42 days of Keto Chow – Day 10
Just a really quick update. Still going well, I did some mystery flavor of 2.1 and some orange cream which was pretty good!
42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 09
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!
42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 08 – Beginning Grape Seed Oil and a dissertation on PUFAs
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 =(
42 Days of Keto Chow – Day 05
This is from last night, finished uploading while I was sleeping. We’ll see if I can make videos a regular occurrence for these updates.
N=me experiment: 4 weeks of *ONLY* Keto Chow – 3rd week tests back
I have the second-to-last test results from my experiment back. To quickly recap: I’m doing a test where I’m only eating Keto Chow and only drinking water. Nothing else. No snacks, no diet soda, no gum, no nothing. I am taking the Keto Chow fish oil pills as they are required to get the right EPA and DHA Ω3 fatty acids, and I was taking a magnesium malate supplement (I need more than normal) but I recently stopped that because the version of Keto Chow that I’m testing (v2.1rc2) has additional magnesium malate in it and the supplement I was taking had a gram of dextrose (which sucks). Here’s my complete food log and information from Cron-o-meter for the experiment so far, and here are my blood tests, updated with the results of my latest blood test.
The week proceeding this test was interesting. The short version is: I was at a tech conference with no refrigeration so I was using avocado oil instead of heavy cream. Because of this, I was getting around 2g of net carbs (or lower) A DAY. On the test, my insulin was low, my glucose showed in the red because it’s so low, my LDL-P is below 1000 and my triglycerides are higher. It’s almost like my body is using lipoproteins to transport energy (adding another data point to Dave Feldman’s hypothesis).
The last 5 days since this blood draw, my ketones have come down from the 4.5-5.5 range to the 3.0-3.5 range and my weight loss has slowed a bit too. I’m guessing this is due to using heavy cream as the fat source. Starting today through the end of the experiment, I’m switching from all heavy cream to half heavy cream, half avocado oil. Avocado oil is OK but not nearly as yummy as heavy cream, so I’m hoping that by splitting it I can get the good taste plus lower net carbs. Even with 100% heavy cream, I was still under 10g net carbs though. Protip: heavy cream has half the calories as oil for the same volume. If you’re replacing heavy cream for oil you use 1/2 as much (roughly).
A few days ago a post showed up on the Keto Chow Subreddit: Full month on KetoChow – 13 lbs lost and loving it and this showed up last night: Week 1 with Keto Chow and not much else . . .– looks like I’m not the only one doing this, N=3 then =)
On a final note, I’d like to illustrate one of the interesting challenges with this experiment. The evening after I got this blood draw, I was in charge of preparing the food for a neighborhood game night (I was also in charge of bringing the Raspberry Pi with the 4 player arcade version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). I had previously prepared a brisket with my sous-vide (recipe and more coming =) so I just needed to smoke it, along with the chicken legs and the bratwurst. I also made pulled pork using the InstantPot. It was a truly glorious sight to behold once it was all done.
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I didn’t eat any of it.
I had thought about eating some before, but I decided that there were too many variables shifting around (coming back from a trip, switching back from avocado oil to heavy cream, etc…) plus I wanted to keep the inputs clean. I fully intend to do a press release after all this is done announcing that I lived for 4 weeks on JUST Keto Chow and I didn’t want to have to add a little asterisk footnote: “*except that one meal where I pigged out on brisket” (on an aside, anybody know how to do a press release? =) Really, it was just like cooking any other meal I didn’t eat these last 3 weeks (like the CavemanKeto chili I made Sunday). Once committed to this course of action, I just keep going. It’s a little like fasting in some respects. I’m not the only one cooking though, my awesome wife has been feeding the kids some really great keto meals too.
Don’t worry: I put a bunch of the meat in the freezer for lunch on Friday after my final blood draw =)
4 years of DreamForce, this year: Keto Chow only
Every year there’s a really large (over 170,000 attendees) tech conference called DreamForce that’s put on by SalesForce in San Francisco. I’ve been attending since 2014, in fact, it was DreamForce 2014 that catalyzed my resolve to do a Ketogenic Diet. This year I didn’t just stay keto, I stayed 100% Keto Chow. I’m in the middle of an experiment where I’m only eating Keto Chow and only drinking water for all my meals. At first, I thought it was a terrible idea to do that during DreamForce, then I decided it was an awesome idea. Here’s how I did it.
