Yes, but that's *weird*! Not-ketosis should be better! There isn't even a word for not-ketosis. My psychiatrist friend is getting interested in the idea that people feel better when fasting. Fasting used to be a penance, not a treat.
I'd argue, of course, that ketosis should be better. Most humans did it most of the time for the last 300k years, until about 10k years ago, when only the nordic/cold climate people did it until about 1-2k years ago. When did they start growing vegertarbles in Norway? 1999?
One point in carb-metabolism's favour is that I never get the "two fuels" thing where I have got plenty of energy but my brain stops working, which I got yesterday after six hours of excited reading about fat chemistry and three hours of chess, and interpret as "running out of ketones".
Did you know that στέαρ is Greek for tallow? Even though stearic acid is only the third most common fatty acid in tallow? All the fats have cool stories.
Could be that you're still adapting to ketones, I don't recognize that feeling you describe. Some athletes report still making improvements in their keto adaptation after 1.5 years. So while you might not constantly have keto flu after a few weeks, you're probably not 100% there yet either.
My experience was always that on carbs my "brain energy" or whatever was about to run out and needed to be refueled, like all those carb addicts having to eat every 3 hours or getting dizzy. A few weeks into keto that went away and hasn't come back since. I can now go 2 days without eating and not notice. I don't have "appetite" or "hunger" the same acute way.
> My experience was always that on carbs my "brain energy" or whatever was about to run out and needed to be refueled, like all those carb addicts having to eat every 3 hours or getting dizzy. A few weeks into keto that went away and hasn't come back since. I can now go 2 days without eating and not notice.
That sounds plausible, should glycolysis, for some reason, be blocked.
Yes, probably! Takes a while to get the impulse engines on line....
Athletics-wise, I'd be very surprised if you could achieve peak performance in ketosis for anything other than short sprints or ultra-marathons. That glucose reserve is two hours of emergency war power.
I have felt the truth of this on several occasions. Once, cycling from Cambridge to Oxford, I ran out, and started limping along slowly. But then we found some glucose bars in a petrol station, and each one was like a little 15 minute power pack.
No amount of keto-adaptation will match the power and flexibility of glucose-burning.
There are some CrossFitters who report doing just as well on keto as before, but it took them 1-2 years. Medium level exercise (between sprint and marathon) does seem to be the most difficult for keto.
Allegedly, people in ketosis don't "bonk" on marathons or "hit the wall" or whatever it's called.
I suspect that athletes who train on keto long enough also learn to ramp up gluconeogenesis, and that way they can run on ketones, fat, and glucose. Are there disciplines in which this is not as good as glucose metabolism ever? Maybe.
> Most humans did it [ketosis] most of the time for the last 300k years
Is a bold claim. The ice may have been a mile thick over London, but the places where the few scattered sapiens were living outside Africa were probably pretty nice. Also I think our actual principal ancestors only escaped from Africa around 50kya (not sure, check me on this).
Are you going to give me a long list of Amber O'Hearn articles to read, because I will totally read them if you do!
A lot of humans were in ketosis occasionally over the last 300k years, I will accept, because the mechanism still works and if we didn't have a use for it it would have crapped out by now.
I'd say it's obviously the default assumption. Carbon techniques show that ancestral humans were hypercarnivores in the technical sense, meaning they ate over 70% of their food from animal sources. I guess technically these only date proteins; so conceivably people could've been eating lean protein and tons of potatoes or rice. But agriculture hadn't been invented yet, and most ancestral plants aren't nearly as energy dense as today. Even modern potatoes, at 7% energy density, you need to eat literal pounds to get enough energy every day.
Did people sometimes eat some tubers or fruits? Probably. But if they ate 70%+ of their proteins from animals, e.g. large megafauna which were even fattier than today's cattle, it's hard to imagine they would've just left all the fat by the side of the road.
I don't have the list, but check out Amber's Lipovore talk, which convinced me of this point. Also the hypercarnivore carbon dating thing seems pretty uncontroversial, my understanding is that this is the mainstream view among paleontologists or whatever these people are called.
I think Amber's right about the Lipovore thing, or at least she's careful and thorough enough that I'm never going to work out that she's wrong.
But you need to be quite short of carbs to actually go into ketosis. Actual obligate carnivores might do it habitually, but we have to work quite hard to make it happen.
