Ketogenic diet helps tame flu virus in mice
news.yale.edu
news.yale.edu
A while ago I experienced a traumatic event. Immediately I had sleep disruption and slowly I began to have textbook symptoms of psychosis. It was horrible and unpleasant. I went on keto and the symptoms went away. I stopped due to side effects and the symptoms came back. I went back on and the symptoms went away immediately. And on and off for a long time, with a perfect correlation between the two. The doctors who diagnosed me with psychosis don’t care that keto does this. I told them that I have figured out how to cure my symptoms and they just give me a blank look. They prescribed me an antipsychotic which I have never had to take although I have come close to needing it a few times. I tell them there are other people who have written about similar experiences and they don’t care. So I have to get the word out like this.
The psychosis is curbed within 24 hours of starting keto. Sleep disturbance persists for about five days. After five days it’s as though nothing had been wrong at all.
I get a really bad rash after a couple of days of keto. This is a well known side effect of keto although it is uncommon. I’ve tried various things, the only one that worked was applying drysol prior to keto, preventing the rash-prone areas from sweating. This gives a clue about the rash, which is important because no studies have been done and its cause has not been determined. If I didn’t get this rash I would happily stay on keto forever.
There’s never been a study about ketosis and psychosis. There’s one being done in Finland right now, although the sample size leaves much to be desired. I’m in contact with the primary researcher and the paper might be released as early as one *year from now.
Ketones being an alternative fuel for the brain, it can relieve neuronal starvation from cognitive hypoglycemia. Whether there's some other magical property of ketones at play, or it's simply that in some people glucose metabolism in the brain is broken, it's all speculation at this point.
Note that for epilepsy patients, the classic ketogenic diet isn't something that people can adhere to, being something that's normally done under medical supervision.
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Btw I tried the ketogenic diet for several months and I noticed cool effects like my face acne almost disappearing.
However the beneficial effects persisted after switching to a moderate carbs diet made of whole foods. The standard diet is a disaster for health, being very inflammatory and obesogenic, but you might want to also experiment with a whole foods diet, made primarily from fresh plants and animal products cooked at home.
You might discover the same benefits. And if you eat at maintenance, or with a caloric deficit, you'll naturally cycle in and out of ketosis daily anyway.
But if what you do is working for you and you feel great, then good for you, keep doing it.
My understanding is that the brain / neurons require glucose to operate, they don't directly metabolise ketones to a great degree. When in ketosis, blood sugar drops very low and the brain's glucose has to be sourced from gluconeogenesis: an inefficient and minimal conversion of ketones to glucose. This low blood sugar has metabolic effects on neurons (as well as many other types of cell).
The USP of a ketogenic diet is that it allows persistent sustainable low blood sugar, which is otherwise only seen in inherently unsustainable fasting.
The movie starring Jayne Seymour wasn't strictly a documentary, but a fictionalized story based on real events.
They didn't say this. They described their own experience. Read their message again. You are, in fact, criticising the post for something not written in it.
> People should make their medical decisions based on consultation with their doctors or other medical professionals
This is exactly what the user described as their experience.
If you, god forbid, ever have a life-destroying ailment and discover a shockingly effective treatment for it, please tell many people what happened for you just as the user above is doing.
this idea of espousing effective cures loses a lot of steam when the patient in question was cured by psychic healing, quartz crystals, or energy projection.
That's why there should exist a level of self-moderation with regards to cure cheerleading; did the psychic crystal surgery remove the cancer, or did your body make a natural recovery? Many would be inclined to believe that the crystal made the difference, and that's a dangerous public opinion.
And J was quite upfront about this being only their own experience. The very fist statement says "keto appeared to cure my psychosis", and it continues like that. There was no advocacy for anyone else to start doing the same.
People do that because they hope to god that folks with a psychosis (or to use your other example, cancer) aren't trying to cure themselves by changing to a keto diet, unsupervised, and without the aid of a professional.
Here's the problem : You're reinforcing the uselessness of professional medical care ("they ignored me and did nothing!") while reinforcing the positive idea of being able to 'cure' yourself with diet (a 'cure' that is only sometimes sustainable, and results in a rash, you say.), and spinning the act of rejecting prescribed drugs for your ailment as positive.
No part of you thinks that it is irresponsible to tell potential psychotics to cure themselves with diet and reject their drugs, since the professionals ignored your pleas?
It's irresponsible to offer up unproven 'cures', especially to a group of people, the psychotic, that may have an already tenuous grasp on reality as it is -- if there ever was a group of people that should have someone supervising their self-medical-experimentation, it's the psychotic.
I appreciate your enthusiasm for a treatment that helped you. I implore you to consider that such things are highly specific, and that medical professionals, often times at the expense of seeming aloof, are often 'looking at the forest, not the trees" with regards to your care. Many are unwilling to explore experimental treatments until the (long) list of exhaustive known procedures for your ailment has been checked through.
My first thought was about Ketosis being used to treat epilepsy, but Ketosis can DRASTICALLY change the quality of your sleep.
