The Ketogenic Pharmacist

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If you break your leg or arm, you get a cast and sometimes surgery to fix where it broke.

If you get an bacterial infection, you get antibiotics to kill the bacteria.

If you have a deficiency in some nutrient or vitamin, you replace it with a supplement or get it from your diet.

If you get any sudden illness such as a heart attack or a stroke, doctors try to dissolve the clot or open the blockage that cause the problem.

This makes sense as they all address the actual problem. Then we start talking about chronic metabolic diseases such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, etc. And all of a sudden, we stop addressing the root cause and start prescribing a long list of medications that only address symptoms or mask the problem. These pills never FIX the problem.

So if we go back to what medicine is about and address the root problem, then chronic diseases can be “fixed”, not with pills, but by fixing the root cause: FOOD!

Obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and fatty liver, for example, are different manifestations of the same disease. The root cause is typically insulin resistance, due to chronically elevated insulin, which in turn is due to chronic carbohydrates toxicity.

The world consumes excessive amounts of sugar and carbohydrates that never existed before the 20th century. The poison is in the dose and what was done to traditionally healthy food (ultra processing, pesticides, genetically modifying crops, etc).

Obesity is NOT Ozempic deficiency

Hypertension is NOT blood pressure medications deficiency

Type 2 diabetes is NOT diabetes medications deficiency

Abnormal cholesterol is NOT statin deficiency

Until you fix your diet and remove what’s making you sick, you will get sicker over time.

Fix your diet to fix your health!

P.S: there are expectations to everything so please don’t start pointing out exceptions. This is about the general principles.

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This should be obvious to most people by now, but I continue to be shocked by how brain washed many remain about what constitutes healthy food. To make it worse, despite suffering with chronic diseases, they continue to eat the same food because they still think that eggs, red meat, whole milk, butter, bacon are bad for them, but they mostly consume bread, pizza, junk fast food, loads of sugar, fake milk, fake meat, etc. and don’t make the connection as to why they’re in poor health. A pill won’t fix your diet. Going to the gym won’t fix your diet.

It’s time you wake up and go back to eating what humans ate for ever: minimally process whole food. Buy fresh ingredients and cook at home.

Eat red meat, seafood, pork, poultry, eggs, dairy, vegetables, and fruit.

Limit sugar, grains, seed oils, dyes and chemical additives.

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Visceral fat is the fat between and inside your organs. We all have it to some degree and plays an important role in health. However, it is hormonally active and when it accumulates in excess it contributes to abnormal chronic inflammation, insulin resistance and organ dysfunction. It is one of the major causes and signs of metabolic diseases.

The most familiar place it accumulates in is the gut that shows up as a big belly. Excess Visceral fat is responsible for fatty liver disease, for example, but fatty organs can affect the pancreas, the heart, the muscles and can spread between normal tissues.

Where the fat accumulates matters. Fat under the skin is neutral, but excess visceral fat is bad for health. Unfortunately, we can’t dictate where the fat goes. Some of it is genetic as we all have a “fat threshold” where fat accumulates under the skin for storage until we reach our genetic limit, at which point visceral fat grows quickly and metabolic diseases soon follow. Risk of cancer also increases.

Remember that fat is the storage unit for dietary carbohydrates. We have very limited storage capacity for carbs as glycogen in the liver and muscles, but the vast majority of carbohydrates are converted to fat and stored in fat cells or as visceral fat when fat cells are full.

The cheapest way to know if you have excess visceral fat is to look in the mirror. Protruding belly (if not a hernia) and thick neck are good indications. Abdominal circumference greater than half your height (waist-to-height ratio > 0.5) is also very telling. You can also measure it with DEXA scan, CT scan or MRI.

How do you get rid of visceral fat?

1. Restrict dietary carbohydrates
2. Intermittent fasting
3. Build more muscle with strength training and eating more protein

Low carb and fasting drop your baseline insulin level, which unlocks fat burning as fuel. Visceral fat will melt off and your health improves.

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Swipe to see the food pictures larger.

People who only focus on calories with their diet are focusing on the least important and often misleading aspect of food.

Take this delicious looking cheese burger with fries and Coke and compare it to this beautiful and delicious 1 pound skirt steak I cooked yesterday. They both contain roughly 1000 Kcal, but their effect on your body cannot be any different.

