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Is a Ketogenic Diet Bad for the Heart?
re: nutrition
re: Nina Teicholz
Real science is never settled, and anyone who has certainty on such things is not qualified to discuss it.
Nina Teicholz can be trusted to mop-up the diarrhea produced by sociopath organizations like the American College of Cardiology, American Medical Association, American Heart Association, etc.
Nina Teicholz: Is Keto Bad for the Heart?
2023-05-04. Emphasis added.
Trusted health groups like the Amer. Heart Assoc. would like you to think so.
Last week saw another spate of anti-keto headlines stemming from an authoritative report, this time from the American Heart Association (AHA), warning that the “keto” (ketogenic) diet is bad for heart health...
This list looked a whole lot like one in January, in U.S. News & World Report’s “Best Diets,” issue, which gave low marks to keto and paleo. And last month, there were another 30-plus keto-bashing headlines, at CNN.com, Forbes, Salon, WebMD, Medscape and other outlets, with altogether millions of social-media views, trumpeting a study presented at a conference of the American College of Cardiology (ACC), which purported to show that a “keto” or “keto-like” diet was associated with elevated LDL-cholesterol (the so-called “bad” one) and a higher risk of cardiovascular events.
Is it possible we’re seeing a campaign of weak science being corralled to scare people away from the ketogenic diet? Upon inspection, it turns out that the science behind these claims is not just flimsy, it’s non-existent. In the case of the ACC reports, for instance, there’s not even a pre-print* of the study published to justify the dozens of headlines.
Since we don’t have “hard data” on death or heart attacks, we can only look at the next-best thing: recognized cardiovascular factors such as cholesterol that might predict longer-term outcomes. Here, we find multiple clinical trials showing that a ketogenic approach resolves high blood pressure (often within weeks), improves many heart-disease markers, and in a sizable trial after 1 year, improved 23 of 26 heart-disease risk factors measured, with overall cardiovascular risk dropping by nearly 12%, according to the ACC’s own “ASCVD risk calculator.” ...
The AHA and ACC, however, are more prominent authorities. Although these groups have historically been heavily funded by pharmaceutical companies, they are still respected by doctors [WIND: doctors are incredibly ill-informed], and their guidelines are widely followed...
...ack of evidence for guidelines is unfortunately not a rare occurrence for the AHA: a 2019 analysis published in JAMA found that only 8.5% of AHA/ACC guidelines met their evidence standards.
...
Despite headlines such as “Popular keto and paleo diets aren’t helping your heart” in the Washington Post, the AHA authors did not actually assess heart-disease outcomes related to these diets in any systematic way... The AHA report was a self-affirmation exercise, a purity test. Headlines should have read: the AHA likes its own diet best and disapproves of others.
...We had a further back-and-forth about a somewhat Orwellian aspect of Iatan’s study. Despite the dozens of headlines stemming from Iatan’s presentation on a “keto” and “keto-like” diet, I discovered that Iatan had not, in fact, looked at a keto diet...
...the phenomenon we may be seeing here is something different: an apparently purposeful amplification of non-existent “findings” on “keto.” I don’t know whether this represents a concerted effort to denigrate the diet. Certainly, one can imagine many potential motives....
For instance, keto, as the virtual opposite of the official recommendations of these groups (AHA and ACC, as well as the US. Dietary Guidelines for Americans), must trigger intellectual and cognitive dissonance for experts who have ‘known’ differently for their entire careers. Also, it feels cynical to say but nonetheless undeniably true that since keto allows people to get off many or all of their medications, the diet poses a clear threat to pharmaceutical companies. Chronic diseases that require lifelong medications are a sweet spot of assured revenue for this industry....
...On the bright side, when your doctor or friend who’s read the spate of headlines this year tells you to steer clear of that “dangerous” keto diet, you can tell them that’s fake news. And when the next round of bad keto news comes, you’ll know to read between the headlines and check the facts.
WIND: I’m not necessarily a fan of a strict ketogenic diet, but most people eat far too many processed foods, sugars, bread, pasta, etc—a recipe for health disaster. But for those facing serious health issues, I fully support the ketogenic diet as the approach most likely to result in a positive outcome.
The AHA, ACC, AMA and nearly all similar medical organizations are in truth intellectually bankrupt, ethically challenged financially compromised (follow the money) sociapathic organizations that have done massive harm to the public over decades. At best, whatever advice they offer should be ignored.
For an example of propaganda, one need only realize that “alignment with’ is the antithesis of science; Popular Dietary Patterns: Alignment With American Heart Association 2021 Dietary Guidance: A Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association. The first listed author 'Gardner' is a militant vegan (a religion for crackpots). Last I checked, “Alignment With” expresses the very antithesis of science. You can’t make this shit up... is the The Simulation messing with us with gardener 'Gardner'?!
See also:
* Peer review is a farce for numerous reasons, but starting with (almost always) no access to the data even by the authors of the study, let alone the reviewers, let alone the medical community at large, let alone studies never published because of rebutting the hypothesis, let alone studies crafted to find the "right" answer.
