Keto Diet Tackles Hypertension, Diabetes, and Alzheimer's Prevention

A growing symphony of voices are beginning to sing the benefits of the ketogenic diet as a way to manage a variety of major health concerns…not only for taming obesity, but also hypertension, diabetes, and also growing evidence that early stage Alzheimer’s can be slowed.

Three of the most important markers of your internal health are your blood pressure, your blood sugar, and your cognitive ability.

If you think about it, these are the three things that affect how you feel and how you interact with the world around you every single day of your life.

It is no wonder, then, that people all around the world are turning to the keto diet to maintain, manage, and take back control of their health when faced with the specter of hypertension, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease.

Today, one out of every three adults has high blood pressure; about one in every ten people has been diagnosed with diabetes; and one in fifty people is living with Alzheimer’s disease—a population that is doubling every five years.

Can making a change in what you eat really make all the difference with how you feel day-to-day and protect you from major health concerns down the road?

First of all . . Yes!

But, more importantly, let’s take a closer look at what the science actually has to say.

Bringing Down Your BP Numbers

As one of the leading contributors to heart disease (the biggest killer in the United States), high blood pressure is clearly one of the biggest health concerns for Americans.

Recently, the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association changed their guidelines for healthy blood pressure levels from ¹⁴⁰⁄₉₀ mm Hg to ¹³⁰⁄₈₀.

Recognizing the importance of early intervention, these institutions changed their guidelines to encourage people to begin making lifestyle changes to avoid later complications—the most important of these lifestyle changes being the way you eat.

When you look at the factors that lead to high blood pressure, it figures that the keto diet would be the best way to prevent high blood pressure and maintain healthy blood pressure.

The first misconception we should clear up is that high blood pressure is not a genetic condition. Sure, genetics can make you more likely than others to develop high blood pressure, but just because your mom or your grandpa had high blood pressure, it doesn’t mean that you will have it by default.

Your blood pressure is all about your lifestyle and nutrition. When it comes to lifestyle, the best thing you can do is to become more active, but you’ll never get more active if you don’t get your diet under control.

Obesity, too much sodium in your diet, too little potassium, and not getting enough vitamin D are all nutritional concerns when it comes to high blood pressure … all of which can be alleviated with the keto diet.

Sodium often gets confused for the salt we use to season our food. Yes, table salt is sodium, but the amount of table salt you use while you’re cooking or sprinkling on at the table is relatively minor when it comes to sodium intake.

Processed foods, prepackaged food, canned food, and fast food are the real culprits of unhealthy sodium intake. As you eliminate these foods on a keto diet, your sodium consumption will drop dramatically, and your blood pressure will start to return to normal levels.

While bananas are the most well-known food for providing potassium, their carb content makes them a poor choice for people following a keto diet.

Instead, keto dieters find plenty of potassium in a meal plan that includes plenty of tomatoes, beets, spinach, salmon, summer squash, and Swiss chard—all of which have far more potassium per serving than a banana.

Dairy is the number one dietary source of vitamin D, and a keto diet encourages the enjoyment of full-fat butter, cheese, yogurt, and milk.

Full-Fat? That’s right! Though it may seem like a contradiction, eating a high-fat diet can actually help you lose weight and gain energy. (And with all that energy, you’ll be better able to get your vitamin D from the best natural source—the sun!)

According to a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, “the low-carbohydrate diet was more effective for lowering blood pressure” when compared to a low-fat diet in a randomized trial.

But that isn’t all that the keto diet can do.

Prevent or Reverse Diabetes

One of the most well researched claims of the keto diet is in its ability lower dieters’ blood sugar levels.

The main reason for this is because your body treats carbohydrates as sugar, because that is all carbohydrates are—large chains of sugar molecules.

This may be difficult to hear for some. Companies strategically package their products to lead consumers’ eyes to believe that they are buying “healthy” pasta and “wholesome” bread, but the bottom line is that eating foods high in carbohydrates is not much different than eating a bag of raw sugar.

That may sound like an over-exaggeration, but when you look at how your body actually breaks down a slice of bread, you see how apt a comparison it actually is.

Without getting too deep into anatomy and physiology, when you consume carbohydrates, the first thing your body does is break the chains linking the sugar molecules together and distributes the sugar all throughout your body.

What your body can’t use for energy, it will store as fat. So, the less active you are, coupled with the consumption of a high amount of carbs, the more overweight you’ll become.

It is this exact model that will lead to diabetes over time. As you age, and as more sugar enters your body, the less your body is able to produce enough insulin to keep up with your sugar intake.

So, what do you do? You cut out the sugar with a keto diet.

Not only does the keto diet discourage you from eating the obvious, sugary no-no’s (cakes, candy, cola, etc.), but it also puts limits on the carbohydrates that turn into sugar.

