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by AJ007 3549 days ago
That is wrong, the ketogenic diet is prescribed by doctors to patients suffering from seizures and it works. There are long term studies and the NYTimes has been reporting about this since the 90s. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/magazine/21Epilepsy-t.html

Everyone picks a diet. If you just randomly eat anything thats available to you, in the developed world, you are most likely significantly overweight and at very high risk of diabetes. With rare exceptions, most fad diets will leave you better off than with no guidance whatsoever. Sometimes pointing someone in the wrong direction is better than them walking off a cliff.

Diet science is definitely progressing and getting better. We knew the basics, like what happened when you didn't get enough vitamin C, but the rest of the details are finally getting fleshed out and accepted by mainstream science.

That said, people following the ketogenic diet need to be doing it correctly and under a doctor's supervision. If you half ass it you can end up just eating a shitload of bad fats and miss nutrients while not actually being in ketosis. That will not lead to a good outcome.

2 comments

Your argument is flawed, doctors prescribe lots of things that aren't good for you because for that person, they're better than the alternative, chemo for example. That something is done by doctors does not make it good.

> but the rest of the details are finally getting fleshed out and accepted by mainstream science.

Uh, no, mainstream science is the only one doing the fleshing out; you're implication that they're behind and only now accepting what diet science already knows is anti-intellectual bunk. If it isn't mainstream science, it isn't science.

"Mainstream" science is regularly hijacked by corporate and other interests. Dietary science is one area that was strongly influenced by producers of refined carbohydrates.
Prescribing it for epilepsy doesn't necessarily make it a healthy diet for your average individual as you are looking for different effect from the diet.