Ketogenic Diet - Powerful Dietary Strategy for Certain Conditions

Read an interesting article today:

Alternate-Day Ketogenic Diet Feeding Protects against Heart Failure through Preservation of Ketogenesis in the Liver

Source

Conclusions:

Continuous KD feeding failed to protect the heart against heart failure
as a result of impairing the capacity of hepatic ketogenesis during heart failure. Mechanistically, continuous KD feeding induced mitochondrial oxidative stress and HMGCL deficiency in the liver, limiting β-OHB production in TAC mice. Importantly, we found that alternate-day KD feeding preserved the capacity of hepatic ketogenesis and exerted significant cardioprotective effects against heart failure. These results suggested that alternate-day KD feeding is a better strategy than continuous KD feeding in the treatment of heart failure.

It’s an animal study, so this needs to be taken with a big grain of salt. However, this ties in with the experience of many who have gone on a continuous KD diet - fatigue, lethargy and other symptoms of ‘mitochondrial dysfunction”. So maybe this is something to try, if formerly you were unsuccessful on a continuous KD - alternate KD with a diet with somewhat higher carb content every other day.
 
So maybe this is something to try, if formerly you were unsuccessful on a continuous KD - alternate KD with a diet with somewhat higher carb content every other day.
Main thing for those with workable limbs to do fasted-sprinting - jogging - cardio exercises twice a week with intense oxygenation, profuse sweating, aiming toward full body workout. Run some stretches barefoot, push-up, sit-up, frog-jumps on the grass.
Incorporate more fat and meat, butter & bacon & lots of eggs in a Paleo diet and most of these civilizational sicknesses can be kept at bay / avoided. Not in the big-concrete city though. No Nature there.
 
I wonder what you guys think about what's said in this video.

I'm not a nutritionist, I simply make my own education the best I can. I've experienced a year of vegetarianism (2years ago) fully believing it was a good way for personal growth, as it has been introduced to me by a certain "Game Changer" Netflix's documentary. Seeing and feeling the direct results on my body/mind after that year (it seriously made me sick), the point finally arrived at diving into the health and wellness section of this forum. I had discovered the Cassiopaean experiment a year before this but was taken into other parts of it.
About nutrition, I have now read the Keto Adapted book, the "Diet research of the sott.net forum - A summary of the science background"

articles from sott.net, parts of this section, and have watched and listened an uncountable number of videos and podcasts.

The man I'm sharing above is a PhD in nutrition, he usually advocates an omnivore diet and I could find him quite right in his approach from previous vids.
In this one, he kind of tires me with the form he gives to it, shouting too much for not many reasons from my point of view. Concerning the content, "based on the literature" linked in the description, he basically explains quite the contrary of what's shared in Keto Adapated and the diet research of the forum, talking about seeds fat/linoleic acid/...

I would be very curious to have your feedbacks about it please.

PS. : Is there a difference between "linoleic" and "linolenic" ? I found both written in the DROTF.
 
I wonder what you guys think about what's said in this video.

I'm not a nutritionist, I simply make my own education the best I can. I've experienced a year of vegetarianism (2years ago) fully believing it was a good way for personal growth, as it has been introduced to me by a certain "Game Changer" Netflix's documentary. Seeing and feeling the direct results on my body/mind after that year (it seriously made me sick), the point finally arrived at diving into the health and wellness section of this forum. I had discovered the Cassiopaean experiment a year before this but was taken into other parts of it.
About nutrition, I have now read the Keto Adapted book, the "Diet research of the sott.net forum - A summary of the science background"

articles from sott.net, parts of this section, and have watched and listened an uncountable number of videos and podcasts.

The man I'm sharing above is a PhD in nutrition, he usually advocates an omnivore diet and I could find him quite right in his approach from previous vids.
In this one, he kind of tires me with the form he gives to it, shouting too much for not many reasons from my point of view. Concerning the content, "based on the literature" linked in the description, he basically explains quite the contrary of what's shared in Keto Adapated and the diet research of the forum, talking about seeds fat/linoleic acid/...

I would be very curious to have your feedbacks about it please.

PS. : Is there a difference between "linoleic" and "linolenic" ? I found both written in the DROTF.
Well I find his 'shouting' to be a bit annoying also! :-) He is focused on cutting calories, regardless of the type of calories, yet I think the Keto thread/s give more information on the types of calorie sources and their effects on among other things, metabolism. I think Mercola has a good point about the dangers of linoleic acid which you may find interesting.
The nutritionist mentions the mechanistic functions of linoleic acid as a fat, yet Mercola shows that linoleic acid has affects beyond just being another fat, that profoundly affect our bodies. Fat is more than a 9 calorie per gram energy source. The type of fat affects our metabolism, immune system, etc

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • Linoleic acid (LA) makes up the bulk — about 60% to 80% — of omega-6 and is the primary contributor to nearly all chronic diseases. While considered an essential fat, when consumed in excessive amounts, LA acts as a metabolic poison
  • Polyunsaturated fats such as LA are highly susceptible to oxidation, which means the fat breaks down into harmful subcomponents. OXLAMS (oxidated LA metabolites) are what cause the damage
  • Over the last 150 years, the LA in the human diet has increased from about 2 to 3 grams a day to 30 or 40 grams. LA used to make up 1% to 3% of the energy in the human diet and now it makes up 15% to 20%
  • The omega-3 to omega-6 ratio is also very important, but simply increasing the amount of omega-3 that you eat is ill advised. You really need to minimize your omega-6 to prevent damage
  • At a molecular level, excess LA consumption damages your metabolism and impedes your body’s ability to generate energy in your mitochondria
In this interview, Tucker Goodrich and I discuss what will be the topic of my next book, namely linoleic acid (LA), which I believe is likely the leading contributing cause of virtually all chronic diseases we've encountered over the last century. Unfortunately, this is a topic that most clinicians and health care practitioners who focus on natural medicine have only a superficial understanding of.

Goodrich has a business background as a stockbroker and asset manager, and developed an IT risk management system used by two of the largest hedge funds in the world. A string of health crises in his late 30s and early 40s prompted him to apply his research and troubleshooting skills to medical research.

As noted by Goodrich, "It was a very upsetting time in my life and medical professionals really weren't any help at all in trying to figure out what caused things." After a lot of reading and researching, he decided to cut out seed oils from his diet, and in just two days, his 16-year-long bout with irritable bowel disease started to dramatically improve.

