I put this phrase into a search engine: "keto diet dangerous"

And whoa! Judging from the flood of articles from all the usual suspects (Mayo Clinic, WebMD, etc,) Imma gonna DIE! Since for the last 4 weeks I've been doing a VLC/Ketosis style diet for my autoimmune issues. It averages 10 net carbs a day.

This extensive January 9, 2019 article is from HVMN, who states "We relentlessly pursue human optimization." Yes, they have a shop with all kinds of ketone products, and I'm sure athletes (clearly their target audience) literally eats it all up. But their podcast has heavy hitters like Dr. Fung and Amy Berger, so I've subscribed to and will see how it goes.



Oh, how the Powers That Wish to Be love to disparage taking charge of our own health as a "fad." But we are not silly hipsters who immediately dismiss something because of its supposed popularity. (A personal pet peeve the size of a blue whale is everyone thinking gluten-free is "just a fad." Right. People give up donuts without some incredibly compelling reason, because my years of observation indicate donuts are themselves incredibly compelling. Uh huh.)

In addition, I must ask the question, "How popular?" Because I mentioned doing ketosis in an online community outside of this board, and I was hammered with cries of "Woo!" "Charlatans!" and my personal favorite, "I don't do a medical thing until it has been published X times in these particular peer-reviewed journals and approved by my doctor."

Fine. Good luck with that.



As something of a nutrition expert thanks to THIS board, I know that. But honestly, in the case of people I meet daily, not one in ten really knows that. They have simply absorbed "Grains good bacon bad" and never think about it. These tend to be people who are young, healthy, and have never battled a weight problem. Still, show me the person who knows what transfats are.



I'll just let that statement lie there for the "BUT peer review!" people to notice.



My bold. Because that is what I live by now.

There was a passage in The Wahls Protocol (currently listening to audiobook) where Dr. Wahls described how she had to run her dietary interventions past a nutritionist for approval about dangers. Which makes sense on its face, except to those who found out their diabetes nutritionist would get on their case about not eating enough carbs and covering it with their drugs.

Many exclaim, "But nobody does that anymore!" I wish it were so. In the last six months a friend's diabetic father, who has been happily lowcarbing with great results for years, still got scolded by his nutritionist. In the next sentence, right after "You are doing incredibly well." He patiently endured the "low carb count scolding" and simply said, "But if I increase my carbs, I won't be doing incredibly well." But they do not believe it no matter how many times he tells them.

Here's my favorite misconception:



My bold, because crikey! that is all I hear. And I explain it, and they STILL don't hear me. It's like this:

"Don't fall down the elevator shaft!"

"I know. I'm on the stairs."

"You could die from falling down an elevator shaft!"

"I know. That's why I'm taking the stairs."

"There's a big red sign! Didn't you see the sign?"

"Yes."





Part of my autoimmune problem is my disordered cortisol, and how it got dysfunctional from long and severe stress from various factors, which I am slowly tracking down and zapping with a big purple science fiction tricorder/ray gun. (Not really, but I would love to have one.)

There's lots more that might be interesting to readers. I'm going to keep it bookmarked, but I'm also resigned to the fact that to most, I am not a reliable source of science. I'll just ignore them and get better, which has been a consistent and reliable feature of committing to low carb since 2003.

Let's face it, low carb has been tricked out like a muscle car and renamed "ketosis." We can roll with it

I've been low carbing as long as you have and amazingly enough I'm not dead yet plus I have sustained it all these years plus I have eliminated numerous health issues while eating this way.. The low fat dogma is so ingrained into people that they can't hear counter arguments. It's like putting one's fingers in one's ears and humming some nonsense sounds, blocking out the truth from even making a dent in the nutritional ignorance that is sadly believed by so many.

I always found it amusing how synonymous Phinney and Volek's "nutritional ketosis" is with Atkins' "benign dietary ketosis."

I do like the distinction for people aiming at higher ketones for medical etc. reasons.

I'm interested in how the person can possibly know that getting enough salt will prevent cortisol issues on keto if



They're suggesting a therapy for a condition they haven't established as existing. Getting in your electrolytes is a good idea, but that might not be the reason.

The brainwashing has been so successful that even an overwhelmingly healthy change backed by recent evidence gets all the villagers (medical community, pharma, food manufacturers, and the victims in the remainder of the population) grabbing for pitchforks and torches. I'm often amazed at the offense displayed when the preached dogma becomes challenged. What was that saying from the Firesign Theater? Everything you know is wrong, or something like that.

Love me some Firesign Theater! And you know what? It's true.

I remember exclaiming to a friend, upon embarking on Atkins, "This has turned my food choices inside out and upside down." I have concluded that, without exception, everything I was told about nutrition was wrong.

• Fat is good for me.
• Grains and sugar are bad for me.
• Heart disease, diabetes, and many other ailments are caused by carbs.
• Red meat and bacon will help me live longer.
• Eat more salt.
• Keep long stretches of time between meals, and eat in a way that lets me do that.
• Breakfast is the most disposable meal of the day.
• Fasting is healthy.

Just yesterday I was reading something on r/ketoscience about how you need to eat masses more protein than you think (over 2.2 grams per kilogram of body weight) before it might start to interfere with ketosis. Immediately some keto bro responds with his n=1 and says "...it turns out I was technically following more of an atkins diet with high protein and fat. Typical day would be something like 140g protein, 20-30g carbs, and 190g fat. I started to follow a more strict, actual keto diet where at least 80% of my calories come from fat and my ketone levels shot up."

