5 ms·

Reads like beginning of a new fad just like keto diet. My idea is that sugar in quantities we ingest nowadays damages all and makes more problems. It is not th

by ozim 2y ago

Reads like beginning of a new fad just like keto diet. My idea is that sugar in quantities we ingest nowadays damages all and makes more problems. It is not that ketones are some magic thing. Only that sugar is rocket fuel for the brain so it should not be used without care.

iamacyborg 2y ago
> Reads like beginning of a new fad just like keto diet. It won't be, ketone supplements are too expensive for that. > My idea is that sugar in quantities we ingest nowadays damages all and makes more problems This is nonsense. Sugar is an easily accessed fuel that your body can readily use for a variety of activities.
- kjksf 2y ago
  It's not nonsense and you're not addressing the main point: overuse. A glass of wine is harmless. A bottle of hard spirit will poison and potentially kill you. Your body can nullify small amounts of alcohol. But if you drink more toxin than what your body can neutralize it poisons you. Sugar and carbs rise glucose level in your blood. When it's small amount your blood will re-distribute it to cells as fuel. But if you eat enough sugar and carbs that your body cannot absorb all the glucose, you become fat and develop diabetes. So yeah, sugar is fuel and tastes good but in modern food products it's used everywhere which makes moderate use very hard to achieve. That's why 99 million of Americans are overweight, 70 million are obese. 29 million have diagnosed diabetes, 10 million estimated undiagnosed diabetes and 115 million pre-diabetes.
  - iamacyborg 2y ago
    You're confusing sugar and carbs with excess calories. Excess calories are harmful, sugar and carbs are not.
    - germinalphrase 2y ago
      Sugar and carbs are very calorie dense, so it’s a distinction without a difference on a practical level.
      - wathef 2y ago
        A carbohydrate and protein have the same calorie content, around 4kcal per gram. Fat is 9kcal per gram.
        germinalphrase 2y ago
        Again, on a practical level - what’s easier to over consume? Carbs and sugars or fats?
      - hawk_ 2y ago
        It's perhaps more accurate to say sugars and simple carbs are easy to absorb whereas fats and complex carbs are harder to absorb. A single gram fat is the most calorie dense substance by weight that we can consume I think. It's just in practice it's hard to become fat by consuming only excess fat.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - nradov 2y ago
      High blood glucose levels are literally toxic. This will damage every cell in your body. Your body can buffer sugar intake to an extent in order to maintain homeostasis but over time this tends to cause insulin resistance. A little sugar is fine but larger amounts are poisonous. The exact limit depends on a number of factors such as muscle mass and liver glucagon level.
      - layla5alive 2y ago
        And proportion of visceral fat stores, genetics, epigenetics, etc.
    - 2y ago
- riehwvfbk 2y ago
  Just because something is less pleasant doesn't automatically mean it's good. On the surface, it would be weird for ketones to improve brain activity - after all "keto flu" is a thing, and it is definitely is not a state of high performance. And if ketones were that healthy then diabetics would the the healthiest people of all. Instead, they are poison, and this is well documented.
  - ddorian43 2y ago
    Keto flu happens when you transition because of loosing too much water that was retained by carbs and electrolytes gets flushed with the water. Very easy to fix by taking a electrolyte supplement when starting keto (LMNT etc). > then diabetics would the the healthiest people of all. Instead, they are poison, and this is well documented. It is documented on T1D, where they make no insulin at all! Keto still helps on T1D, you will always need insulin, just less, and have more stable blood glucose (and all the benefits that entails with it). For T2D, it's the best solution for it (see virtahealth.com for a great company that helps on this).
