Cancer Scientist: This Common Daily Diet May Be Feeding Cancer! - Thomas Seyfried

Use the Glucose Ketone Index to Know Where You Actually Stand

Seyfried developed the Glucose Ketone Index, or GKI, while working with a brain cancer patient named Trudy Dupont who was managing her tumor through a ketogenic diet. He was measuring her glucose and ketones separately, but the numbers were hard to interpret together. One day Trudy emailed in a panic: her blood sugar had spiked to 186 milligrams per deciliter after someone stole her handicapped parking space and she ran up the stairs in anger. She thought her cancer was about to surge. Seyfried asked for her ketone reading. It was still 0.9 millimolar, essentially unchanged. The glucose had moved wildly; the ketones had not. That moment showed him that tracking either number alone was misleading, and he worked with his students to build a single ratio that captured the metabolic state of the whole system. The formula is straightforward. You convert your glucose reading from milligrams per deciliter to millimolar by dividing it by 18, then divide that result by your ketone reading in millimolar. The number you get is your GKI. Seyfried measured the host on camera during the episode: blood glucose of 90 milligrams per deciliter divided by 18 equals 5, then divided by ketones of 0.4 millimolar gives a GKI of 12.5. On the chart Seyfried built with his students, that sits in the zone he calls the prevention range, where Paleolithic humans mostly lived and where cancer and chronic disease risk is substantially reduced. The red zone of elevated risk starts when blood sugar climbs and ketones drop toward zero, which is the metabolic territory produced by a diet of highly processed carbohydrates, constant snacking, and no exercise. A GKI of 500 is mathematically possible in severe metabolic disease.