What is a Keto Diet?

What is a Keto Diet?

In the world of weight-loss diets, high-protein and low-carb have ruled for a decade. South Beach, Paleo, and Atkins diets are often considered “ketogenic” or “keto” diets.

True keto diets differ from the most popular high-protein diets because a keto diet is based on fat instead of protein. Fat supplies up to 90% of the calories in a “true” keto diet.

How Does It Work?

A keto diet is designed to force your body into burning a fuel that the liver produces from stored fat instead of using the normal sugars it derives from carbs.

This fuel from your liver is called “ketone bodies.”

To force your body to use this fuel, you must eat fewer than 50 grams of carbs per DAY. (One slice of bread, for example, contains 15 grams of carbs). After a few days, your body may reach a state of “ketosis,” where it is creating and burning ketone bodies. However, too much protein can also interfere with the process (usually limited to 75 grams per day).

Keto Risks

Recent research suggests that specific genetic markers can make a keto diet unsafe. (Read THE KETO DIET CAN BE DANGEROUS IF YOU HAVE THIS GENE)

A typical person on a keto diet will eat 170 grams of fat, 50 grams of carbs, and 75 grams of protein. And yes, that is a LOT of fat! Your fruits are restricted to a few berries, and your vegetables are very limited.

This can lead to heart disease risks and nutritional deficiencies. Other potential problems are stress on your liver and kidneys, constipation, and brain fog from the low-carb diet.

The Upside to Keto Foods

I send many of my patients to a local keto bakery. This is not because I want them to go on a keto diet, but because I want them to stop eating sugar.

Keto cookies, cakes, and sweet rolls have almost NO sugar OR carbs! It’s like a miracle! Not everyone likes them, but most people can find some great substitutes to be able to eat a cookie when they want to without messing up their immune system.  (See “Sugar and Your Immune System)

The Problem with Keto (And Other Weight-Loss Diets)

Everyone’s body is different. A diet that works for someone else may fail for you, or even damage your health.

Many patients who come to me for weight loss don’t need a diet. Their weight is coming from hormones, digestive problems, or allergies.

My Advice:

Stop trying to lose weight or improve your health based on trial and error. Stop reading about some “great, new thing” on the internet and thinking, “Hey, I should try this out and see if it works!”

Honestly, what are the chances that any given product or diet would work on your particular body? Also, what does “work” mean? If you lose 10 pounds and then gain it back but now will have much more difficulty losing weight in the future, was this a “success?”

Printout from Heart Rate Variability Testing, shows nervous system function

Testing, An (Apparently) New Idea

I can’t think of any single food, supplement, or treatment that would be appropriate for every patient I’ve had in the past year except for maybe clean water.  Every person is unique in many ways and needs different solutions.

You might ask, “But, how can you tell specifically what I should do?”

In health care today, the concept of TESTING is almost foreign. Most treatments, supplements, and drugs are recommended on a “try it and see if it works” basis.

But if you could accurately test someone to determine what foods, supplements, diets, and treatments would be effective and safe for them—why would anyone make any decisions without testing first?

My Universal Answer

I always have the same answer when asked about diets, supplements, or treatments:

“Why don’t you come in and let me test you to find out?”

After all, the only other option would be to GUESS.

So:

Why don’t you come in and let me test you?

The Gene That Makes the Ketogenic Diet Dangerous

Ronald Grisanti D.C., D.A.B.C.O., DACBN, MS, CFMP

With all the craze about the ketogenic diet it would behoove one to know if they are a candidate for this type of diet.

First for those not familiar with the ketogenic diet here is a short summary:

The ketogenic diet is a high-fat, adequate-protein, low-carbohydrate diet that in medicine is used mainly to treat hard-to-control epilepsy in children. Here are 8 additional benefits:

1. Triglycerides Tend to Drop Drastically
2. Increased Levels of ‘Good’ HDL Cholesterol
3. Reduced Blood Sugar and Insulin Levels
4. May Lower Blood Pressure
5. Effective Against Metabolic Syndrome
6. A Greater Proportion of Fat Loss Comes From Your Abdominal Cavity
7. Improved ‘Bad’ LDL Cholesterol Levels
8. Therapeutic for Several Brain Disorders (Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease)

Now with all of these benefits the scientific literature has investigated if indeed this type of diet is beneficial for all people.