  - fl0ki 2y ago
    > On the surface, it would be weird for ketones to improve brain activity - after all "keto flu" is a thing, and it is definitely is not a state of high performance. Keto flu is from a low level of ketones, not a high level. Once enough ketones become available there is no more keto flu. From there most people feel at least normal, and many feel a bit better than normal because the cycles of both energy and satiety are smoothed out by the change in fuel sources. > And if ketones were that healthy then diabetics would the the healthiest people of all. Diabetics have health complications precisely because they cannot moderate their blood glucose, with or without ketones. Ketones do not regulate blood glucose, insulin does. Unlike glucose, excess ketones are harmlessly urinated out, they do not need insulin to process them. Glucose in the blood is toxic [1] if it isn't metabolised because of lack of insulin, and even most diabetics consume enough carbohydrates for this to be a risk. There is a clear relationship between availability of insulin and safe levels of glucose consumption, in fact injecting insulin is usually the first intervention if blood glucose is at dangerously high levels. Search for insulin in that paper. Ketones don't enter into this picture at all as either a toxin or the solution to toxicity. Precisely the point is that ketones can substitute for most of your glucose needs without risking toxicity like glucose does. If all of that isn't enough, diabetics often do better following a ketogenic diet [2], not worse. When you can't naturally produce enough insulin to process the glucose you consume for daily energy, producing ketones instead is a safe workaround which your body performs naturally. What part of that is evidence for ketones themselves being the problem? [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2738809/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2738809/ [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31336509/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31336509/
- onethought 2y ago
  Well, Alcohol is an even more easily accessible fuel that your body can readily use for a variety of activities... but its negatives are well understood...
ddorian43 2y ago
> My idea is that sugar in quantities we ingest nowadays damages all and makes more problems. What about little kids with epilepsy? They haven't had years of sugar to get damaged. Maybe they're susceptible for early onset damage? > It is not that ketones are some magic thing. Only that sugar is rocket fuel for the brain so it should not be used without care. The keto diet for epilepsy (psychiatry/cancer mostly copy it as far as I know) needs high ketone levels (at least 2). Even doing carnivore (0 carbs) with medium fat/protein won't help, you won't achieve the blood numbers & won't get results. You NEED to get ~80-90% of calories from fat to achieve consistent blood levels (ketones 2-4+, glucose 4) for epilepsy version. Think of it as a drug dosage. Some people might need lower dosage, but the standard is at the dosage I wrote (blood test GKI 1-2).
guerby 2y ago
keto diet is a fad, that's big news! Please write a peer reviewed article in the BMJ about it we all want to know. https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/early/2020/11/02/bmjnph-2020-000072 https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/early/2020/11/02/bmjnph-20... "Insights from a general practice service evaluation supporting a lower carbohydrate diet in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus and prediabetes: a secondary analysis of routine clinic data including HbA1c, weight and prescribing over 6 years" Most read paper of the BMJ ever. Follow-up: https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/early/2023/01/02/bmjnph-2022-000544 https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/early/2023/01/02/bmjnph-20... "What predicts drug-free type 2 diabetes remission? Insights from an 8-year general practice service evaluation of a lower carbohydrate diet with weight loss"
- SamoyedFurFluff 2y ago
