Keto Diet with Dr. Christopher Shade: Rational Wellness Podcast 111
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Dr. Christopher Shade discusses Keto Diet with Dr. Ben Weitz.
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Podcast Highlights
1:06 The topic is how the ketogenic diet, fasting, and calorie restriction can have benefits for longevity. This is through stimulating AMPK and inhibiting the mTOR pathway and stimulating autophagy, which is the process by which cells break down and digest old, damaged parts of cells and proteins and debris.
8:04 Dr. Christopher Shade is especially well known for developing liposomal forms of nutritional supplements like glutathione to increase absorption rates. A liposome is is a spherical vesicle made of a lipid phospholipid bilayer. Dr. Shade explained that “You have to design these shells and you have to get them exactly into the right size and you have to have exactly the right chemistry in the middle to hold the whole nutraceutical you’re going to bring. There’s two basic kinds, there’s the hollow water-filled ones for taking water solubles and that’s called Liposome. There’s the solid, oil filled ones for bringing oil solubles like we have in the Keto Before 6. We’re doing things like Berberine and Resveratrol, those are called Nanoemulsions. You have to get the right ratios of all the phospholipids in the membrane. You have to have the right size, you have to have the right ratios in the water, the glycerin, the ethanol, the different oils in there. When you do that and only when you do that do you have this enhanced uptake. In fact, you start absorbing these little spheres right through the oral cavity, right into your blood. You can see this stuff in the blood in as little as two minutes.”
10:10 The Ketogenic Diet is very low carbohydrate, low to moderate protein, and very high fat. It relies mostly on fat and vegetables, which mimicks some of the aspects of fasting. Dr. Shade said that the key is going back and forth between the fed state and the fasting state. During the fed state you are in fat storage, lipogenesis state, and when you do keto, you turn on the lipolysis, fat burning state. You switch back and forth from glycogen storage to glycogen burning. You upregulate your glucose transporters. You block mTOR and you go into autophagy where you recycle your proteins by breaking down dysfunctional parts of organs, like burning the fatty deposits in the liver and breaking down damaged mitochondria. You need to break down these damaged mitochondria to restore cellular function. This happens during the fasted state through the activation of AMPK, which cascades into blocking mTOR, the activation of PPAR-alpha and the activation of PGC1A. When you burn up the old mitochondria and synthesize new ones you can create higher mitochondrial density. You also have a change in the ratio of NAD+ to NADH. This fasting/keto state also probably effects the Sirtuins and the FOXOs, which stimulate growth factor release out of stem cells.
15:19 Exercise has some of the same beneficial properties as fasting. Exercise converts ATP to ADP to AMP and when the ratio of AMP to ATP goes up, it gives you a 10x upregulation of AMPKinase. Then if you phosphorylate this threonine residue on the alpha sub unit, that gives you another 100x upregulation, which means that you now have a 1000x upregulation. This is especially the case when you work out after an overnight fast.
17:42 One of the challenges of a ketogenic diet are that it is very difficult to be super low carb all the time. Dr. Shade explained that “We’ve designed our Western civilization around the all-mighty carb. We’re now reaping the diabesity reward of our own old food pyramid that was all carb.” When you go out to socialize, it is very difficult to avoid all carbs. Also, there is a benefit to switching back and forth between periods of low carbs and periods of higher carbs. He mentioned that Joe Mercola is a friend and he was doing very strict keto for quite a while with low protein as well and he had shrunk down to nothing. He had gone too far. Now he cycles back and forth between keto/fasted and fed and he looks much better. Back and forth between super low carbs and higher carbs. Dr. Shade developed his KetoBefore 6 product so that no matter what you ate the night before that between the overnight fast and you take a teaspoon of this and in 90 minutes you get blood ketones. He explained that if you are using urinary ketone strips, you will see ketones for the first week and then when you are fat adapted, you will not see ketones in your urine anymore because now you are burning the ketones. Urinary ketones are just when you haven’t adapted all of the transporters and enzymes. But if you measure the blood, you will see the ketones.
22:32 Dr. Volter Longo at USC has been doing a lot of research on fasting and longevity. Dr. Longo is recommending what he calls the Fasting Mimicking Diet, which is a 5 day calorie restriction program that he recommends doing intermittently, such as once per month. But this program is essentially a plant based, Mediterranean style eating plan (Dr. Longo calls it a Pescatarian diet plan) and it is being sold in a box by a company called Prolon that Dr. Longo started. Dr. Shade explained that Dr. Longo is not into low carbs but more into calorie restriction and Dr. Shade said that the approach is so low calories, that it’s essentially fasting. Dr. Shade said “You look at these people that Valter Longo was interviewing, and they’re like these little skinny, little people up in the mountains. They’re like, ‘How are you alive? ‘Because, I’ve never had any fun.’ They’re like toothpicks, and I was like, ‘No, I don’t think that’s the way I want to go.’ … We want to look maybe a little grayer, but we want to have mass and strength and we want to have a good robust life until the end here.”
