As much as you try to follow a well-formulated diet, sometime, supplementation with taking different vitamins and minerals is necessary in order to stay healthy even on a keto diet. Some people get into a rut and they eat the same things over and over again, and so you’re.
Not getting all the nutritional benefits of eating a wide range of foods, same with a carnivore diet if you’re eating the keto carnivore or just a strict carnivore diet, if you’re not eating organ meats, you’re, not really getting all of the vitamins and minerals that your body Needs so today I’m sharing with you guys my top 10 supplements that might be necessary for you on the keto diet.
In case you guys don’t already know this. I am a pharmacist, so I have a doctorate degree in pharmacy. So I have gone through years and years of training with learning about drugs and medications and over-the-counter supplements.
So I’m going to share with you guys my advice on some of the top ones. I think that you might need to incorporate into your diet and I’ll have all of these recommendations listed down below in the description box for you, so you can either buy them online or in the store.
Also before we get started one quick disclaimer, although I’m a pharmacist, I am NOT your pharmacist. I am NOT your doctor so make sure before you start any of these supplements that you do consult either your pharmacist or your doctor to make sure that they’re right for you, because some of these things might interact with either other medications that you’re taking or health Conditions that you do have so once again, these are just supplements that I recommend, but before you start them, please do consult your doctor or your pharmacist now before we dive into it, don’t forget to subscribe to my channel and hit that notification bell, so you get Notified every time I post a new video now most of you guys have already heard about the health benefits of collagen and you might even already take a collagen supplement.
It’S actually great for joint health. It’S anti-aging because it helps support your hair and your skin and your nails too, but it also helps with wound healing. In fact, when my mom had heart surgery for a valve replacement, I recommended that she take it.
I gave her some collagen supplement to take just to help with the healing process and she really does believe that that’s what made her heal so quickly, but she actually continued to take the supplement too.
So she takes it every day and if you look at her skin, it’s a lot more softer and plumper, and so it’s something that she’s going to continue to take and there’s many different types of collagen supplements out there.
There’S some that are in powder form, which are great because you can mix it in your morning, coffee or tea or into a smoothie, but there’s also pill form too. If you don’t want to use the powdered form, the powdered form of collagen that I like to take is by perfect Kido.
This is the one that I use it’s unflavored kind, but they actually have different flavors like chocolate and vanilla and salted caramel, but I like it because it dissolves beautifully into the coffee plus it has MCT oils in it.
So that’s gonna help. You keep full longer and it’s gonna give you a little boost of energy. I also feel like it makes my coffee super creamy too. Whenever I use it perfect, Kito’s collagen is grass-fed.
It’S key to approved, there’s no artificial sweeteners or any sort of junk in it. It’S also dairy free, if you guys want to save on your order, click on the link down below in the description box to get there.
Now, you always hear how important it is to get extra salt on the keto diet. But did you ever wonder why I’m going to explain it to you? It’S really quite fascinating, plus you’ll, understand why sodium is so important for biological functions and it’s something that you shouldn’t be scared of, especially if you use it correctly and you eat the proper foods.
If someone is eating a high carbohydrate diet, where there’s lots of insulin being released, the insulin actually tells the kidney to reabsorb that extra salt and then instead of excreting it and water, tends to follow it too.
So not only are you retaining salt, but you start to retain water too. That’S actually why a lot of people that are pre-diabetic or diabetic have high blood pressure because retaining all of this fluid which increases their blood pressure.
It’S also the reason why one of the first-line therapies for high blood pressure is a diuretic, so you can get rid of that excess water to lower your blood pressure. Now, on a keto diet, which is a low insulin, releasing diet you’re not signalling to the body to hold on to salt, so that gets excreted and then so does the water.
So, that’s why it’s important to make sure you’re getting an extra sodium since you’re, not reabsorbing it along with extra water to so that you stay hydrated, often when people first start the keto diet.
They go through. What’S called the keto flu, so they start to get tired and dizzy nauseous. They have a headache. They just don’t feel good. These are all symptoms of in two lo of electrolytes, specifically sodium, but sometimes potassium and magnesium.
So if you want to prevent the keto flu, it’s important that you have extra supplementation, especially in the beginning, with sodium and sometimes when I’m fasting I’ll experience, some dizziness and nausea or headaches, and I really notice it like.
If I’m having and work out, it’s a strenuous workout that I’m doing that’s fasted, that’s when I really start to notice those symptoms so to combat that or actually prevent it from happening I’ll. Take a sodium supplement before my workout.
This is the one that I take. It’S one gram of sodium, so we’ll take one of these tablets either. When I have those symptoms I’ll take one and my symptoms will go away within like 15 minutes or a half-hour or I’ll take it before I’m gonna have like a real strenuous, fasted workout, and this sodium I picked up from the pharmacy.