Maybe you just needed the extra sleep, or deeper sleep that you are getting while on Keto.
I've taken maybe 10 medications for depression. Ketosis was more effective for me than probably 8 of them.
I myself become very lethargic under a normal carbohydrate-containing diet. On low carb I have a lot of motivation and a lot of energy.
Except that's not what you've described.
You've found a way to treat the symptoms, but if you stop doing that thing the symptoms return. That's not curing it.
It's interesting nonetheless, and could assist researchers in developing a cure.
> Keto isn’t dangerous for non diabetics.
I don't really want to get into the trenches of arguing about Keto in general, but a cursory googling suggests that this is a controversial assertion.
Again, not trying to silence you, just urging restraint from an epistemological perspective regarding the giving and taking of medical advice by strangers on the internet.
Diabetes is the second highest profitable disease for pharma companies, and the only way to control it without their expensive and error prone drugs and treatments is to strictly manage your insulin levels through diet.
Anyone who says, on a scientific basis, that keto is dangerous might as well be lumped in with flat earthers, climate change deniers, and anti-vaxxers.
so Keto is controversial because it puts pharmaceutical companies under on diabetes drugs, even though basically any kind of weight-loss diet has a positive effect on diabetic patients?
Nah.
It's controversial because it's a recent fad, and because it's extreme compared to the unrestricted diet of most people. It's been around for years (keto diet) , but it's recently got the spotlight of the public, so for the past few years it's been the miracle diabetic cure -- much like atkin's or whatever other fad diets were around in the past.
>Anyone who says, on a scientific basis, that keto is dangerous might as well be lumped in with flat earthers, climate change deniers, and anti-vaxxers.
ridiculous assumption that the 'scientific basis' is a single conformal idea across the entire industry of researchers. Of course any kind of restrictive diet can be dangerous for some folks, the idea that any diet is absolutely safe is ridiculous on its' face.
Low carb diets have been suspected for years to be no-good for afib patients. The keto diets are now being suspected of the same issue, and there are papers that will soon be published to give us a better idea on the scope (if any) of the issue.
Did you, or anyone really, think that there were any danger-free diets, ever? It's a foolish assumption, given the breadth of diets that exist simply to keep people with unique physiologies living.
Prediction : there will never be a grand unifying diet that works for everyone. We're too diverse.
I wonder if the improvement effect recedes with passage of time or remains stable.
Also unfortunately the study failed to control the protein. Control group had a diet made of 24% protein, keto group ate 10% protein.
Protein restriction has been shown to have profound immune modulatory effects.
Protein restriction is a massive confounder in such studies. Caloric deficit is often another. These often go hand in hand.
Ketosis is the body's winter state. When no carbs are growing outside fat resources need to be used up and the brain needs to work well on a steady stream of ketones as it is more difficult to find food in winter. This immune system boost is also helpful during winter as there are less vitamine sources available. For some reason you also need less sleep.
When carbs are available in summer, the body tries to gather weight, and for this the carb addiction pattern is quite helpful. A high-carb diet is the summer state.
Anyway, this thought is probably difficult to study. We seem to be engineered to grab carbs when we see them though.
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111...
> metabolic rate may rise as much as 55% when fighting severe infections
Translation, when you are sick you should fast.
I'm no expert, but I could see a virus employing a similar mechanism.
https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice/status/119661435015448576...
I love it when there is a nugget of truth in old-wives-tales.
It's always funny to see how school medicine tracks the state of the art by 20 years into the past and then another 40 before it hits the actual doctors and their patients (for the latter part, ongoing re-education requirements might help as to avoid people like my grandma who still thinks after being 30 years out of practice that what she learned after the second world war in her studies is the state of the art of medicine).
For the first part, I have no answer. Something is utterly broken with the way school medicine "innovates".
I would love to be able to write this while drinking my extra large soda and next to it a piece of chocolate cake. Yeah, cancer here I come.
Interesting, any references?
AFAIK that's not true, no, sugar does not act as an immune suppressant, what acts as an immune suppressant is whatever inhibits autophagy and that's primarily protein, or calories in general. High levels of the IGF-1 hormone is also associated with higher risk of cancer and all cause mortality, it's just a weak association, but note IGF-1 seems to also be stimulated by a protein.
This isn't to say that we should restrict protein. In truth we need a lot of protein to remain healthy and these associations have confounders, in truth vilifying any single macro nutrient is just stupid and unsupported by existing evidence.
It's not the sugar in the soda or in the chocolate cake that's going to get you, but the overall caloric surplus ... since after a soda and a chocolate cake you'll still feel hungry. Everything breaks loose on a chronic caloric surplus. And interestingly any study that doesn't control the calories or the protein is flawed, as these are massive confounders.
> "Something is utterly broken with the way school medicine "innovates"."
The problem is that nutrition is a hard science, because obviously you can't dissect people or lock them in cages and feed them crap for the rest of their lives to see how they react :-)
That said the anti-establishment propaganda coming from the low carb camp is increasingly worrying. I've even seen prominent LCHF supporters being or affiliating with anti-vaxxers as well.