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Keto diet and fibromyalgia: Lori’s Chronic Fatigue Syndrome / Fibromyalgia Ketogenic Diet Success Story

by alexxlab

Diet – Fibromyalgia Association Canada (FAC)

This is a subject that always seems open to much controversy. With all of the different recommended diets and conflicting information, it can be very challenging for anyone to know what to follow. The content provided is designed to provide you with quality research so you can come to your own informed decision as to what is right for YOU.  Recommended diets for fibromyalgia vary considerably and no one diet is best for everyone. It is best to minimize foods that exacerbate symptoms and consume nutritious foods that help you to feel your best.

One diet that many people with fibromyalgia find beneficial is the ketogenic (keto) diet.  The ketogenic diet is a diet that limits carbohydrate intake and increases consumption of healthy fat. Carbohydrates come in the form of starches, grains, fruits, and vegetables. The idea behind the keto diet is to have the body turn to fat for its main energy source.   On the keto diet, carbohydrates are limited to 40 grams per day or less and 70% of calories come from healthy fats.  Research suggests that a ketogenic diet reduces inflammation through the increased production of adenosine.

An anti-inflammatory diet also shows health benefits. Although it is very different from the ketogenic diet, some people find it very effective in helping to manage fibromyalgia symptoms. On this type of diet, an emphasis is placed on eating whole grains, fish, fruits, vegetables, and olive oil.

Both of the above mentioned diets show benefits to health. In order to determine which type of diet is best for you, tracking your diet for 10 days is recommended.

The chronometer app is a useful app that breaks down your calorie, macronutrient, and micronutrient intake. This will help to ensure you are getting the recommended daily amounts. It is also helpful to keep note of how you feel after eating a meal, so you can avoid foods that may cause a flare in symptoms.

IMPORTANT: Eliminating foods is not meant to be a long term solution. These “trigger” foods should slowly be added back into your diet one at a time. Give yourself about 5 days before introducing a new food again. Make sure you take notes to keep track of which foods agree with you and which ones do not. If there is a food you still can not tolerate, eliminate it and try that food again at a later time. Do not try to introduce more than one food at a time back into your diet.

Pay close attention to how the foods you are eating correlate with how you feel, your weight, and important measurements, such as blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar levels. Keeping a diary or using the chronometer app is the best way to sort out all of this information.

It is important to keep an open mind when it comes to trying new ways of eating. It has been reported that changing how you eat can have a significant impact on your symptoms.

The information provided is not intended to promote weight loss.   The only intended purpose is for your own health benefit and to improve symptom management.

  • https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4124736/
  • https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7804255/
  • https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7551034/
  • https://www.immunolabs.com/the-importance-of-tracking-your-diet/

Is Fibromyalgia an Autoimmune Disease, and Can Diet Help?

  • Fibromyalgia is a chronic pain disease that’s miserable to have. It’s also a bucket diagnosis — there’s no test for fibromyalgia, and often patients with depression, anxiety and chronic pain will get a fibromyalgia diagnosis when doctors don’t know what else to do.
  • Fibromyalgia is not currently classified as an autoimmune disease, but people who treat it as such have a lot of success. Changing your diet to manage inflammation and balance hormones can help ease fibromyalgia.
  • This article talks about how a high-fat, low-carb, anti-inflammatory diet can decrease pain and manage symptoms of fibromyalgia.

Fibromyalgia is an unusual illness. It’s reasonably common — several million cases a year — and, according to most doctors, it’s incurable. The main symptoms of fibromyalgia are chronic pain and fatigue, depression, anxiety, migraines, and brain fog.

What makes fibromyalgia strange is the variety of things that seem to cause it. Researchers have been debating the cause of fibromyalgia for years. While there’s no clear biological reason for the pain and fatigue in fibromyalgia, more and more researchers suspect it could be an autoimmune issue[]. The traditional treatment for fibromyalgia is drug-based: a combination of opiate painkillers, antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication. But there’s also a great deal you can do with diet to manage fibromyalgia symptoms.

