Keto Kills.. Here’s Why.

Ask any person who has dipped their toes into the dieting waters, and they will probably tell you one of two things: that they have heard of the keto diet, and considered trying it, or that they have jumped on the keto train and seen amazing weight loss results from it. What they won’t tell you, however, is that their body would be slowly dropping into the perfect atmosphere to promote cancer growth, or that their kidneys and liver would be working overtime to keep up with the foods they are consuming. They won’t tell you these things, because they probably don’t know.

Mainstream media is so apt to hop onboard with each new dieting trend, that people are shelling out trillions of dollars to “look their best,” and they aren’t even aware of what’s going on inside their bodies. Or perhaps they are in denial of the fact that they might feel even worse on these diets, because they are so convinced that they’re doing the right thing. Their actual feelings might take a back seat on their quest to feel better. It’s a true tragedy.

So why is keto so popular? Why are so many people waiting on the edge of their seats to be in ketosis? Because it is, in fact, true that ketosis causes weight loss. Sometimes rapid. It can also cause decreased appetite and increased thirst, which causes the dieter to drink more water. These are great things, right? Not so much, when you consider the cost: when you remove carbs from your diet, you take away your body’s number one favorite form of energy. We are hardwired to be sugar burners, that is how our body performs at the optimal level of health. So when you take away its favorite source, it goes for the next best thing: fat, and protein. Your body will eat up your stored fat, hence the weight loss, then it will make its way to your water weight and your muscle mass. On the keto diet, you are steadily providing your body with plenty of proteins and fats to digest, which exhausts much more energy in itself because it goes against our natural function, and it also causes your amazing body to adapt its energy burning method to that of a fat burner. 

At this point, your body is working extremely hard every day. It is going to do its best to take care of you, to make sure you survive, to keep you breathing and functioning at its best capacity. Besides the fact that this slows your metabolism and brain activity due to pure fatigue, the prolonged high protein diet also produces an acidic state in your body. The animal proteins being consumed are high in sulfur-containing amino acids. These are digested by the body and broken down into sulfuric acid. To buffer the acid, your body actually sucks calcium out of your bones to make sure all of your systems stay safe and functioning. This leads to loss of bone integrity, osteoporosis, and teeth problems. The calcium from your bones is then free floating in your body, where it settles into your kidneys and can cause kidney stones, or actually flows into your blood and can cause calcium blockages in your arteries. This affects your heart function, and might potentially explain why ketosis has been stated as a risk factor for increasing heart failure by 33 percent. 

As far as consuming high amounts of fat goes, you are not much better off. Because fats provide more energy per gram, it is very easy to over consume them, and many people are consuming the worst types of fat to begin with. When you eat fats like butter and olive oil, your body does its best to break them down much like any other food, but the chemical compositions remain the same. You are essentially storing molecules of these foods inside your body tissues, undigested and clumping together in the form of adipose tissue. The fat actually prevents insulin from transporting sugar into your cells to be used as energy, so your pancreas thinks it’s doing a bad job. It produces more and more and more insulin.. which causes a catastrophic blood sugar imbalance and perfectly sets your body up for diabetes. Diabetes is clearly linked to further health issues like heart failure, high blood pressure, and kidney problems, so a domino effect is potentially set in place. 

So what is the solution? If keto is so bad, if high-protein and high-fat diets are so bad, what is better? It’s actually right before our eyes-- we eat the way that our bodies intended us to, and consume a diet that is high in fruits and vegetables, supplementing our intake with nuts and seeds, and occasionally whole grains as our body can tolerate them. Our flat teeth are perfect for chewing these plant based foods into a consistency that our miraculous, carb burning body can easily absorb nutrients from. Our long digestive tracts ensure that these foods stay in our bodies long enough to absorb every last vitamin or mineral that we need, allowing us to spend our precious time on such sentient activities as being with our loved ones and fulfilling our life’s purpose. All of which would be much easier to enjoy, if we know that we are doing our very best to support our bodies in their amazing jobs. If we know that we are on our way to thriving instead of merely surviving, giving our cells everything they need to continue loving us as they’ve done so far.