Are Vegan Low Carb Diets Healthy?

Are vegan low-carb diets healthy or unhealthy? Coming right up.

Hey I'm Dr. Sten Ekberg with Wellness For Life and if you'd like to truly master

health by understanding how the body really works make sure that you

subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you don't miss anything. So this

video was requested by one of my viewers called Little Voice and she saw a video

by ask GojiMan and she asked is there any truth to all these claims? So let's

take a look. Our vegan low carb diets healthy or not (by Gojiman). Well we're not going to

talk so much about vegan or not but I'm gonna address these claims because

there's a lot of incorrect statements here claim number one the body is

designed to run on carbohydrates that your brain heart and liver prefers

glucose while the brain runs primarily on glucose when glucose is plenty it can

run as much as 75% on a fat by-product called ketones so that is an incorrect

statement heart prefers fat. If you don't eat enough good quality fat especially

saturated fat from a natural source then the body is forced to convert

carbohydrates into fat so that the heart can have its preferred fuel and most of

your other organs run from a mix of carbohydrate and fat in a stressful

situation they up regulate their their sugar use and in normal circumstances

they run more on fat so that is incorrect.

Claim number two glucose is converted into ATP therefore the body literally

runs on carbohydrate that is pure nonsense because everything that you eat

gets turned into ATP if your body can convert it into

energy at all it is because it turned it into ATP so fat protein and

carbohydrates all turn into ATP. ATP is adenosine triphosphate it's your body's

energy currency and one molecule of glucose can be turned into up to 38

units of ATP and the same holds true for protein fat however can be turned into

as much as a hundred and forty-six to 163 units of ATP so it's a much denser

much more efficient storage form of energy we can get much more energy out

of the fat than the glucose but either way it's going to be turned into ATP

before we can use it for energy so that does not mean that the body literally

runs on carbs claim number three fat and protein can be turned into glucose

through a process called gluconeogenesis this is true but the video says this

only happens if there aren't carbs available and this is not true a lot of

things there's hundreds or thousands of processes in the body that always happen

to some degree but the body adapts so depending on circumstances we up

regulate or down regulate it happens more or less but it's not an on or off

switch so again glucoeogenesis happens under

all circumstances

it does happen more obviously when carbs are low but it still happens on a

regular basis. Claim number four the World Health Organization recommends

that 60 to 70% of your calories come from carbohydrates and 10 to 15% should

come from protein and 20 to 30% should come from fat and he says that every

Health Organization is pretty much on the same page on this and this is true

that is what they recommend it doesn't make it a good idea these people are not

health experts they're not doctors they're not clinicians they're academics

they're administrators and they're politicians that's why they put them

high in organizations that's what they're good at they're not good at

health so I for one I'm not going to take my health advice from

administrators so it's a correct statement just not a wise one in my

opinion claim number five carbohydrates are the preferred fuel for the body and

therefore the body will only use fat and protein for energy when it's forced to

do so and also through the process of ketosis when carbohydrates are really

low and it is true that carbohydrates will be used first but in no way does

that mean that it's a preferred fuel it's the most dangerous thing there in

the body so it has to be gotten rid of as soon as possible so think about it

this way a good blood sugar level is somewhere between 80 to a hundred or 80

to 90 ideally milligrams of glucose per deciliter that means at any given time

the average person has four to five grams of glucose in their bloodstream

if that increases even just a little bit up to six and a half grams that's toxic

that's the level of a diabetic when your blood sugar gets up to that level you're

classified as a diabetic and if it gets even higher then you can have what

diabetics experience as a diabetic coma so sugar is very very toxic to the brain

and that's why it is so closely monitored and that's why it's so quickly

disposed of the blood sugar is always kept at a certain level and if you eat

fat it's gonna stay at a steady level if you eat carbohydrate it's gonna go up

and down up and down up and down creating an unstable supply and constant

rollercoaster swings with the reactive hypoglycemia as a very common problem

claim number six the body stores carbohydrates

therefore they are essential the body stores a lot of things it stars stores

fat protein and carbohydrate it starts the least carbohydrate because it's very

difficult it can only be stored as glycogen and the body is very limited to

how much glycogen it can store it will store a maximum about 2,000 calories of

glycogen but it can store hundreds of thousands of calories of fat even a lean

person like myself can store about has on the body about a hundred thousand

calories of fat but I cannot store any more than two thousand calories of

carbohydrate so that in no way makes carbohydrates essential claim number

seven the brain and the red blood cells use glucose only so this is half true

the brain we talked about it can run as much as 75% on

fad through ketones so that is incorrect but here is a correct statement the red

blood cells do only use glucose but it's never a problem because there's always

some blood glucose available but they don't need a whole lot because the red

blood cells are interesting little things they're very specialized during

their development they eject their nucleus so they don't have a lot of

stuff in them that needs energy to manufacture things they're transport

vehicles and their job is to transport oxygen not to use it if you have to use

anything else than sugar you have to use oxygen so that's a specialization that

the red blood cells have gone through so that they can deliver oxygen without

using it however they can only get about two units of ATP from a glucose molecule

