Keto or Veto: A look Inside Keto Dieting

There are always millions of new diets out there, seemingly popping up out of no where. There’s high fat, low fat, low carb, no carb, there are even diets where all a person eats is fruit or bananas or drinks only coffee. I’m convinced that I could confidently type nearly anything and I would get search results for it. Dieting can be crazy, and usually it is a perfect way to lose wight for about three seconds and gain it all back. This is because all these diets are more like crash diets and not legitimate lifestyle changes, for someone to sustain weight loss they have to change how they are living, not in a I’m being a rabbit kind of way, but in a way that is healthier and more mindful of what is being put in the body’s we have. This is something I’ve learned on my own personal weight loss journey.

Today, I’m here to introduce a diet that has been on the scene for a little while now, and people seem to be liking it. It’s called the Keto diet or the Ketogenic diet, it is a low carb/high fat diet, instead of

ketogenic-diet-and-diabetes — Photo Credit: Here.

using carbs as the body’s main source of energy the body uses Ketones which are produced when the body breaks down fats. This “diet” or “lifestyle” however you id

entify, is gaining popularity, there are even YouTube channels dedicated to Keto and many, many, many, videos on the topic. People like it, believe it in, but is it healthy for us? That’s what I’m trying to figure out.

I came across this article recently, entitled, “How to reduce brain inflammation with a Keto diet”, that claims the Keto diet may have more benefits than simply weight loss. Keto may potentially improve longevity and memory as well as help with neurological function, helping both Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. This all sounds good, but is there any base to any of it?

I started by going onto Snopes, and FactCheck.org, to see if they came up with anything to note. FactCheck.org came up empty, probably because this is medical news related. So I moved onto Snopes. Snopes didn’t have the specific article I was searching, the one listed above, but they did have other diet related fact checks, this and this. These however, both came up as inconclusive, and didn’t mention Keto at all, I had also searched the websites name, Medical News Today, but this was also unsuccessful on Snopes and FactCheck.org, so I moved on to google searches.

I started with looking at the website itself, how credible is Medical News Today. I was taken of course to a Wikipedia article, which gave a brief summery of the site, it was enough to go on though because the article mentioned a parent company attached to Medical News Today, called Healthline Media, so I searched that up too. Similarly, I came up with a Wikipedia article. Healthline was originally founded under a different name but changed the name in recent years, once the company acquired multiple health related websites. Healthline, was founded by a doctor by the name of James Norman. So they at least have some medical background, the founder wasn’t just any old person off the street.

The real factor though will be if the studies and articles they mention in their article are scientific based or biased. So heading back to Medical News Today and their article, we’re going to dive into Keto a little more. I thought first to look at the credibility of the person who wrote the article, if they had any background in medicine or not and turns out the author, Ana Sandoiu, well you can see for yourself.

She doesn’t have any degrees or credentials necessarily, but that doesn’t mean her content isn’t well informed. She writes many articles involving medicine, and all seem to be highly rated if that’s any indication. Ana could just be a great fact checker like we are trying to be. Now, to dig a little deeper into the content of the article.

The article is claiming a Keto lifestyle change can help reduce brain inflammation, Dr. Raymond Swanson, a professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco was the lead on this study. He has done previous studies involving brain injury and metabolic studies and Stroke studies. So this seems like a study he would take up since he has done previous research on both diet related issues and matters regarding the brain. He seems like a good source to go to on the subjects, and his research always seems to be published in peer reviewed journals upon closer exception. His inflammation study was published in, Nature Communications, a peer reviewed journal that publishes media in the natural sciences area.

I wasn’t sure exactly what makes a journal credible or not, so I took to google once again and searched up if there were any engines like Snopes, to check for more reliable peer reviewed journals. And my search came up with PebMed, a database for medical and health related journals and allowed me to search if Professor Swanson and Nature Communications were a good peer reviewed journal to go to, and from the results they seem like they check out.

Overall, this article seems solid in the presentation of research and we can assume from all the checking that the sources are honest in their intents. This means that from the research of Professor Swanson and his team that the Keto diet is beneficial to helping repair the body and reduce inflammation as well as many other good effects like weight loss, longevity and neurological benefits I’ve listed previously. I think it is safe to say that this article is safe to believe and take their information seriously.

[DRAFT] Keto or Veto: A look inside Keto dieting

using carbs as the body’s main source of energy the body uses Ketones which are produced when the body breaks down fats. This “diet” or “lifestyle” however you id

—Still in progress—

Research!