  Neither of these papers are keto diets specifically. It looks like these patients just had way more personal one on one time with their doctors, dedicated group sessions, and carb information. Without actual carb counts there’s no way to know if this is actually keto. Importantly, neither paper specified the high fat part of the keto diet, which makes me think neither paper actually supports keto. Btw I’m not personally an anti-keto guy I just dislike mindless paper citations.
- Aurornis 2y ago
  You linked two papers about reducing carbohydrate intake, which is not a ketogenic diet. A ketogenic diet involves severe carbohydrate restriction and even major protein restriction. The research you shared isn’t applicable. This is a huge problem in online keto discourse: People share a lot of “research” that isn’t applicable, such as these low-carb papers or other research about treating epilepsy with keto diets. You can’t just look for studies about lower carb with positive conclusions and assume that this implies the keto diet is good.
  - dcow 2y ago
    I was with my wife during her gestational diabetes nutrition session. The diet they recommended was for all intents and purposes a ketogenic diet. The only carbs were from natural sugars in fruits and veggies. They just didn’t push the fat and squeeze the carbs as much as you see in keto enthusiast literature. I have a hypothesis though: the keto community does this as a “failsafe” way to instruct curious people how to experience ketosis for the first time. People practicing keto long term (once they’ve experienced the acute benefits and/or initial weight loss) are almost always landing on their own personal watermark which very likely looks like taking in 60+g of carbs a day in a state of “nutritional” ketosis where there are only slightly elevated levels of keytones (~0.4-1.0 mmol/l) in the blood compared to the level of “therapeutic” ketosis used to treat epilepsy (3.0-5.0 mmol/l).
throwawaycities 2y ago
>new fad just like keto diet The keto diet has been around over 100 years and it was developed in a clinical setting for children with epilepsy to reproduce the benefits of fasting - which has been known for thousands of years to prevent seizures - while providing a long term solution and not deprive children of calories. It’s not exactly a fad, it’s just that there are a lot more studies being conducted on the benefits - like fasting studies which lead the discovery of autophagy and the Nobel prize in 2016. The idea sugar is rocket fuel for the brain, is a little misguided. Certain sugars spike insulin triggering anabolic response getting glucose to the cells quickly, but that doesn’t make glucose more efficient for the brain. Ketones are smaller than glucose molecules and more efficient at crossing the blood brain barrier. Rocket fuel for the brain is being in a deep state of ketosis and consuming medium chain fatty acids (e.g. coconut oil) or beta hydroxybutyrate (i.e. exogenous ketones).
- Aurornis 2y ago
  > The keto diet has been around over 100 years and it was developed in a clinical setting for children with epilepsy Yes, exactly. It was developed and studied in the context of epilepsy treatment. The current wave of keto influencers are pushing it as something else, though. I have tried keto and noticed some interesting effects, but the impact on certain parameters of my lipid bloodwork was undeniably bad no matter what I tried. The keto community works overtime to downplay the possible negative effects of the diet, but actual cardio and lipid researchers have very different opinions.
  - dcow 2y ago
    I don’t think it’s so insidious. People see real benefit and results from highly restricting carbs. Something is happening, it’s not just a fad. Sure, it’s fine to debate the pros and cons but to outright disparage it because there a community of excited people who have had life changing experiences talking about it positively seems overly reactionary.
    - jajko 2y ago
      Yeah, those excited folks go often a bit mental over the board and praise it like second coming of Jesus, that's what most folks have problems with. Rational discussion about pros and cons is rare.