"I started immediately feeling better," he says. He also lost a significant amount of weight over the next two months. After that, he stopped eating carbs and realized he must have had a severe case of gluten intolerance.

"Being an engineer by trade, I did a lot of experimenting. What can I eat? What brings back the symptoms? What do I have to avoid to keep the symptoms away? And it was a transformation that made everybody I worked with comment on what a difference they saw in me. It was a very quick change," he says.

Avoiding Omega-6 Fats Is Key for Good Health

While considered an essential fat, when consumed in excessive amounts, which over 99% of people do, LA (an omega-6 polyunsaturated fat or PUFA) acts as a metabolic poison.

Most clinicians who value nutritional interventions to optimize health understand that vegetable oils, which are loaded with omega-6 PUFA, are something to be avoided. What most fail to appreciate is that even if you eliminate the vegetable oils and avoid them like the plague, you may still be missing the mark.

Chances are you're still getting too much of this dangerous fat from supposedly healthy food sources such as olive oil and chicken (which are fed LA-rich grains).

Another common mistake is to simply increase the amount of omega-3 that you eat. Many are now aware that the omega-3 to omega-6 ratio is very important, and should be about equal, but simply increasing omega-3 can be a dangerous strategy. You really need to minimize the omega-6. As explained by Goodrich:

"The ratio is not really what's important. What's important is avoiding the omega-6 fats. There are disease models, like age-related macular degeneration (AMD), where that's starting to be clearly understood, and you can find papers saying explicitly that the important intervention that prevents AMD from progressing is reduction of omega-6 fats, and you can't prevent it by increasing your omega-3 fats.
I've got papers that show, in animal models, very nasty outcomes, such as liver failure, with a lower omega-6 to omega-3 ratio, but high absolute levels of both fats still allows pathology to progress."

LA Is a Primary Contributor to Chronic Disease

When we talk about omega-6, we're really referring to LA. They're largely synonymous, as LA makes up the bulk — about 60% to 80% — of omega-6 and is the primary contributor to disease. Broadly speaking, there are three types of fats:

  • Saturated fats, which have a full complement of hydrogen atoms
  • Monounsaturated fats, which are missing a single hydrogen atom
  • PUFAs, which are missing multiple hydrogen atoms
The missing hydrogen atoms make PUFAs highly susceptible to oxidation, which means the fat breaks down into harmful metabolites. OXLAMS (oxidized LA metabolites) are what have a profoundly negative impact on human health. While excess sugar is certainly bad for your health and should be limited to 25 grams per day or less, it doesn't oxidize like LA does so it's nowhere near as damaging.

Over the last century, thanks to fatally flawed research suggesting saturated animal fat caused heart disease, the LA in the human diet has dramatically increased, from about 2 to 3 grams a day 150 years ago, to 30 or 40 grams a day. Goodrich cites research showing LA used to make up 1% to 3% of the energy in the human diet and now it makes up 15% to 20%.

In my mind, this radical change has had the most catastrophic impact on human health in the history of the human race, as it is the complete opposite of what you need for optimal health. This dietary change has undoubtedly killed millions, probably hundreds of millions, prematurely and still continues to do so because people don't understand this.

"I'm a speed reader and I love reading medical journals … but what nobody's really done is connect all the dots. There are a lot of people who understand little sections of [the science], but they haven't gone on to coalesce everything into a common explanation for these pathologies across different disease states.
I think that's what I've been able to do, and I think that's the key insight that makes this message really compelling,"
Goodrich says.
On a side note, do not confuse LA with conjugated linoleic acid (CLA). While most think CLA and LA are interchangeable, they're not. CLA has many potent health benefits and will not cause the problems that LA does.

How Excess LA Consumption Damages Your Health

At a molecular level, excess LA consumption damages your metabolism and impedes your body's ability to generate energy in your mitochondria. There is a particular fat only located in your mitochondria — most of it is found in the inner mitochondrial membrane — called cardiolipin.

Cardiolipin is made up of four fatty acids, unlike triglycerides which have three, but the individual fats can vary. Examples include LA, palmitic acid and the fatty acids found in fish oil, DHA and EPA. Each of these have a different effect on mitochondrial function, and depending on the organ, the mitochondria work better with particular kinds of fatty acids.

For example, your heart preferentially builds cardiolipin with LA, while your brain dislikes LA and preferentially builds cardiolipin in the mitochondria with fats like DHA. Goodrich further explains:

"To give you an idea of how important this is, 20% of the fat in your entire body is contained in cardiolipin. So, for anybody who doesn't understand mitochondria, mitochondria are what distinguish us from bacteria. It's what allows us to be a multi-cellular creature. They are what produce the energy in your body, what's known as ATP, which is a chemical carrier of energy.
To give you an example of how important it is, cyanide, which we all know is highly toxic, breaks your mitochondria, and that's why it kills you so fast. It prevents mitochondrial respiration and therefore your entire body shuts down almost instantly.
So, [mitochondria are] something we want to take good care of because they're everywhere, in almost every tissue except for red blood cells … There are studies showing that cardiolipin is directly controlled by dietary intake of fats. That is, to an extent, true. Obviously, different tissues build cardiolipin in the mitochondria out of different fats.
But they can vary that composition in fairly short order through changing the diet in rat models, like in the order of weeks. So, you can see changes pretty quickly. I notice things happening in days. What's unique about LA is that it is very susceptible to oxidation when it is in the cardiolipin molecule.
Two LAs that are adjacent to each other can oxidize each other. They're also attached to proteins in the mitochondria that contain iron, and that iron can catalyze the oxidation of cardiolipin. This is a pretty fundamental process in the body."

Oxidation of Cardiolipin Controls Autophagy

Oxidation of cardiolipin is one of the things that controls autophagy. In other words, it's one of the signals that your body uses when there's something wrong with a cell, triggering the destruction and rebuilding of that cell. Your cells know that they're broken when they have too many damaged mitochondria, and the process that controls this is largely the oxidation of omega-6 fats contained within cardiolipin.

“Animals typically develop cancer once the LA in their diet reaches 4% to 10% of their energy intake, depending on the cancer.”

So, by altering the composition of cardiolipin in your mitochondria to one that's richer in omega-6 fats, you make it far more susceptible to oxidative damage. Goodrich cites research showing that when the LA in cardiolipin is replaced with oleic acid, another fat found in olive oil, the cardiolipin molecules become highly resistant to oxidative damage.

