Ketosis VII: Practical recommendations

Well, here we are at our final Ketosis post!  It has been a long ride for all of us, and I hope you have learned as much as I have while researching the topic.

We have seen a lot of benefits of ketosis from helping lower triglycerides to helping with certain neurological conditions.  Now while all of these things sound great, how do we appropriately approach ketosis?  While many of us may want to try and be in ketosis at all times after seeing these benefits, and that it is a normal, physiologic process, I do think there are some reasons to not be in ketosis all the time, but I will cover those in a separate, later post, since I think they relate better to a different topic I have been thinking about lately.

So we know we have three main ways to get into ketosis: fasting, low-grade exercise, and high fat diets.  I think an appropriate ketosis-style diet is one that will combine all three of these into a cyclic approach, that way we make sure to leave ketosis for a little bit every now and then.  Also, as you will remember from my cornerstones of health posts I believe a system of HOW you eat it is very important to overall health, and we will also incorporate this system into our ketogenic protocol.

Ketosis VI: Therapeutic Roles

We have covered most of the hardcore science that I wanted to review when looking at ketosis and ketogenesis.   We have covered most of the relevant biochemistry in terms of how are ketone bodies formed and how they are regulated.  That is all well and good, but I am sure many of you are just wondering how ketosis can benefit you, right?  Well, this article is meant to show you some of the benefits for ketosis. 

Ketogenic diets have been used as therapeutic diets for some conditions for over a century, and while it isn’t used as much anymore, it probably should be.  This article will mainly go over how it can help out those in a disease state; however, I think the mechanisms through which ketones act in the diseases show us some of the power of these energy molecules.  You many not have one of these diseases, but seeing how much they can help with certain conditions certainly makes you think twice about them.

Ketosis Part V: Medium-Chain Triglycerides

We have covered a lot of ground so far in looking over the literature on ketosis and ketogenesis.  We have seen what ketone bodies our body actually uses, and how they are regulated on many levels.

We already know that a high-fat diet is a great way to induce ketogenesis.  However a question many of you may be asking is “Do all fats have the same ketogenic potential?”  Well, the answer to that is no, some fats are better at inducing ketogenesis than others.  The most ketogenic fats we have are the medium-chain fats.

We consume many different kinds of fats, and all these fats vary in two different ways, chain length and saturation.  Saturation refers to the number of double bonds a fatty acid chain has, with no double bonds being a saturated fat, and one or more double bonds being an unsaturated fat.  The medium-chain fatty acids we will talk about here are all saturated fatty acids.  They are called medium-chain because they have between 6 and 12 carbons in their chain (1).  Here are a couple of diagrams of some of these medium-chain fats.

Caproic/Hexanoic Acid

Brain Fuels

If you ask many people what the primary fuel for your brain is they will most likely tell you that it is glucose.  In fact many sources used to say that the brain could ONLY use glucose as a fuel.  However, it has been known for some time that ketones are more efficient fuel source for our brains.  In fact this article says that ketogenic diets have been used as a treatment for epilepsy since the 1920’s!  And now, an even more efficient fuel is being talked about: Lactate.  Peter from Hyperlipid has a good write up about a paper that talks about the brain using lactate, and why he thinks it is such a good fuel.

This is all well and good, I am all for feeding my brain the most efficient fuels.  If we evolved primarily to support such big and “expensive” (energy consumption-wise) brains this would seem a very important thing to do to maintain good overall health.  However, after reading all this I am left wondering: How am I supposed to get all this lactate to feed my brain?  I can’t eat lactate. Also, with all these fuels for our brain, is there an optimal ratio of fuels?  Let’s take a look.