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Low-Carb Diets Are RUINING Your Health [Part 1]
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Transcript
Are low-carb diets harmful to health?
00:00:01
chrisyzen
What if I told you that keto, carnivore, paleo, low carb diets are ruining your health and they're aging you prematurely? Would you think I'm crazy?
Research overview on diet and longevity
00:00:14
chrisyzen
Well, I have a whole chapter in my book, How to Actually Live Longer, where I i delve into the issue quiet at length with plenty of research to support the argument that a low carb diet is not conducive to longevity. And in this video, I'm just going to share some high level concepts and then we'll hopefully unpack the those in future videos yeah because it's it's a massive discussion. I think the chapter on low carb diets is one fifth of the book.
00:00:45
chrisyzen
It's not a very long book. It's 50,000 words or 10,000 words are devoted to low carb diets. Um, so here's the kind of the, the basic overarching theme, right?
Starvation signals and health impact
00:00:57
chrisyzen
Low carb diets send the signal of starvation to your body. They send the signal of scarcity of lack.
00:01:08
chrisyzen
the opposite signal that we wanna be sending the body. We want to be sending the body the signal of abundance so that it upregulates higher thought, creativity, altruism, joy, so you sleep well, you're fertile, your libido is healthy. If we send the opposite signal of scarcity, starvation, you know famine,
00:01:34
chrisyzen
it's going to start downregulating these non-vital for survival functions. And we don't want that to happen because then your your physical health will take a dip, your mental performance will take a dip, everything will start taking a dip because the body is prioritizing survival, not thriving. And why, how do we know that low carb diets do that though, right? what's the Is there any science? Well, yeah. That's basically, so if you look at some studies on the ketogenic diet, on if you go on PubMed and start like browsing studies on the ketogenic diet, sometimes the first sentence in the paper will be something like, the ketogenic diet mimics starvation. like That's
00:02:23
chrisyzen
literally what it was designed to do because they found out that if you restrict carbohydrates alone, just carbohydrates, so it signals the same signal as starvation to the body, right?
Historical studies on ketogenic diets
00:02:42
chrisyzen
So later on, ah some like in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, they did more kind of in-depth studies where, for example, there was one, I think it was in the 80s, they put the man on an isocaloric
00:03:00
chrisyzen
ketogenic diet so it that means they didn't cut the calories so they were eating as many calories as they they were you know the days before except no no carbs and within four days the hormonal profile turned catabolic right so certain you know ah hormones that are quote-unquote catabolic or stress hormones like glucagon so started increasing insulin fell ah thyroid hormone was down regulated right that means that the metabolic rate is slowing very quickly right and ah so this so there's
00:03:38
chrisyzen
it's very well known in research nutrition research circles that removing carbs from the diet gives that signal of starvation to the body that is sufficient and you might be eating plenty of protein might be eating plenty of fat but you are invariably giving that stress signal to the body with the low carb diet and that's not a good thing because again it starts to it starts to prioritize survival without giving a ah hoopla About things like you know your testosterone level
Personal experiences with low-carb diets
00:04:13
chrisyzen
and stuff like that, right? But here's the other thing. We also know that low-carb diets Increase cortisol. Okay, that is how you are here's the thing you your brain your central nervous system needs quite a lot of glucose in a day and No matter what happens
00:04:34
chrisyzen
that glucose will be either created by destroying parts of your body, your lean tissue, and turning it into glucose, so or it will come from the diet. But it will get it will get created or used one way or another, right? There's many pathways to making glucose in the body. So if you cut your, let's say your carbs down,
00:04:58
chrisyzen
to like 100 grams per day. And it's not low enough that you get into ketosis. So you're kind of in this zone between your it's low carb, but it's not enough to be in in ketosis. And it's low carb, but and it's not enough to cover your glucose requirements for a full day. Well, what what do you think happens? Well, cortisol stress hormones go increase, they go up.
