What happened when keto women switched to ‘Eatwell’? – Zoë Harcombe
Executive summary
* Diet trials are rare. Most academic papers come from examinations of populations (epidemiological studies).
* A paper published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences was a diet trial with a difference. Most trials take people who follow the standard (government) diet and then ask them to undertake an intervention. This trial took 10 healthy young women who had been following a keto diet for an average of nearly 4 years and asked them to follow the Standard UK diet (SUK) for 21 days. They then returned to their keto diet. (The keto diet is high fat low carb; the SUK diet is low fat high carb).
* Markers were measured for 21 days in ketosis before the SUK diet, for 21 days during the SUK diet phase and for 21 days after returning to ketosis. The markers were measures of metabolic health and aging.
* Several markers increased significantly during the SUK diet phase – including body weight, BMI, fat mass, total body water, insulin and glucose. Ketone levels in the blood obviously dropped dramatically during the SUK diet phase.
* The subjects quickly returned to Phase 1 marker levels during Phase 3. This confirmed how metabolically healthy they were from the outset.
