Okay, welcome to another episode of the health solutions podcast. I’m your host, Alex Tuggle of Regenerative Brain Institute.

Today, I just wanted to discuss,….you know, I get a lot of things bouncing around in my head.

When I hear them in my head, I try to remember them so I can deliver them to you so that you can also enjoy some of the advantages of having been around integrative health, scene for a while.

So, I guess everybody here has heard of, or  is maybe prescribing or know somebody who is following the keto diet. Yeah.

Spelled K E T O so short for Ketogenic meaning it helps you burn fat, you know ketones or the ketone bodies that are produced as a part of fat metabolism.

So the keto diet is now very popular in weight loss, fitness programs, and lots of diet programs are all promoting the keto diet.

So what is this keto diet and where did it come from? And, is it really good for us?

I  just wanted to sort of historically document  how this keto diet has basically transformed and been rebranded many times over in the past two decades and even last century.

You can see that the keto diet is not brand new.

In fact, this is probably one of the oldest diets. If not the oldest diet humans have ever followed, and it’s just, it’s been rebranded in the last couple of years to help people understand it’s biochemical actions on our  metabolism, helping you get into Ketosis.

Ketosis helps you to burn more fat and there’s other benefits to this.

So, so let’s just, go back one step, you know before the Keto diet was popular, the paleo diet.

It was very popular and this is kind of talking about this ancestral diet that’s been around since the caveman. That’s the paleolithic diet.

It is basically animal proteins, fats, and vegetables, and very few grains at all. Very similar to the keto diet.

And I guess the keto diet, the difference is that it’s promoting even higher quantities of extra fat consumption.

If you remove the carbohydrates from your diet, then you run out of fuel. 

And so you want to give your cells some kind of fuel, and Fat is a fuel that your cells can oxidize and turn into cellular energy.

Whereas protein and vegetables have to go through a biochemical process to be converted into sugar.

So proteins still get converted into sugar.

Amino acids like Glutamine found in animal proteins can actually be converted from the glutamine to glucose that your cells can then utilize.

Fat is a completely different biochemical pathway. It will not turn into sugar. It will be oxidized as a fatty acid like butyrate or acetate.

The paleo diet kind of didn’t really promote as much fat in the diet as the Keto diet, where 55% of your calories come from fat or more.

That allows your body to the remain in the fat burning metabolism.

So anyways, before the paleo diet, which is also considered like the mother of the autoimmune diet, paleo auto immune diet.

Which is basically removing any foods that are triggering your immune system to cause an autoimmune condition to occur, like hashimotos or multiple sclerosis or, you know, auto-immune psoriasis or even other neurological conditions like ataxia, like gluten induced ataxia.

That immune protocol requires you to remove sugar.

So the common theme here is that you cut back on the sugar.

Cut Back On The Sugar To Save Your Health

What you need is a 4-Step System I call the ‘Leaky Gut-Brain Axis Formula’ which gives your gut and brain the exact diet, meal plans, and step-by-step system to eradicate bacterial overgrowth, candida, leaky gut syndrome and GI inflammation.

That the sugar is a major trigger for autoimmune conditions. And then the sugar is also the main thing that’s causing you to gain weight.

If you follow the keto diet or the paleo diet then you are pretty much removing sugar out of your diet.

And before the paleo diet and before the auto immune diet, we had the GAPS diet. So before Paleo diet was branded it was called the GAPS diet.

The GAPS Diet Really promoted eating Bone Broth which is, you know, basically a soup made out of the bones and the cartilage of beef or chicken or whatever animal carcass you have.

Like if you roast a chicken, you eat the meat, then you put all the skeleton and all the cartilage into a pot and you cook it for eight hours, plus.

 And you make a mineral and amino acid rich broth with the nutrients extracted from the bones and the cartilage and even the skin and the fat.

So the Bone broth is a fat, rich, protein rich because of all the cartilage, amino acids and gelatin, and collagen proteins are found in animal proteins only.