The burger meal is as close as it gets to a plant based junk food diet. Look at it. Besides the thin beef patty and the slice of American cheese (which isn’t even real cheese), the rest (and most of the calories) is all free of animal products: ketchup, lettuce, tomato, pickles, bun, Coke, fries cooked in soybean oil.

The skirt steak has salt and pepper and was cooked in ghee. It happens that there are no veggies next to it, but don’t fixate on that. It can easily have some veggies with it and the point remains.

The burger meal is very high carb, high fat and low protein, while the steak is very high protein, moderate fat, very low carb.

The burger meal will leave you sluggish afterward, get a glucose and insulin rush and end up storing most of the calories as fat, then be hungry a few hours later, craving more carbs.

The steak will have a minimal effect on glucose and insulin, will keep you satiated and with steady energy for many hours.

The amount of nutrients in the steak is extremely high, but very low in the burger meal.

The burger meal is the prototype of what the standard American diet looks like, which is responsible from most of the chronic diseases such as obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

The steak represents a whole food, low carb diet, which should be the standard human diet and the diet to fix metabolic diseases.

When you eat right, calories will take care of themselves. When you eat wrong, you always have to worry about your calories and you won’t be healthy regardless.

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The power of food to heal chronic diseases doesn’t get the credit it deserves because it’s not a drug that Big Pharma can profit from and it’s not as sexy as inventing the next big drug to treat an illness. It takes error and commitment.

I’ve been preaching for nearly 3 years about diet and lifestyle as the main way of reversing many chronic diseases. Some people were already doing it and experienced the benefits. Some listened to me and found great results, but I think the majority of people sit on the sidelines not believing that changing their diet can heal them, or they they don’t think they have the willpower or desire to eat differently despite all the suffering.

So, if you’re someone who improved your health with diet and lifestyle instead of drugs, I want you to comment below with what you did and what health issues you improved.

I’m hoping that many of the skeptics will at least wonder that maybe there is something to it. I posted this on Twitter yesterday and I have 240 replies with story after story about how powerful food was for their health.

So go ahead, tell everyone what you did.

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Before you dismiss this because you think you can’t do it or that it won’t work, try to understand why it worked for many people. Imagine a time where you could be symptom free and medication free.

If you have an autoimmune disease such as rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, psoriasis, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, lupus, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, and many more, your body is attacking itself. The problem normally starts in the gut when it gets compromised by something in your diet. Your gut becomes leaky and allows foreign molecules to cross the gut barriers and it triggers a host of immune reactions and inflammation. This can also trigger an autoimmune disease.

The fix is to heal the gut and the inflammation that is ravaging your body.

The carnivore diet is the ultimate elimination diet because you remove all possible culprits from sugar, processed food and plants. By eating just animal food like red meat, seafood, poultry, eggs and even dairy, you will get all the nutrition you need while you give your body a chance to heal.

I have personally seen and heard from others who have put such conditions in remission and did not need powerful drugs that lower the immune system and increase the risk of infections and cancer.

If you struggle with an autoimmune disease, you need to give this a try for a few months. Once you feel better, you can start re-introducing healthy food such as vegetables and fruits and make sure you don’t flare up.

If you still don’t want to do it and would rather be in pain and on medications, then you really need to check in with yourself as to why you’re being so irrational about trying something that is risk free that can potentially heal you. Often the problem is food addiction preventing you from changing.

But even if you’re not willing to go 100% carnivore, eliminating sugar and all processed carbohydrates and minimizing vegetables for a few months will still give you benefits. The key is to do something!

I am trying to lead you to water, but I cannot make you drink. The rest is on you!

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Type 2 diabetes is a broken metabolic state due to severe insulin resistance caused by chronic carbohydrates overdose and toxicity.

Knowing that, it doesn’t take a doctor to realize that removing carbohydrates from the picture should put the whole process in reverse and allow the body to heal. Stopping carbohydrates will reduce blood glucose level, which will reduce insulin level, which in turn reduces insulin resistance and eventually type 2 diabetes goes away.

