42 days of Keto Chow Experiment

42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 14
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42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 14

42 days of Keto Chow Experiment

42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 14

This entry is part 14 of 44 in the series 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment

Day 14, last day of grape seed oil! The kids had a really good dinner last night (see above) – it was about everything I could do to not eat some of the pork, it smelled AMAZING. Speaking of not eating stuff, today was my last full day at my soon-to-be old job, we did a meeting where we got together and brainstormed solutions to problems. Our product manager brought in (at her own expense) a bunch of food including some diet soda for me. I actually forgot to eat breakfast until lunch and am just finishing lunch at 2.

Tomorrow I get to do the blood test for the grapeseed oil week… and then wait for the results until next week. Should be interesting to say the least.

By Chris|2018-01-19T07:14:48-07:00January 18th, 2018|Categories: 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment|Tags: 42dayExperiment, Oil, User Experiences|2 Comments

42 Day of Keto Chow – Day 13: week 1 blood tests

This entry is part 13 of 44 in the series 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment

I got the first round of results back from the blood tests I did on January 12. For the most part, I’m not seeing anything particularly interesting but that’s mainly because these are the “baseline” ones to show what a week of eating only Keto Chow and heavy cream will look like. HDL is 52, LDL is 116, LDL-P (particle count) is 1242 (which is high). Glucose is normal and my fasting insulin is 4.4 which is quite good. You can see all the results of all my tests here.

My Hemoglobin A1c (which acts as a measure of the amount of glucose my red blood cells have been exposed to over their lifetime) has been steadily going down throughout my experiments. Glycated Hb A1c is the measurement typically used for the diagnosis of Diabetes Mellitus (not to be confused with “diabetes insipidus”). In the US it’s expressed as a percentage with numbers higher than 6.5 signifying diabetes, elsewhere it’s in mmol/l with values > 48 signifying diabetes. Typically you want lower numbers with <6% or <42 mmol/l. My first test in October 2017, my A1c was 5.1; In November 2017 it was at 4.9, and now in January it’s at 4.8. I wasn’t diabetic before I started doing keto, though I had a “deranged metabolism” that didn’t handle carbohydrates properly (you can tell because I was fat) and likely would have gone that direction in a few more years.

The 2 Keto Dudes do a better job of explaining what’s going on with diabetes but the interesting thing is that most doctors will prescribe enough insulin to keep blood sugar “low” but not in an ideal range. If you use insulin to bring down blood sugar and you go too far, you’ll actually end up in a coma. The problem is that (I’m working on memory here and a search didn’t find where it’s discussed at length) for each percent of HbA1c there’s an associated increase in all-cause mortality. Meaning if you use insulin to come down to a 7.0 – you are likely to die more than a person with a 6. Dang, I’m going to have to find the reference – it may be this but I’m not sure.

People with Type 2 diabetes make too much insulin and still have high blood sugar, those with Type 1 don’t make enough. The cool thing is: insulin is just a part of the regulation of blood sugar in your body and if that’s broken, guess what? there’s a backup! Your liver is able to synthesize all the glucose needed by your body. Provided you don’t introduce extra glucose into the equation, it’ll do a very good job regulating blood sugar all by its self. This is why people can go for month long fasts and not die without eating glucose.

By Chris|2018-01-19T07:12:06-07:00January 17th, 2018|Categories: 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment|Tags: Keto Chow, cholesterol, 42dayExperiment, blood test|2 Comments

42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 12, how I got started on nutritionally complete foods

This entry is part 12 of 44 in the series 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment

Day 12, ketones up slightly at 3.3 mmol/dL. The numbness from my molar crown wore off yesterday just in time for a dull ache to replace it. I doubt I could have chewed anything before this morning so I would have been doing 3 meals of Keto Chow yesterday anyway =) Late in the afternoon I noticed that the crown has a high spot in the middle so I’m going back to the dentist today to get that taken care of. Any weird “bathroom” issues I had at the beginning of the experiment are completely gone now, which is what I expected.

This morning I mixed up 80 meals of Keto Chow 2.1 to take me through a few weeks. Of note: I made 20 meals of the Savory Chicken Soup flavor, mostly so my wife could have some that wasn’t messed up. The coloring test ones we got kept coming with the sweetener in it, which makes for a really weird taste. Anyhow, that’s what I’m drinking for breakfast today. I put a bit of water into the bottle, added the fat, powder, then hot water and shook it up. Put in in my backpack for the 5 minute drive and it’s still nice and warm.

