The Ketogenic Diet May Protect You from Brain Injuries While Also Losing Weight

There are many things to worry about when it comes to your overall health, wellness, and longevity. For many people, especially this day and age, the main concern is their ever-expanding waistline. Indeed, so much of our society is focused on the external signs of poor health that all sorts of internal health concerns - especially brain health - go largely ignored. But what if by fixing one problem, you could also fix another? Well, we are here to tell you that it's possible. Specifically, you can help improve your metabolism and foster a more healthful brain with the help of ketogenic supplementation.

Ketones, Brain Trauma, and the Science That Connects the Two

For a while now, scientists have known that ketones are pretty good for the human brain. As a matter of fact, the renowned Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital has been using a form of the ketogenic diet for decades to help reduce the frequency of epileptic seizures in children. It has been very successful, too. Recently, this particular path of scientific inquiry has yielded some fascinating discoveries when it comes to treating other types of brain disease.

Take, for example, traumatic brain injuries (TBIs). We're sure almost everyone has heard of them by now do to their increasing frequency and infamy. In recent years, beloved athletes whose respective sports required them to take multiple blows to the head over the course of their career have started showing signs of poor brain health. Naturally, medical experts put two and two together and realized that repeated concussive activity over the course of many years can do serious damage to the brain.

This damage can manifest itself in many forms, some of the most obvious being:

• Depression
• Anxiety
• Psychosis
• Suicidal or violent thoughts
• Severely decreased cognitive function
• Memory loss
• Symptoms of age-related brain diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and Dementia

For some of the unfortunate victims, brain damage from TBIs can cause enough trauma to literally cut their lifespan in half. But why? And what can be done about it?

Now keep in mind that not all of the research has been completed yet, and a lot of this information is still speculation, but the answer may lie with ketone supplementation. The reason traumatic brain injuries are so serious is because the body leaves behind a lot of waste products during and after the healing process. Think of it like a contractor coming into your home to repair a hole in your wall and forgetting to clean up his mess after the job is done. All of that mess may make the space barely livable, much less as useful as it was before the damage that caused the hole.

Scientists and medical experts now have hope that ketones can act like the cleaning crew. When your brain gets injured, your immune system rushes to cure it, which causes massive inflammation. Unfortunately, the inflammation which heals the damage also leaves behind amyloid-beta plaques. These plaques accumulate over time and cause your brain to deteriorate, unless your body does something to clean up the mess. When you introduce ketone bodies across the blood-brain barrier, the brain breaks them down in such a way that the byproducts bond to these plaques and remove them from your neurons, essentially detoxifying your brain.

There's another happy accident which expands upon the benefits of having more ketones in your system, even beyond those of brain detoxification an injury reduction/prevention. When your brain breaks down the ketone bodies, it produces and releases more GABA into the brain. GABA is one of the main neurotransmitters responsible for reducing anxiety and improving your mood. Some even think that it's more powerful than serotonin when it comes to enhancing your emotional well-being.

Like we said, the science is still out on if and/or how effective ketone supplements may be when it comes to improving your brain health, detoxifying your neural tissues, and helping reduce potential damage from a serious brain injury. However, according to the research we've seen, there is some real potential there. Health nuts and neurologists the world over are very excited about the news.

Losing Weight With The Ketogenic Diet

When you get into the science of it, the ketogenic diet is actually quite complex. But the quick and dirty version of it is this: your body needs energy to live, and it can either burn glucose or ketone bodies in order to get it. Glucose is easier, cheaper, and more abundant than ever. Ketone bodies are harder to break down, so the human body only resorts to them when glucose is scarce. By denying your body the glucose it wants, it will burn its own fat in order to get the ketone bodies it needs to stay alive. This leads to weight loss, but specifically it leads to fat loss, which is a great way to improve your overall health, longevity, and quality of life.

Unfortunately, getting your body to burn away its own fat by reducing your carbohydrate intake is a lot like trying to get a toddler to pick up its toys by taking away his/her favorite candy. This twofold biological trauma to your system provokes your body to throw the same type of tantrum you would expect from our hypothetical toddler. The physical manifestation of this tantrum is what's known as the "keto flu". It's an unfortunate set of flu-like symptoms (which you've probably guessed already) that leaves many abandoning the diet before they have a chance to see a real benefit.

Thankfully, supplementing with exogenous ketones can not only help reduce symptoms of the keto flu, but it can help reduce the amount of time it takes for your metabolism to transition into ketosis. there are many wonderful supplements out there on the market which can help you achieve this goal, one of which is a relatively new formula called Ultimate BHB Keto. Regardless of which supplement you take, as long as you purchase a high-quality product from a reputable company, it will help you achieve your health goals faster and more easily than going it alone. and you'll have a sharper, smarter brain to show for it, too!