So bone broth was the best source to extract Collagen from the animals from the bones and the cartilage of the animals.

You can eat them and then roast them, you can flavor them, but basically it is like  chicken soup or beef stock.

 You can add vegetables, celery, carrots and onions and thyme and oregano, and you can make it just like a chicken soup.

Basically chicken soup is bone broth, and Bone broth is chicken soup, its just the Broth part of the soup.

And Bone broth has been cooked for hundreds and centuries and thousands of years, so nothing new there.

Bone broth is an Ancient food, an Indigenous food

You know, old Italian grandmothers made these day-old stews.

And the French had their Coq Au Vin and all their braises and soups and stews and broths, and stocks and gelatinous sauce.

So, this is nothing new.

You read Le Cordon Blue Cookbook and Julia child’s Art Of French Cooking and you will get very similar cooking instructions, so nothing new there. Right.

So we’re just sort of going back to how we used to eat, before the 1950s

There was a kind of surge of chemical corporate food companies sort of taking over and telling everybody to stop eating fat and to stop eating eggs.

 And by the way, you can eat as much sugar as you want.

So Coca-Cola took over the planet there and really funded a lot of medical universities and a lot of the sugar companies and the grain companies, they just, they had a lot of money and they just, they lobbied and they wrote the textbooks that dieticians and nutritionists and doctors learned from.

Like An Apple A Day Keeps The Doctor Away

 Maybe, but you know, too many apples can give you diabetes. Right?

So let’s not just listen to these little old, old tales that they’ve been singing since the 1950s.

So the chemical companies and the food corporations kind of took over in the 1950’s and, made everyone scared of Fat and cholesterol, eggs, meat

And we’re still haunted by the same rhetoric to this very day.

And it’s still confusing people left and right.

So, onward, the GAPS diet, ‘Gut And Psychology Syndrome’ showing how the gut affects the brain.

You have to heal the gut to heal psychological conditions. That was the GAPS Diet.

Groundbreaking work there!

And other Nutritional psychologists have also explained that your brain needs amino acids, right?

Your neurotransmitters in your brain are made out of tryptophan, tyrosine, glutamine, Choline. Cysteine, DL Phenylalanine.

You need, you need amino acids if you want your brain to function, these are all amino acids that your brain requires for neurotransmitter [synthesis.

Neurotransmitters are the chemicals and allow one brain cell to communicate to the other.

So, if you can’t think, you might need some amino acids to help your brain to make more neurotransmitters.

Basically, a lot of people are saying very similar things, but I mean, you gotta take it back to the Atkins diet.

 Doctor Atkins revolutionized our thoughts about diet. And he wasn’t the only one. Okay.

There’s a lot of fitness experts saying the same thing, The Fat Burning diet. It’s the same. It’s been around for decades, my entire life. I’ve read about and heard about this same diet.

And now it’s called the keto diet.

I’m just telling you, it’s not a new thing.

So the Atkins diet eat lots of protein, eat lots of cheese, just stay off the sugar.

Same concept.

Eat proteins.

You know, there’s the Mediterranean diet and the South beach diet.

And, you know, various diets.

You know, the whole time I was just sick to my stomach.

I was like, they just want to sell you a book with some new name on it.

 It’s the same thing.

But people don’t know what to eat because since the fifties, the chemical food corporations really totally demoralized good nutrition and made it an evil.

That Cholesterol is an evil.

And it was a good marketing plan or the number one selling drug on the planet, which are STATINS. Lipitor.

You know, you’re looking at the wrong things here.

If you really want to care about your heart health, don’t eat sugar.

Don’t drink sodas, right?

And look at the types of fats that you’re eating.

Okay. There’s good fat, which is the fat that we’ve had for thousands of years. Which is animal fat, saturated fat butter.

All the stuff they tell you clogs your arteries.

Now I’m not a conspiracy theory, but I just start to wonder if they really:

1. Know anything.

And B.  Whether these people actually want you to be sick, for some profit driven motive. To keep people taking drugs.