28:23 Dr. Shade told the story how he came up with the idea for his new Keto Before 6 product. He was at the Paleo f(x) conference and Dr. Joe Mercola squeezed his love handles and taunted him about his level of visceral fat that would end up killing him. Then Dr. Mercola encouraged Dr. Shade to do 4 days of water fasting, that was to be part of a 30 day intermittent fast and Dr. Shade was not happy about the program. He did some reading and put together some ingredients that he figured out were natural mTOR blockers and he drank it and the he picked up a keto strip and peed on it and it was black, indicating that he was in ketosis. He realized that this could be a biohack to get himself into fat burning more quickly. Dr. Shade explained why he chose the nutrients in his Keto Before 6 product–DIM, Quercetin, Milk Thistle, Resveratrol, Berberine HCL, and Cinnamon bark oil–because these nutrients can help induce ketosis more quickly than just following a ketogenic diet can. Resveratrol is an AMPK activator and its also a Sirtuin activator. Berberine is nature’s Metformin and it is an AMPK activator and also helps with insulin resistance. Silymarin from Milk Thistle is also an activator of AMPK and it helps to seal up leaky liver. Leaky liver upregulates Canalicular trafficking, which affects bile flow. Quercetin is a PGC1A upregulator, it turns up mitochondrial function, it’s a very strong AMPK activator, and it also boosts NAD+ levels in the cell by blocking NADase, which then further induces Sirtuins, which further activates AMPK. All this in addition to the overnight fast results in ketone formation in only about 90 minutes.
33:08 Ketone salts can be helpful for brain health, esp. for patients with Alzheimer’s, MS, or other neurological dysfunction.
37:30 Dr. Shade talked about Keto flu, which is when some people get flu like symptoms when starting a ketogenic diet may be partially related to water and mineral depletion, like a lot of people talk about. But the core of Keto flu is that you are detoxing and as you burn fat, you’re releasing fat soluble toxins. The best thing to do is take binders, like the Quicksilver Ultrabinder. You can also take a bitter’s formula, some PC binders, and some glutathione to support detoxification. Embrace the Keto flu because it means you are getting rid of toxins.
Dr. Christopher Shade is a PhD researcher and the founder and CEO of Quicksilver Scientific, which offers his patented mercury speciation process as part of its heavy metal testing offered to practitioners. Dr. Shade has also developed some of the most advanced detoxification systems using unique combinations of nutritional supplements in specialized nanoparticle and liposomal delivery systems for higher bioavailability. If you go to Quicksilver Scientific you can register as either a practitioner or a patient to buy the nutritional products.
Dr. Ben Weitz is available for nutrition consultations specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also specializing in Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure and also weight loss, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111 or go to www.drweitz.com.
Podcast Transcript
Dr. Weitz: This is Dr. Ben Weitz with the Rational Wellness Podcast, bringing you the cutting edge information on health and nutrition from the latest scientific research and by interviewing the top experts in the field. Please subscribe to Rational Wellness Podcast on iTunes and YouTube and sign up for my free eBook on my website by going to drweitz.com. Let’s get started on your road to better health. Hello Rational Wellness Podcasters, thank you so much for joining me again today. For those of you who enjoy listening to the Rational Wellness Podcast, please go to iTunes and give us a ratings and review. That way, more people can find out about the Rational Wellness Podcast. Also, you can check out the video version on YouTube and if you go to my website there’ll be show notes and a complete transcript–that’s drweitz.com.
