Free Keto Clarity: Your Definitive Guide to the Benefits of a Low-Carb, High-Fat Diet by Jimmy Moore

their patients.
    When Littleton, Colorado–based family physician Dr. Jeffry Gerber began teaching his patients about the connection between their illnesses and their diets of refined and processed foods, he got their attention fast. Unlike many of his medical colleagues, though, Dr. Gerber didn’t pull out his prescription pad and advise his patients to take medications. Instead, he encouraged them to embrace a lifestyle change that included a significant reduction in carbohydrate consumption and a deliberate increase in natural dietary fats (including saturated fat). These changes, he explained, would help them control their hunger, promote weight loss, and ultimately heal the particular health calamity they were facing.
     
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Carbohydrate overconsumption has created the walking dead.
    – Stephanie Person
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    Dr. Gerber doesn’t leave his patients to their own devices with this information. Instead, he tracks their changes in weight, cardio-metabolic markers, and other key health parameters to see how the shift to a ketogenic diet is working for them. Obesity and type 2 diabetes are two obvious signs of metabolic disease and inflammation brought on by a substandard diet. Dr. Gerber does not subscribe to the notion that we get fat and unhealthy by eating too much. He describes this as “shortsighted” and points instead to the quality, not quantity , of calories that come from a diet of whole, unprocessed, nutrient-dense foods, like those our early ancestors ate.
    What’s more, Dr. Gerber says, a large part of skyrocketing health-care costs stems from using ineffective therapies for chronic health problems, including the overuse of drugs, surgeries, and other treatments that never address the underlying issues. Making nutritional therapies, such as the ketogenic diet, the first step in treatment would save costs and perhaps even result in better patient outcomes than if we continued to do things the same way we always have. This may sound like a simple solution, but its advocates have had a difficult time spreading the message in the face of the federal government’s nutritional guidelines and the heavy lobbying by the processed food industry, which stands to lose billions of dollars in annual revenue if people begin cleaning up their diets.
     
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    Unfortunately, conventional nutritional guidelines continue to support the concept that carbohydrates are required for life and health. The most recently updated American Diabetes Association dietary guidelines, for example, urge Americans, with or without diabetes, to get at least 130 grams of carbohydrates per day to provide sufficient nutrition for the brain. But this runs contrary to the science and real-life experiences in which humans have survived without dietary carbohydrates for months, even years.
    – Dr. William Davis
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    Interestingly, Dr. Gerber notes that there have been many clinical trials in recent years showing that a low-carb, high-fat, ketogenic diet results in greater, more sustainable weight loss, improved cholesterol markers, and better blood sugar control than the standard low-fat, high-carb diet. It really comes down to understanding the role of insulin metabolism and that dietary carbohydrates, not saturated fat, drive the increase in insulin production and inflammation that are at the heart of virtually every chronic health problem people are dealing with today—including heart disease, which is the result of inflammation and oxidative stress, not high cholesterol. (Our book Cholesterol Clarity explores this idea in detail.) The scientific evidence is a major reason Dr. Gerber is so enthusiastic about using ketogenic diets with his sick patients. And having seen how much his patients improve on a ketogenic diet, he knows from experience that it’s the therapy that will work best for them. He’s not alone.
    Dr. Sue Wolver, an internist based in Richmond, Virginia, has been practicing medicine for twenty-five years and once dished out