A Mom Tried Keto Diet For 30 Days. This Is What Happened When Things Went Wrong

Hello Health Champions today I'm gonna talk about Keto gone wrong video.

A mom tried keto diet for 30 days. It was a little disturbing to me this video

because I think it portrays things very distorted and so we're gonna watch some

clips together I'm gonna make some comments but then I also want to give

you the bigger picture and tie it together for you so make sure you stay

to the end so that you can tell for yourself if Keto

was the villain or the hero. Coming right up.

Hey I'm Dr. Ekberg. I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and if

you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really works

make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell so you don't miss

anything. A mom tried keto diet for 30 days Things went wrong for her just

weeks after starting it. This is what happened to her pancreas.

Very dramatic opening here is what happened to her pancreas so apparently the keto diet can

do things to your pancreas one day at breakfast JC's husband noticed her

repeatedly pour water from one bottle to another and back while quietly growling

to herself when asked about this after eating she had no memory of breakfast

okay so this is really erratic behavior and a complete memory loss

having no recollection of what she had done it's definitely not normal if the

Keto was causing this then we would see a lot of strange behavior in people who

were doing Keto. At the doctor's office days later JC was diagnosed with

postpartum depression these changes in her body are normal she

just had a baby shifts and hormones and increased

sensitivity to these changes can affect anyone postpartum depression alright

it is not normal it cannot happen to anybody

memory loss and really erratic behavior there's more going on here than just

postpartum depression JC was feeding her daughter human milk incorporates 50

grams of sugar per day if she's not eating those sugars because of her keto

diet this could be a problem proteins and fats can be converted to

sugar for use in milk but that conversion doesn't happen quickly it

doesn't happen easily and it might not be enough to keep up with JC's lactation

this can be problematic if it causes blood sugar levels to become too low so

this is an interesting point that lactation does require some sugar but it

doesn't mean that you have to eat sugar the way he said if you don't eat the

sugar then you're gonna be missing it that's not how it works because your

body has a lot of reserves it can get sugar it can create carbohydrate through

glycogenesis from both protein and from the glycerol in fat another thing that

happens is that if you're in ketosis when you're breastfeeding which actually

a lot of women are these days and they're doing just fine then because

some of the sugar goes into the milk then it's actually easier to get into

ketosis when you're breastfeeding so you may not have to be as strict with your

ketogenic diet you might if your normal dose of carbohydrate if your normal

limit was maybe 20 grams to stay in ketosis when you're breastfeeding you

could probably get the same level of ketosis at maybe 35 or 40 grams so the

thing to understand though is that the body has certain mechanisms to

compensate for that fact and if we think back historically then humans didn't

always have a bunch of carbohydrates and somehow the kids made it through and the

