Keto has Clearly Failed for Obesity

Not that any other diet is doing any better..

“beta hydroxybutyrate” how keto works, as described by the average ketoer

Disclaimer: I’m more ketarded than you

I am probably the most ketarded person you will ever meet. I have been in ketosis for most of the last 9 years, with about 3-4 weeks of exceptions where I ate carbs as an experiment.

I eat a 90% fat diet, and my walking-around ketones are usually 3.5-5.5mmol/L. I’ve maxed out the ketone meter at 8.0mmol/L on a fast recently. I do not think ketosis is “stressful” or necessarily “just a band-aid” or “unsustainable.”

With my Non-24, I’m one of the few people who benefit from nutritional ketosis independent of any fat gain/weight issues. Sometimes people ask my why I kept doing keto after I re-gained 100lbs on it. The answer is obvious: I can’t have a life or career when not in ketosis. Imagine going keto made you not be in a wheelchair. How hard would you stick to it?

All of this preamble is just because a lot of ketards accuse me of having an “anti-keto bias” or an “anti-keto chip” on my shoulder.

That’s ridiculous. I think keto is amazing at what it does.

But let’s not pretend it can do things it cannot do.

Keto is neither necessary nor sufficient for fat loss

A big majority, maybe most people in the low-carb or keto tribe, are convinced that they have the answer for obesity. I used to be part of that group.

But I’d argue that this has clearly been disproven:

1. Plenty of people don’t lose any weight on keto

2. Plenty of people require extremely specific forms of keto (like 90% fat, or seed oil free, or only animal fats) to benefit much from it

3. Some people gain 100lbs doing strict keto (e.g. me!)

4. Plenty of people effortlessly lose weight & improve their glucose control eating a 80% carb diet

5. Historically, most people before 1950 or so were not doing keto yet were slim by our modern standards.

6. Asia. Rice. C’mon, man.

Keto is not necessary to prevent obesity

My grandparents ate a pretty swampy diet mix of butter & bread, meat & potatoes type meals. Moderate protein, and nearly every meal was heavy both in carbs (often refined) and fat (lots of dairy). Western peasants have been eating bread & dairy for hundreds of years, and somehow diabesity was pretty much unknown before 1900.

Even sugar wasn’t an unknown. My grandma made pound cake and cookies and loved baking. They didn’t exactly drink coke, but they were by no means eating a low-carb diet even by relatively moderate standards.

Much of Asia has been eating an 80% carb diet (from rice) for millennia, and they weren’t exactly known as obese & diabetic. There is more obesity & diabetes in Asia now, but they’ve actually moved away from rice as their main staple and incorporated more industrial “modern” foods over the last few decades. If anything, that proves the point: carbs didn’t do it.

Keto is not sufficient to reverse obesity

Keto does produce “magical” fat loss for many people. But it also doesn’t do anything for others, or at least nothing special. There’s a huge sub-tribe of people who claim that “obviously keto only works because it helps you restrict calories.” I would call that “not working.”

And some people it doesn’t even help with that. Some people gain fat on keto. Ask me how I know. There’s a lot of stuff I can believe after gaining 100lbs on strict keto, but “fat gain is impossible in ketosis” is not one of them.

There are, of course, many variations of keto you can do.

1. Low-protein/high-fat

2. Low-fat/high-protein

3. Seed oil-free

4. Calorie restricted

5. Various types of carnivore

Some of these work better for some people than others. But then it’s not really about the keto, is it.

Even if “low-protein/high-fat keto” somehow worked for everybody (which it doesn’t), that doesn’t mean “keto works.” That means “one very particular sub-type of keto works.”

Diet Tribe Dynamics

Having spent the last 2 decades dieting and involved in internet dieting communities, there’s a social dynamic I’ve observed:

1. New diet idea comes up & gains popularity, driven by a handful of huge successes and charismatic leaders/gurus

2. Everybody rushes to this new idea

3. It works great for some percentage of people (say 30%), not at all for another percentage (say, also 30%) and so-so for the rest

4. All the people it doesn’t work for leave quickly

5. Most of the people for whom it only works so-so leave over time

6. The only people left are true believers and grifters/shills monetizing the idea until it runs dry and even they move on

I’ve now observed this for low-carb, Paleo, keto, and carnivore. The exact same people who were talking up low-carb and then Paleo as the panacea for beating obesity moved on to keto, and when that mostly failed, to carnivore now. Some even went to Peatism or “animal based” whatever that means. Some went full-circle to HCLPLF, although that one’s really in its infancy phase, it seems.

Keto is in this phase now, and has been for maybe 5 years in my experience. If you enter any keto space and say that it didn’t work for you, or that you gained 100lbs on it, people will:

1. Yell at you

2. Say you must’ve been doing it wrong

3. Say you weren’t really in ketosis

4. Say you care too much about ketosis, you didn’t restrict calories enough

5. Accuse you of lying (either about doing keto, or about gaining fat)

6. Ban/block you

Not every single person, of course. But the overwhelming attitude is that “keto solves this and if it didn’t for you, you’re the problem.”