"That is basically what I think we need to go back to," he says. "We evolved with low levels of LA in our diet and therefore in our cardiolipin. One of the neatest papers I've ever seen looking at this, something that encapsulated this whole model that I'm talking about, fed rats either a regular high carbohydrate diet, or they added PUFAs to their diet.
Just adding the omega-6 fats to the diet caused the mice to become diabetic. They became insulin resistant, leptin resistant, obese, and the differences are pretty stark between the fat mice and the skinny mice on the high carbohydrate rat diet …
The high-PUFA diet caused a breakdown in the cardiolipin content in the mitochondria in their hearts. So just adding seed oils caused heart damage through a change in the cardiolipin composition."
As mentioned, the primary problem is the OXLAMS, the oxidized byproducts. One of them is 4HNE, which is relatively easy to measure. Studies have shown there's a definite correlation between elevated levels of 4HNE and heart failure. LA is broken down into 4HNE even faster when the oil is heated, which is why cardiologists recommend avoiding fried foods.

OXLAMS Trigger Cancer

Heart disease isn't the only condition triggered by excessive LA intake and the subsequent OXLAMS produced. It also plays a significant role in cancer. As noted by Goodrich, to induce cancer in animal models, you actually have to feed them seed oils. "So, this is a really fundamental process that we're talking about here," he says.

As I mentioned above, animals typically develop cancer once the LA in their diet reaches 4% to 10% of their energy intake, depending on the cancer. In the breast cancer model, cancer incidents increase once 4% of calories are in the form of seed oils.

Disturbingly, most Americans get approximately 8% of their calories from seed oils. "So, we're way over what these thresholds in the lab would suggest is a safe level of these fats based on the laboratory work in animals," Goodrich says, adding:

"We've got this huge disconnect between what the lab science tells us we should be doing and what our dietary guidelines tell us we should be doing. The scientists are saying, 'Oh, look, it's poison. It causes all the chronic diseases,' and the government's saying, 'Eat lots of it.' That's not a good thing."
4HNE is a mutagen, in other words, a toxin that causes DNA damage. One of the primary genes it damages is the P53 anticancer gene. Mutations in the P53 gene are found in 15% of cancers, making it one of the most common. As noted by Goodrich, "P53 is literally a cancer prevention gene. It's how your body regulates cancer. You can all draw your own conclusions about the wisdom of eating something that can cause that to break."

On a side note, one of the major jobs of glutathione is to detoxify 4HNE. You can often tell that you have excess 4HNE if your glutathione levels are low, as this means it's being used up detoxifying 4HNE.

LA and Obesity

High-LA diets also cause obesity. "If you feed mice lots of saturated fat, they don't get fat and they don't get sick. It's only when you increase the LA in the diet from 1% to 8% that they become obese," Goodrich says. Now, mice and rats are not exactly like humans, so how do we know all of this applies to us? Goodrich explains:

"What Alheim and Ramston observed is that, back in 2006, there was a drug introduced called Rimonabant, which was an anti-obesity drug. It was a bit of a miracle drug. I want to quote this exactly because it's so important to understand the effects that this drug had on humans.
'Large randomized trials with Rimonabant have demonstrated efficacy in treatment of overweight and obese individuals with weight loss significantly greater than a reduced calorie diet alone.
In addition, multiple other cardiometabolic parameters were improved in the treatment groups, including increased levels of HDL, reduced triglycerides, reduced weight circumference, improved insulin sensitivity, decreased insulin levels. And in diabetic patients, improvements in HBA1C.'
This paper was released in 2007. Unfortunately, Rimonabant had a side effect that it caused people to want to kill themselves. So, it was withdrawn from the market and it largely killed research for several years into that area.
But what Alheim did in 2012 was demonstrate that the mechanism behind Rimonabant is to block the metabolism of seed oils into the chemicals in your body and the endocannabinoid system that cause overeating. My experience when I stopped eating seed oils was that I forgot to eat carbohydrates.
The effect of Rimonabant in these mouse models is to make them crave carbohydrates and to stimulate them to eat sweet foods and carbohydrates. Everybody's familiar with this effect. It's called the munchies. And it's what you get after you smoke pot, because the endocannabinoid system is the system that marijuana affects and the chemical that Rimonabant blocks is your body's homologue to the THC in marijuana.
So essentially what we've done to ourselves is given ourselves a chronic case of the munchies, which is blocked by this unfortunately very harmful drug. This is as open and closed a case for causation as you're going to find in the medical literature.
We have a human drug that treats this, and as I just read, it treats all these different aspects of this disease. And it works through this one pathway that we have a clear demonstration of in animal models. In this case, the drug is completely pointless because the dietary fix is well known and is simple."

Increased LA Also Increases Your Risk of Sunburn

So, to summarize, the dramatic increase in LA — and the oxidative end products that cause the damage — is the primary cause behind the increase in chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

Simply lowering your LA intake to what your great-great grandparents used to eat, you can essentially eliminate almost every single one of the diseases that are now prematurely killing us.

Interestingly enough, there's even evidence showing eliminating seed oils from your diet will dramatically reduce your risk of sunburn, which is something Goodrich experienced first-hand. "Susceptibility to UV radiation damage is controlled by how much PUFAs are in your diet," he says. "It's like a dial. They can control how fast it happens, and how fast you get skin cancer."

Seed Oils Raise Risk of ARDS and COVID-19

Considering the metabolic and mitochondrial damage caused by LA, there's reason to suspect LA may also play a role in COVID-19, as some white blood cells convert LA into leukotoxin. Essentially, LA contributes to the inflammatory domino effect that eventually kills. Goodrich explains:

"Yes. That's certainly what the conclusion that I drew. I did an enormous post on this, looking at the effects of LA in SARS COV-2 and SARS in general. SARS is a severe acute respiratory syndrome. SARS kills you by giving you acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS).
ARDS can be caused by lots of different things, not just these viruses. You can get it from influenza. You can get it from inhaling acid into your lungs. What's fascinating is the human literature is quite clear that you can induce ARDS through feeding seed oils.
Very sick people who can't eat are fed intravenously. It's called total parenteral nutrition (TPN). Generally, this is used through a product called Intralipid, which is made out of soybean oil and sugar. When you start to understand all this stuff, it's just mind boggling. Doctors did an experiment after they noticed that a lot of their patients who came into the ICU and got TPN then subsequently got ARDS.
So, they started playing with what they were feeding them, and what they discovered was this soybean oil formula increased the patient's rate of getting ARDS. The fatality rate from ARDS is 30% to 60%. Feeding seed oils increased the rate of ARDS by seven times."
As explained by Goodrich, the key toxin that produces the symptoms of ARDS is called leukotoxin, and leukotoxin is made from LA by white blood cells to kill pathogens. It's toxic enough to where if you inject high-enough amounts of it into animals, it kills them in minutes. Leukocytes incubated with LA convert all of the LA into this toxin until there's none left, so, a major part of the disease process in ARDS is the conversion of LA into leukotoxin. That is what ends up killing patients.

