Anthony Gustin - Keto Answers: Simplifying Everything You Need to Know about the Worlds Most Confusing Diet

KETO ANSWERS

Simplifying Everything
You Need to Know about the
World's Most Confusing Diet

Dr. Anthony Gustin, DC, MS
and Chris Irvin, MS

Copyright 2019 anthony gustin and chris irvin

All rights reserved.

keto answers

Simplifying Everything You Need to Know about the World's Most Confusing Diet

ISBN 978-1-5445-0464-3 Hardcover

ISBN 978-1-5445-0462-9 Paperback

ISBN 978-1-5445-0463-6 Ebook

Introduction

Part 1: Keto 101

Part 2: Ketosis in Action

Part 3: Ketosis and You

appendices

Introduction

Y ou cant avoid health recommendations. Theyre on tv , littered on your social media feed, and all over your Google searches. Even worse, all of the recommendations conflict! One day eating bacon is the cure to heart disease, the next day fat will give you a heart attack. Yesterday exercise was the key to health, and tomorrow a glass of wine will be just as good as that exercise. What is going on?

One of the reasons we are so confused about how to improve our health is the outdated and misinformed recommendations made by governing bodies, especially nutrition recommendations. This confusion is nothing new, and its rooted in oldand incorrectdietary advice.

If we take a brief look at history, we see a rising and falling of dietary trends, some of which have made a much greater impact than others. Historically, research has driven nutritional recommendations. In fact, one of the most important characters in the tale of why we are where we are with our health and nutrition recommendations is Ancel Keys, a very successful scientist who led the charge on demonizing fat as a cause for heart disease. Despite the fact that the data Ancel used to support his hypothesis was bogus and has since been debunked, which we will get into more in the coming chapters, his findings were used to spark the movement of low-fat diets meant to improve overall health and reduce our risk for disease. Where did those recommendations get us? If you consider the continued rise in obesity, heart disease, and type diabetes, surely it hasnt helped!

Why is this such a big deal? If you go to the American Heart Associations website right now, youll still see low dietary fat recommendations, especially low saturated fat, and not much mention of animal meat. Go ahead, take a look. Thats why this is a big deal: decades later this misinformation is still being used to shape dietary recommendations.

Today we still see a lot of bad research or misinterpretations of research. However, now social media allows us to easily share that bad or misinterpreted research and provide our own opinions on it, even if we are not qualified to do so. Even worse, these opinions on misinterpreted research are commented on and shared, leading to a nasty cycle of spreading bad nutrition recommendations. On top of this, we also see a lot of click-bait articles on nutrition that are used to market at us, not to educate us. And dont even get us started on the fitness industry!

The explosive growth of the fitness industry has had a pretty substantial impact on nutrition as a whole. One of the problems with the fitness industry is that it has made a bad habit of focusing more on the way we look and less on actually improving our health. Dont believe us? Check out how much iifym has blown up over the last few years. If It Fits Your Macros, or iifym , is a type of eating focused only on hitting your recommended macronutrients to achieve body composition goals. This nutrition strategy is plastered all over social media and is why we see so many fitness influencers eating pizza and Pop-Tarts. There is a lot more to health than just aesthetics; unfortunately, the fitness industry has failed to emphasize that.

So, where are we now? Confused. We dont know which foods are good, which ones are bad, or if we can even trust the quality of foods we are supposed to put in our body. We go from fad diet to fad diet for thirty days, we see some progress, and we go right back to our old habits. The perpetual cycle called yo-yo dieting that can lead to poor health and not to mention poor relationships with food.

This is why we see so many people who are sick, unhappy, and unhealthy. Common nutrition recommendations are a mess, reliable information is hard to come by, and oh, yeah, a lot of doctors dont know squat about nutrition.

Role of Nutrition in Health and Disease Prevention

Another reason why our diets are so out of whack is because a lot of us fail to realize that what we put in our body actually impacts our health and the way we feel! If you drank twelve beers and felt like heck the next day, you would blame it on the beer, right? Why dont we look at food the same way? Instead, we tend to point our fingers toward things like diseases or various conditions that we think require medicine when reallythis is where nutrition is supposed to come in. You may have heard the famous quote from Hippocrates:

Let food be thy medicine and let medicine be thy food.

Hippocrates was right; what you put in your body matters! This is why functional medicine exists. In case you are not familiar with functional medicine, here is a Wikipedia definition.

Functional medicine is a form of alternative medicine, which proponents say focuses on interactions between the environment and the gastrointestinal, endocrine, and immune systems, but opponents have described it as pseudoscientific silliness and quackery.

Opponents say its fake. We thought it was fake, too, until we started reading more research on nutrition. Again, what you put in your body matters. Its fuel. Its what determines how you look, feel, function, and live. If you have chronic conditions, the food you eat is either fueling or fighting those conditions. Taking control of the foods you eat allows you to take control of your health.

In fact, taking control of the foods you eat can impact your life in far more ways than you may realize. If you have no energy, changing the way you eat can help you not spend $ a week on sugary Starbucks coffee. If you are overweight, changing the way you eat can make your body burn more fat (notice we said you still get to eat). If you have diabetes, changing the way you eat can reduce or even completely remove the need for medication. If you have cancer, changing the way you eat could starve cancer, improve outcomes from standard treatments, and maybe even prevent the nearly inevitable return of cancer after remission.

To date, we havent taken control of our health, and that is why we are in the obesity/diabetic/overweight/sick epidemic we are in. We rely on doctors to prescribe medication when we arent feeling well or have a disease. Most times these medications only address side effects; rarely do they address the root cause of a particular condition. Interestingly enough, as you will see throughout this book, your nutrition can actually impact the root cause of certain conditions. Doesnt that sound better than taking medication?

Why Keto Now

Taking control of your health isnt just about nutrition. There are actually four aspects to health that we think are most important: nutrition, movement, sleep quality, and stress management. We refer to these as the Four Pillars of Health. Each plays a vital role in overall health and wellness, as well as disease prevention and management.