The Case for Keto

That’s why the word diet is inappropriate to refer to what has to be a lifelong change in how or what we eat. Lifestyle is the preferred term, or eating pattern

One key to making sense of the universe—i.e., doing good science—is knowing that the answers we get are dependent entirely on the questions we ask, so we’d better be asking the right questions before we conclude we got the right answers.

Hunger is a response, not a cause.

1940s by Ancel Keys. He and his colleagues then wrote a two-volume tome, nearly 1,400 pages total, about all that they had learned. The title, The Biology of Human Starvation

For the dogs, you get an emaciated mastiff. For the humans, an emaciated fat man.

(Another phrase used by physicists to describe this kind of problem is “spherically senseless,” meaning it makes no sense no matter which way you look at it.)

He used this calculation instead to suggest that such a small number of excess calories might slip into our diets without being noticed, even by the vigilant. This is the extreme-obesity-as-accidental-overeating theory,

“True, students sometimes comment that because of the enormous amount of current knowledge they have to absorb, they have no time to read about the history of their field. But a knowledge of the historical development of a subject is often essential for a full understanding of its present-day situation.” (Krebs and Schmid 1981.)

People with obesity are not thin people who couldn’t control their appetites (for whatever reason, psychological or neurobiological) and therefore ate too much. They’re people whose bodies are trying to accumulate excess fat even when they’re half-starved.

Why do we get fat? Because we’re overeating.

How do we know we’re overeating? Because we’re getting fatter.

And why are we getting fatter? Because we’re overeating.

Logicians know this kind of round-and-round logic as tautology. It’s saying the same thing in two different ways but offering no explanation for either. If we’re getting fatter, it means our body mass is increasing, our energy stores are increasing, and so we are indeed taking in more energy—calories—than we expend. Okay, we’re overeating. But by the same token, if we’re getting taller we’re taking in more calories than we expend. But nobody would say we get taller because we overeat.