There have been a large number of people who have replaced processed junk carb food with processed junk protein food in the past twenty years. But I am going to take a wild guess that you might not consider those people to be true adherents to the “Low-Carb Keto lifestyle”. And I must admit that I love to eat a high protein Costco or Atkins food/candy bar as much as the next person. I just do not believe that they are much more healthy for you than a better tasting jumbo sized Reese's peanut butter cup, or an ice cream cone.
There are quite a few documented risks to the “Keto diet”, I do not know whether or not you feel those risks apply to you or the others here. My wife is a nurse who taught nutrition for quite a few years and I responded to medical calls for about 25 years mostly to people who had made poor lifestyle choices. But the people who I observed the most closely were my friends and coworkers. And my conclusion from living and working them were that the Atkins/Keto diet, whatever you want to call it did not work out well in the long term. And the ones who seemed to believe in it the most and went with it the longest were the ones who generally suffered the worst consequences to their health.
Usually they did lose some weight in the short term, but in the long term they typically gained it all back and more. I am talking about people that I knew for decades... I do not know anyone who it really worked out for over a year or two. And as I said before I know a few who kept it up even after their doctors told them they were going to die if they didn't straighten out their diets. They chose to believe the diet guru books instead of their doctors and nutritionists and they sometimes paid the price.
Unfortunately, the amount of true understanding of what constitutes good and bad diet choices has not increased as greatly in the past 20 years as you seem to believe. And the number of people making very bad choices seems to be increasing in this age of increased information. This is because people believe what they want to believe and the more access that they have to information... they typically just use that access to reinforce whatever it is that they want to believe.
So just because they went back to their old ways of eating, after being on Keto, doesn’t make Keto the problem.
And Keto is not high protein, it’s high fat. I don’t believe a high-protein is healthy, and truly is not maintainable in the long run.
But based on what I’ve experience so far on Keto, there is no reason for me to believe that I could not keep this lifestyle for the rest of my life.
Thanks, and like I say life is full of decisions and trade offs. The people on my list will get to hear the good, the bad, and the ugly and they can decide what works best for them, based on being informed as much as possible - especially as they consider what the alternatives are. When there are articles showing bad results with low-carb diets, I’ll ping the list too. In fact, I pinged the list here to show the need to be careful...nothing positive about Keto, or any other ‘alternative’ diet, here, just risks.
“And I must admit that I love to eat a high protein Costco or Atkins food/candy bar as much as the next person. I just do not believe that they are much more healthy for you than a better tasting jumbo sized Reese’s peanut butter cup, or an ice cream cone.”
This one made me laugh. I was in Costco over the weekend and walking by one of the sample stands, and it was some kind of colored drink that looked like, maybe, an energy drink. The lady calls out “Keto friendly”, so I’m thinking - “Oh, she’s one of us”...but then I’m suspicious because just about anything that has the word Keto on it is usually something that people on Keto should stay away from - we’re actually pretty close on that. Before trying the sample, I look at the bottle - carbs, really low, good, then Protein 15 GRAMS. I’m like, “what the hell is in this” so I simply walk away without trying it - if people on Keto need drinks like that, I agree, they won’t do well. I still remember the people dropping dead from protein powder decades ago...not good.