A few advantages are that you find out what's good for you in particular, not every body works the same, that you don't get confused with partial results that get canceled and, my fav, that you learn what works in practice: it's useless to know that you can lose fat with a diet you are unable to follow.
You've probably realized that my experience is about losing weight and general wellness, but that's just the problem with nutrition for most people.
Acknowledging the problems with formal studies, one advantage they have is the ability to get lots of similar input and look at medians, distributions, etc.
Even for short-term goals anything non-measurable is highly prone to confirmation bias - e.g.: "I feel more energetic on this keto diet!" because I expected to feel more energetic on this keto diet and these Instagram accounts I follow keep reinforcing that this is what I should expect. Additionally there is the issue that the human body is a complex system where things that seem good in the short term can be quite bad in the long term - e.g.: "These 6 cigarettes a day are really helping with the over-eating I'd been struggling with!".
For many of us who care to research nutrition more than superficially the goals tend to be more long-term ones like not developing Alzheimer's, cancers, atherosclerosis, organ failures, etc., all in support of staying healthy & active for as long as possible. Those goals don't lend themselves to a hill-climbing optimization via self-experimentation.
No need to spend three months. The body raise all kind of signals in reaction to food, almost instantly.
Even for short-term goals anything non-measurable is highly prone to confirmation bias
Are bathroom scales also affected? Are keto test sticks too?
For many of us who care to research nutrition more than superficially the goals tend to be more long-term ones like not developing Alzheimer's, cancers, atherosclerosis, organ failures, etc.
Don't worry. Considering the level of aggressiveness industry has shown against low carbs diets, if any of those scares had any minimum basis, we would know by now.
Look, this post is no longer in front page, so it's doubtful anyone except us is reading it. I take for granted that you genuinely think what you say and hope you give me the same benefit of doubt. I haven't done keto in like twenty years? (not sure) but I can't tell you this: it works. Last time I did it, I spent two years in low carb with no adverse effects whatsoever. I ran every other day, was in a very good shape.
I can't help chuckling when I read hit pieces like what Wikipedia has to say:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkins_diet
If you read carefully you'll see that they suggest that it doesn't work at all and that it's just placebo, "nutritional nonsense", water losing or simply caloric reduction due to unpalatable plan. That's idiotic, as you can see if you go to other more technical article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketosis
Surprise! It seems that there is actually a non-contentious, perfectly known mechanism to burn fatty acids induced by fasting or reducing carbs intake.
Try to reconcile that with: The Atkins diet is promoted with questionable claims that carbohydrate restriction is the "key" to weight loss. Questionable my ass. That's what the diet is and it works. If you don't like the kind or food you need to eat to follow the diet, it's OK and it's really the reason most people quit.
If you're worried about unknown long term risks, choose your poison: do you think it's safer to be fat? can you achieve the same results as easily with other diets? Power to you. But don't believe the army of liars that's been spreading FUD consistently over the years.
> choose your poison: do you think it's safer to be fat?
This is a false dichotomy. The choice is not keto or obesity. And losing/maintaining weight is one of the short-term & measurable goals I was alluding to. It's trivially achievable in a fairly short time with various approaches and keto is certainly one of them. Many of the others require less self-discipline than keto however, and a number of those have orders of magnitude more man-years of aggregated long-duration testing behind them.
> But don't believe the army of liars that's been spreading FUD consistently over the years.
That's good advice, but how do I identify which one is the army of liars and which one is the army of truth? :)
I'm not proposing that every person invents own diet, just to use common sense if a diet works for you and another doesn't.
As to how to identify who's lying, how about people telling lies? When Atkins wrote the book in the seventies, his critics told that his diet didn't work and provoked a series of terrible side effects, none of what was true.
The fact was that thousands of people were trying the diet and it worked and it didn't make them sick. So where did the criticism come from? You can tell me that there are unknown risks and ask for caution. But if someone is saying in no uncertain terms what they said in the face of evidence, that's a strong indication that they have no interest in truth.
Of course, diet is not the only matter in what some powerful entities try to manipulate the public, it happens in a variety of matters where science, politics and private interests meet. The first principle here is follow the money.
It's funny that you should bring up Atkins and then suggest "following the money"... Atkins Nutritionals sued some of the people that you are labelling as liars, and lost all of their lawsuits. If there's one thing I've learned from my two decades living in America it's that when a corporation loses a lawsuit to individuals here, the individuals are probably barking up the right tree.
Have you considered the possibility that what you are terming "liars" is just "people that disagree with my strongly-held belief"?
It's a tactic the tobacco industry used to fend off attacks for decades.
There was an interesting interview with one of the people on the Nixon-era group which was repurposed from focusing on hunger to the obesity crisis on the political aspects:
«Dr. Mark Hegsted, professor of nutrition at Harvard University and one of the three nutritionists who helped write the report, said:
"There will undoubtedly be many people who will say we have not proven our point; we have not demonstrated that the dietary modifications we recommend will yield the dividends expected.
"The question to be asked therefore, is not why should we change our diet, but why not. "What are the risks associated with eating less meat, less fat, less saturated fat, less cholesterol, less sugar, less salt and more fruits, vegetables, unsaturated fat - and cereal products - especially whole-grain cereals? There are none that can be identified and important benefits can be expected."»
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1977/01/20/...
I don’t think they set out intending to make the problem worse, or that they were getting paid off by industry, and they weren’t wrong about everything but the President wanted To Do Something and they went ahead even though the evidence for salt, fat, cholesterol, and meat was very sketchy at the time and generally debunked with a decade or so when people did bigger studies with good methodology, in particular having good control groups. The problem is that by then you had a bunch of senior people whose careers had been based on this who weren’t keen on substantially reversing the recommendations and so it’s taken much longer to reverse them than it did to create them.