A Dog with Seizures, and a Message from Bangladesh
July 2017 — day 35
I had the whole kit on the kitchen counter. MCT oil. Kerrygold butter. Organic Valley pastured butter with the high butterfat. A pack of ketone testing strips. I called it a complete keto kit (video DWI8qQl5BbY).
I wasn't. The point of that video was the opposite.
Buzz
Partway in, my dog started barking, so we went on a little tour of the house to get away from him. Buzz had a seizure that morning. By then he'd had three that day (video DWI8qQl5BbY).
Here's the connection. Buzz eats a Purina-inspired food that happens to be high in MCT oil. So I knew a bit more about MCT oil than you might think. If a pet food company is looking at it for dog seizures, it makes sense that people doing a ketogenic diet for epilepsy might want to look at it too (video DWI8qQl5BbY).
And that's partly why I had a bottle. People in the groups kept talking about it, I looked at the research, I have a dog with epilepsy, so I figured I'd check it out (video DWI8qQl5BbY).
So how much MCT oil did I take in my first 35 days of keto?
One dose. One (video DWI8qQl5BbY).
That's not how I got into ketosis. I got there on real food.
The message
Around the same time, after I'd started doing these live broadcasts, a woman messaged me from Bangladesh. I'm not very worldly, and I don't know a lot about Bangladesh. But she was writing to me from a store. She could only find a couple of kinds of oil, and she'd been told vegetable oils aren't keto. She was on her third or fourth store, looking for a perfect "keto oil," thinking about sesame or avocado oil and stretching her budget because she believed she needed them. She couldn't even find peanut oil (video DWI8qQl5BbY).
Poor woman. Third or fourth store.
Look, canola oil isn't the ideal oil. I know that. Vegetable oils aren't ideal. But they're acceptable. The change we're making on keto is going from a high-carb way of eating to a low-carb one, getting into ketosis regularly and getting fat adapted. None of that requires you to stop eating vegetable oil. That's a separate health question (video DWI8qQl5BbY).
There's nothing wrong with cooking in olive oil on keto. There's nothing wrong with cooking in canola.
Keep the topics separate
My point: keep the topics separate. "Good for your health" and "needed for keto" are different things (video DWI8qQl5BbY).
Do I think grass-fed beef is better than feedlot beef if you can afford it? Yes. Does grass-fed butter taste better to me? Yes. Is there research on MCT oil? Sure. If you have the money and those things make you feel good, buy them. More power to you.
But ketosis is a natural body process. It happens when glucose runs short and there's body fat around. It doesn't need a perfect omega-3 to omega-6 ratio. It doesn't need MCT oil. It doesn't come with a sales campaign, so the people pushing products at you are pushing products (video DWI8qQl5BbY).
I also had to be honest about my own situation. I live near a Wegmans with a big organic section, and a Trader Joe's. I was walking you around a two-story house. I've got a lot of privilege in that. Weight loss, epilepsy, all the things that bring people to keto, those are problems for poor people too, and for people on an island, or in a neighborhood with nothing but corner stores (video DWI8qQl5BbY).
So when people said "I guess I can't do keto, I can only shop at Walmart," my answer was: dude, you can be keto at Walmart (video DWI8qQl5BbY).
What I'd actually put in your cart
Before you fill a cart with specialty stuff: get a chuck roast and some fatty meat. Learn to cook a chicken thigh. Pork shoulder. Whole cuts with the fat built right in, that people have ignored for 20 or 30 years. Add lettuce. Herbs, too. People don't think of parsley as food, but it's got nutrients in it (video DWI8qQl5BbY).
If I had to name three products, back then I said keto sticks first, then almond flour, then erythritol, which I knew was controversial, but a lot of people need something sweet (video DWI8qQl5BbY).
But really, keto is a carb restriction. It isn't about buying things. It's about not buying carbs.
That was the point of the whole video. Ordinary food, the kind anyone can buy, in any country, on any budget.
What I'd tell you now
On MCT oil I haven't changed my mind: optional, not required. I said the same about bulletproof coffee a few weeks later (video DLRlphyc1t8). The textbook description of ketogenesis agrees with the plain version: your liver makes the ketones, and insulin and glucagon run the process, with no special oil anywhere in that chain (StatPearls: Ketogenesis). One thing I did change: by 2019 keto sticks had gone from my favorite keto item to "you don't need a monitor." Eat your carbs, track if you want, and you'll get there (video 1JbK1_ClDmY). And for epilepsy, a ketogenic diet is a medical treatment. It's set up and monitored with your doctor or neurologist, not from a Facebook group (StatPearls: The Ketogenic Diet). Same goes if you have kidney disease, are pregnant, take diabetes or blood-pressure medication, or have a history of eating disorders: talk to your doctor first (who should talk to a doctor). And for a dog, that's the vet's call.
More on this: the dose-not-ban food list, is MCT oil necessary, keto on a budget, cheap fatty cuts, is grass-fed butter worth it, and the video this comes from, DWI8qQl5BbY.
Earlier: A Fifty Percent Chance · Later: A Rough Weekend and a Small Group