In an effort to stay up to date with all of Kiefer’s prolific work, here is the next series of notes I’ve taken. This is the fourth edition of my Kiefer notes. Again some of these are from his own site, Body.io and some from when he appears as a guest on other podcasts.
For those that don’t know, Kiefer is the author of both The Carb Nite Solution and Carb Back-Loading, both ways of eating that I’ve been playing around with recently. Here is the official link to all of his guest appearances.
Here are links to the prior notes I’ve taken from Kiefer’s stuff:
- Carb Back-Loading Pearls and Criticisms
- More Carb Nite and Carb Back-Loading Tips
- More Carb Nite and Carb Back-Loading Tips Part 2
- More Carb Nite and Carb Back-Loading Tips Part 3
I’ve tried to make sure any of my own personal thoughts are placed in parenthesis.
Now that we’ve gotten all that out of the way…. here we go!
- Promoting Jimmy’s new book Keto Clarity
- Kiefer is one of the guest experts in that book, Rocky was a guest expert in Jimmy’s previous book, Cholesterol Clarity
- Jimmy started experimenting with nutritional ketosis after reading Volek and Phinney’s work
- Purpose of book is to cover: how to get into ketosis and what the benefits of getting ketosis are, a practical guide
- 3 legs in the stool to get into ketosis,
- 1. Low carb.
- 2. Low to moderate protein –
- You need to find your protein threshold level. If you’re sensitive to carbs, you’ll probably be sensitive to protein as well.
- 3. High fat.
- Kiefer says that in some research studies, some people need to cut protein down to 40 gm!
- Jimmy’s threshold is 80 gm protein.
- Fasting for 48 hours will guarantee ketosis, no matter what! People who can’t get into ketosis can try this! (No thank you. I know that I personally don’t need to fast to get into ketosis)
- Rocky asks if Jimmy has ever experimented with lowering caloric load while keeping proteins up to see how it affects ketosis… but Jimmy did not.
- Kiefer thinks that in this scenario, body would start increasing gluconeogensis and making ketosis harder…
- Jimmy lost weight doing Atkins fat fast at 1200 calories… despite losing weight, he felt terrible with brain fog and severe hunger pangs
- Kiefer points out phenomenon that people feel worse when eating severe low calories, like 600 calories, compared to not eating at all
- Ketones are preferred fuel for brain, heart, and diaphragm
- Myth of muscles liking to burn ketones, after a few weeks of ketosis, muscles down regulate enzymes needed to process ketones
- Brain upregulates ketone transporters in ketosis (Mono carboxylate transporters), ketones also upregulate those transporters which can also transfer short chain and medium chain fatty acids, which can be metabolized by astrocytes in the brain.
- Jimmy says using artificial means to increase ketones (MCT oil and ketone salts) better for athletes, but for average Joe, doing it nutritionally will have more benefits than with artificial means
- Kiefer reiterates that while ketones are beneficial, it is not just the ketones that provide the benefits, but also the removal of glucose from the system
- Kiefer says 90% of the benefit is limiting amount of glucose
- Kiefer mentions researchers, like Dr. D’agostino still focus a lot of effort on the ketones, and would favor methods of increasing ketones without decreasing carbs, and Kiefer disagrees with this
- Rocky chimes in and says that Dr. D’agostino is using those methods specifically for Navy Seals and improving their performance.
- South Africa now offering “Banting” options on their menus
- Bashing of Dean Ornish, which they all seem to revel in.
- Jimmy Moore comments that there is big divide being people researching ketogenic diet for epilepsy and the people researching it for performance (Volek and Phinney), and are currently not collaborating with each other, which is a big shame!
- Ketosis can be panacea for many of our diseases, cancer, alzheimers, etc.
- People still confused between ketoacidosis and ketosis
- Ketoacidosis = high blood sugar and high ketones (15-20 mmol), in setting of type 1 DM or type 2 DM with loss of pancreatic beta cell function (no insulin produced)
Ketosis = lower blood sugar with moderate ketones - Kiefer mentions a friend of his who is a Body IO coach, who works at a hospital (Could this be Jeff Fry?) and had conversation with a doctor who seriously believed that ketones are combustible, and being in ketosis can increase risk of spontaneous combustion. And she wasn’t joking…
- Kiefer says – carbs cause degradation of cells and mitochondria with prolonged exposure.
- When you finally do start to feel affects of this, the damage is done already.
- Glucose can be ‘degradating’ over time (man, he really loves that word.. degradate!), ketones are restorative and triggers repair processes over time
- Keto Clarity has 185 scientific references, which was one of the criticisms from his prior book.
