Why Keto Is Good for Leaky Gut & Gut Health
There’s some really interesting new science. Proving that the ketogenic diet has extremely powerful effects on our digestive system from an inflammatory standpoint. You see we’ve known that the ketogenic diet, can be good for digestion simply because it eliminates a lot of bulk and eliminates too much roughage that can cause disturbance for people with irritable bowel syndrome. But now, we’re starting to see that there’s things that happen at the cellular level. Believe it or not the ketogenic diet can produce things that actually help the gut restore itself and regenerate. We’ll dive into it a little bit more detail. My name is Thomas DeLauer and I’m with Keto-Mojo.
What is Leaky Gut?
Today we’re breaking down how the ketogenic diet can help out what’s called a leaky gut. You see the first thing that we have to look at, is there’s a lot of evidence surrounding the ketogenic diet and suppression of what is called the NLRP3 inflammasome. What the NLRP3 inflammasome is, is basically a bunch of proteins that go around and trigger inflammation where it needs to be triggered. It’s sort of like the… I guess you could call them the soldiers of the actual immune system. Okay so, they’re the ones that go around and kind of determine where things need to have inflammation as a result of illness. So, they travel around and if they see oh hey there’s an injury here we need to signal white blood cells and macrophages to go here then they will. Now we want to have this suppressed to some degree, because if it’s elevated and it’s not supposed to be elevated, we have high levels of inflammation which are going to make us sick. Now this happens a lot in the intestinal tract.
So in the intestinal tract you have enterocytes and you have endothelial cells. These cells basically allow things to come into the bloodstream from the intestinal tract but what happens is if there’s a lot of inflammation, they end up getting these sort of cracks in between them and they end up getting so swollen that there’s gaps in between these cells, which make it so that nutrients that aren’t fully digested get into the bloodstream. This is called a leaky gut and although it’s heavily marketed and talked about a lot, it is a real thing and it does really occur. What happens when larger food particles get into the bloodstream is, it triggers an inflammatory response in and of itself because the body doesn’t recognize what these larger chunks of nutrients and food matter are. Like they just don’t know what to do with it. So it triggers a full-scale attack. Making us sick, inflamed, and over all just feeling lethargic. So that’s the first way that ketones help this.
How Ketones Suppress Inflammation
When you have ketones in your body because you’re in ketosis, you suppress the NLRP3 inflammasome which can help mitigate some of that and lessen the inflammatory potential within the intestinal tract. But now there’s an interesting study that was published in the journal Cell. And we’re talking a really new study. 2019 study out of August that’s just fascinating stuff. And it found that ketones actually increase the rate of intestinal stem cell production. You see they did some interesting studies, where they found that if certain mice were devoid of ketones, they had a certain rate of stem cell development. But then when ketones were back in the equation, the stem cell development nearly doubled.
Ketones Increase the Rate of Intestinal Stem Cells
Okay so what that means is we are finding that ketones are legitimately required to create new intestinal cells. So imagine that you’re unhealthy, you’ve been eating just cruddy sugary foods for a long time and your gut is just a wreck. Okay and you start eating healthy but it’s just not making a dent because your body takes so long to go through its natural restorative processes and rebuild the gut lining etc. You have to go through the normal amount of time that it takes to create new stem cells and create new intestinal cells and it’s a drag. It kills your motivation because you’re making healthy moves but now it’s taking a long time to get there. Well, it turns out that if you just go on the ketogenic diet, you can double the rate of production of those stem cells. Which means you could in essence, potentially heal your gut twice as fast. Simply by being able to be in ketosis.
Keto-Friendly Foods Feed the Cells in Our Gut
Now the other piece that we have to look at is a lot of the good quality fats that were consuming on a ketogenic diet, contain the short chain fatty acids like butyric acid that we need to feed the cells within our gut. Okay, so the cells within our gut feed off of short chain fatty acids and normally we have to break down food into these short chain fatty acids. But the foods that we consume via ketosis, these ketogenic friendly foods are naturally high in butyric acid. Naturally high in these short chain fatty acids. So we have just three angles of Awesome gut health that are happening with the ketogenic diet. And these are three angles that we know of, let alone all the other histone deacetylase inhibition effects and all other genetic effects that occur with the ketogenic diet that we can talk about in other videos.
Point is, if you’re trying to get a healthier gut and remember it all starts in the gut, the ketogenic diet might just be the way to go. And the way to measure that you have those amazing ketones in your body, is by measuring and that’s exactly where the Keto-Mojo meter comes in. Otherwise it’s all guesswork. You’re leaving it all up to chance. You need to test. You need to use your gold standard of measuring which is the Keto-Mojo meter and make sure your ketones are elevated so you’re getting those gut healing effects. So, as always, keep it locked in here and leave the guesswork out of the equation. Leave the measuring to the meter and I’ll see you in the next Keto-Mojo video.
