The One and Only Poldaran wrote:
Quote:
Increased risk of heart disease and diabetes
WTF?!
Yeah, sorry, that's absolutely wrong. The rest is generally less than 100 percent correct and more nuanced. If you're following a keto diet, for instance, you're actually LESS likely to have to worry about ketoacidosis, as high blood sugar is part of what causes your body to be unable to uptake the ketones and allows them to build up in the blood. If you're on keto, that's almost certainly not a problem.
Let me start by stating that I don't really have a horse in this race, and I've certainly not spent a huge amount of time researching the keto diet. I've head of it, know people who've used it, but that's about it. My comments are based on my own personal skepticism of the safety of any sort of diet that involves radically changing what you eat in order to create some kind of magic effect on your body, ultimately with the goal of fast weigh loss without having to do things like exercise.
Having said that, just clicking the link on the web site I linked shows that ketoacidosis isn't the result of too much sugar in the blood, so somehow by not having sugar at all (or very little), it can't happen (which is what your argument appears to be about). Increased ketones in the blood occurs because when the body has insufficient sugar in the cells (in the case of diabetics because the body isn't properly processing the sugar, resulting in it being in the blood instead of in the cells), the body responds to the lack of sugar to use as fuel by
burning fat instead. And ketones in the blood are a symptom of the body doing that.
It's not the level of sugar in the blood that causes it, but that the lack of sugar in the cells which causes ketosis, which in turn results in higher ketones in the blood. And if you get too much in the blood, it can become acidic. The takeaway I'm getting (remember, I've not spent a ton of time researching this and by no means consider myself an expert on the subject), is that the keto diet essentially does deliberately what happens to diabetics as a side effect of their condition (and what happens for shortish periods of time when engaging in cardio workouts).
I don't see anything in the article I read about high blood sugar inhibiting the body's ability to absorb ketones in the blood (but I"m not discounting it), but only that low "cell" sugar causes ketosis (burning fat for fuel), which results in ketone buildup in the blood. High blood sugar is not the cause, but a symptom of diabetes which may result in low cell sugar, which in turn causes ketosis. So yeah, my admittedly amateur understanding would suggest that this could be a reasonable risk to someone on a keto diet. Especially if they are not doing so carefully.
As to everything else, see my point above about not spending a ton of time researching, but also my default skepticism of the latest diet fad. I've seen a lot of these come and go, and every single one of them has had some pretty harmful side effects (admittedly due to folks jumping on the fad and not doing things correctly in most cases).
I'll also point out my initial starting point in this. That people go to enormous amounts of effort and put up with a ton of additional side effects and changes to their lifestyle just to avoid the much less impact causing, much less side effect causing, and frankly far more positive additional effects that doing the "exercise" side of "diet and exercise" entails. It's just baffling to me when people speak of all the time and effort and pain involved in something like this, when simple exercise would be far far more beneficial to them.
I spend approximately 2 hours a week total working out. That's it. 30 minutes in the morning, four days a week. About half of that is stretching and basic calesthenics, the other half either light weights (dumbells), or cardio. That's it. Yeah. It's a bit painful starting out, especially if your muscles haven't been worked for a while. But once you get into it, the benefits are amazing. I don't wake up with neck or back pain 3-4 days out of the week. I don't have to work to get out of a reclining chair. I can do things like lift my legs up and hold them out of the way if someone needs to get by, without straining. I have better core strength than I would otherwise. I don't get sick as often (seriously. used to get a cold or flu at least twice a year, now maybe once every other year, I'll succumb to something). And I look a hell of a lot better in the mirror.
And along the way? I don't have to worry much about what kinds of food I eat. I don't have to scan the menu at a restaurant for something that doesn't have any carbs in it (which is darn few things I imagine). I just need to keep the portions reasonable, and balance what I eat to a reasonable degree. I don't have to put up with any of the symptoms or "maybe a problem, but we don't know for sure" stuff. The "side effects" of even a modest regular exercise plan are all positive. Yet, despite this, we have so many people apparently so unwilling to just get out of their easy chairs and do some minor amount of exercise that they'll go through ridiculous hoops to avoid it.
And that, I simply don't get. I mean, I get that people don't do this. I have friends who own at least two or more pieces of exercise equipment, that they bought because they wanted to "get into shape", that are sitting collecting dust, while they are getting rounder and rounder, and complaining of all sorts of health problems. I've seen the same friends go on yo-yo diet after yo-yo diet, complaining all the way. And when I suggest politely that maybe they should use the treadmill or exercise bike they have, they say something like "it's too hard", or "it doesn't work". Well, yeah. If you do it a few times for a week or two and then stop, you wont notice anything. It's a long haul sort of thing. But the long term health benefits are well worth it.
So what I don't get is *why* people do this. But they do. Such is human nature, I guess.
Edited, Apr 1st 2019 3:46pm by gbaji