mothers made it through the norm back then was to breastfeed a

whole lot longer than we do today because they didn't have any baby food

A blood test revealed severe hypoglycemia so severe hypoglycemia when you start

talking neurological disruption and memory loss I'm thinking we got glycemic

levels we got blood sugar levels probably in the 40s or even 30s and

lactation and keto is not going to bring them that low we already know that

there's there's got to be something else going on here. The brain uses sugar as

its most immediate energy source when sugar is suddenly low in the body

this will cause mental status changes and mood swings as the brain's energy

supply is disrupted and when combined with postpartum depression then this

explains everything that's happening to Jacey. So when he says that her

circumstances explained all these behaviors that is just not true it does

not explain memory loss and erratic behavior it could explain a little bit

of weakness or getting the blood sugar maybe down into the 60s but what's going

on here is not explained by those factors and I'm not suggesting that

breastfeeding is optimal on a ketogenic diet but it has happened and these

people still made it through with nothing close to these symptoms she was

sent home with medicines she was given advice to stop the strict keto diet so

long as she was still feeding her daughter. So she sent home with

medication meaning antidepressants for her postpartum depression as if that was

the main problem right they diagnosed extreme severe hypoglycemia but they

still haven't measured A1C they haven't measured ketones you would think

maybe on a ketogenic diet that they would think to measure ketones just to

see what's going on they haven't measured insulin or they

haven't measured c-reactive protein these are very very simple basic

inexpensive tests but they measured glucose they

diagnosed postpartum and they sent her home with antidepressants. One morning JC

got out of bed she laid on the floor arms raised she was conscious but not

responsive she was speaking but incoherent she rolled over on her side

and began to seize as 911 and she's brought to the emergency room where we

are now a blood test again reveals hypoglycemia but this time less than

half the lower limit of normal the medical team administers a sugar water

mixture intravenously JC her consciousness improves in minutes all

other signs and exams returned normal as she appears to be her normal self more

tests are done on her and it's found that nothing is wrong with her kidneys

liver and heart overall it looks like nothing ever happened

she's admitted into the hospital because even if she looks okay something is

clearly amiss. All right so we think blood sugar and

they've already measured extremely low blood sugar and this time they're saying

that it's less than half the lower normal limit which means if lower normal

is about 80 then we're now talking that she's in the 30s all right

so if blood sugar is that unstable if blood sugar goes that low it's either

because insulin is sky-high or because the liver is completely shot and unable

to produce any form of glucose and then they mentioned that they've checked the

other organs they've checked the liver and the kidneys and the heart and

there's nothing wrong there so now we know that it's a blood sugar issue so

here's what's disturbing they still don't measure A1c or ketones or insulin.

The next morning the medical team on rounds finds JC on the floor again arms

raised this time unresponsive but conscious incoherent but still speaking

as she rolls over and starts seizing again doctor's order another test for

her blood sugar severe hypoglycemia found again.

Another glucose IV was infused into her JC is conscious coherent and

oriented again with no recollection at all of what just happened. So now even

though she's admitted to the hospital and they know that she's severely

hypoglycemic they still find her on the floor and the same exact pattern repeats

that her she's extremely hypoglycemic but they give her some sugar and she is

back as if nothing ever happened but they still do not measure any ketones or

any A1c or any insulin even though it is so clearly spelled out at this point

that it is a blood sugar issue and I wonder how much money they've spent on

her already and they're not spending 20 bucks to run those blood tests.

The medical team orders JC too fast for 72 hours over these three days they will

monitor her blood sugar and ketones things seem to be going well a couple

hours into the fest but at the seven hour mark JC started slurring her speech

she was no longer oriented again as she lay on the floor her arms up in the air

on measurement of her blood glucose the results returned less than half the

lower limit of normal ketones which should be high were virtually absent.

So finally they're thinking a little bit further and they're having her start a

72-hour fast and it's very doubtful that which you would make it very far into

that since she's so extremely hypoglycemic and sure enough she makes

it just a few hours in before she has another seizure and another neurological

episode but at least this time they think to measure the ketones and there

are two reasons why she should have very very high ketones because she is very

hypoglycemic and then the body is looking for another source of fuel so

when sugar isn't available the body should start burning fat and a byproduct

of that fat burning is ketones the other reason is that she's also been

breastfeeding so that should take some more carbs out and

have a tendency to increase the ketones further so they would expect to find

very high ketones but they find the ketones are almost zero so at this point

it's pretty much a locked and shut case cancer from somewhere else in our body

that is spread to the pancreas or it could be a functional neuro endocrine

tumor something that releases hormones inappropriately the extreme hypoglycemia

the regular pattern of neural glyco panic symptoms the resolution of her

mental status after the correction of her blood sugar

the medical team makes a clinical diagnosis of insulinoma.

so now after we've seen 50 different examples of how traumatizing and how dangerous a

ketogenic diet can be you end up in the hospital you have seizures and it goes

on and on and on he spent minutes and minutes and minutes giving us examples

of this and then he spends a few seconds telling us that oh by the way it was an

insulinoma and they took her in for surgery so here's the issue that I have

with the video is the format that it's overdramatizing

it is attempting to be shocking rather than educational and in doing that in

spending 95 to 98 percent of the emphasis on all the things that can go

wrong that's the impression that people leave with if they are paying close

enough attention to even hear what the solution is otherwise they're just

totally scared out of their wits about the ketogenic diet so in doing the

format that way I feel that it's very very misleading and when you scare

people about something that can be very helpful then you're hurting people the

other thing that bothers me is the medical management that if they had even

some basic understanding of the dynamics of blood sugar and insulin and ketones

then none of this would have ever happened and

not only the medical profession but the people themselves as we go into this now

the medical professionals they're supposed to know better but even as

individuals we can run a few of these tests and just to make sure that the

changes that were seeing are according to plan so he said that it's an

insulinoma now let's talk about what that is it's a neuro endocrine tumor and

it can teach us a lot once we start understanding a few different scenarios

with these different variables the glucose the insulin and the ketones then

we can start understanding patterns because this is yet one other pattern

that is just really extreme that it shows up so clearly once we know what to

look for so neuroendocrine tumor is basically just like any cell in your

body can have a mutation and start dividing and growing uncontrollably this

can also happen in the very cells in the pancreas in the beta cells if one of the