by ozim 2y ago

iamacyborg 2y ago

> Reads like beginning of a new fad just like keto diet. It won't be, ketone supplements are too expensive for that. > My idea is that sugar in quantities we ingest nowadays damages all and makes more problems This is nonsense. Sugar is an easily accessed fuel that your body can readily use for a variety of activities.

kjksf 2y ago
It's not nonsense and you're not addressing the main point: overuse. A glass of wine is harmless. A bottle of hard spirit will poison and potentially kill you. Your body can nullify small amounts of alcohol. But if you drink more toxin than what your body can neutralize it poisons you. Sugar and carbs rise glucose level in your blood. When it's small amount your blood will re-distribute it to cells as fuel. But if you eat enough sugar and carbs that your body cannot absorb all the glucose, you become fat and develop diabetes. So yeah, sugar is fuel and tastes good but in modern food products it's used everywhere which makes moderate use very hard to achieve. That's why 99 million of Americans are overweight, 70 million are obese. 29 million have diagnosed diabetes, 10 million estimated undiagnosed diabetes and 115 million pre-diabetes.
- iamacyborg 2y ago
  You're confusing sugar and carbs with excess calories. Excess calories are harmful, sugar and carbs are not.
  - germinalphrase 2y ago
    Sugar and carbs are very calorie dense, so it’s a distinction without a difference on a practical level.
    - wathef 2y ago
      A carbohydrate and protein have the same calorie content, around 4kcal per gram. Fat is 9kcal per gram.
      - germinalphrase 2y ago
        Again, on a practical level - what’s easier to over consume? Carbs and sugars or fats?
    - hawk_ 2y ago
      It's perhaps more accurate to say sugars and simple carbs are easy to absorb whereas fats and complex carbs are harder to absorb. A single gram fat is the most calorie dense substance by weight that we can consume I think. It's just in practice it's hard to become fat by consuming only excess fat.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - nradov 2y ago
    High blood glucose levels are literally toxic. This will damage every cell in your body. Your body can buffer sugar intake to an extent in order to maintain homeostasis but over time this tends to cause insulin resistance. A little sugar is fine but larger amounts are poisonous. The exact limit depends on a number of factors such as muscle mass and liver glucagon level.
    - layla5alive 2y ago
      And proportion of visceral fat stores, genetics, epigenetics, etc.
  - 2y ago
riehwvfbk 2y ago
Just because something is less pleasant doesn't automatically mean it's good. On the surface, it would be weird for ketones to improve brain activity - after all "keto flu" is a thing, and it is definitely is not a state of high performance. And if ketones were that healthy then diabetics would the the healthiest people of all. Instead, they are poison, and this is well documented.
- ddorian43 2y ago
  Keto flu happens when you transition because of loosing too much water that was retained by carbs and electrolytes gets flushed with the water. Very easy to fix by taking a electrolyte supplement when starting keto (LMNT etc). > then diabetics would the the healthiest people of all. Instead, they are poison, and this is well documented. It is documented on T1D, where they make no insulin at all! Keto still helps on T1D, you will always need insulin, just less, and have more stable blood glucose (and all the benefits that entails with it). For T2D, it's the best solution for it (see virtahealth.com for a great company that helps on this).
- fl0ki 2y ago
  > On the surface, it would be weird for ketones to improve brain activity - after all "keto flu" is a thing, and it is definitely is not a state of high performance. Keto flu is from a low level of ketones, not a high level. Once enough ketones become available there is no more keto flu. From there most people feel at least normal, and many feel a bit better than normal because the cycles of both energy and satiety are smoothed out by the change in fuel sources. > And if ketones were that healthy then diabetics would the the healthiest people of all. Diabetics have health complications precisely because they cannot moderate their blood glucose, with or without ketones. Ketones do not regulate blood glucose, insulin does. Unlike glucose, excess ketones are harmlessly urinated out, they do not need insulin to process them. Glucose in the blood is toxic [1] if it isn't metabolised because of lack of insulin, and even most diabetics consume enough carbohydrates for this to be a risk. There is a clear relationship between availability of insulin and safe levels of glucose consumption, in fact injecting insulin is usually the first intervention if blood glucose is at dangerously high levels. Search for insulin in that paper. Ketones don't enter into this picture at all as either a toxin or the solution to toxicity. Precisely the point is that ketones can substitute for most of your glucose needs without risking toxicity like glucose does. If all of that isn't enough, diabetics often do better following a ketogenic diet [2], not worse. When you can't naturally produce enough insulin to process the glucose you consume for daily energy, producing ketones instead is a safe workaround which your body performs naturally. What part of that is evidence for ketones themselves being the problem? [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2738809/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2738809/ [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31336509/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31336509/
onethought 2y ago
Well, Alcohol is an even more easily accessible fuel that your body can readily use for a variety of activities... but its negatives are well understood...

ddorian43 2y ago

> My idea is that sugar in quantities we ingest nowadays damages all and makes more problems. What about little kids with epilepsy? They haven't had years of sugar to get damaged. Maybe they're susceptible for early onset damage? > It is not that ketones are some magic thing. Only that sugar is rocket fuel for the brain so it should not be used without care. The keto diet for epilepsy (psychiatry/cancer mostly copy it as far as I know) needs high ketone levels (at least 2). Even doing carnivore (0 carbs) with medium fat/protein won't help, you won't achieve the blood numbers & won't get results. You NEED to get ~80-90% of calories from fat to achieve consistent blood levels (ketones 2-4+, glucose 4) for epilepsy version. Think of it as a drug dosage. Some people might need lower dosage, but the standard is at the dosage I wrote (blood test GKI 1-2).