- Dr. Patel is incredulous that some of his patients complain of being sick of eating bacon… ( I can’t relate… I love bacon. My favorite is Wellshire Farms Black Forest Bacon… yumm)
- Dr. Patel also reports patient with mental status improvement in span of 6 weeks with low carb diet.
Body IO FM 29 – Jason Seib and Sarah Fragoso
- Rocky called Kiefer by his first name John… and it really freaked him out
- Kiefer made his wife call him by his last name… (he has/had a wife??)
- Hates being called by his first name
- Addressing calories in and calories out – Jason says at end of the day, calories matter, but is never the first thing they address. If they get their diet straightened out, the calories will work themselves out.
- Majority of female clients Jason has actually aren’t eating enough calories, and he can’t remember the last time he had to tell someone to cut back on their calories
- Kiefer quotes an Atwater study where they examined calories from macronutrients alone and in combination with others, Fat had a calorie range of 7-11, Protein from 2-4, and even carbs had a range. So he just averaged everything.
- So even the values that we have don’t mean anything.
- It is a fallacy to think our bodies operate like bomb calorimeters
- Kiefer now talking about his issues with paleo: “paleo approved coconut flake cereal.”
- Jason says “paleo is a mess right now.” The idea of using an evolutionary approach to eating, sleeping etc., is actually still sound.
- Paleo community is so broken and convoluted now because everyone is trying to make it solely a diet thing with a certain/specific macronutrient ratio, ignoring all the other stuff including sleep and exercise etc.
- Sarah is grateful for how much paleo has grown especially bringing awareness to people’s own health, however when anything grows problems develop. People are extracting from paleo ideas what they want in order to market it.
- People are prescribing what works for them thinking that it will work for everyone else, when it’s more important to figure out what works for each individual
- Kiefer says paleo diet is unscientific from his perspective because we don’t KNOW what evolutionary people ate. It’s based on a premise that is flawed because our genetic code is changing faster than we initially thought.
- And paleo people are selective about what science they select based on their narrative.
- “There is a focus on grains rather than overall carbohydrate load.”
- Kiefer brings up his thoughts on the gut biome. The research is great, but we also know that when we take carbs out of the diet, it causes a decrease in overall amount of gut bacteria we have, however it also causes shift towards the beneficial species.
- Kiefer feels that paleo is ignoring a lot of good science that is already out there because of the focus on the paleo narrative.
- “Maybe it’s not so much the gluten in the wheat but it’s in these FODMAPS instead. What if that turns out not to be true, what if its not FODMAPS but its some other chemicals. It’s gotta be wheat because that’s what the story says.” (Seems like Kiefer really focused on paleos anti-wheat thing)
- Jason counters that including the ban on wheat helps force people avoid a majority of a lot of bad products without forcing them to calculate all the macro nutrient content
- The thing that scares Kiefer is that as they get evidence that grains and wheat aren’t as dangerous as previously thought it gives Ammo to the ‘other side.’ Which then leads to a backlash and can potentially cause paleo to fade into the background.
- Kiefer states that paleo has overall positive effect because it’s helped so many people in so many ways, brought the environment into the conversation, even raising awareness to how we distribute food in this country.
- When Jason first started out he was hardcore paleo and avoided all rice, starch, and dairy… but now, he’s not has rigid and those are all part of his diet. We have amylase for a reason… meaning we are supposed to have some amount of starch in our diet. There was also a gigantic fish oil prescription that has now been rescinded.
- Rocky hits nail on the head that the paleo name has now been hijacked, which is how we end up with paleo coconut flake cereal…
- Sarah feels like the ‘paleo grandma’ seeing how far things have changed from when she first started.
- Kiefer likes how paleo was about supporting local farming and local agriculture
- Everyone now going on an anti-Mcdonalds rant, Kiefer says the burger meat comes from a soft-serve machine and needs to have beef flavor added.
- Kiefer still attached to his McDonald’s filet-o-fish.
- Obese 300 lb people are sensitive about their weight because they feel like there isn’t solution for them and just feel defeated. Jason says he sees this a lot in his clients, there is a name for it, ‘learned helplessness.’
- Rocky talks about how things for him are still a struggle and he is constantly tempted to go off track (sounds like he has an inner fat kid too!)
- Plug for Sarah’s newest Paleo Thai book
- Kiefer soon moving to Sarah Fragoso’s part of the country… (I think it’s in Oregon)
- Kiefer feeds his dog paleo food…
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Body IO FM 30 – Research Review 4
- Topic is calories in vs calories out – Do two diets with same caloric content (isocaloric) but different macronutriet produce different weight loss and or different type of weight loss?