"It is often noted in the popular press that what kills people is this cytokine storm. What I'm describing is the mechanism of the cytokine storm. Leukotoxin is uniquely what causes the symptoms of ARDS, as has been clearly demonstrated in the animal models," Goodrich says. "So, it seems to me that a sensible thing to do would be [to] change your diet. Why wouldn't you want to do that?"

How LA Triggers Heart Disease

Goodrich also explains how high LA levels cause heart disease. One of the first things that happens in atherosclerosis is your macrophages, another type of leukocyte, turns into a foam cell, essentially a macrophage stuffed with fat and cholesterol. Atherosclerotic plaque is basically dead macrophages and other types of cells loaded with cholesterol and fat. This is why heart disease is blamed on dietary cholesterol and fat.

However, researchers have found that in order for foam cells to form, the LDL must be modified through oxidation, and seed oils do just this. Seed oils cause the LDL to oxidize, thereby forming foam cells. LDL in and of itself does not initiate atherosclerosis. LDL's susceptibility to this oxidative process is controlled by the LA content of your diet.

"That's a result that's been repeated several times, so subsequently, the definition of an atherogenic lipid in your blood is one that contains oxidized omega-6 fats. That's the definition," Goodrich says.
"The standard explanation of why you get heart disease and why it progresses the way it does is because the omega-6 fats in your blood get oxidized and become toxic, and progress you all the way through atherosclerosis until it finally kills you.
That's the standard explanation for what causes heart disease. I can't tell you how many cardiologists I have talked to who don't understand that that's what the medical literature says is causing this disease.
Now, it's worse if you're also on a high carbohydrate diet. A ketogenic diet is somewhat protective against the negative effects of this, but I can't stress enough that this is the standard explanation for cardiovascular disease in the medical literature — that seed oils oxidize and that's what causes the pathology."

Understanding Olive Oil

As mentioned, olive oil also contains LA, but it also has other healthy fats. This makes olive oil a bit tricky. The main fat in olive oil is oleic acid, which is one of your body's favorite fats. Your body actually makes it, which is why it's not considered an essential fat. Oleic acid is much more resistant to oxidation than LA, which is why olive oil is a pretty decent cooking oil.

According to Goodrich, oleic acid is protective against both cardiolipin oxidation and LDL oxidation. Interestingly, oleic acid can also replace LA in LDL. Other fats, such as palmitic acid, cannot do that. The problem with olive oil is that it also has a fair amount of LA.

"The percentages that I've seen quoted in literature range from 2%, which is awesome, to 22%, which is not good," Goodrich says. The other problem is the olive oil market is hugely corrupt and fraught with fraud. Many olive oils are cut with cheaper seed oils, which raises the LA content.

So, in summary, if you're using olive oil, I strongly recommend keeping close track of your total LA intake. Anything over 10 grams a day is likely to be problematic (although the exact cutoff is still unknown, so this is merely an educated guess).

If you really want to be on the safe side, consider cutting LA down to 2 or 3 grams per day, to match what our ancestors used to get before all of these chronic health conditions became widespread. If olive oil puts you over the limit, consider cooking with tallow or lard instead. Beef tallow is 46% oleic acid and lard is 36% oleic acid.

High-LA Sources to Avoid

As Goodrich suggests, if you want to protect your health, you'd be wise to avoid all concentrated sources of LA. Top sources include chips fried in vegetable oil, commercial salad dressings, virtually all processed foods and any fried fast food, such as french fries.

"What amazes me is people who go to all these measures and I'll hold up my girlfriend as an example. She was a vegan when we got together, had a farm and grew organic food and went to extremes to avoid toxins in food and then went home and cooked with seed oils," Goodrich says.
"There are so many people who are like this, who are genuinely trying to do their best to have a healthy diet and then they're chugging down LA that turns into a metabolic toxin in your body, and they wonder why they can't lose weight.
By the way, after I told her, what I just said here: Avoid seed oils, avoid refined carbohydrates, eat animal food and animal fats, she lost 56 pounds in two and a half months and her autoimmune disease, fibromyalgia, went into complete remission.
"

The Importance of Carnosine

Beef, even conventional grain-finished beef, has low LA. Grass fed beef has higher DHA and CLA, which makes it a healthier option. Beef is also the primary source of carnosine, which has been shown to be anti-atherogenic.

Carnosine is also a mitochondrial stimulant, a sacrificial scavenger of advanced lipooxidation end products (ALEs), which is very similar to advanced glycation end products (AGEs). AGEs is another name for HNE and all the other reactive oxygen species generated from oxidizing LA.

Carnosine is the most effective scavenger for HNE. Carbonylation of proteins is basically the process through which proteins in your body get damaged and become ineffective. HNE damages 24% of the proteins in your cells, so carnosine can go a long way toward warding off this cellular damage. As explained by Goodrich:

"In heart failure, Alzheimer's and in AMD, one of the things they see is an inability of the cell to produce enough energy. The mitochondria are getting damaged. HNE does that damage. It damages 24% of the proteins in the cell, primarily around energy production.
One of the worst cancers is glioblastoma, a brain cancer. A researcher up in Boston, [Thomas Seyfried], decided to try and figure out why the mitochondria are getting damaged in glioblastoma, and found they all have oxidized cardiolipin. Every single cancer cell he looked at had damaged cardiolipin in it.
One of the ways your cells produce energy is they basically ferment glucose into pyruvate outside of the mitochondria This is a perfectly normal part of metabolism and they produce something called pyruvate. A molecule called pyruvate dehydrogenase takes pyruvate into the mitochondria and converts it to acetyl-CoA so the mitochondria can burn it very efficiently for fuel.
Well, one of the things HNE does is it breaks pyruvate dehydrogenase, and they see this in Alzheimer's where their cells are no longer able to produce enough energy. This is why your cells are dying in Alzheimer's. The beta amyloid plaques in Alzheimer's disease are induced by HNE. There's a great model that came out of Harvard a couple of years ago showing that.
And in cancer, if you can't get pyruvate out of the cell, out of the cytosol, the part of the cell surrounding the mitochondria, it has to ferment there and turn it into energy, which is what we call the Warburg effect, where you start shifting over to this damaged primitive fuel system. The evidence seems to be that that's because you've broken your mitochondria.
Even the critical, the most important part of the mitochondria, complex 5ADP synthase — which is what takes all the energy coming from your mitochondria and turns it into ATP, which is what fuels the rest of your body — is damaged by HNE. This is a huge issue. There's no more fundamental problem in aging and health than protein damage."