All the open-minded, skeptical people have long moved on. First to carnivore, where some are happy now, and many have even moved on from that already.

Keto is not even necessary to reverse obesity

Plenty of people on r/saturatedfat have reversed their obesity and even diagnosed Type 2 Diabetes by using a high-carb, low-fat, low-protein diet (HCLFLP). Basically, veganism without the ideology and seed oils. I suppose the “whole-foods, plant-based” diet is pretty similar to this. Although refined foods seem pretty ok for a lot of these people, as long as they stick to the other parts.

When I tell long-term, committed ketards that I gained 100lbs on keto, they often look at me and sigh and hypothesize that once your body is “broken” you may never fully recover and never get really lean.

But if all is lost and nothing works, then how come I just lost 75lbs again doing a super-low protein variant of keto? And how come these diagnosed diabetics “magically” reverse their diabesity on a 80% carb diet by severely restricting protein and fat?

It just doesn’t add up.

One of the things that ketards will inevitably bring up is Kempner and his Rice Diet. If you haven’t heard of this guy, he was a German scientist who fled the Nazis and went to Duke University. He put obese, diabetic, and hypertensive people on a diet of mostly white rice, or white rice and fruit.

A lot of the people lost astonishing amounts of weight, reversed their diabetes, and their hypertension.

Unfortunately, Kempner was apparently also kind of a jerk. There are many stories of his ill moral character, to the point of “voluntary” whippings for people to uphold the discipline required on his diets.

I think Kempner’s character is neither here nor there. If he was the only example of a HCLPLF diet working, I’d probably dismiss it. But I know plenty of people over the internet for whom this type of diet works just as well as keto/carnivore does for the best responders.

At the same time, “Kempner was an asshole” doesn’t disprove HCLFLP. It’s just one data point that shows us what is possible, but that we should be skeptical about. E.g. if the rice diet only works with voluntary whippings, maybe that’s kind of a limiting factor.

What constitutes a diet “succeeding” or “failing?”

I don’t think a diet that works well for 30% of people, and so-so for another 30%, is a huge success. It’s a huge success for those having success, of course.

But I’d expect at least 50%, and honestly that wouldn’t be enough. I’d need to see about a 70% success rate in people who reasonably follow the diet.

Another thing that signals “failing” to me is that “the diet allows you to starve yourself slightly better.” Caloric restriction is just weight loss put on your credit card. It’s most likely going to come back, it’s most likely going to cause you issues.

It’s just not a fix; it’s a band-aid. Sure, starve yourself to fit into that wedding dress. But let’s not pretend you’re fixing anything long-term by doing that. It’s just to look nice for that one day.

This involves all bodybuilder diets: bodybuilders literally starve themselves for months at a time to peak for one specific day of a stage show or photo shoot.

That’s the opposite of dietary success in my book.

(This is, by the way, why I consider the new GLP-1 drugs to be mostly failures.)

There is currently no diet that meets my criteria. Likely, not even my own ex150 diet would work “magically well” for 70% of people. When I ran an n=10 trial, it did work very well for 70% of people (9.6lbs average weight loss), but those people were hardly randomly selected.

Is my standard unrealistic? I don’t think so. We just have to get out of the mindset that our favorite diet has to be The One. It might be a little more complicated.

Obesity is Slightly Complicated

I wrote a while ago how I think Obesity is Slightly Complicated. That’s why you can’t fix everyone by telling them to “just do keto” or “just do carnivore” or probably “just do veganism.”

I liken it to fixing a car stranded by the side of the road. Whether you can get that car going again with a tire inflator really depends on if it has a flat tire. You’re not going to fix an empty gas tank or a broken spark plug with a tire inflator.

But it’s not that cars are unfixable, complex messes. We don’t throw up our hands and complain about an epidemic of fixing-resistance in cars. If we diagnose issues with spark plugs, empty gas tanks, and flat tires, then apply the appropriate remedy, we can probably get 75-85% of stranded cars back on the road.

What if we just apply a tiny bit of meta to dieting?

1. Do either keto or low-fat

2. If it doesn’t work, do the other one

3. If that doesn’t work, restrict protein

If keto works for 30%, and low-fat works for 30%, and low-protein works for another 20% or so, we’d already be covering maybe 80% of the population.

I’m sure there are some people who need even more tweaking, or completely different protocols. But this trivial little algorithm, merely mixing up to diametrically opposed dietary tribes, could help the vast majority of the people (if my totally made up percentages are right).

The main issues is that both camps (keto/carnivores and vegans) are religious cults at this point, and they hate each other. Even considering the idea that the other side may be right about something makes you an apostate.

You could describe this as the “no-swamp” diet. Or you could describe it as a meta-diet, which describes a way of cycling/experimenting through various other diets until you find one.

Either way is fine with me.

Let’s just get to 80%.