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Comment by anon-e-moose | Hacker News Reader

Farther down in that diet you can see that its not considered healthy as a general practice:

"The ketogenic diet is not a benign, holistic or natural treatment for epilepsy; as with any serious medical therapy, there may be complications."

"Long-term use of the ketogenic diet in children increases the risk of retarded growth, bone fractures, and kidney stones. "

In other words, it does not seem that the body should be run this way long term.

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Indeed. In fact, this was the whole deal with the Atkin's diet (remember that??) a while ago. Zero carbs, but craploads of protein and fat will force the body into long term ketone usage.

Basically, your body runs on glucose. Everything else is a stop gap for you to get more glucose.

Basically, your body runs on glucose. Everything else is a stop gap for you to get more glucose.

But don't forget that the body can make quite a lot of the glucose using a process called gluconeogenesis. And substances like amino acids, glycerol or products of fatty acid oxidation are used as precursors.

So, in essence - yes, it runs on glucose, but glucose does not necessarily come from dietary carbohydrates.

I believe that study of the diet was also severely caloric restrictive, and the food the kids were given were vegetable franken-oils etc.

You can go on a ketogenic diet and eat plenty of healthy fats and some vegetable produce.

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