Ketogenic Diets: A Brief History Of One Of The Most Popular Diets

There is a story behind every human action, invention or concept. Some of them are funny, some of them are not, but it is surely interesting to know how something we’re familiar of came to its use. Todays story is about ketogenic diets – one of the world’s famous diet plans ever. In its relatively brief history, ketogenic diets emerged as a mainstream, nonpharmacologic therapy for treating epilepsy. Its primary goal was to remove the limitations of the non-mainstream using of fasting. It was very popular during the 1920s and 30s, but shortly after abandoned in the favour of new drugs. However, since the drugs couldn’t provide over lasting control over the seizures, ketogenic diets found its way into the epilepsy treatment, especially with children.

Ketogenic Diets and Wilder Researches

The term ketogenic diets were coined by Russel Wilder. He used the term to describe a diet that produced a high level of ketones in the blood through an excess of fats and the lack of carbohydrates. After Wilder several researches.. were conducted, all to confirm the positive effect of reducement of carbohydrates in the daily nutrition plan. Accordingly, there are several variants of this ketogenic diet. One of them, called classic, includes individual calculations for each child, based on their age, weight, activity level, culture and food preferences. The main concern of this plan is the precise calculation of fat/protein/carbohydrate ratio set individually for each patient.

Ketogenic Diets vs Atkins

Another type of ketogenic diets contains by using a medium-chain triglycerides (MTC) oils as a basic food supplement, since it was proven that MTC produces more ketones per unit of energy when metabolized. The use of MTC oils allows for a diet with lower portions of fat and greater portions of protein and carbohydrates. Also, this type of ketogenic diets allows less restrictions in regard to choosing ingredients for diet. The idea of using a form of the Atkins diet in treating epilepsy emerged in 2003. The changes in the original model of Atkins’ diet include extending the induction phase and encouraging the fat consumption. This type of diet isqualified as one of the most effective diet in reducing the number of seizures.

However, several authors have tried to dismiss this type of ketogenic diets since the sample used in research was small, and the study didn’t last for a long time. All of these forms of ketogenic diets follow the rule “low carbs/high fats”, which is one of the reasons to be the primary weight loss plan nowadays.