Before you start thinking about the keto diet as restrictive, understand that this is a low-carb diet, NOT a no-carb diet.

The distinction being that the keto diet is interested in seeing you get enough of this macronutrient to keep your metabolism flexible, but not so much that it becomes exhausted and just gives up on the process all together.

With limits set anywhere between 20g and 100g of carbs per day, depending on your specific needs—the carbs you do consume would not come from bread (12g of carbs per slice) or pasta (43g of carbs per cup, cooked).

See how quickly those carbs would add up? See how quickly your body might lose pace with the sugar consumption?

Instead, keto dieters reach their daily carb intake by adding up the small amounts of carbs in certain vegetables, dairy products, and berries. So, it’s not about not eating carbs, it’s about getting your carbs from low-impact, diverse sources to keep your body happy.

So, all that sounds good in theory, right? But this isn’t just some theory; this is all scientific fact.

In an applied nutritional investigation, diabetics following a keto diet saw greater glycemic control and lower blood glucose levels than those following a low-calorie diet after 24 weeks.

Diabetics have also seen reductions in body weight, body mass index, total cholesterol, LDL-cholesterol, triglycerides, and urea after following the keto diet for about a year.

Most recently, one study went as far to say “biomarkers of type 2 diabetes can be reversed in a substantial fraction of participants…emphasizing individualized carbohydrate intake to induce nutritional ketosis” among other lifestyle changes.

And, if you are pre-diabetic or just worried that you may be heading towards pre-diabetes, The Diabetes Council has lauded the keto diet as an essential part of a preventative maintenance plan.

We can clearly see that the keto diet is great for the body, but what about the mind?

Alzheimer’s Disease: The New Diabetes?

It’s easy to understand how the keto diet works on the body. With hypertension, we can see weight loss taking pressure off of your heart. We can see the reduction of sugar providing greater glycemic control for diabetics. But what does diet have to do with how your brain works?

Quite a lot actually! The thing that you have to realize is that the body and the mind are not these two wholly separate entities. Your brain is an organ just like your stomach, liver, and your skin are all organs—it just has a different function.

When your body is healthy, your mind will also operate in a healthy way. If your body is sick, your brain will malfunction. The sicker your body is, the more cognitive impairment you will suffer.

Did you know that some in the scientific community are starting to call Alzheimer’s disease Type 3 diabetes?

This is because doctors and scientists alike are starting to see a clear connection between what people eat and their cognitive abilities.

One of those doctors is Dr. Mary Newport, a neonatologist and wife of an Alzheimer’s patient. When Dr. Newport realized the connection between Alzheimer’s and blood sugar, she put her husband on a keto diet and began seeing improvements in just 2 weeks (you can see more of Dr. Newport’s story below).

Mary Newport’s Story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOLYjpAmOHw

Dr. Newport’s story is not uncommon. In fact, 90% of Alzheimer’s patient caregivers reported improvement in one or more areas after patients started a keto diet, including: memory, cognition, social interaction, speech, resumption of lost activities, sleep, appetite, and vision.

According to Dr. Guojun Bu at the Mayo Clinic, the term Type 3 diabetes refers to the fact that the “brain’s insulin utilization or signaling is not functioning.”

You see, your brain needs insulin to regulate all of its functions, much like how your blood needs insulin to use and store sugar. So, when insulin becomes exhausted, not only is it bad for your body, it’s bad for your mind.

The good news is that, if we understand Alzheimer’s disease as another mark on the diabetes spectrum, the ways we go about preventing, treating, and reversing diabetes are the exact same ways we can manage Alzheimer’s.

Though the pool of in-depth scientific research is shallow at this point, as doctors and researchers are only starting to see how the keto diet can treat Alzheimer’s, the science that we do have has been quite positive.

Whether reducing cognitive impairment, improving memory, or just getting more omega-3 and vitamin D for optimal brain health, the keto diet has proved its value as a force of positive change in the lives of Alzheimer’s patients and the people who care about them.

Taking Control

What is so surprising about the three major health concerns that we’ve covered here today is the disconnect between how deadly, yet how treatable each condition is.

We’ve been talking about the biggest killers in the U.S.—the conditions that cause the greatest losses in your life and in the lives of people you know—and all of it can really be treated by taking a more active and conscious role in what you consume every day.

The keto diet is a good way to begin working on or preventing these health concerns. Once you get a feel for the guidelines, it is incredibly easy to follow. In time, it doesn’t even feel like a diet or rules. It just feels like… well… living.

And that’s the goal, isn’t it? Who wants to wake up every day to a bunch of pills to make life manageable when you can just get up and get living?

Good health, good life.

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