To understand the main benefit of the Ketogenic diet is to understand what Insulin is. Insulin is a hormone created in one of our essential glands called the Pancreas. There are such little islands called β-cells that they create Insulin. Insulin is necessary for our life. Without it, we would be dead within a few hours but its abundance causes almost all civilization diseases today. The Ketogenic diet lowers the level of insulin and that’s why is this diet very beneficial to our health. Did you know the average person is consuming so many carbohydrates that spike his Insulin level 8x more than is supposed to be? But back to Insuline purposes in our bodies
Feeding our cells
The first and main purpose of Insulin is to feeding our cells with the nutrition that they need. Insulin acts as something like a key to land into a cell’s insulin receptor (a keyhole), unlock it, and act as a straw thru that streaming necessary nutrition and energy in form of glucose into the cell that it gathered thru its bloodstream journey. Insulin is our blood protection from the glucose in our bloodstream because when is not taken from our blood causes Hyperglycemia and glucose destroys our blood vessels.
Storage and conversion
But what about when all cells are full but we still have a lot of glucose in our blood? Then Insulin acts like a storage hormone and stores excessive glucose mostly in the Liver. As we have excessive carbohydrate intake and our storage space might be not enough our very clever hormone has another special ability. It acts like a macronutrient converter. When there is no place to put glucose Insuline converts it into fat. It is real magic in nature and from the historical point of view, it is literally a lifesaver ability. When something like this happens we know very well where that fat is gonna landing. Am I right? Yes or yes? Yes, in parts of our body that we don’t like.
Gluconeogenesis
Our necessary clever hormone has another magic ability. It is also can change fat or muscles back into glucose and it is also surviving mechanism. There are some parts of our body that use as the only source of energy glucose. I will mention just a few of them as examples. Red blood cells, around 30% of the brain, Retina, etc. Other parts can run on Glucose or Ketone (fat property) but they prefer Ketone more. It’s a far better and cleaner source of energy. Because a minority of our body parts use just glucose though we need something that can tap into our fat or muscles reserve and change those properties back to glucose and it is our Insulin. It can convert fat into glucose directly but for glucose conversion from muscles, it uses another hormone called Cortisol which breaks muscle fiber into small pieces, and then Insuline change them into glucose. This is what we call Gluconeogenesis
My explanation is oversimplified and would not be taken as some scientific study. It is just a simple explanation for people that don’t understand scientific language. This is it and I hope u had little fun reading it and you understand the properties of Insulin a little bit for a better understanding of the Ketogenic diet.