7 Mistakes people over age 50 make with the Keto Diet and how to get on the right track.
The biggest keto mistake that you could make over the age of 50 is buying that red convertible. Don’t do it. Buy the blue one.
Hopefully, I made you chuckle, but in all seriousness, I’ve got seven very common over 50 keto mistakes. Now we all make mistakes with Keith Go, every single one of us. I do whatever. But when you’re over 50, there’s just different mistakes which you should be paying attention to. And I want to kind of lead off with what I feel is probably the most prevalent.
And that is ignoring the importance of electrolytes. When you’re older, that’s going to be very, very powerful and nerve signaling, which reflects in our energy.
I see a lot of people over the age of 50 that end up feeling pretty run down and have these bouts of low energy, especially when they’re first starting keto.
Now, there was a study that was published in the Journal of Nutrition and Metabolism that found that when we are going on to a ketogenic diet, a lot of our lower energy and our lower performance is clearly associated with lower levels of sodium and potassium.
And by simply adding sodium and potassium back in, it seems to correct the energy and the performance issue.
This seems to be more powerful in people over the age of 50, probably because it’s easier for them to lose electrolytes.
So what happens when we first start keto? Especially. Yeah, sure. We have insulin levels that come down and that causes us to lose some water and we lose electrolytes with that.
But also remember that our liver carbohydrates, our liver glycogen. Well, water binds to those carbohydrates, like three to 4 grams of water for every 1 gram of carbohydrates. So when we cut carbohydrates and those glycogen stores lower, we lose a lot of water with that. And along with that water loss comes electrolytes.
So do replenish electrolytes however much you can.
I really don’t think you can go too overboard. As long as you’re balancing with sodium, potassium, and magnesium.
This next one is super important and it is consuming too many of your calories later in the day. Two things happen that are colliding here. As we get older, our appetite in the morning seems to decrease.
You’ve probably noticed this. You just want to have a light breakfast. The impetus to have a light breakfast is much higher.
But additionally, keto also makes us feel very satiated. So it’s easy to get up in the morning and just have something very, very light. And I urge you to do what you can to stack your calories closer to the morning.
The Journal Clinical Investigation published a study that demonstrated that as we get older, our circadian clocks get more and more whacked out. It’s not just a matter of the society we live in today.
As we get older, we do throw off our circadian rhythm more and more and more. A lot of it has to do with mitochondrial dysfunction and metabolic dysfunction and all that. That’s a story for a different day.
The Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine had demonstrated that when calories were stacked towards the latter part of the day, it resulted in significantly poor sleep.
Now, on the contrary, another study that showed that when you consume your calories in the first 6 hours a day, like the bulk of them in the first 6 hours, it resulted in the restoration of circadian clock genes, showing that not only did sleep improve, but you were actually able to kind of restore some of the gene expression associated with regulating everything.
If you regulate your circadian rhythms, then your metabolism can regulate with in line with that, and you can start probably feeling youthful again. It’s quite important, even though it sounds very boring.
One of the best things that you can do is simply add more fats in the morning.
It may seem like a voluptuous omelet to have, like, a four or five egg omelette, but that’s only going to be like 20 or 25% of the most of your daily caloric needs. You need to stuff it with some cheese. You need to stuff up some avocado. You need to stuff up some olive oil, stack those calories in the morning and taper them off towards the end of the day, moving into the next one.
This is super, super important, and I know it sounds cliche, but please pay attention because it’s probably one of the most important things.
Not eating enough nonstarchy vegetables is not just detrimental in general, but exceptionally detrimental for people that are over the age of 40.
There is a study published in the Journal Nature Metabolism that I found just so fascinating. It took a look at what’s called microbiome uniqueness. Now I talk about microbiome diversity a lot, saying, like a blanket statement, we should have a diverse microbiome because it’s good for us.
But what we found with aging individuals is that uniqueness is more important, and that means the ability for your body to adjust the microbiome for its own individual. So uniqueness means I have a significantly different microbiome than you do, and you have a significantly different microbiome than Jerry does.
The point is that that uniqueness demonstrates that our bodies are being flexible and adjusting the microbiome the way that it should to counteract or correct insufficiencies and problems within our body. That uniqueness becomes very important.
But we have to give our body the fuel to grow when it needs to grow.
If it doesn’t have the fertilizer like the prebiotic fibers and the starches that we get from veggies, it doesn’t have the ability to grow what it needs to grow. If my body says we run into a problem, we need a lot of bifidobacteria right now, but we don’t have the ability to grow it because this guy’s not eaten fiber.
What can it do, therefore less uniqueness? Right. So getting critical about your prebiotic fibers getting critical about even probiotic supplementation becomes very important over the age of 50.
I want you to throw the whole cholesterol concern thing out the window. Ok. Saturated fat can elevate cholesterol, but it’s usually a temporary thing in terms of how it reuptakes in the liver and all this. Let’s not worry about that because LDL, all that conversation really has to get broken down a lot more into particle size, fluffy, extra fluffy, all this different stuff that’s really important with what’s called a fractionated panel. But let’s not really worry about that right now.
The bottom line is that more saturated fat doesn’t equal more health, more saturated fat takes valuable calories away from fat that could be coming in with nutritional value.
So again, saturated fat is kind of like a placeholder it really outside of myelination and helping the nerves a little bit. It’s not like a huge, tremendous benefit to adding more, but there is a lot more benefit to adding, like more olive oil or more avocado oil or more fish oil. Right. So by adding more saturated fat, you’re just taking away calories from where you could be getting good polyunsaturated fats and good monounsaturated fats.