Well it may ultimately come down to your genes. Most specifically, your APOE genotype.

The three different types of APOE genes are as follows:

APOE2 – Best suited to a High Fat / Low Carb Diet (saturated fats are good)
APOE3 – Suitable For Both
APOE4 – Best Suited For A High Monounsaturated Fat / Low Carb Diet (Avoid Saturated Fats)

Research studies have shown that APOE4 carriers are most effected by high cholesterol, and benefit more from a low saturated fat diet, instead using monounsaturated fats,  low carb diet, whereas APOE 2 carriers suit a high fat low carb diet, regardless of the saturated fats.

So what should you do?

Ask your doctor to order the APOE genotype blood test and see if you are in fact a carrier of the APOE4 gene.

If you are a carrier of the APOE4 gene, I recommend decreasing your consumption of saturated fats and focus more on monounsaturated fats.

Compliments from Functional Medicine University

The Physics of Pain

There is a physics of the nervous system that explains long-term or chronic pain.

If you are suffering from this kind of pain, usually you just want it to stop. You aren’t likely to care overly much about physics.

However, you should know that understanding the physics can lead to “just getting it to stop.”

Standing Waves

Remember from physics how a wave looks? It’s a big “S” on its side. As time progresses, the energy goes up, then comes down, then goes up again.

If the wave hits something that reflects it back, you get an echo. But if the return wave exactly matches the original wave as it returns, you get something wonderful and weird called a “standing wave.”

It’s as if the wave isn’t moving. The high energy point stays in the same place, as does the low energy point.

We’ve all experienced this at a stoplight. The guy pulls up next to you with the subwoofers so massive that his suspension is bottoming out. Suddenly, your car is shaking. Your body is shaking. Your teeth are shaking.

You’re experiencing a standing wave.

Your Nervous System and Energy

“Standing Waves” in the nervous system

Your nervous system is a conductor of energy. This energy, which contains coded information your body needs to operate, moves back and forth across the nerves all over your body, all the time.

An impact or injury anywhere in your body can cause a system overload. If this overload creates a barrier to nervous system energy, it can change the length of the path that energy will travel before it’s “answered back” in the system. This can cause a nervous system standing wave.

Impact and injuries can set up a standing wave of energy in your nervous system.

Like the subwoofers in the next car, this energy overload can get very uncomfortable and can be a cause of pain. Because the overload can prevent normal nerve communication, you can have slow healing and long-term pain.

Wrong Solutions

With its concentration on pharmaceuticals, medicine believes that the answer to pain is using drugs to block nerve conduction. Drugs temporarily stop the pain, but the stress on the nervous system may worsen the standing wave problem. In most cases, if you stop the medication, you continue the pain.

Solving the Problem

Once you have a basic understanding of the physics involved, you can see that the solution would be to bleed off the excess energy from the standing wave so healing can occur.

Success with this involves an entirely different point of view from traditional medicine.

Medicine’s viewpoint is that “the body is doing something wrong (hurting), so we need to stop it from doing that wrong thing (medicate it).”

A better view would be, “the body is intelligent and can heal itself with a bit of assistance, as long as the assistance is what the body wants, not what some “expert” thinks it wants.”

The Army’s Solution

Dr. Aaron Cook performs an acupuncture procedure on Jackenson Pierre Propeta on hospital ship USNS Comfort. (DoD photo by Spc. Nashaunda Tilghman)

Few organizations are faced with as much of a pain problem as the US Army. After tremendous difficulties with addiction, accidents caused by soldiers impaired with painkillers, and death from overdoses, the Army was willing to try anything as long as it worked.

What they settled on was acupuncture.

Acupuncture is a process of communicating with the body and helping it to re-route and balance nervous system energy.

With acupuncture, there are no drugs, no addiction, and no side effects. And in many cases, acupuncture provided more significant pain relief than drugs.

