Keto Clarity: Your Definitive Guide to the Benefits of a Low-Carb, High-Fat Diet (20 page)

– Dr. William Davis

Making people scared to death of eating fat, while saying nary a word about the negative health effects of carbohydrates, has had the unintended consequence of encouraging obesity and chronic disease. With the abysmal failure of the low-fat lie we’ve been fed, don’t you think it’s time to start looking at the role fat could play in making our health
better
? Lay your fears aside, eat more fat than you probably ever have before, and watch the remarkable things that happen in your health as a result. Dialing down the carbs and getting protein right are important, but eating the right amount of fat will take you over the top and make ketosis happen in earnest.

I realize that eating more fat may go against everything you’ve ever believed about healthy nutrition. Every fiber of your being will tell you not to do this. And that internal battle about whether this is the right thing to do for your health is something all of us who have chosen to pursue a low-carb, moderate-protein, high-fat, ketogenic diet have had to grapple with at some point. Once you are ready to take the plunge and go full-fledged keto, the remedy to fat phobia is to just embrace the fat and eat it in your diet confidently, knowing it is going to make you healthier than you’ve ever been before.

Occasionally people who are new to the ketogenic lifestyle may experience diarrhea and intestinal discomfort. Dr. Mary Newport, a neonatologist and authority on the therapeutic use of ketones, suggests that if you do experience discomfort right away, try increasing your carbohydrates slightly while decreasing your fat intake a bit. Then gradually decrease carbs and increase fat to help your body adjust.

I believe a lot of the side effects seen with ketogenic diets in past research studies have to do with poor design of the diets, mostly poor food quality, and the continued fear of saturated fat.

– Bryan Barksdale

Here’s a handy acronym that will help you remember why fat is good:

F
eel fuller
A
lternative fuel
T
riggers ketones

You may not need to eat a bit of butter with every bite of food like I do, but you’ll be ramping up the amount of fat in your diet to levels you probably never thought you’d ever consume. For example, you can ask for heavy cream in your latte at Starbucks instead of milk. Your health will benefit as a result. Coming up in the next chapter, we’ll put your new nutritional habits to the test to see how well they are working to start pumping ketones throughout your body.

A high-fat diet in the presence of carbohydrate is different than a high-fat diet in the presence of low carbohydrate.

– Dr. Richard Feinman

Key Keto Clarity Concepts

• A low-carb, high-fat diet is a healthy diet.
  
• If you want to produce ketones, you need to eat fat.
  
• When you cut carbs and moderate protein, all that’s left to eat is fat.
  
• Fat is the key to being full and satisfied.
  
• Our cultural perception about fat being harmful is wrong.
  
• Leading experts are coming out in support of saturated fat.
  
• The fat phobia that exists is not supported by the scientific data.
  
• Americans are slowly realizing low-fat not as healthy as once thought.
  
• It’s time to break through decades of indoctrination against fat.
  
• Fat is not the enemy in your diet. Fat is your friend.
  
• Consuming fat is necessary so that you can burn it as an alternative fuel source.
  
• Never, ever, ever eat a diet that’s both low-carb and low-fat.
  
• You may need to eat a lot more fat than you currently are.
  
• An Arctic explorer realizes the benefits of eating fatty foods.
  
• Every fiber of your being will fight you about eating more fat.
  
• Fat leads to feeling fuller, acts an alternative fuel, and triggers ketone production.
  

The ketone testing technology for the urine, blood, and breath are definitely interesting and a great direction for measuring for the specific level of ketosis.

– Dr. Dominic D’Agostino

Keep carbs low
Eat more fat
Test ketones often
Overdoing protein is bad

At this point in the book, you’ve heard all about what ketones are, why you probably want to increase the amount of them in your body, and what it takes nutritionally to make this happen. But you may be wondering how in the world you are supposed to figure out if you are actually in a state of ketosis. That’s what this chapter is all about, and it will cover some of the old, traditional ways of measuring, the current devices available on the market, and some really cool emerging technologies that could forever change the way we check for ketones in the future.

Before we dive into the latest gizmos and gadgets that technology has to offer for measuring ketones, let’s first identify the three types of ketone bodies that are found inside the body:

1. Acetoacetate
   (AcAc)
   , the primary ketone body in the urine
   
2. Beta-hydroxybutyrate (BHB)
   , the primary ketone body in the blood
   
3. Acetone
   , the primary ketone body in the breath
   

For decades, the traditional method for measuring the presence of ketones has been testing acetoacetate levels in the urine. The ketone test strips for urinalysis can be purchased in a bottle of fifty for around $12 to $15. (To double your money’s worth, cut the strips in half lengthwise and just use half of a strip each time.) The strips change color to signify the level of acetoacetate. If you are just starting your pursuit of ketosis, you may see beige (no ketones), pink (some ketones), or purple (a lot of ketones).

Avoid using urine ketone test strips as a measure of keto-adaptation. This is akin to looking for banana peels in your garbage to figure out how many apples are in your refrigerator and how many of those you are eating. Apart from only measuring ketones eliminated as a waste product, urinary ketone test strips measure only one kind of ketone, acetoacetate, and fail altogether to measure the most critical and predominantly utilized ketone in a healthy state of ketosis: beta-hydroxybutyrate. This is
always
better and more accurately measured with a blood ketone meter.

– Nora Gedgaudas

But in recent years, newer and more precise devices that can measure the ketone body primarily found in the blood (beta-hydroxybutyrate) have become popular among low-carb, high-fat dieters. There are two major blood ketone monitors available on the market at the time of writing: the Precision Xtra brand from Abbott (sold under the brand name FreeStyle Optium in Europe and Australia) and Nova Max Plus from Nova. Since 78 percent of the ketones present in the blood are beta-hydroxybutyrate, being able to test for this is a really big deal. Precision Xtra is a better meter for accurate and consistent readings (NovaMax displays “LO” instead of a number readout when ketones fall below a certain level, even when you could be in ketosis).