Our topic of conversation today is how the ketogenic diet, fasting and even calorie restriction can have benefits for longevity. We’re going to be talking to Dr. Chris Shade, one of my favorite people. Both of these types of programs, ketogenic diet, fasting and even just calorie restriction have been advocated by various doctors, scientists for reducing diabetes, other chronic diseases and also to promote longevity. The ketogenic diet is a very high fat, medium protein and low carb diet that originally was found to be helpful for Epilepsy. The drug Rapamycin, which inhibits mTOR, mTOR actually stands for the mammalian target of Rapamycin, also prevents the development of Epilepsy. mTOR is a cell signaling pathway and both fasting and the ketogenic diet have been shown to inhibit this mTOR pathway. They promote longevity by inhibiting this mTOR pathway because mTOR regulates and stimulates… regulates autophagy. Autophagy is a process by which cells break down and digest old damaged parts of the cells and proteins and debris. By reducing mTOR you stimulate this rejuvenation process that’s really beneficial for cells and for living organisms. Increased AMPK is another molecule that helps to decrease mTOR and stimulate Autophagy. The first drug that was found to inhibit mTOR is this drug I mentioned called Rapamycin. Now this drug was originally isolated from a bacterium found on Easter Island and the natives call this island Rapa Nui, so that’s how they came up with the name Rapamycin. It was originally developed as an antifungal drug but then was found to have immune suppressing properties and so it was really an anti-rejection drug. Now Rapamycin is being used off label by some anti aging doctors as an anti aging drug. mTOR is really a nutrient sensor that detects if there are enough nutrients available for cell growth and if there’s no food such as while fasting, then the cells go into an energy conservation, no growth, dormant state for the sake of survival.
Dr. Chris Shade is one of the most brilliant PhD researchers working in the field of nutritional supplements, and he’s the founder and CEO of Quicksilver Scientific. Quicksilver Scientific is known especially for its heavy metal testing and detoxification systems and products and its unique liposomal supplement delivery systems. Dr. Shade has developed a new supplement to help patients more easily get into ketosis while following a ketogenic diet, Keto Before 6. Chris, thank you so much for joining me today.
Dr. Shade: I’m happy to be here. I always like talking to you Ben. I always like rolling on about these subjects, because they’re fascinating and incredibly helpful.
Dr. Weitz: And we all want to live a long time.
Dr. Shade: Yeah, that’s it. And live really well. We want the health span to be super long.
Dr. Weitz: Exactly. We want to rectangularize that curve and live a high level of function and then drop off at the end, the last day.
Dr. Shade: Yeah. Just go screaming right into the end.
Dr. Weitz: Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you became involved in Functional Medicine and in the nutritional supplement field?
Dr. Shade: Yeah. It’s a funny sort of cyclical path here, winding and cyclical. I was originally… I was a son of a professor. I was a nonbeliever in natural things. All of a sudden I’m in college, you take certain things and you open up your mind a little bit. I got into organic farming and I became an organic farmer. It was before USDA Organic. Things were really hardcore soil ecology back then. I really got involved in because first I was involved in environmental science and I saw environmental science as a profession is just running around behind the polluters making them feel good about things and making it public like you’re actually doing something but it was bullshit. I got deeply involved in food supply and health from food supply. Real organic farming is like I said, is deeply ecologic and there’s all this interaction between the microbes and the organic matter and the mineral matter inputs. This whole food web that’s going on in the soil to feed this food web that’s coming up above the soil. It’s only now that we’ve gotten so sophisticated about GI and digestion that we see it in a similar way that we used to look at soil.
I joked that I went out of business in organic farming the year that Whole Foods came along. I was early for the whole thing. I left school where I left the farm, and I went back to school, and I was looking at environmental chemistry again, and looked at metals, toxic metals. Then I developed that testing for looking at very small specific amounts of mercury in the environment and how it moves up the food web. I wanted to get back directly into working on health. I took the patent for that testing and all the knowledge that I had from that I came back into integrative and Functional Medicine and I brought forth these tools for evaluating toxicity. Then with that I had to develop tools for alleviating toxicity. Those were the detox systems I developed and in order to do that I needed to break this bioavailability barrier that surrounded glutathione. I had to be able to get glutathione in, which would normally be broken down by your digestion and that led me to Liposomes. I tried a lot of them out there, and most of them were just a lot of hype and not really a lot of action. I got really good at making my own Liposomes. It was so amazing what it can do for bioavailability that we started looking at all the other holes in Functional Medicine and then which compounds really need this kind of help. We started developing out a broader range beyond just detoxification.
Dr. Weitz: By the way, what exactly is a Liposome?
Dr. Shade: A Liposome, it looks like a little cell. It’s a spherical vesicle or a carrier made of a lipid phospholipid bilayer. Phospholipids are the same things that make up your cell membranes and they’re used for phospholipid therapy-
Dr. Weitz: It’s a lot more complicated than just combining a nutrient with Phosphatidylcholine or Lecithin right?