Acupuncture Patching

Homeopathic Acupuncture Patch

At my clinic, we use homeopathic patches placed on acupuncture points to balance nervous system energy and reduce pain.

The patches absorb the body’s infrared radiation and convert it to a specific light wavelength, stimulating the acupuncture point where the patch is applied. The patches are extremely effective at bleeding off excess nervous system energy. Rebalancing the nervous system this way breaks up the standing waves causing pain.

“Patching” is one example of how we assist the body’s intelligence to heal based on testing rather than on guessing.

Patient Success with Homeopathic Patches

I had a crazy neck pain for about a week that wouldn’t go away with heat, massage, soaking or my infrared blanket. One day with Dr. Billiot’s little patches on two key points of my body and the pain disappeared. –J.S.

Intermittent Fasting?

Intermittent fasting is an eating pattern that cycles between periods of fasting and eating. For example, you might eat only between 8 AM and 6 PM, or you might fast for two full nonconsecutive days a week. There are a lot of variations.

The benefits: The idea is to improve your health by mimicking ancient eating schedules instead of always having food available. Reportedly, you can increase your mental clarity, burn fat and lose weight, feel better overall and improve your health to avoid diseases.

Ahh! You picked up on that “reportedly” I dropped in the last paragraph. But this doesn’t mean that I disagree with intermittent fasting in general.

I believe that some people may get substantial benefits from intermittent fasting. I’ve read the research and rationales behind it, and much of it does make sense.

Where I can’t entirely agree is that any diet, food, supplement, or treatment could work for “everyone.” As an example, in my practice, I see mainly severe chronic cases. These people are physically very stressed. They are very toxic and usually have some immune suppression. Intermittent fasting would be about the worst thing that many of these people could do to themselves.

“Testing,” a Weird New Idea?

I can’t think of any single food, supplement, or treatment that would be appropriate for every patient I’ve had in the past year. Well, except for maybe clean water.  Every person is unique in many ways and needs different solutions.

When I make this statement to people, they often ask, “But, how would you be able to tell who would benefit and who would not?” This confusion shows how foreign the concept of TESTING is to most people. If you could accurately test someone to determine what foods, supplements, diets, and treatments would be effective and safe for them—why would anyone make any decisions without testing first?

Intermittent Fasting Test: Could You Benefit?

One method of testing is to observe clues shown by the body. This method is crude, and there are much better ways to test, but try it out!

• Do you get shaky or irritable if hungry?
• Do you get out of breath climbing stairs?
• Are you fatigued in the afternoons?
• Do you have trouble getting or staying asleep?
• Do you have stiff or painful joints?
• Do you have fluid retention?
• Do your ears ring?

If you have several of these symptoms, intermittent fasting might not be a good thing for you to do. More accurate testing could determine what diet would be ineffective for you and precisely what WOULD work to improve your health.

Medicine’s Failure to Test

When medical doctors treat patients with chronic illness, they test to diagnose but don’t test to determine causes. Not knowing the cause, the doctor must follow a fixed treatment protocol for that diagnosis and often only treat symptoms. The result is often a lessening of the symptoms but no solution to the actual problem. The undiscovered cause of their conditions or diseases may continue to deteriorate their health, and the patient may suffer from chronic health conditions for the rest of their lives.

“One Accurate Measurement is Worth a Thousand Expert Opinions”

—Admiral Grace Hopper

The practice of medicine relies on the doctor’s opinion as the primary method of deciding what is wrong with the patient and what treatment would be effective. This is so true that it’s normal to seek a second opinion to see if you can get more than one doctor to agree on your treatment.

My long experience is that many—maybe most—people are so used to this medical guessing that they’ll shrug and say, “So what’s the problem with opinions?” The problem is that an opinion is really a guess.

Doctors have been practicing this way for so long that we think it’s normal. But what other profession could get away with this approach? Would you need a “second opinion” on the engineering of a bridge or skyscraper or the design of your car? These and almost all other professions rely on accurate measurements and proven methods based on scientific and engineering principles that consistently get results.

