My guest today is Ellen Davis, author of Fight Cancer with a Ketogenic Diet and creator of Ketogenic-Diet-Resource.com, a website showcasing the research on the positive health effects of ketogenic diets. We’ll be talking about what a ketogenic diet is, how it can help your health, and how to prepare it. I read her entire book because a friend of mine who has cancer is on this diet and improving. You’ll be surprised to find out what single food feeds cancer. Ellen is currently finishing a Master’s degree in Applied Clinical Nutrition at New York Chiropractic College and works to help others implement a ketogenic diet for health. She has authored several articles on ketogenic diets for the Well Being Journal and recently released the second edition of her ebook which has in over 45 countries. Ellen lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming. http://www.ketogenic-diet-resource.com | http://www.healthy-eating-politics.com | http://www.gluten-free-diet-resource.com
Get the recipe for Ellen’s Sandwich Rolls
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How to Prevent & Fight Cancer with a Ketogenic Diet
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Ellen Davis
Date of Broadcast: March 18, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free.
Today, we’re going to talk about something that might sound a little bit different to what you usually hear about what you should be eating. We’re going to be talking about a Ketogenic Diet. And basically, what that is is a high fat, adequate protein, low carb diet.
And the way I found out about this is because a very good friend of mine who has cancer is on this diet. And it has actually helped her cancer. And not only did it help her cancer, but it’s helping a lot of people with their cancers.
And when I read the book—I actually read the book that my guest today wrote. My friend recommended it to me because it has a recipe—we’re going to talk about the recipe too—for a gluten-free bread that really looks like bread and tastes like bread. I made some this morning, and oh, my god, it really is like bread. I just toasted one of that. You make them in little roles, like little hamburger bun kind of rolls. And I just sliced one in half and put it in the oven with some butter on it and it came out all crispy and toasty. I’m very excited about this because it’s a very different texture, much more like bread than most gluten-free breads are.
And so my friend wanted me to know about this. I read the book. And I learned so much about food—just so much! I read a lot of books about food, but I learned things that I didn’t know about food by reading this book. And we’re going to talk about those too.
So, this morning, I’m going through my emails. I get a lot of health-oriented newsletters. And this morning, there was one with the headline Woman Battles Deadly Brain Cancer Using Low Carb Ketogenic Diet without Chemo.
And so, obviously, we’re going in the right direction here.
But even if you don’t have cancer, you probably want to listen to this today and look into this because it will help prevent cancer—obviously, we can’t say that it cures cancer, but people fight cancer with it. But even if you don’t have cancer or if you don’t want to have cancer, this diet particularly sets up your body in a way that will make it very difficult for cancer to develop. And we’ll find out more about that coming up.
The name of my guest is Ellen Davis. She’s the author of Fight Cancer with a Ketogenic Diet and creator of Ketogenic-Diet-Resource.com. Welcome, Ellen.
Ellen Davis: Well, thank you for having me. Glad to be here!
DEBRA: It’s my pleasure. I really love your book.
Ellen Davis: Thank you.
DEBRA: Another thing I liked about it, not only is it full of really great and useful information for keeping people healthy, but it’s really easy to read. Ellen writes in a very straightforward manner that made things that I’ve read ten times very understandable than other places. So I really appreciated that. And I think everybody should have your book.
Ellen Davis: Well, thank you.
DEBRA: So, tell us how you got interested in this subject.
Ellen Davis: Well, it’s been a long journey. I started about five years ago. I was having the symptoms of diabetes.
My mother was diabetic, my grandmother was diabetic, so it kind of scared me. I started looking at my diet and made some changes.
The first thing I did was take processed food out of my diet. I felt a lot better after doing that. But as I went along, I started finding that the more that I avoided bread and carbohydrates in general, I felt even better.
So, that kind of snowballed into learning about the Ketogenic Diet, just looking at low carb diet, and then just going further and looking at the Ketogenic Diet. And I decided that all of the information that I had learned over my research of two to three years needed to be shared with people.
So, I started a website called the Ketogenic Diet Resource. And that is the place where I put all of the research I find about the efficacy of that diet in promoting health. It not only can be used to treat cancer, but that particular diet has been used to treat epilepsy in kids for the last 20 or 30 years. So, it was only known in the medical centers in that area. But it actually has a lot of beneficial effects for many different diseases including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and just general health things like GERD and reflux disease and things like that, joint pain.
