A physician's warning on the keto diet - KevinMD.com.
On a ketogenic diet, the requirements for certain minerals are far more significant than on a typical high-carb eating plan. The body needs more potassium on a high-fat diet, not just to help prevent keto flu but to help balance electrolytes and calm the nervous system down.

Even many keto diet proponents admit that, if the diet’s not done “the right way,” it can be the opposite of healthy. Here are a few things you should know about the ketogenic diet before.

The keto diet limits starchy vegetables such as carrots, sweet potatoes, parsnips, pumpkin and squash and eliminates many fruits. This might restrict the amount and variety of nutrients, vitamins.

Why Ketosis Happens. When your body has no access to food, like when you are sleeping, fasting, or following the ketogenic diet, the body will convert some of its stored fat to highly efficient energy molecules called ketones.(We can thank our body’s ability to switch metabolic pathways for that.) These ketones are synthesized after the body breakdowns fat into fatty acids and glycerol.

Unlike the Atkins diet, which only restricts carbs, the ketogenic diet also restricts protein based on your activity level, so that extra protein doesn’t get converted into glucose. When people first go on nutritional ketosis, they sometimes focus on getting their carbs super low (i.e., less than 20 grams per day), and that can cause hormone and mood problems, especially in women. They make.

Does the ketogenic diet work? A clinical trial at Great Ormond Street Hospital in 2008, and other studies since then, showed that the diet significantly reduced the number of seizures in a proportion of children whose seizures did not respond well to AEDs. After three months, around 4 in 10 (38%) children who started the diet had the number of their seizures reduced by over half, and were able.

When you start off on a diet it is important to understand what you can eat and what you can’t eat, otherwise, it really isn’t a diet. The same thing applies to the ketogenic diet. There are certain foods that you can not eat if you wish to stay in a state of ketosis. Thankfully, the the list of keto-friendly foods that you can eat is so long that you really shouldn’t have a problem.