when we embark on a ketogenic diet one of the things that we really are trying to aim to do is improve our insulin sensitivity unfortunately this particular fat can actually cause problems on a ketogenic diet and the unfortunate thing is it's what a lot of us default to now you probably know a little bit of my history I was 300 lb before I lost 110 lb with a ketogenic diet so I appreciate it there's things that I did that I kind of wish I did differently now so when you look at the impact Believe It
or Not of saturated fat when it comes down to insulin sensitivity insulin resistance we kind of have to rethink how we line up our fats on a ketogenic protocol now don't get me wrong I'm not suggesting that if you're doing a low carb approach you need to completely 86 saturated fats okay I'm not discounting that saturated fats are great for myelination they are great for the brain they are a great overall source of fuel but when it comes down to insulin sensitivity they might be actually hurting us a little more than they're helping us and
don't worry there's ways that we can go around it and how we should structure our ketogenic diet now at first glance if I say reduce your saturated fat to someone that's doing keto they're going to get mad at me I love my cheese I love my RI eyes I love that stuff and that's what's allowing me to stick to this so let me first off say that I understand if that is what is allowing you to stick to a ketogenic protocol and allowing you to legitimately lose the weight I will argue that losing the weight
losing the fat losing the visceral fat losing the abdominal fat is the biggest priority but once that weight starts to come off you do need to pay attention to how you are getting your nutrition in so what happens when we consume a lot of saturated fats is it actually impacts our insulin sensitivity it does so via affecting uh gene expression it actually can change the expression of insulin receptors so there a study that published in cellular physiology and biochemistry that demonstrated that saturated fats can effectively reduce the expression of insulin receptors by 2x so it
basically decreases the amount of insulin receptors you create and when you're doing a ketogenic diet you have so much caloric density coming from fats it actually augments how a beta cell which produces insulin ends up producing insulin in the first place it can potentially cause those pancreatic beta cells to die there's an interesting study that was published in the journal of clinical endocrinology and metabolism and it looks specifically at a high saturated fat ketogenic diet versus a high polyunsaturated fat ketogenic diet the reason that I mentioned this is you have to remember what your goal
should be with a ketogenic protocol your goal is to drive Ketone levels moderately High your goal is to improve insulin sensitivity and reduce insulin resistance and your goal should be to improve improve your lipid profile okay now I see far too many people that are doing a ketogenic protocol that do end up messing up their lipid profiles they end up seeing elevated levels of LDL they even see bad particle size LDL increasing but if you look at this study it's very interesting because it compared a high saturated fat ketogenic diet so 60% saturated fat 15%
polyunsaturated fat and 25% monounsaturated fat compared this to a low-saturated fat ketogenic diet 15% saturated fat 60% polyunsaturated fat and 25% monounsaturated fat what they found with the low saturated fat group was that the average Ketone level increased 8.4 Mill per deciliter compared to the high saturated fat it only went up 3.1 mg per deciliter so my point in saying this is before you get mad at me for saying reduce your saturated fat because it might affect insulin sensitivity consider the fact that simply reducing saturated fats and increasing polyunsaturated fats and monounsaturated fats will actually
increase how many ketones you produce so what are you after are you after eating a ribeye with cheese and I understand that could be the case right don't get me wrong or are you after getting the actual benefit because if the benefit comes from getting ketones in place and prevent uh producing them excuse me then obviously we want to do that and polyunsaturated fats create more ketones than sat saturated fat and they create them faster now Additionally the higher saturated fat group ended up having a pretty significant increase in LDL cholesterol now I don't care
what argument you want to have with LDL cholesterol at a certain point too much is not good but it's an easy thing to fix by reducing the saturated fat to maybe 20% of your total fat calories and start adding in more olive oil and I think it's a pretty easy thing to do if you want to have meat that maybe is a little lower saturated fat you just pick the right kind of meat right you pick ones that have less marbling or ones that have maybe less of a thick ribbon of saturated fat uh like
fillets things like that are perfect filet even New Yorks to a certain degree are great or skirt steaks or flank steaks where there's not as much saturated fat or go for like poultry or go for fish or the cool thing about pork is pork has a higher monounsaturated fat content and in certain Cuts has lower saturated fat I put a link down below for butcher box they have really good grass-fed grass finished beef but they also have really awesome things too they have pork they have scallops they have salmon they have Cod they have halit
you name it and it's all super good pricing and that link is down below it gets delivered directly to your doorstep cool thing about grass-fed grass finished is it has a slightly higher omega-3 content as well so the fatty acid profile is generally better when it's grass-fed grass finished which is one of the things I really like about butcher box as well so that link is down below you've got to try it out like I've got specific cuts that I really like I'm a huge fan of filets I like the leaner Cuts I like my
Stakes kind of medium rare maybe even more on the rare side and a filt is just so good it's like making me hungry thinking about it anyhow that point is link is down below so you can pick your own custom box get it delivered to your doorstep that easy so that special link down below for butcher Bock so it's it's a big blow when you first hear about it okay saturated fat like in an effort to improve insulin resistance saturated fat could actually be negatively impacting us and I'll kind of paraphrase why this is happening
saturated fat is very calorically dense it's energy dense okay our pancreatic beta cells our cells in our pancreas that produce insulin when they receive a lot of energy from a thing like a saturated fat there's so much energy being produced so much ATP that they actually become somewhat for lack of a better term insensitive to glucose okay so that means if you do have carbohydrates come into the equation then then the beta cells aren't responding to that glucose very well you might be thinking well I'm keto I'm never going back I'm never going to have
carbs again it still does not change the fact that you still respond to insulin even with protein consumption maintaining insulin sensitivity is very very important so you might be saying okay I've reduced my saturated fat intake what do I do now well first off reducing your saturated fat intake on keto will a probably lower your overall calorie intake it probably just will saturated fats are very appetizing they're hyper palatable they satisfy regions of our brain and I think when you start cutting them down and increasing other fats you'll find you just eat less to begin
with and the more weight that you lose the more your insulin sensitivity improves and remember I'm not putting the cart before the horse I want you to lose weight okay and do what makes you lose weight but one could argue that they could lose weight eating literally only cheese does that make it healthy does it make it sustainable and not necessarily right so we have to look at this situation the other thing is there was a study that was published in diabetologia that found that after just seven days of intense caloric restriction at 600 calories
per day just seven days ended up essentially starting to restore beta cell responsiveness so all this beta cell sort of insensitivity and unresponsiveness that can happen from so much saturated fat all the time can actually be reduced and even reversed very very quickly so one of the things that you can do to sort of course correct is say okay you know what yeah I'm going to do it for 6 or seven days I'm going to reduce my calories to 500 calories a day that sounds miserable I don't necessarily think it's safe or sustainable but based
upon this study it might actually work and one of those things that like if you go to an extreme deficit I know people fast for 3 4 days all the time maybe you do that maybe you do a two or three day fast and really reset things but I arguably think that just doing severe caloric restriction for a few days could really reset things but additionally just putting yourself in a deficit for 6 or S weeks that's a little bit more than what you would normally do because people make the mistake on keto of still
eating too much it's easy to overeat the cheese and keep your calories too high just bring them down a notch and allow yourself to start a burning some of the hepatic lipids the liver fat and B restore that sensitivity to glucose and just nutrients in general so I'm sorry to rain on your parade still have your cheese just maybe count the amount you have I'll see you tomorrow
