HEALTH
foods, and we need them for healthy human cognition. We are unique that way with respect to other
species. Our brains utilize 20 to 30 percent of our
total energy supply just to operate them, whereas
our closest primate ancestor has a brain that uses
only about eight percent of its total energy supply.
Our brains are very metabolically expensive as a
species, and the fat that we consumed from the
animals that we hunted for countless millennia
helped to supply and rapidly develop that structural substrate. It actually also made us uniquely
capable as a species of operating our brains on
almost nothing but ketones, which are the energy units of fat capable of almost fully fueling our
brains. In fact, infants are born effectively in a state
of ketosis, and ketones are the primary fuel for
neuro-development. We’re really literally born to
run on fat, but here in modern times we are conditioned to begin depending on carbohydrates as
soon as (or only if) we start consuming them in earnest.
The thing about carbohydrates is that structurally, maybe one to two percent maximum of human physiological structure is actually carbohydrate-based at all. We use a few glycoproteins
Nature would never
have been so stupid or
shortsighted as to make us
wholly dependent on only
one fuel (much less one
as volatile, damaging and
unreliable as sugar). We
have glucose which we can
think of as a form of rocket
fuel that gets released in our
bodies in greater quantities
when we’re being confronted
with say, an emergency or a
need for extreme exertion.
30 | New Consciousness Review
for immune function and glucosamine (things of
that nature) for some connective tissue. There are
very few other types of cells in our body that rely
of actual necessity upon glucose as their primary
source of fuel, like our red blood cells, some of the
cells in the retina of your eye, and a few cells in the
inner medulla of your kidneys. Other than that, we
can do almost everything we need to do using free
fatty acids and/or ketones to fuel our body and our
brain--especially our brain.
According to research by Dr. Richard Veech (one of
the world’s foremost experts on ketosis, and the
Senior Researcher and Laboratory Chief at The National Institutes of Health, the inventor of the ketone
ester, and has worked for the last 47 years studying cellular energy and homeostasis) our heart actually runs close to 28 percent more efficiently in a
state of ketosis than through a sugar-based metabolism. Nature would never have been so stupid or
shortsighted as to make us wholly dependent on
only one fuel (much less one as volatile, damaging
and unreliable as sugar). We have glucose which
we can think of as a form of rocket fuel that gets
released in our bodies in greater quantities when
we’re being confronted with say, an emergency or
a need for extre