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Have you ever heard of Vitamin K2? It may be one of the most important vitamins for your development of a healthy body. Unfortunately in the recent past, fat has been demonized. That means everything that comes along with the fat has been rid of in our society. One of those things is Vitamin K2, a fat soluble vitamin. It was first discovered as “Activator X” by Dr. Weston A. Price in the early 20th century. It helps build and maintain proper bone, teeth and heart structure. Without Vitamin K2, you are not able to deposit calcium where it needs to go. Your bones start to deteriorate, and your body will deposit that calcium elsewhere, like your arteries. It is essential that you get proper amounts of this vitamin. You can mainly get it from grass-fed animal products. Grass-fed butter is my favorite, but you can find it in things like beef and cheese. Please take note that the animal had to have been grass-fed for it to have Vitamin K2. Otherwise, you can gain the necessary amounts through supplementation. If you choose this route, make sure to at least get 100 micrograms per day of this vitamin. You want to take the MK-7 (menaquinone-7) form of this vitamin. As always, subscribe to our show on iTunes and leave us a 5-star review if you like what you heard! And join our Facebook group – The Ketogenic Benefit Group – for more support, tips, and helpful people to keep you motivated. Cheers!

Having a hard time sticking with the diet? Use these tips, foods, and tools to help you along in your journey. It is so important to follow the diet, but unfortunately, that doesn’t make it easy to follow. Having certain tools in your back pocket can help you stick with the diet. Tips: Have a clean, open, and uncluttered kitchen. Make your grocery list throughout the week. Never go shopping when you’re hungry Foods: Almond flour for keto bread. Keto fat bombs for satisfying your sweet tooth. Cauliflower as a utility food for many substitutes like rice and macaroni. Tools: Food processor to blend food or make things like cauliflower rice. Spiralizer for creating zucchini noodles. Slow cooker or pressure cooker to have food ready when you come home. As always, subscribe to our show on iTunes and leave us a 5-star review if you like what you heard! And join our Facebook group – The Ketogenic Benefit Group – for more support, tips, and helpful people to keep you motivated. Cheers!

It seems like there is always some sort of objection to the ketogenic diet. Whether it’s heart disease or kidney failure, there is always some fear making way into the minds of people looking to start the diet. While you may not have heard of these objections before, they are bound to come up at some point or another. You should be prepared to understand why the diet is not dangerous. We go over 3 of them in the show: heart disease, thyroid scares, and kidney concerns. Follow each link to our articles (with tons of research references) to learn more about each situation. Heart disease is not a disease of cholesterol. If it was, then we would see problems all over the vascular system – not just in the tiny space of the coronary arteries. Don’t be worried that your cholesterol goes up. You will have a healthier heart than most. Your thyroid function will go down. But is that a bad thing? Does that mean your thyroid is hurt? Or maybe it means your body is more efficient with less thyroid activity – which would be a good thing. Because all of your thyroid hormones decrease, that means there is no build-up anywhere along the signaling cascades – so your body does not think it needs thyroid hormones. There are even studies that show less thyroid activity means a longer life. Decreasing your thyroid activity it a good thing! Please don’t worry about it. Your kidney will be just fine! The only objection people have with the diet in relation to kidneys is that the high amount of protein can be harmful. Who said the keto diet is high in protein?!?! No one! It is moderate to low in protein. Anyway, high protein diets are only harmful if the person has pre-existing kidney dysfunction. Those kind of people have to watch their protein no matter what die they are on. There is nothing a high protein diet can do for a perfectly normal kidney. As always, subscribe to our show on iTunes and leave us a 5-star review if you like what you heard! And join our Facebook group – The Ketogenic Benefit Group – for more support, tips, and helpful people to keep you motivated. Cheers!

Cholesterol – a mere bystander and good Samaritan – has been wrongly accused of a crime. It is our job to prove him innocent because, after all, he is innocent. It is time to bring the true offender to trial and see how the evidence stacks up. Cholesterol is not the root problem anymore than a bad grade is the root problem of a failing student. Rather, it is the result of having a deep issue. It is the effects of that deep issue that we see and love to blame. Unfortunately, we have used that reasoning for too long, and it has cost millions of people their health. Cholesterol is there to help soothe your problems, but it gets caught up in other problematic process because of things like oxidation and inflammation. Those are the real issues at hand that we should tackle. As always, subscribe to our show on iTunes and leave us a 5-star review if you like what you heard! And join our Facebook group – The Ketogenic Benefit Group – for more support, tips, and helpful people to keep you motivated. Cheers! Resource mentioned in the show: Atherosclerosis and the Cholesterol Theory: A Reappraisal https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Atherosclerosis-and-the-Cholesterol-Theory-%3A-A-Wong-Mohamed/3e0495f9565cec355aa0682cc12d1787f2db5b5f

