Do Carbs Kill Your Brain?

Unless you are a type one diabetic you may have miss diagnosed yourself. People who are type one diabetic can’t make any insulin and can go into what is called “Ketoacidosis”, a very sever overload of ketones. That cant happen in a normally healthy person just by keeping your carbs low. Instead, you will change your metabolism and become adapted to burning fat for energy rather than sugar ( glucose). Both your brain and your body work more efficiently burning fat. Babies for example are naturally in ketosis if they breast feed right up until the moment their parents start feeding them carbs. Human breast milk is very high in saturated fat.

Your body naturally produces all the glucose you will ever need and can store about 2,000 calories worth of it in your liver. You never need to eat a single carb. That is what an “essential” nutrient is, something we cant make on our own and need to eat. We can make all the glucose we need without out ever eating a single carb. Therefore, by definition carbs are not essential.

I dont know you but if you got sick dropping your carb load there can be several reasons for that. After a lifetime of eating carbs/sugar people sometimes need to help their digestive system come back to life ( with pro biotics or fermented foods) so it can once again digest fat properly.

People who have felt bad trying low-carb diets are almost always feeling the effects of lower blood pressure and sometimes lower blood sugar. Both of those are good things but they can make you feel faint and queasy while your body adjusts.

No one should try very low carb without some research — the “New Atkins” book is a really excellent and scientifically excellent starting point — edited by Eric Westman of Duke University Medical Center.

If you have any kind of complex health issues you should try to involve your doctor — and if your doctor refuses to cooperate, and his/her reasons to say no don’t make sense to you, find another doctor.

When you go low carb, the first thing that happens is you lose 4-6 pounds of fluid. There are two theories about that — one theory is that your body needs more fluid to digest carbs. The alternate, very intriguing theory, expounded by Perlmutter, is that the extra water weight is simply an inflammatory response to carbs, particularly to grains and sugars.

In any case, when you lose that water weight, your blood pressure can go down quite dramatically and people feel lousy from hypotension and mild hypoglycemia. Fortunately there is an EXTREMELY easy cure for this — drink something salty, like chicken broth. It will stabilize your blood pressure while your body is making the adjustment to low carb. It works in nearly all cases where people are feeling bad on a low-carb diet.

Often in a few weeks, as they lose water weight and then burn off a bunch of fat, people’s blood pressure stabilizes at a much lower level and they can come off their blood pressure meds, which is one nice benefit of low carb eating. Another really nice benefit which almost everybody experiences is that acid reflux simply disappears — often in a few days. So people who are basically permanent users of Prilosec or Zantac can come off them — which is really good because there is more and more concern about long term side effects from those drugs.

The confusion between ketosis (fat burning) and ketoacidosis (a very serious condition suffered by diabetics in very late stages of the disease) I am not going to get into here, but any doctor who is still confused about that ought to turn into his/her medical license. Ketosis is safe for almost everybody, and virtually everybody does it to some degree every time they go 6-8 hours without food..

Arguments that “explosive energy” can only come from a carbohydrate diet have been pretty well debunked. Look up the work of Jeff Volek and the scientifically rigorous blog of Dr. Peter Attia. Very low carb is actually a great regimen for people who exercise a lot (ask the LA Lakers whose training regimen is now low carb).

Last time I read Attia, he was exploring the idea that carbs may provide a marginal benefit in sprint-type events. But for anything of distance/endurance, people seem to perform better, not worse, on VLC. The theory being that ketones are simply a better fuel than glucose and glycogen. The metaphor is that carbs are like burning paper, or maybe a marshmallow, and ketones are more like burning wood, or maybe lamp oil. Ketones provide a steadier and more efficient source of fuel.

In my personal experience as a low-carb eater, I don’t get the “hit the wall/second wind” experience when I ride my bike. I just start out feeling like “second wind” and I don’t hit the wall at all. I don’t do long rides — maybe 20 miles — but my level of fatigue while riding is dramatically lower when I am limiting carbs.

From my experience, I have worked 10 hour shifts with complete ease while eating pretty much keeping below 60 g of carbs. I used to walk basically all day long and carry boxes weighing in some cases up to 50 pounds. I figured I walked on average 15-20 miles per day for 5 days a week, averaging about 75-100 miles per week. Most of the people I would ask them what they ate for breakfast that were the most likely to quit or take breaks or complain the loudest about all the walking required of the job often told me that they ate large breakfasts, juice, toast, cereal, fruits and maybe some eggs, but they usually never could keep up with the work, some were large and muscular, looking pretty fit, but complained regularly. I hardly ever felt tired nor winded by any of the work, I would usually eat at most 2-3 eggs with some bacon for breakfast. That was all. Recently I went off this diet and went from 165 to 225, not walking or exercising just eating carbs and whatever I felt like, When I did a low carb diet in 2006 I went from 250 to 165 over the course of 12 months, that enabled me to work that job. Anyways recently I have gone back on the diet dropped down to 195 from 225 (had inflammation, allergy problems with nasal polyposis, sedentary and carb consuming), now my allergies are clearing up no polyps issues, My reasons were not weight this time around though I did need to lose some, I just wanted to stop the inflammation. Now I can run 5k almost not breaking a sweat, not feeling tired afterwards, prior to cutting carbs running 5k was an ordeal, tiring and painful. Of course losing weight has helped, but while eating any carbs I wanted and exercising I was going nowhere, lifting weight and jogging, my weight would not budge nor would my polyps shrink, I cut wheat out and within the past 3 months my system has been relentlessly shedding the excess and the polyps have stayed put not to block my airway!