Curious about how keto really works or if it can actually help with things like dementia or diabetes? Get a clear breakdown of what a true medical keto diet looks like and why most people are doing it wrong. Learn how diet impacts your brain, metabolism, and long-term health in ways you might not expect.

It also dives into why early testing is critical, even if you feel fine, and how small changes now can prevent major health issues later. Whether you're looking to improve your energy, lose weight, or just avoid future health risks, this is a smart, practical listen that connects the dots between food and function.

Highlights of the Podcast

00:04 - Why You Might Need a Health Coach

02:20 - What Real Keto Looks Like

04:55 - Keto and Dementia

08:59 - Catch Diabetes Early

11:39 - Why You Should Act Now

15:00 - A Word of Caution

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:00:04] All right. So we talk a lot about, you know, the different things that people need and why they need to coach and all that type of stuff and why they need somebody to walk them through this. Um, and people ask me like, well, can't they just do these things on their own? You can, it's possible. Like you can, you can figure out how to run a, an actual real medical based keto diet. You can figure it out on your own and you can do it by yourself. It is possible. It's highly improbable. When we're trying to find things for individual people, um, there's a lot that goes into it. So for instance, now I want to throw this one out because I want to make sure people understand this. Um, I've talked about methylene blue and methylene blues. Fantastic. I think it's great. It does lots of awesome things for people who have mitochondrial dysfunction, stuff like that. Um, and GLP ones, we've talked about those and those are fantastic for diabetics. I like them for the dementia people, people who have high insulin resistance. And we need to break that down. It's fantastic for those people. People who are 20, 30, 40 pounds overweight over fat, we need to break that down. I think they're usable. They're functional for that. If you don't have these issues, you don' need to use the stuff. So if you don have mitochondrial dysfunction, you shouldn't be taking methylene blue. If you have 10 pounds to lose, you shouldn' be doing GLP-1s. You know, cause these things, the risk reward on them isn't where it needs to be. So if don't need specific supplementation, you shouldn't be taking it. If you dont need testosterone, I talk about this a lot, you don't need more than enough. If you have enough, you don't need more.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:01:40] So there's a lot of these things that might not be right for you. Like carnivore diet might be phenomenal for your, your husband, your wife, your best friend, not for you, um, like we use, like one of my favorite diets in the world for fixing epilepsy, fixing, you're working on dementia, uh, working on diabetes is an actual real, what we consider a keto diet. Um, there's of things that are keto that aren't keto, um. A keto diet is high fat, zero carbohydrates, and like 10%, 20% of your, your macro function is going to be protein. Um, you give your body no choice, but to use fat as a fuel source. Um, and then as you start doing that, your body then starts making ketones and that's highly beneficial to brain function. Like the diet that I normally run. And a lot of the people I work with run is a low carbohydrate, high protein diet. Your body's still making sugar from the protein. Um, and so that's not a ketotic diet. It is really beneficial. It's easy to run. The foods are delicious. Uh, people see pretty significant weight loss. They still gain muscle function. Brain works just like normal. They don't really see that difference of the way they feel. They might have more energy, stuff like that, because they're cutting the toxins out, but it's not what I would consider. like an epileptic or a something we're using to actually fix a problem in the body. Um, so when you actually like how you decide where these things are and like which ones you want to run, uh, depends on, you know, what your functional ability is, what's your problems are and what your goals are. It's keto diets are phenomenal. A real actual producing ketones, keto diet are great.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:03:31] Again, not for everybody, phenomenal. We have the most research of any diet you can imagine. We have most actual research on keto diets because we found out that they fix brain issues like epilepsy and dementia and they fix biochemical issues like diabetes. We figured this out over 100 years ago. Um, we started, we've been using keto diets to fix epilepsy for a long time. Um, it is the number one treatment we have for epilepsy, even versus anti-convulsants, um, cause it'll actually fix it. Like there's a lot of, there's a lot research where it's shown. Someone had horrible epilepsy. They had them, they walked them through properly on a keto diet for, you know, a couple of months, six, eight months a year. And then they came off the diet and they'd never had any seizures again. Um, so. It's one of those things that you can use according to the research you can use to fix or cure epilepsy. Um, you can definitely use it to fix her cure, uh, diabetes. All these things have been shown over and over and over again in research. We've done it with diabetes several times. Um, and it's the best course of treatment for dementia. Um, now when I say that, I want to make sure that we, again, we're backing, we were framing these things properly. Um, the dementia I've worked on the dementia, I've had great success for if you're in the dementia world. Uh, the, the MCI of like four and below, we've had great success with five is questionable. I haven't worked on anybody over five. Um, so if you know what those mean, that's kind of where we're at. So, you know, by the time that you're drooling on yourself in a nursing home, that that's not the people that we're fixing. Um, it's the people where you definitely have it. you're still kind of waiting for things to get worse. Those are the ones that works phenomenally on. But again, because the reason that the way that metabolically you treat dementia is you fix the diabetes, you fix these with cholesterol. And the reason the way you fix the issues with the cholesterol is you give the body high end, healthy, really clean nutrients to make the cholesterol out of.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:05:33] So when we have cholesterol problems like plaque in the arteries and the stuff with the brain. Um, it's not that the cholesterol is bad. Cholesterol is not bad. I, you can have as much as you want to. It's not bad, um, as much, as you want to within normal physiological parameters. Like if you have, if 300, you know, you have you have high, you know, total cholesterol, 350, something like that. You could be a hundred percent healthy. Uh, you could be very unhealthy at 90 or a hundred total close. Like, like you have them within the range and you can be dying. You have it really high. You can be fine. It's the quality of the LDL. And so the quality, the total cholesterol function, and so keto diets will actually fix the diabetes issue and fix the cholesterol issue. Those are the two major pieces of issue we see with both diabetes and with dementia. And so it'll fix both of those issues. So, you know, then you just have to regenerate and heal the brain. Uh, so the in actual real keto diets, phenomenal for those type of individuals. Uh, is it something that you could run on a daily basis? Yeah, like you can, um, a lot of people can, a little people do. It's a little bit more difficult, um than say like a high protein, low carbohydrate, moderate fat diet. Um, but it's all kind of depending on what your body needs. We talk about the somatotypes. We talk to about ectomorphs and mesomorphs, and endomorphs and how they really require a little different chemical set. Um, then you factor in lifestyle, like what you're doing, you know, how often are you going out and entertaining clients or whatever, like how often do you travel and we got to start fitting things into your life. You know, there is a diet for a person that's going to be best for them. Uh, and oftentimes it's one of those things where you kind of have to hodgepodge things together to find something that's the optimal choice for them?

