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Is the High-Fat, Low-Carb Ketogenic Diet Right for You?
By: T.J Murphy
Sep 19, 2016
The diet has quietly become the rage among ultra-endurance athletes and elite soldiers, and it’s a surprisingly yummy way to fuel up.
In the past several years, as measured by Google Trends, interest in an unusual style of eating called the ketogenic diet has tripled, and chances are you have a friend or coworker who’s tried it. Early adopters are typically people who run or ride a lot and want a food plan that doesn’t just fill their tanks but also boosts performance. Followers scarf eggs, cheese, and olive oil in hunger-killing quantities, turning their backs on just about every carb other than vegetables. They don’t use half-and-half in their coffee—they use heavy cream. Still, they’re likely to look a little lean, since the ketogenic diet turns them into 24/7 fat burners. (Even while surfing the couch.) And don’t be surprised if they report feeling better and stronger than ever.
Ketones are a type of organic substance that includes ketone bodies, a collective name for the three molecules that are produced naturally by the liver when it breaks down fat for energy, a process that the ketogenic diet jump-starts. Under normal circumstances—that is, if you’re eating a standard, balanced diet—your body gets most of its energy by turning carbohydrates into glucose, which cells then convert to energy. If you significantly reduce carb intake (typically to less than 50 grams per day), your body undergoes a fundamental change: it starts relying on fat-generated ketone bodies as its primary energy source. The brain, heart, and muscles can all burn ketone bodies efficiently if you’ve been eating this way for a month or so. This metabolic state is called ketosis.
A Day in Food on the Ketone Diet
How endurance athlete Patrick Sweeney puts away nearly 3,000 calories a day on the ketone diet.
See more→
Historically used as a driver of weight loss, carb restriction has recently gained favor in ultra-endurance circles and the military’s Special Forces. The idea is to radically crank up fat burning so that athletes and soldiers are in ketosis during grueling, survival-like situations. The biochemistry of how ketone bodies aid performance is complicated, but the processes and benefits are summed up well for laypeople by Dr. Ken Ford, a ketones expert who runs the Florida-based Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), a nonprofit research outfit that’s funded by organizations like DARPA, the National Science Foundation, and the Army, Navy, and Air Force.
“During ketosis, the liver produces ketone bodies that are converted into substances that feed cellular energy production,” Ford says. “So basically, an athlete in ketosis can access additional fuel. Though there’s no scientific reason to believe that a ketogenic diet would increase anaerobic power or muscular strength, there is reason to believe that aerobic capacity and muscular endurance could be improved when sufficient ketone bodies are present to complement glucose.” The upshot is that for lower-intensity, longer-range exertion, ketone bodies offer the physiological equivalent of solar power.
There’s more. Ketone bodies apparently switch on specific genes responsible for a flurry of molecular upgrades, enhancing health and lengthening lifespan. Scientists are now investigating their use for treating everything from traumatic brain injury to cancer.
This broadband interest is new. The diet itself isn’t. Ketosis got a foothold in medicine in the 1920s, when it was used successfully to treat children with epilepsy who didn’t respond to drugs. Labeled the hyperketogenic diet, the regimen gave patients 90 percent of their daily calories from fat to help prevent seizures. “No one knew how it worked,” Nobel Prize–winning biophysicist Rod MacKinnon says. “They just knew it worked.”
More recently, there’s been a keto buzz among endurance athletes. It started in 2012, when Timothy Olson, a runner who follows a ketosis-friendly diet, broke the record at the Western States 100, the rugged, revered annual trail race in the Sierra Nevada. Last year, Zach Bitter, another ketones-adapted runner, set the American record for 100 miles on a track—11 hours 40 minutes 55 seconds. Data from a study conducted by Ohio State human-sciences professor Jeff Volek showed that during Bitter’s runs, as much as 98 percent of his energy can come from fat and only 2 percent from carbs. Your body can store a maximum of around 2,500 carbohydrate calories. But if you’re carrying around, say, 25 pounds of stored fat, that’s the equivalent of roughly 100,000 potential calories. So a fat-adapted runner can, in theory, chug along indefinitely.
Google’s parent company Alphabet is setting up a new “bioelectonics” venture with FTSE 100 pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). GSK will own 55% of the new joint venture, c…
Source: The Body Electric
Google’s parent company Alphabet is setting up a new “bioelectonics” venture with FTSE 100 pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).