In the past, I’ve stayed at hotels with refrigerators, this time that simply wasn’t an option. Most of the hotels near the conference were all booked up and the remaining ones fell into 2 categories: over $1000/night super swanky, under $75/night hostels with shared bathrooms. I went for the latter, luckily I got my own room without a bunk bed – but there wasn’t a fridge. I had to come up with a plan for preparing Keto Chow using only shelf stable ingredients. I’ve used Trader Joe’s shelf-stable whipping cream but I wanted to give Avocado Oil a shot, but before that – I wanted to give butter a shot!
I’m testing out a new version of Keto Chow, it’s very close to the current 2.0.2, just with some slightly different ingredients and with new flavors. One of these flavors is Savory Chicken Soup – it’s meant to be consumed while hot. If it’s hot, then I can use butter, which has the added bonus of not being liquid so I can make it easily through airport security without problems. I did the math and for my calorie target, I needed either a 1/2 cup of heavy cream, 1/4 cup of Avocado Oil, or a half stick of butter in each meal. So I put a bag of chicken Keto Chow and a half stick of butter into a HydroFlask. After going through security I found a coffee shop and the nice lady filled up my HydroFlask with crazy hot water (for free!). I dropped in the butter and Keto Chow powder and waited for my flight. I finally drank it around lunch time and it was still hot enough to slightly burn my tongue.
I did learn a very valuable lesson for dinner that night: don’t put the powder in with the oil until it’s time to add the water too. If you do, the powder and the oil will not ever fully mix with the water and you get floating crunchy powder blobs. It wasn’t fun, I only drank about 3/4 of it.
The rest of my meals were made in my HydroFlasks or Blender Bottle using Avocado Oil. I got a great tip in a comment that I should use a large syringe to measure the oil. That worked exceptionally well with a 60 cc/ml syringe. I would pour the oil into a disposable plastic cup and then fill up the syringe, squirt it into the container and repeat for all 3 containers. The only clean-up was wiping off the syringe tip with a tissue. I would have sandwich bags with the powder pre-measured in my backpack; and as soon as I got to a place with either ice water (regular Keto Chow) or hot water (the chicken soup one) I would prepare 2-3 of the bottles.
How is Avocado Oil? Well, if I hadn’t ever tried Keto Chow with heavy cream, I would think it’s awesome, but I have – so I still think it tastes far better with heavy cream and that’s what I’m using now that I’m back home. For shelf stable purposes, for people with issues digesting the heavy cream, for those that are lactose intolerant, or for people that want insanely low net carbs, avocado oil is an amazing option. I’m planning on putting a bunch in my basement for emergency food storage. Coupled with Keto Chow powder and water, I’m set!
Most of my Cron-O-Meter entries for the last week look something like this:
Yeah, that’s 1.4g of net carbs for the whole day! That’s insane. We’re talking 100% of my daily nutrition: with all my fat, all my electrolytes, protein, and more – with 1.4g of net carbs. Along with the low net carbs, my blood ketones were consistently in the 4-5.5 range.
Staying Keto Chow only at the conference really wasn’t that hard. When everyone else was standing in line for a lunch box, I was on-time for my next class. When everyone else was trying to find dinner accommodations, I drank mine (and often headed back to the hostel to sleep!). At the “DreamFest” concert, while all the people were scrambling to get hotdogs or the other food available (yeah like any of it would be keto friendly!) I just went and grabbed a seat – no fuss, no muss. The grand total cost of all my food for 5 days was $55.71 – that’s a screaming deal at just over $11 a day.