- First Study – Meta Analysis
- Macronutrient profiles of the different trials, only 1 was low carbohydrate, and it looks like this group actually had better weight loss than the other diets. But as the study progressed, this group had poor adherence and went to 40% of calories from carbs.
- This study didn’t even address the poor adherence
- This study considered diets less than 45% calories from carbs as “low carb”
- Kiefer emphasizes importance of clarifying what “low carb” actually means
- That’s why Kiefer came up with “ultra low carb.”
- This study also only looked at weight loss, but didn’t even look at changes of compositions
- Kiefer discusses origins of the whole “calories in calories out” concept.
- Goes back to Atwater when he was studying the caloric content of food, putting people in calorimeters. Over 10,000 human subjects.
- Despite different life styles of the subjects, they had similar average of overall caloric expenditure
- Atwater wanted to find a way to construct plant based diet for poor Americans that would mimic an animal based diet (mainly food of rich Americans), using calories as a way to convert one from the other
- In Atwaters papers he makes reference to the fact that there can be big difference to the physical value of food (how much energy it generates when physically burned) vs physiologic value of food (what your body actually does with food.
- Second article – Is a calorie a calorie?
- They presented evidence that went against their claim that calories are all equal, and then concluded that they just didn’t know why that evidence arose, but that it didn’t violate the calorie is a calorie rule
- Gluconeogenesis is a very wasteful and costly process expending a lot of energy
- Production of ketones is also wasteful although some of the energy waste is offset by the increased metabolic efficiency of the heart and diaphragm.
- From one of Feinman’s papers, they found that with removal of carbohydrates from diet, the initiation of gluconeogenesis and nutritional ketosis will cause the body to expend 10% more calories than normal.
- This current paper didn’t think this 10% extra caloric expenditure was “significant.”
- Kiefer says there are already a lot of papers supporting this increase in caloric expenditure when carbs removed
- This study is the first time
- Kiefer goes on long rant about how it is bogus to apply the first law of thermodynamics to the human body UNLESS you are able to account for every little thing coming out of the body including hair growth, food that is not absorbed, heat generated, how each molecule of what is being consumed is utilized and what it’s being converted to… etc… which given what we have now is impossible to measure all of this stuff
- We know that if you introduce insulin into the system, you create a favorable environment for fat cells (consequence of second law of thermodynamics ) to accumulate extra tissue internally. More likely to absorb fatty acids and glucose and esterify that combination into triglycerides for storage.
- When insulin is removed from the system, all the lipogenic systems are turned off, and amino acids and fats are shuttled into ketone production. These are all facts and have been studied in detail!
- For some reason, people still want to stick to “first law of thermodynamics” despite all of this other evidence.
- Kiefer talks again about story about guy consuming 10,000 calories in olive oil and staying the same weight after a month. This happened because he wasn’t absorbing all the calories, and this is NOT addressed by the first law of thermodynamics! This can be explained however with the 2nd law.
- Rocky says that everyone agrees that in order to lose weight, or rather to lose body fat, there has to be some sort of energy deficit (Love Rocky… always the voice of clarity!), according to their Dr. Feinman podcast, a lot of physiologic processes are rate limited by enzymes, and these enzymes can be upregulated or downregulated depending on what diet you consume.
- Rocky continues to say that they aren’t trying to deny that a unit of energy isn’t a unit of energy, but that unit of energy can have different physiologic effects on these different enzymes, which can then produce different effects at the end of the equation. This explains why some diets create greater than fat loss compared to others.
- Kiefer says that at a 10,000 ft view, if the goal is weight loss (which he says is a nonspecific target because it can be loss of water, muscle, bone, or fat… apparently when you go on a carb restricted diet for a long time you can actually lose bone mass!!!), then you need to create a deficit as to what is coming into the system.
- Different macronutrients introduce different ways to get that energy deficit. If on a high carb diet, the way to get that deficit is to cut calories. If on ultra low carb diet, instantly making this shift while eating the same amount of calories, has given you a calorie deficit (as described above). The calorie deficit has been introduced in a different way without decreasing food intake.
- Kiefer quotes Feinmans study showing that the Zone diet has highest attrition rate of any diet. Ultra low carb easiest for people to stick to. High carb diet somewhere in the middle
- Kiefer quotes study in NEJM that if you introduce testosterone to a male with low testosterone, with no change in diet, this will stimulate increase in growth of muscle mass as well as bone density with decrease in bone mass… again with NO change in diet. All the naysayers would agree with this.
