People are changing the way they eat to help improve their overall health and lifestyle and many are turning their attention to the ketogenic diet that has caused quite a stir in the nutrition world.

It is impossible to ignore the mounting ketogenic diet success stories that have been shared by people from all walks of life. Celebrities, athletes, models, and regular folks have taken to social media to post their testimonials and personal experiences with the ketogenic diet, accompanied by before-and-after pictures of their bodies that seemingly highlight the diet’s effectiveness. Yet, there has been much misinformation and contradictory scientific views circulating in the air about the diet that has led some to dismiss it as a fad and raised speculations about its viability.

WHAT IS A KETOGENIC DIET?

A ketogenic diet is high in fat and very low in carbohydrates. In essence, it aims to condition your body to using a different type of fuel. Instead of relying on sugar (glucose) that comes from carbohydrates (e.g. grains), the keto diet relies on fat, including stored fat, producing ketones as a by-product. The diet is ketogenic because you generate ketones and the new metabolic state is called ketosis.

DEBUNKING 7 COMMON MYTHS OF THE KETOGENIC DIET

We recently invited Dr. David G. Harper, an Associate Professor of Kinesiology at the University of the Fraser Valley, health consultant, researcher, educator and co-author of BioDiet, to explain the health benefits of a ketogenic diet and address some of the common myths surrounding this much-debated diet.

D: Dr. David G. Harper

Myth 1: You will lose muscle mass on a ketogenic diet.

D: The short answer is no. You will not lose muscle mass. If you want to build muscle mass while on a ketogenic diet, you certainly can. It may not be the fastest way to rapidly bulk up but if you’re looking at it from a dietary perspective, it may be more challenging to put on a significant amount of muscle in a short period of time. Another thing to add is that people tend to lose muscle mass as they age, a condition called sarcopenia. I have not experienced any of that and I’ll be turning 60 in two months. Speaking from personal experience when I transitioned to a ketogenic diet 8 years ago, I first lost 27 pounds of body fat and then put on 10 or 15 pounds of muscle. So, in short, I’d say you get what you train for.

Myth 2: You should only stay on a ketogenic diet for short periods of time.

D: Most people adopt a ketogenic diet as a short-term solution for losing weight. The issue is if you’re going to use it to lose weight and then go off it, you’re going to gain that weight back. We do not recommend people cycling on and off ketogenic diets as most of the good research out there points to the fact that you should go on a ketogenic diet and stay on it. You also shouldn’t have ‘cheat days’, since one cheat day can knock you out of ketosis, which may take days to weeks to return to.

Myth 3: A ketogenic diet has the same effect on both men and women.

D: It depends on the particular individual. When people adopt a ketogenic diet, they reduce their carbohydrate intake and that triggers a process called gluconeogenesis – the production of glucose in the liver and kidneys when dietary intake of glucose is insufficient or absent. So, everybody starts to burn fat and produces ketones but the degree to which people do varies amongst individuals. There are many genes that affect the digestion, absorption and assimilation of foods, resulting in quite a bit of variation in populations. The efficacy of the keto diet also depends on their age. Most of the people I counsel are postmenopausal women, so their hormone conditions have changed and there’s a natural tendency for them to put on body fat. There might also be changes in their cholesterol levels that we have to take into consideration and so on. So, I would say it’s not so much a matter between men and women, it’s that all of us will respond differently to any diet.

Myth 4: You can’t drink any alcohol on a ketogenic diet.

D: You can consume alcohol but you should restrict alcohol consumption in the initial stage of converting to a ketogenic diet, especially during the metabolic conversion that is Step III in the BioDiet. There are two reasons. The first one is alcohol can impair our judgment and willpower to stay off on eating food that isn’t part of a ketogenic diet. The second reason is alcohol interferes with the metabolic conversion, but once you are keto-adapted (i.e. burning and producing ketones), you can drink in moderation. An average glass of dry white wine contains roughly around 2-4 g of carbohydrate and red wine, 4-6 g. Hard liquors like vodka do not usually have appreciable amounts of carbohydrate. Some keto practitioners think people shouldn’t drink alcohol at all, but I think that’s an unrealistic expectation for most people.

