The Keto vs. Plant-Based Diet Showdown at the NIH

The highly-rigorous trial suggests that a whole-foods, plant-based diet may be the superior choice.

Welcome to Impact Factor, your weekly dose of commentary on a new medical study. I’m Dr. F. Perry Wilson of the Yale School of Medicine.

There is a right way and a wrong way to do a diet study. The wrong way is to send a survey to a few thousand people asking them to recall what they eat and linking those responses to outcomes down the road. That’s how we get studies that tell us that eggs kills you, or keep you healthy, or something.

The right way is to do what the good folks at the NIH did in this study appearing in Nature Medicine — lock people in a room for 28 days and measure absolutely everything.’

The real driving force for this study are questions about a ketogenic diet — what started with Atkins gets reborn every few years with a different name but the logic is basically the same — carbs are the enemy.