- Kiefer quotes studies where people injected with cortisol for long period of time, will cause decrease in mass of muscle tissue and bone tissue and an increase in fat mass… WITHOUT dietary changes. All the naysayers would agree with this.
- The minute you ask if there is a hormone that can increase body fat faster as it’s introduced into the body, aka Insulin, and you say, we have enough evidence that if you keep your insulin perpetually high, you will create an environment that favors fat accumulation… people instantly go bonkers and disagree and say this is the dumbest thing ever!
- Example of if type 1 diabetics consistently inject insulin in same site without rotation they get localized fat accumulation in that region because insulin causes growth and accumulation of fat locally.
- Next study – Energy balance or fat balance?
- Looked at taking macronutrients in an isolated manner and determining rate of metabolism and where they end up.
- Alcohol, fat, protein, and carbohydrate
- The study alludes to the fact that we have such limited glycogen stores, but our fat stores are immense, and how the variability of this effects the oxidation of the macronutrients.
- Rocky says, with regard to the insulin hypothesis naysayers the disagreement, maybe from the concept of looking at it from an acute stand point: you eat a meal high in carbs, the carbs turns into fat, and the high insulin causes the fat to be stored. Rocky says him and Kiefer are actually approaching it from the chronic view in that the chronicity of an elevated insulin environment causes the excess storage of fat.
- Kiefer says only in past few years do we have the scientific ability to explore the 2nd law of thermodynmics on a biologic level
- It’s not one specific meal, it’s the chronicity of the exposure.
- When you eat a fat + carb meal, you create the perfect environment for fat storage. Carbs provide glucose for the glycerol backbone, fat provides fatty acids to attach to the glycerol backbone to form triglycerides, and the carbs also stimulate insulin release which triggers fat storage.
- Kiefer quotes studies that show over a long term, physical activity does not necessarily equate with caloric expenditure. The more active you are over a prolonged period of time, you body seems to settle down into a basic, universal rate of energy use. When other populations in the world are examined, like Hadza tribe who were walking constantly all day, running and hunting, and very active. When compared to their metabolic needs with a typical office working overweight American, when body mass was corrected, energy needs were identical.
- The only thing that determines how many calories you need is body mass (lean mass is better correlate).
- The more you exercise, the more your body becomes efficient at doing that exercise!
- The whole exercise more and eat less to lose weight is BS.
- Kiefer also thinks that if you stick to ultralow carb over long period of time your body will adjust, and will eventually lose the metabolic ineffeciencies/advantages over time. The best time to take advantage of metabolic ineffeciencies is in periods of transition from high carb to low carb, or even from high fat to low fat.
- This is one reason Kiefer is strong advocate of his diets, because it keeps the body inefficient for longer period of time (CNS and CBL)
Body IO FM 31 – Dr. William Walsh
- Specialty in brain science, helping people with natural therapies for things like depression, ADD…
“advanced nutrient therapy” - Rocky listened to the audiobook, Nutrient Power, and was intrigued by what he heard
- Within the past 5 years we are learning about the epigenetic effects of things we eat. Genes encode proteins (enzymes, structural proteins, etc).
- Methylation is a process by how genes are expressed: people can be under-methylated or over-methylated which has a lot to do with mental and physical health.
- Under-methylaters make up most of the world great athletes, and has to do with the formation of creatine.
- Most cancer forms are ‘epigenetic’ in which environmental insults change these methyl switches, the regulation that turns on or off certain genes.
- Almost every aspect of our existence has to do with gene regulation
- We are now at the point where we understand what certain nutrients can do to things like regulating neurotransmitters, or enhancing GI heath or immune function
- It now looks like autism, schizophrenia, cancer, and heart disease are epigenetic diseases.
- Once a gene is ‘methylated’ it’s stuck on like concrete and can’t be changed. This determines your characteristics for the rest of your life.
- Fortunately there is a second epigenetic mechanism called “histone modification” which is what we can use with methylation therapies to help people with mental and physical problems.
- In a fetus, the most important time is between 19 and 22 days of gestation, which is before most women know they are pregnant. This makes it too late for women who try to clean up their act (ie quit smoking and drinking and start eating healthy) AFTER they find out they’re pregnant.
- Hopefully there will be time in a future where you can test a newborn baby to see what their genes and epigenes are and then tailor treatment to prevent epigenetic disorders like schizophrenia, autism, etc…
- Kiefer asks about a theory he’s heard that our current obesity epidemic is a result of an epigenetic effect when these people were exposed to an environmental dietary thing at the early ages of 2-3 years old, causing people to be obese the rest of their life.