Dr. Shade: No. You have to design these shells and you have to get them exactly into the right size and you have to have exactly the right chemistry in the middle to hold the whole nutraceutical you’re going to bring. There’s two basic kinds, there’s the hollow water-filled ones for taking water solubles and that’s called Liposome. There’s the solid, oil filled ones for bringing oil solubles like we have in the Keto Before 6. We’re doing things like Berberine and Resveratrol, those are called Nanoemulsions. You have to get the right ratios of all the phospholipids in the membrane. You have to have the right size, you have to have the right ratios in the water, the glycerin, the ethanol, the different oils in there. When you do that and only when you do that do you have this enhanced uptake. In fact, you start absorbing these little spheres right through the oral cavity, right into your blood. You can see this stuff in the blood in as little as two minutes. It’s good for something like vitamin C or B vitamins. It makes them more bioavailable but it’s amazing and it’s a game changer for stuff that otherwise isn’t bioavailable like glutathione or like in the Keto Before 6 you’ve got Berberine, Resveratrol, Quercetin, Silymarin. All these things that have all this promise for what they can do to your biochemistry, but it’s very unrealized promise generally because of their bioavailability issues. That was the whole trick, is to get around this bioavailability and then make it more like an injection and really get the deep rewards of our natural medicine cabinet.
Dr. Weitz: Cool. Let’s talk about the ketogenic diet and what benefits are attained in this way?
Dr. Shade: Absolutely. Ketogenic you see that comes on the heels of the Paleo. Paleo got big but not huge. Keto got huge and it’s because it works on so many different issues that it was applied to. Probably the biggest medicinal, the biggest pathology it was used for was around Type 2 Diabetes and insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, those kinds of things. Paleo was very low carbohydrate, it’s still very low carbohydrate, but Paleo tended to accentuate the protein aspect of it. Where Keto now limits the protein, not like it as much as it limits carbohydrate but it limits protein, and then it really relies on fat and vegetables. This is a really big thing because it really is mimicking a lot of the aspects of fasting.
All of this is a roll, a back and forth pendulum between fed and fasting. Fed means you have access to carbs specifically. When you have access to carbs now talk like the Paleo guys like way, way back and evolution. You didn’t have that access to the carbs. When you did, what you did was store this surplus energy that you are getting and it would turn you, it would make you store energy as glycogen. You would store energy as fat. You would actually take that, you would synthesize all these carbs together in the fat, store fat or any fat that you’re eating in you would store instead of burning it. In these periods of abundance when you come upon the trees that all the fruits are coming out, the berries that are coming out of the bushes, the grains are coming out. You can eat a lot, and you’re going to store it like a bear’s fat. Now in the fasted state, when you don’t have those carbs, now your blood sugar is going to drop and more importantly the insulin is going to drop. Then you switch to this fasted state where you go back into all that stuff and you start burning it all. You switch from lipogenesis which is building fat on, to lipolysis, which is burning fat. You switch from glycogen storage to glycogen burning. You even upregulate your glucose transporters so you can more effectively burn what’s there for you. Coming along with all this then is the blocking of mTOR and that shift inward instead of protein synthesis, you go into autophagy where you recycle protein. This is really important because it’s at that point you go inward and you take all of the dysfunctional parts. That could be whole cells, dysfunctional parts of organs, and probably the most notable for this is the liver, like burning the fatty deposits in the liver. In the cell, I think Mitochondria, they get damaged. You can throw all the CoQ10 and all the mitochondrial supplements you want at that damaged mitochondria. It’s only when you really break that down and rebuild it that you’re going to restore function.
mTOR forward is protein synthesis. It’s fat synthesis. It’s laying down mass. This is important when you’re young you’re laying down mass all the time but when you get old you got to go in, you’ve got to clean up what’s going inside. That happens during this fasting period through this activation of a factor called AMPK. Then that cascades from there into the blocking of mTOR, the activation of PPAR-alpha, which PPAR-alpha stimulates burning of fat. With that also comes the activation of PGC1A to another nuclear transcription factor like PPAR-alpha but this is signaling for mitochondrial biogenesis. While you’re burning up the old mitochondria, you’re synthesizing new ones. If you do this right, you can restore the cell door higher mitochondrial density. You also have a change in the ratio of NAD+ to NADH. More NAD+ which gives you more oxidative potential to burn things up and that drags with it the Sirtuins and what are called FOXOs. Sirtuins and FOXOs are both pro longevity genes. This keto diet is this and there’s Keto is… let’s just call it the keto state is burning efficiently, clearing, clarifying, and regenerating. It also has effects probably through the Sirtuins on turning up growth factor release out of the stem cells. So it’s a really a wonderful, wonderful tool.
Dr. Weitz: Doesn’t exercise have a lot of these same properties because I just want to… when you work out, you’re breaking down your muscles, you stimulate your… getting rid of, you’re stimulating a lot of these different factors. You’re burning your glucose, you’re causing your body to utilize fat.