You can find it behind the pharmacy counter, it’s still an over-the-counter product, so you don’t need a prescription for it, but they also have other different types of salt supplements out there and no thermit abs makes one you just have to either ask your pharmacist or go Visit your pharmacy to find them.
If you don’t want to take an actual pill supplement form, you could actually just add about like a half a teaspoon of salt to some warm water stir it around to dissolve and drink that like as a shot, but I think that’s really gross, and I just Can’T stomach it, so that’s why I go for the pill form of salt in, of course, the easiest way to get salt in your diet is just to add it to your food, so make sure that when you are cooking your food that you’re adding salt to It for about a semester and my undergrad at UC Davis, I decided to major in neurology.
It sounded really cool at the time until I realized that nerve conduction really had a lot to do with physics, which was like my least favorite subject. But with that one semester I did learn how nerve control muscle contraction and all has to do with potassium will and sodium too, but in a nutshell, nerve impulses, travel from the brain to the muscle by a series of action, potentials, opening and closing sodium and potassium Gates, when the nerve signal gets to the muscle, if there’s not sufficient potassium around the nerve and the muscle will actually keep firing and you get a spasm, charley horses and muscle spasms are also another symptom of the keto flu.
So to prevent them, you want to make sure that you’re getting enough potassium in your diet. Now some foods that are high in potassium are avocado, broccoli, spinach and also animal protein, but you can also supplement to.
This is especially important if you don’t have a balanced diet or if you’re, first starting out on the keto diet, and you don’t want to get the keto flu. So the one that’s over-the-counter is. This is potassium gluconate, it’s 99 milligrams of potassium gluconate.
You could take one or two of these a day just to make sure that your potassium levels are up again. You do want to consult a doctor before adding on any additional potassium and especially a potassium supplement just because it can interact with certain medications that you might be on or it can cause like heart problems.
If you have underlying arrhythmia issues, make sure you consult your doctor before adding on any potassium supplements. Some symptoms of a low potassium are diarrhea low energy, a heavy feeling of the legs and dizziness magnesium.
This is another very important supplement that you should consider taking you’ve. Probably already heard that a lot of people are actually deficient in magnesium long ago, it used to be in our water sources, so our ancestors never had to worry about magnesium deficiency, but that’s not the case anymore.
So now we mostly get it from our foods and a lot of those vegetables that are grown conventionally, even some organic vegetables. They have a lot of nutrition and nutrients ripped from it because it’s not in the soil anymore.
So that’s when it’s important to supplement magnesium is used for a lot of different cellular processes like nerve, conduction and muscle contraction. It is also needed to help burn glucose way. A lot of people that consume a higher carbohydrate diet are at real risk of having magnesium deficiency.
Magnesium is also needed to regulate potassium too so a lot of times when a customer comes into my pharmacy and they tell me they have muscle cramps. I might think about giving them a potassium supplement or recommending that they eat some foods higher in potassium, but a lot of times like that muscle spasm is caused by a lack of magnesium first and not potassium, so that’s one may be a magnesium supplement.
They might want to try that too, and there are many different forms of manganese I’m out there. My favorite form is magnesium glycinate because it has a better absorption, so your body’s gonna use it as opposed to magnesium oxide or magnesium citrate that don’t get absorbed into the body quite as well, and those ones tend to cause more diarrhea, which is good.
If you’re trying to combat constipation, I usually take my magnesium in the evening just because it does have a calming effect. So, if you’re having trouble going to sleep, then you might want to consider taking your magnesium in the evening.
Another way that you can get magnesium is by taking a bath with epsom salts, so epsom salts is a magnesium salt and you have to soak in the tub for about 20 minutes with about a couple cups of epsom salts in there.
In order to get it absorbed into your skin, but it’s a great way it soothes sore muscles it. It just gives you that calming effect too, so that you can get some rest at night. Magnesium is also available as a spray that you can spray at bed.
Time on your chest and once again it’s going to get absorbed into the skin as you sleep another way that you can ensure that you’re getting all the necessary electrolytes and vitamins and minerals is by consuming organ meats.
Now I don’t really like the taste of organ meats, so I don’t usually cook with them all that often so I tend to reach for a capsule form supplement that has freeze-dried organ meats in it and the ones I’ve been using are by ancestral supplements.
I’Ve been using these for around six months and I can completely tell the difference. They’Ve increased my energy. I have a better mood when I notice when I’m taking these. Sometimes I do stop taking them and I do notice a difference in my energy level.