Anyway, before the Atkins Diet, before that came out, which I think was the nineties, maybe it was in the eighties, but you know, they had the Atkins bars and all these protein bars.

But Atkins really helped people realize, Oh, protein is what I need. I need, I need to feed my body protein.

Got it!

And that was great.

And so I tell people, you need the protein.

Now some people, their digestive systems don’t work so well. And if we eat a lot of protein, a lot and a ton of meat, well, you don’t break it down.

And it just goes into your intestines unbroken down, and just sort of sits there in your intestines and ferments.

 This fermentation going on, which is normal. It just means that Bacteria in your gut, in your small intestine and large intestine.

There  is like 10 pounds of bacteria in your colon.

That bacteria is actually helping to eat and break down the food to help release the nutrients. But the problem is that some of these bacteria are not good.

Okay?

Dysbiosis is dysfunctional ……biosis.

Bio, meaning life.

There’s dysfunctional life.

A Condition of dysfunctional organisms living in your colon, dysbiosis.

So that was the term. For so many years, gut dysbiosis.

Now we’ve got to say SIBO and like nobody knows how to spell SIBO because it is not a word.

It’s an acronym.

It’s small intestinal, bacterial overgrowth .

Before SIBO and before the ATKINS Diet, there was the Candida Diet.

Same thing….

You gotta stop eating sugar.

And you got to eat protein.

And you pretty much have to stop eating Rice or grains in general because anything like that is a carbohydrate and any carbohydrate turns into a sugar.

Like alcohol or juices fruits.

How many times I have to explain to people that eating fruit  is still sugar. Fructose is a sugar.

In fact Fructose causes you to gain weight more than sucrose, like table sugar. Table sugar gets metabolized very quickly.

Fructose has to be converted into glucose in the liver, which causes fatty liver disease.

And my friend’s brother-in-law thought he was healthy being on a vegan diet and ate bowls of fruit everyday, and ended up with fatty liver disease, from eating so much fruit.

And my client with fatty liver disease, he’s lost 70 pounds in six months.

By realizing he, you know, he had to do something to save his liver.

His liver was collapsing,he had  fatty liver disease. And so in six months he lost 70 pounds following a fairly, some kind of graduated, transition diet, you know, it’s a way to transition into more of a restricted diet or an elimination diet.

An Elimination diet is something else. That’s where you remove all foods except for chicken or broccoli.

It’s a very simple diet because there’s lots of food triggers and that’s the elimination diet was the original auto immune diet.

But that would help you get aware of food sensitivities, which trigger inflammation.

So the Candida diet is what I first started when I was 10 years old and Ihad to stop eating bread and stop eating sugar.

At the time I was eating tons of sugar and carbohydrates.

As soon as I got home elementary school, I would rush to the pantry.

Get out two slices of Orowheat bread. Right. Whole wheat bread. Whole grain Whole Wheat Bread.

It’s so healthy. Right?

And I would slather it with butter. At least I knew butter

I mean you couldn’t stop me from eating butter.

 It just wasn’t very good butter. It was not very good butter. Right?

So now I have a higher standards of my dairy products, but some people are all anti dairy.

Look, you know, I studied French cooking when I was 17 because of Western A Price. And I’m going to get to that.

Weston A Price came up with this back in the thirties and forties, okay, so,  Keto Diet is nothing new.

It’s so old.

It’s being regurgitated and rebranded

Whatever you gotta do.

Whatever gets people to think they’re doing something new and something exciting.

But the Candida diet was my first taste of a low carbohydrate diet. And at the time I put butter and a huge amount of honey, I was a honey addict, cause it’s so healthy, right, honey.

Honey, and butter and then I would cover it in cinnamon.

Oh my God!

It’s my version of a cinnamon bun.

And I would put that into the toaster oven, the bread, the butter, [00:18:00] the honey and a huge amount of cinnamon and I would toast it until that bread was sopping through with cinnamon-honey-buttery-goodness.

It would be crisp and melt in my mouth.