The diet itself is just very beneficial for human health.
DEBRA: Well, let’s just jump right in and talk about the diet because there’s so much to talk about about it. So, explain just basically what a Ketogenic Diet is.
Ellen Davis: So, a Ketogenic Diet is a diet in which you restrict carbohydrates to a very low level. And you eat just enough protein to support your lead body mass—and by that, I mean the part of your body that’s muscle and bone (that’s not fat basically). And then, the rest of the calories come from natural fat. And that has the effect of changing the body’s biochemistry.
When you restrict carbohydrates, you go into a state in which the body doesn’t have enough carbohydrates to provide the brain with fuel. And so it switches over to burning fat for fuel instead. And when you break down fats through the liver, it creates these things called “ketone bodies.” And that’s where the “ketogenic” comes from because that process is called “ketogenesis.”
So, as those ketones get to higher levels in the bloodstream, when we get to a certain level, the brain can start using them for fuel. And so it doesn’t need as much glucose. And the brain actually prefers to burn ketones. It does better on them as do your muscles as well.
DEBRA: I find that to be very interesting. I didn’t know that. I can’t tell you how many books I’ve read about foods and diets. And I didn’t know that until I read your book, that the body actually prefers ketones. And I have always read since I was a child in school that what your body runs on is glucose.
And so to have this idea that we should be running our bodies on fat instead of sugar was a totally new thing for me.
And yet, I don’t remember if it was on your book—I’ve been reading like about five books this week—but in one of the books I’ve read said that what the body does is it actually stores fat. We think that storing fat is a bad thing because we don’t want to be fat. But the point was that our bodies store fat so that in times gone by when we didn’t have all the food that we have available now and people were living out in the wild for millennia and food was irregular, we needed to store some fat as a survival thing until we haunted the next wooly mammoth or whatever it was.
DEBRA: Yeah, exactly, yeah. I wrote that on my website as well. That is true, that’s absolutely true.
And this is the controversy over low carbs diet that everybody sees in the mainstream media (which is completely incorrect) and most dietitians will tell you. Our registered dietitians are trained by the American Dietetic Association. Most of them will tell you that you will die without carbohydrates which is completely false. There are no essential carbohydrate, meaning that if you don’t get carbohydrates from your diet, it doesn’t matter. You’ll still go along just fine.
And even the bible that the American Dietetic Association goes by says that, that for all intents and purposes, the human body does not need carbohydrates coming from the diet to survive. So that totally negates that […], that you have to have carbohydrates.
What they don’t understand is that if your diet is very high in carbohydrates, it stops your body from using your ketones. So if your blood sugar is high, that means insulin is going to be high.
Insulin is the hormone that helps your body store blood sugar. You don’t want to have a lot of sugar in your blood because it causes problems. Those are the problem that diabetics deal with. So your body has a mechanism to move that sugar out of your bloodstream into your cells as quickly as possible because it’s somewhat toxic.
So, when that happens on a regular basis, if you get a high carb diet, then your blood sugar is pretty high all the time which means that your insulin is going to be high because it’s always having to store that sugar. When insulin is high in your bloodstream, it stops your body from burning. It literally locks the fat that you’ve stored in your fat cell, so it’s not available to you anymore as a fuel.
So, yes, when you are adapted to a high carb diet, if you don’t get something to eat, you’re going to feel pretty crappy. You’re going to feel shaky. You’re going to feel like you don’t have a lot of energy because your body is used to burning a fuel that it can’t store very much of.
You can only store about 1600 calories of glucose in your bodies. So if you don’t eat every six to eight hours, you start to feel kind of shaky because you’re getting low on fuel.
DEBRA: We need to take a break. But after, we’ll talk more about this. And the point that I wanted to make is that our body prefers to burn fat. And we’re going to talk about that more when we come back from the break.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Ellen Davis, author of Fight Cancer with a Ketogenic Diet. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Ellen Davis, author of Fight Cancer with a Ketogenic Diet. And her website is Ketogenic-Diet-Resource.com. And she also has a couple of other websites, HealthyEatingPolitics.com and GlutenFreeDietResource.com. She’s a very prolific writer and a very excellent researcher. A lot of what she says, I totally agree with.
There’s a few things I didn’t agree with, Ellen. I didn’t want to put my butter in the microwave to melt it in your recipe.
Ellen Davis: Oh, okay. Okay!
DEBRA: But the basic things that you say, I totally agree with.
