Tag Archives: Weight Loss

The Downsides To The Ketogenic Diet

Let’s talk about high fat, high protein diets, and their impact on the gut.

In the last year or so, I’ve been concerned about the stool test results I see from clients following a ketogenic diet. These diets are very low in carbs, including resistant starches.
My concerns are now being validated in the scientific literature.

When you’re on a ketogenic diet, the weight comes off but, you’re cutting back on carbs, including the healthy ones. Now, a lot of experts in the field, including dieticians, nutritionists, and naturopaths are raising concerns about the decrease in carbohydrate intake.

Carbs are essential for your overall health and your gut. If you restrict carb intake for an extended period, the gut can suffer significantly. Studies are demonstrating that people who cut their carb intake have lower levels of beneficial bacteria. They also have smaller amounts of short-chain fatty acids, which in turn reduces the amount of antioxidants available to protect cells from DNA damage.

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Losing weight on a ketogenic diet may also mean that your aging has accelerated.
There is no doubt people who eat more protein and more fat are prone to more rapid aging than people who eat a balanced diet. Looking slim now might come at a considerable cost when you’re 60. You could end up looking ten years older.Be careful with the ketogenic diet. Consider the long-term consequences of reducing your intake of healthy carbohydrates.

You shouldn’t cut as many carbs out of your diet as you possibly can, thinking that keto is a weight-loss nirvana. The ketogenic diet may help some people in the short-term, but eventually, you’ve got to come back to ground zero and start eating a normal diet again. Thanks for tuning in, and don’t forget to click on the link below in the description box fo my full report.

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Your Weight And Your Gut

Losing weight and keeping it off is greatly influenced by your gut bacteria.

If you look back to the ’50s, there was a big push for people to gain weight. It was post-war, and a lot of food industries weren’t up and running properly. People were primarily eating real food.

The artificial foods that came to the forefront in the 60s changed things dramatically.
Today it’s all about losing weight on this diet or that diet. There is no shortage of factory food that damages our health rather than building it up. You need to eat the right food and have the right metabolic rate to get the kind of physique your want. The gut flora plays an instrumental role in weight management.

The following are the steps I recommend to anyone who wants to lose weight or keep their weight in a healthy range.

1. Firstly, you want little to no inflammation in the body. Your immune system needs to be functioning properly so that your gut doesn’t react to gluten or lectin or any other compound in food. Fixing a leaky gut solves a lot of problems that people have with food.

I’ve helped a lot of people fix leaky gut by removing junk from their diet. This allows their intestinal membrane to heal, and the excessive permeability disappears. Low and behold, they can eat foods they haven’t been able to tolerate for years. Now their gut is in a better position to properly digest a wide range of food.When you eat a broader range of foods, you end up with a much more diverse microbiota, which is essential for building good gut and immune health.

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2. Foods with the right amount and type of fiber are essential. These types of foods help control your appetite and metabolic rate. Fiber contributes to a feeling of satiety, so you’re not tempted to eat a sleeve of cookies or a couple of doughnuts. The lack of fiber in the classic ketogenic dieting concerns me. I think it contains too much meat, too much fat, and not enough carbs, including resistant starches.

3. Optimize your gut health. An unhealthy GI tract can increase your tendency to store fat. Many people with poor gut health also have decreased insulin sensitivity resulting in higher blood sugar and insulin levels. This leads to more inflammation, more fat storage, and increased risk of diabetes and heart disease.

It’s crucial to eat the right kinds of fiber, fats, and protein to keep the gut healthy. At the same time, avoid antibiotics if at all possible. This class of drugs can reduce the levels of beneficial bacteria in your gut. When that happens, the door is open for harmful bacteria and yeast to overgrow. This overgrowth can impair your immune system, distort your appetite, increase fat storage, cause fatigue, and trigger brain fog. When you feel that bad, it’s a lot more likely that you’ll reach for the second burger and extra ice cream cone. A healthy gut helps you make healthy food decisions and vice versa.

4. Build up the right balance of microbiota in your gut. I’ve been advocating this for 30 plus years, and my recommendations are being more and more validated by scientific research. Having a healthy mix of bacterial species in your guts helps maintain your metabolic rate, your weight, and your physique.

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Green Tea Extract: Is It Good For The Gut And Good For Your Weight?

Let’s talk about weight loss and green tea extract.

Right now, the research is a mixed bag. Some studies say that green tea works well to drive down inflammation, help repair leaky gut, and improve insulin sensitivity. Other studies say green tea doesn’t do any of those things.