The picture collection at the top of this post is the “headshot” photos they offer for free in the “Admin” zone at DreamForce. I’ve gotten one each year I went. The first one was taken about 2 weeks before I started Keto. That year during DreamForce I gained 4lbs. The next 2 years I was, and stayed, keto – but I still gained 2-3 lbs during the conference. This year? I lost 2.2 lbs the 5 days I was gone.
n=me experiments – 100% Keto Chow, blood tests, dealing without a fridge
I’m in the final stages of doing some changes to the Keto Chow recipe (v2.1) and I wanted to do a “burn-in” test to make sure that everything is working properly. Might as well experiment on myself, right? My plan for the next 4 weeks is to ONLY eat Keto Chow, drink only water, take fish pills, and have some salt if necessary. On Friday I went over to my local LabCorp and had 14 vials of blood drawn for 25 tests. Around vial 9, the vein in my left arm gave up and they had to pull the remainder from my right arm. Here’s what I got:
| GGT | Cortisol | Heavy Metals | Lipid Panel | Thyroid Cascade Profile |
| Apolipoprotein A-1 | C-Reactive Protein | Hemoglobin A1c | Lp-PLA2 Activity | Uric Acid |
| Apolipoprotein B | Fasting Insulin | Homocyst(e)ine | NMR LipoProf +Graph | Vitamin A and E |
| CBC | Ferritin, Serum | IGF-1 | Reverse T3, Serum | Vitamin D |
| Comp. Metabolic Panel | Free Fatty Acids | Iron | T3Free | Zinc, RBC |
My plan is to have 6 other tests done every Friday for the next 4 weeks:
| NMR LipoProf +Graph | Lipid Panel | Comp. Metabolic Panel | CBC With Diff. | Fasting Insulin | C-Reactive Protein |
Today I’m running a test on my Postprandial glucose after eating. It’s something I’ve done before but it was time for an update I’ll probably report on that tomorrow.
Now, here’s where it gets fun: I started my experiment yesterday and it’s going well so far. Then I started thinking about what’s going on in the near future and realized I’m going to be heading off to San Francisco for the DreamForce conference in 2 weeks. Crap. “That’s like the worst timing ever for a test!” I thought, then I thought “Might actually be good timing for a test” The likelihood of me breaking keto traveling while I’m doing a nuts-o test on myself like this is actually lower.
Big problem is: the “hotel” I’ll be staying at does not have refrigeration available. I’m going to need to come up with a game plan during the 5 days I’ll be traveling. Here’s what I have so far:
- I’m going to use avocado and MCT oil instead of heavy cream.
- I’m going to portion out the powder for meals into individual bags ahead of time.
- This week I’m going to test to see how adding the oil to the powder beforehand affects storage and taste.
- If that works, I’ll put the oil right into each bag, making a sort of thin oily paste.
- I’ll triple-bag the mix =)
- I’m going to find a place that has ice and ice water available (they have it all over the place at the conference) and mix my keto chow in HydroFlasks, they should stay good for several hours, more than long enough for the “just mixed” taste to go away (which takes like 30 minutes).
- I suspect I’m going to do some kind of intermittent fasting, maybe I’ll leave all of the stuff at my hotel and just eat 3 meals in a small window.
- I’ll bring soap and a bottle brush and wash out my HydroFlasks every night.
- I’ll have my magnesium supplements handy along with some salt. I’m planning on mixing salt with water to drink during the day if I feel like I need it.
Anyhow, that’s the plan. I’m posting this ahead of time to further decrease the likelyhood of me failing (accountability FTW!!!)
Fun Videos – Coconut Oil will (not) kill you & Low Fat food will make you fat
First we have JP telling us how the American Heart Association has to be right about Coconut Oil killing you
And then we have Adam ruining low fat food
Weird thing is: Adam uses a lot of references from Taubes and Teicholz about sugar being bad but fails to follow through on what you should eat. If you watch the entire episode the clip above comes from the nutrition advice they do give is more of the same “eat less, move more” – guess they decided telling people fat is good was a bit too much.
Some thoughts on MLMs and poor “meal replacements” that are just snacks
In case you hadn’t noticed, Keto Chow is not distributed via multi-level marketing. There aren’t any “memberships” or other tomfoolery and you don’t have to trick family and friends into hearing a sales promotion to get a discount. I can very happily say that I have never once bought into a MLM and there’s no way I’d ever allow this company to engage in something as disingenuous. I think John Oliver did a fairly good job of summing up everything that’s wrong with Multi-Level Marketing.
