Keto Diet vs Low Carb Diet - Which Is Better For You?

keto diet versus low carb diet aren't they the same thing well a ketogenic

diet is always a low carb diet but a low carb diet may or may not put you in

ketosis so today we're going to talk about the entire spectrum of

carbohydrates from lowest to highest and help you understand where do you need to

be in order to meet your health goals but also to achieve optimum health

coming right up

I'm doctor Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete if you

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anything keto and low carb have become very

popular because they're addressing the main problem of our times which is

insulin resistance when we eat carbohydrates and especially sugar we

triggered insulin insulin is a storage hormone so most people on a modern diet

have become much much better at storing calories and fat than to burning

calories and fat most people have lost the ability to burn fat appropriately

because there's so much food and so much sugar available that our insulin levels

and our blood sugar levels stay on a constant high keto or ketosis or a

ketogenic diet keto is a physiological state it's what happens when you switch

from carbohydrate metabolism to a dominant fat metabolism when the vast

majority of your energy comes from fat then your body produces ketones it's a

byproduct of that fat burning and if you have above baseline measurable amounts

of ketones that means you are predominantly burning fat which is a

good thing if you're trying to you lose weight or reverse insulin

resistance most people have to eat somewhere

between 20 to 50 grams of net carbs to be in ketosis and what's a net carb you

take the whole amount the whole number of carbohydrates in the food and then

you subtract the fiber because the fiber is something that we don't digest it is

there to fill out to provide bulk it gives your intestines and work to do but

you don't absorb it it provides no blood sugar no calories no energy so we don't

count it we subtract it and end up with net carbs and if your net carbs are 20

to 50 then for the most part you're gonna be in ketosis but there will be

exceptions some people have to do that either for a very very long time or they

have to go even lower 20 to 50 grams on a 2,000 calorie diet means you're eating

4 to 10 percent of calories from carbohydrate on the other extreme on the

other end of the spectrum is the sad diet the standard American diet and I

know that's totally appropriate acronym and according to the official guidelines

you should eat 45 to 65 percent of your calories from carbohydrate that puts you

at 225 to 325 grams of carbs per day and while that would create problems for a

lot of people it is not outrageously wrong for everybody what makes it wrong

for everybody is the fact that most of the food is processed and there's a lot

of sugar and a lot of chemicals in there as much as 50% of the carbohydrates

consumed are sugar which means the white crystal stuff out of the bag but also

sugar added like ketchup and cookies and baked goods and salad dressings and so

forth and of course the high-fructose corn

syrup in the sweet drinks so even though a healthy active person eating whole

food could probably tolerate for the most part a relatively high level of

carbs it's the sugar that destroys it for us because the sugar is has to be

processed mostly by the liver and it puts pressure strain stress on the liver

and we develop fatty liver and insulin resistance and when that happens we have

broken our carbohydrate processing machine and once that happened now we

have to become much much more drastic in our choices so there's a difference

between maintaining something and reversing something and most of us have

become very insulin resistant the vast majority of people over 75% in the

Western world are insulin resistant so and that's because of all the sugars so

now the reason keto and low carb are so popular is that that's the thing that

finally addresses the main problem so some people think that low-carb is

anything less than the modern diet and a lot of people think that the modern diet

is normal or balanced because that's what they've been eating all their life

for the last couple of generations they don't know anything else so they think

oh anything less than that is low carb which is not the case from the point of

view that we're discussing this if we want to reverse insulin resistance now

we're probably talking about a maximum level of about a hundred grams of carbs

so low carb generally in the low carb community is fifty to a hundred grams

which would give you ten to twenty percent of calories from carbohydrates

so Kido vs. low carb vs. high carb is a continuum and depending on your

situation your genetics your lifestyle your history you're going to be at a

different place a front place is going to be appropriate

for you so anywhere from 2% carbs on the low end up to maybe fifty percent carb

be appropriate for a certain person and it depends on how insulin resistant are

you so while there's a carb continuum there's an insulin resistance continue

and we measure this with something called Homa I our homeostatic model

assessment of insulin resistance and what it does it takes your fasting

glucose it multiplies it by your fasting insulin it divides by a constant and you

