“When we are properly nourished, we experience a positive euphoria, both waking and sleeping.” By Ray Peat
Dr Ryu’s practice is a low carbohydrate clinic which prioritises the restoration of metabolic health to men and women. We advocate the ancestral health movement incorporating a real-food-based paleo diet.
This is a diet naturally selected through human evolution over 2 million years, a diet that best suits our digestive system, energizes and repairs the body and brain. This nutrition-dense stone-age diet is our ammunition against the assault of modern life, the incessant stress, premature hormonal decline and enables recovery from synthetic hormone exposure and the ensuing nutritional deficiency.
Our genome was established before agriculture so the paleo diet excludes grain and refined carbohydrates. Its composition, therefore, is naturally low in sugar and starchy carbohydrates but high in fat and vegetable fibre which provide alternative energy sources to sugar.
The perils of the modern western diet dotted with processed foods
The modern western diet is composed of low fat, high carbohydrate foods with frequent exposure to processed foods, themselves mainly composed of flour, sugar and industrial seed oil with no nutritional value. This induces abnormal cellular function and a chronic low-grade inflammatory state that in turn causes truncal obesity and metabolic syndrome.
A high carbohydrate diet switches on the hormone response of insulin which inhibits fat burning and decreases thyroid hormone, so causing a lowered metabolism and lowered sex steroids function.
Many people suffer metabolic mayhem with short term consequences of body fat accumulation and low energy, low libido, low mood and long term consequences such as heart disease, cancer and dementia.
The loss of blood sugar control – the pre-diabetic state in which blood sugar levels seesaw between too high and too low in the presence of excessively high levels of insulin – is the hallmark and origin of numerous modern illnesses and the key driver of the epidemic of fertility problems for both men and women in industrialized society.
Long-lasting clean fuel, the fat
Achieving health and preventing premature ageing and diseases are intimately tied to the ability to generate energy. Fertility and pregnancy maintenance are high energy demanding procedures that are expensive and expendable. The metabolic energy is the most important factor that controls reproductive success. Sex hormone levels, in turn, affect energy intake, storage and expenditure, so they influence each other.
Regaining the ability to access and burn fat as the main fuel is so critical for our metabolic health, fertility, pregnancy maintenance and development of the baby.
references:
Evidence that supports the prescription of low-carbohydrate high-fat diets: a narrative review
Carbotoxicity—Noxious Effects of Carbohydrates
Dr Ryu’s articles
How fatigue depletes fertility?
Mitochondria, ageing and egg quality
The master gland of metabolism, the thyroid