Take Control of Your Health by Lowering Your LA Intake

As you can see, the evidence strongly suggests excessive LA is driving all the killer diseases today. The solution is simple though. Just lower your LA intake. There's an easy way to do this. You don't have to send all your food out for analysis. Simply use an online nutritional calculator such as Chronometer to calculate your daily intake.

Chronometer will tell you how much omega-6 you're getting from your food down to the 10th of a gram, and you can assume 90% of that is LA. Again, anything over 10 grams is likely to cause problems. Since there's no downside to limiting your LA, you'll want to keep it as low as possible, which you do by avoiding high-LA foods.

Keep in mind you'll never be able to get to zero, and you wouldn't want to do that either. So, just what should you eat to keep your LA intake low? Goodrich summarizes his own diet:

"I eat mostly beef. I eat vegetables. I cook mostly in butter. I eat a little bit of fruit. I eat occasional grains. Occasionally I'll have corn, a little bit of rice and potatoes. I'm mostly on a cyclical keto diet. Once you fix your metabolic system, then you can go back and forth a lot easier and I don't see any reason to be on strict keto long term. I think [cyclical keto] is healthier.
They looked at a ketogenic diet in rodents and found they were protected. The reason they were protected is because they were able to burn HNE as fuel. But if you add a little bit more insulin into the system, then it turns off fat-burning and HNE goes out of the mitochondria and does more damage."
This is yet another reason for working out in a fasted state, which Goodrich also recommends. "I think working on a fasted state is one of the most important health things that you can do, without question," he says. Goodrich also points out that the reason a strict ketogenic diet can cause liver failure is due to the omega-6 fats in the diet. It's crucial to make sure the fats you eat are actually healthy.

Goodrich is currently in the process of writing a book about this, as am I, in which all of this information will be laid out in even greater detail. In the meantime, you can learn more by visiting Goodrich's blog, Yelling-Stop, or follow him on Twitter. In closing:

"I can't say anything that you haven't already said in this talk, honestly," Goodrich says. "You want to eat like your ancestors ate because your ancestors were healthier and they were not eating industrial seed oils. They were not eating industrial processed carbs in high quantities.
They were making sure that they got lots of animal meat and animal fat and they were getting exercise. I mean, it doesn't really matter what kind of exercise you're doing, just as long as you're doing it.
I think I have helped many people in many different ways by telling people this. And it's typically a short conversation, like my girlfriend who cured her autoimmune disease, fibromyalgia. She'd been in constant pain for almost 30 years and it went away in a couple of weeks. I mean, that's amazing, and it's so simple to do.
This is, I believe, the fundamental problem with our modern health — this issue of LA. There are lots of other things that play into it. There's no doubt about that, but that's the fundamental thing. If you fix that, you can get away with doing a lot of other things that aren't exactly optimal, but still be healthy."
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Unprecedented psychiatric & metabolic benefits noted in this study:


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An overview as to why the keto diet is so helpful in these group of patients:

Major Depression​

Inflammation is implicated in all three conditions but has been most extensively studied in depression. Inflammation plays a role in the development and course of many cases of clinical depression and is associated with poor response to antidepressant medications (45, 46). The KD has been shown to reduce inflammation via complex influences on both central and peripheral immunoregulatory pathways (4750). The KD also influences multiple neurotransmitter systems involved in depression, including the dopaminergic, serotonergic, glutamatergic, and GABAergic systems (51).

Bipolar Disorder​

Among those with bipolar illness, there is a higher prevalence of impaired glucose metabolism even in drug-naïve individuals (52). Calkin (53) found that those with insulin resistance or type 2 diabetes are more likely to experience rapid mood cycling, less likely to respond to lithium, and more likely to suffer a more progressive disease course. Proposed mechanisms by which glucose and insulin dysregulation may dysregulate mood include damaging oxidative stress which, in turn, could impair mitochondrial function (16). Napolitano et al. (54) recently discovered that the KD can increase brain levels of glutathione, a ubiquitous intracellular antioxidant key to buffering oxidative stress. Campbell and Campbell (55) hypothesize that the KD might help ameliorate symptoms of bipolar illness by shifting the brain's primary fuel source from glucose to ketone bodies, thereby bypassing existing mitochondrial defects and reducing further mitochondrial injury. Calkin et al. (56) have proposed that insulin resistance, via inflammatory damage to endothelial cells, can compromise the integrity of the blood-brain barrier (BBB) in people with bipolar illness. Interestingly, disruption of the tight junctions critical to BBB structure and function has been observed not only in bipolar illness but also in major depression and schizophrenia (57).

Schizophrenia

Hyperinsulinemia, insulin resistance, and impaired glucose metabolism are more common in treatment-naïve individuals experiencing first-episode psychosis than in the general population (58). While this association alone is insufficient to support a causal relationship between metabolic dysregulation and psychotic symptoms, several cases of acute hyperglycemia associated with transient psychotic symptoms in patients with type 1 and type 2 diabetes have been reported (59). Pathophysiological features of schizophrenia shown in pre-clinical studies by Sarnyai et al. (44) to improve in response to a KD include N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor hypofunction, sensory gating deficits, and glutamate excitotoxicity.

KDs also help rebalance neurotransmitter systems, (16) stabilize neural networks (60), improve neuroplasticity (61), and bridge the energy gap resulting from the cerebral glucose hypometabolism associated with major depression, bipolar illness, and schizophrenia (17).
 
Nina Teicholz published recently this article, and she has more in her Substack.

The Latest Study on Red Meat & Heart Disease: A Red Herring

A new study out of Tufts University led to a multitude of fresh headlines that meat increases the risk of heart disease. It would seem that the danger of meat is now a foregone conclusion, but this paper, like so many others, is marred by significant scientific missteps and financial conflicts of interest, including a drug-development program at the Cleveland Clinic, funded in part by Procter & Gamble.