Dr. Shade: It’s the AMPK, during the exercise. AMPK is interesting and it’s a little counterintuitive how some of these supplements work on it. AMPK is AMP Kinase. AMP is the downstream from ATP. ATP adenosine triphosphate has the most stored high energy phosphate bonds. It’s donating those bonds to drive cellular energy processes. It loses one and then it becomes ADP and then it’s still got two and it loses another one it becomes AMP. AMP can’t do anything, it’s the end of the line there and it’s got to be recycled back. When the ratio of AMP to ATP changes so AMP is higher than ATP that is the activator. It’s one of two activators for AMPK. Just that one there will come from exercise that’ll activate AMPK and it’ll start you going into your stores and starting to burn things up and it’ll give you a lot of this cleanup. Now that AMP:ATP gives you about a 10x upregulation of AMPK. But then, there’s a side shot on to the three… there’s three sub parts of AMPK and to get anything to happen you need this AMP:ATP ratio to change and AMP sticks into that, that activates 10x. Then if you phosphorylate this threonine residue on the alpha sub unit that gives you another 100x upregulation and that takes you to 1000x upregulation. That will come during deeper aspects of calorie deprivation. If you’re really well fed and you’re exercising, you might get that small AMP bump but you won’t get the whole thing. It’s why fasted workout will get you even more, especially fat burning than a fed workout will.
Dr. Weitz: Interesting. What are some of the challenges that people have tried to follow a ketogenic diet and actually get into ketosis? Because from my experience working with clients, it’s very difficult, the ones that test to actually be in Ketosis.
Dr. Shade: Yeah, exactly. This is the whole trick as you have to be on this really low carb, high fat thing for a long period of time. We’ve designed our Western civilization around the all mighty carb. We’re now reaping the diabesity reward of our own old food pyramid that was all carb. There’re carbs that are really snackable, they’re really easy to deal with and it’s what’s going on out there. There’s this aspect of shutting yourself away from some of the social experiences that are going out there. That are going on out there especially around dinner where there’s drinking, there might be beer, there might be wine. There’s chips and little crunchy things and there’s pasta basis, there might be everything. You’re going to be like, “No.” To all of that. That’s a real pain and you’ve got to stay days like that to get into ketosis. Finally, you get that ketosis going and one night you break down to eat that stuff and boom, you’re off the wagon and you’re no longer in ketosis. That was the big hack for us here was the ability to have these nutraceuticals connected to a real high bioavailability delivery system, coming super fast and hard and hit both of those two triggers on the AMPK, both the AMP:ATP and phosphorylation of the threonine residue.
When you do that, so you wake up in the morning, you have this, regardless of what you ate the night before. It doesn’t matter how many french fries and beer you ate last night in the morning, just that period of fasting overnight, you take a teaspoon of this in an hour and a half, boom, you got blood ketones. It’s interesting how fast you fat adapt on this because if you’re using urinary ketone strips, you’ll start showing ketones the first day and for about a week you will, and then by the next week you’re not seeing any ketones anymore. Then you’re like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m out of ketosis.” You measure your blood and boom, there they are. That’s all fat adaptation. Urinary ketones are just when you haven’t adapted all of the transporters and enzymes to use all of that food.
One of the things that the guys who are doing keto just continuously and especially like Mercola and some of his buddies were trying to really strongly block mTOR. They weren’t just doing keto, they were doing keto with just a few grams of protein a day and they were really worried about what nut they ate and stuff just to keep the protein really down. Those guys shrunk down to like nothing. I remember looking at Joe and I was like, “God, what did you do?” Then, I see him a couple months later and he’s back to Joe. In fact, it was the best he ever looked and he was like, “Yeah, I went a little too far there.” So, now these guys cycle. Think of it like fasted and fed and there’s a little dowel symbol in between and you got to go back and forth. There are so many good things that happen when you do eat the carbs. There’s a lot of growth that happens. There’s so many good things that happen when you’re in the fasted state. Now these guys would go like fat side for like three, four days and then they’ll take complex carbs for another three days. They’ll swing back and forth.
Dr. Weitz: It reminds me of what I used to do back in the old bodybuilding days when we’d be doing competitions and go super low carb and then carb load right before the shows.
Dr. Shade: Yeah, yeah. Bulk up. First cut, cut, cut and then bulk up and that stuff takes a toll. One of the things that we did with this, intermittent fasting, there was always intermittent fasting but nobody can do intermittent keto because you couldn’t generate ketones in one day. So, we call it Intermittent Cyclical Keto because the reason it’s called Keto Before 6 is because you could be keto all day and then at 6:00 PM we’re calling dinnertime, you can go back on onto carbs. You have this cyclical intermittent keto where you keto up, keto all day again and at night you go back to the carbs. That’s how I work now and every day I work like that, I just give myself fat all day and then at night I eat whatever there is. My wife is French-Italian, so there’re carbs a lot and I feel freaking great. This is the best I’ve ever felt, all day long you’re banging with energy and then at night you rebuild and you sleep like a baby.
