... while your brain needs glucose, you do not need to EAT glucose to provide your brain with the glucose that it needs. That is because your liver has the remarkable ability to transform the protein that you eat into glucose. This process is called "gluconeogenesis."
You liver can transform 58% of every gram of protein you eat into glucose, so any deficit created by eating less than 130 grams of carbohydrate can be made up by eating enough extra protein to supply the liver with the raw material to make some carbohydrate on its own.
But (as they say on the infomercials) that's not all! After a period of prolonged glucose "starvation" the brain's requirement for glucose drops. It becomes far more efficient and is able to run largely on the ketones produced by metabolizing fat. At that point, the brain's requirement drops to a mere 40 grams of glucose. If you ate no carbohydrate at all, you could can easily get that 40 grams of glucose from eating 69 grams of protein, or slightly over ten ounces of a protein-containing food like meat, cheese, or eggs. If, like most of us who limit our carbohydrates to control our blood sugars, you eat 45 to 100 grams a day, you will already be eating enough glucose to keep your brain happy.
This ability of the liver to make glucose from protein and its ability to adapt to burning ketones has been known for a long time. You can find it discussed in complex scientific language on pages 279 and 282 of the textbook, "Understanding the Brain and Its Development." Though the chapter assumes that a lowering of carbohydrate would be caused by "malnutrition" the same mechanisms occur when you lower carbohydrate and eat enough protein and fat to avoid malnutrition.
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Originally Posted by cj111
