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So their diets were dominated by carbs, and the results were terrible (in one case, the loss of both eyesight and hearing).

I hate to be the one to rain on your low carb, keto parade... but you are missing the point of this example of bad eating. Most of the people I know who have caused serious damage to their health and in many cases actually died were those who went overboard on Atkins style diets. Most young people can handle a seriously screwed up diet philosophy for a few years without harming themselves permanently, but older folks often put themselves in an early grave.

Humans are omnivores; we typically do the best when we eat a diverse diet. The lesson from this story is not that eating too many carbs and too much oil will make you go blind, the problem here was that the idiot kid are nothing else. People who restrict the diversity of their diets because of some weird belief system are typically doing a disservice to themselves. Because we are omnivores most of us can handle a certain amount of lunacy in our dietary philosophy but the problem with diet true believers like vegetarians or people who will eat basically no “carbs” is that they tend to push their nonsense too far and on everyone else.

If people want to live their lives avoiding whole grains, fruits, and vegetables, fine. Most of us do eat too much processed flour, sugar, and fats and this puts our health at risk. But not as much as people I have known who literally cut everything other than meat out of their diets, and ended up in the hospital. And the ones who ignored their doctors and nutritionists dietary advice often cut their lives short even if they had lost some weight and their cholesterol numbers were not that bad.

So once again the moral of this story is a lack of diversity in one’s diet is bad. If the kid chose to eat only deep fried fish without the breading instead of the chips he might not have gone blind but he still would not likely be a healthy teen.

This morning my wife is making us omelets with some of the leftover rib steak that I grilled over charcoal the other day. They have some delicious tomatoes and peppers and other vegetables from our garden in them. You probably do not object to that, but I like to eat mine on a piece of wheat toast. And for desert I like to split a blueberry pop tart with my just because their processed flour and corn syrup based filling are delicious. And we are still working on her chocolate moose birthday cake.

“Most of the people I know who have caused serious damage to their health and in many cases actually died were those who went overboard on Atkins style diets.”

Thanks for the warning, at least you do sound credible here. A few months back, on a similar thread, there was a food industry lobbyist trying to convince us that trans-fats and sugar were actually good for us. LOL. We all got a kick out it.

I do think the problem with Atkins, at least early on, was that the dangers to our kidneys of protein-loading was not well understood, and since Atkins was considered a nutcase, no one bothered to try to better understand it. If you do go back the 20+ years to Atkins, you’ll find a mindset where eggs, butter, and fatty red meat was still considered poison - so people, even on Atkins would try to minimize those, and end up on lean meat, poultry, and fish - all very high in their protein to fat ratio. So, yes, they were putting their kidneys in danger. As we’ve been saying on these threads, if you do go low-carb, you still don’t get a free pass regarding what you do eat, you still have to keep the protein levels down - which means keeping the fat levels up.

So, as to the risks, now that much more is understood, we’re keeping an open mind and waiting for some real evidence that people who properly adhere to the Low-Carb Keto lifestyle are actually putting themselves at risk. So far, no one on ping list has said anything about having that issue...so we’ll see, nor have we found anything beyond hand-waving regarding the risks. They may be out there, but we’re waiting, for now.

One other thing to keep in mind is that life is full of trade-offs. I know of one person on my list who was near suicide because of what the doctor-prescribed drugs were doing to him. He went on Keto, got off the drugs, and is doing much, much, better. Others trade off looking at a certain life of diabetic complications, versus the still un-quantified risk of kidney issues. It’s really up to the medical community to take these people seriously and come up with useful data, because these people are NOT going away otherwise - particularly if they’re looking at a future of nothing but suffering due to diabetes.