THRIVING VS EXISTING (Part Six)

I seemed to thrive on the fresh simple food (meat, fish, vegetables, milk, butter, lard, eggs), my mother cooked for our family. Looking back now, though, I realize that we also consumed an awful lot of white sugar in the form of cakes and daily desserts, as well as in our tea, coffee and cocoa! This didn't do my teeth much good (to my chagrin), but more importantly we didn't then know the affect that sugar can have on our health. Apart from my asthma, though, I felt fine.

Then, in my mid-twenties, I met my husband and took on his vegetarian approach, predominantly utilising beans and pulses, but accompanied by manufactured margarine, soya milk, pasta, starchy rice and so on.

Reflecting now, I must have lost many nutrients by not eating meat and fish.

My sudden change to vegetarianism may also explain the very negative change in my libido. Which is a swine, because I loved my libido!

KETO? I NEVER DIET!

My long-term vegetarian husband had had gut problems for most of our time together. He had already suspected that the flour in pasta may have been contributing to this and so we eliminated it from our daily diet. It didn't improved his IBS though. Oh, and we did start to eat fish.

Then, after some research (on behalf of my father, who was diagnosed with dementia in 2021) we decided upon a ketogenic approach to our food to see if things could be improved.

Within months my husband's gut issues completely resolved!

And very soon, without setting out do so, we both lost most of our abdominal fat.

On top of this, we found ourselves suffering less tiredness, and I noticed that incipient joint pain and, better still, my plantar fasciitis had gone. That was a relief because the pain in my thumb was making manual gear change difficult and the pain in my accelerator foot was giving me pause when I set off on car journeys. What, no more road trips with my son? What a wretched prospect! Anyway, it went, and we do!

My asthma too started to improve!

It seemed that inflammation, with its accompanying symptoms, was being dealt with!

So what is, and why did we choose, a ketogenic diet?

'It is a very low carb, high fat diet that shares many similarities with the Atkins and low carb diets.

'It involves drastically reducing carbohydrate intake and replacing it with fat. This reduction in carbs puts your body into a metabolic state called 'ketosis'.

'When this happens, your body becomes incredibly efficient at burning fat for energy. . It also turns fat into ketones in the liver, which can supply energy for the brain.

'Ketogenic diets can cause significant reductions in blood sugar and insulin levels (and thus inflammation). This, along with the increased ketones, has specific health benefits against diabetes, heart disease, cancer, epilepsy, and Alzheimer’s disease.'

(Source)

KETO: A PROPER HUMAN DIET?

A 'proper human diet', containing a high proportion of ‘good’ fats, and with greatly reduced carbohydrates, can, according to Dr Ken Berry MD (watch here), address many metabolic problems.

The 'proper human diet' is nutrient dense; full of fatty acids, amino acids, vitamins and minerals. This diet is satiating; containing healthy fat, healthy protein and non-starchy vegetables. It is a diet that, in an evolutionary sense, is optimal for human health.

Dr Berry, a family physician who practices in Tennessee in the United States (drberry.com), has a mission to help the increasing number of people suffering inflammation-based metabolic illness. He encourages us to follow this 'proper human diet'. He says, "This is, by definition, uninflammatory". He explains that the ingestion of excess sugar along with grain-based carbohydrates creates insulin resistance and thus chronic inflammation.

"Dr Ken Berry .....has made it his mission to turn the tide on the epidemic of Type 2 Diabetes, chronic inflammation and dementia." Karen Martel, Transformational Nutrition (watch here)

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