Comment by KempyKolibri
6 hours ago
We have some case studies and pilot studies without any kind of control. Perhaps keto/low carb could be helpful (it certainly is with epilepsy!), but I certainly haven’t seen any evidence that it’s superior to other diets that achieve the same things (I.e. weight loss, or higher clinician contact time - a lot of these pilot studies end up losing a bunch of weight and getting several extra hours per week of contact with their clinician - who knows if much/all of the benefit comes from this?).
Having had quite a lot of experience with the keto/low carb crowd, I think we’d see a lot more adoption/interest in their ideas if they approached things in a less ideological/dogmatic way. It’s hard for responsible clinicians to get involved with, say, Metabolic Mind when people like Bret Scher hand wave around the CVD risks from high SFA intakes, or big up low quality work like the godawful Keto-CTA paper.
There _are_ responsible keto advocates out there like Ethan Weiss, and I suspect that if the keto/low carb community were to promote _their_ work rather than that of people like Nick Norwitz and Dave Feldman then their diet of choice would be taken more seriously.
Unfortunately much of the low carb movement is quack town at the moment. I hope they get their act together, there are benefits in there for people in need, but they need to get serious first.
I've never heard of any other diet or non-keto nutritionist being able to reverse such mental illness. Do you have any links?
>> but I certainly haven’t seen any evidence that it’s superior to other diets that achieve the same things
You can find many N=1 examples for this on the linked youtube channel and then you have hundreds of testemonials here (click load more) on the carnivore diet healing autoimmune issues: https://www.revero.com/blog/success-stories
No other non-keto diet comes even close to this.
I've only ever come across the keto diet as the one that can do this to such an extent. I've only heard of some T2 diabetics reversing it by losing weight in the context of "any diet that causes weight loss".
They don't wave around CVD risks: they show you that all the pro "SFA is bad because of CVD" crowd is also full of biases and very bad science and pharma sponsored studies that shill statins etc...
I agree that the Keto-CTA paper was trash. Horwitz isn't the best when it comes to this.
Though when you say that most are quaks: the entire "SFA is bad" field can also be marked like this when you see that most of those studies are trash, how eg "lasagna" is designated as "meat" in studies and similar trash.
There is no clear signal about SFAs being bad since you can find counter-studies for each viewpoint.