He sounded like a serious lifter, so 140g of protein is likely adequate for him, but that's a guess. No further information on whether reducing his protein helped him lose weight or fat, etc.

Why do people think that "keto" is some vastly different thing from low carb and that if you don't follow all the made up rules perfectly (20g net! Macros! High fat! Protein bad!) that you will not lose weight? And why do people continue to insist that getting adequate protein is a high protein diet?? It is sooo frustrating to me.

The diet he describes gives 73 percent calories as fat. A perfectly good diet--it could be ketogenic, but isn't necessarily so. When it comes down to it, my problem isn't with making a distinction between a ketogenic low carb diet and a non-ketogenic one--it's just that Atkins prescription was a bit broader than what people seem to be talking about. The Atkins starting point is basically to not worry about fat or protein, but then he has tweaking all over the place. The fat fast/induction intermittent plan he advocated was certainly targeting a deeper ketosis. But just following the stock advice, I think people could end up all over the place in their ratio of fat to protein.

I find I need to keep my protein sort of 'just adequate' most of the time for best effect. Before I did this, I still had some chronic pain issues with my shoulder. Also if I'm getting anxious or depressed, most of the time I'm sort of edged up on my protein intake and have to back down a little. It's sort of a thin line, you don't want too little, either. Which is why I agree, if you get good enough effect somewhere short of a strictly speaking ketogenic low carb diet, don't even worry about ketone levels. Personally I wouldn't push things as far as I do if trial and error hadn't shown that it's worth it in my case. It's sort of a pain in the butt, otherwise. But I do get to eat a lot of homemade low carb ice cream, there's that.

I tend to go high on my protein, because I get hungry if I try to restrict it. I think there's a few unique factors in my case:

• I have a rare genetic condition that includes "extra brain wiring" and leads to stress conditions where I "overthink" things. I believe this predisposition to overclocking my processor uses up more than the average quota of neurotransmitters. Which are made from protein.
• I've been trying to heal from various challenges, and my body need protein to rebuild.
• I am currently on very low carbs, so maybe I just need that bit of more protein.

Way to make it work for you!

Looks like the quote function worked out a little wonky.... it's the opposite for me, at least at a reduced body weight, increasing my protein intake past a certain point will increase my appetite, lead to binges even on strictly low carb foods, etc.

Teaser, low carb ice cream recipe?

One interesting twist these days is that the ketogenic/VLC diet is not just something that fat people do to temporarily shed some weight while clogging their arteries with saturated fat and filling their colon with 7 pounds of undigested red meat. In spite of all the old rhetoric it is now trending as a healthy way to eat -- obese, overweight, or not. Skinny people are doing it. Athletes are doing it. More lifestyle -- less temporary diet. The people are seeing the results, learning the science behind it and doing keto in spite of the all the cat calls from the establishment.

I'm part of a Dave Feldman's Facebook group called "LMHR - Lean Mass Hyper Responders." Many (if not most) of the members there are lean and/or very active people. I fall in with the latter. They also have in common high HDL, sky-high LDL-C, and low triglycerides. This lipid profile related to VLC/Keto is apparently much more common than previously known. It seems to kick in for many (like me) once metabolic issues - such as insulin resistance -- get resolved. For those starting keto who are already lean, mean, and metabolically healthy - the doctor freaking lipid profile can happen within a few weeks. All those skinny people doing a fat man's fad diet. They had it coming (tongue-in-cheek).

I started this WOE 5 years ago and the times really have changed since then. While I'm still surprised how clueless most people are about carbs, the trend is certainly moving in the right directions. Atkins is no longer a dirty word - even if hidden behind more trendy names.

Low carb ice cream recipe... I whip heavy cream with flavouring, then freeze it in the bowl. Sometimes I'll add an egg yolk, it makes it harder to overwhip and wind up with something more like butter, and generally improves the end product. Sometimes I'll use sugar free koolaid drops for flavouring, other times a bit of vanilla or cocoa and stevia.

Yup!!

To bring the list up ONE more notch.... reduce the bacon amount, or use nitrate free; eat grass fed beef for that "red meat" , and make those fats lard and tallow from grass fed livestock and dump the processed seed oils.

And ya, breakfast IS the LEAST important meal of the day!!

Dang it, I must find my hand mixer before summer.

I've tried and it's impossible unless you are extremely rich.
I buy bacon for $3.29 pp, organic would be twice that price. We go through 2-3 packs per week.
Organic chicken unless you raise it yourself (truly don't feed them GMO corn or standard antibiotics in the chicken scratch) costs $12-14 for one chicken when I can buy a whole regular chicken for $4.
Beef, organic grass fed is a little idealistic considering the grass stops growing in the winter or when they days shorten, even in South America where a lot of the grass fed is imported from. Sprouts gets theirs from Uruguay. Unless you grow your own hay you are buying hay and it costs lots of bucks.
But even with growing our own hay, to have a good protein content, costs to poison weeds and fertilize the grass costs a TON of $$. There is no profit, lets just say you don't even break even.
Everybody who raises cattle has to do something else for actual income to support the cattle.