I got into Paleo years ago and eventually followed nearly everyone in that community over to Keto. Keto never seemed to work very well for me. I didn’t know what else to do and kept at it for a long time, even though some issues it caused were difficult to deal with.

My sleep was a wreck when I was in ketosis and I often would clench my jaw and grind my teeth during my sleep. I would search google for others with those symptoms and nobody would mention it so I thought I just wasn’t getting enough electrolytes or something.

More electrolytes and more magnesium seemed to help a bit, but I felt it was just masking a problem. I still had trouble sleeping and would still clench my jaw or grind my teeth occasionally if I took too many or too few of certain electrolytes.

I did a lot of research and found Ray Peat’s Information online. I am starting to believe the sleep problems were caused by the brain not being able to regulate serotonin, as well as higher cortisol. Keto, Low Carb, and Carnivore can cause you to be unable to regulate your serotonin and induce more cortisol and a stress metabolism state. I believe this higher stress is why weight loss can occur on keto, however it is probably not a good state to be in for very long.

Serotonin isn’t just a happy chemical as the pharmaceutical companies would like you to believe. Serotonin syndrome is a recognized issue that causes a number of symptoms, including:

• Anxiety
• Restlessness
• Muscle Rigidity
• Diarrhea
• Bowel Sounds
• Shivering
• Dry mucous membranes

I believe many people who have tried low-carb, keto, and carnivore diets have experienced many of these symptoms. They are unwittingly causing themselves serotonin dysregulation.

The solution is simple, though in the keto community it is sacrilege. Even though you are scared out of your mind to eat more sugar and carbs in your diet by all these keto gurus, you can just try it for a month or two like you did when you started keto and see how it works for you. Simply bring carbs like fruit and sugar, maybe some starches, back into the diet, while still avoiding harmful substances like vegetable oil as much as possible.

You may lose weight more slowly and will not quickly get six pack abs, but you will not be dieting at the expense of other parts of your life and wellbeing. Being less stressed and more resilient is a very valuable quality in these times.

The actual epidemic only gets lip service once in awhile. This graph of hospitalizations only goes to 2009, but the trajectory of the graph is going straight up! What must this look like 10 years later! 42% of americans in 2018 are obese!

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db360.htm

Source: https://www.hcup-us.ahrq.gov/reports/statbriefs/sb137.pdf

It is likely that a diet including seed oils is responsible for a lot of metabolic disease. I would propose that this includes sunburns, caused by diet more than just staying in the sun by itself. Recently sunscreens that contain Benzene were recalled, so it’s entirely possible that skin cancer was exacerbated by sunscreen itself!

Seed oils are very high in Omega-6 that cause inflammation. Seed oils are originally a waste product of industrial processes, not meant for food. If you watch how it’s made you will realize that vegetable oils are not really food.

The invention of sunscreen may have even coincided with the growing use of seed oils in the 1930’s. Sunscreen was invented in 1938 in Switzerland by Franz Grieter. He got a sunburn when hiking in the mountains and created a cream to help him prevent it. In the 1930’s Weston A Price was also visiting Switzerland and found a marked difference in the diet between isolated mountain communities and modern city dwellers.

The diet of isolated mountain living swiss was noted as: “primarily consisted of dairy products (raw milk, butter, cream and raw milk cheese) from cows grazing on lush alpine slopes, and rye bread, or roggenbrot, from rye grown in the valley. They ate meat about once a week, usually veal, using all the parts and making soup with the bones, and some vegetables during the summer months.”

The diet of city dwelling “modernized swiss” was described that they: “got their food from stores selling sugar, white flour, pastries, jams and jellies, canned condensed milk, canned foods and vegetable oils.”

This looks similar to the extreme difference between an ancestral diet and a modern food diet.

A number of other bloggers and twitter users have found that they have not gotten sun burn, or not as severe a reaction to the sun when seed oils were removed from their diet as well.

Eating animal saturated fat could be protective, natural vitamin D is necessary for good health and sunscreen really is the new margarine.

I have started to use reduced lenses to try to reduce my prescription strength. That will be a blog post for later, once I see how it works for me. In the meantime I now have lots of eyeglasses that I have ordered online as i try different lens reductions.

I have never been happy with the standard way of cleaning glasses, using microfiber cloths and spray cleaners. They always seem to leave a residue that does not evaporate or eventually causes me to scratch the lense coating.

My new solution is to use a camera lens pens, and it works great! I am able to clean the lenses with no scratching or residue.

First you brush away any dirt on the surface with the brush side of the lens pen. Brushing both sides of the lenses until you don’t have any dirt. The brush also tends to move around any smudges or oils on the lenses so you might see it streaking the lenses. That will go away in the next step.

The second step is to wipe the lenses with the carbon applicator to remove any smudges. The carbon applicator will clean the lenses. Move the applicator around so it moves the smudges off the edge of the lens, instead of stopping in the middle. If your carbon applicator does not have much carbon on it, you can put the cap back on and move the cap on and off the applicator. The cap of the lens pen has a carbon sponge inside of it that can apply more carbon.

I love how clean my eyeglasses are now. This is the cleanest i’ve ever gotten my eyeglasses and have ordered a few lens pens from amazon to keep them around.