[bityard]

Keto (and to a degree, paleo) is a balanced diet. These diets, or something very much like them, were what humans were eating when we evolved into our present state.

The Western diet is highly unbalanced in favor of carbohydrates and sugar because these are easy to farm, store, transport, and sell. The food pyramid we all know and love is a product of over two centuries of industrial agriculture.

[cyphar]

Keto is not a balanced diet -- by definition the goal is to place your body into ketosis (by removing carbohydrates from your diet). I'm not sure what definition of "balanced" you're using, but I wouldn't call removing an entire class of macronutrients "balanced".

Note that hunter-gatherer human societies didn't just eat meat, they almost certainly ate berries and fruits (both of which contain sugars and are thus excluded from Keto diets -- though to be fair, modern fruits are quite different to their ancient counterparts). And early human societies definitely consumed grains.

Don't get me wrong, feel free to have whatever diet you prefer. But Keto is by design not an example of a balanced diet, nor is it accurate to make an appeal to nature when discussing it.

> The Western diet is highly unbalanced in favor of carbohydrates and sugar

I don't disagree with the sentiment that modern western diets are on the whole incredibly unhealthy (though large quantities of unhealthy fats are hardly blameless). But carbohydrate consumption is not limited to the Western world, nor is it a new phenomenon.

Rice has been a food staple in Asia for an incredibly long time (having been domesticated in the Neolithic Period). And bread has existed in the Middle East and Europe for even longer.

[wtetzner]

> Note that hunter-gathers didn't just eat meat, they almost certainly ate berries and fruits (both of which contain sugars and are thus excluded from Keto diets).

One can safely eat berries and fruits on Keto, just not too much of them. It's entirely possible that those hunter-gatherers were in ketosis even if they sometimes at berries and possibly other fruit. Not to mention fruit wouldn't have been available all year, which means they were likely in ketosis for most of the year.

> by definition the goal is to place your body into ketosis

You say that like ketosis is somehow a strange state for your body to be in. But given that fat is a more efficient fuel source for your cells, it seems that ketosis might be the normal state for your body to be in, and running on carbs the uncommon state.

> but I wouldn't call removing an entire class of macronutrients "balanced".

You're not necessarily removing it, you're reducing it so that it's no longer your primary fuel source. It's also the only macronutrient humans can survive without consuming. Gluconeogenesis provides enough glucose for the parts of your body that require it, and everything else runs on fat, which is more efficient than using sugar.

> Rice has been a food staple in Asia for the vast majority of human history (having been domesticated in at least the Neolithic Period). And bread has existed in the Middle East and Europe for even longer.

Human evolution is much much longer than human history, which is just a blip in comparison.

[enchiridion]

Also important to note that fruits in their current form did not exist back then.

[partyboat1586]

The Neolithic period is around 12000 years ago. Anatomicaly modern humans have been around for 200,000 years plus and other hominids for millions of years before that. Carbohydrate consumption as a large portion of our diet is very new on an evolutionary time scale.

[wtetzner]

> The food pyramid we all know and love is a product of over two centuries of industrial agriculture.

And fittingly, was provided to us by the Department of Agriculture, not the Department of Health as one might expect.