So I recommend 20% to 30% of your daily fat intake comes from saturated fat. Now let me paint a picture for you for a second. Look at it from an evolutionary standpoint. And no matter where you stand on that, I just want you to look at this just so it makes sense.
Even a few hundred years ago, if we were in a time where we would go into a ketogenic state, it would be because we’re starving.
The ketogenic state is either starving or deprived of carbohydrates. In the wintertime, if there’s not a lot of plants and we’re relying on meat and hunting. Well, then, yes, we would be consuming a lot of meat and fat from meat, but studies clearly demonstrate and data clearly demonstrates that wild animals have three to four times less fat than the meat that we’re consuming.
Now it’s domesticated, so much less fat. Okay, now also significantly less saturated fat and significantly more polyunsaturated fats and some monounsaturated fats.
So from an evolutionary standpoint, no matter how you want to look at that, if we were in a true natural ketogenic state and we are consuming naturally, it would be very hard for us to get a bunch of saturated fats unless we are in like a South Pacific Island eating a lot of coconuts or peeling nuts, which I love.
So point is that, yeah, we don’t need to be hammering the saturated fat 20% to 30% of your total fat coming from saturated fat is perfect. Leave yourself room to have monounsaturated fats.
Leave yourself room to have more plants so that you can actually get some more of that gut diversity.
Number five.
I’m going to touch on briefly because I think you know the deal here too much in the way of artificial sweeteners. Now, yes, there’s a huge microbiome link there, but I’m not even going to touch on that too much because too many people combat it.
They love their artificial sweeteners, and they hate when anyone rains on the artificial sweetener parade. But the reality is, there is evidence that it messes up the microbiome, but let’s just forget that one for a second. Let’s talk about the fact that you were hammering your brain with hyper palatable, hyper sweet things that are triggering a dopamine response that are just going to make you more hungry and you’re going to lead to dopamine exhaustion.
You’re going to lead to all the stuff that’s going to make you feel potentially just kind of lethargic and depressed. So if you can, wean off of that stuff, you will find that you actually don’t crave it very much. And it’s a big mistake because as your metabolism is slowing as you get older, which it naturally does, the last thing you need is cravings.
Moving on, focusing on the scale only. But I have brand spanking new data as of May 2021.
That was published in a preliminary report of MedRx. This found okay, don’t need to be paying attention to the scale because there are a huge myriad of benefits that are occurring on the ketogenic diet outside of how your scale changes.
And some of these benefits are going to be a precursor to how you’ll lose weight later on. So this study published that a calorically unrestricted keto diet, meaning not even restricting calories at all, but just going on keto was just as effective as a very low calorie 1200 calorie non keto diet at reversing type two diabetes and improving insulin sensitivity.
That’s right.
Not even restricting calories. Just going keto have a similar effect as it would if you were to plummet your calories to 1200.
What in the world? Right. But then there was a study published in the Journal Clinical Radiology that found that a low calorie ketogenic diet, compared to a traditional low calorie diet of the same caloric value was almost three times better at reducing visceral fat levels.
How about that? So when you go keto, you can potentially reduce your visceral fat levels, which are largely inflammatory leaking when we get older, the last thing we want is more chronic inflammation. So there’s a lot of things going on outside of just the scale. We correct these things. And then sure, you’re setting up the metabolic framework and the mitochondrial framework to allow yourself to recover later in a better fashion.
Then I have to break this one to you. Anything that has sodium benzoate. If you’re over 50, throw out, get rid of it. Now. It’s a preservative, but there’s some serious metabolic damage that can occur with it in everybody, let alone if you’re over 50, because you really need to pay attention to this stuff.
One of the biggest problems that we face as we get older is less efficient and less abundant mitochondria to begin with, less ability to process fuel leads to more blood glucose, whatever.
Well, the Journal of Food Biochemistry found that sodium venue it affects our mitochondrial DNA. It affects our mitochondria to the point where our mitochondria will swell and the external membrane will even rupture. This affects how the mitochondria reproduces, and it can just flat out kill the mitochondria. So then we’re not able to process energy through it.
We are basically accelerating cellular aging. Get rid of the sodium benzoate.
Then, to make matters worse, there was a study published in Biochemistry, Medicine, and Metabolic Biology that found that sodium benzoate inhibited hepatic fatty acid oxidation.
What does that mean? That means that it stopped or slowed down the ability for the cells within the liver to process fat and convert them into ketones, literally potentially lowering your ketone levels.
We don’t want that because a lot of the effects we want from a genetic standpoint from certuins from FOXO, all kinds of stuff that has to do with aging and longevity.
They’ll those are all regulated by higher levels of betahydroxybutyrate ketones. And we don’t want that potentially blunted by a stupid sodium benzoate coming in and affecting our hepatic cells.
Right?
Bottom line is, there’s things we need to pay attention to.
References
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/JAHA.120.019140
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21471535/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42255-021-00348-0
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4564526/
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature13793
https://nutritionandmetabolism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1743-7075-1-2
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.07.21256854v1
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/article-abstract/2775559?utm_campaign=articlePDF&utm_medium=articlePDFlink&utm_source=articlePDF&utm_content=jamacardio.2020.7073
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.07.21256843v1
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32204895/
https://www.jci.org/articles/view/90328
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3227713/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31151228/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41574-019-0210-x
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263554489_Sodium_benzoate-mediated_cytotoxicity_in_mammalian_cells
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0885450588901144
