 The keto diet is a high fat, low protein, low carbohydrate diet where the body switches from a carbohydrate burning metabolism to a fat burning metabolism. This state of fat burning is known as ketosis. This is achieved when your blood sugar is at a level where blood ketones can be utilized for cellular functions. General guidelines being approximately 70% of your calories from fat, 15% from protein, and 15% from carbohydrates. The biggest thing that people miss is we were never supposed to be on a carbohydrate burning metabolism in the first place. Babies are born in ketosis and there is no natural food source before the Neolithic Revolution that would allow us to even exit ketosis. Modern carbohydrate access is a luxury. Consuming natural animal and plant foods, being active all day, would result in our bodies being in ketosis most of if not all of the time. This is not abnormal, it's a healthy metabolic state. Blood ketones are fat cells in the bloodstream that are available to be utilized by various tissues including the brain. Normally our body uses glucose, but ketones are produced by the liver in certain states. Low food intake, carbohydrate restriction, prolonged exercise, starvation, alcoholism or type 1 diabetes. Carbohydrate restriction and exercise being the hypothetical state of a natural human diet. The primary ketone body is beta hydroxybutyrate. My pet peeve is that people are obsessed with entering ketosis. Even on a standard American diet, your body will achieve ketosis at night. People worry about too much protein, knocking them out of ketosis on a carnivore diet. But unless you have some underlying medical condition where your body has to maintain a certain blood sugar level, you shouldn't worry about natural eating patterns causing you to leave ketosis. It's not this end all, be all magical number. People pricking their fingers every two hours, oh what am I ketone that? And we see this happen a lot with many diets, vegan, carnivore, paleo, whatever it may be. People become obsessed with certain things because they are glorified, in this case measuring blood ketone levels. One common argument against a keto diet is that your body will enter ketoacidosis. Ketoacidosis is when your pancreas isn't producing insulin, so your body cannot use glucose and it sounds kind of dangerous, right? Ketoacidosis. This results in the body overproducing ketones, creating abnormally high circulating blood levels of ketones. This is typically only seen in diabetics and it's also the cause of keto breath. My belief behind keto breath is that people are either overweight and their body is producing so many ketones they are exhaling it through their breath or they're just over consuming fat maybe because they're lacking food quality. Now what are the benefits of a keto diet? The main one is weight loss and this is achieved because ketosis makes your body efficient at burning fat and our goal with weight loss is to burn fat. This applies during sedentary activity as well but especially during exercise. In some cases a keto diet allows you to lose visceral fat, the type stored between your organs and your intestines, considered the most dangerous to health. The reason for visceral fat storage is something I don't really want to share in this video but it's not specific to insulin and carbohydrates. As the general dietary advice behind a ketogenic diet does not solve this directly. Another major benefit is the reduction of oxidative stress. This is a combination of many factors, some of them being the removal of inflammatory carbohydrates especially processed and refined foods and increasing the amount of animal foods. You know hypothetically our past diets were lacking animal nutrition really just a more whole foods diet in most cases. There have been studies showing that the brain increases uptake of ketone bodies in critical states of repair specifically brain injury and my guess at this is the brain requires fatty acids to function therefore in a state of repair would prefer to use ketones instead of glucose. Let's troubleshoot some common keto problems. What if I don't have energy? Most keto dieters will suggest to increase your calories, your fat or ultra macronutrient ratios but my understanding of nutrition has led me to believe that vitamin D3 deficiency is a driving factor as well as other possible nutrient deficiencies. If you're not losing weight on keto sometimes people are in an extreme state of insulin resistance in that case you might have to restrict carbohydrates and protein even further. You know normally that guideline of 70% fat, 15% carbs, 15% protein going to have to mess around with that a little bit usually lowering the carbohydrates even more. I'm sure you guys have heard the myth that people are losing water weight not body fat on keto. This is precisely a myth a lie made up by the modern media to discourage people from trying a keto diet. You guys have probably heard this said by vegans as well. Anyone that doesn't want you to go keto. Many people are concerned about saturated fat, cholesterol and its relation to heart disease. This is called the lipid hypothesis. A hypothesis because it's never been proven which is why I have a video explaining the true cause of heart disease. In the majority of cases cholesterol blood work improves that is if you want to go by modern medical standards of blood work you know those same doctors that are making money and money and money. Can you follow a keto diet if you're a diabetic? Yes, but whether you're type 1 or type 2 both require supervision as medications need to be altered to avoid serious side effects. Type 1 diabetics are more difficult but still doable. Will my exercise performance decrease? Initially, possibly, but it should return to normal in several weeks. If not then you may need to increase calories or alter the macronutrient ratios. Some people do function better on higher protein and higher carbs. Do I need electrolytes as the keto diet causes the kidneys to excrete more? This depends on your body composition and activity level. Overweight people might have to actually supplement certain electrolytes but someone that is average body weight should be able to obtain all of their minerals from natural sources. I think seaweed is truly the healthiest plant food. It's an amazing source of electrolytes, iodine, roll with seaweed if you need something for electrolytes. How does exercise and muscle mass affect keto? Your body will not store as much muscle glycogen. Your muscles will look flat, less full, not as bulky. You can build muscle and strength on a keto diet but it is difficult to manipulate muscle glycogen for body building purposes without carbohydrates. To summarize, a keto diet can offer certain concepts to implement into your lifestyle but the chief goal should be to consume the majority of your calories from high quality animal foods as nutrients contained in them are building blocks for our bodies. The difference between feedlot supermarket meat and truly pasteurized animal products is the difference between you being unhealthy versus healthy. Some of you might be wondering how do you eat so much fat on a keto diet and still maintain food quality? Raw dairy products like cheese, cream, butter, fatty fish, as well as fattier cuts of grass fed beef like belly, short rib, brisket are ideal. I don't personally try to maintain ketosis, in fact I consume a fair bit of protein and carbohydrates in comparison to fat but that's because I have a high lean body mass and as someone of Italian descent, I don't perform as well on a keto diet as someone with more northern European ancestry. So as with many things, listen to your body, try to look at what we're doing from a scientific perspective, from a logical perspective but if you don't feel good on a keto diet and everyone's telling you to do it, they're not always correct. So thank you guys for joining me, if you could please like the video, subscribe, hit that bell icon. If you guys want to support me further, definitely check out my book The Ancestral Indigenous Diet, some great concepts you can work into your keto diet or really any diet. Frankie's Syringe Meat, Frankie's Naturals, check those out down in the description below guys. Thanks again, enjoy the rest of your day.