Talk:Ketogenic diet

harms or dietary intolerance in young children
This edit by User:FULBERT added the text "while harms or dietary intolerance in young children were rarely reported in the literature." The relevant text I can find in the source (Pharmacologic and Dietary Treatments for Epilepsies in Children Aged 1–36 Months) is "Dietary harms were not well-reported." There is a section in the source called "Harms of Dietary Treatments" It discusses four trials that report various harms along with their other findings. It isn't clear what led them to conclude "Harms of diets were rarely reported, so we drew no conclusions about harms or dietary intolerance." Possibly the wide range of occurrence reported, type of side-effect or lack of specifics of side effects mean they were unable to draw conclusions. But I think the text added to our article suggests harm or intolerance is rarely reported because it rarely occurs, rather than that details of harm or intolerance are rarely adequately collected during studies. Often there is just a non-specific rate of drop-out without going into details of why. The review is critical of current studies in this population group ("the lack of reporting on treatment outcomes beyond seizure frequency"). I would be surprised if the infant population was significantly better at tolerating this diet compared to slightly older children.

My conclusion is this is a review critical of the lack of knowledge in this field (epilepsy treatment of very young children) and a comment that they so lack information in one aspect (harm caused by diet) they can't draw any conclusions is probably not encyclopaedically relevant to this article. We certainly shouldn't give the impression that side-effects or harm is rare in infants, because it doesn't say that. If you agree, I'll remove the sentence. Perhaps there is something else we can draw from this source? -- Colin°Talk 08:29, 1 March 2024 (UTC)


 * I am finding that sentence confusing, and now that I've read your comment, I'm even more confused about what was meant. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:01, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Revert of addition of immunomodulatory effect
bon courage reverted my addition of what I thought was a pretty interesting finding, published by folks from the NIAID. He said in his revert the edit needed a Med RS. -:) Oh well, I am not sure what more of a medical resource it would need, if he had cared to look it up ( or my credentials -:). It is a medical resource. This entire page doesnt have anything about immune modulation (yet) and this new finding is cutting edge, might explain why ketogenic diet works in epilepsy. I will restor emy edit as I think this was a frivolous revert of a well sourced good faith edit. Wuerzele (talk) 21:26, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
 * You added this paper, a 2-week primary study. It doesn't pass WP:MEDRS. No dispute that you added this in good faith but this is not well sourced content. It doesn't belong on Wikipedia. Psychologist Guy (talk) 21:41, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
 * “No dispute that you added this in good faith but this is not well sourced content” I agree. It seems too early. Let’s wait for better sources (MEDRS-compliant-reviews). -- Dustfreeworld  (talk) 05:12, 12 April 2024 (UTC)
 * ... if he had cared to look it up ( or my credentials -:). It is a medical resource ... I think this was a frivolous revert &larr; this combination of cluelessness about the basics of our medical sourcing guidelines, assumption of bad faith, and "don't you know who I am!?" argumentation is pretty alarming in an editor with a non-trivial contribution history. Bon courage (talk) 03:44, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

The ketogenic diet FAQ is wrong according to published papers and this article should be expanded to include weight loss uses
Summary: Like it or not, not only the common usage of the term "ketogenic diet", but also the use of that term in scientific literature has evolved to mean a diet which produces measurably elevated levels of blood ketones.

There is also a significant amount of emerging research that shows ketogenic diets for weight loss are not a "fad diet" but rather have proven scientific evidence showing that they work also for treatment of fatty liver disease (as one example). The use of a keto diet for weight loss should be merged into this page as the accepted medical definition of a ketogenic diet is one that produces elevated levels of blood ketones in non-diabetics. Even if those diets are not as extreme as the ones for treatment of epilepsy, words and phrases change meaning over time and this definition has been used by many peer reviewed articles and should be accepted.

I'm not going to provide an exhaustive list of sources showing this is the accepted scientific definition, but a few for example are listed below, e.g.

Bueno NB, de Melo IS, de Oliveira SL, da Rocha Ataide T. Very-low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet v. low-fat diet for long-term weight loss: a meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. Br J Nutr. 2013 Oct;110(7):1178-87.

Paoli A, Rubini A, Volek JS, Grimaldi KA. Beyond weight loss: a review of the therapeutic uses of very-low-carbohydrate (ketogenic) diets. Eur J Clin Nutr. 2013 Aug;67(8):789.