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On scientific grounds alone, the paper is less-than convincing: Its findings are based on a low-quality type of data that, on the whole, can only show associations, not cause-and-effect relationships. What’s more, the associations reported are tiny: 1.15 for unprocessed red meat, 1.22 for total meat, and 1.18 for all animal foods. These numbers are close to 1 (= zero risk), and they’re all well below the threshold for ruling out other possible explanations for the observed results.

Further, the study blames a metabolite called TMAO (trimethylamine N-oxide) for red meat’s apparent harms, but the food that most boosts TMAO is not red meat, but fish!

Published in Atherosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology (ATVB), the study looks at data on 3,931 adults aged 65 and older from the Cardiovascular Health Study, who were followed from 1989-90 onwards, for a median of 12.5 years. Twice during the study, subjects filled out a “food frequency questionnaire” (FFQ) in which they were asked to remember the foods they’d eaten for the past year. Different questionnaires were used for each data collection, and a test of how well the two could be combined yielded correlations as low as .56 (1 is a perfect correlation).1 A well-known problem with FFQs is that people don’t report accurately the foods they eat; hardly anyone can recount what they’ve eaten two days ago much less over the past year.2

FFQ questions themselves can skew results. In this study’s merged dataset, for instance, only 4 questions were used to gather information about red-meat consumption: on bacon, hot dogs, hamburgers, and a category called “beef, pork, lamb.”3 Compare this to the 28 questions on various types of vegetables. It’s well-known that the more questions asked, the better the data, and this FFQ, named after its inventor, Walter Willett at Harvard University, was clearly designed to get better data on vegetables--less so on meat.

This post should really end here. We should feel at ease setting aside these headlines and wait for a study using better FFQs and yielding an association (measured by “relative risk”) greater than 2. Relative risks below 2 should be “viewed with caution,” said a publication of the National Cancer Institute.4 The numbers 1.15-1.22 in this study imply that other factors (called “confounders”) may be causing the slightly greater heart-disease risk observed. For instance, it’s known that red-meat eaters tend to smoke more and exercise less. People eating hot dogs and hamburgers are also likely to be accompanying those foods with milkshakes and French fries, yet the ATVB study does not report adjusting for sugar or overall carbohydrate intake.

The idea that TMAO causes heart disease and that meat consumption is its principal cause is a theory promoted by Dr. Stanley L. Hazen of the Cleveland Clinic. His first paper came out in 2011, and he started blaming red meat in 2013. The current paper, on which he’s an author, proposes the following mechanisms for TMAO’s links to heart disease:

In experiments, TMAO promotes macrophage foam cell formation,[8] vascular inflammation and inflammasome activation,[9–12] endothelial dysfunction,[13] platelet hyperreactivity and thrombosis,[14,15] and decreases reverse cholesterol transport.[16]
It would be nice if the paper explained that eight of the nine experiments cited here (citations 8-16 in the paper) were conducted not on people but on mice or in test tubes, a type of data that is speculative and cannot be assumed to extend to humans. The one experiment performed on actual people showed “enhanced platelet aggregation” (leading potentially to thrombosis) when subjects were fed TMAO supplements. However, TMAO from supplements appears to be absorbed differently than TMAO from food, so this entire pathway is far from certain.

You might be wondering why the authors are focusing on TMAO, when we’ve been told for decades that red meat is bad for health due to saturated fat and cholesterol. What happened to those explanations? As it turns out that in recent years, the science to justify them has been shown to be weak. A major “State of the Art” review in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, concluded in 2020 that, when it came to heart disease, the evidence was insufficient to justify continued caps on saturated fats. And the American Heart Association together with the American College of Cardiology issued a 2013 review stating that there was insufficient evidence to show a relationship between dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol.

The ATVB authors downplay the importance of cholesterol and saturated fat. Evidently an alternative explanation is needed for heart disease and red meat as its cause.

If TMAO is their answer, however, they should really be warning against fish, not meat. Cod yields 65+ times more TMAO than beef, and halibut, at least 100 times more, according to a 1999 study that examined the effects of 46 foods on TMAO excreted in human urine. Carrots, cauliflower, peas, peanuts and potatoes also lead to far more TMAO than beef. A 2017 analysis came straight out and called the TMAO story “a red herring.” Red meat is clearly not the problem.

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In many areas of science, it would be unseemly to suggest that researchers have conflicts of interest, but nutrition science is often enigmatic unless you follow the money. The funds flowing from the food and pharmaceutical industries into this field are massive—and have been since the 1940s at least. Multinational packaged food companies would like you to eat boxed cereal instead of eggs and macaroni rather than meat. Pharmaceutical companies, for their part, may invest in certain lines of research as a foundation for the development of drugs or devices. Yet is it fair to ascribe bias to this paper?

Unfortunately, yes. The paper’s senior author, Dariush Mozaffarian, Dean of the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, is also the creator of the “Food Compass” rating system, which found Lucky Charms, Frosted Flakes and altogether 70 brand-named cereals from General Mills, Kellogg’s, and Post to be worthy of rankings far higher than eggs or ground beef, as I wrote about here.

The Food Compass also reflects a specific bias against red and processed meats by subtracting up to 10 points (out of 100) “simply for being themselves,” as researcher Zoe Harcombe explains in this excellent blog post. Points were also deducted for a food’s cholesterol content, even though, as explained above, there’s no evidence to show that dietary cholesterol contributes to heart disease. And the Food Compass gives no credit to red meat for containing heme iron and other needed nutrients that are in the forms more easily absorbed by humans than when consumed via plants or supplements. The top score meat could obtain in this rating system was 73, Harcombe calculates. In other words, Mozaffarian built a bias against meat into his model.

Mozaffarian discloses in the ATVB paper that he receives funding from Barilla, the world’s largest pasta company—which clearly stands to benefit if meat is sidelined off the dinner plate. (Barilla has invested heavily in nutrition researchers and in promoting the idea that meat as bad for the climate). Mozaffarian also receives funds from the Gates Foundation, whose founder has campaigned widely against beef while also being one of the top investors in meat-replacement companies; and Bunge, a major producer of plant-based meat and dairy replacements (Mozaffarian does not disclose Bunge in the ATVB paper but reports it elsewhere).