What I mean by digestible carbohydrates is basically all sources of sugar, natural or not, and starches that turn into sugar when digested, primarily grains such as bread, pasta, rice, etc. Eating vegetables that are mainly fiber are not digestible carbohydrates for the most part and are ok eat.

When you remove carbs, your body will switch its energy source to dietary and body fat.

Eating a protein and fat centric whole food diet is the best at maintaining satiety and reducing cravings. This allows you to eat less frequently, so you won’t be snacking.

If you do this consistently:
- Type 2 diabetes will go away
- Prediabetes will go away
- Excess abdominal visceral fat will go away
- High blood pressure will improve or go away

When these conditions go away, you’ll be off medications and you’ll avoid complications of these diseases.

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All you need to do to be healthy for the most part of your life is to give your body proper nutrition and avoid poisoning it with the toxic junk that people eat everywhere you look.

It’s really simple, folks! Avoid the poison and you will stay healthy. Remove the poison and you will eventually get back to being healthy.

What is the poison? It’s anything that resembles the standard American diet, which is loaded with excessive amount of sugar, refined carbs, processed oils, chemicals, pesticides, preservatives, dyes, etc.

All you need to do is remove this junk from your daily life and eat real whole food rich in protein and fat and low in sugar and refined starches.

The only obstacle is the addictive nature and convenience of the food that is killing us. So, awareness and commitment to your health is essential to be able to avoid the sea of poison you’re surrounded by and focus on proper nutrition.

You owe it to yourself and your family.

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Good health is our default state. If we eat right, we become “lucky” to be among the few who are truly healthy.

Staying healthy is active work. But, poor health is also active work.

When you continuously eat junk food, too much sugar, fake food, smoke, drink alcohol to excess and live a sedentary life, you will become unhealthy.

If you change that to eating real whole food as often as possible and live an active lifestyle, you will become healthy!

True health isn’t complicated. People think about it in a complicated way.

The hard part is doing the simple things consistently for a long time to reap the benefits.

If you’re in poor health, do something about it. Eliminate the poison they made you sick and is keeping you sick. Replace junk with real whole food. Cook your own food from scratch whenever possible.

You can do this.

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Who wouldn’t love a quick fix for their problems? But as you all know deep down, there is no quick fixes for complicated problems.

If obesity can simply be fixed with a pill, an injection or surgery, I would be the first to recommend them and avoid months and years of coaching people to change their behavior and address what they eat.

The new weight loss drugs and weight loss surgeries work for initial rapid weight loss. If your stomach can’t fit food because you cut most of it out, you’ll be full fast and you will lose weight (and have nutrient deficiencies). If you have no appetite and are nauseated because of the weight loss drug, you won’t eat much and you will lose weight.

This is no different than exerting willpower to restrict calories to lose weight.

However, sooner or later, if you don’t change your eating habits, your emotional eating, your food addiction and you don’t change what you actually eat (not just how much), your weight loss will eventually stop and you will start gaining weight again, because the drug effect wanes after a year or two, the body adapts and you will find ways to consume the junk calories that caused the problem in the first place. Weight regain usually comes back with vengeance.

Save yourself money, complications, side effects and eventual failure and focus on the root issue, which is YOU. You need to make better food choices. You need to work on what makes you eat bad in the first place. This deep work cannot be overcome with a drug or surgery.

Having said that, some people may benefit from the drugs as a temporary measure to kick start the process of lifestyle change if they’re failing to do it.

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True health, whether physical or mental, is NOT a drug deficiency problem.

You’re not overweight because you’re deficient in Ozempic.

You don’t have abnormal cholesterol because you’re deficient in statins.

You don’t have high blood pressure or type 2 diabetes because you’re deficient in drugs used for these conditions.

You are not anxious and depressed because you’re deficient in Xanax and Zoloft.

You get the gist. You are physically unhealthy because you are deficient in proper nutrition and poisoned by toxic junk and consume too much sugar, ultra refined and fake food.

Your mental health is often damaged for the same reason as your physical health. After all, your brain is another organ swimming in a body environment that you created with the food you ingest.

You health is your responsibility and is under your control because what you eat is under your control. Fixing your health is largely done by fixing your diet.

If you rely on the medical system to fix your problems, you will be screwed. You will find yourself overmedicated, but not any healthier.

