Keto: Should You Consider It?
Keto: Should You Consider It?
There's no doubt it's the cool thing to be doing. You cannot step on to social media without being bombarded with transformation photos of "get shredded with keto"
There’s also a lot of push from GP’s for peri and post menopausal women to try keto because they’ve heard it’s a good thing as it helps with insulin resistance, the increase in visceral fat and an increase in use of free fatty acids (FFA) so let’s enhance that system and burn even more FFAs.
But, is it all it's cracked up to be for an active woman?
What is it?
A keto diet is when you drastically reduce all carbohydrates in your diet (simple sugars to complex carbs like vegetables). It forces the body to burn fat instead of glycogen (stored carbs). Your body adapts to being fed only fat and protein and burns fat for fuel. You lose weight because you're not storing any carbs as glycogen or as fat (if you eat too much).
Originally the diet was researched for male patients who were obese and diabetic and who needed to lose weight quickly for operations/get their blood sugar down.
A keto diet was also found beneficial for people who had brain injury, epilepsy, dementia, concussion and other types of head injury/conditions. With certain conditions the brain doesn't metabolise glucose (its normal fuel) as well as it should and a keto diet helped improve functionality. This approach has now been replaced with drugs that do the same thing.
But does this mean you should do it?
Any restrictive diet will mean you will lose weight. You cut out a whole food group and, bingo, you lose weight. But can you keep that up forever? The diet industry knows you can't because who can live without carbs forever?
But it seems like everyone's doing it so it must be good, right? From a performance and health perspective we should look a bit deeper. Does it actually make you faster? No. Can you recover quicker? No. Does it increase your peak power? No. This is because you can't change the body's basic physiology - to get fat burning you need some carbohydrate.
For women is it good? The idea is you tune your body to burn fat instead of carbohydrate and the body gets used to using ketones (the by-product of fat metabolism) for fuel.
A small amount of research studied post-menopausal women who DID NOT exercise. It helped those women to lose fat, improved insulin sensitivity, reduced cravings and “food moods”. What it doesn’t show you is how exercise is a huge factor in affecting insulin sensitivity and other markers of public health burden diseases.
Women ALREADY burn more fat to carbs relative to men. Women are not small men! When women are in their high hormone phase and oestrogen is rising they are at maximum fatty-acid oxidation because oestrogen doesn't allow the body to access carbs that well so your body has already learned to burn fat. Your body is already doing what keto claims to do! In peri and post menopause fat burning is enhanced even more - you’re a fat burning machine.
A study based on active women showed the opposite effect of keto.
Increased cortisol (you're body is in a catabolic/breaking down state),
Decrease in progesterone which led to thyroid suppression - down regulating resting metabolic rate and dysregulation of the thyroid hormone
Impaired glucose tolerance
Indicators of fatty liver disease and
Women gained fat. (And not just visceral fat but subcutaneous abdominal fat which is really hard to lose again.)
For certain populations of people who have medical conditions a keto diet can be beneficial. If you're ordinary Josephine and are active (ie you’re doing some exercise and are not considered medically obese) then you should think twice about cutting a whole food group out of your life!