And I had two slices of that every single day until I made myself sick.

 And you know, I fought with my sugar addiction for years, even after being an adult and a functional medicine practitioner, which I didn’t call myself that at the time. I was an Integrative Medicine practitioner orthomolecular practitioner, mega vitamin practitioner.

They just keep changing the names.

Functional medicine now.

We use lab tests that other doctors don’t use.

So that’s all functional medicine means: we use other lab tests that your allopathic doctors generally avoid or don’t prescribe and dont look at or don’t understand.

So, yeah, the gluten. I ate a lot of gluten and I had a lot of sugar and I was really sick and I had brain fog when I was 10.

I had memory deficits, attention deficit disorder.

I was really creative. I was really smart, but I couldn’t focus. And I was really moody and grouchy and really emotional.

 Well my mom, being the integrative medicine practitioner and acupuncturist. Her client helped her  learn about Candida.

So my childhood, I learned all about candida and how candida overgrowth is a yeast overgrowth.

And if you stop eating sugar, it will die. It’s a yeast that ferments and grows on sugar, and beer and yeasty foods and wine, and fruits and grains and rice.

And so to do a Candida Diet , this is way back in the 1990’s, like before the Atkins Diet.

It’s horrible.

And you take these herbs to kill off Candida too.

A lot of antifungal herbs, and I use the formula way back when, by a company I still use their products.

You start with a low dose and you just kill off a little bit of Candida at a time.

I had athlete’s foot and toenail fungus and I had brain fog.

And you know what, after six months, it was really hard. It was like withdrawals.

 I liked, it was like, I was like a junkie coming off my bread and my sugar, but I started to feel my mental clarity came back and my emotions got a lot better.

But I had that tendency to sort of crave carbohydrates, right? Don’t we all?

I tell you, sugar is the gateway drug.

And yet, you know, marijuana is not the best thing for people to do every single day, but before marijuana. I mean, alcohol.

Alcohol is legal. So alcohol……..and sugar.

Thats what starts our addictive complexes that can get to harder drugs and harder substances.

Alcohol and sugar.

You know, if you’ve ever been to an AA meeting, you know, you’ll see they, they smoked cigarettes and they eat cake and they drink coffee. So, theyre just trading addictions.

They put a ton of sugar in their coffee. It’s a drug. What can I say.

So before the Candida diet, there was a lot of other doctors and more orthomolecular doctors that describe this stuff in detail.

But it started with Weston, A Price who was wondering why, why Western civilizations and industrialized Western civilizations basically were completely ravaged by dental caries and bone deformations, which he would describe in the dental bone structures of the maxilla and the mandible.

And he would show pictures, show the malformations and degenerative conditions of our bone structure and our pinched airways, and our sinuses as a consequence of eating white flour and white sugar.

And that was his thesis back in the 1940s. And so he described how all the indigenous people, the primitive indigenous peoples that had not been modernized and introduced to our white, Caucasian, British empire diet.

They still maintain extremely good health and healthy bones and healthy teeth, and good health all around.

And as soon as those indigenous populations started to eat sugar and white flour, well, their health woiuld decline and, they would start looking like the white settlers.

They would look like the colonists. They would have similar facial features and they would lose their broad cheek bones and broad foreheads, and their bigger brains.

And they’re bigger dental arches and their perfect teeth.

They would lose all that by eating sugar and flour.

And before Atkins Diet and Weston A Price just study French cooking. Fine French cuisine, and you’ll see how much butter and how many eggs and animal fat and you know, like Duck Confit and organ meats and Liver mousse pate and Goose liver fois gras.

And how rich and how Fatty and cholesterol rich these foods are.

But as Weston A Price would show like these are nutrient dense.

 That Organ meats of animals contained 20 times the amount of vitamins and minerals, and nutrients, and cholesterol.

And let’s start calling cholesterol what it is. It’s a nutrient. Your brain is made out of cholesterol.

The myelin sheath.

The Schwann cells that surround your axons in your neurons are made out of cholesterol.