Co-author Stanley Hazen, the ‘inventor’ of the TMAO hypothesis, turns out to have been in a partnership with Procter & Gamble (P&G) since 2015. This includes a “Joint Development Agreement” with P&G “to develop an over-the-counter product that can help people manage their TMAO levels.” P&G has participated in and paid for Hazen’s research while also employing him as a consultant, as Hazen reported in 2018 and again in the ATVB paper. Hazen also consistently discloses being named as a coinventor on “pending and issued patents held by the Cleveland Clinic relating to cardiovascular diagnostics and therapeutics.” A search of the US patent database for “Cleveland Clinic” and “trimethylamine N-oxide” yields 23 existing patents.

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Of the 83 news stories now published on the new TMAO study, I’m willing to bet that few-to-none report on the major conflict of interest with P&G, even though it’s easy to find. Many of these stories begin with the exact same line, clearly from a press release: “A daily hamburger might raise the risk of developing heart disease…”

The motives behind this paper are clearly complex yet one thing is clear: a tenable case against red meat, this paper is not.


Further reading on TMAO:

Does Carnitine from Red Meat Cause Heart Disease? Blog by Georgia Ede on a widely covered 2013 paper by S. Hazen;

Choline and Eggs: Eggs still don't cause heart disease, Blog by Chris Kresser, 2019;

Meat, Plants, and TMAO, Blog by Zoe Harcombe, on a 2020 paper by Christopher Gardner.

1
Feskanich D, Rimm EB, Giovannucci EL, Colditz GA, Stampfer MJ, Litin LB, Willett WC. Reproducibility and validity of food intake measurements from a semiquantitative food frequency questionnaire. J Am Diet Assoc. 1993 Jul;93(7):790-6. doi: 10.1016/0002-8223(93)91754-e. PMID: 8320406, This is reference #37 in the ATVB paper. If you look at Table 1, you’ll see the correlations had large confidence intervals. The correlations for animal foods ranged from .07 to .87, which means the reliability of combining these surveys is pretty much unknown.
2
For more on the problems of nutritional epidemiology, including a recounting of how Harvard University’s Walter Willett defended epidemiology among his colleagues in a closed forum, see my book, pp.261-265.
3
Ibid.
4
There is in fact a raging debate about whether this standard, from 2002, should still be applied, since nearly all relative risks found in nutritional epidemiology fall below 2. Epidemiologists in nutrition argue that their methods have become more accurate in recent years. We can leave that debate aside for this study, however, since the data were collected from 1989 to 1996 with only phone-call follow-ups after that.
 
Harvard doctor Chris Palmer discusses his research into the ketogenic diet and fixing mental illness, as well as how psychological trauma causes metabolic disorders. He's now in the process of bullet proofing the science behind it all, and focusing on creating a ground up movement based on the science.


You can add the B1 and HBOT thread to this (both help fix the mitochondria), as well as any number of 'mild' mental illnesses. Generalized mood disorders, OCD, ADHD, gender dysphoria, PTSD etc

I'll add this hear too if others haven't seen it:
This makes me think of the following in which Dr Anthony Chaffee, an American medical doctor specializing in Neurosurgery, gives a lecture called 'Plants are trying to kill you' in which he states Brussels have no less than 136 carcinogenic properties. God bless Christmas!

 
So I've finally taken the plunge into getting my diet into harmony with what my body actually needs. I will share my short journey until now.

I'm 3 weeks into the diet (as prescribed in this thread) and until now it has been relatively smooth sailing. Before starting I restricted carbs to almost 0 for a week, so technically I've been low carb for a month now. Before that I didn't really pay too much attention and would eat more or less whatever. I got first introduced to KD 1 and 1/2 years ago when I joined the forum. I spent a lot of time reading about the horrors of the standard high-carb diet but as I've been seemingly healthy and physically able to function at a commendable level my whole life, I lacked the motivator to undertake the journey.

Around christmas time I decided to finally take the step I know I needed to take at some point, and I can say I regret not just starting earlier. I didn't jump in completely blindfolded, as I did read a lot in the previous 1 and 1/2 years, several articles and posts, along with PBPM, and I also read about 30 pages of this thread before starting, and have been keeping at it, currently on page 155. I'm also currently working through LWB (have yet to check that thread out), but I'm simultaneously working through about 6 other books also, so all in due time. :whistle:

In the same day that I decided that "now is the time", I also took albendazol for 3 days to get rid of some pesky parasites. I became very sick for that first week while also being carb restricted. I might have pushed from too many directions at once and my body was not happy. Now as I'm over that first hump, the situation has stabilized and I feel better than before starting the diet.

I didn't pass a bowel movement in 5 days in the beginning and was almost getting worried, but after I saw people here reporting going several weeks without, I was reassured. The first 2 weeks my sleep was all over the place and I was getting by on 2-3 hours a night as my brain was in hyperdrive all night. Now that has stabilized also, and I sleep on average maybe 7 hours a night. Waking up way earlier than I used to and also very quick to activate in the morning.

The positive changes that are most tangible for me are a more relaxed base level emotional state, and increased mental clarity. Physical energy levels have been fluctuating, but all in all I do feel an improvement. The first days I visibly lost weight, and already being on the skinny side I almost freaked out, thinking to reach for carbs to put the weight back on. As I've continued the diet and also doing the resistance training, I feel my weight has returned to my previous baseline.

I'm not taking - and never really have - any supplements, but I have ordered both magnesium citrate and glycate in powder form as I reckon those could help a lot on the way. Also considering doing a round of EDTA when I have more money, and also perhaps adding some fish oil to the arsenal.

As for negative side effects, until now they've been minimal. Apart from the first week (which at least partly was because of the albendazol) I haven't had much issues at all. Only some digestion concerns, more on that below.

A few things I'm wondering about.. I know the effects of gluten take 6 months to get out of the body and I suppose I can expect to see more improvements the longer I stick to this, but at what point can I call myself keto-adapted? I'm pretty sure I'm in ketosis for, I'm assuming, most of the time since I started, as my carb consumption is very close to 0 and I'm not overconsuming protein.

I'm of course eating waaay less than before, being surprised at how little food the body needs, if it's the right food. Carb cravings are very minimal, and they're not so much physiological or emotional, they're just remnants of habitual thought and behavioral patterns (grabbing a snack when passing the kitchen, eating in the middle of the night etc.). I haven't been a sweet tooth for some years already, so this is not a big adjustment. I don't really feel hungry anymore, which was to be expected. I'm still getting used to that.

