welcome back it's time now for our share the health segment so I'm joined now by dr. Robert Boyer with trailhead clinics thanks so much for coming in hey happy to be here it's always great so we are talking about the dreaded diet and this is one that I haven't really looked into the ketogenic diet what is that it's it's actually pretty popular right now there's so you kind of have to understand how the body processes energy and sugars in order to understand this diet so typically your body prefers to use sugar as its main source your sales do for their energy and because we have such a high carbohydrate diet and are especially in our in our culture people tend to get a plenty of sugar and so your body uses that for its energy and anything else it gets in this in the way of calories well it will store you know you can store sugar as fat you can store you know other calories protein fat is fats as well and the ketogenic diet what it's doing is it's trying to get your body to break down extra energy right so our bodies are built to store fat so that you know when you have food you can you can store it and then when you don't have food you have an energy source to live off of right and so when your body is no longer getting enough calories or those energies through sugars then it'll start breaking down your own fat in order to provide that energy into ketogenic bodies and so that's why it's called the ketogenic diet and so what are some main foods that this diet consists of so it's a high fat diet and essentially what you're doing is you're trying to limit your carbohydrate load to you know let's say less than you know maybe 10% of your total calories that'd be tough for me yeah yeah for most of us and so you know it's it's high fat you know higher protein just really really severely reduced carbohydrates so obviously losing weight is a big health benefit but are there any like medical benefits to it yeah there certain there are in fact the the ketogenic diets been around for probably a hundred years it really was researched back in the early 1900s as part of they found that it's helpful for children with seizure disorder and epilepsy and so if they follow a strict ketogenic diet which is even a little bit more the way they do it you know for medical purposes is probably even more strict and stringent than what people are using it for dieting but yeah it can help to reduce the number of seizures and we're not exactly sure the mechanism on that there's there seems to be some you know changes it causes in the brain and stuff to be able to help with that but it's pretty cool that's a pretty big benefit how about medical risks there there are I you know I think the what I've seen is and from what I've read the weight loss that's produced from the ketogenic diet can be fairly rapid and and so people can lose weight pretty quick as far as you know wanting to maintain your weight on that diet I don't I don't necessarily think it's the best idea at people with it's just you know there's other healthier diets I think a balanced diet you know where you're having more fruits and vegetables because of their antioxidants that they have whole grains you know and then healthy fats and the problem with the ketogenic diet is a lot of times people you know are increasing their fat content but they're it's unhealthy fats it's maybe processed meats or you know fried foods or those kind of things and those aren't good for our bodies anyway and so that's a risk people with kidney disease really shouldn't do the ketogenic diet because it's you know it could probably it can cause some problems with getting too high in certain electrolytes and because they can't process it the right way so certainly there's some risks there I think finding that good balance for weight rack maintenance is you know more of a Mediterranean style diets ideal awesome well thanks and we'll have all that information up on our website western slope now calm and don't go anywhere except right back after four great