Heading out for date night? Check out yesterday’s eating out post in the left column.
Ketones Protect and Heal Brains
For those who want to journey down the rabbit hole of how ketones are demonstrating aggressively protective behavior in our noggins, check out Dom D’Agostino’s talk on ketone nutrition. He is a fan of exogenous ketones. He’s building them.
I’m not currently a fan of exogenous ketones for regular people (us). Dietary change is what brings your insulin level down which should bring inflammation down both of which signal health and wellness benefits. Adding ketones without the dietary changes may have some performance benefit or may help you kickstart a repair of something particularly invasive. I’m concerned that that shortcut will create an incentive to skip the hard steps of changing your diet. Ketones are cool, but part of the benefit of being in ketosis is the whole body improvements. Very specific interventions with exogenous ketones make sense. Brain injuries present in the emergency room – bathe the brain in ketones to save it? Absolutely, that makes sense. Time will tell how folks will actually use exogenous ketones. Given the products already on the market I see the shortcut coming and that makes me sad.
Which ties into the rest of tonight’s work. One possible reason you are not getting into ketosis or are not interested in trying to get into ketosis is tied to sugar cravings which has some logically challenging complications. There’s evidence of chemical reactions in your brain but also perhaps some hope: What we think we know about Addiction.
Strong Recommend for a longer watch: Fat Head the movie.
Want a long movie with food for thought (har har)? In response to the vilification of McDonalds with Super Size Me, this gent ate a mostly McDonald diet with a splash of Arby’s and Wendy’s for 30 days and had very different results. He’ll even break down the math for you in terms of what was so wrong with the way the information was presented in Super Size Me. Whatever you think of Fat Head, you should be appalled at the way the information was presented in Super Size Me. See the movie for free here: Fat Head on Youtube or you may be able to find the commercial free version on a streaming site.