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Mention of the keto diet is everywhere—in newsletters, on billboards, in sponsored Google searches and splayed on a loud sign when you enter your local grocery store. Svelte celebrities like Halle Berry, Vanessa Hudgens, Kourtney Kardashian and Tim Tebow credit the low-carbohydrate (“carb,” for short), high-fat diet for boosting energy and promoting weight loss because it forces the body into a state of ketosis (when your body has so few carbs, it uses fat your fat for energy). Still, experts can’t decide if the trend is actually good for you.
“A practical KD can be a healthy diet,” says Dr. Alvin Berger, MS, Ph. D, adjunct professor of nutrition, University of Minnesota, CEO of SciaEssentials, and co-founder of LifeSense Products. Berger believes that keto has many benefits over the standard American diet (SAD). If you’re following a clean keto diet, you’re likely not eating as many added sugars or refined carbs, and likely eating more whole foods. “As the high carb-low fat dietary approach has been a miserable failed experiment contributing to the current obesity/metabolic syndrome epidemic, I favor a practical high healthy-fat, low-carb, ‘keto-friendly’ diet and life style,” Berger says.
While Berger feels that claims of keto diets starving people of carbohydrates are exaggerated, he recognizes there are potential health risks involved with keto. There’s the challenge of understanding what fats are healthy. Consuming large amounts of potentially atherogenic fats like coconut oil or lard is not advised. Neither is practicing “dirty keto” where your fats are of poor quality (for example, deep fried) and your carbs are high glycemic. “Another concern is that key phytonutrients may be neglected, such as those in some vegetables and fruits, for fear of going over their carb-limit,” he says.
Stephanie Laska started following a keto diet eight years ago. In a year and a half, she lost 140 pounds and has kept the weight off for six years. Laska discovered the diet on accident. She spotted a friend’s husband at a barbecue and noticed he had both lost a lot of weight, and was also eating a huge plate of food. “I was impressed,” Laska says. “Any diet that included mayo and alcohol seemed worth looking into!” Unhappy at a weight of 289 pounds, Laska had tried and found temporary success with Weight Watchers, but found she’d rebel against the food tracking system and omit items from her log. She felt deprived, and was always looking for loopholes that would ultimately backfire.
“Individual results vary, as with all diets, so one person may have positive results while another may have horrible side effects”
Keto was Laska’s way of following a diet without feeling deprived, and the results were life changing. “I will never go back to eating high carb/high sugar foods,” she says. “I feel amazing!” She posts about her experience with keto on her website DIRTY, LAZY, KETO, and even wrote a book by the same name. The dirty and lazy qualifiers refer to Laska’s less strict take on keto, allowing for sugar and grain substitutes like Splenda or low carb tortillas, and only counts carbs, versus counting carbs, calories, fat and protein. “Having this flexibility allows me to enjoy foods like I used to,” Laska says. “You don’t have to be perfect to be successful at weight loss! Plus, I can wash down my slice of fat pizza with a Diet Coke.”
With the 3-figure weight loss number and 12 marathons under her belt, Laska is living proof that the keto diet can be helpful for people. But its not the first diet to be endorsed by celebrities and proven by true-life testimonials. While diets like the Atkins and South Beach Diet were all-the-rage once upon a time too, but now they’ve been largely tossed aside. “The trend now for [keto] weight loss is considered a fad,” says clinical dietitian Rebecca Kerkenbush, MS, RD-AP, CSG, CD, FAND. “A fad diet is characterized by: promises fast results, doesn’t include exercise, isn’t something that can be maintained long-term, restricts or excludes whole food group(s), and it tries to sell you products (supplements, herbs, pills, bars, shakes, etc).” Kerkenbush doesn’t recommend the diet for a number of reasons. For starters, she says it’s very strict and if you don’t follow it correctly, it won’t work. She warns that those following a keto diet should do so under clinical supervision and only for brief periods. “Individual results vary, as with all diets, so one person may have positive results while another may have horrible side effects,” Kerkenbush says.
According to Kerkenbush, those potential side effects, which may be short and/or long term, include: bad breath, headaches, weakness, fatigue, muscle cramps, hypoglycemia, increased lipid/cholesterol levels, constipation, increased thirst, confusion and weight loss. Additionally, you may end up eating a diet low in nutrients—like calcium, Vitamin D, iron, folic acid, and B12. Kerkenbush says that people with diabetes or kidney disease should talk to their doctor before trying keto, and the diet is off limits for pregnant women.
Kerkenbush suggests an alternative to keto—the DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stopping Hypertension) diet or Mediterranean diet. “These are more lifestyle changes than ‘diets,’” she says. “The focus in these diets is on fruits, vegetable, whole grains, beans, fish and healthy fats (i.e. olive oil). They don’t exclude food groups or require a calorie restriction.”
At the same time, Ken D Berry, MD, author of the book Lies My Doctor Told Me, thinks that the keto lifestyle is a re-discovery of the proper human diet, not a fad. “The twin behemoths of big-government and big-food have pushed us towards our current epidemics of obesity and type 2 diabetes with their diet recommendations,” Berry says. “Returning to the proper human diet filled with fatty meat, some veg, and rarely some natural sugars is not a fad, but a return to eating the way humans have eaten for hundreds of thousands of years.” Berry argues that the diet recommended by the US government or the American Diabetes Association allows for too many carbohydrates, going against the way the human body was designed. Keto jumps back to a way of eating before foods started getting mass marketed in the 20th century, and delivers an array of benefits.
“Removing sugars, grains and vegetable seed oils from the human diet is like removing the rat-poison from a rat’s diet,” says Berry. “Obesity, type 2 diabetes, fatty liver and a host of other chronic diseases start to reverse course. Chronic skin conditions like psoriasis and eczema start to improve. Mental conditions like anxiety, depression, and PTSD become less severe. Many of the chronic diseases we have thought were just part of the natural process of human life and aging are now are revealed to be induced by all of the processed foods we have been told to eat for the past 60 years.”Falling somewhere in the middle of the keto debate is Ann Louise Gittleman, PhD, CNS, a New York Times best selling author who has been working in the nutrition field for more than thirty years. “In my opinion, the ketogenic diet is a double edged sword, to tell you the truth,” she says. Gittleman sees that the diet can be hugely successful for those in need of major weight loss results, “yet there are those whose genetics and fat metabolism are simply not geared for it,” she says. For example those without a gallbladder or who have “sluggish fat metabolism” are most at risk. At the end of the day, she believes that the diet can be healthy if the right kinds of fats are used, but she doesn’t recommend keto as a diet to maintain in the long term. Her national bestseller, Radical Metabolism, “contains a higher plant-based fat diet that even the slowest of losers can tolerate as well as those who are hypothyroid or don’t have a gallbladder.”
Experts seem to believe that keto can serve a purpose, but it’s not a cure-all. The diet might not be for everyone and might not be ideal for a long term solution to managing weight. Follow keto right, and you could have dramatic results that no one can argue with. Will they last? Is it right for you? A Kaiser newsletter seemed to sum it up well: “When it comes to any diet or major lifestyle change, it’s best to talk to your doctor first. They may recommend something like the keto diet—or they may not. It all depends on you, your body type, and your medical history.”