What spurred this rant? This morning I was kicking around /r/keto and saw a promoted post for Soylent. Thought that was weird so I checked the “promoted posts” for the subreddit to see if I was getting that ad based on my reddit behavior or if Soylent were actually targeting /r/keto – it’s the former. But I did see an ad for “Wakaya BulaFIT KetoFUEL” – looked it over to see what it was (gotta check out the “competitors”). Much like the junk Pruvit KETO//OS product, this is another MLM backed quick-fix “Keto” for the masses. Finding the actual nutrition information was extraordinarily difficult – it’s nowhere on the main page or in the shopping cart where you can buy 30 servings for US$115! Ultimately I found it in their marketing flyer they give to the “Independent Ambassadors” who can buy it for $85 if they get “preferred” status.
So what do you get for that $115? 30 servings of a 250 calorie “protein” drink with some powdered MCT oil. The ingredients aren’t even remotely ketogenic. #1 ingredient? Dehydrated Sweet Cream, which I know from my own analysis is borderline keto at best. The label says 0g of carbs per 4g serving but it’s actually 0.48g. Anyhow… then you have some egg powder, some whey protein concentrate and then comes the MCT oil powder. I looked into adding MCT oil powder to Keto Chow but decided the economics didn’t make sense. It’s cheaper for everyone if you just buy Quest MCT oil powder off Amazon. Now here’s the funny thing: in the BulaFIT KetoFUEL they didn’t even bother to use soluble corn fiber to “powder” the oil, instead, they used maltodextrin. Maltodextrin is starch, it’s glucose molecules joined in chains to form a polymer and your body rapidly turns it straight into glucose, spiking your blood sugar and hindering ketosis. Oddly, they also used some acacia gum but show 0g of fiber on the panel.
250 calories for $3.83. Barely any electrolytes, 5g of carbs, only 12g of protein. Could you drink one as a “meal”? I guess – 250 calories isn’t going to keep you full for very long. Honestly, you’d do better to Intermittent Fast and then eat a proper meal. Could you replace all your meals with this product? Absolutely not (and 1800 calories of this stuff would cost you $27 and be 36g of carbs). It’s not designed as a true “replacement” for a meal, it’s more of a snack and if that’s what you’re looking for then go grab some string cheese ($11.09 for 60 at Costco). You’ll get 240 calories if you eat 3. You’ll end up with around 1g of net carbs, more protein, similar fat, AND it’ll only cost you $0.55! And it’s cheese… time to get me some more cheese.
Questions about alcohol on keto and using different oils/protein
Got an email today, I took long enough to answer it I thought I might as well put my answer in a blog post.
The first question was about whether they need to give up alcohol
Well, there are a lot of reports on /r/keto about being on keto lowering tolerance for alcohol (just search for “keto cheap date” and you’ll see what I mean). “Liquid bread” drinks like beer have WAY too many carbs but distilled spirits don’t – and the aforementioned lower tolerance makes it less expensive too.
The second question was about if I had considered algal oil in powder form – it’s what Rosa Labs uses for Soylent 1.6
Rosa Lab’s motivation is a bit different than mine: they want to use vegan sources for everything. While that’s possible with keto, it runs counter to much of the philosophy. MCT oil and cream are better (tasting) and have definitive advantages for ketosis. Additionally doing powdered oils with keto is difficult to do because most powdered oils use starch (maltodextrin) and you’d end up with several times more carbs that the max amount. The only exception to that is the Quest powdered MCT/Coconut oil but it’s prohibitively expensive. I did some poking around and found that to get powdered coconut oil in palettes it ends up being almost exactly the same price as the end user simply buying it from Quest off Amazon.
The third question was about switching to soy protein
Rosa Labs was using rice protein in their powdered mix but it gives an icky silty gritty mouthfeel. Doing Soy protein is the best option if you don’t want to use whey protein. Again, I’m not interested in vegan (I eat a lot of bacon) – I want the best tasting and highest nutrition that’s economical, with emphasis on taste and texture. To that end I’m using whey protein. Doesn’t have the grit of rice or the (incorrect but whatever) public relations issues that soy has with the phytoestrogen scare.
So the short answer to the 3rd question is simply: Keto Chow already has superior nutrition, flavor and mouthfeel; it’s better than the new stuff Rosa Labs is using.
