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:
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:
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…
