A recent headline is saying keto causes heart attacks. Even though Dr. Martin isn’t big on the keto diet, he urges listeners to unpack these studies and not take them at face value. It turns out the unpublished non-peer reviewed study didn’t even use a real keto diet in their assessment.
There’s no doubt that the keto diet has become very popular, but Dr. Martin says it’s been hijacked. The original keto, or ketosis diet from the 1920’s was high fat, low carb. The keto diet of today is more artificial than it is natural. In that case, yes, eating all that garbage could possibly give you a heart attack.
Join Dr. Martin as he unveils the truth behind keto and why you want to be careful with it.
TRANSCRIPT OF TODAY'S EPISODE
Announcer: You're listening to The Doctor Is In Podcast, brought to you by MartinClinic.com. During the episode, the doctors share a lot of information. As awesome as the info may be, it is not intended to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent any disease. It's strictly for informational purposes.
Dr. Martin: Well, good morning everyone, and once again, welcome to another live this morning. Hope you're having a great day. Okay, now, I don't know if you saw this headline yesterday, at least I saw it yesterday. Keto, okay, we're going to talk about keto this morning at least partly through our time together, but you might have seen this headline. I think it probably made the mainstream keto causes heart attacks. Okay? Now, the headlines referred to an unpublished study. I looked it up. I kind of found it funny because they really didn't use a real keto diet. Okay? So you and I know what keto is, okay? It's very popular today. You go into Costco, go to your grocery storage, and you will see keto foods all over the place become very popular.
Now, if you've been following me at all here at the Martin Clinic, I've been telling you I'm not all that big on keto per se, okay? And the reason is I think keto has sort of been hijacked, okay? Let me tell you what I mean by that. The original keto diet, keto comes from the word ketosis, okay? And that original diet was used as early as the 1920s. That might have been even earlier than that. And there's actually publications that will talk about the keto diet. If you go back as far back as 1920, and it was used with some success. As a matter of fact, the sick kids, even today, will use the keto diet with kids. For example, I had a patient, this is a few years ago, that was put on the keto diet for seizures.
Now, what is a real keto diet? High fat, low carbohydrate. That's the keto diet. Now, come farther into the early 1970s. You've all heard of the Atkins diet, okay? The Atkins diet. Now, the Atkins diet got vilified. Why? Because it was a high fat diet. And Dr. Atkins, who was a cardiologist, made it famous. And they called it the Atkins Diet, but it really was a keto diet because it put people into ketosis. What does that mean? Well, if you keep approximately, okay, if you eat less than about 15 or 20 grams of carbohydrates in a day, your body has to burn a fuel. Well, if you're not burning carbs, you are going to burn fat. That's ketosis. That's what it means. And sometimes people confuse it with keto acidosis, which is completely different. And in a way, it's why even Dr. Atkins was vilified. I mean, the guy was a cardiologist. He wasn't a dummy.
And some people said, oh, Dr. Atkins died of his diet. No, he didn't. He was coming out of his cardiology clinic in downtown New York. He slipped and fell on ice and hit his head, and he never regained consciousness. That's how he died. But the ketotic diet is a high fat, very low carbohydrate diet. So they did this study, and it really was not a published study. It was a study apparently. But when you look at the foods they use, it really wasn't a keto diet. Now, let me get into a little bit of detail. Not on this study, but the keto wave that's going on. Let's eat keto. Well, you're not really eating keto to this extent. Look at the foods, keto snacks, keto bars, keto this, and keto that, okay? And there's a whole industry that has come up. The food industry's not stupid. They're figuring, okay, people want to go keto, so let's make them food for them. Guys, those mostly are garbage foods.
I'm not a carnivore. I'm a nutrivore. I'm into nutrition. When people tell me they're eating keto, I always ask them, what do you mean by that? Because if you live on eggs, meat, fish, dairy, except grocery store milk, you're eating a keto diet. Because if that's what you're eating, you are going to be in ketosis. Is that good? Well, sure it's good because you're burning fat as fuel. And when you are eating healthy fat, the way God gave us fat, look at animal products. Okay? "Ah Dr. Martin it's full of cholesterol." Yeah, cholesterol is only found in the animal kingdom. It's not in the plant kingdom. I'm not telling you not to eat plants, but cholesterol is found in the animal kingdom in eggs, meat and cheese. That doesn't make it bad. That actually makes it good. All your nutrients, your amino acids, your most bioavailable protein is found in the animal kingdom. Am I telling you, you can't have any vegetables? No. Am I telling you you can't have any fruit? No, I'm not telling you that.