By Chris|2018-01-19T07:12:24-07:00January 16th, 2018|Categories: 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment|Tags: video, flavors, User Experiences, 42dayExperiment, ketochow2.1|0 Comments

42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 11: soaring ketones, thoughts on exogenous ketones
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42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 11: soaring ketones, thoughts on exogenous ketones

42 days of Keto Chow Experiment

42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 11: soaring ketones, thoughts on exogenous ketones

This entry is part 11 of 44 in the series 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment

Day 11. I still haven’t had “breakfast” yet today. At 07:30 I went in to get a crown, 3 hours later it’s done but I’m still numb and not particularly hungry yet. Fortunately for me, when I do eat I’m not going to need to chew. Got the crown today so I could squeeze it in this last week of my “day job” before I quit on Friday. It’s a little scary but mostly I’m looking forward to only having a single full-time job next week.

My blood ketones are predictably coming up with the insanely low net carb count I’m doing with the oil. Yesterday I got up to 3.2 mmol/dL:

Now, your level of blood ketones is NOT an indicator of how much weight you’ll lose, and unless you are doing a ketogenic diet for treatment of epilepsy or Alzheimers you really don’t need to stress about ketone levels. Still for my own tests, it’s cool to see the levels going up. It’ll be interesting to see if/how they go down when I start on heavy cream again this Friday. Speaking of Ketones, let’s talk a little about taking artificial, or “exogenous”, ketones.

To start off with: I’ve been doing a ketogenic diet for over 3 years and to date, the only exogenous ketones I have taken were in a competitor’s keto “meal replacement” (at 200 calories I wouldn’t consider it a meal but whatever) that had beta hydroxy-butyrate salts in it (ketones). It wasn’t very good and I didn’t even finish the one drink (and I still have 11 in a box somewhere). Aside from that, I’ve never bothered. I figure I want to use my own fat to make them, and doing it that way is cheaper anyhow. I’ve heard a lot about exogenous ketones and I think they do have their place with:

High-performance athletes that need a jolt of energy faster than MCT oil can provide
Treatment of epilepsy or Alzheimers
People new to Keto that aren’t making enough ketones themselves yet but they also don’t have enough glucose left.

For that last group using exogenous ketones could be a good way to get through that first week in conjunction with extra electrolytes. The problem with exogenous ketones is there are a lot of unknowns right now in what the long-term effects are, mostly due to the “handedness” of natural vs. artificial. Within organic chemistry, you’ll often have molecules that can be assembled in two different ways, one a mirror image of the other. When life on earth creates the molecule, generally it’s always done the same way due to RNA sequences and other proteins that are running things. When you create a molecule in a lab, all bets are off and you will often end up with both types. Our enzymes know what to do with the ketones made in our livers, they don’t really fit the mirror image ones. Another problem is that in our bodies you have all 3 of the ketones being produced in concert, with the ratios of each tightly controlled. When you take only one of the ketones artificially it can mess things up because ketones aren’t just a fuel, they also act as a powerful signaling pathway that tells our cells what to do. This is of even greater concern when you take artificial ketones while still eating a carb-heavy diet full of glucose. We are not designed to have high glucose at the same time as high ketones, it’s simply not how things work.

So, in case you’re wondering if I’m going to add ketones to Keto Chow: the answer is “No.” =)

By Chris|2018-01-19T07:13:16-07:00January 15th, 2018|Categories: 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment|Tags: 42dayExperiment, Exogenous Ketones, Oil, Keto Chow|3 Comments

42 days of Keto Chow – Day 10

This entry is part 10 of 44 in the series 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment

Just a really quick update. Still going well, I did some mystery flavor of 2.1 and some orange cream which was pretty good!

By Chris|2018-01-14T21:11:17-07:00January 14th, 2018|Categories: 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment|Tags: experience, Oil, blood test, 42dayExperiment|0 Comments

42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 09

This entry is part 9 of 44 in the series 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment

I wasn’t very hungry at all yesterday doing Grape Seed Oil, so I drank my 3rd one after we went bowling. This morning I woke up to my guts making gurgling noises – which was kinda weird. Anyhow, today I spent almost all day getting speakers installed into the walls of our family room in the basement. Working like that I usually don’t get hungry either but I remembered to eat to keep the data from the experiment valid.

Tonight I mixed up 7 meals of Keto Chow with grape seed oil using a test batch of Keto Chow 2.1. Didn’t take long to mix (which is good since I’m rather tired).

Doing oil instead of heavy cream has my net carbs for the day exceptionally low and my blood ketones show it. Last night I hit 1.8 mmol/dL and tonight I was up to 2.2!