Engineers do not guess. Neither do carpenters, chefs, pilots, accountants, or carpet installers.

Professionals are expected to “know their stuff” and get a predictable, effective result. Except for doctors! (Well, and, maybe philosophers, sports bookies, and politicians.)

The Takeaway:

Everyone’s body is different.

Your genetics, damage from illnesses and injuries, the diet you were raised on, your preferences, your environment, available food, your drug history, stress history, personality, and many more variables are all different from other individuals.

So, there is no “universal” diet, food, lifestyle, supplement, drug, or treatment that would get good results for everyone. Far, far from it!

The ability to test any of the above items before recommending them to an individual is not only of critical importance, it is obvious.

Because: the only other option would be to GUESS.

Watch this video to see one example of advanced testing.

We Tell Adolescent Girls What’s Going to Happen

So, why don’t we tell 45-year-old women what’s going to happen?

Why is it still taboo to talk about?

Remember puberty? Your reliable young body suddenly got a mind of its own. Crazy things started happening, both physically and mentally. Can you recall the helpless, out-of-control feelings that you had at that time?

Your parents probably gave you a “heads-up” in advance, so you knew (kind of) what to expect. Your friends sooner or later, were going through the same experience. It was scary and awkward, but there was the promise of becoming an adult to look forward to, and you coped with the changes.

Perimenopause is a different experience.

First, no one has likely given you that needed heads-up. Honestly, it would be difficult to do because everyone experiences perimenopause at different ages and in different ways.

Your cycle may suddenly become irregular, your sleep terrible, and your moods frightening. Then everything can go back to normal. Did that really happen?

There are the common symptoms of perimenopause… and then there are YOUR perimenopause symptoms. Everyone experiences this life process somewhat differently.

Health Care System Failure

Most of us look to our doctors for answers to personal health questions. The problem is, you may not see your gynecologist but every three to five years for a Pap screening, during which time you may move well into perimenopause. The other problem is that many perimenopausal symptoms are nonspecific, and your doctor won’t try to treat them anyway.

If you tell your doctor, “My energy is completely unpredictable. I wake up exhausted but then feel OK later in the day. Sometimes. Other days I’m fine. I yelled at my kids for no reason, then broke down in tears.” This is unlikely to elicit a prescription, and if it did, you might not want to take it.

Conventional medicine is usually ineffective at helping you with perimenopause. Leaving you… where?

The Cause

In your late 30’s, your ovaries will begin to rid themselves of their eggs by releasing more and more eggs each month. As you progress into your 40’s, there are fewer follicles available for ovulation.

Perimenopause begins when you have some cycles with no ovulation.

Estrogen and progesterone are your two main sex hormones, and these balance each other. Progesterone is released with ovulation, so fewer ovulations reduces progesterone and causes “estrogen-dominance” in your body. This is the cause of hot flashes, mood swings, vaginal dryness, irregular cycles, poor concentration, and many more perimenopausal symptoms.

As perimenopause continues, there is a gradual decrease in both estrogen and progesterone. The problem is that none of this is predictable or linear. Your hormones rise and fall erratically, creating physical and emotional havoc.

The Way Out

Treating individual perimenopause symptoms is a game of whack-a-mole: you never win.

What is required is a holistic approach to understanding the physiology of the hormone changes taking place, digestion and food reactions, and related organ and gland stress (liver, thyroid, adrenals, etc.).

Correct lab testing is critical, but even more important is for your doctor to know you and follow along with the changes in your body. Seeing your doctor at least monthly, often more frequently, allows her to understand the changes your body is making and the various components of those changes.

An effective doctor functions as a “perimenopause coach.” With this help, you can feel happy, productive, and energetic even as your body continues to change unpredictably.

I hope this helps!

Dr. Melodie Billiot

Energy is Life; Fatigue is No Life

If you have a fatigue problem, you know it.

The Misery Package

Often physical fatigue combines with mental sluggishness. Brain fog, poor concentration, and memory problems at the same time you have no energy can make up a misery package.

Physical and mental fatigue combined can be a knockout blow to your life.

