#nutritional studies
Okay guys, I know I haven’t been online and most of y’all are here for teh spoopernatural. But right now I really want to talk to people about nutritional studies and a bunch of stuff I learned from researching the ketogenic diet I’ve been on for the past like two months or so. You see, I have a horrible gluten and grain sensitivity that I never knew about up until a few weeks ago, as well as Hashimotos Thyroditis (or, chronic lymphocytic thyroiditis) which is an autoimmune disease where my body sees my thyroid and thinks it’s an invader and kicks the piss out of it, which causes my hypothyroidism. All of that together makes for a very not happy and not healthy me. I’ve been struggling with this stuff for years, several years of which I had no idea I was struggling with this stuff. Luckily, I had a friend who told me what to get checked at the doctor’s and she was right, and I at least knew what was wrong. The sucky thing about that is that Hashimotos and Thyroid issues tend to be treated with just a pill and being sent on your merry way. After two years of no improvement (and it getting even worse) my friend stepped in again and told me about ketogenic diets. For her, her favorite benefit was the fact that it helped her lose the thyroid weight. Thus far for me, my favorite benefit is that I’m not constantly in pain and running for a bathroom.
In my first week on a ketogenic diet, I’ve read a lot of things about it, because I’m a fuckin nerd who wants to know what to hell I am doing to my bodacious temple of awesomeness. I’m not genuinely interested in losing very much weight (you should’ve seen the look on my mother’s face when I told her that I didn’t want to go under 200 pounds, which was the weight that I felt and looked best at), but I’m more interested in relieving my IBS and maybe helping with my Hashimoto’s, which effects you more than people think.
The sad thing is, the more I read about ketogenics and the studies done for this diet, the more I realize something very very important that I think all people should realize: nutritional science isn’t just bad and underfunded, it’s really damn bad and hella underfunded.
I took a course in Epidemiology, which is basically a fancy word for the study of health issues and how they develop and spread. The biggest thing I learned from this course (other than if I was put in a one on one educational setting where i was free to learn at my own pace, I probably would’ve been pretty good at math and science, which I’m a little slow in) is the difference between causation and correlation.
See, in the early 1900s, it was discovered that people with atherosclerosis (layman’s terms: heart disease) also had high blood cholesterol levels. They assumed high cholesterol caused heart disease and reducing cholesterol would help heart disease, and so they told everyone to cut their saturated fat from their diets. That sounds perfectly logical, but heart disease was and is still just as prevalent. A few decades down the line, doctors found out that there isn’t just one but three kinds of cholesterol, they all do different things, and your body makes them in different ways. The original cholesterol test measured the total blood cholesterol, not what kind. And so while nutritionists and doctors insisted that their patients cut fat from their diets, people did, and they replaced them with carbs, which when consumed in high amounts (as most people do to replace the full feeling you get from fatty foods) turn into vLDL and LDL (bad cholesterol).
The point is: nutritional science is based predominantly on what most people call “arm chair science”. Most nutritional studies (studies are how scientists find out what effects a thing has on another thing) are flawed because they usually last very short term (between 6 months and a year as a median), have very small focus groups, and rely heavily on the honesty of those participating (because you can’t look people up in a laboratory and control what they eat for years, that’d be very unethical and expensive). Nutritional studies are also very expensive to conduct, and money for studies usually comes from outside biased sources (companies and organizations who have a stake in the study).
The reason why all that matters when it comes to the ketogenic diet (or any diet) is that when it comes right down to it- “scientific” nutritional literature is often funded by biased sources, not given a long enough study time, and reliant on the honesty and ethics of the subjects in the study (and humans are such fickle creatures).
HOWEVER.
What I have come to find from researching pro-keto and anti-keto papers and studies is that no matter how you slice it, in the short term, it works. Anti-keto proponents claim that the weight loss comes from being in a calorie deficit, just like any other diet, and that the high fat content makes it easier for people to stick to it because it makes them feel satisfied and fuller longer. Pro-Keto proponents claim that the weight loss comes from Ketosis, or the bodily state in which the body produces ketones, which breaks down fat into glucose to replace the shortage of carbs to be turned into glucose.
Both of them acknowledge that ketosis is a real bodily state that can be monitored and maintained, they just disagree one whether or not it is the cause of the weight loss. But what they do agree on is this: Ketogenic diets cause weight loss, provide significant relief for people with gluten and grain sensitivities/allergies, and can help control and improve epilepsy.
So, while there isn’t a whole lot of reliable science on how it works (like how we still have no idea how a lot of things in our bodies work), what has been proven is that it does work.
TL;DR: Ketogenic diets work, be careful when reading nutritional studies, face the fact that science is not always right, be skeptical, and read stuff