Medicine has a role for acute illnesses, trauma and some special conditions. It also has a temporary role in managing chronic diseases when in danger, but you will not heal and get healthier from chronic metabolic disease unless you address the root cause, which is your diet.

It’s time you take charge of your diet and health!

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If you get a painful splinter stuck in your finger, you can do many things to control the symptoms. You can:
- cover your finger with padding to avoid irritation
- avoid pushing on it so it doesn’t trigger your pain
- take pain medications so it doesn’t hurt
- numb your finger so you stop feeling it

But none of the above will fix the problem. You will continue to have the splinter. Your finger will get inflamed requiring more drastic measure to control the symptom. Your finger may even get infected and you risk losing it.

Alternatively, you can fix the root cause by plucking the splinter out of your finger. This will cure the condition and you won’t need any other treatment.

Unfortunately, the modern medicine approach to chronic metabolic diseases is similar to managing the splinter without removing it.

Type 2 diabetes is a prime example. Chronic carbohydrates toxicity is the root cause here. This causes insulin resistance and the developed of the disease. The solution is simply removing carbohydrates from the diet so the body can heal. Drugs will only mask the symptoms for a period of time. Without changing the diet, it will get worse and require more medication.

The same concept applies to other diseases that are rooted in diet: obesity, primary hypertension, fatty liver disease, cardiovascular diseases, many autoimmune diseases, etc. Drugs can help, but they won’t fix the problem. Your diet can!

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If you struggle with obesity, type 2 diabetes, prediabetes, or any chronic metabolic disease for that matter, the cause for the vast majority of people is the DIET! What people eat day in and day out led to their current state of health.

Family history only gives you a hint of what you might be genetically predisposed to IF you follow their path of eating habits.

Chronic metabolic diseases are diseases of the modern world that sky rocketed in the last 50 years. Our genes did not suddenly change, but our food environment dramatically changed and is literally poisoning us.

EVERY person is capable of reversing their condition and healing. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU CAN DO IT!

The solution might not be easy but it is VERY simple: you MUST change what your diet consists of.

Ignore all the noise out there and the new drugs on the block. Ignore most official dietary guidelines.

There is no one right diet, but you have to eliminate junk food and fake food. You need to reduce the amount of sugar and refined starches that you eat. You need to stop drinking your calories and eating “empty calories”. You need to prioritize whole food. In my opinion and experience, the ideal diet is a whole food animal based, low carb diet. It’s the most nutrient dense, satiating way of eating.

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The elephant in the room that most people ignore when they start to wake up to their poor health and dream about getting healthier is the fact that most people are addicted to some form of junk food, whether they know it or not.

Junk food, sugar and most ultra processed food are addictive. Food companies know this and they engineer their products to maximize consumption in order to maximize sales. There is a reason why many can’t stop eating once they start consuming hyperpalatable, addictive food. If you look closely, most of this junk is loaded with sugar, ultra refined starch and some form of fat (mostly seed oils). The combination of carbs and fat is extremely palatable to humans. Combine that with low protein and you become insatiable and overtime you become metabolically sick.

Recognizing your food addiction to junk is half the battle. If it wasn’t for addiction, people would have a much easier time switching to real whole food.

Kids and adults are hooked to junk. Have you seen kids menus in schools, hospitals and restaurants? It’s horrifying. When you set a child on the wrong path before they’re even conscious of themselves, you create a sick adult who will struggle all their lives.

Awareness is key to success. There is nothing wrong in indulging in junk food once in a while, but it cannot be your main diet. Most chronic metabolic diseases are dietary diseases.

You can put an end to your suffering from chronic metabolic diseases if you recognize your addiction and make a decision to quit. Once you decide, the solution is waiting for you. There is plenty of delicious real whole foods that will support your healing journey.

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We have a metabolic health crisis in the world. More people are sick than healthy. The vast majority of people (at least in the US) are either overweight or obese. Nearly half the population has prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. If you also count hypertension, heart disease, autoimmune diseases, cancer , etc., you won’t find many truly healthy individuals. That’s really sad and a public health disaster.

The solution is really SIMPLE. It’s so simple that most people refuse to believe it, because it puts the responsibility on them to do it.

Junk food is killing us. People don’t eat real food anymore and health experts keep singling out the healthiest food on the planet, MEAT.

