What dieters should know about the ketogenic diet

Have you heard about the ketogenic diet? This increasingly mainstream means of losing weight involves drastically reducing your intake of carbohydrates and replacing them with fats, which puts your body into a metabolic state called ketosis. While some people swear by the ketogenic diet, medical professionals and dietitians have concerns about whether it’s a healthy and sustainable way to lose weight.

How the ketogenic diet works
A ketogenic diet forces your body to burn fat for fuel instead of glucose. When you stop eating carbohydrates and glucose is no longer available, your energy needs get fulfilled by converting fat into ketone bodies. Ketosis begins when your body must turn the fat stored in your muscles as glycogen into ketones.

To keep your body in ketosis, you have to eat a diet that’s about 70 percent fats, 20 percent proteins and 10 percent carbohydrates. Approved foods include meat, eggs, non-root vegetables, nuts, oils and some dairy products like cheese and butter. Prohibited foods include bread, pasta, fruit, potatoes, beans and sweets.

What are the risks?
The ketogenic diet was developed for a specific medical purpose—to help control seizures in children with epilepsy. However, it’s unclear whether it’s safe to use for weight loss over long periods of time.

There are also numerous side effects that dieters may come up against. Many people experience nausea, cramps, headaches, constipation and light-headedness—symptoms sometimes collectively known as the “keto flu”— after their body goes into ketosis.

What’s more, the diet involves eating large amounts of saturated fats, which increases your risk of heart disease. It may also lead to nutritional deficiencies in vitamins and minerals that you usually get from fruits and legumes.

Extreme diets like the ketogenic diet rarely yield good long-term results. If you fall off the wagon (as is easy to do with extreme diets), you’ll start to gain weight back again. It’s safer and more effective to lose weight gradually with a balanced diet that’s easier to stick to over time.