What is the thing about sugar that makes it so bad? As you can guess from the title, it is fructose. This simple sugar plays a major role in metabolic disease and addiction. We go over what fructose is, why it is so addictive, why it leads to metabolic instability, and what to do moving forward. If I had to sum everything up into a single sentence, it would be this. Stay away from fructose, and especially keep it from your kids. The kids are the only shot we have at rooting this out of our society. We, as adults, have already become addicted to sugar. We fully accept and embrace it in our society. But the kids haven’t experienced that yet. They still have hope, and I truly believe that is how we will get rid of this nasty substance. As Max Planck said, “A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” As always, subscribe to our show on iTunes and leave us a 5-star review if you like what you heard! And join our Facebook group – The Ketogenic Benefit Group – for more support, tips, and helpful people to keep you motivated. Cheers! Resources mentioned in the show: Robert Lustig’s review on fructose: Lustig R. (2013). Fructose: It’s “Alcohol Without the Buzz”. Advances in Nutrition 4(2): 226-235. Research on how fructose leads to metabolic problems and organ fat: DiNicolantonio JJ, Mehta V, Onkaramurthy N, O’Keefe JH. (2017). Fructose-induced inflammation and increased cortisol: A new mechanism for how sugar induces visceral adiposity. Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pcad.2017.12.001.

Food is tricky. It’s an absolute necessity for our survival, but it can also be the very thing that causes our disease. Unfortunately it also has addictive properties. I know firsthand the kinds of struggles that come about. The refined carbohydrates in our diet cause hormone releasing that resemble neurological pathways fired during drug addiction. Although many people like to pretend this is not a real issue, it is. Food addiction is very real, just like addiction to nicotine is very real. How do we expect to help people with their weight problems or metabolic diseases if we can’t acknowledge the struggle as that similar to beating a drug addiction? It makes living a ketogenic life somewhat a nightmare. Thus, it is so important to lay off those kinds of food. Replace those starchy and addictive foods with other kinds that are just as delicious – anything containing whole and natural fats. You don’t need to sacrifice taste for health. You just need to stay away from the bad food long enough to recognize you can break its grip. When that happens, you can start to really nail down your weight loss goals. Weight loss is not about counting your calories. It is about eating better food that does not trigger your insulin responses. That boils down the best kind of food as fat. Plain and simple – that is what you will eat if you want to lose weight and break your addiciton. As always, subscribe to our show on iTunes and leave us a 5-star review if you like what you heard! And join our Facebook group – The Ketogenic Benefit Group – for more support, tips, and helpful people to keep you motivated. Cheers! Study on food addiction mentioned in the show: Refined Food Addiction: A classic substance use disorder https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306987708006427

Polyunsaturated fats have become popular in recent times. Why is that? Large company marketing tricking the world into believing they are better for you. They are supposedly “heart healthy” because they lower cholesterol. Ancel Keys played a key role in the country-wide scare of saturated fats. One category of polyunsaturated fats that is especially troubling is “vegetable oils.” They are not really vegetable oils. They are seed oils that require a lot of processing to make. They use that term because it sounds healthier – but I assure you they are not healthier. You should avoid them to the best of your ability. They have a high ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fats, which causes inflammation and leads to other health problems. They also form into harmful oxidation products because of their high reactivity. Vegetable oils break down both while your cooking and while they are in your body. Read more about the problems of vegetable oils in addition to this podcast by following the link to our article on it below. We have all our scientific resources and studies there. Harm of PUFA https://www.betabios.com/debunked/polyunsaturated-fat/harm-of-pufa As always, subscribe to our show on iTunes and leave us a 5-star review if you like what you heard! And join our Facebook group – The Ketogenic Benefit Group – for more support, tips, and helpful people to keep you motivated. Cheers! Additional resources mentioned in the show: Seven Countries Study (Ancel Keys) https://www.cabdirect.org/cabdirect/abstract/19711403775 Reactive Oxygen Species https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316571144_The_Cell_Aging_Regulation_System_CARS.