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:07:26] So, uh, if you don't have somebody to walk you through how to figure this out and then walk you though, how to, you know, make it all fit in your life. Uh, that's what that's, what we do. So, you, know, we can help you with that, but if you're running something, if you running a keto diet and you feel great and you're losing weight, fantastic, stay on. If you're running a diet and you can't figure out where, where it's going, then, you know, give us a call. What kind of help you kind of figure out how to fit it in your life? Uh, if you have something, if you've got diabetes, if you have, you know, high fasting insulin, if you have pre-diabetes, if you have those things and you're worried about them, you know, we're give us a call, we'll help you walk this through so that we can fix it. Diabetes isn't a joke. Um, it's not one of those things. A lot of people play with it and they're like, oh, I've got it, but you know it's not causing me problems, you Those not causing me problems. It is causing you problems. You just don't recognize the symptoms of it. Um, so what we've got to work through, you can cause kidney failure, liver failure, heart attack, stroke. Uh, it obviously causes dementia and Alzheimer's that leads into those things. So if you've, if you got type two or you wonder about it, uh, the way that you tell is you take a fasting insulin, don't don't look at your overall glucose, A1C is not a bad thing to look at, but I would look at fasting insulin, that's the easiest way to tell. If your doctor's not pulling it, call us. We'll pull it for you. Um, those are the things that you've really got to start looking at because long-term function, it's so much easier to fix things when they're smaller and they're new. Like that is, I realized how silly that sounds like. Well, everybody knows that. Yeah.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:08:59] But the problem is, is that most people aren't like scared enough to work on it until it gets really bad. And once it gets bad, it really hard to fix. Like we can still fix it, but it's hard. It takes longer. You've got to be more dedicated. You know, so those are the things. So if you're, if you haven't, if you haven' found the, if you haven't worked with somebody to find the right diet for you, the right schedule of how you're sleeping, you know, the supplementation you're taking, what exercises you're doing, what you're doing for your mental work. You know? And some of the stuff we've been able to get people all the way from start to finish on that stuff and two, three months, if you haven 't done that, you're missing a lot of the things that you need to do for your health. Um, and I tell people this all the time, you have people who are I die for my kids. Like that's, that's easy. Like that not that big of a deal. Will you do the work to live for them? Will you be the example for them where you do? The things that you need to do so that you're there mentally, you're there energetically, uh, and you're. There, you know, from a fit function, uh. You know, I'm, so I went that weird spot in my life where I'm like, I'm 45 and we're watching our parents, you know, and our, the friends of our parents and our uncles and so like that, you start to age out and we'll watching people. I'm having conversations with my friends. about their parents and they're like, I don't know, we're about to move into, you know, skilled care or nursing or, you know, these type of things. This is, this is the, this is the point.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:10:21] Like if you guys are looking at your parents, if you're looking at you're uncles, if you're looking at these types of things and you're watching their health, that's the path you're on. You might, you're what we're seeing. I'm not saying you, but what we've seeing is that you're this generation is going to get to that dementia state. get to that, you know, chronic illness. We're gonna get to that, that bad place. So the things that we were seeing that were being the eighties, nineties issues, we're starting to see in the fifties and sixties and seventies. Um, a lot of the things we have in our food are making these things worse. A lot of things we had, all the medications we're taking are making things worse, uh, so if you guys are in that set and you're starting to look at, you know, your friends, parents, your parents, like the people around you and like, man, this is terrible. I would get on it. And if you want to see some of this stuff, Just go and be an observer. Like go to some of these dementia support groups, go to these elder care, memory care support groups. Go to some these high, like the diabetes where people are falling apart support groups and listen to what these people say. It is, you know, I'm in the middle of it. I talk to these people every day and I still go to the support groups because I hear and I learn things from those people that isn't in the research. It's not what you're, when you work with the docs and stuff like that, that's not you're hearing.