Ellen Davis: Okay.
DEBRA: So, we were talking about the break about how the body’s preferred fuel is actually fat. That’s what it stores for emergencies. It doesn’t store glucose for long-term fuel. So tell us more about that.
Ellen Davis: I’ll just skip to the punchline on that. I was just saying how the dietitians recommend a high carb diet because that’s what everybody eat. But if you lower your carbohydrate intake and you adapt to breaking down fat and using the products of fat called ketones for fuel, your body does much better on that fuel. And that’s what dietitians don’t know.
They assume, like doctor’s do, that ketones have something to do with what’s called ketoacidosis which is a dangerous condition that type 1 diabetics can go through. But there’s a difference between nutritional ketosis (which is what I’m talking about) and ketoacidosis. The difference is just in the volume of ketones that are released into the body. In a diabetic situation, it’s 10 times or 20 times what you would have in nutritional ketosis.
So, ketones are beneficial for the body. But if you haven’t done the research, you wouldn’t know that.
DEBRA: So I’ve been eating more fat. I mean, there’s been times in my life I always want to eat fat. My whole life, I’ve wanted to eat fat. Butter is my favorite food. I can just eat butter out of—just butter.
Ellen Davis: Yeah, I do the same.
DEBRA: I’m just always looking for things to put butter on because I have to put it on something. And avocadoes and all these things that are very high fat, I always want to eat them.
And so, when I was trying to do a low fat diet, the hardest thing for me was to just reduce the amount of fat I was eating. People would say, “You have to reduce your calories. And fat has more calories per gram than anything else. So you really have to reduce them out of fat.” And yet I found that as I’ve just been letting myself eat all the fat I want (butter all over everything and lots of coconut oil), the right kind of fat, not trans fat and things like that, the good fat, I’m losing weight with no problem. Whereas with carbs, I was…
Ellen Davis: Well, good for you. That’s excellent! That’s great.
DEBRA: And my body feels better. I sleep better. I have more energy. And I’m not craving food. Since I’ve been doing this for the past month or so (six weeks or so now), the amount of food that I’m eating is less and less because my body is starting to burn some of my fat as fuel and I’m not so hungry. And some days, I wake up in the morning and I don’t even remember to eat because I’m not hungry. Whereas before, I would be starving in the morning, just starving.
Ellen Davis: Yeah, that’s a side effect of ketosis. It diminishes hunger.
DEBRA: Yeah, yes. So I’m very happy with this.
Now, I see in your book that the percentages for what you call a Restricted Ketogenic Diet is 75% to 80% fat and oil; 15% to 20% protein (and that would be just the amount of protein that you need); and then 5% leafy greens fibrous vegetables.
I understand how to do this now. But tell us how do you get 80% of your diet to be fat.
Ellen Davis: Well, you have to be very careful about how much protein you’re eating. That’s where I think people have the most difficulty. I mean, you can cut your carbohydrates. You just cut all of the grains and flour and sugars, anything cakes, cookies, breads, stuff like that, pasta. Cut that out of your diet. And there’s still a lot of food left to eat. There’s all kinds of meat you can eat and all kinds of fats.
But fat, since that does have 9 cal/g and protein and carbohydrates only have 4 cal/g, it doesn’t take much fat to get to 80% of your calories. So, a typical day would be a couple of eggs scrambled in 2 tbsp. of butter, and that’s only 14 g of protein in about 30g or 40g of fat. So already, you’re up there.
And then lunch, a lot of times, I will have 4 oz. of sour cream mixed with cinnamon and cardamom and a little bit of Stevia. And that might be lunch.
DEBRA: Wow!
Ellen Davis: I know you don’t eat dairy, but you could do it with avocado. You could have a huge bowl of mashed avocado with onions and tomatoes and a few other vegetables…
DEBRA: I do that! That’s actually my afternoon snack. I eat a whole avocado with tomatoes and green onions and paprika.
Ellen Davis: Yeah, I forgot that you don’t eat dairy. Sorry about that.
DEBRA: That’s okay.
Ellen Davis: But yeah, there are lots of ways you can do it. It’s just basically adding fats to your meals. So dinner could be 3 oz. or 4 oz. of some kind of protein meat or poultry or fish. And then, you might make a hollandaise sauce to go over it or you might just put a whole ton of butter on it. It doesn’t take much to get up to 80% fat.