Dr. Weitz: Now you know Valter Longo, who’s doing this Fasting Mimicking Diet and claiming all the same benefits. He’s been doing a lot of research but his program is not really… it doesn’t seem to be a high fat diet. It’s a low calorie, vegetarian sort of thing.
Dr. Shade: Yeah. He’s the ultimate… he’s not a biohacker guy, he’s not trying to get the best of all worlds in one shot. He is the ultimate spokesman for the traditional Paesan, which means Peasant, Mediterranean Diet. He’s like these guys who had no money, ate twigs and berries and a little bit during the day live pretty long. Now they also found that once you get past a certain age, you’ve got to start stuffing the body full with protein and carbs or you die really quick but up to like 65 living on a calorie restricted diet makes you live better. That’s the Valter Longo approach is you have to… he’s not low carb. He’s like, “Yeah, you eat spaghetti. You just eat a little, little, little bit.” He’s just a calorie restriction guy with a varied diet and then fasting a couple times a year. They call it Fasting Mimicking. It’s freaking fasting. “Have a bottle of water with a couple of nutrients in it.” That’s fasting.
Dr. Weitz: A little powdered soup, you put water in, and put it in the microwave.
Dr. Shade: Yeah. This is like, this is not jiving with the rest of the naturopathic, Mediterranean thing.
Dr. Weitz: Interesting. You mentioned Sirtuins, and I remember David Sinclair who was doing a lot of the anti-aging research and he was trying to figure out that. He found that calorie restriction stimulated the Sirtuins and then he found out that he was trying to figure out a way so you could get the benefits of calorie restriction without actually doing calorie restriction for years and years. He was playing with Resveratrol and there was a thought that that was going to be the magic anti-aging nutrient but it didn’t quite work out as well as he had hoped.
Dr. Shade: Yeah. There’s a couple things that go into that, one is bioavailability. These things that we’re supposed to do Sirtuins and that kind of activation. That would be Resveratrol, Pterostilbene, Quercetin, even Silymarin, Berberine have a lot of those same aspects. You could see an AMPK activation which ones hit from which direction and which ones invoke Sirtuins and which ones don’t. It’s all coming down to a couple of key pathways. Here’s the deal, it comes down to this dietary. It’s not… they’re trying to have one thing you do all the time. They’re not having that rhythm and that pacing through the day where all you need is a really long intermittent fast or that intermittent keto where all you’re doing is fat feeding yourself, couple that to a bioavailable fat or nutrient like that and boom, you have all those things. In the next phase of this, in the next year or so I want to get together with some of those guys who did that work and see, “Hey, if we do it this way, do we get all of those benefits without that constant calorie restriction?” It’s just like it’s a calorie differential. You put them into a different bucket during the day just in a fat derived calories to drive the system all day and then you replenish with the broad spectrum at night. I’m certain that you’re going to get all those benefits all together and there’ll be little things that we tweak in, and we’re got to look at the total calorie usage. But, just from seeing the ketones turn on like that you know that you’re hitting all of those switches.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. It seems to me that there’s got to be this balance that, part of an anti-aging strategy has to be not just clearing out old cells and debris and stuff, but our cells break down, and we have to rebuild, and the ability to rebuild and create new neurons and new cells. So, while it may be beneficial, it seems to me to go into this fasted state where you maybe have lower IGF-1 levels and lower growth. Long term, that’s probably not a good idea, it seems that probably following a keto diet for too long because you’re inhibiting the regeneration of all those cells. That’s got to be an important part of anti-aging as well.
Dr. Shade: Yeah, and of our health span. You look at these people that Valter Longo was interviewing, and they’re like these little skinny little people up in the mountains. They’re like, “How are you alive? “Because, I’ve never had any fun.”” They’re like toothpicks, and I was like, “No, I don’t think that’s the way I want to go.” It’s the old alchemy is solve the coagulum, dissolve and then re-precipitate, dissolve, re-precipitate. That’s what we want to get to. We want to look maybe a little grayer, but we want to have mass and strength and we want to have a good robust life until the end is here.
Dr. Weitz: Right. We’ve got to be able to regenerate our cells,
Dr. Shade: Exactly.
Dr. Weitz: We have to go through periods of growth in and reformation of new neurons and connections
Dr. Shade: You’re not going to have that power without putting the calories in.
