Why The Health Conscious May Prefer Ketogenesis Over Carbohydrates

It’s arguable that the “low carb, high fats (LCHF)” diet is beneficial to us — but why so?

Some people who go on the keto diet do swear by it. There are many food products one can incorporate into their diets that cut out a majority of carbohydrates.

Even for me, I tend to avoid bread nowadays, for instance.

Unfortunately, the discipline level goes down when dating — I’d call that “dating calories”. I end up having more ice cream than I should be having (which is none, of course).

But interestingly, both carbohydrates and fats will feed the cell in similar ways for the cell to generate energy. Let’s see how that works!

Scientifically, our cells use the tricarboxylic acid cycle (TCA, also known as the citric acid cycle or the Krebs cycle) to generate energy from this molecule known as acetyl-coenzyme A (acetyl-CoA).

Acetyl-CoA is oxidized in the mitochondria to synthesize adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the biochemical energy currency that is used by the cells for energy purposes. Acetyl-CoA can be obtained from glucose (carbohydrates), ketones (from fatty acids), or (to a lesser extent) proteins, all of which can be found in our daily diets.

The body preferentially uses glucose as a source of acetyl-CoA, but when there is a scarcity of carbohydrates in the diet, the body shifts its source of energy derivation towards the ketones.

Hence, the ketogenic diet was born. By going keto, the main aim is to shift the source of energy derivation from carbohydrates towards ketones. If one can switch that source satisfactorily well, their dependence on carbohydrate consumption can be lowered significantly.

Which may be good. Because most societies in the developed world are drowning in carbohydrate-rich processed foods, which can be pretty darned addictive:

And of course, when we’re overconsuming carbohydrates in our daily diet, we’d just be taking in way more aldehydes than necessary:

We know where that can take us, eventually.

We don’t want to end up there, to be honest.

Especially not if we live in a region where the healthcare industry is run for profit.

If we can’t take care of our own health, we’d have to pay others through the nose to take care of our health.

With no guarantees that we can actually recover that original state of health.

So of course, some people choose to go strictly keto for health purposes — especially in the case of diabetes/pre-diabetes, where it would be to the person’s best interest to cut out carbohydrates almost completely.

So what happens if we do go keto?

The main idea for going keto is to reduce one’s dependency on carbohydrates as an energy source and to push that dependency onto ketones — a keto diet would be aiming to generate more acetyl-CoA from fats than from carbohydrates. Hence, the keto diet would generally recommend more fats and fewer carbohydrates in one’s diet.

The main metabolism switch comes from the peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor alpha (PPAR-α) transcription factor. It is said in this paper that PPAR-α “is a ligand-activated nuclear receptor highly expressed in the liver”, and that PPAR-α also regulates the expression of fatty acid-metabolizing enzymes in the liver.

In this case, our liver would be a key player in switching our energy consumption from primarily carbohydrates to primarily ketones. Supporting PPAR-α activity is also said to improve one’s liver health, including liver problems such as:

steatosis, inflammation and fibrosis in pre-clinical models of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

However, as our diet is widely varied…

One person’s keto may not necessarily be another person’s keto, let’s be clear on that.

It’s not easy to achieve uniformity in a keto diet, even if the types of food being consumed are similar. Different cultures are going to have different styles of eating, and it’s never a “one size fits all” kind of mentality.

For example, in the consumption of meat. What would happen if I were to consume meat that is high in antibiotics? Would that have an influence on my diet, as compared to one who consumes antibiotic-free meat?

In the consumption of other products, such as fats and eggs, dioxin content can be a problem, even from organic sources.

I’m saying that there can be external influences that are not within our control, and that can never be fully within our control. The presence of these unaccounted-for contaminants can also influence our health significantly.

And that goes for people on any kind of diet, too!

It’s key to be aware of how our body works, as well as how it responds to whatever food that we’re consuming.

Joel Yong, Ph.D., is a biochemical engineer/scientist, an educator and a writer. He has authored 5 ebooks (available on Amazon.com in Kindle format) and co-authored 6 journal articles in internationally peer-reviewed scientific journals. His main focus is on finding out the fundamentals of biochemical mechanisms in the body that the doctors don’t educate the lay people about, and will then proceed to deconstruct them for your understanding — as an educator should.