DEBRA: Yeah, because what we’re talking about percentage of calories, not percentage of food. It’s not 80%…
Ellen Davis: Yeah. And that’s also going to change. If you’re having 1200 calories a day, then you would eat—you start with your protein. If you’re a person that weights 126 lbs., and let’s say your lean body mass is 100 lbs, your protein is going to be set at 1g per kilogram of lean body mass.
DEBRA: What’s that in American numbers?
Ellen Davis: In American numbers, it’s going to be 100/2.2. So that gives you your kilogram. If you do that, that comes up to about 45g. And that is 1g per. So that’s 45g of protein for somebody that’s about 125 lbs. And then, your carbohydrates are going to be below 20. If you’re a cancer patient, you’ll be below 12 to start. And then, the rest of the calories are fats.
So, if you take that all out, and you do 45g of proteins times four—and this is all done in the book for people. They can figure it out in the book themselves. There’s a little thing that they follow. But that’s about 200 calories worth of protein. So you’ll have about a thousand calories worth of fat to eat. That’s only about 90g of fat. And that’s really not that much. A tablespoon of butter has 12g of fat in it. So, 90g adds up really quick.
DEBRA: Like 10 tablespoons of butter and avocadoes and cream and all that stuff.
Ellen Davis: Yeah. Right!
DEBRA: We need to take another break, but we’ll be back. My guest today is Ellen Davis, author of Fight Cancer with the Ketogenic Diet. We’ll talk more about the diet and what we can eat and how it helps your health. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Ellen Davis, author of Fight Cancer with a Ketogenic Diet. She also has a website, Ketogenic-Diet-Resource.com, where she has lots of information about this diet including recipes. And you can order her book online there. Just a very interesting book!
So, Ellen, I want to make sure that we have plenty of time to talk about this subject I’m about to say. When I read this, I thought, “Oh, my God! If I haven’t already done this, I would sure do it now” for this reason. Tell us about what cancer cells love to eat.
Ellen Davis: Cancer cells love sugar because it’s the only fuel that they can burn.
DEBRA: Say that again. Say that again.
Ellen Davis: Cancer cells love sugar. And it’s because the only fuel that they can burn.
DEBRA: Okay! So now, when I read that, I thought, “Oh, my God! There are all these people who are eating sugar and we’re all talking about diabetes and things like that, but we’re not talking about how sugar…”—
I’m not going to say that sugar causes cancer, but cancer cells can’t survive without eating sugar. So if we remove the sugar from our bodies, then if we don’t have cancer, the cancer is not going to grow because the food isn’t there for them. And if we do have cancer, it’s going to help a lot to reduce it.
And so, it seems like it’s such an obvious thing to me, that if I haven’t already eliminated sugar years ago, I would do it right now. I would just go to my kitchen and take every piece of sugar out of it.
And it’s not just talking about white sugar, but this is why it’s a low carb diet. It’s because cancer cells love sugar.
Ellen Davis: Right, right.
DEBRA: I actually have never heard that before. I’m not saying that you’re the only person who’s ever said that, but I’ve never heard that before.
Ellen Davis: Yeah. And what’s funny about it—it’s interesting to me why doctors don’t embrace this more—is that they use a glucose in the body (the medical term is glucose) and they use a chemical that’s called a glucose analog to find cancer in the body. Cancer cells, when you inject this drug, the cancer cells love sugar, so they suck it up and it glows. It has a tracer in it, a fluorescent tracer in it. And that’s how they find cancer on a PET scan.
DEBRA: Wow! That’s just so obvious.
Ellen Davis: They give people a glucose analog drug.
DEBRA: That’s just so obvious! That’s just so obvious if that’s how they find cancer.
Ellen Davis: There’s a video—I have a video—on my website from Sloan Kettering, one of the top cancer centers in the country with the president of the Sloan Kettering talking about how a high carbohydrate diet is probably not a good idea.
DEBRA: Wow! Well, everybody that’s listening, this is another reason why I have been on a low carb diet for many years. But what I have learned from studying the Paleo diet and what I’ve learned from Ellen’s book, there’s more to it than simply eliminating carbs. And this is why it’s so necessary to—it’s like low carbs is a good place to start and gluten-free is a good place to start, but there’s more to it. That’s about what I can say.
So, let’s see, what else do I want to say. Now tell us about how different foods affect blood sugar and insulin.
That’s what we want to do. We want to keep our blood sugar down because that is what fuels cancer. That’s what makes our body store fat and dump all these other symptoms that come from that.