Sure the boys are off hunting. But the girls are home seeking carbs. Even 30% of your food from plant sources should keep you out of keto. (OK it's not a binary, but a potato a day should shut down ketosis??)
> large megafauna which were even fattier than today's cattle
I am sceptical. Humans are by far the fattest animals in the wild (which is itself a puzzle). Farm animals have been bred to get fat, and are fed PUFAs to make them fatter. Ancient megafauna were probably not very fat at all.
We don't have to work that hard. I think you can get into pretty decent ketosis on 50g carbs per day, probably 100g. If you work out a lot, maybe even more.
E.g. I suspect most athletes are habitually in low level ketosis part time.
A pound of potatoes has about 80g of carbs. So you could probably be in some low level ketosis eating a pound of potatoes a day. Especially if you've just been walking all day after an overnight fast and you come home to the potatoes.
Well, based on fasting causes ketosis, and it used to be something people did to mortify their flesh and get religious visions. That doesn't sound like "Hey, this is great, my brain works much better, I wish I could do it indefinitely".
For that matter actual starvation was a thing even here until around 1850, and I've never heard any ancient report that says "It starts off great, all the tiredness just lifts away as soon as you run out of bread".
Although people *do* say that nowadays, and I am currently looking at beloved potatoes and thinking, "If I eat you, my brain will stop working...."
I am not carb-craving (no willpower!) but I am definitely getting a bit carb-curious at the moment. Why, if all the beef and butter I'm eating now is just better food that I work better on?
Fasting -> ketosis -> visions -> keto bad doesn't follow at all. Drowning doesn't mean water is bad, either. If you are in ketosis without fasting, you can do it indefinitely with no downsides that I've seen. Some people allegedly get side effects, but then so do people who eat carbs sometimes, so...
> I'm starting to wonder why I don't just stay in ketosis rather than only ever doing it for two weeks at a time. I like this feeling.
Hear hear!
Yes, but that's *weird*! Not-ketosis should be better! There isn't even a word for not-ketosis. My psychiatrist friend is getting interested in the idea that people feel better when fasting. Fasting used to be a penance, not a treat.
It should be? Based on what?
I'd argue, of course, that ketosis should be better. Most humans did it most of the time for the last 300k years, until about 10k years ago, when only the nordic/cold climate people did it until about 1-2k years ago. When did they start growing vegertarbles in Norway? 1999?
I don't think vegetables will grow in Norway at all. But they do have a reputation for eating Swedes.
Oh bloody hell, that pun doesn't work in freedomspeak. Sorry.
Applause please, loyal subjects of the Empire. Rattle your chains or something.
I was always puzzled by the word "rutabaga". I think I assumed it was some sort of vehicle.
One point in carb-metabolism's favour is that I never get the "two fuels" thing where I have got plenty of energy but my brain stops working, which I got yesterday after six hours of excited reading about fat chemistry and three hours of chess, and interpret as "running out of ketones".
Did you know that στέαρ is Greek for tallow? Even though stearic acid is only the third most common fatty acid in tallow? All the fats have cool stories.
I did not know that.
Could be that you're still adapting to ketones, I don't recognize that feeling you describe. Some athletes report still making improvements in their keto adaptation after 1.5 years. So while you might not constantly have keto flu after a few weeks, you're probably not 100% there yet either.
My experience was always that on carbs my "brain energy" or whatever was about to run out and needed to be refueled, like all those carb addicts having to eat every 3 hours or getting dizzy. A few weeks into keto that went away and hasn't come back since. I can now go 2 days without eating and not notice. I don't have "appetite" or "hunger" the same acute way.
> My experience was always that on carbs my "brain energy" or whatever was about to run out and needed to be refueled, like all those carb addicts having to eat every 3 hours or getting dizzy. A few weeks into keto that went away and hasn't come back since. I can now go 2 days without eating and not notice.
That sounds plausible, should glycolysis, for some reason, be blocked.
> Could be that you're still adapting to ketones
Yes, probably! Takes a while to get the impulse engines on line....
Athletics-wise, I'd be very surprised if you could achieve peak performance in ketosis for anything other than short sprints or ultra-marathons. That glucose reserve is two hours of emergency war power.
I have felt the truth of this on several occasions. Once, cycling from Cambridge to Oxford, I ran out, and started limping along slowly. But then we found some glucose bars in a petrol station, and each one was like a little 15 minute power pack.