You get two choices:

1. Push through the fatigue to live your life as best you can. Although this is admirable, the stress of pushing yourself can lead to additional health problems.
2. Reduce your activity level to what you feel you can do. Pacing yourself sounds like a sensible solution, except that in most cases, your energy will continue to drop, and you’ll do less and less. Living with reduced output and accomplishment can lead to depression, apathy, and a poor quality of life.

Causes of Fatigue

Fatigue has physical causes, but only a few of these are medically treatable.

Fatigue can come from many different sources:

• Thyroid: This is a hormone gland that controls your metabolism, your heart (your primary source of energy), and your brain. So, a thyroid malfunction can slow your metabolism, cause fatigue from heart stress, and create severe brain fog. Often this won’t show on a blood test.
• Adrenals: These glands create a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol controls your blood sugar and blood pressure, digestion, and whether you feel hungry. It manages your sleep, your ability to tolerate physical activity, and your ability to cope with stress. Are you sluggish in the morning? Do you crash in the afternoons? Do you have high energy at midnight? Cortisol can be the culprit in all of these.
• Sleep problems can cause fatigue and brain fog. If you try to solve your sleep problem with drugs, you’ll still get no actual sleep. The drugs will knock you out into what looks like sleep, while your sleep deficiency continues, and drug dependency increases.
• Heart stress can cause debilitating fatigue. In some cases, you will be diagnosed and treated with drugs, surgeries, or pacemakers. But the fatigue, though improved, can persist. In other cases, your heart stress may not show up on labs or tests—but your fatigue will continue.
• Medications often have fatigue as a side effect. Culprits are blood pressure meds, anti-depressant and anti-anxiety meds, steroids, and antihistamines. Solution: get healthy enough to get off your meds!
• Mental problems can suck the life out of you, creating lethargy and fatigue. Depression, anxiety, eating disorders, drug or alcohol abuse, and grief all can create fatigue.
• Deficiencies of all kinds can create fatigue. Vitamin B12, vitamin D, folic acid, and iron deficiencies can all cause fatigue.
• Infectious diseases can cause short-term fatigue, as anyone who’s had the flu can attest. However, some infections (such as Covid) can be long-term or even lifetime. CMV (cytomegalovirus), Lyme disease, EBV (Epstein-Barr virus) can cause long-term—even decades—of fatigue.
• Chronic diseases often have fatigue as one of many symptoms. Diabetes, kidney disease, liver disease, and anemia can all cause fatigue and brain fog.

The Fatigue Siren Song

The number of people with fatigue problems is undoubtedly staggering. Once you have fatigue, you often can’t recover from it because the fatigue can entrap you into perpetuating itself.

Fatigue often prevents you from fixing your fatigue problem.

It takes action and energy to resolve your fatigue problem, but you may be too tired to do anything about it. If you reduce your activity level to match your available energy, your activity will continually reduce as your fatigue increases until there is little left of your life.

In Greek mythology, the Sirens (monsters who looked like beautiful women) sang to the sailors and lured them onto the rocks to their death. In real life, fatigue can lure you into a similar fate.

There is an Answer to Fatigue

There are three things you must know to be successful at ending your lack of energy and getting your life back the way you want it to be:

1. DECIDE: You have to overcome the “Fatigue Siren Song” and decide to do what you must to end your fatigue. If you decide that you will handle the fatigue, and you aren’t slowing down until you do, then your chances of success get very high.
2. REALIZE: Conventional health care can rarely help you with chronic fatigue. Medical doctors aren’t taught the knowledge and techniques to handle most causes of fatigue effectively. You’re going to have to find a holistic doctor.
3. UNDERSTAND: Just because there’s no medical treatment available for most causes of fatigue, this doesn’t mean that there’s no hope. Your body can heal almost all of the causes of fatigue listed above.

Your body has a fantastic ability to heal itself. Just because there is no effective cure for your condition doesn’t mean that your body couldn’t—with some assistance—heal the problem.

Find Out More

You should find out if you could recover from your fatigue (or other “unsolvable” health condition). What would your life look like if this happened?

