When it comes to diets and diet trends, the choices can be dizzying. With so many ways to lose weight, it’s hard to decipher which methods are healthy and actually work.
Lisa Ravindra, MD, an internal medicine specialist at Rush University Medical Center, takes a closer look at seven popular diet trends and how each stacks up in terms of weight loss and overall health benefits.
1. Ketogenic diet
The ketogenic diet is an extremely low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet. The goal of the diet is to maintain a state of ketosis, which means that by eating fewer carbs, the body’s fat-burning system relies mainly on fat instead of sugar for energy.
This concept is actually nothing new. “There’s a lot of research, going back to the early 1900s, that ketogenic diets help with certain neurologic conditions like epilepsy in children,” Ravindra says. “But it’s relatively a new strategy for weight loss.”
Benefits
If your weight loss goals are more immediate, a ketogenic diet may be able to help you achieve those results. “It’s been shown to be very effective for short-term weight loss — more so even than low-fat diets,” Ravindra says.
Additional benefits may include preventing certain types of chronic disease. “There’s been some suggestion that there may be benefits as far as other brain disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis and even brain cancer,” Ravindra adds. “But there have not been any definitive studies yet.”
Drawbacks
Some health experts believe eating a large amount of fat and protein from animal sources can increase your risk of heart disease and certain cancers.
“On the ketogenic diet, you can, for instance, eat all the bacon you want; that obviously goes against what we’ve always thought would be healthy,” Ravindra says. “And we don’t yet know the effect of this diet on people with liver, kidney and heart disease.”
The diet is also really strict. “It’s an extreme diet, cutting out almost all carbohydrates,” Ravindra says. That means giving up or limiting conventionally healthy foods like fruit, whole grains and some vegetables.
Very low-carbohydrate diets may also be associated with more side effects than a low-fat diet, including headaches, fatigue and bad breath.