The meat what I can source from butchers' shops here in Romania is not grass-fed and I have no idea how/where I would find any. Sometimes I'm lucky and can score some meat from people who hunt, but that's a rarity. I'm considering learning to trap some of the deer we have in abundance here in the mountains, but then again, not having a freezer to store the meat is the issue. I will at some point give the meat canning a shot also.

I mostly eat broth, eggs, butter, lard, heavy cream, some sausage, pork belly, pork chops and organ meats (I LOVE BRAINS!!!). I was drinking raw milk until a few days ago, when I decided to give it a break and see if there's further improvements, which I think there are. I really have trouble letting go of the idea though as the raw milk I buy in our village is just heavenly, and I do believe those cows are at least mostly grass fed. Anybody here drinking raw milk? Even just half a cup a day? :halo:

In the last month I ate 3 pieces of cucumber, one spoon of sauerkraut, and today I made a liver pate that has one onion in it. That's all the vegetables I've been consuming and for the rest, animal products. I might start mixing in some broccoli and cauliflower at some point for variation, but for now, I'm keeping steady on the green-free approach. Some days I eat a handful of walnuts with butter.

What I'm a bit annoyed by is that seemingly I have trouble digesting solid fat, as from pork belly and pork chops. Everything else my body handles super smooth, but after eating bacon or chops, it's like it grinds to a halt, and I have stomach pain. I tried our homemade ACV and one day I do believe it helped, but today it definitely did not. I read someone else recommended baking soda, would that be an option? Otherwise I guess L-carnitine or the ox bile is something that would get recommended, but as long as I can keep it as simple as possible without extra supplementation, I prefer to do that. Or I could change the meat to something else, but these cuts are the fattiest around so it would be a shame if I can't digest them. It's the simplest meat in regards to the fat/protein ratio to just throw in the pan and eat. Also the rest of the family likes it.

As for the rest of my household, we're having ongoing debates with my girlfriend about this and it's very much back and forth. She did start eating meat last year again after being vegetarian for many years, and now she's been eating all of the fatty food I've been making, but she still has other opinions as to what we're "supposed to" be eating. As we have kids, it bothers me that I "have to" keep feeding them fruits and muesli and potatoes, but hopefully in time, this will change also. All of this is a good exercise in free will and external consideration.

That's my journey until now. I want to extend a ginormous thank you to everyone that've contributed to this thread and the research that has been done on this. It's a priceless resource for anyone looking to get their health on track. So, again, thank you!
 
I didn't pass a bowel movement in 5 days in the beginning and was almost getting worried, but after I saw people here reporting going several weeks without, I was reassured. The first 2 weeks my sleep was all over the place and I was getting by on 2-3 hours a night as my brain was in hyperdrive all night. Now that has stabilized also, and I sleep on average maybe 7 hours a night. Waking up way earlier than I used to and also very quick to activate in the morning.
For what it's worth, make sure you're getting lots of electrolytes - the body tends to get rid of lots of them when switching to this diet.
Sea salt in general, potassium (lack can cause constipation, although that may not be the case here) and magnesium (at night, for relaxation).
 
I didn't pass a bowel movement in 5 days in the beginning and was almost getting worried, but after I saw people here reporting going several weeks without, I was reassured.
I used ground linseed / flaxseed to counter the lack of fibre, and it did help. It has the highest fibre to carbohydrate ratio that I could find. It also has other good benefits.

I found that if you buy the seeds, and grind them up in a spice grinder before you need them makes them nicer to eat, since they keep fresh as seeds, and after grinding them the powder can go rancid quite quickly :-)
 
Robert Malone just started going keto, and he's convinced it was a good decision:

For me, this has not been an easy change. Giving up grains and carbs is not easy! But I went cold-turkey and wham! The effects were immediate. I dropped weight and my energy levels increased dramatically. My blood pressure is getting in better control, and I am looking forward to seeing the effects on lipid profiles and pre-diabetic markers in my next blood draw.

So, today I am just going to highly a couple of important new papers that confirm some of the positive effects of this diet.
 
I'm looking for some pointers on how to proceed as I'm entering week 5 of this diet.

Generally speaking, things are going great. Energy levels are steady, no feelings of hunger (except when I eat too much protein), emotions mostly stable etc.. However there's some lingering brain fog and I'm having trouble understanding a few symptoms I never before experienced before starting this diet.

For instance body temperature regulation; I remember reading in the beginning of this thread about skinny people converting carbs to heat and I definitely was one of those people as my girlfriend would always remark how warm my body was. Now, however, my extremities are cold, and sometimes I get the whole-body shivers that last about a minute. I read online different deficiencies that could cause it but I should be getting adequate vitamins and minerals from the way I'm eating now so I'm not sure. Also, as with most things, there's many possible culprits and pinpointing the exact cause of these things might be tricky.

Another thing is my sense of balance is off sometimes and I misstep as if drunk occasionally.

Also all the programming associated with food is coming up to the surface to be dealt with and until now it's been okay. I passed my first birthday party test with flying colors as the cakes and pizzas were flying in front of my face, but being so satiated from a fat-heavy lunch, it didn't even look appealing to me.

I found the thread about thiamine deficiency and was thinking that some of my symptoms can be explained by that, so was thinking to order some B1 as it's cheap. I'm also thinking of ordering L-glutamine to speed up the recovery of my gut. Could either of these help me along?

I'm still waiting for my order of magnesium (citrate and bisglycinate powder) to arrive (along with fish oil), and hopefully that will help me somewhat along the way.

I'm currently testing to be without eggs (1 week now), which is a shame, as that's the one food I have access to an impeccable source of (our own chickens).

Reading about other peoples experiences though, I'm starting to think I should instead eliminate dairy. Ever since I was old enough to hold a glass I've been chugging down milk any time I had the chance, so it would make sense to me that the relationship my body has with dairy might be a complicated one.

Maybe I should just be patient and not expect too much too soon, as I'm reading of people having been on this diet for over a year and still not having been able to perfect the process. I suppose just steadfastly continuing on the diet will show slow and steady improvements by itself...
 
Now, however, my extremities are cold, and sometimes I get the whole-body shivers that last about a minute.
Hi @MatiaS :-)

I'm just speculating here. If you have entered the ketosis state, you will be burning fat stored in your body. There are a lot of chemicals and bad stuff which is soluble in your body fat, which means it's probably been stored there for possibly years.

This bad stuff is probably now mobilised and in your bloodstream now, and you're probably having a hard time processing it all out of your system. I guess I would say to drink more water to help purge it all out ?
 
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