Wellness Coaching – Your Brain was Designed for Ketones

We Americans spend 17% of our GDP on healthcare. That’s roughly double what other countries spend. So, if we’re spending $1.2 Trillion a year, why are so many of us dropping like flies from epidemics such as cancer, heart disease and stroke? I believe that the major contributing factors include our stress-induced lifestyle, diet, and our body’s inability to rid itself of harmful toxins. More specifically, most diseases in our culture are directly related to our dependency on sugar for fuel.

When you eliminate sugar and starchy carbohydrates from your diet, the brain begins to shift its source of energy from glucose to ketones. Ketones are the energy units found in fat. By shifting your dependency from sugar to ketones, you will be returning to the way your body was meant to metabolize foods.

Embracing the diet of our ancient paleo ancestors (before agriculture) is the only way to reverse the dramatic increase of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes in our society. The dietary fat sources of our hunter-gatherer ancestors included flesh and organ meats that was hormone-, antibiotic-, and pesticide-free, heavy cream, wild-caught seafood, some eggs, coconuts, butter, ghee, lard, avocados, olives, nuts, and seeds. It did not include trans fats, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, margarine, or genetically modified foods such as soybeans or rapeseed (canola oil).

Not only does the brain prefer ketones over sugar for fuel, it operates much more effectively and efficiently on them. As a result, you won’t need to consume as many calories as you did as a carbivore. This allows you to maintain your ideal body weight without having to go on starvation diets. Research shows that an increased consumption of omega-3 fatty acids is beneficial to cognitive functioning, the lowering of cholesterol, and the reduction of arterial plaque. The diet of the Intuits (the indigenous peoples of the Greenland arctic) were found to contain between 14,000 to 20,000 mg of omega-3 fatty acids a day and virtually no heart disease. Needless to say, their body’s were efficiently living on nothing but ketones.

To help train your body to run on ketones, it is important that omega-3 fatty acids should make up at least 1 to 1.5 percent of the total daily caloric intake, with omega-6 making up about the same. Higher amounts of omega-3 may be needed temporarily (several months) in order to reduce a deficiency state.

Jason Lincoln Jeffers is a Wellness Coach who founded Sunlighten and co-founded Sunlight Day Spa; holistic wellness companies dedicated to far-infrared radiant therapy, sound therapy, and massage therapy. His Wellness Coaching practice incorporates far-infrared sauna detoxification, upper cervical care, and maintaining an alkaline-forming, nutrient-dense, sugar-, gluten-, and starch-free diet.