Are You Right For The Keto Diet
These days, it looks like everyone is discussing the ketogenic (in short, keto) diet - the low-carbohydrate, moderate protein, high-fat diet program that transforms your body into a fat-burning machine. Hollywood stars and professional athletes have publicly touted this diet's benefits, from slimming down, lowering blood sugar, fighting inflammation, reducing cancer risk, increasing energy, to slowing aging. So is keto something that you should consider dealing with? The following will explain what this diet is all about, the pros and cons, as well as the problems to check out for.
What Is Keto?
Normally, the body uses glucose as the main way to obtain fuel for energy. While you are on a keto diet and you also are eating very few carbs with only moderate amounts of protein (excess protein could be converted to carbs), the body switches its fuel supply to perform mostly on fat. The liver produces ketones (a kind of fatty acid) from fat. These ketones turn into a fuel source for your body, especially the brain which consumes plenty of energy and can run on either glucose or ketones.
When the body produces ketones, it enters a metabolic state called ketosis. Fasting is the easiest way to achieve ketosis. While you are fasting or eating very few carbs and only moderate levels of protein, your body turns to burning stored fat for fuel. This is why people tend to lose more excess weight on the keto diet.
GREAT THINGS ABOUT The Keto Diet
The keto diet is not new. It started used in the 1920s as a medical therapy to take care of epilepsy in children, but when anti-epileptic drugs came to the marketplace, the dietary plan fell into obscurity until recently. Given its success in reducing the amount of seizures in epileptic patients, an increasing number of research has been done on the power of the diet to take care of a range of neurologic disorders and other types of chronic illnesses.
Neurodegenerative diseases. New research indicates the benefits of keto in Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, autism, and multiple sclerosis (MS). It may also be protective in traumatic brain injury and stroke. One theory for keto's neuroprotective effects is that the ketones produced during ketosis provide additional fuel to brain cells, which may help those cells resist the damage from inflammation due to these diseases.
Obesity and weight loss. For anyone who is trying to lose weight, the keto diet is quite effective as it helps to access and shed the body fat. Constant hunger may be the biggest issue when you try to shed weight. The keto diet helps avoid this problem because reducing carb consumption and increasing fat intake promote satiety, making it easier for people to adhere to the diet. In a study, obese test subjects lost double the quantity of weight within 24 weeks going on a low-carb diet (20.7 lbs) compared to the group on a low-fat diet (10.5 lbs).
Type 2 diabetes. custom keto diet Apart from weight loss, the keto diet also helps enhance insulin sensitivity, that is ideal for a person with type 2 diabetes. In a study published in Nutrition & Metabolism, researchers noted that diabetics who ate low-carb keto diets could actually significantly reduce their dependence on diabetes medication and could even reverse it eventually. Additionally, it improves other health markers such as lowering triglyceride and LDL (bad) cholesterol and raising HDL (good) cholesterol.
