You seem quite defensive about keto and missed most of the point of my post. I wasn't writing about keto specifically, I just needed a few examples and that was one that came to mind at the time. You can sub in "eating nothing but sauerkraut and grapefruit" or anything else that springs to kind. My post was about self-experimentation in general. The "scares" you refer to, I did not claim were a result of a low carb diet - they were examples of the types of long-term issues that some of us would like to avoid. Unfortunately the impact of diet & lifestyle on those can be decades in the making - not to mention that some, like Alzheimer's, don't allow for do-overs - which makes it rather hard for an individual to employ self-experimentation to avoid them. The fact is that an individual won't be able to determine if consuming more or less of vitamin X or mineral Y will increase or decrease their probability of developing condition Z via self-experimentation for most of the scary conditions, let alone if vitamin X needs to be present in combination with compound Z, etc.

> 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? :)