get a score a Homa I our score and an optimum value is 1

plus or minus a few tenths so if you're in that range you have a very very good

balance between insulin resistance and insulin sensitivity so normal value

could be a fasting glucose of a hundred and an insulin level of four divided by

a constant of four or five gives you approximately one once you get up to one

point five you're still okay but you're starting to develop slight insulin

resistance and by the time you get up to two or three or four you start having

moderate to severe insulin resistance at the high end of the scale we can have

people like diabetics that are untreated meaning they haven't changed anything in

their lifestyle that could be a 10 or higher but we also want to consider the

low end of the scale can you be too insulin sensitive and the answer is yes

because we could be any extreme as possible down to about 0.5 is probably

okay but once you start going below 0.5 if you have for example a fasting

glucose of 80 or 70 and your insulin starts going down below 2.5 now you are

probably too insulin sensitive and in this case you're probably very lean

you probably or active and you probably have trouble

gaining weight you might want to gain weight but you can't you think you can

oh let me eat a bunch of fat let me let me try the keto diet and that's probably

not going to be the best thing for you doesn't mean you have to eat as much as

50% carbs but you probably shouldn't be keto either there's probably a better

balance for you someplace else on the scale so you're gonna have to play

around with that and what happens if you're too lean then you don't have

enough reserves if you get a sickness if you get a cold or a flu then you don't

have a lot of reserves and you also don't have a lot of fat soluble vitamins

to help your immune system so there is such a thing as too lean and to insulin

sensitive so the Homa ir is an excellent way of assessing insulin resistance but

it doesn't tell us the whole picture so let's look at a couple of examples here

if we take a diabetic and let's say they wake up with a fasting glucose of 200

and we measure their insulin and it's 20 we compute the score and their home I R

is 10 meaning very insulin resistant and there's no surprise there because every

one of those markers tell us that their insulin resistance their their

full-blown diabetics but they may the solution may still be pretty simple for

some of these people they're just insulin resistance they're just diabetic

because there's just a flood there's a total overwhelm of sugar and

carbohydrates in their life and if they some of these people if they cut out the

soda and the cookies and the candy they may be well on their way to improving

some people are not going to be that lucky so the first thing we look at is

glucose if the fasting glucose is sky-high we know there's a problem

but we could also have a low or normal fasting glucose and have a problem

that's when we go looking at insulin because you could have you

could eat a bunch of sugar and you make a bunch of insulin that's enough to

lower your glucose and now you're gonna have a low glucose but a high insulin

because you're pushing the system your system has to work really really hard to

keep that glucose under control and then once you've done that for a while and

you want to lose some weight now you realize hey it's not working so well so

now we go and take the test and you have a fasting glucose of a hundred but your

insulin is still at 20 so this could be a person that have tried a lot of things

they used to eat a lot of carbs but they stopped so now for several months

there's very little carbs in the system but their system is still stubborn their

cells are still insulin resistant so they could have a score a Houma are of

five which is still very high but not as high as the diabetic but in a sense

they're more insulin sensitive because they've done a lot of lifestyle changes

but their cells are still not responding so this person we have to start looking

at their weight loss history and their carb intake have they started doing the

right things and it's still not working that's the what we're finding a lot of

people today who are very insulin resistant even though they have a low

glucose and a low a1c so those are the people who probably have to do the keto

but it may not be enough even so who needs to do keto well if you want fast

weight loss then keto is probably going to get it faster than the low carb for

most people if you want to reverse a disease if you have diabetes if you have

diagnosed diabetes and you want to reverse it and you want to reverse it

fast then keto is probably going to get it done faster and if your body is

stubborn then it might be a necessity same thing it

you have stubborn weight you've tried a lot of different things but you lose a

few pounds you plateau and you just stuck there Tito in this case might be

anywhere from 2% to 10% of carbohydrates of calories from carbohydrates but you

probably also are gonna have to add some more things there are more factors that

are producing that that are supporting that insulin resistance so the other one

is the frequency of meals every time you eat it's a message to release insulin

and to store fat and if you eat six times a day then that's six times that

you're storing fat intermittent fasting is when you start eating fewer meals and

you start going longer between meals especially overnight and intermittent

fasting is when you start cutting down from six meals you start skipping the

snacks you're down to three meals then you become low-carb you come better fat