instead of 38 if we want to get more than two we have to use the oxygen and

again the red blood cells job is to deliver oxygen not to use it up that's

why they only use glucose and they're the only cells that do that as far as I

know claim number eight there are two molecules of water associated with every

molecule of glycogen and it is true that glycogen is what we call hydrophilic it

attracts water it holds water to it like a sponge but it's incorrect that it's

two molecules to one molecule because glycogen is an enormous molecule it

holds tens of thousands of units to it so there's tens of thousands of

molecules of water per like a molecule not two so the two comes from the fact

that it holds about two to three times its weight in water claim number nine on

a low-carb diet you can lose weight initially

and you will lose six to ten pounds very quickly but it's all water there's some

truth to this because most of the weight loss in the beginning is water but

that's true for no matter what diet you go on it is not true that six to ten

pounds are due to the water loss from glycogen that is limited about three to

four pounds because you can only store about one pound of glycogen which holds

about two to three times its weight in water claim number 10 ketosis is only

normal if you're sick or starving this is not true

again there's thousands of processes going on in the body all the time and

they don't go on or off they go up or down and every night you do a little bit

of up regulation for ketosis everyone makes more ketones during the night so

it's a normal phenomenon and it's true there is more when we are sick or

starving because the body is very adaptive claim number eleven you may

lose weight with the ketogenic diet but he says it's all water loss and also he

says the weight loss is not sustainable because if you keep eating like that

then you're gonna gain the weight back so again I'm sorry all you guys who have

consistently lost weight over years and years that didn't really happen and we

do know that carbohydrates is a food that triggers insulin and insulin is a

fat storage hormone so we do know and there is an abundance of meta analysis

meta studies on this and there's a lot of clinical research and results as well

that the carbohydrates trigger insulin causes fat storage

and insulin resistance if you want to get out of that you reduce the carbs and

you fix the problem claim number twelve fat in the blood slows the blood flow

and thereby creates insulin resistance high cholesterol and cardiovascular

disease and this is really interesting because it's the blood sugar that turns

into fat triglycerides high triglycerides which is fat in the blood

is almost invariably caused by high blood sugar because if your insulin

resistance the blood sugar can't get out into the cell so the body has no choice

but to convert it into fat and now you have some of this happening but the

insulin resistance is a result of the carbohydrates not the fat and the high

cholesterol and the cardiovascular disease comes from inflammation which is

a result of insulin due to carbohydrates so end an incorrect statement claim

number thirteen these are all the reasons that the World Health

Organization recommends a high carb diet the main reason that they do that is

that they're politicians and there is something called lobbying the biggest

industry in the world is processed foods and they need to pack a bunch of starch

and sugar into their food and they have lobbyists who influence all these

politicians in the World Health Organization and any other health

organization that's why the Captain Crunch and the marshmallow cereals have

a heart-healthy symbol on them because there is lobbying activity claim number

fourteen low-carb and keto is not good in the long run it's not a long term

diet so the only way the longest term that I

can think of would be as long as Homo sapiens has been around then that would

be about 250,000 years there is probably most likely due to all the available

evidence we have probably had a whole lot better access to fat and protein

through the months of the year then we have vegetables and fruit and grain

grain is a new addition in the last 10,000 years so low carb and ketosis is

what humans have done for most of their existence so long term study would be

the 250,000 years that we have been around so again that is not a correct

statement so one thing that he said was that that I completely agree with that a

lot of confusion comes about from eating processed foods it's not so much whether

we can eat a certain potato or we can eat a certain thing but it's when we

turn the potato into a potato chip it is when we we process the food we destroy

the nutrients we change it around we still need to eat low carb but if we

eat whole food it's gonna be pretty much low carb and grains have not been part

of human diet for all of these years as far as the vegan aspect I don't want to

get into a whole lot of detail so this is not about vegan versus not but we

need to understand that some of the things that we do can be good short-term

and some can be good long-term so vegetables are cleansing they're

wonderful for a short period of time to clean out the body to cleanse the liver

to assist the body and getting rid of accumulated junk but it's not a

long-term plan it's not good for the long term because it doesn't have the

building blocks animal products have better quality building block

and they're more bioavailable they go more directly in in their natural form

in the body so we need both we need vegetables and we need animal

foods animal foods and vegetables in the long run for balance and lots and lots

of vegetables for periods of time as a cleanse so I hope that helps answer some

of these questions and these are important questions these are very very

common misunderstandings there's a lot of myths there's a lot of outright

misinformation so if you'd like me to do individual videos on some of these then

please let me know I'll probably do some anyway but if there's specific ones that

you'd like to know more about let me know and I'll do a short video on that

and expand on it if you're new to this channel and you enjoy this kind of

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