Ellen Davis: Sure, yeah. So there are three different types of food, what we call macronutrients: there’s carbohydrates; there’s protein; and there’s fat.
Carbohydrates have the greatest effect of course on sugars. Any amount of carbohydrate that you eat—people talk about good carbs and bad carbs, but all carbohydrates drive up blood sugar. I don’t care if it comes from a potato, a huge salad or whatever it is. It’s still carbohydrates and it’s still going to have an effect on blood sugar.
Protein has less of an effect although it still has an effect. It’s just a lesser effect. Unless you eat a lot of excess protein, the effect on blood sugar is not as great as carbohydrates. So if you sit down to eat a 24 oz. steak, you’re going to have a pretty big insulin and glucose response.
DEBRA: Before you go on about this, I want to make sure that this point is clear because this is something that I didn’t know—and here I was, trying to control my blood sugar for years and years and years and eating all the protein I wanted because I thought that protein didn’t affect your blood sugar.
But the point that you made is that if you eat the amount of protein that your body needs in order to repair your body, then you’re using up the protein. It’s the excess protein that makes your blood sugar go up.
Ellen Davis: Right, yeah. So if you’re eating way over what you need for body maintenance, anything that’s not being used gets turned into glucose in the body.
DEBRA: And see, I think that I was already on the right track because I eat about 3 oz. of protein per meal, and I think that that’s right for me.
Ellen Davis: Yeah. That’s about right, yeah.
DEBRA: And I think you have some way in your book of figuring out how much protein you need?
Ellen Davis: I do, I do. Absolutely! There’s a whole little process there.
DEBRA: So, people can figure that out for themselves.
For me, that’s something like two eggs in a meal (whichever meal I decide I want to put them in) and 3 oz. of chicken or 3 oz. of grass-fed beef. And I have a pretty good idea of what that looks like now. And I also do things like make soup or I’ll make four to six servings of soup to eat all week and I’ll put in the right amount of week. If I just eat my serving, it’s got it in there already.
So, that was one of the things that I thought was most interesting. If you think of fat, I think most people understand that fat has no carbs (and protein has no carbs), so people think if it doesn’t have any carbs, it doesn’t affect your blood sugar, but that’s not true.
Ellen Davis: That is not true.
DEBRA: Protein can affect your blood sugar if you eat too much.
Ellen Davis: Right, right. And fats have no effect on blood sugar. They have a very, very little effect. So, the higher your diet is in fats, the lower it is in carbs and protein, the less effect it’s going to have on blood sugar and insulin.
DEBRA: Isn’t that interesting, that the body prefers to burn fat and it doesn’t raise the blood sugar at all.
Ellen Davis: In your blood, for a normal person, there’s only about a teaspoon worth of glucose circulating at any one time. So, when you go eat a bagel, that’s 16 teaspoons of sugar that you’ve just dumped into your system.
DEBRA: Phew!
Ellen Davis: Your body is just not designed to handle that sugar load. And we didn’t have that kind of sugar load until about 10,000 years ago. We didn’t have that kind of sugar load on our biology until agriculture started about 10,000 years ago. There were various reasons why that started, but we’re just not genetically designed to handle that much carbohydrate.
DEBRA: Interesting! So, on this article that I was talking about the beginning about the woman who was battling brain cancer using the Ketogenic Diet, they had a little clip from the Andy Griffith show. Aunt Bee had made a pie and they were talking about how they shouldn’t eat the pie, they should eat the meat loaf. She was talking about at that particular time back in the 60’s, we knew we should be eating meat loaf and not pie. And now it’s completely flipped.
Ellen Davis: It was in the ‘70s that that flipped around when a government committee decided that low fat was the way to go. And then, the media picked it up. But before then, yeah, everybody knew…
DEBRA: We need to take a break. we need to take a break or the commercial is going to come in on top of you.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Ellen Davis. And we’ll be talking more about the Ketogenic Diet when we come back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Ellen Davis, author of Fight Cancer with a Ketogenic Diet. And Ellen’s website is Ketogenic-Diet-Resource.com. It’s Ketogenic-Diet-Resource.com.
Ellen, if somebody wants to get started on a Ketogenic Diet, can anybody do this or are there people who shouldn’t be doing it? How would you get started?
Ellen Davis: There are people that should not be doing it. On my website, I have a page called a Keto Diet Plan.
