The Case for Keto by Gary Taubes

Author:Gary Taubes [Taubes, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781783786541
Publisher: Granta Publications
Published: 2020-04-29T16:00:00+00:00

As clinical experience with these trials has been accumulating, so, finally, has the clinical trial evidence. When I first reported on this subject for that 2002 New York Times Magazine article, we were seeing only the very first clinical trials assessing the relative benefits and risks of these eating patterns. These trials informed my decision to take the unorthodox position that I did in the article. Once researchers and authorities in the 1960s chose to believe that all obesity was caused by eating too much and then embraced the notion that saturated fat was a primary cause of heart disease, they did their best to put the entire nation and then the entire world on diets that would hypothetically prevent heart disease. No meaningful research was done on even the short-term effects of LCHF/ketogenic eating. That remained the case through the end of the century. (In the course of my research, I interviewed researchers in Germany who had done clinical trials on LCHF/ketogenic diets through the mid-1980s, then stopped doing them when they decided that the consensus opinion on the dangers of fat must be right, even though that was the opposite of what their own research implied.)

Only at the turn of this century, with the awareness of an obesity epidemic and typically motivated by a personal conversion experience, did physicians begin once again to conduct clinical trials on LCHF/ketogenic eating. In my article, I noted that five clinical trials had recently been completed (albeit not yet published) comparing the LCHF/ketogenic Atkins diet to the kind of low-fat, calorie-restricted (semistarvation) diet recommended then and still by the American Heart Association and the British Heart Foundation. The trial participants ranged from overweight adolescents in Long Island, who followed the diets for twelve weeks, to Philadelphia adults whose weight averaged 295 pounds and who followed these diets for six months.

The results of those five studies were consistent. The participants eating the LCHF/ketogenic high-fat diet lost more weight, despite the advice to eat to satiety, than those who ate the American Heart Association and the British Heart Foundation recommended low-fat, low-saturated-fat diet. Moreover, their heart disease risk factors showed greater improvement. In other words, the results of these trials were the opposite of what physicians and medical researchers would have predicted. And this is what I reported.

Since then, as of the spring of 2019, close to one hundred, if not more, clinical trials have published results, and they confirm these observations with remarkable consistency. The trials are still incapable of telling us whether embracing LCHF/ketogenic eating will extend our lives (compared to other patterns of eating the authorities might recommend), but they continue to challenge, relentlessly, the conventional thinking on the dangers of high-fat diets, and they tell us that in the short term, this way of eating is safe and beneficial.

Following LCHF/ketogenic eating for the duration of these clinical trials (at most two years), or at least being assigned to eat that way, results in equal or greater weight loss than any

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