Most people have heard of the keto diet, and have a vague sense of what it is and how it works. But what most people don’t know about is that the keto diet has a crazy history. And that history can tell us a lot about fad diets and weight loss.
For a recent issue of Men’s Health, I spent months investigating why the keto diet is so insanely popular right now. Along the way I met the bodybuilders, biohackers, scientists, doctors, and hucksters behind the buzziest thing in nutrition.
For the unfamiliar
It’s the diet that has books sitting atop Amazon’s sales rankings, a militant Reddit army, celebrity endorsers, big business backing, and more. The claims behind it are very, very big. Weight loss, of course. But also clearer thinking, more energy, curbed appetite, increased fertility, and much more. Some claim it even kills cancer cells.
How the keto diet works
To go keto, you eat enough fat to send Paula Dean into orgiastic mania: 80 to 90 percent of the food you eat is made of fat. The rest is protein and a few carbs. So you basically eat meats baptized in butter and oil, and a chase them with a few vegetables
All that fat and no carbs forces your body into a biological state called ketosis(hence the name “ketogenic”), where you run on an alternate energy source, called ketones. Which all sounds so sciencey and intriguing, right?
Sure, but is the keto diet actually intriguing?
That depends on who you ask and what you’re using it for.
The diet was originally developed in the 20s to treat epilepsy. And it works really well for that. Just as good as medications, without the nasty side effects.
Scientists who study the diet’s other alleged benefits—clearer thinking, more energy—haven’t discovered anything conclusive, but it does seem to make some people less hungry.
The cancer stuff is overblown. It slows the growth of some types of tumors but speeds others. “It’s not as simple as ‘starve your cancer of (carbs),'” one cancer researcher told me.
OK, but does the keto diet help people lose more weight?
Studies say it works the same way any weight loss diet works: When you limit what you eat you … limit what you eat, and in turn eat fewer calories.
But! It’s easy to take unremarkable study results and write off keto. The real world, however, is far more complex than a research lab.
Let’s say scientists were to take 500 people and put them on a diet. They may find that the diet caused an average weight loss of two pounds. Which isn’t all that exciting. But that’s an average. Not everyone would have lost exactly two pounds. Some of those people may have lost 30 pounds while others gained 10. And if you’re the lady who lost 30 pounds, well, that diet is exciting.
Hence: The best diet is the one that works for you.
All the scientists I spoke to reiterated that point.
Because the point holds with real people. Take, for example, a soldier I met who’d been eating keto for more than a year and lost 50 pounds. “It just works for me,” he said. The internet is full of women and men just like him.
For others, keto is a no go. Mostly because its restrictions make it tough to sustain for the long haul. Sure, beef and butter and butter sounds great today. But how about after 30, 60, 90 or 365 days in a row?
My barber put it this way: “Yeah, I tried keto. I maybe did two weeks and lost some weight. And then one day I sat down to eat lunch, which was so much ground beef cooked in so much oil on top of some lettuce, and—GOD—I just couldn’t do it anymore. It all became so gross.”
Why is keto so popular right now?
It has qualities all fad diets need to tip, and a few that make it uniquely suited for faddishness today.
It gives people a simple, good/evil story about food. Pretty much every named diet has this (e.g. low fat: fat is bad; paleo: post-industrial foods are bad; etc). For keto, the message is that carbs are bad and fat is good.
It has legit science behind it. See here. Real science creates buy-in. Problems arise when hucksters steer the science down B.S. alley. E.g., One small study showing that keto may slow the growth of a very specific, rare type of brain tumor is spun into claims like “Therefore keto can beat cancer!” Ehhh, not so much.
It kills on social media. You dump a ton of water weight when your body transitions to the ketogenic state, which is great for “I lost X pounds in Y days!”testimonials.
It’s big among influencers. Lebron and Kim K did it. Joe Rogan—who has a larger audience than the major network nightly news shows—and Tim Ferris have hyped it on their podcasts.
It’s geared to the data generation. Biohacking is a big, popular thing, and the diet is a biohacker’s OCD dream. Keto is all numbers and figures you must dial in—grams of fat, grams of carbs, ketone blood levels—to “optimize” yourself.
