Ellis lectures on the benefits of ketosis

The first installment of the Graves lecture series kicked off 7 p.m., Tuesday in room 111 in the library.

This first lecture was given by Josh Ellis, assistant professor in the Family and Consumer Sciences department, and the title of his presentation was “Nutritional Ketosis is Phat.” The lecture focused mainly on giving good advice on how to live a healthier life and ways to refine our diets so we can get more out of them.

He said during the lecture that the reason he is doing these type of lectures is because “This is the first generation of American kids expected to live shorter than their parents.”

With that said however, the presentation was tailored toward older people, which was evident because there was an older crowd featuring adults who didn’t attend CSC but lived either in Chadron or close to it.

Ellis started off by talking about the history of our ideals of what a healthy and unhealthy diet are. He spoke about the origins of saturated fats and how we came to a conclusion that they are unhealthy for us to have.

He also spoke about John Yudkin and how, in 1972, he said that sugar was the main cause to all of the health issues that we have.

Then he paralleled that statement with interesting facts about how the average American consumes close to 152 pounds of sugar annually,  and close to 30 million of the population has type 2 diabetes.

He also gave his views on the nutrition guidelines which has transformed from the food pyramid model to My Plate. He said that doesn’t believe in those, because only about 20 percent of the population follows these recommendations.

In the later parts of the lecture he started offering his opinion on how to make diets work so we get more out of them. He then spoke about Nutritional Ketosis; which is the process of accelerating production of the ketones through the restriction of dietary carbohydrates, which is a high fat and low carb diet.

One surprising statement that he made was that physical activity is better for lowering insulin levels and helping cognitive thinking. Exercise alone won’t assist with weight loss, which is a common misconception today. One thing he reiterated during this lecture was the more natural foods we eat the healthier we are, and to try and stay away from processed foods as much as possible.

The upcoming lecture will be Oct. 13; and the speaker will be Steve Coughlin, who will be performing a poetry reading featuring many different poems from his book. All lectures are free and open to the public.