1. E-Cigarettes unhealthy

I think this article would make a good lengthier post because they have a lot of links to go upstream to find more information and the topic plus the topic claims to be fact-checked and I’ve never seen that on any of my other articles or any articles really. So this provides and interesting challenge to see if their fact checking is correct or not.

2. Constricting Nutrition Studies?

I thought this article looked promising and interesting because it really does seem like everyday something else, is bad or good for us. And no one can make up their minds or come up with a cohesive agreement of what is/is not healthy choices for our health and wellbeing. Among those I found it interesting that this one professor took it upon himself to put his foot down and yet I’m still unsure of why I shoul listen to him. Why is he the end all be all authority of this topic?

3. Inflammation helped by Keto diet?

I liked the idea of doing this article for my longer post because I’ve been interested in the Keto diet for weight loss and I think it would be even more beneficial and interesting if this diet had more upsides to it than I previously thought. This article links out to three other studies and suggest more beneficial side effects of this diet like longevity, since we’ve heard this before with many other studies I’d like to see where this goes.

Fact Check # 5: Coffee causes what now?

One of my all time loves is coffee. Coffee is also my favorite pass-time, I spend my FREE time searching up pretty coffee pictures on Pinterest (My Board). I work as a Barista, coffee is a big part of my life and I love it. Iced or Hot. I’m currently drinking coffee as I write this post.

WIN_20170926_22_41_04_Pro_LI — Me, Writing this, drinking coffee

So naturally, studies that include coffee interest me. Imagine my surprise when I searched up “recent studies” in google’s search bar to find this article published by Food and Wine. The headline:

“Cancer Warnings on Coffee May Be

Coming to California”,

Well, that just won’t do.

If I have learned anything so far from this course it is that I cannot trust every headline at face value. Upon further inspection, the headline is a bit misleading. More in subtext than anything else. People may infer from the headline, that ALL coffee causes cancer, but that’s not even true 100 percent. The article states that, “Coffee producers openly admit that roasted beans contain acrylamide—a naturally occurring chemical that is also designated by the World Health Organization as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”,” Which “probably” to me, means unsure, which isn’t going to stop me or most coffee lovers from drinking the beverage. Considering all the other benefits with so much scientific backing, (1, 2, 3, 4 , 5), coffee helps with weight loss, helps the liver, can help with longevity and help over all cognitive function and mood. Those are some pretty hefty benefits.

This article from Food and Wine, really serves more as a warning or a friendly reminder to not over consume coffee than an absolute truth. Like anything else, too much of anything is bad for us. It seems to be saying more to be aware of acrylamide, than to be afraid and throw out all coffee products in your home and boycott the nearest Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts. Basically no one needs to blow this out of proportion.

Fact Check # 4: News Bias

In today’s world, navigating the media chaos can be a bit taxing and confusing and among all else, time consuming. The everyday person expects their news to be easy to read and understand. It’s news therefore it should be factual and non-biased but depending on the news source this is far from true.

Eli Pariser brings up another worry to add to our media consumption list: lack of choice. In his TED Talk Prasier, speaks of a time he was looking for counter viewpoints to his more left leaning views and noticed all of the conservative responses had disappeared. And yes, Prasier is more progressive and likes more liberal posts more often so Facebook took that into consideration, at the start of this this feature seems useful, and more personalized but in reality doing this makes consuming news tricky. Who do we trust? Who can we trust? Now, as consumers we must lookout for ourselves with news similar to how we look at the nutrition facts on the foods we consume. We as a society, simply cannot trust blindly, we much make an effort to be continuously informed. Pariser calls this circumstance, “Filter bubbles” which he describes as, “your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online.”

Our three types of sources for news are categorized by political party, Liberal, Conservative and Mainstream and each have their own dedicated news outlets. Between all of these outlets there is a bit of cross over involving topic and the filter bubbles, Donald Trump. Not all the articles are on the same topic however, (Conservative, Liberal and Mainstream), but Trump bridges all three as a general topic. Each has their own voice from and language that distinguishes one source from the next. And the public can even tell this from the headlines on each.

The Mainstream Media is less emotional and more factual in presentation and phrasing, while the liberal headline grabs the reader’s attention by using words that trigger a response, most of us know what being livid feels like, it is visceral and understandable but doesn’t give off the same message as the mainstream media outlet.

Fact Check # 3: Who are Occupy Democrats?

