The Ketotic Diet

One diet that works (and it’s not for weight loss)

Most diets are designed to help lose weight, and for one reason for another they often do not work well.

However, one diet has been proven to be effective in a completely different area of health. It is called the Ketotic diet and it is particularly effective for epilepsy. If you are like me, you’ll be thinking, how random is that? But this diet has been proven to stabilise brain cells, often in situations where medication cannot, and decrease the chances of epileptic patients having seizures.

So what is the Ketotic diet? Well, ketones are substances that your body uses for energy when it does not have glucose.
When your brain starts burning fat and muscle to make energy, this is when ketones are used. So a ketotic diet is just what you’d expect – no carbohydrates or sugar, high levels of animal fat and protein.

It has to be strict, for your body to produce ketones. But when it does, it is ketones that cross the brain barrier and provide energy to your neurons. These ketones must have a stabilising effect on neurons and decrease the chances of a seizure occurring. This type of diet has the most evidence in childhood epilepsy and is currently not considered first line of treatment.

There are risks of a ketotic diet, it can affect the levels of salts and glucose in your bloodstream, so this needs to be checked occasionally. Also, long terms, it may lead to higher rates of high cholesterol and heart disease, however this is not known for sure yet.

For these reasons, a ketotic diet is not recommended long term, but can be useful for a short term (up to two years) for control of difficult-to-manage epilepsy.

So there you go, some diets can be effective, but not necessarily in areas that you expect!

By Dr David Hassan. Read more here.

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