And one of the first things I do, there’s a list there that you can download that has some medical conditions that are contraindicated for the Ketogenic Diet (meaning you shouldn’t be doing the Ketogenic Diet if you have these conditions).
So, I would recommend that people look at that page. It’s called The Keto Diet Plan page on my website. It has that information there.
If you don’t have any of those conditions, then the Ketogenic Diet is safe, and it’s non-toxic. And it’s healthy for just about everyone. So if you want to start it, you can go to that page. But it’s basically just being conscious of your carbohydrate intake and knocking down your protein a little bit and eating mostly natural fats and green, leafy vegetables and meat, fresh meat.
It’s really a fresh food diet. Mostly, you can do it just by getting rid of processed food.
DEBRA: Right! But I found for myself that I got rid of processed food a long time ago, but I was still eating the wrong relationships of fat and carbs and protein. I was on a low carb diet, but I think I was eating too much protein and not enough fat.
When I started changing around the fat, that made a big difference in my ability to lose weight and how my body looked and how I feel.
One of the things that I highlighted in your book is about coconut oil. Now, a lot of websites where they’re talking about low carb or real food, coconut oil, coconut oil, coconut oil is a big thing. And I read a lot about why people think that different foods are healthy and why they think they’re not healthy.
But one of the things that you say about coconut oil is that if you take coconut oil, it gets converted directly into ketones in your body. And so that’s a way that just by adding more coconut oil to your diet, you can make that transition faster.
Ellen Davis: Correct, yeah. At the beginning, that’s recommended to help ramp up ketosis, to take a tablespoon or so of coconut oil. You don’t want to go crazy though because if they’re not used to that, it will cause some bowel issues. So you want to go slowly on ramping up your coconut oil intake.
DEBRA: I remember, there are so many different ways. Tell us different ways that you might use coconut oil. I know that it’s not something that one would typically put on their salad and salad dressings or things like that.
Ellen Davis: It is a saturated fat. It’s solid at room temperature, so you kind of have to melt it if you want to use it as an oil.
But one of my favorite ways to have coconut is to get coconut butter and just eat it right out of the jar. It’s really good. If you’ve never had Artisana’s coconut butter, I highly recommend it. It’s very, very good.
DEBRA: I have! It’s delicious. It’s delicious.
Ellen Davis: So I’ll do that a lot. Or you can use it to fry foods. A lot of people will fry their eggs. And a lot of people will take it and put it on a hot drink in the morning and drink it. So they’ll put it in coffee or they’ll put it in tea or something like that.
DEBRA: I’ve never heard of that. So, we don’t have to avoid fried foods on this diet?
Ellen Davis: No, no. No, you just don’t want to have vegetable oils. First of all, if you want to fry, you’ll need butter or olive oil or coconut oil.
DEBRA: I think that’s wonderful.
Ellen Davis: Of course you don’t want to bread anything. You just want to fry.
Now, if you want to have fried eggs in the morning, you can have that. Yeah, I fry stuff. All my Teflon skillets gets used very, very frequently.
DEBRA: I made the other day fried chicken by first putting it in coconut flour, and then dipping it in egg, and then dipping it in coconut flakes.
Ellen Davis: Ooh…
DEBRA: Then I put about an inch of coconut oil in my skillet, and I really fried them. They were crispy and just all the characteristics of what you would want in a fried chicken. They didn’t taste like they were dipped in wheat.
They tasted kind of coconut-y. They were crispy and salty. They’re wonderful! Wonderful!
Ellen Davis: That sounds great.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. So there’s a lot of things that can be done. And I love being able to have more fat in my diet.
So, we only have about five minutes left, five or six minutes left. Is there anything you want to talk about that we haven’t covered?
Ellen Davis: Yeah, there’s quite a few things. This diet can be used to prevent cancer. I think you’ve mentioned that at the beginning of the show. Cancer patients are restricted to a pretty low carbohydrate intake, maybe 12 grams. But you could start this diet at 50 grams of carbohydrates because that’s really the cut-off for ketosis.
So, as long as you’re eating a moderate amount of protein and you’re staying below 50 carbs, you can get a lot of the benefits from a ketogenic diet. And that gives you a little more choices in terms of what you can eat. At 50 carbs, you could probably have a few strawberries or something like that during the day.
So, it’s not as restrictive for cancer prevention or just to optimize health. Like I said, you can stay right around 50 grams for that. My website has a lot of menu plans and some other things that people can look at. There’s quite a bit of information there if somebody wants to start the diet.