If you’re taking a statin drug you are degenerating the myelin sheath of your brain and nervous system.

And that can lead to Parkinson’s disease tremors, because the nerves don’t conduct properly.

In multiple sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease, amyotrophic lateral syndrome, and you can get Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.

And you’re eating your brain, but you’re eating up your hormones. And the thing is that your brain can’t function without your hormones. You need cholesterol to make hormones and vitamins to convert that cholesterol into into the hormones.

You need enzymes that convert cholesterol to pregnenolone , and from pregnenolone to DHEA or from pregnenolone to Progesterone.

Progesterone to Cortisol, Progesterone to Testosterone. Progesterone. Progesterone.

And so that leads me to another discussion on stress.

So stress and nutrient deficient diet, and high amounts of sugar and you wonder why so many people have neurocognitive disabilities, ADHD Alzheimer’s, autism, the list goes on and on.

And the diet that people are promoting called keto diet has been around.

I want to rebrand it as the indigenous diet based on the research of Weston A Price, because it’s the diet that all people have eaten for thousands of years until the 1800’s or anytime an empire has gained so much power, they started developing grains and bread products like the Egyptians, you know, and the Romans and every empire in history fed their populations grains like bread.

And rice and it’s the diet of the empire.

And it’s the diet of slaves.

If you are eating grains and sugar than you are being enslaved through diet of the empire.

They’ve been producing breads since the Egyptians since Babylon.

And, you know, you look at it, all these middle Eastern cultures, they have bread with everything, but you know what?

It is a part of the culture that is from the empire of that culture .

It is not the indigenous aspect. Indigenous peoples raise sheep. They raised goats, chickens, pigs. Cattle,

You know, the Indians love cows and their dairy, and we hunted deer and venison and in Africa they would eat, you know, lions and tigers and elephants, any kind of animal.

You’d have the anyway hunted whales and seals and fish. It’s Animal food.

And that was the primary staple of all indigenous diets.

And we were healthy for thousands of years. And, you know, if you think that we didn’t live that long until we got vaccines to save us, I’m going to fight you on that. That is historically not accurate.

And, you know, definitely having sanitation helped, and there’s a lot of reasons why we have more people living these days.

But, you know, we’ve had empires killing each other through war for thousands of years.

So, war has constantly cut back on our population.

And then these diseases that were caused in the 1800’s, all from eating sugar, from the British empire.

So whenever you think about the Keto diet, it’s actually the indigenous diet.

It’s the Ancient diet. It’s like the paleo diet. It’s the candida diet. The Atkins Diet.

Whatever you want to call it.

Just know that there’s different forms of this diet that work for different people.

So Keto Diet is just new branding and it’s kind of a very fundamentalist approach to making sure you eat this is much that and you’re always in ketosis….. and that’s not balanced.

If you want to know more about how I guide my clients in eating a rational, nutrient dense diet that includes all these nutrients without causing you digestive health problems because your organs can’t really handle eating that much fat, well then I recommend you check out my book, called the Leaky Gut Brain Diet Cookbook, and I will put a link down below and you can look at how that works and the types of recipes that really keep you on a diet you can follow and will help you stay healthy and maintain good weight loss, cognitive functioning, and hormone health, and cellular membrane integrity, and reducing inflammation and auto immunity and all those things that we want to reduce.

You have to start with the diet. So make sure you understand diet.

Know where it comes from. Understand it is the indigenous diet, it is the most ancient diet.

And, but even then they had herbs, they had spices.

It wasn’t like the carnivore diet. I don’t care. You know what I mean?

You can do that. You can do the corner carnivore diet, and only eat meat. Our ancestors did that, but they also had herbs and spices and a lot of things that also promoted health.

So,  look up the Leaky Gut Brain Axis Diet, and cookbook, and I’ll lay it all out there and you’ll see exactly how you need to move forward with your diet from now on.

So, Thanks for listening. And I hope I gave you some things to move around a bit and, I’ll see you next time. Take care.

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