Does ketogenic diet work? Yes.
Is the ketogenic diet sustainable long term? No.
Ketogenic (keto) diets are very low carbohydrate diets, so low that your body is forced to convert fat into ketones to prevent your brain from dying from lack of carbohydrate. Ketones aren’t carbohydrates but your brain can use them to get energy.
Keto diets have been used to treat epilepsy and diabetes for a long time but most people have been interested in them because they supposedly help one lose weight.
Why is keto so big right now?
Because it makes sense. Because it is giving people results. Because many people feel like they can stay in this lifestyle long term because they don’t feel deprived. Because it works for a lot of people.
Are they really as effective as people say?
No.
It looks like ketogenic diets work fairly well at first but their effects dissipate over time. In short-term tests, lasting hours to several months, many studies show that ketogenic diets make people feel less hungry. That’s a common result but there are a study in which people eating low-carbohydrate diets didn’t lose more weight than people eating a balanced diet over 3–6 months.
Those effects tend to go away in longer experiments. Both low-carbohydrate and low-fat diets led to an 8-kg weight loss at 6-months but the people gained back approximately 1 to 2 kg at 12 months. That analysis also reported that low-carbohydrate diets were no more effective than low-fat diets at 12 months.
A very recent study confirmed that a ketogenic diet doesn’t produce much greater weight loss at 12 months than a low-fat diet (6 kg versus 5.3 kg).
Is the weight loss due to ketones?
Probably not.
Ketogenic diets tend to be high in protein. It turns out that high-protein diets reduce appetite and cause weight loss even if they aren’t low in carbohydrate. That fact, along with the fact that low-fat diets are just as good as ketogenic diets in the long term, means you can produce weight loss without forcing the body to produce ketones.
Are ketogenic diets healthy?
Possibly not.
There are some studies suggesting that people eating very low carbohydrate diets tend to die at a younger age. Untreated diabetics may have very high ketone levels in the blood, leading to ketoacidosis which is dangerous.
Is there any credible scientific evidence for the Keto diet?
If you are trying to lose a bit of weight over the next 6 months, probably yes.
If you are trying to reduce your weight over the long term, no.
Just because lots of people on the internet say that keto diets will solve your weight problem, doesn’t mean that they will.
What makes keto diets so alluring is that they work well for a while. We usually fail to notice that they don’t work in the long run even though the long run is all that matters.
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