> On average, the participants lost 10% of their body weight; reduced their waist circumference by 11% percent; and had lower blood pressure, body mass index, triglycerides, blood sugar levels and insulin resistance.
Any person that loses 10% their body weight through a diet is going to feel much better.
Also, diets, regardless of what they make you eat, also have a habit of forcing you to make better choices regarding what it is you put in your body, meaning fewer foods loaded with ingredients that might not jive with the human neurological system.
> loaded with ingredients that might not jive with the human neurological system.
This seems... handwavey at best, do you know of any concrete ingredients with proven negative effects on the neurological system or is this pure conjecture?
It's not weight, it's BMI. If you shift your composition to muscle without changing your weight, that's still a dramatic improvement. This is not "a complex." Discussions of "losing weight" are typically short hand for reducing the percentage composition of fat in the body.
If you're obese, changing composition will likely add many health benefits, and very often the overall weight of the person shifting said composition will be lower because they were carrying a lot of fat, and only added a reasonable amount of muscle if they took up exercise.
True, but the amount of people who are technically "overweight" due to high muscle mass are statistically insignificant. Even most professional athletes are in the normal BMI range; it's only a few sports or positions that rely on power where they tend to be heavier.
BMI is a perfectly fine societal tool. It is a bit less effective individually, but that’s between you are your doctor. If your doctor says your BMI is bad, it ain’t cause you’re a body builder (and for the record, body builders leaving normal BMI also increases their risks of various health problems)
Also, the vast majority of body builders are in “overweight”. Most muscle heavy gym goers should still be in normal BMI, or maybe the low end of overweight at a 10-15% body fat.
I'd like to understand why, this doesn't sound obvious to me? Unhealthy overweight people, I can picture it, but otherwise? An athlete at 240 lbs might not see any benefit whatsoever for instance. In other cases I can also picture people gaining weight feeling much better under the right circumstances.
All in one weight in itself doesn't mean much in isolation. That's why you have people with a high BMI that are healthier than people with a "normal" one.
I suspect its because health is complicated, but eating less calories correlates with many more healthy outcomes.
>An athlete at 240 lbs
As a contrived example, somebody this big (athlete or not), is probably at an increased risk of sleep apnea. I know of some competitive athletes (with visible abs, no less) that were surprised to learn they have sleep apnea. After a CPAP they felt better. Alternatively, they could probably have lost weight (but no longer be as competitive in their chosen sport.) Some of the risk factors (gender, neck circumference) aren't the typical proxies we use to subjectively assess health as a layperson.
>That's why you have people with a high BMI that are healthier than people with a "normal" one.
This can be true, but it is not generalizable. Last I heard, something like 1% of people with a high BMI would fall into this camp.
I meant overweight/unhealthy people losing weight would feel better. Totally agree that a heavier athlete wouldn't necessarily feel better with weight loss.
Weight is strongly correlated to risk of cancer, heart disease, etc. and BMI strongly correlates to body-fat percentage. If you are a gym-rat outlier then congrats but that doesn't make BMI useless.
I don't know but losing weight and feeling much more agile it just improves your life altogether, waking up is easier, moving around is easier, everything in general just feels "better" plus your mind feels more focused.
Mechanical advantage and impact. Weight is not just a constant force in our joints, and it's not applied evenly. As an example, imagine holding forty pounds at arms length vs wearing it in a backpack or letting it dangle to the floor. The forces on the shoulders from all three are radically different.
Additionally, when you walk or run you don't place only and exactly the force of the weight of your body down. Each foot is loaded with an impact and the forces are distributed up the leg. What your knee experiences is a dynamic and spiky load.
. . . "A weight reduction of 9.8 N (1 kg) was associated with reductions of 40.6 N and 38.7 N in compressive and resultant forces, respectively." . . .
. . . "Our results indicate that each pound of weight lost will result in a 4-fold reduction in the load exerted on the knee per step during daily activities. Accumulated over thousands of steps per day, a reduction of this magnitude would appear to be clinically meaningful. " . . .
Remember that pounds is a unit of force - not mass.
There's the set of "tech neck" images (example https://www.vital-balance.com/en/tech-neck/ though many more can be found) where it shows what the force on the neck is from the head. At 0°, it's 10-12 lbs of force down. If you've got your head tilted at 45° looking at a phone, the infographic says that its 49 lbs of force on the neck.