Dr. Weitz: Why did you choose these particular nutrients? In particular, I noticed that you have Berberine, and I find that as a super interesting nutrient because there’s been research on using Metformin for its anti-aging effects to be able and Berberine has been shown to have some of the same benefits.
Dr. Shade: Yeah. It’s the nature’s Metformin. Metformin is just a killer AMPK activator, but it’s not like Metformin is pharma’s version of Berberine. It was a natural compound now they just synthesize it. I forget, which plant they extracted it from but it was a natural compound. It’s a killer AMPK activator. I remember the first time I heard Terry Grossman say to me, “Everybody should be on Metformin, everybody over a certain age.” I’m like, “Huh?” Then I looked into it, yeah it’s an AMPK activator. It’s an under have two up regulator. It hits all these switches. Now, why did I use all the ones that I did? Let me first tell you where this all came from. I’m at Paleo f(x) and Joe Mercola comes up to me and he squeezes my love handles and taunts me and he goes, “Chris, all this visceral fat is going to kill you badly.” I’m like, “Shit. I know.” He had to school me for the next week on the phone every day and I have to do this 30 day intermittent fast. Then I got to do four days of water fasting. I get a week into that and I’m like, “The hell with this.” I started pulling together stuff that I know are mTOR blockers from my minimal reading on this. I start stacking them together, and I’m taking them, and I picked up a keto strip and I peed on it and it’s black. I’m like, “Jesus Christ.” I looked into this more and I realized that I was shifting myself deep into fat burning in no time at all.
What do you have in here? All right, you got Resveratrol. We just talked about that as it’s an AMPK activator, it’s a Sirtuin activator. It helps bring up NAD. Berberine, nature’s Metformin. It’s another Metformin it’s what it is. It’s a strong AMPK activator. It’s great on insulin resistance. It’s known for all these metabolic aspects. Silymarin, from Milk Thistle. People don’t know that’s also a really good one. It’s one of the activators that gives you the hyper charge of the AMPK. Once you’ve got the AMP in there, I mentioned that there’s this 100 fold activator. It goes through this trigger called the Liver Kinase B1 which is in the Liver. It was first seen as a tumor suppressor gene and because all this stuff is tumor suppressive because they’re mTOR blockers and they enhance autophagy and that’s this downstream cleanup thing. Milk thistle is really good to that direction and really good at activating this stuff in the liver. One of the things that it does as I look more into this AMPK activation in the liver seals up leaky liver. Have you ever heard of leaky liver?
Dr. Weitz: No.
Dr. Shade: You hear of leaky gut but sure enough there’s leaky liver too. It upregulates my favorite word Canalicular trafficking. Arresting canalicular trafficking, what’s there, right? Bile flow.
Dr. Weitz: You must have practiced that word.
Dr. Shade: This is… it’s high bile flow, and it’s repairing all these parts in your liver. I’d read before about it stabilizing bile flow under stress and this is a part of it through activating it this way. Then you’ve got Quercetin. Quercetin, yeah some people say it’s PGC1A up regulators it supposed to turn up mitochondrial function. Yeah. But, it does that because it’s a very strong AMPK activator, and it is separately and Sinclair showed this a booster of NAD levels because it blocks NADS called p38, that breaks down NAD. It raises NAD+ levels in the cell, which then further induce Sirtuins which further activate AMPK, and the whole thing drives together. One is just, so I could get that many AMPK activators together but another is because they hit these, some of them actually transiently block ATP synthase to bring AMP up to fit into that hole while others hit that threonine to hyper charge it. They’re coming at the situation from a couple of different aspects. Some are a little bit more focused on one organ over another, but the whole spread together gets me enough of a punch of the AMPK activation then I have that ketone information in an hour and a half.
Dr. Weitz: What about ketone salts and people advocate those as being beneficial?
Dr. Shade: Yeah. I was just over in Switzerland and I was talking to… looking for her name. Elaine, this is really cool because now ketone salts don’t fix everything at a cellular level, but they are amazing for energies especially in the cases of like Alzheimer’s where there’s not enough energy in the brain. I don’t find her name on here but her name was Elaine and she has a company called KetoSwiss and they’re using very specific salts of ketones or Ketone esters. I forget which one, but they figured out exactly how to get them and to have a steady ketone level throughout the day. That application is towards Alzheimer’s because the brain can only use two forms of fuel, glucose and ketones. When you have what’s called Type 3 Diabetes, which is part of the pathology of almost every Alzheimer’s patient. You can’t use the sugar. You can’t get it in. Ketones rescue the whole system, but it’s not bringing with it the shift into fat burning. It’s not bringing with it the autophagy, it’s not bringing with it the mitochondrial biogenesis, all these metabolic shifts that happen don’t happen. All you get from that is energy. The best application of the ketone salts is into anyone with a neurological dysfunction. They’re probably going to find they’re really good for Parkinson’s and MS and some of these other neurological ones but certainly in Alzheimer’s it shows it. They claim that it gets you more keto and fad adapted quicker but why don’t I just go with the real thing?