insulin producing cells get a mutation then it could start dividing

uncontrollably but still have the ability to produce insulin and now it is

completely outside of the body's control it's just pumping out insulin no matter

what it's not part of the normal feedback mechanism it's the cells have

gone rogue and let's take a look at some of these patterns so we start with a

blue here this is normal glucose so I'm gonna take an example of a healthy

person this would be someone who is insulin sensitive but who is not

currently on keto so this would be a normal blood sugar so let's call that

maybe ninety now if you do keto now you're cutting back the carbs and the

body is producing more ketones so the blood sugar doesn't have to be as high

so once we're kind of established in keto and we've

reversed insulin resistance we would expect glucose to be a little bit lower so if

it's 90 here this would probably be 75 or 80 then when we look at type-2

diabetes these are obviously people have lost control over their blood sugar so

it could be anywhere from 130 150 180 and if it's not controlled very well it

could be 2 & 3 & 4 & 5 hundred milligrams as well so that range could

be huge depending on how well it's managed then we look at type 1 diabetes

and now the blood glucose is completely uncontrolled because everything they eat

becomes blood sugar but there's nothing there is no insulin they've lost the

ability to make any kind of insulin so the only way for their bodies to get rid

of glucose is through the kidneys it ends up in the urine so they're

uncontrolled type 1 diabetes unmanaged type 1 diabetes so this would be really

sick people who haven't found out that they have it yet or doesn't have access

to some insulin this insulin could be hundreds or could get up many many

hundreds even a thousand milligrams per deciliter if the kidneys can't filter

out the excess sugar fast enough but as we heard in the video the with an

insulinoma a lot of these people will have a fasting glucose or even not even

fasting it could happen within hours because they have so much insulin that's

just pushing that blood sugar down that they'll be in the 30s often and 30s is

extremely dangerous for the brain okay this that this can kill people so it's

very very important that we find these things as early as possible but then

let's look at some other variables so the glucose was the only thing that they

measured but what if they had just measured one more thing what if they had

just measured ketones all right so in a healthy non keto person

that the ketones would be very low they would be zero point something 0.1 0.3

somewhere around there in a person doing keto who's in a stable nutritional

ketosis those ketones would probably be one point something up to three point

something unless you're doing a longer extended fast then they could go a

little bit higher still a type-2 diabetic they will have very very low

ketones because the insulin is going to prevent the fat burning that results in

ketones a type one diabetic has zero insulin so their ketones are going to be

sky-high and this is what's called ketoacidosis this is not nutritional

ketosis this is a pathological life-threatening conditions where there

ketones go five sometimes ten times higher than you could ever get in a

healthy state if you have any kind of insulin present now if they had measured

this earlier they said when they measured it they expected to see

significant ketones and they were almost zero this would have been a dead

giveaway very very early on and this is something that a person can do for

themselves you can buy a very very inexpensive blood meter and you can

measure the glucose and the ketones and you would have known you would have

known days into the process you would have found this out now let's look at

the last piece here that they also didn't measure and this you can't do for

yourself but a lab can do it very inexpensively and that's insulin so in a

healthy person the glucose and the insulin are going to be relatively

balanced and if you do keto your insulin is going to be a little bit lower than

if you eat more carbs but if you take it while your fasted then they're going to

be similar for the most part again a type-2 die

Bedok is someone who's insulin resistant because their insulin is so high so we

expect that to be three to five to eight sometimes even ten times higher than a

healthy normal person again a type one diabetic has zero we're not even putting

any amount at all because their pancreas the cells have died they have no

capacity to make insulin whereas an insulinoma

like we said it's gonna pump out insulin regardless no feedback mechanism no no

paying attention to anything else going on in the body it's just gonna crank out

that insulin as fast as it can't produce it so that insulin is going to be

sky-high it's gonna run probably 20 30 40 times higher than a healthy fasting

level so these are kind of the opposites of each other one has super high ketones