Myth 5: If you are very active or an athlete, you shouldn’t be on a ketogenic diet.

D: A lot of the high-performance athletes in the world like Lebron James, the late Kobe Bryant, Aaron Rodgers, Phil Mickelson, Lindsey Vonn, Chris Froome all improved their performance on ketogenic diets. It has a huge advantage for aerobic events because the maximum output for an athlete is based on how quickly you can get oxygen to your muscles which is what we call VO2 max. And, because ketones and fats burn much more efficiently with less need for oxygen, you can improve your performance significantly if you’re keto-adapted. Where a ketogenic diet might not be as useful is in anaerobic, burst performance sports like hockey or soccer, where one does need an ample supply of blood glucose to provide the immediate energy requirements in those types of sports.

Myth 6: You shouldn’t eat vegetables and fruits on a ketogenic diet because they can be high in carbohydrates.

D: This is partly true and partly not. Personally, I don’t eat a lot of fruits but I do eat some berries on a daily basis because berries are very high in beneficial phytochemicals that are difficult to get from other sources. Unfortunately most fruits available in stores are highly modified to be very sweet so they contain a lot of sugar and aren’t suitable for a ketogenic diet. In terms of vegetables, most anything that grows above the ground, other than beans (green beans being an exception) and grains are fine. Stay away from corn, rice and root vegetables like potatoes, carrots, and beets because that’s where a plant stores its starch, and starch is really just super-concentrated glucose.

Myth 7: You can eat a lot of fat, regardless of the source, on a ketogenic diet.

D: Pretty much. One of the big paradigm shifts in health research is that there is no compelling evidence that links saturated fats (animal fats, some plant fats, etc.) to cardiovascular diseases. That has never been proven. In fact, there are some beneficial saturated fats that are cardio-protective, so I’d say eat the animal fat like the fat on your steak, the chicken skin. There is no harm in doing that. What I’m not a big fan of are seed oils like canola or corn oils and so on. These are some of the most processed foods we eat and we do not eat any processed foods on a ketogenic diet. Nut oils like avocado oil, olive oil, coconut oil, and macadamia oil are very healthy. Cheese, especially high-fat cheese, is very healthy as well.

KETOGENIC DIET RESOURCES

For people who have been thinking of adopting a low-carb, high-fat diet but are cautious in their approach, we’d recommend talking with a health professional to see if the diet would be suitable for you and align with your lifestyle objectives as everyone’s situation and physiological needs and functions are different. Alternatively, you could consult Dr. David Harper’s latest book, BioDiet, a no-frills yet comprehensive essential starter guide on taking control of your health and well-being by adopting a well-formulated ketogenic diet. Dr. Harper also strongly recommends consulting with your family physician before embarking on any significant change in your diet.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

What we’ve gathered through this interview with Dr. David G. Harper is that a well-formulated, long-term ketogenic diet can indeed go a long way in the pursuit of a healthier lifestyle. As with anything else we do, time and commitment are the utmost importance in order to achieve visible and enduring results, and adhering to a ketogenic diet is no exception. Once again, we’d like to thank Dr. David G. Harper for taking the time to provide us with a better understanding of the ketogenic diet and enlighten us with valuable insights that have altered the way we think about the food we eat.

ABOUT DR. DAVID G. HARPER

As an educator, researcher and health consultant, Dr. David G. Harper, has studied the impact of diet on human health for many years. The culmination of that extensive work is the BioDiet, a well-formulated ketogenic plan that works with the body’s natural processes to improve health and reverse decades of damage caused by our collective carbohydrate addiction.Dr. Harper and Dale Drewery adopted the BioDiet in 2012 and the weight loss and health improvements they experienced led him to counsel hundreds of people on the Biodiet with similarly consistent and impressive results.

Dr. Harper is an associate professor of kinesiology at the University of the Fraser Valley and a visiting scientist at the BC Cancer Research Center, Terry Fox Laboratory. He holds a PhD from the University of British Columbia and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in comparative physiology at the University of Cambridge. He is on the scientific advisory board of the Canadian Clinicians for Therapeutic Nutrition and is a member of the Institute for Personalized Therapeutic Nutrition.