In my mood, when I don’t take them so I’ve been using these around six months and I swear by them. Ancestral supplements believes that we should be eating, like our ancestors did. When our ancestors killed an animal.
The most prized possession was actually the organ meats. They would eat those first before they ate the meat. Our ancestors also believed that certain organ meats would help heal. Whatever is ailing you so like.
If you were having heart problems and you should eat the heart because you’re getting all of those nutrients and vitamins from that organ – that maybe your own heart needs if we’re started, taking their basic organ meats, which has liver heart, kidneys, spleen pancreas, so I’ve been taking That one and then I moved on to taking the the brain, all of their supplements are freeze-dried.
They come from grass animals that are raised on small farms in New Zealand, they’re produced in small batch quantities too, and they have third parties come in and test them for purity and safety, and these New Zealand cows are humanely raised and they’ve never had an incidence Of mad cow disease, so you don’t have to worry about that if you’re gonna go with the beef brain and the brain supplement helps with mental clarity and cognition and memory.
So that’s why I decided to take it just because I want to have the best mental performance possible, especially in my job as a pharmacist where I have to memorize a lot of things. It also has new atrophic factors to support the survival of existing neurons and actually encourages the growth of new ones too.
I reached out to ancestral supplements, because I love their products so much and they graciously gave me a code for you guys to try. If you want to purchase some of them, you can use code, keto focus at checkout, and it’s gonna give you 10 % off your order and that website will be listed down below for you guys, as well as my discount code.
Next, I want to talk to you guys about my sickness regimen. Now I really should bottle this up because I swear by it. It works like a charm every time I do it. Well, I mean almost every time but anytime, I feel a cold coming on or like a sore throat or just kind of worn down I’ll start this regimen and it just wipes it out and sore throats gon feel better within a few days.
Don’T end up getting sick at all. Once again, you might want to consult your doctor before trying this, because you might be on some medications or underlying health conditions that might not work well with this regimen, like I said, I start this regimen when I first start to have symptoms of feeling, sick or Maybe there’s somebody around me, like my husband or my kids, that are sick and I don’t want to get sick.
Then I’ll start taking this regimen to prevent me from getting sick in the first place, and my regimen includes vitamin D of vitamin C and elderberry extract. Those are the three things that I absolutely take.
Sometimes I out on other things like zinc or a colostrum supplement, but these three are the key. Vitamin D helps with your immune system. It helps support it. In fact, back when tuberculosis was running rampant, one of the treatments was to treat with cod liver oil, and that is actually really high.
In vitamin D and low vitamin D levels have been associated with upper respiratory tract infections and allergic asthma. I live in the Pacific Northwest, so I hardly get any sun exposure, especially this time of year.
So that’s where supplementation with vitamin D is key to keeping my immune system healthy. So what I do is when I feel that cold coming on, I start taking high doses of vitamin D, so we’re talking fifty thousand international units once a day for three days.
Only again, if you want to feel more comfortable about it, consult your doctor, but I wouldn’t be too worried about overdosing on vitamin D. A lot of people do have to take fifty thousand international units once a week, especially if they’re living in a climate.
Like me, where they don’t get a lot of sun exposure and even some cases, people do have to take it once a day. The other two supplements I’ll end up taking is vitamin C. This is a thousand milligrams I’ll take a thousand milligrams four times a day, along with some elderberry extract.
I give this in capsule form, because if you get the syrup, it does have a lot of sugars in it. Unless you can find a sugar-free syrup, but I’ll just take two capsules of this four times a day, along with the vitamin C and I’ll take both of these four times a day for as long as I have symptoms.
So once my symptoms are gone, then I’ll stop it and both of those, the vitamin C and the elderberry are antioxidants. The elderberry extract also contains immune, stimulating vitamins, and it helps with inflammation now.
This next supplement is something that not everybody is going to have to take, but it’s actually a necessary supplement. If you have the MTHFR gene mutation, which I do so, I have to take the supplement and actually there’s a lot of people that have some variation of this gene mutation out there.
I think they estimate, like a thirds of the world’s population, has some sort of snip or MTHFR gene mutation. So the MTHFR gene is an enzyme that helps in the reaction of breaking down folate into a necessary actively to perform all sorts of cellular activities from DNA repair synthesis immune functions.
Every single cellular function needs this enzyme in order to work. So if you are deficient in this enzyme at all, then that’s when you’re going to have complications down the road and mutations in the MTHFR gene can actually lead to a buildup of homocysteine and homocysteine is related to heart disease and blood.
Clots too, in fact, before I even knew that I had variations of this gene mutation. I had my lab stand. This was when I was in my 20s and the doctor came back and said. I had really high homocysteine levels, which I thought was absurd, because I was in my 20s.
