On a fasting day, I like to drink buttered coffee with 1 tablespoon of grass fed butter, and 2 tablespoons of MTC oil, all put in a high speed blender. It seems to vaporize hunger pretty rapidly and give me even energy and focus, and makes the fast easy. Because there is no protein in the drink or carbohydrates, it won’t affect blood insulin, but it does make me feel great. In the USA this is called “bulletproof coffee”.

The lipid profile from grass fed butter is a bit different from ordinary butter from cow factories because grass is the natural food from cows, so it is better for you. And MCTs (medium chain triglycerides) is the preferred energy source for the brain.

There are skeptics, but if you actually try it, you’ll know right away that it really does work as promised.

If there is any injury to the brain, it immediately locks it down and switches to MTCs even if there is available glucose. Furthermore, MTCs can pretty dramatically reverse Alzheimer’s disease because for some reason glucose can’t easily get into the brain even though it doesn’t require insulin in in the brain.

https://youtu.be/_9INyTTXfR0

My understanding is that the only two substrates that can be utilised by the brain are ketone bodies (BHB) and glucose. Granted ketone bodies are derived from triglycerides by breaking it down into glycerol and fatty acids. The fatty acids are then converted into ketone bodies which can then be used by the brain. This happens prior to crossing the blood brain barrier. In the absence of significant levels of glucose the brain will use a majority of ketone bodies as its energy substrate. Without watching the hour long video how far into the video does the doctor say that MTCs are used by the brain? Does she actually say this? Or does she say MTCs are converted into ketone bodies and then used by the brain?

You have to treat everything in internet land with a degree of caution as a lot of the information is wrong or partially true. Can you point me to a scientific paper (in a reputable journal) that states triglycerides can be used directly by the brain rather than a youtube clip.

bigbooty: you’re right about the ketone bodies, but checking my biochem text, it is also true that the MCTs can bypass some of the systems in order to quickly get into mitochondria of the liver cells quickly to be converted to ketone bodies. It’s like fructose in the sense that it has to go through teh liver, so you would not want to overwhelm your liver, so it’s probably better to consumer it during a short term fast. So they do have to pass through the liver. So this means that those ketone bodies can be supplied quickly since normally you’d need to be in a fasting state for several days to supply enough ketone bodies for the brain to switch over to ketone bodies for fuel.

But Dr. Attia also made the point that I just learned today that your body does not have the enzymes to store MCTs, so it has to either immediately use it as energy, or discard it.

Without getting heavy into biochem or physiology though, I just find that it totally kills my appetite for hours and seems to give me an even burn of energy that I never got with sugar/cream coffee, or even black coffee.

Yes, I really like your references. I’ve read Dr. Fung’s book, and watched of of his videos, and read a lot of his blog. He really filled in some missing pieces of the puzzle for me. I had regained a lot of weight that I lost 6 years ago because I didn’t fix my insulin receptors, didn’t know about the importance of IF or meal timing. And now I think that diet drinks messed with my brain’s metabolic regulation somehow. If it messed with my appetite more than about 140 calories a day or so, I’d have quickly been in real trouble. So I left those diet drinks behind because I’m not sure of their effect.

I also read a lot from Peter Attia, and I like his work.

Butter Bob Briggs on YouTube makes really good videos, since he has applied the work of Dr. Fung to shrink from 300 lbs to very lean, so it’s good to hear it from a practitioner.

Although I’m not eating any refined carbs or sugar, I haven’t bothered to determine my exact level of carb intake from veggies, or my ketone levels. Maybe that’s the next step?

I did 8 – 24 hr fasts over 2 weeks, but 24 hours into a fast, I have zero hunger, so I might as well continue. It does get easier because I know someone who only ate once a day for the past 35 years or so. And he never thought of it as any big deal.

This year though, I was 4 months in on weight loss before I discovered Dr. Fung’s book, so most of my 60 lbs off was done without knowledge of meal timing and IF. I only started it in May, but I got the message loud and clear and now I’m committed to continue doing that long term.

What Dr. Lustig and Dr. Fung have not made razor clear to me is the relationship between liver insulin resistance and insulin resistance of the rest of the body. So I’m still not clear as to why some people have liver insulin resistance but are not fat.

I used to be able to tolerate any carb when I was young and be ultra lean, but something happened and poisoned my system, probably sugar overload such that after that I became insulin resistant but it was decades before I understood what had actually happened. Now I’m wondering to what degree I can restore insulin sensitivity, and if I can ever become as I was as a teenager.

I’m impressed that now my BP is 93/55, which is pretty much the ideal of ideal for someone 60. It only took 5 months to improve it to that from pre-hypertensive. So perhaps insulin receptors can be fully restored with enough intermittent fasting?