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- Because keto diets reduce carbohydrates to around 5% of a person's daily calories, healthy foods like beans, whole grains and some vegetables are usually banned.
- Shivam Joshi, a kidney doctor, says these products are "some of the healthiest foods on the planet" and should not be avoided.
- In addition, he said, there simply was not enough evidence of what a keto diet can do in the long term for a person's body.
- Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.
Eat fat, stay slim, this is the principle of the popular ketogenic diet.
"I eat cream in all things," Kinesiologist David Harper told Business Insider recently.
The diet is designed to send the body into a state of ketosis, which is the same mode of fat burning as that unleashed when a person dies of starvation. Keto dieters consume very little carbohydrate to promote this metabolic state, moving the body from its default carbohydrate burning state and forcing it to use fat as fuel.
Celebrities such as LeBron James and Kourtney Kardashian, as well as some Silicon Valley technicians, swear by the diet, telling them that it helps them lose weight and also raises mental fog.
Harper also said that the plan allowed him and his wife to stay healthy and satisfied. He is also studying whether the treatment regimen plays a role in improving cancer treatments; some other oncologists are also looking into the issue.
But not everyone is convinced of the merits of the keto diet.
Dr. Shivam Joshi, who sees patients at NYC Health and Hospitals Bellevue and teaches medicine at NYU, said the keto diet wrongly banned many healthy longevity foods, such as beans and whole grains. Joshi recently co-authored an opinion piece in the medical journal JAMA Internal Medicine in which he states that "the enthusiasm exceeds the evidence" of the high-fat diet plan.
"What people do is basically throw the baby out with the bath water when they label all carbohydrates as bad," he said. "This is not true."
Joshi thinks that time will eventually prove that the keto plan is no different from other pbading fads.
Keto diets avoid all carbohydrates, including those that studies have linked to a long life
"Whether you're watching Paleo or Atkins or Dukan or South Beach, every diet has its own variation or twist," said Joshi.
In the case of keto, Joshi worries centers on ketones, chemical compounds created in the liver when people burn fat to get energy. We all produce ketones, especially during exercise or when pregnant, but keto dieters have more in the blood because they barely ingest carbohydrates. (People on the keto diet get about 70 to 80 percent of their daily calories as fat, about 15 percent as protein and just 5 percent as carbohydrates.)
Joshi thinks this strategy gives a bad name to the good carbs they do not deserve.
"Many people who buy the keto diet say that carbohydrates are bad," he said, adding, "I do not defend refined carbohydrates, which many of my critics think I am. unrefined fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, lentils, etc., these are some of the healthiest foods on the planet. "
Nutrition experts generally agree with this. People who consume more whole grains like barley, brown rice, oats and quinoa tend to live longer and healthier. They can even reduce their risk of developing certain deadly diseases.
"Higher consumption of whole grains is badociated with lower risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer and mortality," Centers for Disease Control researchers wrote in a recent article on low whole grain consumption in the United States .
Diets rich in whole grains, such as the Mediterranean diet, are also systematically badociated with lower cognitive decline and fewer symptoms of depression than other diets.
The Mediterranean diet and the keto diet, however, have one important common point: they limit all refined carbohydrates, which are the bare versions of cereals found in foods such as white bread and donuts. In its natural state, a whole grain of wheat, for example, includes an outer envelope of bran and germ. But to produce the refined version, this shell is removed, leaving only the endosperm of wheat.
The refined carbohydrates, whether they come from cakes, cereals or other cooked dishes, do not stop long in our body, which means that they do not make us feel filled. Instead, they are quickly digested and can cause blood sugar to skyrocket. Regularly eating lots of refined carbohydrates can contribute to weight gain and increase the risk of chronic health problems such as heart disease and diabetes.
"When you look at it, we ate a lot of refined carbohydrates, like your white bread, white rice, white flour, etc. These are fiber-free foods that have never been useful," Joshi said. ;said.
About two-thirds of the US food system is made up of ultra-processed foods, which encourages overeating. It is therefore easy to understand why the average American consumes 400 more calories a day than 50 years ago.
AP / Tony Gutierrez
Gatorade shower
The risks of following the keto diet in the long term are not well known
Joshi's other concern about the keto diet is that there is simply not as much scientific evidence on its long-term effects as on diets focusing on whole grains and other plants.
The keto diet is not new: people have been practicing different versions of high-fat diets since at least the 19th century. In the 1920s, the ketogenic strategy was introduced to treat drug-resistant epileptic seizures.
But the scientific literature on keto is thin, in part because there are not many people on a keto diet.
"If you're considering the ketogenic diet as a medical intervention, prescription or anything else, you want to know the risks, benefits and alternatives," Joshi said. "We do not have long-term studies on a cohort of people for a long time to document safety."
Joshi noted that there are studies of children who have used the keto diet to reduce their seizure rates. When these children enter the diet, their "bad" LDL cholesterol levels can increase, while their "good" HDL cholesterol is formidable. At least one child under keto diet for the control of seizures died of heart failure. Nonfatal complications may include kidney stones and iron deficiency. And yet, most crisis-prone children do not stay vetoed forever: they can follow the diet for a few years, then start eating more carbohydrates.
For adults, even less is known about long-term effects.
"We do not know if the ketogenic diet in adults leads to [bone] Fractures, you know, in 10 years we do not know, "said Joshi.
Cardiologist Ethan Weiss (who follows himself on the keto diet) acknowledges that it's not yet clear whether the diet is safe for everyone.
"I think the vast majority of people who follow this diet will have no problem with their cholesterol," Weiss told Business Insider. "But I'm not going to tell people who have cholesterol problems that it's not a problem."
Harper, however, says people are following diets that include fewer fats and more carbohydrates for years, and the results are as follows: Rates of diabetes and obesity are skyrocketing.
"It's been 30 or 40 years since we've been abusing fats, especially saturated fats, when we should actually have been denigrating sugar," he said.
No single diet is good for everyone
David Harper / BioDiet
biodiet keto
Disagreements over the keto diet point to a broader truth about the science of nutrition: no single diet can fit everyone.
"On the personal level, we now know that there is no diet or dietary intervention that suits everyone, or even an individual throughout their lives," wrote a team of Scripps Research cardiologists in the Lancet medical journal earlier this year.
As previously noted by Business Insider, Tim Spector, an epidemiologist and professor at King's College London, "it's not because a diet or recommendation exists that it fits."
However, nutritionists generally agree that any ideal meal, whether keto or not, should be full of fresh, fibrous, low-processed vegetables.
NOW WATCH: The popular keto diet can help you lose weight, but it has serious side effects
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SEE ALSO: What a husband and wife who have been on a keto diet for 6 years keep in their kitchen
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