This is when I ate really really clean and worked out all the time like a maniac, so it just did not make sense at all that I had high homocysteine levels and the doctor too didn’t really know about this gene mutation.
So we didn’t go down that path. It wasn’t until years later, when I had a 23andme test done where I discovered that I did have this mutation and I actually have the worst type, I’m homozygous for the c6 7:17 mutation, which means that I only have about 30 percent of normal enzyme activity.
If I was heterozygous like, I had one good copy and one of these bad copies I’d be around like 65 % and there’s other variations of snips within this gene that can cause varying degrees of enzyme of diminished enzyme activity.
So that’s why I think genetic testing is super important, especially when it comes to this. So in my situation, where I have the homozygous bad copy of this gene, I have to take a special prescription supplement.
So this is an active form of folate. It’S called el methylfolate, so it’s already gone through that reaction. It doesn’t really need that enzyme to give me an active form of folate that I can use for all my cellular processes and actually with consistently taking this supplement every single day I did have my labs.
Retested and my homocysteine levels are normal now, so I highly recommend that you guys get tested for this gene mutation or just any sort of genetic mutations that might be out there. You never know what you might have or what you could be passing down to your kids as well: vitamin k2 as another necessary supplement to have if you’re on the keto diet or even just any sort of diet.
Vitamin k2 is not the same thing as regular. Vitamin K that you’re used to hearing about that’s in like kale and all these green leafy vegetables they’re at different. It was first discovered by a dentist named Weston Price when he traveled the world in the early 20th century, looking at diet and diseases and and teeth health in different populations.
He found that people they ate like non industrial diets and had like poorer oral health hygiene. Actually had really good teeth and he believed it was a mystery and nutrient called activator X that was responsible for protecting them against tooth decay and disease and with later research.
It’S been discovered that this nutrient, this activator X, is actually vitamin k2. So, like I mentioned, vitamin K has different forms when the main forms is vitamin k1, which is found in our leafy greens and plants.
Plant foods and the other one is vitamin k2 which is found in animal foods and fermented foods too, and vitamin k2 is important because it plays a role in shuffling calcium. So it can help shuffle calcium into your bones, and so that’s going to help prevent against auto pur OSIS.
But it also like, if you get calcifications on your arteries, usually specifically this one – that a lot of people do have to get cleaned out because they get calcium deposits on there. Vitamin k2 can remove those calcium deposits.
So it’s really good at clearing out your arteries of any sort of calcifications and a lot of us on my keto diet are actually already consuming a lot of vitamin k2 because it’s in our grass-fed butter so make sure that you’re eating butter from grass-fed sources.
But if you want to make sure that you’re getting optimal protection, you do want a supplement just like vitamins. Minerals are very important for cellular functions and processes. They help to detoxify you.
They help to prevent you against diseases. They help slow down aging. They help with free radical scavenging tons of different things, they’re necessary for cellular functions. Basically, now we’ve already talked about the major ones like sodium and potassium and magnesium, but there’s a lot of other micronutrients out there that are necessary and that’s you need – and these are called trace, minerals, there’s chloride, which is needed for stomach acid production, calcium, which is Needed for for muscle, contraction and bones and heart contractions, there’s also other ones like selenium, sulfur, copper, manganese, all different types of trace, minerals that are needed for day to day functions.
I take a mineral supplement daily. The one I take is a liquid form. This is my Kido beam and I’ll. Have it listed down below where you can purchase it? It’S my favorite one, because it’s tasteless, you can’t taste it at all and it contains so many different micronutrients and they’re all listed on the back here.
This next up limit is really something that you need only if you’re having bowel issues, so, if you’re having constipation or diarrhea, which both are common, especially when you’re, first starting out with a keto diet or a carnivore diet.
So, if you’re having either of these a lot of times, psyllium husk can work because it’s a bulk forming laxative, so if you’re having constipation it just creates bulk up in your colon to help then push everything out.
Vice versa, if you’re having a diarrhea, it helps to bulk up the stool, so you’re not having like every all the liquid flush out. So again, it’s creating like a bulk, which sounds really gross and I’ll stop using the word bulk.
I promise, but it’s a really good natural remedy, it’s all from soluble fiber, so there’s nothing. That’S really gonna stimulate insulin, release so perfectly safe for the keto diet. Well, that’s my take on my top recommended supplements to have on the keto diet.
Once again. These are all recommendations you do need to consult your doctor, your pharmacist, before going ahead with any of these just to make sure that they’re gonna be right. For you make sure you subscribe to my channel keto focus and again hit that notification bell.
So you don’t miss any of my videos coming out. Stay healthy, bye,