00:05:24
chrisyzen
And you are either breaking your body's tissues down to turn them into glucose or the protein that you eat from the diet. will get deaminated and turned into glucose, which is a toxic process, releases ammonia, puts strain on the kidneys, not good. So you're kind of in a sort of horrible spot, right? You're not in ketosis because when you're getting to ketosis, it takes a burden off this gluconeogenesis system to make glucose constantly for the brain and whatever other activity.
00:05:55
chrisyzen
um so it kind of sucks and your cortisol is high you feel horrible people don't sleep well i know when i was doing low carb back in 2018 i was having sleep problems and i was like why I'm doing all this good stuff, intermittent fasting, I'm doing the bio hacks, the supplements, the clean eating, the red light therapy, like exposing my and myself to sun in the morning, no blue light at night, all of it dialed in, all of it
00:06:29
chrisyzen
And still like I was waking up in the middle of the night, couldn't fall asleep or hadd wake up at six in the morning, couldn't fall asleep, had to get up running on coffee because then you sleep like crap. And it's because your stress hormones are elevated constantly to make up for this glucose deficit,
Video series on long-term diet issues
00:06:50
chrisyzen
right?
00:06:50
chrisyzen
So ah this is a little, try to keep these videos short, this is a little prelude to the kind of the rest of this mini video series on why low carbs are um not good long term. If you do a low carb diet,
00:07:09
chrisyzen
And through that you clean up your diet and you become more intentional with what you're eating and you cut out a lot of crappy grains and ah Twinkies and cakes and whatever other nonsense processed food. That's that's a great step but don't conflate the benefits you got from cleaning up your diet with a benefit of the low-carb diet per se. That's a big mistake people make when they go to keto or plant-based or carnivore. Usually, they go from eating badly, but not not great, to cleaning becoming more intentional, cleaning up their diet. So whether you when you do that,
00:07:49
chrisyzen
you could move to high protein, low protein, high carb, low carb, plant-based, fruitarian, only meat, only steak. Most of those diets, will you will feel better because you're you're removing a lot of toxic crap from your diet. But it's not those diets necessarily, or maybe maybe those diets are a good stepping stone, but they are not optimal for long-term function. And this is what my my um my aim is to teach my clients, my readers, is what do we do to maintain optimal function for as long as possible?
Strategies for sustainable health
00:08:27
chrisyzen
Not to lose 20 pounds in the new year and then regain it back and then the next year we try the next thing and then the next thing so we're constantly losing and gaining the same 20 pounds.
00:08:39
chrisyzen
But how can we send the signal of abundance to the body so it doesn't have to become thrifty and lower its metabolism and store everything? How do we make it so that the body um so the body has this sort of hormonal milieu where stress hormones are low?
00:08:57
chrisyzen
where ah the the protective hormones are in decent ranges, you know like testosterone and DHEA and so on, and you feel good and you perform well and then you have better sleep and then you make better choices and you don't have to rely on willpower or this next diet or whatever the heck the case may be two to reach your health health
Critique of low-carb diet advocates
00:09:21
chrisyzen
goals, right? That's kind of the idea. how do we What do we do on a daily basis?
00:09:25
chrisyzen
that is sustainable long term that will not send a signal of starvation of scarcity to the body that will cause it to lower its metabolic rate which will cause us a lot of health issues in a few years or in a decade right that is the key and this is where a lot of Folks out there that are preaching keto this there's no such thing as an essential carbohydrate um All of the stuff they are a little bit Still it in kindergarten level when it comes to this health Restoration health optimization and longevity stuff, you know, they're still they're still stuck in 2018, you know
00:10:04
chrisyzen
but This is the kind of stuff that was being preached in 2018, keto, low carb, carnivore. It's been six years since then. we have As a the health space in general, we have moved on significantly. Carbs are no longer the devil.
00:10:23
chrisyzen
They are no longer the devil, you know? So it's time to update your knowledge if you if you have not. if you've If you've been listening to somebody that's telling all the slow-carb stuff is the bee's knees, they just have not gotten the memo yet. So youre ahead of the you're ahead of the curve. So that's a good thing. So I'll see you in the next video.