and no insulin and the other has no ketones and super high insulin so if we

understand these different scenarios if we just have a very basic understanding

of these mechanics then we can understand a whole bunch of scenarios

much much easier and if the people in the ER had known any of this they would

have tested at least ketones and insulin on the first visit and when you found

that level of hypoglycemia then you would have had those tests performed

they think a lot of the resistance to the ketogenic diet is that they don't

understand these basic mechanics. This is described in several case reports of

insulinoma diagnosed during pregnancy so here we get a screenshot of some of the

research that this even though it is a rare phenomenon it is very well known

but I want you to really pay attention to the item right after that he stopped

highlighting and it says misdiagnosis has been fatal meaning if you

find this in time if you don't address it properly these people can die all

right so even though this particular video

points to keto as a problem at something that can create all these different

issues of seizures and so forth I want to take a quick look at another paper

that has a different perspective so this is a very similar case that was

published in the Journal of the endocrine society

it doesn't say here's what went wrong they say ketogenic diet unmasking a case

of insulinoma right so it helped reveal it and they're saying about insulinomas

that they are a rare sporadic neuroendocrine tumor there's about 4

cases per million people and it's often difficult to diagnose given the

presentation of vague symptoms again why you want to measure some of these very

basic markers but the biggest reason that the symptoms are so vague is that

we have an unlimited access to carbohydrate so these people they have

so much insulin that keeps pushing the blood sugar down that they have these

enormous cravings and it doesn't take them very long to get extremely morbidly

obese because their bodies are not burning any fat or whatever they're

eating their bodies are storing due to all that insulin and because the insulin

is pushing down their blood sugar they have to eat carbs just to stay alive I

mean they their blood sugar would go so low that they did eventually die if they

didn't get those that glucose and in this case they actually measured some

things when a guy came into the emergency room they measured his a1c and

it was 4.8 right someone who's obese and looks like a type-2 diabetic is not

going to have an a1c of 4.8 that's someone who is extremely lean extremely

insulin sensitive and who has very very low blood sugar throughout the day

they're going to come in with 4.8 unless they have an insulinoma

that keeps pushing the blood sugar down so this guy his fasting glucose was

30 milligrams per deciliter that if they are even awake if they are not having

seizures and are unconscious then there they're about to and this person's

corresponding insulin level was eighty seven point nine okay a healthy level is

between three and five so pretty much the same thing happened he was very very

hypoglycemic so they gave him some sugar and then he perked right back up they

started a 72-hour fasting test and two hours into that test

he had a glucose level of 38 again less than half of the lower level of normal

and his insulin again was 76 so about 25 times the normal level and they

continue. Even though the biochemical diagnosis of an insulinoma is

straightforward just like we've talked about it's very very straightforward if

you actually measure something there is a median duration the average duration

of symptoms prior to diagnosis is about a year and a half

due to the very often nonspecific presentation and again it's nonspecific

because we have access to a lot of carbohydrate but if we go on a ketogenic

diet then we're gonna unmask it very quickly but rather than unmasking it

quickly why don't we measure a few things to see if we are following

anywhere near a normal pattern and here's the conclusion of of this paper

they say it's unclear how long our patient had an insulinoma or when it

would have been discovered had he not started the ketogenic diet we

believe his decision to begin the ketogenic diet directly led to the rapid

diagnosis of his tumor which means they found it earlier before it got even more

serious and just like he showed in his paper right after his quote was that

mis-diagnosis has been fatal so again my issue with the video is that it

portrayed the ketogenic diet as the initiator of all these problems when in

effect the ketogenic diet may actually have saved this woman's life so the

moral of the story is that the ketogenic diet was not the villain but if anything

it was more so the hero and if we just measure a few little things and most of

these things you can measure for yourself very inexpensively then you can

know if what you're doing is having a normal expected result or if there's

something totally abnormal going on that you want to seek some help for if you

enjoyed this video make sure that you take a look at that one thank you so

much for watching and I'll see you in the next video