DEBRA: Good! One thing I just realized that I wanted to say is when I was reading your book, I realized about how we get all these nutrients from foods. And one of the things that my doctor said to me because I was commenting to him, my medical doctor, that I’m not so hungry, he said, “It’s because your body’s actually getting nourished.
And it’s actually getting nourishment from foods.” And for years, I’ve heard this argument about whether or not people need to take supplements because they can’t get enough nourishment from food.
Well, now, what I would say after eating this way is I would say I’m getting so much nourishment from food that I look at my pile of supplements and I go, “You know what? I don’t really feel like taking these.” I’m taking much less supplements than I used to.
But it occurred to me that the only reason that supplements even exists is because people aren’t eating real food.
I mean, the worst supplements to take would be those made from synthetic nutrients and have synthetic additives in them, but then you can go to whole foods supplements, but still, it’s even better to just get your nutrients from food.
And if you’re eating these whole foods that are nutrient-dense, like eating complete proteins, eating fats (those are where the nutrients are), and for calories, eating animal proteins and fats, it has so much nutrition than eating plants.
Ellen Davis: Correct, yes.
DEBRA: And so here we have food that doesn’t have nutrition. And then, we’re being sold the nutrition in a bottle or a pill.
Ellen Davis: It doesn’t make much sense.
DEBRA: It doesn’t make much sense.
Ellen Davis: No, it’s a crazy way to do a food chain, but that’s where it is right now for the American diet.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so what else do we need to know? We’ve got about three minutes.
Ellen Davis: The thing I would also say about the Ketogenic Diet is they’re anti-inflammatory. So if you’re having any kind of inflammation issues, this is definitely a diet you want to check out and look because it is very anti-inflammatory. It really shuts down the inflammation even at the cellular level. So it’s something that people want to take a look at if they have a high Celiac to protein reading or having any kind of inflammation issues within the body. It’s something that they should definitely take a look at.
DEBRA: Good, good. So, tell us typically what you eat.
Ellen Davis: In the morning, usually—I’ll make a quiche on the weekend. So I have a quiche that—again, I’m a dairy person—will have heavy cream in it and cheese and eggs. But if you didn’t want to have dairy, you could have eggs in the morning with bacon or gluten-free sausage. That’s another favorite breakfast of mine.
Lunch, usually, like I said, a very high fat meal is sour cream or avocado or a salad sometimes with some meat on top of it. And dinner, usually, a piece of dish or a piece of chicken and some more green vegetables—bread and butter of course.
DEBRA: So, let’s see, what do you eat for your carbs. Your carbs are basically your green vegetables?
Ellen Davis: Yeah, pretty much. I mean, I’ll make the bread with the almond flour. That’s got a few carbs in it. I’ll have one of those or so. But I don’t usually eat very many carbs during the day. I just have found that with my blood sugar, the past blood sugar issues that I’ve had, if I go over 20 or 30 carbs a day, I start to not feel good. So I keep it pretty low for myself.
But that’s not always the case for everyone. If you don’t have any blood sugar issues, like I say, you can probably get—there are some people that can eat a hundred carbs a day and still be in ketosis. It just depends on what your metabolism do.
DEBRA: Yeah, everybody’s body needs different…
Ellen Davis: Absolutely, yeah.
DEBRA: Yeah.
Well, Ellen, thank you so much for being on today.
Ellen Davis: Well, thank you for having me.
DEBRA: Yeah, I really appreciate the information that you’ve put together in your book and on your website. I’m going to be looking at this more.
Oh, so let’s talk about your recipe. On my food blog—you can just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and go to “Food” in the menu across the top, I put in there Ellen’s recipe for making her sandwich rolls, her bread. And this bread, actually, these rolls, if you shove them to somebody or have them eat them, they would not say, “Ewww… what’s this?” They’d say, “Oh, this is good bread.” It really looks and tastes like a wheat roll.
It turns purple when you break it, a very beautiful color.
Ellen Davis: Yeah, I know. Sometimes, it does it; and sometimes, it doesn’t. I think it’s the type of […] that you get.
That’s the only thing I could figure out.
DEBRA: Oops, we’ve got to go! We’ve got to go. It’s the end of the show.
Ellen Davis: Okay.
DEBRA: Thank you for being with me today. ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com.
Ellen Davis: Take care.
