Talk:Ketogenic diet

Proposed section about non-medical "ketogenic" diets

I noticed there was a hatnote directing users to Low-carbohydrate diet, but it's pretty easy to miss or scroll past. Maybe we could add a short section with 2-3 sentences about the fad diet with a Template:Main section hatnote. Here's a sketch I put together with information and refs from the low-carbohydrate diet article. 143.244.37.117 (talk) 03:01, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

Fad diet

Main article: Low-carbohydrate diet § Ketogenic diet

In the 2010s, the ketogenic diet's medical use inspired a fad diet for people wanting to lose weight. Celebrity endorsements contributed to the popularity of the diet trend. There is no evidence that an extreme low-carbohydrate diet has any distinctive benefit for weight loss, and it carries a risk of adverse effects.

Discussion

Any thoughts on this? I understand there is a desire to keep pseudoscience out of this article, but I think it might be more useful to acknowledge the existence of the fad diet while clearly stating its lack of scientific basis. 143.244.37.117 (talk) 03:01, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for considering a solution to the problem. I had another read of Wikipedia:Disambiguation today. I think our current practice of having the medical therapy as the primary article, rather than making the page a disambiguation page or making it discuss all diets that may be ketogenic, is the best approach. The therapy is 100 years old, and will still be around long after using such an limiting diet for weight loss becomes a rare thing. In addition, being ketogenic is just an extreme kind of (or phase in) a variety of low-carb diets. Having a small section that informs the reader of an alternative usage of the term is not a practice recommended in our guidelines. I agree that casual readers may not notice the hatnote, but readers who are more familiar with Wikipedia will probably spot it more readily and give it a quick glance when they arrive at a page from searching. It has become a standard and low-impact way of mentioning alternatives. -- Colin°^Talk 08:51, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

There needs to be a section on "as a fad diet" added to this article. It was on my list of things to do for a long time. Please see the gluten-free diet article. It has a section "As a fad diet​". We don't need to create a new article for this. I suggest this content to be added at the bottom of the article in a new section. Psychologist Guy (talk) 12:13, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

Psychologist Guy, as a coeliac patient, few things piss me off more than so-called "gluten sensitive" people who loudly demand GF but do exactly none of the work necessary to understand whether their food is at risk of cross-contamination, which is my #1 source of poisoning. Guy (help! - typo?) 12:16, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

The "diet for weight loss" is not a sub-topic of "diet for epilepsy therapy". The only way that would work is if the scope of this article was expanded to include any ketogenic diet for any purpose. The first problem with that is that is not what our reliable sources do. They talk about these things separately. So should we. -- Colin°^Talk 19:54, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

It is a sub-topic in that the weight loss diet was directly inspired by the medical diet. There are reliable sources that specifically discuss the (mis)use of the medical diet as a weight loss diet, such as those cited in the proposed subsection. Having a subsection helps to explain the relationship between the topics more than can be practically done in a hatnote. 143.244.37.141 (talk) 21:44, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

Please don't set up a straw-man argument, I'm not proposing making this a disambiguation page or changing the topic of the article. I'm proposing adding a short section about the fad diet inspired by the topic of this article. It's not an unrelated topic which happens to share a similar name. 143.244.37.141 (talk) 21:44, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

I'm not setting up a straw-man argument, just outlining the various options open to editors at the guideline page for dealing with this sort of issue. "inspired by" is a tenuous reason for including a subsection, and I'm not actually convinced it is inspired by it. Of course people will briefly mention the 100-year-old medical therapy for various reasons such as giving it an air of medical soundness rather than quackery, but I don't think anyone thought "I wonder if this treatment for really sick children, which fixes their epilepsy, might help me lose weight". It seems more likely a consequence of taking a "carbs are evil" approach to its extreme conclusion, searching to see if there has been any research done on what happens to you if you essentially avoid carbs altogether, and discovering by chance there's an epilepsy therapy that does just that. -- Colin°^Talk 22:03, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

I don't think the disambiguation guideline is relevant here. According one source discussing the history of the fad diet, the trend attained prominence when pop-culture figures seized on some actual scientific research into the ketogenic diet and started promoting the diet as a magical panacea for health and weight loss, far in excess of the actual findings. So it is accurate to say that the fad diet is a direct offshoot of the medical topic, albeit an unscientific one.

More relevant guidelines would be WP:DUE and perhaps WP:ONEWAY. I would argue that the latter guideline does not apply as the use of ketogenic diets for weight loss has some coverage in scientific sources as a topic of potential research interest, so it's not a totally fringe topic. It's just that the fad takes a kernel of real science and extrapolates it into the realm of pseudoscience. As for due weight, I think a few sentences isn't excessive given the article's size.