Masood W, Annamaraju P, Khan Suheb MZ, et al. Ketogenic Diet. [Updated 2023 Jun 16]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2024 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK499830/

A quick google search will find the plethora of other papers that does not consider the definition to be a diet used only for epilepsy treatment or 90% fat content. 2001:558:6045:10D:EC97:D297:9502:B579 (talk) 04:30, 29 April 2024 (UTC)
 * This is not correct. Medical organizations do not recommend the keto diet for weight loss, nor do any health guidelines. The StatPearls source you cited admits that there is no long-term health outcome data on keto and weight loss. The evidence is only short term, much more clinical data is needed if you are going to make those claims. The same source says that a ketogenic diet increases the risk of heart disease and kidney stones. Due to the increased CVD risk, cardiology organizations do not recommend keto. As for your claims about keto improving liver disease, there is not any good clinical evidence for this. Your source does list some papers but there are no good systematic reviews on this because again the evidence is limited and not conclusive. Harvard Health says that keto could be worse for the liver . Psychologist Guy (talk) 08:29, 29 April 2024 (UTC)
 * It's the usual Article titles and scopes problem.
 * You could just as easily write "Like it or not, not only the common usage of the term influenza, but also the use of that term in scientific literature has evolved to mean not just the influence of astrology on the body, but also a contagious disease, so we should merge Astrology into Influenza virus" – because "the accepted medical definition", and the original source of the word, was astrology, and only later did it come to mean a disease caused by a particular group of viruses, so they're all the same thing, right?
 * A voluntarily chosen diet for adults hoping to lose weight is not a diet for kids who are at risk of dying from uncontrolled seizures. These are different subjects.  Therefore, they get separate articles.  If you are jealous because the article about the pediatric epilepsy treatment got written first, and thus got this name, then that's entirely understandable but not a reason to think that kids who could die are the same as adults who want to shed a few pounds.
 * It might interest you to know that the names of articles can change. This one could be renamed, e.g., to Ketogenic diet (epilepsy treatment).  Maybe that would stop people from thinking that "their" title is used on the "wrong" subject, or that epilepsy treatments and weight loss are the same thing.  In the meantime, the information you seek is at Low-carbohydrate diet.  There is a link to this at Keto diet. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:51, 29 April 2024 (UTC)
 * This has been discussed many times on this page (see archive). I don't think a name change is likely to win approval because nobody has shown any inclination to write a proper article on e.g. ketogenic diet for weight loss. It's all well and good saying Wikipedia should have an article about X(a) that should be called X, if nobody in the history of Wikipedia has written such an article. Write that article and we can discuss names. It has been noted many times that the professional literature does not discuss epilepsy treatments and weight loss treatments together (vs mentioning one in passing). Wrt Psychologist Guy's comments, I think one of the problems is the hostility shown towards weight loss options, as demonstrated by the carb article calling it a fad diet. Pejorative terms just inflame things unnecessary and there are no weight loss treatments (outside of drugs and surgery) that work long term on a reliably significant number of people, so I think pulling out KD as one option to scorn is hypocritical. The American Heart Association can recommend certain diets all it likes, but there isn't really evidence people choose them and stick to them any more than any other diet. -- Colin°Talk 08:45, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

Confusion on grammar.
@Psychologist Guy "This article is about a dietary therapy for epilepsy. For information on ketogenic diets as a lifestyle choice or for weight loss, see Very low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet."

The problem is, why the word "or" should not in be case when the 2 choice available? Heres my choice:

"For information on ketogenic diets as a lifestyle choice or for weight loss, see Very low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet."

Means there are two choice

"For information on ketogenic diets as a lifestyle choice" "For information on ketogenic diets asfor weight loss," help me for the problem. 203.190.54.67 (talk) 09:53, 24 May 2024 (UTC)


 * "As for" is not correct grammar. The first part of the sentence as written is structured like this:
 * For information on ketogenic diets
 * as a lifestyle choice or
 * for weight loss...
 * Some adults follow a high-fat diet as a lifestyle choice, and some other adults follow a high-fat diet for weight loss. There are two main reasons why adults follow a high-fat diet.  The word or is used to indicate that different adults have different reasons. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:29, 26 May 2024 (UTC)