Healthy Weight

If You’re Eating a Ketogenic Diet You’ll Want These

All the doctors at Robinhood Integrative Health believe that if you want to drastically improve your health, the best place to start is with your diet.

And adapting the ketogenic diet is easily one of the most powerful ways to improve diet. Quickly.

The health benefits of a ketogenic diet are indisputable. And while plenty of people want to bash the ketogenic diet, many of the takedown articles aimed at the ketogenic diet ignore hundreds of studies that support ketogenic eating for health improvements.

Our goal here isn’t to convince you that the ketogenic diet is something you should switch to.

Instead, we wanted to let you know that one of the products we have that aids in adhering to a ketogenic diet is on sale now.

Our ketone strips are a product that helps you monitor your ketone bodies, which are a byproduct of ketosis in your body.

With these strips you can keep track of the level of ketosis you’re in.

Why the Ketogenic Diet Requires Ketone Strips 

It might be an overstatement to say that the ketogenic diet requires ketone strips.

It isn’t an overstatement to say that ketone strips are extremely helpful for helping people trying to stick to the ketogenic diet maintain their ketosis.

Strips measure the ketone bodies in your urine, and the concentration of your ketone bodies in your urine gives you an idea of how deep into ketosis you are.

A little about ketone bodies.

The ketone body is something that your body makes when you’re not using glucose as energy.

There are 3 kinds of ketone bodies

> Acetoacetate

> Beta-hydroxybutyrate

> Acetone

Ketone strips are one of the best, and most affordable ways for you to measure how many ketones are in your urine.

Ketone strips existed long before the keto diet became popular.  The medical community used them for a long time to assist type I diabetes measure ketone bodies in their urine. Type 1 diabetics have to watch out for something called ketoacidosis – a life-threatening condition where ketones reach dangerously high levels and make the blood acidic.

For people who want to go “keto” these strips help you monitor your ketone levels to show you much fat you’re burning.

Here’s how these strips work.

At the end of a ketone strop is an absorptive pad. These pads contain chemicals that are designed to detect ketones. When they detect ketones they change color depending on the concentration of the ketone bodies.

Light pink indicates that there are low-levels of ketones in the body,

Dark purple means you’re in full-blown ketosis.

These tests mainly detect acetone, and occasionally acetoacetic.

If your strips detect both it means you are absolutely in ketosis.

The third ketone body, Beta-hydroxybutyrate, is not detected by strips as it is mostly contained in the blood. If you want to test for beta-hydroxybutyrate you’ll need to get more expensive (and more painful) blood testing strips (which we don’t sell).

Using the strips is much more simple.

All you do is pee (or dip in urine) on the absorptive pad. After that, you wait 15 seconds to a minute for the pad to change color. Compare the color to the color on the chart and you’re good to go.

These are the actual breakdowns of the strips.

  • Below 0.5 mmol/L – normal
  • Between 0.5-3 mmol/L – nutritional ketosis
  • Over 3 mmol/L – high ketone levels
  • Over 5 mmol/L – dangerously high and indicative of ketoacidosis

Ketone strips are extremely helpful for people who are trying to get into ketosis and/or find themselves falling out of ketosis more often than not.

They are quite accurate for entry into ketosis as well as normal ketosis.

However, when you’re in deep ketosis and have remained there for some time they will become “less accurate.” Only because when your body makes more ketones than it can use, it gets rid of it through urine or breath. But when ketones are fully metabolized, few, if any, will appear in the urine.

Meaning when you’re burning ketones for fuel there won’t be much leftover in your blood/urine/breath.

How to Know If You Need Ketone Strips

Not everyone will need ketone strips.

If you eat fewer than 50 grams of carbs daily and high fat within just a few weeks’ time you will be in ketosis.

If you’re trying to get into ketosis but aren’t that strict with carbs you may benefit from strips because you’ll be able to find that balance and check for signs of ketosis.

Best of all is ketone strips are non-invasive, easy to use, cheap, and relatively accurate.

With these strips you can keep track of the level ketosis you’re in.

 

Talk soon,

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