How does insulin play a part in the ketogenic diet? It is actually front and center into allowing your body to go into ketogenesis. Most people think eating fat gets you into ketosis. That is only partially true. The counterpart to that idea is that you need to keep your insulin down. So a high fat diet is not enough – it also needs to be low carb. It is the “low carb” aspect that allows you to generate ketones. Insulin is a hormone in your body used to get glucose into cells. It is also the hormone responsible for storing that glucose when your cells don’t want it. It stores the glucose as glycogen in muscles and the liver. When those stores get full, insulin then converts the glucose into fat for further storage. Thus insulin is the energy storage hormone. If we want to go into ketogenesis, then we need to make sure insulin is not around to store our energy. Rather, we want to use up that energy. That’s what ketones are. They come about when your body cannot store energy and has to do something else with it. The energy substrates get sent down a different pathway when insulin is not around. Keeping insulin levels down is not just good for a ketogenic diet, but it is a good idea no matter what. Hyperinsulinemia can be to blame for a lot of physiological diseases. Most importantly, it helps our bodies become insulin resistant. When there is so much insulin around, your body responds to it less and less. So, we want to keep insulin down, but we actually don’t want it to go too low. If there is absolutely no insulin around, then our body starts burning fat to an extreme nature where we go into ketoacidosis. However, you don’t need to worry about this coming from diet alone because our bodies always have a base level of glucose and insulin around no matter what we eat. Keep your focus on making sure insulin is not too high, and your body will take care of it getting too low. As always, subscribe to our show on iTunes and leave us a 5-star review if you like what you heard! And join our Facebook group – The Ketogenic Benefit Group – for more support, tips, and helpful people to keep you motivated. Cheers! General information on the roles of insulin: http://www.vivo.colostate.edu/hbooks/pathphys/endocrine/pancreas/insulin_phys.html.

There is a lot of hype over “ketosis.” Well, what is it exactly? How do we induce it with diet? Those are the questions we hope to answer today. The story of ketosis is both beautiful and sad at the same time. It has been a part of human existence from the beginning. It has saved us from certain death and extinction. But in recent years it has been given a bad rep because of its close association to “ketoacidosis.” Nutritional ketosis is good and entirely different from ketoacidosis. Ketosis is an entirely different metabolic state – one that optimizes your health. What is ketosis? It is a metabolic state where you burn fat for energy. But you need to burn that fat in absence of insulin in order to fully induce the ketogenic state. Acetoacetate, acetone, and betahydroxybutyrate are the 3 ketone bodies that your body will use for energy when that happens. These replace glucose as your energy sources. How do you enter ketosis? You need to have little insulin around. That can come from fasting (or starving), from eating mainly fat as your diet, and have type 1 diabetes. Ketosis with type 1 diabetes is the way you get into the state of ketoacidosis. But THAT WILL NOT HAPPEN THROUGH DIET INDUCED KETOSIS. Entering it with a high fat and low carbohydrate diet is the surest way to maintain nutritional ketosis. How do we recommend starting ketosis? Tip 1) Wean off the carbs over a 2-week period. At the same time increase the amount of fat you eat. Eventually, you want to get to the point of less than 30 g of carbohydrates. Tip 2) Take in plenty of salt and electrolytes. Mix table salt in all your dishes and supplement in magnesium and potassium. They will make sure your transition is smooth. Without them, you will gain a deficiency because the diet naturally drains your body of those minerals. Tip 3) Realize it takes time to be fully fat adapted. Being in ketosis is not being fat adapted. Being fat adapted and feeling the full effects of ketosis can take weeks if not months. Just stick with it – you will get there. Tip 4) Keep it simple! Decrease carbohydrate. Increase fat. That is it. Worry about the “natural”, “organic”, and “unprocessed” food later. We will go into what fats are best later. For now, just keep in mind you want more fat and less carbohydrate. Thank you so much for checking us out, we greatly appreciate it. You are awesome, and keep up the good work! As always, subscribe to our show on iTunes and leave us a 5-star review if you like what you heard! And join our Facebook group – The Ketogenic Benefit Group – for more support, tips, and helpful people to keep you motivated. Cheers!

Have you ever wondered, “what if?” What if diet caused all your problems? Would diet then be the answer to all your problems? Yes. In this episode, we go over our background story of how we came to the diet and all the promises the diet has. Whether you are using the diet for disease management, longer living, mental focus, or weight loss, you are sure to benefit from this lifestyle. Enjoy! **Let us know if you have any comments or suggestions: Facebook Group (The Ketogenic Benefit Group) Email (info@betabios.com)