>The ketogenic diet has been proven to be effective for treatment-resistant epileptic seizures by reducing the excitability of neurons in the brain
>There is increasing evidence that psychiatric diseases such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder stem from metabolic deficits in the brain, which affect the excitability of neurons, Sethi said. The researchers hypothesize that just as a ketogenic diet improves the rest of the body’s metabolism, it also improves the brain’s metabolism.
I wouldn't be so quick to look for the most reductive/simple answer. Drastic dietary changes can have a huge impact on the microbiome, which can in turn lead to substantial changes in all kind of signaling between the gut and brain (in terms of hormones, immune molecules, neurotransmitter precursors, and much more). There may also be implications for cellular metabolism.
As the quote above touches upon, many mental health disorders may have a component of disruptions to metabolism and energy balancing on the cellular level. Possibly including ADHD, autism, treatment resistant depression, and OCD, in addition to schizophrenia and treatment resistant epilepsy.
I agree, I do also wonder what the role of routine and following through on commitments is. Getting things done alone can make people feel better and more confident.
Yeah, I think the connection between mental illnesses and physical health is a seriously under researched topic. At least, it's not something that's in popular science anyway.
Also they have just got a free dietician to plan their meals. Planning meals is a thing you spend a bit of time on and you want to get it right, a reasonably stressful doing.
Haven't read the paper, but I can't tell from this summary article if they tested any other diet programs as a control - is it possible that the improvement comes from being more ordered and thoughtful about food choices, rather than from the specific diet used?
Definitely worth doing other experiments with other diets - but having tried both I think there is a qualitative difference.
I lost 10kgs twice in my life; the first time with a high carb, low fat diet and the second one with a no carb, high fat diet. Roughly same weight interval 84kg->70kg and roughly the same timeline (I was aiming at -1kg per week).
The high carb diet was tough: I was hungry all the time and I had to count calories precisely. Mentally I felt roughly like I did before the diet. Mostly tired. I didn't do much adjusting to my diet, I just had less food than before in order to create a caloric deficit.
The no carb diet was easy: I was never hungry, I had mental clarity for the first time in my life. After the occasional sleep deprivation I was feeling much better than before. I started eating twice a day with no snacks, then migrated to one meal per day with no hunger. Adjusting to the new diet came with some mistakes (eg. balancing elecrolytes to get the optimal level of energy) but after fixing them I was much better than before.
I was a world class yo-yo dieter (having lost and regained > 100 pounds four times) and I agree with you. After 50+ of years of trying many many diets I finally tried very low carb carnivore and that was the first thing that stopped the yo-yo. For 3.5 years now. I wish I had tried it earlier and life, but I was never a particular meat eater before, and an anti-meat vegetarian and vegan for years. It took extreme desperation to make me try it, and the benefits were almost immediate.
I can confirm that for this N=1, both clean vegetarian and carnivore diets are a large improvement over the standard American diet health wise, but the later has been much more sustainable.
That pattern has been very successful for me. Beef short ribs are my favorite food now, and I have them for my main meal of the day (breakfast) on most days. I'm eating a plate of them as I type this. On that diet I've gone from morbidly obese to merely overweight, my diabetes is in remission, and my IBS has become manageable. The duration of the satiety from this meal is very high, so I'm not at all tempted to try to down them all day. I was a binge eater on carbs.
I wonder why you consider ribs to be carnivore junk food? Is it the fat? On any low carb program you're practically obliged to replace carbs with fat for energy. If it's the saturation of the fat, carnivores like me tend to disagree that it's unhealthy. Of course that doesn't work very well if they're covered in sugary BBQ sauce, but my breakfast has just three ingredients: ribs, salt and butter.
Guess my objection is generally the saturated fat, and the lack of fiber, and the sauces.
But you are correct. If it is just salt and butter, then ribs is a low processed food and probably not even as bad fat wise as other cuts. Probably also not the most fatty either.
Maybe a better carnivore 'junk' food example is like someone making a 'lasagna' with just layers of hamburger and a layers of cheese. So it is just all hamburger and cheese slop.
I've done both keto and vegan. And lost weight with both.
At the moment, I'm not sure I can define which one is better.
I tried so hard to relieve my IBS problems by increasing dietary fiber. That's the standard advice for bloating and constipation, and I had it bad ... to the point of suicidal thoughts. As a long time vegetarian who lived on big salads it was no problem upping my fiber. It just didn't work. It made things worse. The only relief I could find was in fasting.