No amount of keto-adaptation will match the power and flexibility of glucose-burning.
There are some CrossFitters who report doing just as well on keto as before, but it took them 1-2 years. Medium level exercise (between sprint and marathon) does seem to be the most difficult for keto.
Allegedly, people in ketosis don't "bonk" on marathons or "hit the wall" or whatever it's called.
I suspect that athletes who train on keto long enough also learn to ramp up gluconeogenesis, and that way they can run on ketones, fat, and glucose. Are there disciplines in which this is not as good as glucose metabolism ever? Maybe.
> Most humans did it [ketosis] most of the time for the last 300k years
Is a bold claim. The ice may have been a mile thick over London, but the places where the few scattered sapiens were living outside Africa were probably pretty nice. Also I think our actual principal ancestors only escaped from Africa around 50kya (not sure, check me on this).
Are you going to give me a long list of Amber O'Hearn articles to read, because I will totally read them if you do!
A lot of humans were in ketosis occasionally over the last 300k years, I will accept, because the mechanism still works and if we didn't have a use for it it would have crapped out by now.
I'd say it's obviously the default assumption. Carbon techniques show that ancestral humans were hypercarnivores in the technical sense, meaning they ate over 70% of their food from animal sources. I guess technically these only date proteins; so conceivably people could've been eating lean protein and tons of potatoes or rice. But agriculture hadn't been invented yet, and most ancestral plants aren't nearly as energy dense as today. Even modern potatoes, at 7% energy density, you need to eat literal pounds to get enough energy every day.
Did people sometimes eat some tubers or fruits? Probably. But if they ate 70%+ of their proteins from animals, e.g. large megafauna which were even fattier than today's cattle, it's hard to imagine they would've just left all the fat by the side of the road.
I don't have the list, but check out Amber's Lipovore talk, which convinced me of this point. Also the hypercarnivore carbon dating thing seems pretty uncontroversial, my understanding is that this is the mainstream view among paleontologists or whatever these people are called.
I think Amber's right about the Lipovore thing, or at least she's careful and thorough enough that I'm never going to work out that she's wrong.
But you need to be quite short of carbs to actually go into ketosis. Actual obligate carnivores might do it habitually, but we have to work quite hard to make it happen.
Sure the boys are off hunting. But the girls are home seeking carbs. Even 30% of your food from plant sources should keep you out of keto. (OK it's not a binary, but a potato a day should shut down ketosis??)
> large megafauna which were even fattier than today's cattle
I am sceptical. Humans are by far the fattest animals in the wild (which is itself a puzzle). Farm animals have been bred to get fat, and are fed PUFAs to make them fatter. Ancient megafauna were probably not very fat at all.
Just came across this: https://tuckergoodrich.substack.com/p/yes-virginia-the-paleo-diet-was-low
Re our discussion if paleo would've been keto/low-carb
We don't have to work that hard. I think you can get into pretty decent ketosis on 50g carbs per day, probably 100g. If you work out a lot, maybe even more.
E.g. I suspect most athletes are habitually in low level ketosis part time.
A pound of potatoes has about 80g of carbs. So you could probably be in some low level ketosis eating a pound of potatoes a day. Especially if you've just been walking all day after an overnight fast and you come home to the potatoes.
Well, based on fasting causes ketosis, and it used to be something people did to mortify their flesh and get religious visions. That doesn't sound like "Hey, this is great, my brain works much better, I wish I could do it indefinitely".
For that matter actual starvation was a thing even here until around 1850, and I've never heard any ancient report that says "It starts off great, all the tiredness just lifts away as soon as you run out of bread".
Although people *do* say that nowadays, and I am currently looking at beloved potatoes and thinking, "If I eat you, my brain will stop working...."
I am not carb-craving (no willpower!) but I am definitely getting a bit carb-curious at the moment. Why, if all the beef and butter I'm eating now is just better food that I work better on?
Fasting -> ketosis -> visions -> keto bad doesn't follow at all. Drowning doesn't mean water is bad, either. If you are in ketosis without fasting, you can do it indefinitely with no downsides that I've seen. Some people allegedly get side effects, but then so do people who eat carbs sometimes, so...
That is true. But modern people really do seem to cheer up and start working better when they fast. Which is just a bit weird, surely?
Maybe cause it gets them into ketosis, which circumvents the broken glucose metabolism bits?