ScienceAlert: This Study on Nearly Half a Million People Has Bad News For The Keto Diet. ttps://sciencealert.com/study-on-h...
Criticised for excluding important food groups, possibly causing diabetes, being difficult to follow, harmful long term effects, easy to miss key nutrients, increase blood pressure, increased risk of cancer and more.
This was big news today. Hopefully, everyone gets the message.
Interesting article. It's good to see a well balanced diet is the way forward. I hope people heed the warnings.
Oh dear. The problem with strawmen is that they're invincible. You knock one down and someone just props him back up and off he goes again. Still, I'll give it a try.
(1) Very few people remain 'keto' for any length of time. Of those who describe themselves as low-carb adherents, I'd guess not more than a few percent stay keto, all the time, for months or years. It's just boring.
(2) I'm heartily sick of nutritionists who view the world through a lens of protein, fats, and carbs. The idea that plants thrive only on N-P-K was discarded decades ago, yet here we are, still working with an equivalent model for humans. People eat food, and by the nutritionists' own admission, 15g of carbs from a slice of white bread or a glass of Coke is not the same as 15g of carbs from a portion of hummus. Not even close. So why does all their research treat them as the same? When you boil everything down to C-F-P, you lose information. A lot of information. It's no wonder they're still arguing the toss.
Let's just examine how stupid this is with some real numbers. The fat content of the typical SAD diet (men) has been estimated at 80g/750kCal, and protein 100g/400kCal. For a 2400kCal diet (the recommended number for men), 1250kCal would be carbs, or 52% ... which is exactly the fraction suggested by the diet experts as "ideal" (50-60%, depending on who you ask). And yet, curiously, people eating the SAD diet are all fat and ill. This is what dieticians like to call a "paradox" (and what normal people call "being wrong").
(3) While we're on the subject of paradoxes:
Professor Banach said: “Low carbohydrate diets might be useful in the short term to lose weight, lower blood pressure, and improve blood glucose control, but our study suggests that in the long-term they are linked with an increased risk of death from any cause, and deaths due to cardiovascular disease, cerebrovascular disease, and cancer.”
Not mentioned here is that LCHF also improves your LDL:HDL ratio, and triglyceride numbers drop through the floor. So let's get this straight: on all of the biochemical markers which doctors use to gauge good health - bodyfat, blood pressure, cholesterol/TG, and glucose response - LCHF makes you look like you're ... um, healthy. But at the same time, you're more likely to die of CVD or cancer.
Hmm. More research is needed, as they say. Or perhaps a bit more quality research and bit less of the other sort.
(4) Here comes our well-worn strawman again, lurching along with a bolt through his neck and stitches around his forehead. This isn't true:
"...those people [who eat lowest carbs] tended to replace carb-heavy foods with animal fats and proteins: "beef, pork, lamb, chicken, and cheese," as Seidelmann put it."
That one crops up half-a-dozen times in the links from the ScienceAlert pages. Oh, those silly low-carbers, eating nothing but steak and bacon, aren't they funny, no wonder they all die of heart attacks.
Except they don't, and they don't.
The canonical LCHF diet is mostly plants. The fat content is around 120-180g, and of that, anywhere from 25%-50% is from plant sources (the higher number is for vegetarian LCHFers).
Meat consumption is probably less than the 300g+ eaten by the average American. You need a surprisingly small amount of fat (~100g) from added butter, oils, and meat.
Flour- and starch-based products are minimized, but they're not eliminated entirely. Beans, root vegetables, and the like feature regularly on the LCHF plate. It's just that bread, pasta, and rice are not eaten all the time, every day, for years on end.
And hidden away in all the misinformed blather is this:
"There is a way to do a low-carb diet and age well: people who ate small amounts of carbohydrates but more plant-based proteins like veggies, seeds, and nuts were found to be less likely to die and tended to live to a ripe old age."
Well, quite. Which is why we do exactly that.
Hi Andy,
Just putting a link to that article/report - I am going to read it later. Thanks for posting about this.
sciencealert.com/study-on-h...
Zest 
As someone with thyroid issues, I see a lot of people following keto over on the thyroid group. It's one of the very few ways they manage to lose weight, and most report it leaves them feeling "well".
On the one hand we tell them that they need to lose weight or they'll develop diabetes, heart disease, cancer and high blood pressure. Then we tell them that the only diet that helps them lose weight will cause them to develop diabetes, heart disease, cancer and high blood pressure. On the balance of risks, they'll choose the path that allows them to feel well.
It sounds as though the third study mentioned, lumps keto in with the "low veg intake" group - a low veg intake group also includes someone who eats toast for breakfast, supermarket sandwiches for lunch (with crisps and a bottle of juice), and ready-meals for dinner, and we can't compare those two groups fairly.
What fools are these. Keto is best to lose all fat.
You do not keep on Keto for long time.
I do not eat bread and rice now and not fat anymore.
You must eat good meat to stay strong and healthy. Everyone knows that.
Halal or kosher meat is the only meat i eat.
Mohammed.
The study is based on self-reporting using 2 questionaires, 6 years apart, and also takes in data from various other studies around the world. It has a very large number of cohorts, which is good, but the value of these observational studies is very limited and there must be a lot of external influences not accounted for. They admit that they cannot prove cause and effect with this study.
Keto
Keto diet
Keto diet is the only one