A lot of the green tea studies involve mice, and the results haven’t been replicated in humans
In one study of male mice, they put half on a high-fat diet, something akin to the ketogenic diet, and the other half on a standard mouse diet. The high-fat diet had green tea extract mixed into it. Over time, the group that received the green tea lost 20% more weight than the other group.

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What isn’t clear is how much green tea extract was included in the diet. For all I know, it could be the human equivalent of having thirty cups of green tea or half a pound of green tea powder a day. That’s not a very realistic approach to weight loss. I think about one or two cups of green tea a day would be my limit.

Of course, you can’t look at a study of mice and directly extrapolate to humans. It possible that they share some effects, but it needs to confirmed by testing in humans.

Green tea is one of the many very healthy teas. Oolong tea, Lapsong Suchong, and Jasmine tea are all excellent options. Green tea has a very high flavonoid profile, meaning that it has high antioxidant activity. It’s a superb tea to drink once or twice a day, but I don’t think it’s the nirvana of weight loss. No one is going to lose 100 pounds by merely drinking green tea.

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What You Need To Know About Gum Arabic

We’re going to talk about gum arabic, an insoluble fiber.

Gum Arabic comes from the Acacia plant that grows in the Sudan. Acacia are also known as Wattle trees. This plant has beautiful flowers that can make you sneeze like crazy. The sap from this tree is dried to make Gum Arabic.

Gum Arabic has been used for many things over the years. I think, at one point, it was even used to make the back of postage stamps sticky.

The insoluble polysaccharides in Gum Arabic are very beneficial for your digestive health as they pass through the GI tract.

In the 1970s, the Federal Drugs Administration in the US categorized Gum Arabic as Generally Recommended as Safe (GRAS), so there aren’t usually any significant risks. Gum Arabic can cause gas, bloating, and loose stools if you take too much from the very beginning.

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I think Gum Arabic is definitely worth a shot if you’re carrying a bit of excess weight, or if you want to build up beneficial gut bacteria. As per usual, take it slowly. You can’t go from zero to 100 miles an hour in three seconds without breaking your neck.

Studies have shown that one ounce (28 grams) is quite beneficial. If you do that for six weeks, you can potentially lose up to 2% of your body weight. In one study of about 120 women, the subjects were divided into two groups. One group got 30 grams of Gum Arabic per day, and the other group were given a different type of insoluble fiber. After six weeks, only the Gum Arabic group had lost 2% of their body weight.

When you eat Gum Arabic, it generates a sense of satiety. It changes the way the satiety hormone, leptin, reacts with your gut and brains. You’re not going to feel like eating a lot of food when you’ve had a good dose of Gum Arabic.

That being said, I wouldn’t use it primarily as a weight-loss tool. I would look at Gum Arabic as a way to improve gut health. It’s a nice powder that you can add to different dishes. It’s very good for the digestive system and is even linked to lowering cholesterol.

Taking a half an ounce of Gum Arabic a day helps bind LDL cholesterol and move it out of the body. Oat bran and rolled oats do the same.

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Gut Flora And Weight Loss

Which gut bacteria is the best for facilitating weight loss?

Well, it’s more complicated than that. Let’s look at fiber as an example. It’s the bacteria in our gut that actually digest the fiber we eat. The fermentation process that breaks down the fiber really powers us up. Bacteria also help us access the B vitamins and folate in food.

In one study of 62 people, the subjects were given a considerable amount of fiber to eat. When they conducted stool testing on the participants, they found that some people had higher levels of Prevotella bacteria. Prevotella is particularly adept at breaking down fiber and resistant starch.

Another group of bacteria, Bacteroidetes, were found in higher levels in people who ate diets high in meat and fat. If you follow the keto diet, we’d expect that you would have more Bacteroidetes than Prevotella in your gut. In contrast, vegans would have more Prevotella.

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Prevotella levels have a stronger association with weight loss than Baceroidetes. The people who lost the most weight during the study period were those with the highest level of Prevotella. This group of subjects lost an average of 5.1 pounds.

The authors of the study concluded that it isn’t so much what you’re eating that determined weight loss; it’s what you’re digesting. Digestion also has an impact on your metabolic rate.

To my mind, this study proves the point that eating large amounts of meat and animal fat is not going to provide long term health benefits. It will also shift your gut flora towards including groups that are less adept at fermentation and digestion.

I know the body can make energy from ketones obtained from fat and protein, but I still don’t see a high-protein diet as a healthy approach for the long term. I recommend eating foods high in fiber to build up the Prevotella and other bacteria that increase your metabolic rate.

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