Every once in a while, I like to issue myself dietary challenges out of curiosity of their demands and how they affect my health. The most recent is the ketone diet– in light of our recent discussion of how the body shifts from utilizing glucose as a primary fuel source to ketone bodies in response to low carbohydrate intake. As someone who has been vegetarian for almost half of my life, I assumed making this switch would be exceptionally simple, but it wasn’t! The last few weeks have really highlighted how widespread carbohydrate-heavy foods and snacks are. The process required careful tracking and planning… No more rice, significantly fewer bananas, more tofu, and my realizing of the shockingly apparent absence of keto-friendly snacks. What made this diet even harder to pursue was the fact that I couldn’t consume any form of beef, pork, poultry, etc (crucial components of a healthy keto diet), as I was still vegetarian.
Without surprise, I quickly noticed the symptoms of ketosis “keto flu”, that we discussed in class: fatigue, irritability, increased thirst/urination, and was fascinated by my understanding of how the metabolic processes my body is used to has made a switch to sustain energy production. Overall, as difficult as it was to maintain, I found trying the diet gave me a significantly more personalized understanding of the mechanisms we approached in class. I found myself overanalyzing nutrition labels, rationalizing how particular ingredients would enter key metabolic pathways and disrupt the state I’d worked to achieve, further cementing my love for mammalian biochemistry.