GSK will own 55% of the new joint venture, called Galvani Bioelectronics, while Alphabet’s Verily Life Sciences (formerly Google Life Sciences) will own the rest.
The two companies will invest £540 million in the new UK-based business over 7 years, as well as contributing intellectual property rights to Galvani. Galvani will “enable the research, development, and commercialisation of bioelectronic medicines.”
The release says that bioelectronics is “a relatively new scientific field that aims to tackle a wide range of chronic diseases using miniaturised, implantable devices that can modify electrical signals that pass along nerves in the body, including irregular or altered impulses that occur in many illnesses.”
GSK has been involved in bioelectronics for 4 years and says it thinks diabetes, arthritis, and asthma could all potentially be treated using the new method.
The idea for the joint venture is that GSK can bring its drug and development expertise to the table, while Alphabet can contribute best-in-class tech and analytics.
The Google empire has been mounting a growing push into the world of healthcare in recent years. Google cofounded biotech R&D firm Calico in 2013 and spun out Verily Life Sciences last December. DeepMind, the London-based AI company Google bought in 2014, has also been developing tools for the NHS.
Moncef Slaoui, GSK’s Chairman of Global Vaccines, says in a statement announcing the deal:
“This agreement with Verily to establish Galvani Bioelectronics signals a crucial step forward in GSK’s bioelectronics journey, bringing together health and tech to realise a shared vision of miniaturised, precision electrical therapies. Together, we can rapidly accelerate the pace of progress in this exciting field, to develop innovative medicines that truly speak the electrical language of the body.”
Brian Otis, Verily’s Chief Technology Officer, says in the statement:
“This is an ambitious collaboration allowing GSK and Verily to combine forces and have a huge impact on an emerging field. Bioelectronic medicine is a new area of therapeutic exploration, and we know that success will require the confluence of deep disease biology expertise and new highly miniaturised technologies.
“This partnership provides an opportunity to further Verily’s mission by deploying our focused expertise in low power, miniaturised therapeutics and our data analytics engine to potentially address many disease areas with greater precision with the goal of improving outcomes.”
Galvani will initially employ 30 people and be headquartered at GSK’s Stevenage base. It will have a second research facility at Verily’s San Fransisco offices.
The announcement of the new joint venture comes a week after GSK pledged to invest £275 million in its development network across the UK. GSK shares are up 0.53% after an hour and a half of trade on Monday.
As always, the internet provides a great breadth of information for all of us. Occasionally, one finds misguided or false and misleading information that usually has a transparent or self-serving…
Source: PEMF Technology Points
As always, the internet provides a great breadth of information for all of us. Occasionally, one finds misguided or false and misleading information that usually has a transparent or self-serving nature to it.
I have seen comparisons, “buyers guides” to PEMF, use of clinical science not related to the represented device, and multiple other representations that are not referenced, not supported by PUBMED research, and technically inaccurate information that is, at best, embarrassing to the entire PEMF industry.
Several general points should be mentioned that make for an appropriate understanding of the BEMER technology and its position in the marketplace. The US market for medical devices creates a robust environment for confusion and misrepresentation, however, the European market is more driven by credibility and facts. The European medical market is driven by health management and cost containment because of the social model of medicine i.e. the government(s) promote health maintenance because of the prohibitive cost of disease management through drugs. Prescription drugs, in the US, are used as a primary response to any disease state. Prescription use, as a result, is often 10 fold in the USA vs. any developed country.
The second PEMF consideration is that the European Union medical system does NOT embrace PEMF technology that is widely utilized in the United States. The reason for this fact is that BEMER has advanced their signal technology so far beyond the PEMF units that BEMER is now the standard for improving blood flow and this is directly related to the work of Rainer Klopp MD. Dr. Klopp is THE noted researcher and scientists behind the patents that BEMER technology embraces.
While we respect the need to misrepresent technology or burrow science in a related field, BEMER has no need to do either tactic for the obvious reason that they have produced our own technology and science based on the actual application of BEMER in a clinical setting.
Dr. Klopp is the author of the medical textbook on microcirculation and is the established expert on the topic at numerous international medical conferences. His inventive mind produced the ONLY device that actually proves the inferiority of PEMF technology vs. the BEMER signal.
PubMed establishes real science on BEMER technology which has been inappropriately used by countless PEMF marketing tactics including our relationship with NASA.