adapted your body learns to burn some fat now you decide hey I'm not so hungry

for breakfast let me skip breakfast so you eat at noon and at 6:00 what has

happened here is you have turned your feeding window down to six hours which

makes your fasting window overnight 18 hours for 18 hours

you're not eating not eating is really low-carb it's zero carb and now you're

really giving your body a chance to recover you're giving the chance the

cells a chance to become a little hungry for for some more glucose that gives

them a chance to burn off some of those fat stores and become insulin sensitive

and 18 hours might do it or you might have to go longer so some people push

that window down to feeding window to once a day they might eat for 30 to 60

minutes a day and have an almost 24-hour feeding fasting window and some people

have to go even further or choose to go further because

they want to do it faster or their body just isn't responding to the shorter

fasts so some people might go 36 or 48 or even 72 hours or even seven-day fasts

I would suggest that you start slowly and gradually so you get your body used

to it and you know how your body responds another factor that can help is

exercise because once you increase your heart rate and your blood circulation

now the muscles get hungry and they are starting to accept fuel without so much

insulin which means you're becoming more insulin sensitive the body doesn't have

to produce insulin to make that happen so exercise is a great thing and I've

have some videos on that as well you want to do low intensity long duration

plus a little bit of high intensity extreme high intensity very very short

called HIIT high intensity interval training

and you don't want to do a lot of stuff in the middle which is both most people

do in the gyms another factor is stress and stress puts the body in a state of

needing more resources when you're in fight flight your body expects a

struggle so it wants more resources for fuel so it raises blood sugar it raises

cortisol which drives blood sugar up and when blood sugar goes up so does insulin

so stress actually creates insulin resistance where you end up on the

continuum and how many of these you have to try depends on how instantly

resistance you are and how far you have to go to make it work for you some

people might reach their goals on a low-carb diet meaning they don't have to

go so low as to get in ketosis but they eat 50 to 100 grams they stay physically

active they find the balance even in the low carb level or they're not in a hurry

and that would be totally fine if if that works

for you the medium to higher carb though is probably not going to reverse

anything and this would be for people who already have a high basic metabolic

rate someone who has a low Homa I our score someone who is active and probably

young it's a program to maintain rather than reverse and here you could eat

anywhere from 20 to 50 percent depending on your situation depending on your

genetics and and all these factors but you also if you're young and you do this

and it works you probably want to keep a close eye on it because you can also

develop insulin resistance over time because your body has a lot of

resilience so it might take 20 years for it to break down so personally I would

not go as high as 50 unless you're just extremely lean and you're you're wasting

away but if you have sort of a normal weight you're reasonably active then I

think you're gonna find your best range in the 50 to 100 grams so let me finish

up with an example of how research can tell you the wrong things because

there's a lot of fat phobia in in the world today and when people go low-carb

they have to increase their fats they either increase their their fat in

itself or they increase the fat through meats yet fatty meats but either way

your fats are gonna go up and people are afraid of fats especially saturated fat

but there's nothing wrong with these things the problem comes when they do

what they call high fat research and they said we took these test subjects or

these mice it could be in animals or people and they say we put them on a

high-fat diet or even they might even say high fat low carb but they feed them

40% of calories from fat 20 from protein and 40 from car

hydrate so this is not a high-fat diet and it's not a low-carb diet

it's a terrible diet and if you had your home I are down below one you could

probably get some great results for a long time on that diet but if you're the

least bit insulin resistant then that 40% of carbohydrate is going to keep

your insulin sky-high and if insulin is sky high you're still in storage mode

and then you add 40 percent fat to that and now you're in trouble

so you cannot eat a lot of high fat and high carb at the same time you got to

pick one and if your insulin resistant then the high carb one low fat is not

going to be your model if you're thin and you want to eat a lot of vegetables

and you want to go low-fat high-carb you can probably get away with it for a

while but you have to really watch that you're getting enough high quality fats

in there to get your essential fatty acids but when they do research on

insulin resistant people and they give them 40 percent of calories from

carbohydrate they're gonna be jacking that insulin way way up and they're

creating terrible trouble for that person so no wonder if they think that

is what a high fat diet is then obviously they're gonna draw some bad

conclusions about that these people are going to get very sick but it's not the

fat that creates the problem it's the insulin please leave your comments and

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