Keto Misguided
Quitting sugar to get the emergency stress system going is misguided. Still, unfortunately, there are plenty of ways to manipulate people with what can sometimes look like the correct information.
And it’s easy to think that the information you’re handing out is correct when what you got sold was faulty foundations.
On the other hand, although largely ignored, there is good quality biological evidence demonstrating the relationship between the intentional promotion of a ketogenic state and disease progression.
Particularly when examined in the context of other known stressful and inflammatory physiological responses to sugar restriction, warnings against quitting sugar seem to get based on logically consistent and convincing arguments.
Ketones and lactate “fuel” tumor growth and metastasis. Cell Cycle 2010 Sep 1; 9(17): 3506–3514.
Sugar restriction is well understood to promote exposure to cortisol and free fatty acids (FFAs) throughout the system.
These two factors (concerning FFA’s, particularly polyunsaturated in composition) play a significant role in developing and advancing many inflammatory conditions, including diabetes and cancer.
But because the “stress sprinkler system” is designed to protect in the short term, it isn’t challenging to create studies or misinterpret short-term results to argue that the sugar-restricted ketogenic state is beneficial and, therefore, a good thing to promote intentionally.
The sugar-restricted state, especially when combined with increased cortisol and FFA circulation, gradually (sometimes rapidly) interferes with thyroid metabolism and digestive function.
This stressful combination increases bacterial endotoxin levels, lactic acid production, nitric oxide, estrogen, adrenaline, and serotonin levels.
All these inflammatory stress substances, in excess, work together to encourage disease.
They have a physiologically protective role temporarily and locally, but these biochemical substances are not safe in excess and when systemic. Hence the confusion.
You can take a snapshot of all sorts of harmful circumstances and frame them in a positive light. Still, it doesn’t follow that all the evidence showing the severely detrimental impact that eventuates doesn’t exist, is wrong, or should get disregarded as irrelevant.
The claim that sugar promotes cancer and diabetes gets based on an unscientific approach. However, it becomes easier to understand once you look at the high-quality science showing how cortisol and excessive exposure to polyunsaturated FFA’s promote both these disease states.
The idea that “sugar feeds cancer” doesn’t make sense when you know the role that fat and amino acids play in cancer growth and spread and when you understand how sugar helps to reduce stress substance exposure.
If you want more details regarding this, there are plenty of studies attached to longer articles I have previously written and published on this blog, such as my article Sugar Feeds Thyroid.
There will always be stories about people who have done well on ketogenic diets, but remember that you are often just looking at one moment in time rather than following what happens over the long term.
People often feel good (for a while) when exposed to high levels of protective stress substances, and test results can also be misleading when you don’t understand the proper context.
Later, when things aren’t going well, it is common for that to get framed to place the blame on anything but the original treatment or preventative approaches used.
You don’t have to take my word for it; think about it, and try and look at examples you hear or read about from this perspective.
I’m not a doctor or health professional, and this is not advice in any way, shape, or form.
Remember that some people benefit from promoting one view over another, and not all “scientific” studies, or interpretations of studies, are a reflection of the truth.
Copyright 2021, by Dan M @ CowsEatGrass. All rights reserved (except for quotations and images having their own protected copyrights). This copyright protects author-publisher Dan M’s right to future publication of his work in any manner, in any and all media — utilizing technology now known or hereafter devised — throughout the world in perpetuity. Everything described in this publication is for information purposes only. The author-publisher, Dan M, is not directly or indirectly presenting or recommending any part of this publication’s data as a diagnosis or prescription for any ailment of any reader. If anyone uses this information without the advice of their professional health adviser, they are prescribing for themselves, and the author- publisher assumes no responsibility or liability. Persons using any of this data do so at their own risk and must take personal responsibility for what they don’t know as well as for what they do know.