By Chris|2018-01-14T21:08:48-07:00January 13th, 2018|Categories: 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment|Tags: Oil, blood test, Keto Chow, cron-o-meter, 42dayExperiment|5 Comments

42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 08 – Beginning Grape Seed Oil and a dissertation on PUFAs
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42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 08 – Beginning Grape Seed Oil and a dissertation on PUFAs

42 days of Keto Chow Experiment

42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 08 – Beginning Grape Seed Oil and a dissertation on PUFAs

This entry is part 8 of 44 in the series 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment

Today I’m starting the first day of the “real” experiment (last week was a “washout” period to normalize everything). I’m starting with Grape Seed oil. Why Grape Seed Oil? well, it has the highest Poly Unsaturated Fatty Acids (PUFAs) of any oil I could find, including Soybean oil (ok, technically I think Walnut oil has a slightly higher amount but walnuts give me canker sores and I didn’t want to go there). Why am I going to be doing a week of PUFAs? let’s recap in case you missed it:

In my earlier 4 week test, I did a week of avocado oil and I got some really weird results with my triglycerides. I asked Dave Feldman about it and he suspected that part of the cause may have been that I went from using heavy cream as a fat source to avocado oil – which is going from primarily saturated fat to mostly mono-unsaturated fats with a little poly-unsaturated. My body likely wasn’t used to that much PUFA so it may have been the cause. The only way to be certain would be to isolate out an oil that was exceptionally high and compare it to saturated, and mono-unsaturated (MUFAs) fats.

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So what’s the big deal about PUFA vs. MUFA vs. Saturated? Some of it is simply the way the molecules are set up, a major part is that seed oils (which are typically very high in PUFAs) aren’t something humans have consumed for very long, less than 100 years and often shorter. Our metabolism really doesn’t know what to do with them and the high Omega 6 causes inflammation and oxidative stress. By definition a poly-unsaturated fatty acid is a chain of carbon and hydrogen atoms that have multiple double bonds, Mono have a single double bond, and saturated have only single bonds:

Saturated Fats are exceptionally stable and resistant to oxidation (“Reactive Oxygen Species” is a term you’ll hear a lot) – this is why your grandma kept a bucket of lard on the counter and it never went bad. MUFAs do oxidize, though they’re quite good – Olive Oil is primarily MUFAs. PUFAs oxidize like crazy – in heat and even in light! But because the Diet-Hear Hypothesis that fat = bad, cholesterol = bad depends on the ideal that lowering cholesterol is the end-all-be-all, the fact that PUFAs lower cholesterol (while causing inflammation but that’s ignored) means they are “Heart Healthy” and recommended for consumption if you absolutely MUST have fat in your diet. Problem is: our bodies LIKE saturated fats because they know what to do with them so we have companies modifying PUFAs to look, feel, behave, and taste more like saturated. Thus Trans-Fatty Acids were born. We artificially add hydrogen atoms to make PUFAs into Saturated. “Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil” is code for Trans-Fat and fortunately everyone agrees that trans-fats are awful. In part thanks to the work of Nina Teicholz. If you’d like to go down the rabbit-hole on the history of fat, I highly recommend reading “The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet” which Nina wrote. It’s absolutely fantastic.

Anyway, I got my first blood test of the experiment today. I feel sorry for the poor employees at the Draper, Utah LabCorp location. They used to be a walk-in only location but ever since I’ve been going there, you can make an appointment online (which is what I’ve always done). Well there were 3 of us doing blood tests together so we all just carpooled. Well, some people had been there waiting since just after 8 and they took all 3 of us with appointments right at 9 – ahead of the people that had been waiting. Conveniently there’s a card with info to call to express your displeasure and the phlebotomists encouraged the people to do so. I thought there was goign to be a riot =(

By Chris|2018-01-12T15:44:03-07:00January 12th, 2018|Categories: 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment|Tags: PUFA, experience, Grapeseed Oil, video, Oil, blood test, science, cholesterol, 42dayExperiment|2 Comments

42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 07

This entry is part 7 of 44 in the series 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment

Day 07 – going well still. Ketones are still steady at 0.6mmol/dL Tomorrow is my first blood test for the experiment and today is my last day of doing heavy cream only in my Keto Chow. I’m mixing it up a bit by adding raspberry flavored Torani sugar-free syrup (which is one of the tips you’ll find on the flavor hacks page AND you can use it on Keto Pancakes) since vanilla can get… boring sometimes.

Taking the probiotic yesterday worked like a charm (it always does for me, which is fortunate) though I did find out that at least one of my kids has a stomach bug that’s unrelated to doing Keto Chow for all his meals (which he isn’t doing ANY of his meals as Keto Chow), there’s a possibility it’s unrelated but who knows?

By Chris|2018-01-12T07:17:42-07:00January 11th, 2018|Categories: Uncategorized, 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment|Tags: 42daysofketochow, experience, video, Keto Chow, saturated fat, User Experiences|2 Comments

42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 06

This entry is part 6 of 44 in the series 42 days of Keto Chow Experiment

Day 06. I had a pretty bad dehydration headache this morning. I actually stopped on my way to work and grabbed a small jar of pickles, ate them all and drank the juice. USDA reference database says it had approx 33.6 calories with 3.7g net carbs. I’m still counting it as “Keto Chow only” though. I do feel better, pickle juice always makes me happy =)

My blood ketones are still hanging out in the 0.4-0.6 mmol/dL range. I expect in 2 days that’ll jump up quite a lot when I start my week of GrapeSeed Oil. (more…)