This type of stuff is unironically going to shorten the lifespan of millions of people. The keto diet is so absurd. If I wanted to invent something that technically followed the rules but was wildly unhealthy, I doubt I could come up with something as absurd as the chaffle (a waffle made of cheese), but I know people who’ve actually eaten them. Once I was visiting my family and started snacking on some chips, but something felt off, so I checked. It was literally just melted crispy cheese. We’re going to be the first generation to have a lower lifespan than our parents.
i’m really glad i get nauseous from too much fat and sugar… makes it really easy to avoid stuff like that
it does make it kinda difficult to visit the US and see friends though: anywhere we eat is a minefield of fat, sugar, and salt that leaves me just wanting a damn salad to cleanse my palette but even then it probably has fricken ranch on it or a weirdly salty vinaigrette
This is not a problem unique to keto. Plenty of diets have enough loopholes for you to technically follow them while being incredibly unhealthy. There’s a reason the term “junk food vegan” exists.
“Keto” itself has a ton of different forms, but the main goal is to move away from processing food into glucose and towards processing food into ketones. That effectively means cutting carbohydrates. A lot of these pretty much everyone agrees are bad for you: sugar, corn syrup, starches. That isn’t unique to keto. What is unique is cutting out other carbs. Fruits, and some vegetables (I’m using casual categories here), have been bred over thousands of years to have a ton of sugar in them. Grains like wheat, oats, and rice are probably the most significant and weird things that keto cuts: these have been efficient sources of calories for humans for thousands of years, the foundations of civilization, yet are not compatible with ketosis.
In order to maintain the same caloric intake, that means increasing fat and protein (technically alcohol too lol). If you increase saturated fats (dairy, red meat, coconut and palm oils) that’s unhealthy. The healthy way to do it is to go for unsaturated fats: fish, poultry, seeds, nuts, most other vegetable oils. It also happens that red meats are the ones that are significantly worse for the environment and economy. Seafood and poultry certainly have their own environmental impacts of course, and are more expensive per calorie than grains. If you can stand to get away from Western cuisine, there are plenty of insect options that are great sources of protein (shrimps is bugs after all). But articles like this (I can’t confirm because it’s behind a paywall) almost always project out the worst-case scenario that all of this increased protein intake is coming from beef, the worst source. Beef and pork should absolutely be reduced to luxury items people eat on rare occasions, or perhaps not at all. Fish and poultry can definitely be part of a sustainable future: there are a lot of conditions like epilepsy that BENEFIT from getting more protein from animal sources.
That’s all just talking about macronutrients. The other components are micronutrients and fiber. Leafy green low-carb veggies like lettuce, kale, spinach, broccoli, brussel sprouts. Dietary fiber is listed under carbohydrates on US Nutrition Facts but does not count towards the “Net Carbs” that someone on keto should be looking at. Mushrooms are good too.
Someone can eat nothing but Oreos and still be vegan, and someone can eat nothing but beef jerky and cheese and still be keto.
Yeah, I understand it. And I know the general idea is to make it easier for your body to enter fat burning mode “ketosis” which iirc means that if you hit a calorie deficit (the goal of any diet) instead of feeling weak and hungry, you’ll feel mostly normal. But I just don’t buy it because even with this supposed biologic hack, I’ve seen plenty of people it hasn’t worked for. Carbs and protein both have 4 calories per gram, fat has 8. When animals want to gain tons of weight, ex. hibernation or whales building blubber, they eat tons of fat.
Even the “bad” diets of the 90s didn’t want to cut fat out, they just wanted to reduce it. But with keto, supposedly even just a few carbs will make your body seek energy there and not enter ketosis, so lots of people try to avoid literally any carbs at all, and if they don’t lose weight, they blame it all on that one 100 calorie slice of wonder bread. It gives the diet a strange cult-like quality where you can almost always blame it not working on people not adhering to it strongly enough.
If it works for you, especially if you do it in a more sustainable way, who am I to tell you how to live your life. But for most people I’ve seen, it doesn’t, so I’m still a skeptic.
I know the general idea is to make it easier for your body to enter fat burning mode “ketosis” which iirc means that if you hit a calorie deficit
That is not the goal of keto at all. People can choose to add calorie counting, but that’s an additional step. Calories are a unit of thermal energy. It’s how much energy is released when the food is burned (more technically, oxidized). The most basic way to measure this is to burn it in a way that directs the thermal energy to a container of water, where it’s then pretty straightforward to measure the temperature change and do the math.
As a vague heuristic to measure the energy in food this is… Sometimes useful, sometimes not. What your body actually does is break down carbs into glucose, and things like protein, fat, and alcohol to ketones. Those eventually get broken down further into Adenosine
triphosphate, or ATP, which is the basic fuel source your cells mostly use to do things. This is not the same as an oxidation reaction.