In case this wasn't clear, I'm not trying to promote the fad diet and I'm not suggesting Wikipedia should either. My suggestion is to briefly describe the existence of the fad, explain its connection to the article subject, clearly state that it's not supported by scientific research, and provide a section hatnote to the main article about it. 143.244.37.205 (talk) 07:45, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

Even if we assume for the moment that "Mens Health" is a reliable source, it doesn't in fact argue that the fad diet comes from the epilepsy diet. It mentions a series of independent proponents of a low-carb ketogenic diet. Wrt to WP:DUE, the professional sources on the epilepsy diet do not discuss diets for life extension, bodybuilding or helping reduce middle-aged spread. Disambiguation is relevant because these are actually different diets: the fad one is high protein and designed for weight loss, the epilepsy one is adequate protein and designed as much as possible for the child to grow normally. -- Colin°^Talk 12:50, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

References

Discussion on Wikipedia medicine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Medicine#Saturated_Fat,_shifting_consensus,_Cardiovascular_disease_(CVD)_,_and_general_health. Please feel free to participate. Thank you!— Preceding unsigned comment added by FrederickZoltair (talk • contribs) 00:56, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

Long-term effects

I've removed the added section on long-term effects. The sources there were studying use of low-carb diets for weight loss in adults. This article is about a medically supervised therapy in children. The diet for children is merely adequate protein, whereas many low-carb diets for weight loss in adults have high protein as well as high fat. The main concern with children is growth and other development issues. In adults doing weight loss there are concerns about lack of nutrients because they are not being medically supervised, whereas the epilepsy diet is supervised by a hospital dietitian. One paper on the KD for epilepsy notes "the evaluation of long-term efficacy and side effects is particularly difficult due to the inability of the subjects to continue a KDT over an extended period of time. Retention rates on the cKD at 1 year and 2 years have been reported at 45.7% and 29.2%, respectively" I'm not aware of any study of patients with significant data beyond two years. The children who respond well tend to stay on the diet, and there are cases who have been on it for many years, but not to collect enough data to comment on side effects generally. Some of the removed text could be useful in the Low-carbohydrate diet article. -- Colin°^Talk 12:41, 26 November 2021 (UTC)

Thanks Colin. I wasn't aware that the articles about LC and keto are strictly seperated into diet and medical therapy. It is my impression that a lot of keto is going on in social media that is borderlining between LC and keto. In a way that people do long-term LC with some keto interventions. Is there no article/section that deals with the fad diet version of keto where my section could make sense? Tischbeinahe (talk) 12:49, 26 November 2021 (UTC)

Tischbeinahe, you'll find some info at the FAQ on the top of this talk page, and in the archives this has been discussed several times. The borderlining is part of the problem, with all sorts of diet variants and no easy way to establish an article that is more specific that the LCD one. Many LCD are only ketogentic at times (e.g. the induction phase of the Atkins) and most adults aren't be supervised by a dietetian or testing themselves daily, etc, etc. And some are using this fad diet for weight loss, for diabetes control, for body building and for life extension. Medically, low carb diets are being property studied (for weight loss or diabetes), and ketogenic diets investigated for some other therapeutic uses (mainly neurological). I think the biggest problem for people writing about LCDs in general is that Wikipedians are not allowed to syntheise, whereas an expert could perhaps take the results of study X and claim it was appliable to patient group Y. -- Colin°^Talk 15:01, 26 November 2021 (UTC)

Thanks Colin for your support. I’ll have a look into the archive. Tischbeinahe (talk) 19:16, 26 November 2021 (UTC)

See Ketogenic diet (fad diet) (section at the bottom), put good sources there. The section needs to be expanded. Psychologist Guy (talk) 21:49, 26 November 2021 (UTC)

Thanks Psy, I have already included the content in Low-carbohydrate_diet#Safety. Tischbeinahe (talk) 07:28, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Alzheimer's

Colin not sure if this new review is useful: PMID 35718870 SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:13, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

Thanks Sandy. I don't think this paper advances what we say in the article text, that these neurological conditions are being researched. I found the authors rather credulous about all the case studies and small pilot trials. -- Colin°^Talk 07:10, 24 June 2022 (UTC)

As is suspected; thanks for looking :) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:26, 24 June 2022 (UTC)

any articles on carnivore diet?

Links to any article(s) on ("pure") carnivore diet(s) - or experiments on it? Would be very interesting to say the least. 84.211.240.52 (talk) 16:39, 3 July 2022 (UTC)