I want to share my unsuccessful experience. I started keto diet couple of weeks ago. By the end of 1st week my PD symptoms progressed dramatically up to the point that I could not go to work one day. Basically medications did not kick in at all or lasted for an hour or so. I was taking one pill after another, nothing worked, had multiple dystonia spasms, and so on. My guess was that I depleted a glycogen supply while body did not quite switched to burning fats, and therefore could not make an energy efficiently. I was willing to keep going hoping that it should get better with time. Couple of days ago I had an appointment with a new neurologist. Here is his interpretation. He said that they looked into keto diet in regards with dystonia (one of my main PD issues) and did not find it beneficial. His take on it was that worsening of the symptoms was related to protein competing with levodopa absorption. When glucose is not present, body looks at protein as a next energy resource as fat digestion requires more energy (9 kcal fat vs 4 Kcal protein). As a result, protein from the food as well as the body muscles gets digested into peptides and amino acids and all these bio products being present in much higher concentrations than levadopa interferes with levadopa absorption. Levadopa absorbs nonspecifically, through passive diffusion and therefore significantly higher concentrations of competing reagents reverse dynamic equilibrium. To make it even worse this protein/levadopa competition happens in two places: guts and brain. With guts we can try to time food and medicine intakes, but in the brain protein seats pretty much all the time. These are just some bullet points that I recall from the doctor visit, take it as a disclaimer. So, to conclude this story, I stopped keto diet and feel great - medicines work, and most important my fear of atypical PD plus condition gone at least for now (this scare of atypical PD hunts me all the time when symptoms progress). But the sad part is that I was so happy with losing weight on the keto diet, and now my fear of PD + gone together with the hope of wearing bikini this summer.
I wonder if those of you who are doing or tried to keto diet had a similar experience. I am going to give it another try with cutting significantly protein consumption, eating mostly greens with oil during the day and adding protein in the evening. Though I am concerned by my neuro explanation, if indeed the body goes after protein from the muscle for the energy instead of fat because it requires 2 times less energy to digest, then it will always decrease effectiveness of dopamine supplementation. Any thought, experiences?
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