The reality is that most people consume astronomical amount of carbohydrates in the form of sugar, ultra refined carbs and grains.

I single out seed oils for many reasons: It’s equivalent to junk food. It’s put in everything. It’s a recent addition to the human diet, and I believe it’s highly inflammatory.

You can start your health journey by:
1. Reducing the amount of refined carbohydrates in your life.
2. Avoiding seed oils
3. Avoiding grazing and frequent snacking.

Eat real whole food. Prioritize protein and healthy fats (animal fat, olive oil, avocado oil, coconut oil). Eat to satiety.

By removing the poison from your diet, your body will start healing. Fine tuning and optimization is very individual.

If you don’t remove the cause of your illness from your diet, no amount of supplements, medications or added healthy food would make a significant difference.

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A lot of people suffer from gout, a very painful inflammatory arthritis caused by the deposition of uric acid crystals in joints. Uric Acid is a waste byproduct of purine metabolism, which is excreted by the kidneys. Uric Acid is present in all living things that have DNA. However red meat and shellfish are often blamed because there is a higher concentration of purine. So the standard advice for people with gout is to avoid meat, which is the wrong advice.

First, when we look closely, almost every person who has gout has some metabolic health issue such as hypertension, prediabetes, type 2 diabetes, fatty liver, obesity or simply increased visceral fat.

You don’t see a metabolically healthy person develop gout, even when all they eat is meat.

While an overload of purine from meat in a susceptible person can trigger a gout attack, the root problem however is SUGAR, particularly FRUCTOSE.

Fructose is unique. Its metabolism in the liver leads to Uric Acid production. Excess consumption of fructose (present in sugar, honey, high fructose corn syrup, fruit), leads to excess Uric Acid production. Also excess fructose contributes to insulin resistance, which also affects the kidney’s ability to excrete Uric Acid.

Gout is a metabolic problem driven by excess fructose consumption, not excess meat consumption.

The other major source is alcohol, which also leads to excess purine and Uric Acid production, increasing the risk of gout.

Cut out fructose and alcohol, not meat and your risk of gout drops dramatically.

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Metabolic diseases are dietary diseases. Once you truly understand this, you’ll realize that you are 100% responsible for and capable of fixing any metabolic condition you have such as obesity, prediabetes, type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease, and improve a whole bunch of symptoms that you might not be connecting to your diet such as fatigue, brain fog, skin issues, aches and pains, headaches, autoimmune conditions, anxiety, depression, etc.

Take a close look at what you’ve been eating for the past few years. Does it look like this 🥤🧃🍔🍟🌭🌮🍩🍕🥯🍪🍫🧇🍝🥞🍦🍚?

If so, make it look like this 🥩🍳🐟🦐🍗🥓🥗🍓🫐🍄🧀🧈🫒🥑🥦🫑🧅🧄🍠

Switching from a highly processed toxic junk food diet to a whole food nutrient rich diet will put you on track to lose weight and reverse most of the conditions mentioned above and more. You can also come off most medications in the process.

The key to success is consistency, which is in short supply these days.

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Metabolic diseases don’t happen overnight. They may manifest suddenly in the form of a stroke or a heart attack or any health crisis. You may discover you have type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure or fatty liver disease one day during a routine doctor visit. However, none of this happens suddenly.

Going from metabolically healthy to developing a chronic disease is a long process that takes years to develop and manifest. Your genes may increase your risk, but it takes a poor diet and lifestyle to pull the trigger.

Most people ignore the slow decline of their health because they “feel fine.” Many don’t connect the dots that their constant fatigue, low energy, poor sleep, headaches, aches and pains are due to their diet and not random luck or just stress or older age. We get a lot of warning signs along the way, but most ignore them.

You can prevent this. You can reverse this. But only YOU can do this. You have to take a serious look at your diet and lifestyle and make drastic changes. If you don’t, you are dictating your fate.

The good news is that your body is amazing at healing itself. What took years to manifest, can reverse within weeks and months. Some may take a few years, but the improvement is almost immediate.

If you’re not dead, it’s NEVER too late to improve your health by changing your diet.

This diet is simply going back to eating real whole food, away from junk, excess sugar, excess refined starches, artificial ingredients.