Who really are Occupy Democrats? I know I always see them posted on Facebook. Usually by one particular friend who is more right than left. Often he posts things like this:

By a group on Facebook, with a similar name as Occupy Democrats, only with logic added to it. Usually this page will contridict something the original page had posted. In hopes to establish some sort of evener footing or more concise and truthful statements. This for me has been the first red flag that Occupy Democrats isn’t 100 precent factual. It seems like they spin the truth the way they want to, and giving it a quick google search brought up the Polifact page, that states, “Occupy Democrats, founded in 2012, is an advocacy group created to counterbalance the Republican tea party.” So I find this ironic that this alternate page is trying to balance out the counterbalance page? That seems skeptical. They are trying to balance out the unevenness of other parties which in general would be a good thing if done right but given Polifacts nice chart here, we can say that Occupy Democrats aren’t the safest bet when looking for the truth.

Fact Check # 2: What’s up with Climate Change?

A popular topic as of recently has been climate change, considering all the hurricanes and storms that have occurred in such secession the question on our minds is mostly, what the hell is going on? Believing in climate change or not, it’s hard to argue with a multitude of storms, it’s just unusual and concerning.
An article by Henry Bodkin, titled, “Climate change not as threatening to planet as previously thought, new research suggests”, (Here) plays around with the idea that we aren’t doing as bad of a job as the crazy weather patterns would suggest. The title is a bit misleading though, as the article suggests we aren’t polluting the world as quickly as science thought 10 years ago, not that climate change itself really isn’t a global problem we should focus on fixing.
That got me curious though, how well are we doing? And how accurate is the information that Bodkin presents? This seems all well and good, but there’s not much citing in his article in terms of scientific information, he alludes to it but doesn’t not explicitly cite the study mentioned or the charts/graphs used to establish that we aren’t doing so bad in the climate change department.

So I took to digging around and going upstream to find some more information about this topic. It wasn’t really all that easy, looking for the particular study mentioned was a bit tricky because I was looking for key words. The place where the study was published/took place, which was the Journal of Nature and Geoscience and a person or persons that had a hand in the research and publishing, who was Professor Myles Allen of Oxford University. His page can be found here. This lead came up with a bunch of studies that involved Allen because as it turns out he’s a major contributor regarding climate change. Many studies seemed to be fairly recent and it was difficult to understand where this information came from without proper access to the studies in their entirety. And the Bodkin’s article cited “in a recent study,” but doesn’t supply a date or even a study name to go off of.

So with that bit of a block I took to google to see what the general consensus was regarding this issue. I came up with an interesting page on NASA’s site that claims around 97 precent of scientific based peer reviewed journals largely agree that humans have made a huge impact on the environment in which we live (here). Which isn’t a much of a surprise, because of course we make an impact in the world which we live positive or otherwise. But nonetheless is a stifling number regardless.

Fact Check # 1: Trump Donates 1 Million for Hurricane Relief ?

President Trump is many things to many people and depending on where a person lies on the political spectrum can be positive or negative. Lately however, with Hurricane Harvey blowing through the state of Texas, the Trumps, have donated 1 million dollars of their own funds to hurricane relief. This isn’t too big of a surprise given that many other influential people (Here and Here) have put money toward helping out people hurting from the hurricane but it’s Trump, so really we never know what to expect.

That is where my adventure began with this lead. A high school friend of mine, who coincidentally lives in Houston, Texas, and is a huge Trump supporter, shared a post. I hadn’t heard much from him lately (he’s OK by the way), so I took to scrolling through his feed and came across this:

I had vaguely heard musings that Trump had donated a sizable chunk of change to the hurricane relief but didn’t pay too much into the specifics until now. I wanted to know

A. If he really did donate that dollar amount,

B. And if any place had a list of where exactly that money was allocated.

A quick google search, was kind to me.

Source 1: Trump donates the 1 mill, but hasn’t decided where he wants to put it all. Wishy washy, not a huge surprise. So check, he at least donated the money, to well, someplace. Eventually. Cool.

Upon further digging I had found more specifics regarding where he put all that money.

Source 2: Trump decides where all that cash is going.

It suffice to say that no matter what Trump does though, he can’t get away from critics, if the post John shared is any indication, there’s a fair share of people who believe Trump hasn’t done enough. Now, whether that’s from other issues that he’s flopped on or this particular circumstance is hard to say. My take is this, we should just be happy he did anything at all.