Keto Diet Conniptions

This is the first in a series of posts in which I present some common-sense rebuttals to the various fad diets out there; I picked the “keto” diet to begin with because it’s pretty hot right now. Something else is probably coming or has come down the pike already and I just haven’t gotten clued in yet. In reality, though, it doesn’t matter too much what the diet of the moment is, because all of these fad diets fall into some basic, broad categories: you can restrict fat, or carbs, or a specific food category (such as meat or gluten). Or you can just restrict calories in general. (Note that people with specific medical issues such as celiac disease or allergies, or people who eat a certain way as a matter of conscience, such as those who abhor the killing of animals, are not included in the fad diet category.)

To begin with, “keto” is short for “ketogenic.” The short explanation of what this term means is that it is simply a more extreme version of the low-carb or Atkins diet. Its defining factor, however, is that you’re following it in order to “trick” your body into functioning unnaturally. Once you understand this concept you’ll see that it’s completely unworkable and cannot lead to lasting weight loss or health benefits, because, as the Chiffon margarine ad so wisely said so many years ago:

“It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.”

The “trick” of the keto diet is that you’re starving your body of carbohydrates, the main source of the fuel your body runs on, glucose, in an effort to get the body to start burning fat. Oh, and you also have to severely limit your protein intake, because your body can plunder protein to make glucose. Remember, your body has to have glucose in order to survive. Because we hear so much (and rightly so) about the dangers of high blood levels of glucose (which would be a better term than “sugar,” actually), we tend to start thinking that glucose itself is dangerous. But it’s only the abnormal levels that are so, and low levels can be just as deadly as high ones. Did you know that your brain can survive for only about six minutes without glucose as well as without oxygen? It cannot store either of these items.

As is the case with so many health fads, there is a germ of truth, or perhaps a kernel of truth, in the basic idea, and that is that a ketogenic diet has sometimes been prescribed for children with epilepsy, as having the brain run on “ketone bodies” (which are made from fat and are usable by the brain) seems to limit seizures. No one seems to know why, and I haven’t run across how this whole technique was discovered in the first place, but that information isn’t all that relevant to the current craze. The important fact to note is that starting in the 1930’s it was recognized that this diet could be medically useful, but only in certain situations and under close medical supervision. Then what always happens happened—people started jumping on the bandwagon, facts got distorted, and the lure of making a buck loomed large. A complicated medical phenomenon got shoehorned into brief, pithy sales pitches, and a fad was born.

So what would you have to do if you were to start a keto diet? (I’m not recommending it, just to be clear—I’m explaining it.) You’d need to start eating around 80% of your calories from fat, 15% from protein, and only 5% from carbs to really get into dietary ketosis. Following those percentages would mean that if you were eating the typical number of calories per day for the average woman (2,000), you could have only 100 calories from carbs. If your eating plan lets you eat more carbs than that you’re almost certainly not entering the keto zone; you’re just eating a low-carb diet. It may be just as well, though, as ketosis isn’t really good for you, at least in the long term. And remember, you have to restrict protein, too; 15% of 2,000 is 300. So if our hypothetical woman ate two eggs for breakfast she’d be getting 10 grams of fat but 12 grams of protein, plus 1.2 grams of carbohydrates. So she couldn’t just eat lots of eggs every day because she’d end up with too much protein. And while many keto diet plans encourage you to eat lots of non-starchy vegetables such as peppers, mushrooms, lettuce, green beans, and broccoli, those foods do have carbs, roughly averaging five grams per cup. So you can eat lots of them, but they’re not “free.” And guess what? I was curious to see whether or not these veggies have any protein, and they do: broccoli weighs in at around 4 grams/16 calories per stalk.So if I’m calculating this correctly, two stalks of broccoli at 16 protein calories each would equal a tenth of the protein allowance for the day (32 calories out of 300). With the two eggs above, our poor hypothetical woman (or PHW) would already have used up almost 80 of her allowed protein calories for the day, or well over 25%. If she eats a four-oz. piece of chicken breast (which is very small) she’s now up to 224 protein calories, leaving her with around 75 calories left. She’s allowed to have cheese, but that has 28 protein calories per ounce (or standard slice), so she she can only have three slices. Now everything else she eats has to be fat. As an excellent article in Popular Science says, “Keto is hard. If it’s not hard, you’re probably not doing it right.”

That’s enough for today, as I’ve probably fried everybody’s brains. (I’ve certainly fried mine.) In my next post I’m planning to do a case study on a couple’s experiences going keto. They think they’re doing great, but I would beg to differ!