The Anti-Aging Effects of a Keto Diet
Anti-aging is a term that’s just thrown around pretty loosely. And in this video, I want to help you understand how to truly start combating aging at a cellular level and comprehend what’s going on inside your body. I’m Thomas DeLauer with Keto-Mojo and I’m going to help you understand how the ketogenic diet, and periods of fasting, can play a big effect on something known as vascular aging. You see when we look at overall life, when we look at disease, aging is probably the strongest risk factor that we have to worry about, so if we can reduce aging, we can reduce our risk factors of disease plain and simple.
The Relationship Between Calorie Restriction and Aging
When we look by and large at how we can delay aging or have an anti-aging effect on the body, calorie restriction comes to mind first and foremost. We’ve been studying caloric restriction for years and when it comes down to the effect on aging, it’s been proven in a lot of studies that reducing calories can increase a life span. But what if there are some ways utilizing the Ketogenic Diet that we could actually delay aging without having to reduce calories to a crazy extent. Well, science is starting to prove that there are some ways and it all has to do with the common denominator known as beta-hydroxybutyrate. You see, when you fast or when you go through periods of caloric restriction your body produces something known as beta-hydroxybutyrate or BHB for short, and when you’re on the Ketogenic Diet you are producing BHB or beta-hydroxybutyrate. As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what the Keto-Mojo meter is measuring. When you’re measuring ketone levels, you’re measuring levels of beta-hydroxybutyrate. So, here’s where things get interesting because BHB now has a link directly with an anti-aging effect.
Molecular Cell Journal Study
There was a study published in the journal of Molecular Cell and it took a look at something known as vascular aging. Vascular aging is starting to get studied a lot more now. Vascular aging literally has to do with the aging of the vessels that supply blood and lymph to our organs and other areas of our body that are super important. Inside our blood vessels, inside our arteries, and inside our lymphatic vessels, we have these cells called endothelial cells. Our vessels are living, and these cells are literally there surviving, dividing, multiplying, growing, and as they age the vessels age. If we can measure the anti-aging effect of these vessels, we could take a look at anti-aging as a whole. This study found that beta-hydroxybutyrate does delay the aging of these endothelial cells and it does so by preventing a specific type of death called senescence and this particular type of cell death that occurs from aging. Overtime a cell loses its ability to grow and it loses its ability to divide. What ends up happening is the cells eventually just wear out and die. Now when we have beta-hydroxybutyrate in the equation it forces or encourages a cell to divide at a younger age which means that you end up with younger cells. When cells divide, they’re essentially creating new cells. Since beta-hydroxybutyrate has an effect on helping cells divide we can keep a particular area of the body younger for a longer period of time. In this case with the vascular aging situation we’re encouraging these endothelial cells to divide, and therefore stay younger and reducing vascular aging.
The Production of Stem Cells
There is another component that’s added to the equation here and this is one that’s just starting to get studied as well and this is the fact that beta-hydroxybutyrate encourages stem cell production as well. When we’re looking at the vascular system the encouragement of stem cells means that those endothelial cells can be produced more often, you’re going to be able to have new life. Stem cells are really emerging in all kinds of research these days, helping us restore knees from knee pain, helping us restore joints, helping us grow new hair, all kinds of things. Stem cells are really the future, so when we look at beta-hydroxybutyrate and its effect on generating the proper stem cells in specific areas of the body, we could be tapping into an entirely new system that promotes an anti-aging effect. If you want to make sure that you’re living your best life possible for as long as possible, you’re going to want to start listening to the science and you’re start paying attention to how often you get into the ketogenic state or how often you experiment with fasting. The best way to know that you’re there is by utilizing the Keto-Mojo meter because it gives you a flat out answer of what your levels of beta-hydroxybutyrate are in your body at that particular point in time. So as always, make sure you’re keeping it locked in here with Keto-Mojo and leave the guesswork out of the equation. You want to leave the measuring to the meter so you know right where you’re at. I’ll see you in the next video.
