The Great Keto Debate
Most diet articles lie with one-sided arguments
To the deep psyche, food and love are identical. Life or death depends on being nourished by the positive side of the equation, the Madonna, or devoured by the negative side, the Old Witch. All mammalian females have both instincts, activated by plenty or scarcity of food.
Years ago I read, “The Body in Question,” by Jonathan Miller, in which he had a picture of the human body not as it visually appears, but as it would appear if represented by nerve endings (a cortical homunculus). It was mostly hands and mouth, with the feet and sex organs respectably represented. It was similar to the Homunculus pictured above, except the mouth was as big as the hands.
Dietary information usually comes down as observational studies and after that come the meta-analyses of cohort and observational studies, followed by a press release which is run pretty much as written, with headlines such as, “It’s official, keto will kill you,” or, “Red meat is poison.”
The first thing one should do when looking at statistics on diet is understand relative risk versus absolute risk. The last meta-analysis I saw had cherry-picked what to include and what to exclude. But let’s say there is some validity to the study. What is the real risk versus the relative risk?
