
Since posting the piece on ketone bodies and their causing breathalyzer problems I’ve had enough comments and emails to make me realize that there are probably many people unsure of what ketones really are, where they come from and why. Let’s take a look at the goals and priorities of our metabolic system to see what happens. Fear not, I’m going to try to keep the biochemistry to a minimum.
The primary goal of our metabolic system is to provide fuels in the amounts needed at the times needed to keep us alive and functioning. As long as we’ve got plenty of food, the metabolic systems busies itself with allocating it to the right places and storing what’s left over. In a society such as ours, there is usually too much food so the metabolic system has to deal with it in amounts and configurations that it wasn’t really designed to handle, leading to all kinds of problems. But that’s a story for another day.
If you read any medical school biochemistry textbook, you’ll find a section devoted to what happens metabolically during starvation. If you read these sections with a knowing eye, you’ll realize that everything discussed as happening during starvation happens during carbohydrate restriction as well. There have been a few papers published recently showing the same thing: the metabolism of carb restriction = the metabolism of starvation. I would maintain, however, based on my study of the Paleolithic diet, that starvation and carb restriction are simply the polar ends of a continuum, and that carb restriction was the norm for most of our existence as upright walking beings on this planet, making the metabolism of what biochemistry textbook authors call starvation the ‘normal’ metabolism.
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