Find the underlying causes behind your fatigue. THIS IS A FREE ANALYSIS.

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Introduction

The most effective way to prevent Covid is to protect yourself from becoming infected (mask, avoiding crowds, hand washing, etc.). Close to this would be getting vaccinated.

But these actions aren’t 100% effective. You can still be vulnerable.

A great safety net to these actions is to boost your immune system. This has the added benefit of protecting you from many other illnesses and just making you healthier overall.

Several lifestyle practices and products can help you with this, but they aren’t all created equal by any means.

Here’s a rundown of the most effective, in order of importance:

1. Avoid raising your blood sugar level by not eating refined sugar or drinking sweet drinks.
2. Keep your zinc levels high by using effective, high-quality zinc supplements daily (See article below to understand just how important this can be).
3. Get your Vitamin D levels checked, and if needed, supplement them up to at least 30 mg/mL. Sun exposure can also help raise D. (Vitamin D deficiency can cause widespread pain, lower resistance to infection, and increase mortality from all causes.)
4. Take Vitamin C daily.
5. Eat a healthy diet of fresh foods, and avoid processed and junk foods. Eat only small amounts of processed carbs (bread, white rice, pasta).
6. Sleep! Most people need seven to eight hours a night.
7. Get out and move around! Exercise, outside space, and fresh air are important.
8. Maintain yourself in a good mental space and spend your time with happy people. Avoid toxic humans like… the plague. (If you have trouble finding happy people, you can always become a patient and hang out with us!)

Read the article below to understand the science behind zinc levels and how this can prevent severe illness if you get sick.

Stay Healthy!

Dr. Melodie Billiot

PS: Two Basic Delta Variant Facts You Should Know:

1. The “R0” (R-Aught) of a communicable disease measures how infectious it is. An “R2” means that one infected person is likely to infect two others around them. The higher the R0 number, the more infectious the disease. Original Covid was an R2, Delta variant is estimated to be about an R6.5. (Chickenpox is an R10, measles is an R12-18 by comparison).
2. Delta incubation period is 4 days compared to original Covid’s 6 days. This makes people contagious sooner, and they may possibly infect others before symptoms begin. This short incubation makes it difficult to make contact tracing work.

Find Out How to Get Help with your Health:

Would you please take five minutes to fill out a health assessment survey and send it to me? I’ll call you for a phone consult and discuss what could be done about your health. It’s complimentary, no strings attached. Either I can help you or point you in the right direction to get help. Don’t give up! You can recover your health if you persist.

An Important Nutrient to Boost Your Immune System

Ronald Grisanti D.C., D.A.B.C.O., DACBN, MS, CFMP

As we face the crisis of Covid we all need to consider ways to boost and strengthen our immune systems.

One important nutrient to add to our immune-fighting arsenal is zinc.

According to a study done in Spain at the European coronavirus conference, researchers found that hospitalized COVID-19 patients with low blood levels of zinc tended to fare worse than those with healthier levels.

In the study, the leading researcher, Guerri-Fernandez, and his team tracked 249 patients admitted to the hospital with COVID-19 in March and April. Patients averaged 63 years of age, and 21 (8%) died from their illness.

All of the patients had their blood zinc levels tested upon arrival — the average level was 61 micrograms per deciliter of blood (mcg/dL).

However, the researchers reported that among those who died of COVID-19, blood levels of zinc were much lower, averaging just 43 mcg/dL. In contrast, blood levels among those who survived the illness averaged 63 mcg/dL.

The scientific community considers it common knowledge that mild to moderate zinc deficiency can impair macrophage functions (the PacMan of the immune system) and natural killer cell (NK cell) activity.

In the functional medicine world, the RBC intracellular test is the best test to determine a true zinc deficiency.

I also recommend looking at your most recent lab test and seeing the level of your alkaline phosphatase. Levels of alkaline phosphatase below 70 IU/L should raise an eyebrow for a possible zinc deficiency.

The most absorbable form of zinc is zinc monomethionine.

The two best foods with the highest amount of zinc include pumpkin seeds and oysters.