When I finally tried the low residue approach of carnivore it relieved my symptoms by the next morning. As a result I've become skeptical that either fiber or carbs are health foods for me. I'm also much more skeptical of the epistemic capacity of nutrition research.
Can I suggest you look at the FODMAP "diet". Go on the elimination phase to remove the potential FODMAP triggers, then if and when it gets better after a few weeks start re-introduction to see what the triggers are. For me its Garlic, Onion, Fructans in Soda drinks and most fruit.
After sorting that out I added some psyllium fibre tablets and I'm mostly sorted.
Seems like the conversation usually boils down to just the term 'fiber'.
I agree, taking extra fiber supplements can be bad, or overwhelm the gut. But you can eat vegetables, and get fiber, but at a lower volume of fiber before you get constipated.
I'm just on side that vegetables are important. And the carnivore diet people don't seem to get enough vegetables generally, and all the other nutrients in vegetables. Even thought, you can do Keto with low carb vegetables. It can be done. Thought difficult.
Also. Gluten. When I cut out Gluten, that also cut out a ton of carbs (no breads). If you just eat vegetables without grains, it is pretty low carb.
Maybe, by the time you eat just meat, or just whole plants, or even a combination of whole foods (meat and vegetables, minus grain), your are being much more healthy in general than the Standard American Diet.
really, just eating a whole baked potato can be considered low carb compared to someone downing oreo's.
I wonder if you might have a microbiome problem, i.e. you lack the microorganisms necessary to break down certain foods such as fibres. There are now treatments which have been demonstrated to have success in restoring the missing microorganisms that lead to food intolerances, the most successful being FMT.
As I understand it the capacity of the human gut to break down insoluble fiber is quite limited, especially compared to ruminants that can turn cellulose into fatty acids in their rumen. I'm sure that a healthier gut than mine can handle insoluble fiber much better, but I'm skeptical that even healthy humans can do that by digesting a significant portion of their dietary insoluble fiber.
Humans can't really digest fiber (like ruminants), but fiber is metabolized to some degree by bacteria in the colon. Specifically the bacteria ferment fiber into butyrate which is important for immune system function and other things. If you don't get enough fiber then that is likely to cause gut microbiome problems.
Also because the hard part of a diet is entirely in the mental realm. Dieting is extremely simple to “perform” on paper but no matter what knowledge or tools you have , you’ll end up feeling hungry and have to have the fortitude to deal with that. Consistently over months and years
I am a month in right now on tracking every calorie I eat as close as possible in a spreadsheet.
It astounds me what I thought I could eat and think I am still in a calorie deficit. I would even say I had become completely delusional from diet misinformation.
All these gimmicks to cause yourself to restrict calories is so suboptimal to simply counting.
I think counting calories is unpopular though exactly because not counting calories allows for a level of self delusional. You can then mentally be in this super position of at the same time believing to be on a diet without actually restricting calories. Of course you don't lose any weight but you are on a "diet".
High carbohydrate diets do not do a good job of suppressing ghrelin levels in the bloodstream - meaning you stay hungry for longer. High protein diets (not necessarily high fat) do a much better job of appetite suppression.
Then again low carb vs high carb are worthless labels if you are drastically changing your protein consumption between the two diets yet fixating on another macronutrient.
Though those labels were always suspicious to begin with, especially since the carb in the “low carb” meme seems to only
cash out into refined grains, not beans or broccoli.
> The no carb diet was easy: I was never hungry, I had mental clarity for the first time in my life. After the occasional sleep deprivation I was feeling much better than before. I started eating twice a day with no snacks, then migrated to one meal per day with no hunger. Adjusting to the new diet came with some mistakes (eg. balancing elecrolytes to get the optimal level of energy) but after fixing them I was much better than before.
I have no study to back me up but I think all anecdotes and studies about weight-loss without self-denial is bound to get more push-back than normal. Weight-loss and fitness above a certain level is “supposed to” (we think) involve hard work and sacrifice. No doubt colored by the hard workers who pushed through and have now have built a minor identity around how their strong character compared to their former selves.
No? Scientific experiments should work to rule out alternative causes, that's the whole point of it. Introducing a lot of structure to someone's life that was previously very unstructured (as diet often is in mentally unwell people) could be part of the reason their symptoms improve, rather than necessarily the diet itself. It's an alternative cause that I think should be ruled out before assuming it's the content of the diet itself that caused the difference.
Control groups are not "whataboutism". If adding that kind of control showed keto was specifically helping these people, then that'd be great; but since the study doesn't seem to have done that, it's hard to be confident in the conclusion.