Download the Bulletproof Diet Roadmap to learn what and how much to eat 

Fibromyalgia and autoimmune disease

Fibromyalgia and autoimmune diseases share symptoms, as well as a lot of the same triggers:

  • Genetics. Some people seem to be genetically predisposed to fibromyalgia[].
  • Stress and trauma. Chronic stress can set off fibromyalgia, as can psychological trauma. If you had a traumatic childhood or have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), you’re at much greater risk for fibromyalgia[]
  • Obesity. Being overweight or obese increases your risk of fibromyalgia as well[].
  • Poor sleep. Low-quality sleep is a risk factor for fibromyalgia[]. Sleep deprivation triggers neuropathic muscle pain (similar to fibromyalgia) in healthy young adults; increasing sleep quality gets rid of the pain[].
  • Gluten sensitivity. A lot of people are sensitive to gluten, but not at a level that counts as celiac disease. If you’re gluten-sensitive, you have a higher risk of fibromyalgia[].

Fibromyalgia and diet

If you have fibromyalgia, use the following nutritional changes to help manage your symptoms.

Go gluten-free for fibromyalgia

Even if you don’t have celiac disease, you could be sensitive to gluten. Non-celiac gluten sensitivity is a common trigger for fibromyalgia[].

If you don’t have a severe reaction to gluten, it can be easy to miss non-celiac gluten sensitivity — but sensitivity to gluten is fairly common[][], and eating it could be quietly sapping your energy and causing background inflammation, which can contribute to fibromyalgia. There are a variety of other reasons to avoid gluten and grains, too.

Try cutting gluten out of your diet and see how you feel. You may notice a major difference.

Related: What to Eat When You Have Autoimmune Disease

Eat more fat (especially omega-3s)

A high-fat, low-carb diet can help you minimize a lot of the more severe symptoms of fibromyalgia.

  • People with chronic pain showed a significant decrease in brain hyperexcitability and reported less pain after switching to a ketogenic diet[]. Eating keto also treats a variety of neurological disorders by normalizing brain activity[].
  • A keto diet decreases inflammation and eases joint and muscle pain[].
  • Keto enhances cognitive function, which could help with the brain fog common in fibromyalgia ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27568199″>[].
  • High-fat diets are great for weight loss[], and losing weight significantly reduced pain and depression in overweight people with fibromyalgia[].  

Eating a ketogenic diet or a variation of it (like cyclical keto) could help you with fibromyalgia.

And while you’re eating more fat, make sure you double down on omega-3s from wild-caught fish like salmon and sardines. Several small studies have found that omega-3s decrease neuropathic pain[], including pain from fibromyalgia[], and a robust collection of research shows that omega-3s are great for decreasing inflammatory pain[] ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17335973″>[].   

Lectins and fibromyalgia

Cutting lectins out of your diet may also help with fibromyalgia.

Lectins are proteins found in beans, lentils, peanuts, wheat and other grains, and nightshade vegetables like peppers, eggplant, and potatoes.

If you’re sensitive to lectins (a lot of people are), eating them can cause widespread, low-grade inflammation and pain[], as well as arthritis[]. Lectins can also contribute to autoimmune diseases, and removing them from diet relieves autoimmune issues in many patients[].

That said, lectin sensitivity varies a lot from person to person. You may be able to eat lectins without a problem. The best way to find out is by removing lectins from your diet for a month and seeing how you feel. You can also test your C-reactive protein (CRP) levels before and after the month to see if your inflammation goes down.

The big lectin-containing foods you’ll want to avoid are:

  • Grains (especially whole grains)
  • Potatoes
  • Tomatoes
  • Beans
  • Soy
  • Peanuts
  • Lentils
  • Peppers
  • Eggplant
  • Chickpeas
  • Milk and cream

If you have fibromyalgia, changing your diet can make a huge difference in your symptoms and how you perform day-to-day. If you aren’t sure where to start, the Bulletproof Diet Roadmap is a simple (and free) guide to which foods you should eat and which foods you should avoid.

 

 

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The dangers of variations on the theme of the keto diet are named

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A keto-like, low-carb, high-fat diet may be associated with higher levels of “bad” cholesterol and a doubling of the risk of cardiovascular events such as clogged arteries, heart attacks and strokes, according to a new study.

Photo: pixabay.com

A new study has found that regularly following a low-carb, high-fat diet has been associated with increased levels of LDL cholesterol – or “bad” cholesterol – and an increased risk of heart disease, says study lead author Dr. Yuliya Yatan of Vancouver (Canada).

“This study is an important contribution to the scientific literature and suggests that the harms outweigh the benefits,” comments Christopher Gardner, professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, who led clinical trials of the keto diet.