But when your body is burning fat as fuel, what am I talking to you guys about all the time? Change fuels. Because crappy carbohydrates, pretend you're a wood stove for a minute. You would never heat your log cabin with a wood stove and all your burning is paper and twigs. Guys, that's what carbohydrates are. They burn quickly, they leave you hungry. Whereas when you are eating a high fat, high protein diet, you've changed fuel and now you are burning rocket fuel. That's the point I always want to make. So when I read a study, keto causes heart attacks. Guys, don't buy it. Okay? Don't buy it. First of all, it was a very poorly done study. It was not peer reviewed and it was unpublished, but it made the headlines. And so you know what I do? I take those studies and I'm going to give to you another take on them, okay? Nah, it doesn't cause heart attack.
And let me read you a quote. I'll actually post this on our Facebook after, okay? It's a quote. This is a low carb, high fat diet, okay? This is a quote, I'll put it up afterwards. "This is the new medicine, which is going to take 30 years to be accepted." Okay? So just understand folks in nutrition before it can become mainstream. This guy is saying it's going to take 30 years to be really accepted. Is that true? Maybe with social media and everything that we have today, it may not take that long, but it's his quote. So this is the new medicine, low carb and high fat. This is the new medicine, which is going to take 30 years to be accepted, but as per your health, okay? This is the quote. "But as per your health is concerned, as far as your health is concerned, you better accept it today. You haven't got 30 years to wait." I like that. I like that. Not no carb. Now you do a 30 day reset. You know I highly recommend that 30 days reset your body.
Listen, let me show you a chart. I don't know what it'll look like because I drew it up myself. And you know me, I flunked art. And I can post this chart afterwards, but I, I've done it here and I don't know what you guys see there. Okay? I know you'll see it upside down to some extent. Okay? Again, okay, look at this chart. Okay? Now on this here, you have hours one to six hours after you eat. Okay? So down that line is six hours, the bottom of the chart. And what they did is they measured how food affects blood sugar. Okay? How food affects blood sugar. So on the bottom of the chart, you have ours up to six hour, and then you have what foods they ate. And look at the top. You see this graph here. See that one? It goes up crazy. And then on this side of the chart is your blood sugar hours and then blood sugar up to 20. Okay? Up to 20.
If you eat, look, here's what it says, okay? If you eat crappy carbs, what do I mean by that? Bread, pasta, rice, cereals, sugar, sweets, pastries, juices, grocery store milk. Cause it's too sweet. Look at the chart. Okay? Your blood sugar goes crazy. And then even up to six hours later, six hours after you've eaten those foods, yes, your blood sugar has come down, but your insulin, your secretion of insulin is still secreting after six hours. That's incredible, guys. Now look at the difference. This is okay. They took eggs, meat, and cheese. Imagine that they must have been listening to me. They took eggs, meat and cheese. And you can see the graph here. No spike in blood sugar, no spike, zero. Your blood sugar doesn't go up and your insulin hardly shows up on the radar. And the same thing they did for coconut, avocado, butter and olive oil. Eggs, meat and cheese. And then the third graph is coconut, avocado, butter and olive oil.
Guys, one of the biggest things that I talk to you about on a daily basis, it's almost like I got a one track mind is insulin and insulin resistance. Metabolic syndrome. That is 93% of the population have some form of metabolic syndrome. What is that? High blood sugar, higher than normal blood sugar doesn't even have to be diabetes, it's just the blood sugar is up. Higher triglycerides, lower H D L, belly fat. So waist size, we talked about that yesterday. Elevated levels of uric acid. Those are part of metabolic syndrome. Elevated, well, I didn't even talk about this. I should have put it first. Metabolic syndrome is high blood pressure. If you have one or two of those symptoms that I just mentioned are biomarkers, you've got metabolic syndrome and 93% of the population are on the Titanic. And they don't even know it because they don't associate food with what I'm talking about. They don't associate it. "Oh, doc, I got genetics for diabetes and all that." Yeah, that's a factor. It is, but it's not everything. You can override your genetics. You make choices every day in what you eat.
