At UPG, we get a lot of questions about diets and how they could benefit people living with serious ailments. Today, we look at two popular disease-fighting diets: the ketogenic diet and the alkaline diet.
We have known for a long, long time that what you put in your body will affect what you get out of your body. As Hippocrates himself, the father of modern medicine, has said, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”
Here at United Patients Group, we always strongly recommend eating better to feel better. For most people, this simply means more vegetables and less processed foods. But in certain cases, a strict diet may be needed to fight the illness. Let’s take a deeper look at a couple of these strict diets, which people they’re supposed to help, and whether and how they work.
Ketogenic Diet
Before anti-convulsants were created, one of the main ways epilepsy was treated was through the ketonic diet, an extremely high-fat, low-carb regimen. When the patient ingests very few carbohydrates, his or her body can’t create energy the usual way (by converting carbs into glucose) and has to run on substances called ketone bodies, created by the liver and sent to the brain. Elevated levels of these ketone bodies (the molecules acetone, acetoacetic acid, and beta-hydroxybutyric acid) lead to a metabolic state called ketosis, which through unknown mechanisms helps reduce or even eliminate epileptic seizures.
The ketonic diet became the primary treatment of pediatric epilepsy after it was reported at an American Medical Association (AMA) convention in 1921. Fasting, which also induces ketosis, had been a known treatment before then, but it obviously was not sustainable long-term. As anti-convulsants became available, the ketonic diet’s popularity faded away, but it was resurrected in the late 1990s as an alternative treatment for intractable epilepsy.
The diet imposes a strict ratio of 4:1 or 3:1 fat to proteins and carbs and is usually used for children (adults have a harder time following it). Because it is so difficult to get right, the diet requires medical supervision. But for epileptics who don’t respond to medications, the ketonic diet can be quite effective. One study of 150 children who were taking at least two anti-convulsants found that 34 percent of those who remained on the diet after three months had a greater than 90 percent reduction in seizures. Another survey of 58 children who didn’t respond to multiple anti-epileptic drugs reported improved seizure control in 67 percent of patients who followed the ketonic diet.
Alkaline Diet
The alkaline diet is all the rage in some circles, promoted by numerous books claiming
benefits from weight loss and energy increase to curing heart disease and cancer. The idea is that the human body is naturally slightly alkaline (pH 7.35–7.45), but eating foods that cause an acidic reaction makes our systems acidic (anything lower than 7 on the pH scale), which can throw the system off. According to this theory, eating more alkaline foods will restore balance to the body, curing ailments that thrive in acidity, such as cancer.
Foods to avoid on the alkaline diet include dairy, processed grains, red meat, and sugars. Foods to increase include veggies, sprouted grains, nuts, and low-sugar fruits. Drinking alkalinized water is also encouraged. Because the diet recommends lots of fresh, whole foods, people who go on it will likely lose weight and feel better. But what about its health claims?
Mainstream medicine rejects the entire premise that you can change your body’s pH levels with diet. Gabe Mirkin, MD, explains, “All foods that leave your stomach are acidic. Then they enter your intestines where secretions from your pancreas neutralize the stomach acids. So no matter what you eat, the food in stomach is acidic and the food in the intestines is alkaline. Dietary modification cannot change the acidity of any part of your body except your urine.”
The American Institute for Cancer Research is blunt in its rejection of the low-acidity-environment theory: “Altering the cell environment of the human body to create a less-acidic, less-cancer-friendly environment is virtually impossible. … While proponents of this myth argue that avoiding certain foods and eating others can change the body’s pH level, these claims stand in stark contrast to everything we know about the chemistry of the human body.”
Having said that, we have met quite a few people who feel genuinely transformed by going on the alkaline diet. If you’ve tried it and found any notable (or even miraculous) benefits, please share your story in the comments.
My husband and I have been on alkaline diet for a month already. I lost more than 10lb. My husband lost around 7Lb. , he doesn’t follow it as strictly as I do. We both feel so much better than we did before started this diet. All our friends noticed such dramatic change in such a short period of time. Most of them started to follow alkaline diet too. We feel proud we became role models in healthy life style for a lot of people around us!
The claim of acid alkaline balance using food rejected by the AMA is well known. AMA has never proposed using nutrition for health except after they are dragged into it by the marketplace originating from overseas, where significant use of food for creating or maintaining homeostasis is common. The U.S. position has been to only use drugs and surgery for promoting health. Also note that the World Health Organization also ranks the U.S. as having the most incidents of cancer, as well as its population dying earlier than any other developed nation.
That aside, of course the body regulates ph very well. And different areas of the body require a different ph. What is important to know, is that the most important area the body maintains ph is the blood. Blood ph is best at 7.365. The body will do anything to maintain that slight blood ph.
What happens when we over acidify our food intake, is that over time, after around age 40ish, is that the body loses it’s ability to buffer all the acids that are thrown at it. And the next measure it will use, is borrow minerals from the bones to maintain that blood ph slight alkalinity. And borrowing mi deals from the bones will have a significant impact on decreasing bone health. So, the thinking is that alkalizing with food or water for health is simply to prevent that house of cards of making the body choose to maintain life at the expense of bone health. The proof has always been with people who report positive results.
3rd paragraph typos: should read: And borrowing minerals from the bones will have a significant impact on decreasing bone health.
Other typos: where stated ph. Should read ph.
Auto correct not allowing correction of pH acronym.
I tend not to trust things that make left wingers happy because one thing that the left has taught me is that they jump at literally anything that fits what they want to believe without any evidence or facts or credible information regarding the validity of the matter. How does this fit? Simple, they don’t want us killing animals. They’ve actively been making meat more expensive and Democrats are actively trying to make the meat industry untenable, especially the beef industry. I can’t help but think that the craze over anti-meat has to do with the amount of money political support Democrats get when they attack the meat industry.
I mean, we’ve had more scientific study on the affects of a ketogenic diet for much longer than a vegetarian alkaline diet, and we still can only speculate on its affects on things like heart disease and cancer. However, we do already know of scientifically-tested, human-practiced health benefits of the ketogenic diet. Diabetics can go asymptomatic almost overnight by just cutting their carbs to levels consistent with maintaining ketosis. We know that excessive consumption of sugars contribute directly to heart-disease and insulin resistance. We have real-world present-day examples of people like the eskimos who lived hundreds of years of having very little plant-consumption and a high-fat, high-protien diet.
As for ancient humans, until agriculture became a mainstay of society, they likely lived in ketosis for most of their lives as the majority of their food was wild game except for during the harvesting seasons where edible plants were ready to eat. The vast majority of human history was not agricultural, as far as we know. It was hunter-gatherer, and gathering is seasonal, whereas hunting is all year round and potential food is running around quite literally everywhere. Even in our era of causing extinctions, we have not stopped an over-abundance of animals, all potential meals, from living literally everywhere we are.
Jimmy – your argument makes no sense, and in fact, makes you sound stupid. Diet has nothing to do with “left-wingers” and Democrats. In fact, in light of Trump’s recent proposed cuts to medical research, exactly the opposite is true. If you want to hunt, go hunt. Last I checked, we still had a 2nd Amendment. And by the way, Democrats own guns, too. I do.