The Case for Keto: Rethinking Weight Control and the Science and Practice of Low-CarbHigh-Fat Eating by Gary Taubes

Author:Gary Taubes
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Health, CKB000000 Cooking / General, HEA048000 Health & Fitness / Diet & Nutrition / General
ISBN: 0525520066
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2020-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

Since the heyday of the Atkins diet in the 1970s, authorities have refused to accept the notion that LCHF/ketogenic eating is safe. (And those that do promptly lose their credibility as an authority by doing so.) They believe that the fat content in the foods we think we should eat instead of refined carbohydrates and sugar is too high, so arguably unnatural. Those of us who promote this way of eating can speculate that many hunter-gatherer populations lived on vaguely similar diets and perhaps even in a state of ketosis—the Inuit, pastoralists like the Masai in Kenya, Native Americans in the winter months—but we’re just speculating. The unusual aspect of these diets leads to legitimate questions about the risks outweighing the benefits. This is as it should be.

No matter how much weight people might lose, no matter how easily, the orthodox medical opinion remains that these diets will kill us prematurely. Generations of physicians, medical researchers, dietitians, and nutritionists have been taught to believe (as was I and probably you, too) that we know what a healthy diet is. We know it because this is what healthy people tend to eat. They eat fruits, vegetables, whole grains, pulses (legumes), such as lentils, peas, and beans—mostly plants and plenty of carbohydrates. They avoid red meat and processed meats, and the fats they eat tend to be unsaturated, from plant sources rather than animal. Any radical deviation from this way of eating, regardless of weight loss, according to the consensus of medical opinion, is likely to be unsustainable and ultimately to our detriment.

This is the reason the authorities convened annually by U.S. News & World Report to judge diets and tell us what to eat rank LCHF/ketogenic diets as among the least healthy imaginable, regardless of the copious research and clinical experience that now argues quite the opposite. This is why two of the more media-savvy proponents of conventionally healthy eating—David Katz, a physician formerly associated with Yale University, and the former New York Times columnist Mark Bittman, a best-selling cookbook author—thought it appropriate to suggest recently in New York magazine that losing weight on LCHF/ketogenic eating (let alone maintaining weight for a lifetime) was analogous to getting cholera, an often fatal, infectious diarrheal disease. “Not everything that causes weight loss or apparent metabolic improvement in the short term is a good idea,” they wrote. “Cholera, for instance, causes weight, blood sugar, and blood lipids to come down—that doesn’t mean you want it!”

Despite the hyperbolic rhetoric, Katz and Bittman have our best interests in mind. Their concern is a legitimate one. The world is full of things we can do or take—medications and performance-enhancing substances—that will reverse and maybe even correct some symptoms of ill health in the short run, but will shorten our lives or ruin them if we take them for years or decades. The first rule of medicine is not actually to do well by your patient, but to do no harm. That’s the Hippocratic Oath. As a recent

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