“Elevated LDL cholesterol should not be discounted as just a minor side effect of the VLCD (very low calorie diet) or ketogenic diet,” Gardner said, pointing out the higher risk of cardiovascular events in people with higher blood ketones. compared to those on a more standard diet.

According to CNN, the study identified a low-carb, high-fat (LCHF) diet as 45% of total daily calories from fat and 25% from carbohydrates. The study, which has not been peer-reviewed, was presented at the American College of Cardiology Annual Scientific Meeting in conjunction with the World Congress of Cardiology.

“Our study was based on the fact that in our cardiovascular disease prevention clinic we would be seeing patients with severe hypercholesterolemia on this diet,” says Dr. Yatan.

Hypercholesterolemia, or high cholesterol, increases a person’s risk of heart attack or other adverse cardiovascular events, CNN explains.

“This got us thinking about the relationship between these low-carb, high-fat diets, lipid levels, and cardiovascular disease. And so, despite this, there is a limited amount of data on these relationships,” said Dr. Yatan.

The researchers compared the diets of 305 people on the LCHF diet with about 1200 people on the standard diet, using health information from the UK Biobank, which tracked it for at least a decade.

Researchers found that people on the LCHF diet had higher levels of low-density lipoprotein, also known as LDL, cholesterol, and apolipoprotein B. Apolipoprotein B is a protein that coats LDL cholesterol proteins and can predict heart disease better than elevated LDL cholesterol levels.

The researchers also observed that the total fat intake of the LCHF dieters was higher in saturated fat and twice that of animal sources (33%) compared to that of the control group (16%).

“After an average of 11.8 years of follow-up—and after adjusting for other risk factors for heart disease such as diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, and smoking—people on the LCHF diet were found to be at risk of several serious cardiovascular events such as blockages in the artery that needed to be opened with stenting procedures, heart attacks, strokes, and peripheral arterial disease,” the researchers said.

The researchers said in a press release that their study “can only show an association between diet and an increased risk of serious heart disease, and not a causal relationship,” as it was an observational study, but their findings merit further study, “especially when approximately 1 in 5 Americans report being on a low-carb, keto-like, or full keto diet. ”

Dr. Yatan emphasizes that limitations of the study included measurement errors that occur in self-assessment of dietary intake, the small sample size of the study, and the fact that the majority of participants were British and did not include other ethnic groups.

The study also looked at the longitudinal effect of dieting, while most people on a keto-like diet tend to do it intermittently for shorter periods of time.

The majority of participants – 73% – were women, which according to Dr. Yatan, “quite interesting to observe, but it also confirms the existing literature that women in general tend to diet more, tend to be more interested in changing their image life.”

Dr. David Katz, a lifestyle medicine specialist who was not involved in the study, said that “there are various ways to formulate a diet with LCHF and it is very unlikely that they all have the same effect on serum lipids or heart attacks. “.

However, he added, “that the LCHF diet is associated with side effects in this study is a reality check for those who follow such diets just because they are in vogue. ”

Most health experts say that the trendy keto diet, which forbids carbohydrates to force your body to burn fat for fuel, excludes healthy foods like fruits, beans and legumes, and whole grains. On a keto diet, you limit your carbohydrate intake to just 20-50 per day – the lower the better. For example, a medium-sized banana or apple contains about 27 carbohydrates – that is, the daily allowance.

“Food groups that need to be eliminated to achieve ketosis are major dietary sources of fiber, as well as many important nutrients, phytochemicals, and antioxidants. This is of concern to many healthcare professionals who consider VLCD or the ketogenic diet to be detrimental to long-term health,” notes Dr. Gardner.

As CNN explains, keto is short for ketosis, the metabolic state that occurs when your liver starts using stored fat to produce ketones for energy. The liver is programmed to do this when your body loses access to its preferred fuel – carbohydrates – and thinks it is starving. The keto diet has been around since the 1920s, when a doctor stumbled upon it as a way to combat seizures in children with epilepsy who were resistant to other treatments.

Low-carbohydrate diets such as keto rely heavily on fat to keep a person satiated. At least 70% of the keto diet will be fat; some say it’s more like 90%. While you can get all of this fat from healthy unsaturated fats like avocados, tofu, nuts, seeds, and olive oil, saturated fats, like lard, butter and coconut oil, as well as whole grain milk, cheese, and mayonnaise, are also allowed in the diet. However, eating lots of foods high in saturated fat increases the body’s production of LDL cholesterol, which can build up inside the arteries and restrict blood flow to the heart and brain.

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