6 Studies That’ll STOP You From Going Keto

Egis R.
4 min readJul 16, 2022
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You know those keto zealots who claim keto is the best diet for weight loss and everyone should do it? I know one because I gave him a box full of ‘you’re blocked’ right after I wrote my first post on Medium. These people would be completely banned if I were in power because they spread misinformation based on misinterpreted data.

They’ll go ‘keto is better for weight loss because lower insulin levels and induced ketosis which I don’t know much about but I’m sure black magic has something to do with it.’ That’s where misinterpretation of the research comes into our story.

They cherry-pick studies involving higher protein intakes in the ketogenic groups. This gives an unfair playing field for keto because protein seems to be the most satiating macronutrient — it makes you eat fewer calories (source).

Even worse, they throw studies at you forgetting to mention that calorie intake isn’t matched between the ketogenic and high-carb groups.

So these studies can effoff.

But what would happen if we looked at studies that matched protein and/or calorie intake between the keto and non-keto conditions? Kevin D. Hall answered this perfectly in a 2017 review:

There has never been an inpatient controlled feeding study testing the effects of isocaloric diets (i.e. having the same caloric intake) with equal protein that has reported significantly increased energy expenditure or greater loss of body fat with lower carbohydrate diets.
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He is right you know. I’ve been digging into the research so thoroughly that my eyes have begun to flow blood — except for one study, all tightly controlled studies that matched protein and calorie intake between the keto and non-keto groups showed no fat loss advantage of the keto diet.

This study did this:

Seventeen overweight or obese men were admitted to metabolic wards, where they consumed a high-carbohydrate baseline diet (BD) for 4 wk followed by 4 wk of an isocaloric KD with clamped protein.
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Despite vastly different carbohydrate intake between the groups — 31g vs. 300g — both groups lost similar amounts of fat. Oh, and the high-carb group consumed 147g of sugar while the keto group only 10g (suck on this, ‘clean eaters’). I told you long ago that sugar doesn’t prevent fat loss.

The other study by Soenen et al. put 132 participants into four calorie-matched…

Egis R.

I’m Egis, an online weight loss coach who has heightened BS sensors for fitness & nutrition. Only evidence-based & sustainable fat loss. www.absscience.com