Adventures in Ketoland, or How I Learned to Love the Purple Stick

It seems like a lot of people are becomming interested in ketosis diets and being in ketosis. I have experimented with daily carb intake as low as <10g/day, and done a great deal of research on the subject. Other than Celiac I am otherwise a normal eater now and when I undertook it. My goal was not weight loss but to simply learn about and optimize my body.

The science does not support eating <50g/day of carbs [1] unless you have non-refractory epilepsy (you would know). Likewise, the evidence suggests that eating >150g/day leads to the problems described by the author [2] and those that many of us experience before exposure to some form of low carb diet (ketosis is a metabolic state, not a formala for a healthy diet).

So the conclusion of all of this reading and scientific journal rabbit holing is that humans should eat 50-150g/day of carbs, and that the further away you are from this optimal range, the worse. And that in lieu of all those carbs most people are eating, they should instead be eating more protein and fat from good sources.

The best curation of the scientific literature that I have found on this subject is the blog of "The Paleo Mom". While biased towards Paleo (for pretty compelling scientific reasons) her writing is very well cited and she has a PhD in Medical Biophysics and first-hand experience with autoimmune diseases (how I found her) [3].

The TL/DR of what I learned is: fast once a week for >16 and <24 hours, eat 20% of calories from carbs, 30% from protein and 50% from fat, avoid inflammatory foods like grains, dairy, nightshades, refined sugar, FODMAPs, alcohol and eat way more vegetables and a variety of meat and seafood along with olive or coconut oil as much as possible.

[1]: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13590840310001619... [2]: http://www.thepaleomom.com/2016/02/rebuttal-to-paleo-diet-co... [3]: http://www.thepaleomom.com