guerby 2y ago

keto diet is a fad, that's big news! Please write a peer reviewed article in the BMJ about it we all want to know. https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/early/2020/11/02/bmjnph-2020-000072 https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/early/2020/11/02/bmjnph-20... "Insights from a general practice service evaluation supporting a lower carbohydrate diet in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus and prediabetes: a secondary analysis of routine clinic data including HbA1c, weight and prescribing over 6 years" Most read paper of the BMJ ever. Follow-up: https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/early/2023/01/02/bmjnph-2022-000544 https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/early/2023/01/02/bmjnph-20... "What predicts drug-free type 2 diabetes remission? Insights from an 8-year general practice service evaluation of a lower carbohydrate diet with weight loss"

SamoyedFurFluff 2y ago
Neither of these papers are keto diets specifically. It looks like these patients just had way more personal one on one time with their doctors, dedicated group sessions, and carb information. Without actual carb counts there’s no way to know if this is actually keto. Importantly, neither paper specified the high fat part of the keto diet, which makes me think neither paper actually supports keto. Btw I’m not personally an anti-keto guy I just dislike mindless paper citations.
Aurornis 2y ago
You linked two papers about reducing carbohydrate intake, which is not a ketogenic diet. A ketogenic diet involves severe carbohydrate restriction and even major protein restriction. The research you shared isn’t applicable. This is a huge problem in online keto discourse: People share a lot of “research” that isn’t applicable, such as these low-carb papers or other research about treating epilepsy with keto diets. You can’t just look for studies about lower carb with positive conclusions and assume that this implies the keto diet is good.
- dcow 2y ago
  I was with my wife during her gestational diabetes nutrition session. The diet they recommended was for all intents and purposes a ketogenic diet. The only carbs were from natural sugars in fruits and veggies. They just didn’t push the fat and squeeze the carbs as much as you see in keto enthusiast literature. I have a hypothesis though: the keto community does this as a “failsafe” way to instruct curious people how to experience ketosis for the first time. People practicing keto long term (once they’ve experienced the acute benefits and/or initial weight loss) are almost always landing on their own personal watermark which very likely looks like taking in 60+g of carbs a day in a state of “nutritional” ketosis where there are only slightly elevated levels of keytones (~0.4-1.0 mmol/l) in the blood compared to the level of “therapeutic” ketosis used to treat epilepsy (3.0-5.0 mmol/l).

throwawaycities 2y ago

>new fad just like keto diet The keto diet has been around over 100 years and it was developed in a clinical setting for children with epilepsy to reproduce the benefits of fasting - which has been known for thousands of years to prevent seizures - while providing a long term solution and not deprive children of calories. It’s not exactly a fad, it’s just that there are a lot more studies being conducted on the benefits - like fasting studies which lead the discovery of autophagy and the Nobel prize in 2016. The idea sugar is rocket fuel for the brain, is a little misguided. Certain sugars spike insulin triggering anabolic response getting glucose to the cells quickly, but that doesn’t make glucose more efficient for the brain. Ketones are smaller than glucose molecules and more efficient at crossing the blood brain barrier. Rocket fuel for the brain is being in a deep state of ketosis and consuming medium chain fatty acids (e.g. coconut oil) or beta hydroxybutyrate (i.e. exogenous ketones).

Aurornis 2y ago
> The keto diet has been around over 100 years and it was developed in a clinical setting for children with epilepsy Yes, exactly. It was developed and studied in the context of epilepsy treatment. The current wave of keto influencers are pushing it as something else, though. I have tried keto and noticed some interesting effects, but the impact on certain parameters of my lipid bloodwork was undeniably bad no matter what I tried. The keto community works overtime to downplay the possible negative effects of the diet, but actual cardio and lipid researchers have very different opinions.
- dcow 2y ago
  I don’t think it’s so insidious. People see real benefit and results from highly restricting carbs. Something is happening, it’s not just a fad. Sure, it’s fine to debate the pros and cons but to outright disparage it because there a community of excited people who have had life changing experiences talking about it positively seems overly reactionary.
  - jajko 2y ago
    Yeah, those excited folks go often a bit mental over the board and praise it like second coming of Jesus, that's what most folks have problems with. Rational discussion about pros and cons is rare.