New Consciousness Review Winter 2016 | Page 30

HEALTH foods, and we need them for healthy human cognition. We are unique that way with respect to other species. Our brains utilize 20 to 30 percent of our total energy supply just to operate them, whereas our closest primate ancestor has a brain that uses only about eight percent of its total energy supply. Our brains are very metabolically expensive as a species, and the fat that we consumed from the animals that we hunted for countless millennia helped to supply and rapidly develop that structural substrate. It actually also made us uniquely capable as a species of operating our brains on almost nothing but ketones, which are the energy units of fat capable of almost fully fueling our brains. In fact, infants are born effectively in a state of ketosis, and ketones are the primary fuel for neuro-development. We’re really literally born to run on fat, but here in modern times we are conditioned to begin depending on carbohydrates as soon as (or only if) we start consuming them in earnest. The thing about carbohydrates is that structurally, maybe one to two percent maximum of human physiological structure is actually carbohydrate-based at all. We use a few glycoproteins Nature would never have been so stupid or shortsighted as to make us wholly dependent on only one fuel (much less one as volatile, damaging and unreliable as sugar). We have glucose which we can think of as a form of rocket fuel that gets released in our bodies in greater quantities when we’re being confronted with say, an emergency or a need for extreme exertion. 30 | New Consciousness Review for immune function and glucosamine (things of that nature) for some connective tissue. There are very few other types of cells in our body that rely of actual necessity upon glucose as their primary source of fuel, like our red blood cells, some of the cells in the retina of your eye, and a few cells in the inner medulla of your kidneys. Other than that, we can do almost everything we need to do using free fatty acids and/or ketones to fuel our body and our brain--especially our brain. According to research by Dr. Richard Veech (one of the world’s foremost experts on ketosis, and the Senior Researcher and Laboratory Chief at The National Institutes of Health, the inventor of the ketone ester, and has worked for the last 47 years studying cellular energy and homeostasis) our heart actually runs close to 28 percent more efficiently in a state of ketosis than through a sugar-based metabolism. Nature would never have been so stupid or shortsighted as to make us wholly dependent on only one fuel (much less one as volatile, damaging and unreliable as sugar). We have glucose which we can think of as a form of rocket fuel that gets released in our bodies in greater quantities when we’re being confronted with say, an emergency or a need for extre