The Keto Diet

The ketogenic (or koto) diet is a very high-fat, very-low-carbohydrate diet that has been getting a lot of attention recently because of the benefits it has on weight loss. Keto basics The ketogenic diet is a very low-carb, high-fat diet that shares a lot of similarities with Atkins and the low-carb diet. Technically, you can eat any type of food on a ketogenic diet as long as it fits into your daily carb goals, but those foods are intermediate between high carb and low carb.

People sometimes confuse keto with high-fat, high-carb, which is horrible for your body. Even when you know that you should eat a very low carb, high fat, moderate protein diet -- it is still confusing to figure out what foods you should be eating.

If you are a beginner, or you are just learning your way around a ketogenic food list, then your biggest questions may revolve around just which low-carb, high-fat foods you can eat while following a ketogenic, very low-carb diet.

The ketogenic diet is a high-fat, appropriate-protein, low-carbohydrate diet used in medicine mostly for treating difficult-to-control epilepsy (refractory) in children. The keto diet, an abbreviation for ketogenic, involves eating high amounts of fat, moderate amounts of protein, and very few carbohydrates--fruit is also not allowed. The keto diet allows many people to eat the kinds of high-fat foods that they like, like red meat, fatty fish, nuts, cheese, and butter, and yet lose weight.

Very-low-carb, high-fat diets, like the ketogenic diet, have been shown to be helpful for weight loss. In fact, when compared with low-fat diets, ketogenic diets seem to produce greater long-term weight loss. More than 30 high-quality scientific studies have shown that compared with other diets, low-carb and ketogenic diets lead to much more effective weight loss.

There are tons of studies published in the past 30 years showing how higher amounts of fat and lower amounts of carbs are helpful. Unlike other low-carb diets, which emphasize protein, a keto plan emphasizes fat, providing up to 90% of your daily calories.

A keto diet switches you from burning glucose -- provided by carbohydrates -- to burning ketones -- produced by fat -- for energy. Instead of relying on sugar (glucose) which comes from carbohydrates (such as grains, legumes, vegetables, and fruits), the keto diet relies on ketone bodies, a type of fuel the liver produces from stored fat. The diet involves drastically cutting back on carbohydrates, to 50 grams or less per day, in order to help the body reach ketosis, a condition where it has to burn fat (rather than sugar) for energy.

This high-fat, very-low-carbohydrate diet usually means eating less than 50 grams of carbohydrates per day--less than four slices of bread. A well-formulated ketogenic diet, in addition to restricting carbohydrates, also moderates protein consumption at less than 1g/lb bodyweight, except if an individual is doing intense exercises that include resistance training, in which case protein consumption may increase to 1.5g/lb bodyweight. Function A ketogenic diet is composed mostly of high-fat, moderate-protein, very-low-carbohydrate.

If you're old enough, you might remember that the low-fat diet has its own theory, which was the subject of much discussion in the 1990s. High-fat diets promote overeating because fat has nine calories per gramme compared to four for carbohydrates and protein. Hall's research aimed to evaluate competing views by contrasting the diets side by side.

Twenty subjects, in-patients at a NIH facility so all their consumption could be monitored, were fed either the keto diet or the low-fat diet for two weeks, and then switched over to the other. (These studies are very expensive, which is why they tend to be small and short.)