- Dr. Walsh confirms this theory. We’ve known for a long time that depending on their nutrition as very young children, that people with a tendency towards obesity that by the time they’re 3 or 4 already have a much greater population of fat cells, that are also larger fat cells, and a lot of experts think this is epigenetic, and may have occured in the first 20 days of gestation!
- We’ve also learned that methylation has a lot to do with proper diet for example, if you’re under-methylated (22% of the population) you need a high protein diet. If you’re over-methylated (8% of the population) will thrive on vegetarian diet. Carb tolerance also.
- About 70% of the population don’t have a methylation problem
- Part of being under-methylation leads to competitiveness, strongwilled, perfectionists
- Over-methylated people tend to have more muscle mass but don’t have the mental desire and competitiveness as the under methylated
- Many of the very tall basketball players were found to have an amino acid disorder. A couple of his 7 foot basketball players had poorly functioning fast twitch muscles making it harder for them to grab rebounds and react quickly. Arginine is one of the reasons why they’re so tall, but is also why it’s sohard for them to put on muscle mass. They called it Manute Bol syndrome. They were so under-methylated that they couldn’t create creatine and therefore have low muscle mass.
People that are over-methylated are very good at mathematics, better at music, very artistics, unusually friendly people, make wonderful neighbors. They care more often about other people than themselves and frequently work as nurses and counselors. As opposed to the under-methylaters that are driven perfectionists trying to be the best. CEOs, doctors, lawyers, scientists… people who have this kind of podcast - Funny part where Dr. Walsh says he would bet anything that both Rocky and Kiefer are under-methylated. He says most people that are under-methylated sail through life rather well and have high accomplishment. Usually have a family history of high accomplishment.
- About 1 out of every 5 under-methylaters tend to run into trouble, typically obsessive compulsive disorders, hooked on smoking, alcohol, illegal drugs, gambling. Women might develop shopping disorders. Anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder.
- We also need to look at metal metabolism. Zinc deficiency has a lot to do with physical and mental health. A lot of athletes became dramatically better once their zinc levels were normalized. There are a lot of nutrients that because of genetics, people are deficient in, and can probably benefit from multiple times the RDA of those nutrients… the hard part is just figuring out which ones they need!
- On the other hand, people can also have nutrient overloads because of genetics. We’ve learned that clinically with depression, anxiety, learning disorders, violent children, it’s really the nutrients that are in overload that cause more problems rather than the deficiencies. So when people ask him what multivitamin he would recommend, he thinks the answer is none of them because you can do as much harm as good if you stuff someone full of amino acids, vitamins, and minerals some of which could make things worse!
- The key is knowing what works for that specific individual.
- Things can get complicated, for example, folic acid or any form of it including, folinic acid, or methyl-folate has dramatic impact on epigenetics. It is extremely good at helping people who are under-methylated normalize their methylation, the problem is that folic acid tends to lower serotonin activity. So one of the complications is that if you have someone who has anxiety, depression, or behavior disorder, and are undermethylated… their methylation will improve, but their condition will worsen (because they have conditions that have low serotonin)!
- There are only 6 or 7 nutrient factors that dominate mental health.
- Nutrient therapies take 2-3 months to take effect
- Can allow tapering of psychiatric medications to find optimal dose
- With depression, they’ve found that depression is currently made of 5 different disorders each with different neurotransmitter abnormalities, and there are now blood tests that can be done that will help determine which medications to use to address the specific sort of depression! For example, under methylaters will respond well to SSRIs, but folks that are over methylated will get worse with SSRIs and become suicidal and homicidal…
- Psychiatrists are starting to get excited by this…
- In post partum depression… they’ve found this is due to over abundance of copper!
- Kiefer brings up the evidence that a low carb ketogenic diet can have extremely beneficial effects on people with depression and anxiety disorders, and help to decrease and sometimes altogether stop some medications. He asks if Dr. Walsh has seen anything between relationship of glucose and if it can exacerbate methylation problems in these cases?
- Dr. Walsh says yes. Especially with people who have glucose control problems, even with schizophrenic and depressive who tend towards low blood sugar, if you clean up their diet, will help them a lot. It’s especially important for children with ADHD, they are easiest people to help, making sure they have a good diet.
- The only people who need a high carbohydrate diet are athletes.
- Some athletes run into problems from guzzling too much gatorade before an event and throw themselves into low blood sugar.