Looks like a good study coming up. If they do it right, and actually keep the carbs low and the fat high and not too much protein, maybe they will finally put all this debate to rest:
"......... they’ll be randomly assigned to 1 of 3 equal-calorie diets: a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet that’s either high or low in added sugar or a very low-carbohydrate, high-fat ketogenic diet that causes the body to switch from burning carbohydrates to burning fat.
The group will be the first of 5 that will participate in the trial over 3 years.................Deprived of dietary sugars and starches on the very low-carb diet, the body reduces insulin secretion and switches to primarily burning fat within a week. In this metabolic state—called nutritional ketosis—the liver converts fatty acids into compounds called ketone bodies that can penetrate the blood-brain barrier and provide fuel to the brain, as well as the body’s other tissues..............a well-formulated ketogenic diet limits protein to adequate amounts to maintain lean body mass but doesn’t restrict fat or overall calories.
Despite being allowed to eat fat to satiety, people on a ketogenic diet often experience rapid weight loss—up to 10 pounds in 2 weeks, noted Goss, who researches the diet and uses it to treat obesity and type 2 diabetes at UAB. The diet has a diuretic effect, and some of those initial pounds are water weight. But as insulin levels decline and the body switches to fat-burning mode, it draws on fat depots, leading to further reductions in weight, Goss said.
Meanwhile, because many people feel less hungry on a ketogenic diet, they often naturally reduce their overall caloric intake, which could aid in their weight loss, said Bruce Bistrian, MD, PhD, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and chief of clinical nutrition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Just how much they may lose depends on many factors, including the amount of calories they spontaneously reduce, as well as their starting total fat and lean mass, age, sex, ethnicity, and activity level, he said.
In a recent 8-week randomized trial including 34 obese men and women 60 through 75 years old, those who ate a ketogenic diet lost 9.7% of their body fat, while those on a low-fat diet lost just 2.1%. The ketogenic dieters also lost 3 times more visceral adipose tissue than the low-fat dieters, according to Goss, who presented the data at last year’s meeting of The Obesity Society.
Beyond Weight Loss
There’s also increasing interest in the ketogenic diet for diabetes management. Insulin sensitivity improves on the diet—although the mechanisms are not entirely clear—along with glycemic control.
“It seems to help people not only lose weight but reduce their requirement for [diabetes] medications, and they get improvements in their hemoglobin A1c [HbA1c], which is an end point for diabetes management,” said Steven Heymsfield, MD, a professor in the department of metabolism and body composition at Louisiana State University’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center and president-elect of The Obesity Society...........Stephen Phinney, MD, PhD, an emeritus professor of medicine at the University of California, Davis, is investigating just that. In 2015, he launched a telemedicine-based type 2 diabetes clinic called Virta Health. Virta’s physicians and dieticians coach patients on safely using a ketogenic diet to treat their condition.
The 10-week results of an ongoing 5-year Virta Health study demonstrated HbA1c-level improvements (an increase from 19.8% to 56.1% of participants with levels lower than 6.5%), diabetes medication reductions and eliminations (56.8% of participants), and body mass decreases (7.2% on average). Of the 262 patients who enrolled in the study, 238 stayed in the program for at least 10 weeks. In 6-month data, the average weight loss from baseline was 12%, with an 89% retention rate. Phinney plans to publish 1-year data soon.
Beyond helping people reduce their weight and get control of their blood glucose, ketogenic diets may also be heart-healthy, thanks to improvements in triglycerides, high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol levels, abdominal circumference, and blood pressure.
Low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol levels increase for some on the diet. Emphasizing unsaturated rather than saturated fat could help ward off these increases, but experts disagree on the ideal fat composition of the diet. An important caveat is that there appears to be a shift from more harmful small, dense LDL particles to less-harmful large, nondense particles on the diet....................................................................".
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2669724?guestaccesskey=ed4d3210-6d58-4805-93af-2d49d3b4f060&utm_source=silverchair&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=article_alert-jama&utm_term=mostread&utm_content=olf-widget_03292019EDIT: sorry, I just discovered this link I quoted from is not working. I don't know how to fix it at the moment.
EDIT #2: This link covers the same info:
https://www.sott.net/article/374365-interest-in-the-ketogenic-diet-grows-for-weight-loss-and-type-2-diabetes-in-mainstream-medicinePost Edited (BillyBob@388) : 4/3/2019 7:55:19 AM (GMT-6)