interchangeably here since few people follow a medically controlled ketogenic diet.
In the embedded video, you’ll see that Homo Habilis (the early human branch that Homo Sapiens extends from) existed from about 2.4 million years ago, while grain agriculture has existed for only about 16,000 years — or less than 1% of what we can call “human existence.” Eades cites work by Blake Donaldson, who suggests that “during the millions of years that our ancestors lived by hunting, every weakling who could not maintain perfect health on [a diet of] fresh, fat meat and water was bred out.” Such were the harsh realities of early human life.
In fact, Dr Eades concludes we didn’t evolve to eat meat; we evolved because we ate meat.
If you are a geek, like me, you will find his discussion of Stable Isotope Analysis interesting — it’s evidence that we ate a meat-based diet in our early history. The overall finding of these analyses is that humans evolved on a diet of primary meat.
All this is just to bring home the point that no — the low-carb, keto diet, is NOT some new fad pulled out of thin air and a diet we have a little-to-no history with as a species. Rather, for 99.6% of our existence as a species; we ate a low-carb diet.
How to Start a Keto Diet: A Detailed Keto Diet Plan for Beginners
What it also brings to light is the limited context most doctors have when it comes to treating patients who are obese or overweight. Since most don’t read the Paleontology journals, they, along with many Nutritionists and Fitness professionals, see the ubiquitous high-carb diet as the diet we’ve always eaten. Probably, more accurately, they don’t really think of it much at all — they just see it as our default diet. But for Jarad Diamond, in his book Guns, Germs and Steel comments that “the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.”
With the above in mind, we can look at a keto, or any low-carb, diet in a context that is broader than just a strategy to lose weight.
Under the Radar
Most of the processes that go on in our bodies run at a level below our consciousness — and beyond our conscious internal control. If we had conscious control of our digestive processes, for example, we could just command it to not digest certain foods we ate. But that’s not how we work. You put food into the system; it gets digested and metabolized according to our physiology.
None of our internal systems has the capacity or ability to monitor, measure or control our weight. Let that sink in, because it is a critical point. Your conscious mind can know how much you weigh — by looking at the result when you stand on a scale — but the unconscious systems that basically run your body have no way of interpreting or using that information.
Our weight is a side-effect of the body’s attempt to manage our stored energy. When you realize this, you quickly see why a ketogenic, or low-carb, diet works to normalize weight.
The “eat less/move more” advice doesn’t work because it poses a threat to energy management. Our bodies have a system in place that runs our energy management functions. Its goal is to keep us from running out of energy — because if we run out of energy, we die. So, it’s an important management function!
How to Start a Keto Diet: A Detailed Keto Diet Plan for Beginners
When you eat less, you have less energy coming into the body. If this situation continues, and you expend energy at a rate higher than you are taking in, it could lead to you running out of energy. The energy management system reacts to this threat by motivating you to eat more — it makes you hungry, so you will seek out food, and it delays your feeling of satiety once you eat, so you will eat more food to make up for the energy you didn’t eat earlier. We’ve all had this experience of being active all day — skiing, hiking, whatever — and then eating a dinner that’s larger than usual.
If we consciously resist the extra eating — because we want to lose weight — our body has another tactic to keep us from dying from a lack of energy: it will slow down what we do to match the level of energy coming in. So, if you continue to eat less, your body slows its metabolism — energy spending — to match the energy income. This metabolic reaction doesn’t take place immediately. But it happens. It’s why to Eat Less/Move More works for a while and then stops working.
In short, when you impose an energy imbalance on your energy management system, the system works to counteract the imbalance.
Glucose-based Metabolism
Before we look at the Ketogenic diet, we need to look briefly at how the body generates the energy it needs to do its work.
Within our cells are little engines of sorts — called mitochondria. The mitochondria take nutrient energy and convert it into a chemical called Adenosine Triphosphate, or ATP for short. Our cells use ATP to do their work — and there is a lot of work to be done inside each of our cells to keep us alive. When glucose is the main source of nutrient energy for the mitochondria, they make only the amount of ATP the cell needs to do its work. In this situation, metabolism is said to be “coupled” and the process is very efficient.
Enter the Ketogenic Diet
A ketogenic diet is one that produces ketone bodies for use in the production of ATP. This happens when the body has little glucose to metabolize. Priority for glucose metabolism goes to the blood because blood cells have no mitochondria and directly metabolize the glucose molecules in our system. If we don’t eat any carbohydrate (from which glucose can be derived) our liver will take either dietary fat, body fat, or both, and convert it into glucose via the process called gluconeogenesis. The fact that all the glucose we need can be synthesized by the liver is why carbohydrate is considered a non-essential (i.e., we don’t have to eat it) nutrient for humans.
How to Start a Keto Diet: A Detailed Keto Diet Plan for Beginners
So, on a low carb diet, available glucose goes to the blood and some go to the liver cells and some go to the brain. The rest of our nutrient energy comes from fat and ketone bodies.
The key to keto comes in when the mitochondria in our fat cells convert ketone bodies into ATP. The efficient, “coupled” metabolism we saw when glucose was the nutrient energy used to make ATP goes out the window. In its place, metabolism becomes “uncoupled” and very inefficient. Under conditions of ketone-based metabolism, fat cell mitochondria make more ATP than the fat cell needs for its work. The extra ATP is just wasted, making the heart pump faster than necessary, making us warmer than necessary and possibly making our muscles a bit fidgety as they use up the excess ATP.
The difference, here, is that while there is increased energy expenditure, it is a natural reaction to the nutrient environment — it’s not a reaction to an externally imposed energy imbalance. This is why one need not eat at an energy deficit while on a low-carb diet and still lose weight — indeed, it is why I’ve lost 175 pounds without going hungry.
In the broader context of human existence that I described at the beginning of this article, you can see that the human body evolved with a means to produce all the glucose it needed even in an environment without available dietary carbohydrate. Why did we evolve to need any glucose in the first place? Because the early ancestors of humans (pre-Homo Habilis) were herbivores and lived off of the derived glucose and, probably the protein generated from the biome of their large gut (like ruminants and gorillas do today). Shifting to scavenging meat allowed our brain to get bigger — but for that to happen, our gut needed to shrink and that meant surviving on plants alone was out.
Keto works for weight loss because of the uncoupled metabolism in our fat cells — but not because the body is looking to lose weight. It’s just a side-effect of metabolizing ketone bodies — and we can make more ketone bodies when we have more body fat.
Thank you for reading this article — hopefully it contained something you found useful.
How to Start a Keto Diet: A Detailed Keto Diet Plan for Beginners
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