What is keto?

We at the Ketobakery.co.uk, in partnership with the Person-Centred Neurosciences Society and the Lifestyle Health Foundation, wish our visitors and customers to discover the many health and quality of life benefits of ‘keto’, including improved brain functioning. Such benefits are born out of both personal experiences and a vast amount of scientific research and literature, which began over 100 years ago.

Keto, as you may already know, is typically accompanied by the word ‘diet’, and together those words, for some people, are often associated with a desire to lose weight. The weight loss that people often associate with keto is what we call a beneficial ‘side effect’ of eating foods high in fat, low in carbs (carbohydrates) with moderate protein content.

Keto for us is short for ketogenic foods. These are foods that typically generate energy for your body, through the burning of fat/ketones and switching it from burning carbohydrate/glucose/sugar/ which is typically found in oats, pasta, potatoes and rice. Foods eaten as a replacement, would typically be high in good quality fats including avocado, oily fish, eggs, meat (grass fed is better), various nuts and seeds, butter and olive oil.

Although there are companies who sell low carb versions of pasta and rice (online). many high street shops sell the likes of cauliflower rice. You can, of course, buy a whole cauliflower, to either make the rice or slice it to make steaks. Then, in terms of potato, celeriac is a good substitute and our Qetomix can be used to make ‘dumplings’. 

It is by making such switches that your engine’ burns fats, rather than carbs. By running your engine on fat rather than carbs, it can help your body to rebalance. It is this rebalancing that can contribute to the management of medical conditions such as epilepsy, migraine, brain injury as well as diabetes (type2).

There is also research to indicate that make there changes, the growth of tumours, (cancerous and non cancerous), can be slowed, and in some cases it may halt the tumour growth.

You can learn more about the the quality of life benefits associated with eating ketogenic foods, including the control of epilepsy seizures from the Person-Centred Neurosciences Society’s, Epilepsy Quality of Life online library or resources – www.eqol.org.uk.

You may also wish read about the role of ketogenic foods in brain-gut health by visiting another of the P-CNS resources, the Neurodigest website www.neurodigest.co.uk 

Lastly, if you are interested to better understand the significance of stress and the role of the ketogenic diet, especially in epilepsy, you may wish to watch Neil’s 30 min talk “Why buildings collapse and the relevance to epilepsy and the ketogenic diet“. This was a talk given a a health professional conference and you can watch it from https://vimeo.com/470949680

And of course, do keep an eye out for our ketobites, which we will add to on a periodic basis.