Following a keto diet is damaging for your body and brain whether you eat an animal-based keto diet or a plant-based keto diet. Some people experience temporary relief or weight loss on a keto diet, but it’s important to understand that these improvements are short-lived. Especially if you suffer from chronic illness, autoimmune disease, neurological conditions or mysterious symptoms, you’ll want to run the other way from anything close to the keto diet.
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The reality is, it’s not possible for your body to go into ketosis if you’re eating any amount or form of sugar whatsoever, including the natural sugars found in most foods. That means anyone eating even a tiny bit of nuts, seeds, avocado, cheese, butter, tomato, or green juices is taking in natural sugar. Unless someone is eating only bacon three times a day (in which case they’d feel terrible and cause even more damage for themselves down the road), they’re not entering ketosis.
The idea that your body can switch to burning fat as fuel is also flawed. We don’t run on fat. We run on glucose, which is sugar. If it were true that our bodies could flip from burning glucose for energy to burning fat for energy, as the keto diet suggests, then it would be impossible for someone who was overweight or obese to starve. If the ketosis theory is correct, you could take away an overweight person’s food completely and they’d continue to live for a long period of time, using their fat as energy. But that’s not how it works. Fat does not convert to usable material for our bodies.
Anyone of any weight can starve or be malnourished without the glucose and nutrition their body needs, that is, without the glucose and nutrients that are bountiful in carbohydrates such as fruits and starchy vegetables, and without the nutrients found in leafy greens and herbs. These are what I call the CCCs, which stands for Critical Clean Carbohydrates. I detail why these foods are necessary, helpful and healing in Liver Rescue and share how dozens of the foods in the CCC category bring healing to the body.
The Old Roots of High Protein, Low Carb Diets
To everyone’s detriment, the world has become anti-sugar and anti-carbohydrate. Shunning fruits and starchy vegetables is taking away people’s ability to heal. How did we get here? The answer requires a quick history lesson and an open mind. In the early 1930s, the meat packing industry and the government joined forces to promote protein. Around this time, instead of going to the farmer and the butcher shop for meat, animal products were becoming industrialized. They were made cheap and available in mass. They were promoted as critical. Monetary interests were put ahead of people’s health.
The idea that protein is more important than anything else was pushed by the partnership of industry and government. This belief was indoctrinated into the conventional medical model and taught in grammar schools. It got drilled into everyone’s thinking and consciousness (and has remained there in the decades since).
Before this colluding effort to push protein, health practitioners were not focused on protein and meat. Protein wasn’t the top choice to sustain people. Alternative practitioners and healers especially believed in fruits, leafy greens, vegetables, herbs, potatoes, nuts and seeds. And although they weren’t focused on protein, the reality is there’s some protein in everything you eat. It’s in spinach, it’s in berries, it’s in bananas. It’s everywhere. Nonetheless, the baseless but calculated decisions to promote heavy protein intake continue to influence and confuse our thinking today