Instead, they gave the participants cookbooks, and assigned them a personal coach to help them plan and cook their meals and follow through with the diet change. Giving that kind of personal support to change habits and make more considered choices to someone with mental health challenges is bound to make them feel better, no?
Right; for ADHD a keto diet did very little to improve my symptoms, but when I was doing it I was still eating quite impulsively and without a proper schedule or meal plan. Doing those things, creating a routine, regardless of what I was eating, made a big improvement to my symptoms in that it created a lot of structure, routine and planning that was previously absent.
Chris Palmer, Harvard Psychiatrist has written a book called "Brain Energy" about the potential effects of Ketogenic therapy. The crux of his theory relies on Mitochondria's health which play essential roles (serotonine dopamine regulation, epigenitic signaling...) apparently a lot more than just providing ATP. And you have millions of them in each neurone so trauma, addiction, chronic stress, malnutrition, brain insulin resistance... may have compromised those organelles and the neurones therefore become over or under excitable. Ketones provide a relief for Mitochondria (only alternate energy source for the brain, mitophagy of damaged cells, protection of healthy ones through uncoupling). It is a lot more than just basic common sense for good health - although getting all the essentials nutriments may be part of it as well !
Anyway in his book (or podcasts) there are many anecdotal but nevertheless fascinating cases of hopeless patients in total remission after a couple of months on keto therapy. It seems a lot of research is underway as well
Keep in mind that the study is conducted with schizophrenic and bipolar disorder patents that are on medications, are overweight and gained weight while on their current medication and ..."with at least one metabolic abnormality, such as insulin resistance, hypertriglyceridemia, dyslipidemia, or impaired glucose tolerance."...
Given this study design, I don't really find the results that surprising.
It may seem like armchair common sense to you, but I doubt any medical facility in the entire country would prescribe a ketogenic diet for those patients because there isn't a hard scientific basis to do so. Also going from insulin resistant to schizophrenia/bipolar is a bit of a surprise.
So this is important work. It'll also be interesting to see if it replicates and generalizes.
There is some evidence out there that links insulin resistance to depression via BDNF depletion, which is also implicated in schizophrenia. BDNF is also thought to be up regulated by exercise.
I think we're just starting to understand the link between diet and mental state. I don't know if keto is the best answer (I have opinions on keto having cycled through the diet many, many times) but it is reassuring that this unchartered area of science is being taken seriously.
As anecdotal evidence, I went on a strict keto diet three months ago and my mental state is far more stable. When I have a cheat day, I feel noticeably more anxious.
This is more evidence that you have an unknown food intolerance than keto being good for you. Red and processed meats are very clearly linked to heart disease and cancer. Most keto people eat large amounts of both.
I have celiac disease and before it was diagnosed my anxiety and depression was much worse. I even tried keto once and felt better, because I wasn't eating gluten for the first time in my life. I think there's a larger conversation to be had about how we develop auto-immune issues and food intolerances as we age, but we really don't see that as a regular thing to worry about. Nor do we really have the tools to see what foods we cannot handle well other than elimination diets, which is what keto seems to accidentally be for many people.
Yeah, there are a few comments like these now about how keto benefits must for-sure be a fluke correlation. Even though the submitted article apparently says otherwise. (On the other hand (comment says) my own anecdotes are rock-solid.)
It’s weird enough how all science articles attract but-what-about-correlation knee-jerk comments. But diet articles also seem to attract anecdote wars.
Animals feel stressed in zoos and modern people have few natural struggles. Diets are like natural wars and natural war feels natural and clean therefore feels good. People like telling war stories. War stories show where the teller overcame a real struggle, better story if struggle was natural and clean. Even better if teller was a hero in the story. Everyone is a hero in their own diet story.
A diet high in red meat can shorten life expectancy, according to researchers at Harvard Medical School. The study of more than 120,000 people suggested red meat increased the risk of death from cancer and heart problems.
Substituting red meat with fish, chicken or nuts lowered the risks, the authors said. The British Heart Foundation said red meat could still be eaten as part of a balanced diet.
The researchers analysed data from 37,698 men between 1986 and 2008 and 83,644 women between 1980 and 2008.
They said that during the study period, adding an extra portion of unprocessed red meat to someone's daily diet would increase the risk of death by 13%, of fatal cardiovascular disease by 18% and of cancer mortality by 10%. The figures for processed meat were higher, 20% for overall mortality, 21% for death from heart problems and 16% for cancer mortality.