So guys, when you see a headline, okay, try to unpack it a little, little bit. Keto causes heart attacks. Guys don't buy that. Now, if you're living on those crappy things that you would get in a grocery store, keto bars, keto this, keto that, eh, maybe because there really are really artificial foods. Go back to eating the way God wants you to eat. Eat from two kingdoms, the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom. You need both. But like I said, you look at a guy like Atkins who talked about insulin in the 1970s, and he was a cardiologist. He said, look, I can lower people's blood pressure. I can lower people's triglycerides. That's what he used to say with food. And again, he got a bad rap, but he wasn't a dummy. He was taking what they found out in the 1920s for something else and looking at seizures and grand mal and all these things. They were doing this stuff in the 1920s. They kept people off carbohydrates like zero, nada.
I brought to you an experiment that was done one year in a hospital in a New York Hospital in the 1928. I talked to you about that. Dr. Stephenson who spent a year with the Inuit in the Arctic. He came back and he said, I've never seen such healthy people as these people. All they eat is blubber. All they eat is fish. All they eat is seal, and they don't have any plants. They're in the Arctic. He said, what did they do? They just eat blubber. He said, I was expecting them to drop and have heart attacks right in front of me. He spent a year eating what they ate. He said he never felt better. Then he comes back and he said, you put me in a hospital and you test my blood sugar and whatever. Even back then in 1928, you can read all about it. They were amazed in the hospital. They just fed 'em fish, they fed 'em fat, and they fed him with the Inuit eat. So guys, this is well established.
Now, it never became mainstream, right? Dr. Kellogg, he had a lot to say about that. Really, cereal was coming out and they didn't like the fact that people were eating bacon and eggs. So guys, all I'm saying is when you look at these things, you've got to look at the whole picture and understand how your body operates. And when I show you that graph, one of the biggest problems in our society today is that metabolic syndrome. It's the elephant in the room. It is linked to cardiovascular disease, it's linked to cancer, it's linked to Alzheimer's. It's linked obviously to diabetes. The connection. And when you understand how food breaks down and how much insulin you need, eventually your cells, and this is what we've created a disaster in our society today where people, they're carboholics and they don't realize it. I talk to people all the time and they send me their blood work or whatever, and I look at it and I say, well, look, eh, from what I see, put your hand up. My name is Tony, and I'm a carboholic. I said, look, if your triglycerides are high and your H D L cholesterol is low, you're a carboholic. Yeah, you're a carboholic.
C-reactive protein. Inflammation. You know what insulin does over a period of time? If you develop insulin resistance, you are creating an inflammatory response in your body. It's silent. You don't even know you have it. But if you get your blood work done and you look at your C R P, your C-reactive protein is up, that's dangerous. Why is it dangerous? Because inflammation left unchecked is going to damage your blood vessels. It's going to get at your endothelial layer of your blood vessels. It's going to start damaging your blood vessels. It's going to develop plaque. It's not cholesterol that develops plaque. It's an inflammation response in your body when your insulin goes up. So guys, the food choices that you make are really, really important. So I wanted to bring that out today because people were asking me yesterday on Facebook, what's Dr. Martin think of that study? Not much. Not much. But like I said, I put a little asterisk. I don't like packaged keto foods. I don't like that. And a lot of people say, doc, I'm eating keto when they're really not. They got too many carbs in their diet to be a true ketotic diet.
So understand what that is. Ketosis you can actually measure it is when your body is burning fat as a fuel and not carbohydrates. And the only way to do that is to lower your intake of carbohydrates. It's really simple. Now, again, you don't hear me necessarily talking about keto so much. I don't like the word, it's been hijacked. I'm a nutrition guy. Give me the real foods, and especially in the animal kingdom, okay? And guys, I've proven it to tens of thousands of patients, tens of thousands. You lower your carbs, you get rid of those crappy seed oils, the middle aisles of your grocery stores, and you watch what happens to your body, you'll make it. Your body will regenerate and it won't take long. You'll empty your liver, you'll give your brain fuel that it loves, it adores. You give your heart real fuel with coQ10 and other factors when you eat, especially from the animal kingdom. So remember that when you look at these studies, and if you're not sure, ask me because I don't mind pontificating on them. Okay? Guys, did I tell you lately I love you? Nope, I haven't. I know I do it a lot, but I mean, you guys are the great. Best audience in the universe. And I mean it. We love ya. Talk to you soon.
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