More importantly though, when you reduce caloric intake you risk some negative outcomes, which is where we start to mix between physiological and psychological. A lot is based on genetics: if you are lucky enough to have the right genes, you can reduce caloric input or increase caloric output and see weight loss results. Unfortunately, a lot of people like myself don’t have such genes. Instead, when we reduce calories are bodies starts to use processed designed to survive famines- slowing the metabolism, reducing the amount of energy expended, storing as much energy as possible (as fat). If you stick to it long enough, you will lose weight eventually. The problem is that your body makes it harder to stick to it.
Hunger is one of the most basic, primal driving factors baked into the relationship between our body and mind. Caloric restriction can make people hungrier. It causes a lot of diets to fail. It also makes it hard to keep the weight off.
What keto does is gets your body used to treating fat as a source of energy to be used rather than stored for later. So I don’t have to count my calories, I just make sure that what I’m eating has relatively few carbs. Personally, I prefer protein-heavy foods over fat-heavy, although some keto people would argue that doesn’t count as strictly “keto” anymore. It’s not because I’m a gymbro who needs protein, but because protein makes me feel full and satisfied. I don’t have to count calories. I don’t have to be hungry. I don’t have to keep track of every little thing that I eat and think about whether I can afford to have a drink at the end of the night. Compared to caloric restriction (weight watchers), the minute-to-minute decisions are way easier and the day-to-day decisions go away.
It’s not for everyone of course. The academic research, like with every other diet, is mixed. When you get off keto you’ll probably gain some weight back. I’m sure there are some medical conditions that it makes worse. My wife happens to have a lot of issues that are improved by keto (epilepsy and PCOS. Kidney stones too, though the research on that is more mixed).
Isn’t that still with the goal of consuming less energy? We can treat a calorie as some strange artefact, but burning is the best way to break all bonds and release energy, and water is a common substance that holds heat well. It’s all basic thermodynamics. Any diet that works is some variation of eat less, move more. It isn’t just you whose metabolism and hunger change with weight, it’s everybody. And it goes both ways. If you start to gain weight, your metabolism speeds up. And the longer you’ve been at your current weight, the more your body resists change.
But regardless, whether it makes your body burn fat more easily so you don’t stay hungry or whether it burns a different kind of energy, it’s all an alleged trick to make calorie dense foods make you lose weight. I appreciate that it may work for you, but I’ve seen it not work enough that I wouldn’t recommend it.
And final thoughts. Sometimes I might have to limit myself to stay healthy, but I really like not having to ever give anything up, just to have everything in moderation.
This type of stuff is unironically going to shorten the lifespan of millions of people. The keto diet is so absurd. If I wanted to invent something that technically followed the rules but was wildly unhealthy, I doubt I could come up with something as absurd as the chaffle (a waffle made of cheese), but I know people who’ve actually eaten them. Once I was visiting my family and started snacking on some chips, but something felt off, so I checked. It was literally just melted crispy cheese. We’re going to be the first generation to have a lower lifespan than our parents.
that all sounds so disgusting
i’m really glad i get nauseous from too much fat and sugar… makes it really easy to avoid stuff like that
it does make it kinda difficult to visit the US and see friends though: anywhere we eat is a minefield of fat, sugar, and salt that leaves me just wanting a damn salad to cleanse my palette but even then it probably has fricken ranch on it or a weirdly salty vinaigrette
its good short term, but never a long term thing.
This is not a problem unique to keto. Plenty of diets have enough loopholes for you to technically follow them while being incredibly unhealthy. There’s a reason the term “junk food vegan” exists.
“Keto” itself has a ton of different forms, but the main goal is to move away from processing food into glucose and towards processing food into ketones. That effectively means cutting carbohydrates. A lot of these pretty much everyone agrees are bad for you: sugar, corn syrup, starches. That isn’t unique to keto. What is unique is cutting out other carbs. Fruits, and some vegetables (I’m using casual categories here), have been bred over thousands of years to have a ton of sugar in them. Grains like wheat, oats, and rice are probably the most significant and weird things that keto cuts: these have been efficient sources of calories for humans for thousands of years, the foundations of civilization, yet are not compatible with ketosis.
In order to maintain the same caloric intake, that means increasing fat and protein (technically alcohol too lol). If you increase saturated fats (dairy, red meat, coconut and palm oils) that’s unhealthy. The healthy way to do it is to go for unsaturated fats: fish, poultry, seeds, nuts, most other vegetable oils. It also happens that red meats are the ones that are significantly worse for the environment and economy. Seafood and poultry certainly have their own environmental impacts of course, and are more expensive per calorie than grains. If you can stand to get away from Western cuisine, there are plenty of insect options that are great sources of protein (shrimps is bugs after all). But articles like this (I can’t confirm because it’s behind a paywall) almost always project out the worst-case scenario that all of this increased protein intake is coming from beef, the worst source. Beef and pork should absolutely be reduced to luxury items people eat on rare occasions, or perhaps not at all. Fish and poultry can definitely be part of a sustainable future: there are a lot of conditions like epilepsy that BENEFIT from getting more protein from animal sources.