The study, published in Archives of Internal Medicine, said: "We found that a higher intake of red meat was associated with a significantly elevated risk of total, cardiovascular disease, and cancer mortality.
That study you cited is junk science which relied on low quality data and failed to control for key confounders. A more comprehensive review study in the same journal concluded as follows.
"The magnitude of association between red and processed meat consumption and all-cause mortality and adverse cardiometabolic outcomes is very small, and the evidence is of low certainty."
That's kind of what I was thinking - and directly contradicts other claims in these comments that want to attribute it only to the weight loss.
Personally I've cycled through keto a few times. I will say that while it did not line up with my goals sufficiently (you cannot powerlift/bodybuild long term on keto - your body _needs_ exogenous glucose for that) I was way more clear-headed and alert despite being tired all the time (presumably that's more because of the workouts).
Sadly my experience is that keto did absolutely nothing for my overall mood. Strict keto for many (6+?) months. I was quite disappointed by my own lack of results, mentally. Physically: absolutely amazing results.
My data point also is the same. But concerning cheat days, I decided to reintroduce carbs one type at a time in measured amounts to find which ones and how much bothered me. It’s still underway but now I know to not have oats (commercial oat milk specifically; “organic”) in any amount, it bothers me too much even though it tastes nice. Or sour dough bread made with one specific brand of wheat for example. It’s easier to experiment this way so i can transition into a 3 month keto / 3 month low carb diet which is my goal after i reach the body composition i want.
I tried keto and felt good and lost weight, but everyone keeps telling me it's bad for my heart. I'm 30lbs overweight and don't have much energy, so that feels bad for my heart too.
It's interesting though, I kind of wonder if this is a sort of paradoxical reaction as (relatively) mentally healthy people who I know tried it (e.g Atkins) had their moods significantly worsen.
Anyone considering getting on the latest dietary fad train should think twice; strict adherence to a modified dietary regime without monitoring by medical professionals can lead to unintended consquences. Often, the promoters of such diets use a handful of scientific studies to gain followers (hence revenue), even if such studies (such as the one in this article) aren't applicable for the general public. If you want to get on the train regardless, or are already on it, I suggest reading this entire review (2013) (it's dense, a chatbot can help).
It covers everything from basic biochemistry to unusual disease states, here's the diet-relevant bit:
> "Ketogenic diets are often unpalatable, which leads to poor patient compliance. Additionally, such diets raise blood cholesterol and free fatty acids, increase the risk of nephrolithiasis, and cause constipation (23, 116, 201). Therefore, Veech and Clarke developed and tested ingestible ketone ester compounds, which can rapidly generate ketoses exceeding 5 mM in rats and humans (37, 103, 195), while sparing the adverse consequences of high-fat diets."
Now these ketone esters are being marketed direct to consumers when they really should only be used under medical supervision as part of a coherent treatment program for specific issues:
Nonsense. The only people making revenue are Kelloggs, Kraft etc. Not everything has a self-serving motive. Just look at obesity rates in the US and you know something is terribly wrong with the food we’re eating. If you care about people, heck if you just care about healthcare costs, you should want to figure this out.
For keto, the main thing you need to know is that if you are on high blood pressure or diabetes meds you can have dangerously low blood pressure or blood sugar on keto. Seriously, don’t try it without medical supervision lest you pass out in the bathroom. For anyone not on meds, you may need more salt than you’d otherwise have. Otherwise it’s fairly safe. There’s nothing harmful about ketones. They can help with epilepsy. Maybe your brain runs better on them without epilepsy, so it’s worth a shot to find out. Docs prescribe bipolar people seizure drugs and it works for some reason, so it’s not an unreasonable hypothesis.
A friend went on carnivore diet (a ketogenic diet) and went from a person who always had lots of anxiety for several years to being much calmer. While that was the most stark transformation, I know 3 others who have made the same dietary change and are experiencing similar, although less pronounced results. They did not start out being obviously anxious, but it is clearly having an impact.
Seeing these results, I made the same dietary change (although I am in decent shape and not overweight). I am seeing similar benefits.
I read some studies about gut flora being tied to mental wellbeing. This is so complicated probably because there’s so much diversity at play, what might balance the gut for one person may unbalance another.
Arguably pilots are outliers in some ways in that their job requires long periods of seating, uninterrupted.. and often bad sleep or an irregular sleep schedule. (edit- yeah I should have read the article, its not about pilots)
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39896423