Dr. Weitz: What period of time do you think it’s probably safe to stay on a keto diet? I’m particularly worried about negative effects on the microbiome.
Dr. Shade: Yeah. Now that’s interesting. Interestingly, AMPK activation, remember I said it seals up leaky liver. It also seals up leaky gut.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Dr. Shade: It’s enhancing tight junction integrity in the GI tract, and it’s lowering the immune activation that’s happening during the leaky gut, and it’s pacifying that whole situation. It also has some effects on stabilizing, letting the immune system help stabilize the microbiome and making the immune system better at dealing with bad guys by increasing the immune system’s ability to digest and recognize bad invaders. On the other hand, if you’re not eating enough fiber with this then you can starve your microbiome. This is the Paleo thing that happens, too much meat not enough fiber. As long as you do a lot of fiber, don’t worry about the carbs in a leafy green salad. There’s some in there, but not a whole lot the carb problem is more like the sweet potatoes. Your recipe for keto sweet potatoes, no, that’s not true. You got to get a lot of fiber and even if you’re doing things like gums and psylliums those will help that whole issue. The core question was how long should we be on these keto diets? I believe in cycling in and out of them, pretty much for the rest of our life, this is going to be a way that we eat, and a way that we do things. Doing it dead on for a couple of months if you’ve got cardiovascular issues, if you’ve got a lot of excess weight, if you’ve got diabetes, obesity, insulin resistance, metabolic, that could be months where you’re resetting all of that stuff. Once you get the stability go back and forth, maybe halfway, half the time one way, half the time another. The way I do it now is basically I’m keto by day and I’m omnivorous by night.
Dr. Weitz: Good, good, good. Okay, I think that’s the main questions I had. Anything else you want to leave our audience with?
Dr. Shade: Yeah. Keto flu.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Dr. Shade: Keto flu. Yeah, there’re aspects of water and mineral retention, I just started going through it.
Dr. Weitz: Okay. Let’s define what the Keto flu is. People on the ketogenic diet and then they have these symptoms like the flu, right?
Dr. Shade: Yes. You know what people say when they go and do a detox. You get flu like symptoms. In the Keto dialogue they’re saying, “Well it’s a water because you’re burning your glycogen. You don’t have enough water stores and your minerals are coming out with that. It’s water and minerals and you just take salt and water.” That’s also what you do when you’re detoxing too hard.
See, as you go into lipolysis, and you’re breaking down your fat you’re releasing fat soluble toxins. You have a big toxic load going on through the body. Now, one of the ways you deal with the negative symptoms in a toxic load is dilute out with water and when you take a big dose of salt, you actually shut down detoxification. You shut down and then boom, they’re out of the tissues it makes it a little bit easier.
You’re doing the same thing there because the core of Keto flu is really toxins. It’s not going to be a better with this, in fact, it might be worse because there’s a lot of liver generators in here. There’s a lot of detox generators in here. The key around it is the use of a good binder through that first two weeks when you’re doing that. I don’t have a bottle here but our Ultra Binder as Charcoal Zeolite, Acacia gum, IMD our metal binder and Chitosan in it. All those are different toxin binders. When we had a cohort of people go through the Keto Before 6 protocol, a couple of them went into that Keto flu, I gave them binders. Susan went on that, everything went away and everything was stabilized.
Detoxification is an inherent part of going into this keto stage and this is when you get the fat soluble stuff out. When you do that you need to be able to support detoxification. Absolute minimum is a binder if you don’t have something there are bitters in here, but I would get if you’re not going to do this. Get a bitter’s formula, some PC binders, maybe some glutathione and support that whole detox, embrace what’s happening there when you feel that Keto flu.
Dr. Weitz: That’s great. That’s great. How should we find out more about the Quicksilver products?
Dr. Shade: Come to quicksilverscientific.com and you can see all the products there. Register either as the practitioner or a consumer and also you can learn a lot more, there’ll be some webinars there on the site and then on YouTube we have a Quicksilver Scientific YouTube page where all of our last 30 webinars are posted up there. If you register on our site, you’ll get our newsletters. You’ll get all the information of when we’re doing webinars and talks and just join in with this whole process here you will not regret it.
Dr. Weitz: Excellent. Thank you, Chris.
Dr. Shade: Thank you so much, Ben.