That’s all just talking about macronutrients. The other components are micronutrients and fiber. Leafy green low-carb veggies like lettuce, kale, spinach, broccoli, brussel sprouts. Dietary fiber is listed under carbohydrates on US Nutrition Facts but does not count towards the “Net Carbs” that someone on keto should be looking at. Mushrooms are good too.
Someone can eat nothing but Oreos and still be vegan, and someone can eat nothing but beef jerky and cheese and still be keto.
Yeah, I understand it. And I know the general idea is to make it easier for your body to enter fat burning mode “ketosis” which iirc means that if you hit a calorie deficit (the goal of any diet) instead of feeling weak and hungry, you’ll feel mostly normal. But I just don’t buy it because even with this supposed biologic hack, I’ve seen plenty of people it hasn’t worked for. Carbs and protein both have 4 calories per gram, fat has 8. When animals want to gain tons of weight, ex. hibernation or whales building blubber, they eat tons of fat.
Even the “bad” diets of the 90s didn’t want to cut fat out, they just wanted to reduce it. But with keto, supposedly even just a few carbs will make your body seek energy there and not enter ketosis, so lots of people try to avoid literally any carbs at all, and if they don’t lose weight, they blame it all on that one 100 calorie slice of wonder bread. It gives the diet a strange cult-like quality where you can almost always blame it not working on people not adhering to it strongly enough.
If it works for you, especially if you do it in a more sustainable way, who am I to tell you how to live your life. But for most people I’ve seen, it doesn’t, so I’m still a skeptic.
That is not the goal of keto at all. People can choose to add calorie counting, but that’s an additional step. Calories are a unit of thermal energy. It’s how much energy is released when the food is burned (more technically, oxidized). The most basic way to measure this is to burn it in a way that directs the thermal energy to a container of water, where it’s then pretty straightforward to measure the temperature change and do the math.
As a vague heuristic to measure the energy in food this is… Sometimes useful, sometimes not. What your body actually does is break down carbs into glucose, and things like protein, fat, and alcohol to ketones. Those eventually get broken down further into Adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, which is the basic fuel source your cells mostly use to do things. This is not the same as an oxidation reaction.
More importantly though, when you reduce caloric intake you risk some negative outcomes, which is where we start to mix between physiological and psychological. A lot is based on genetics: if you are lucky enough to have the right genes, you can reduce caloric input or increase caloric output and see weight loss results. Unfortunately, a lot of people like myself don’t have such genes. Instead, when we reduce calories are bodies starts to use processed designed to survive famines- slowing the metabolism, reducing the amount of energy expended, storing as much energy as possible (as fat). If you stick to it long enough, you will lose weight eventually. The problem is that your body makes it harder to stick to it.
Hunger is one of the most basic, primal driving factors baked into the relationship between our body and mind. Caloric restriction can make people hungrier. It causes a lot of diets to fail. It also makes it hard to keep the weight off.
What keto does is gets your body used to treating fat as a source of energy to be used rather than stored for later. So I don’t have to count my calories, I just make sure that what I’m eating has relatively few carbs. Personally, I prefer protein-heavy foods over fat-heavy, although some keto people would argue that doesn’t count as strictly “keto” anymore. It’s not because I’m a gymbro who needs protein, but because protein makes me feel full and satisfied. I don’t have to count calories. I don’t have to be hungry. I don’t have to keep track of every little thing that I eat and think about whether I can afford to have a drink at the end of the night. Compared to caloric restriction (weight watchers), the minute-to-minute decisions are way easier and the day-to-day decisions go away.
It’s not for everyone of course. The academic research, like with every other diet, is mixed. When you get off keto you’ll probably gain some weight back. I’m sure there are some medical conditions that it makes worse. My wife happens to have a lot of issues that are improved by keto (epilepsy and PCOS. Kidney stones too, though the research on that is more mixed).
Isn’t that still with the goal of consuming less energy? We can treat a calorie as some strange artefact, but burning is the best way to break all bonds and release energy, and water is a common substance that holds heat well. It’s all basic thermodynamics. Any diet that works is some variation of eat less, move more. It isn’t just you whose metabolism and hunger change with weight, it’s everybody. And it goes both ways. If you start to gain weight, your metabolism speeds up. And the longer you’ve been at your current weight, the more your body resists change.
But regardless, whether it makes your body burn fat more easily so you don’t stay hungry or whether it burns a different kind of energy, it’s all an alleged trick to make calorie dense foods make you lose weight. I appreciate that it may work for you, but I’ve seen it not work enough that I wouldn’t recommend it.
And final thoughts. Sometimes I might have to limit myself to stay healthy, but I really like not having to ever give anything up, just to have everything in moderation.