 It's fairly well known that low carbohydrate diets can cause insomnia, specifically keto, paleo, carnivore, but is that really the truth? If you spend a bit of time browsing around any dietary form, vegan, fruitarian, mediterranean, pescetarian, raw primal, whatever diet, people have sleeping issues simply when making a nutritional change. There are quite a few elements to address here. Gut bacteria changes, nutrient imbalances, carbohydrate intake, supplements, allergies, and probably a few that I don't even know off the top of my head. But before we start troubleshooting a dozen different factors, we should address the three obvious ones. Are you eating enough? Are you consuming caffeine? Are you in a high Wi-Fi environment? Because if you start fiddling with this stuff before addressing this first, that might not fix it. And you don't eat enough food in general, regardless of macronutrient consumption, regardless of diet, your cortisol, adrenaline, various other hormones, skyrocket causing hyperactivity in most people. And this is especially an issue for some people when they start fasting and for those with an increased amount of muscle mass. If I go just one day without eating, I can't sleep. Obviously you want to increase your calories to remedy the solution. But if your body just isn't meant to handle large amounts of fat and protein, if you're not digesting what you're eating, a low carb diet might simply not be for you. You can look into digestive enzymes, mess around with foods in your diet. But we definitely want to address some other factors before ruling it out because a low carbohydrate diet can be very healthy and therapeutic for some people. So you're in a caloric deficient. Your adrenals are stressed because of hormone overproduction due to a lack of calories. You're exhausted from not sleeping, so you start drinking some coffee. You consume some more caffeine. Caffeine stresses your hormones, your adrenals even more, and it has a fairly long half life even when you're drinking it in the morning. There's still caffeine in your system when you go to bed at 10, 11 midnight. It's an obvious culprit for a lack of sleep. And since most people on keto and carnivore diets are consuming less calories and they're drinking more caffeine, it's a quick step towards adrenal fatigue. The lack of fiber and higher volume foods in these low carb diets also reduces gut motility and surface area, likely making coffee more potent. And I'm sure that clown Dave Asbury has a lot to say with bulletproof coffee. You're literally dousing your stomach with caffeine and MCT oil, which is antibacterial. So you're literally destroying your gut bacteria every morning. I honestly couldn't think of a better way to destroy your gut than drinking bulletproof coffee every morning. I've touched on Wi-Fi in many videos and you want to make absolutely sure that the environment you're sleeping in, preferably the environment you're living and working in has zero Wi-Fi signals as they will dysregulate calcium channels in the body, causing more, you guessed it, hormonal imbalances. A low carb diet with lots of coffee, sleeping near a cell phone is a living nightmare. You can watch my past videos addressing household concerns of Wi-Fi, EMF and how to reduce them. Are a people on a low carb or ketogenic diet consuming so much caffeine because they're tired or perhaps craving minerals in certain foods as well? Chocolate is a very popular keto food. It also happens to be very high in magnesium and copper. And I would argue that magnesium and copper are the two minerals that most people are missing for proper sleep, especially on an animal-based diet that favors zinc and lax copper and magnesium. Problem is, foods like coffee and chocolate are also incredibly high in histamine and the main symptoms and side effects of a histamine intolerance are insomnia. I have a video addressing histamine intolerance a few months ago. If you want to learn how to fix that, basically supplementing copper and magnesium in fairly high amounts over a two month period of time will help you sleep better, you'll produce more of the enzymes needed to process histamine and you might be able to still stay in love with your coffee. Are there other nutrient imbalances in your diet that can cause insomnia? It's possible and in order to develop an understanding of overall nutrient profile, nutrient synergy, you should watch a few videos on my channel, maybe check out my book or course for a concise summary. I'll repeat that the copper and the magnesium supplementation will fix a lot of imbalances for most people. Speaking about supplements, what supplements are you taking? If you can't sleep, if you have insomnia, you shouldn't be taking any supplements. If you still can't sleep without supplements for a period