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:11:39] It can be devastating, um, but go to the nursing homes, go, go look at these people, go talk to them, go figure out like how you're feeling and stuff like that. If your grandma or your, your mom or something is like looking to go to these things, go and investigate them, go talk the people who are there, see how that feels. Remember you're going to be there one day. So the, the care you take of your body right now depends on how you are functioning. Take a look at that and kind of recognize what's going on. A lot of this stuff, you know, is dietary change. And a lot of people are like, oh, it's just so much change. You can start bleeding it in over time. Like we've got people that we've walked into keto diets over two, three months because it was too much of a change. And so we changed some foods and we changed some foods, and we change some foods. And then bang, they were in it. And they're like, oh, it's easier to walk into it. Because the other thing is that most people are like, I don't know what to eat. I don' know how to do this. You can either get a couple of books and start reading them and then figure it out that way, or you can have somebody walk you through it. Now here's the, here's, the other problem. This makes everything just kind of go throw up in the air. There are things that are marked keto that might be keto for some people that are not keto for others. Um, a lot of the chocolate bars, a a lot of the things that were out, um, aren't, uh, so a lot of the protein stuff that's marked keto, um may be for some and may not be for others, like here's the issue with, with, with running keto. This is why it's so hard.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:13:01] If you consume too much protein, especially protein that breaks down easily, your body won't get into ketosis. It'll stay in a sugar fat. It'll say it in a Sugar State. And so your body's still making sugar. It's still running on sugar. It's just making it. So you're, you're consuming these highly high dense proteins that are easily broken down. Your body goes, cool. We'll just turn these into glucose and we'll use glucose instead of making ketones. So if you've ever run a key that you ever tried to run a keto diet and you couldn't get your ketone levels up. It's very easily the amount of protein you were consuming. It could also be the amount of fiber you're consuming. So, because fiber blocks absorption of different things. It's really good to block sugar. So those, that's why these low carb diets, these low-carb high protein diets are so easy and they work really well for fat loss and building muscle and all that sort of stuff. So those are fantastic. However, they're not real keto because you're not producing ketones. You're not running on ketones So, some of these things, as we start walking through... You might think you're in a ketotic state and you're not. So I've talked to people who were like, well, I've, I tried to do keto because you know, I wanted to fix XYZ or I wanted a lose weight and it never worked for me. And you're like, did you check your ketone levels every day? Again, if you guys don't look, you can't tell me that you were in or out of ketosis. Um,.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:14:23] So there's a lot of these things that you kind of have to be walked through to understand all the intricacies of them. But if you've got, if think you've gotten a little bit of mild cognitive impairment, if, if your having issues remembering stuff, if you know, you're having, you know. You're having any of those things. If you take a self assessment, like just Google self assessment for memory self-assessment for MCI or mild cognitive impairment or self-assessment for dementia, take those things. And if it doesn't come back as 100%, you're fine. I would start getting that looked at and I would started working on that now. But I would starting walking through some of these things early. The other thing is that, you know, we keep seeing cancer after cancer after cancer that wasn't there and then, oh my gosh, it's there. If you guys got vaccinated with COVID, I would highly recommend that you start working on something right now because Just because you don't have cancer now, just because you don't any issues right now, it doesn't mean you're not going to have them quickly in the next two, three years.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:15:21] So if you guys have seen these things jump on, if you're, if you have friends who, you know, might need to recognize some of this information or get some stuff set up, get ahold of them, send this video to them. We can start helping them out. Um, but this is the big thing. If we don't start taking control of our health, you go, you're going to have any, if leave it up to the government, if we leave it to what the FDA says. you're 100% gonna be sick and miserable because the FDA's job is to protect the pharmaceutical companies and get you on as much stuff as you can. And I will have that conversation all day long because there's no evidence at all that the FDA is protecting individuals, they're protecting pharmaceutical companies, 100% of the time. There's so many, so many examples. Anyway, if you guys have any questions to this up questions@chalmerswellness.com, drop them in the comments. We'll talk to you guys later. Have a nice day. Thanks for your time.

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Dr. Matt Chalmers

Disclaimer: This content is for informational purposes only. Before taking any action based on this information you should first consult with your physician or health care provider. This information is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health providers with any questions regarding a medical condition, your health, or wellness