Sorry, keto fans, you're probably not in ketosis
Then again, you shouldn’t be anyway.
The diet gets billed as a miraculously enjoyable diet—eat all the fat you want, just cut out the carbs. But the ketogenic diet (also called keto) was never supposed to be fun. It was supposed to treat severe epilepsy. And as a medical treatment, it was only intended to be administered under the supervision of trained nutritionists and physicians. The professionals would be able to monitor patients for potential problems and ensure that their diet was actually keeping them in ketosis—a metabolic state where your body switches from using glucose as energy to using ketone bodies, which come from body fat. They needed those checkpoints because staying in true ketosis is exceptionally challenging for adults. It’s far easier in children, though researchers aren’t exactly sure why, so it’s primarily kids who undergo the treatment today.
The point of keto is to force your body to deplete its glucose (and the stored form, glycogen) so it will have to use body fat as a fuel source. It’s capable of making ketone bodies from your fat, which can replace glucose as an energy-storing molecule. To do that, you have to break apart fat molecules thus ‘burning’ the fat off. But here’s the thing: your body really really doesn’t want to run out of glucose. No glucose means starvation as far as it’s concerned. And when you’re starving, your body will start to break down protein just to get those sweet, sweet carbs. Of course, you have a source of protein in your body already: your own muscles. “When in starvation mode, your body breaks down muscle in your body,” says Giancoli. “Ketosis is a way of trying to preserve that protein. It’s not ideal, but it’s your body’s way of saving you.”
Neither Giancoli nor any of the other dieticians and nutritionists who evaluated keto for a recent US News & World Report diets ranking would recommend it. Many of them said they had serious concerns about long-term safety of doing keto.
So maybe not being in ketosis isn’t so bad after all—now just cut back on the saturated fats.
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