Keto works, but only for about a week.
As was the case with gluten-free diets, ketogenic diets started as something a few people needed to do, and eventually became something people wanted to do. This was mostly due to celebrity endorsements from folks like Lebron James and Gwyneth Paltrow. According to some new research from Yale, however, while a ketogenic diet can be good for you, it only continues to be for a few days.
The way keto works is that by reducing your body’s carb-count, you sort of trick it into thinking it’s starving, which it isn’t, because you still get calories from fat. The body then instinctively starts burning its fat reserves to keep itself alive. No carbs, fat burns off; in theory, it’s perfect. The problem, according to Yale scientists who experimented on mice, is that your body is still storing fat even while burning it. After about a week of this pseudo-starvation state, the mice were consuming more fat than they were burning off, which led to diabetes and obesity (which keto is, ironically, supposed to help prevent).
Long-form tests still need to be performed on human subjects to determine if keto is truly safe. For the time being, unless you need a ketogenic diet for health reasons, you might want to try something else, or at the very least, only do it in short bursts.