of one, two, three weeks, then we can start incorporating certain things to figure out if they fix the problems you're having. This includes medication. You're taking antihistamines, benadryl, allergy medications, I did a video on those I think a year ago, stop taking everything. There's a good chance when you're taking 20 supplements, when you're taking three supplements with insomnia that one of those is the culprit. You'd be very surprised at what can cause insomnia. Does a lack of carbohydrates cause sleeping issues? This is a similar problem to under eating where your hormones go out of whack as well as changes to neurotransmitters in the brain. Some of this might just be an adjustment period. Low carb, high protein diets certainly cause more sleeping irregularity than the opposite. It can go away after several days to weeks, but this can very well tie into gut bacteria issues. This biosis is a very simple term for microbiome imbalance. It's nonspecific. You could have an overgrowth, you could have not enough bacteria, you could have too much of the wrong bacteria, you can have too much of the right bacteria. You could have not enough of the right bacteria. It's a nonspecific term. The point is that your tummy hurts, it's messed up. Most microbes need carbs. What I mean by most microbes is if you don't consume carbohydrates, a lot of the bacteria in your gut's going to die and it's going to create this environment that's conducive to whatever diet you're following. Some people are able to go a long period of time on these low carbohydrate diets without feeding that specific gut bacteria, but eventually you will run into issues, which is why I was okay on the carnivore diet for four or five years and then I hit a wall. This is why First Nation Alaskans, the Inuit Eskimos, consumed rotten meat every day to replace the bacteria in their gut as they had very little to no carbohydrates in their diet. As I mentioned earlier, a low carbohydrate diet might not be for most people. Most First Nation Alaskans also ate very frequently to keep calories high for their cold environment. They ate three, four, five times a day very high fat, high protein meals and meal timing can make a huge difference from person to person. You might not be eating often enough to get your calories in. If you're eating twice a day as much as you can, you might want to increase your meal frequency if you're not sleeping or you might be eating too much. You might be eating too close to bed and that can be disrupting your sleep. There's a bunch of mechanisms and reasons why, mainly due to the gut, but the important thing is switch up meal timing, experiment, see how you feel, see what works for you. Next up is allergies. Pretty simple. Are you allergic to something you're eating? Are you allergic to the supplements you were taking? If I eat chicken or eggs, I won't sleep that night. And those are the most common allergies as well as nuts and seeds. So try to take note of dietary changes when you incorporate new foods. Figure out a baseline to start with. And that is the key word I have been working towards this whole video. Find a baseline. If you don't start with scratch, eating food that you know works. Remove coffee, turn off Wi-Fi, reduce high histamine foods, balance nutrients, remove supplements, address allergies. If you don't do these things, you're not going to figure out what is causing your insomnia. Get to a point where you're able to sleep, then worry about following a specific diet or protocol. Anything on this planet can be fixed with the proper knowledge. Don't become a victim. Don't feel like you have to suffer. Don't feel like you're never going to sleep. You guys have known I've had a lot of sleeping problems recently as my health declined over the past two years. Before that, I slept like a baby just fine on the carnivore diet, 10, 11, 12 hours a day. Through all my experimenting, I know what happens. I know why I didn't sleep. Did I take too much magnesium? Did I take too much of this? Did I eat too much food? Did I do this? Did I do that? There's a bunch of reasons. I might do a Patreon video where I go over my sleeping issues and how I fix them. But maybe not. We'll see. Thank you guys for joining me today. If you guys would like to support me, there's a bunch of means to do so down in the description below. We are restocking a lot of stuff on Frankie's Syringe Me today, so definitely check that out. I launched my audio book for the Ancestral Indigenous Diet last Sunday, so if you guys have been looking forward to that, you can listen to that as well. Of course, we have the new shampoo on Frankie's Naturals, and I'm trying to get you guys some more stuff on organ supplements. Thanks again for joining me, guys. I'll see you for tomorrow's video and live stream.