What are the effects of the ketogenic diet on nutrient adequacy, gut flora, and heart disease risk?
Given decades of experience using ketogenic diets to treat some cases of pediatric epilepsy, a body of safety data has accumulated. Nutrient deficiencies seem to be the obvious issue. Inadequate intake of 17 micronutrients, vitamins and minerals has been documented in strict keto dieters, as you can see in the chart below and at 0:14 in my video Are keto diets safe?
Dieting is a particularly important time to make sure you meet all your essential nutrient needs, as you may be taking in less food. Ketogenic diets tend be so nutritionally void that one review estimated that you would have to eat more than 37,000 calories a day to get an adequate daily intake of all the necessary vitamins and minerals, as you can see in the chart below and at 0:39 in my video.
That is one of the advantages of more plant-based approaches. As its editor-in-chief Journal of the American Dietetic Association put it, ‘What could be more nutrient dense than a vegetarian diet?’ Choosing a healthy diet can be easier than consuming more than 37,000 calories a day, which is like putting 50 sticks of butter in your morning coffee.
We’re not just talking about not even making ends meet. Children I have they got scurvy on ketogenic diets, and some did passed away from selenium deficiency, which can cause sudden cardiac death. Vitamin and mineral deficiencies can be solved with supplements, but what about the lack of prebiotics, the dozens of types of fiber and resistant starches were found concentrated in whole grains and beans that you would miss?
Not surprisingly, constipation is very common in keto diets. As I’ve reviewed before, starving our microbial selves of prebiotics can have a whole host of negative consequences. Ketogenic diets are done is depicted to “reduce the species richness and diversity of the gut microbiota,” our gut flora. Changes in the microbiome can be detected within 24 hours of switching to a high-fat, low-fiber diet. Lack of fiber starves the good bacteria in our gut. It used to be thought that dietary fat itself was absorbed almost entirely in the small intestine, but based on studies using radioactive tracers, now I know that about 7 percent of the saturated fat in a high-fat meal can reach the colon. This can result in “detrimental changes” in our gut microbiome, as well as weight gain, increased leaky gut and pro-inflammatory changes. For example, there may to be a fall in beneficial Bifidobacteria and a decrease in the total production of short-chain fatty acids, which are expected to increase the risk of gastrointestinal disorders.
Striking to the heart of the matter, what can all that saturated fat do to our hearts? If you Look on low-carbohydrate diets and all-cause mortality, those who eat lower-carbohydrate diets have a “significantly higher risk of all-cause mortality,” meaning they live, on average, significantly shorter lives. However, from a heart disease perspective, this issues whether it is animal or vegetable fat. Based on the famous Harvard cohorts, eating more animal-based, low-carbohydrate diets was associated with higher rates of death from cardiovascular disease and a 50 percent higher risk of death from heart attack or stroke, but no such association was found for diets with lower carbohydrates based on plant sources.
And it wasn’t just Harvard. Other researchers have also found that “low-carbohydrate dietary patterns favoring Animal-based sources of protein and fat, from sources such as lamb, beef, pork and chicken, were associated with higher mortality, while those favoring intake of plant-based protein and fat, from sources such as vegetables, nuts, peanut butter, and whole grain bread, were associated with lower mortality…”
Cholesterol production in the body takes place immediately are correlated in body weight as you can see in the chart below and at 3:50 in mine video.
Every pound of weight loss by almost any means is that are connected with about a one-point drop in blood cholesterol levels. But if we put people on very low-carb ketogenic diets, the beneficial effect on bad LDL cholesterol is blunted or even completely reversed. Compensatory changes in LDL or HDL (what we used to think of as good cholesterol) are not are considered is sufficient to offset this risk. You don’t have to wait until cholesterol manufactures up your arteries to have negative effects either; within three hours of eating a meal high in saturated fat, you can see a significant decline in arterial function. Even with a dozen pounds of weight loss, the functioning of the arteries it gets worse on a ketogenic diet instead of improving, which shows up as with low-carb diets in general.
For more on keto diets, check out my video series here.
And, to learn more about your microbiome, check out the related videos below.
