Keto Diet and What Your genetic Markers Point To

Keto diet (also Ketogenic diet) is a fad diet extremely strict in nature, extremely difficult to sustain and extremely low in carbohydrates. In other words, it’s as good as an alternative to fasting.

The goal of keto diet is to reduce carbohydrate foods to an extremely low level to lower your insulin, decrease glucose and adapt your body to use ketones from fat as its primary energy and fuel source.

In order to achieve ketosis, your body breaks down ketone bodies, a type of fuel the liver produces from ingested fat, instead of sugar or glucose from carbohydrates.

And, you must eat 75 percent of your calories from fat to achieve ketosis, but your genetic markers may raise a red flag against consuming too much fat to the detriment of your health.

Is keto diet good for you, considering the possibility that your genetic markers may point towards a different prognosis and may even indicate a different course of action?

Well, let’s see about that.

Keto Diet is not Everyone

According to Rachel Kleinman, RDN, LDN, clinical dietitian at Ingalls, keto diet is predominantly used to manage seizures in children with epileptic condition. She also infers that the diet’s effectiveness in treating obesity or diabetes is very limited.

Keto diet may help you improve your carbohydrate metabolism, greatly reduce your abdominal fat and significantly reduce inflammation. But at the cost of not knowing what your genetic markers point to or whether keto diet may significantly harm your health in the long run.

It also puts a blanket restriction on vegetables, fruits, whole grains and low fat dairy, which might help in your long term weight loss goal. Here too, your genetic predisposition determines whether you can eat low or high fat, whether you can eat dairy products or not, whether less carbs are good or less protein.

Keto might help you in the short run, but its long-term effects on your health must not be treated lightly.

Types of Keto Diet

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There are four types of keto diets, each boasting benefits of its own:

• Standard ketogenic diet (SKD): A very low-carbohydrate with moderate-protein and high-fat diet. It typically contains 70 per cent fat, 20 per cent protein and only 10 per cent carb.

• Cyclical ketogenic diet (CKD): This diet involves periods of higher-carb in between the ketogenic diet cycles, for example, five ketogenic days followed by two high-carb days as a cycle.

• Targeted ketogenic diet (TKD): This diet allows adding additional carbs around the periods of the extreme physical workout.

• High-protein ketogenic diet (HPKD): This is similar to a standard ketogenic diet, but includes more protein. The ratio is roughly 60% fat, 35% protein and 5% carbs, but it is still very high in fat.

Keto Diet May Have Adverse Effects

Studies have demonstrated that low-carbohydrate ketogenic diets also reduce serum triglycerides dramatically.

Low triglyceride levels can be considered beneficial normally, but abnormally low triglyceride levels can lead to worse outcomes in certain conditions, such as heart failure. They can also lead to autoimmune disease.

Keto diet may reduce your waistline if strictly adhered to, but here is a downside. Keto may cause nutrient deficiencies such as electrolyte imbalance, which is caused by losing a large amount of body fluids. This, in turn, leads to “Keto Flu”, a condition which occurs when your carbohydrate intake significantly decreases and electrolytes are increasingly excreted from your body via urine.

And, we don’t know what to expect of a diet program which mandates eating 20 grams or less of carbohydrates in a given day without setting your genetic markers to point toward the right, optimal solution with regard to losing weight organically.

Keto diet is a quick-fix solution, a stopgap arrangement and an extremely unsustainable proposition in the long run.

It’s a boobytrap waiting to explode on you, if you aren’t sure of what to expect.

Your Genetic Markers Can Help You

A genetic marker like is a landmark, which helps you to identify the desired location that you want to go to. Technically, genetic markers can help link an inherited disease with the responsible gene.

Your genetic markers can show if you’re predisposed to certain possible medical conditions or allergic to certain food types. They help you in making changes to your lifestyle through DNA-based food and lifestyle recommendations, perfectly tailormade to make your life better and your health optimally managed.

A personalised lifestyle approach keto diet, based on your genetic markers, would maximise both the therapeutic effectiveness and long-term safety for you.We can identify your biomarkers that may enable the selection of personalised dietary interventions to maximise your likelihood of successful response. (Source)

Genes might help predict disease risk, and they also go a long way in preventive healthcare and making informed health decisions.

If you have a question related to this blog post, write to us here and we will update this post with a response. 

Our heartfelt thanks to all great Folks at  WebMD, National Library of Medicine and SelfDecode for their great research material.

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