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Comment by ethanbond | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly enough, a low carbohydrate (often including a switch to artificial sweeteners) is a well-established treatment for childhood epilepsy.

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Really? Can you point to a source?

Many people with epilepsy and migraines have discovered different food triggers. In my case Aspartame was the leading trigger. Anyone who has seizures should seek out and eliminate potential triggers to see if it helps. I suppose a high carb diet could be a trigger for someone... I didn't have a high carb diet... but I know eliminating aspartame helped me.

I am still amazed how Donald Rumsfeld was able to influence its approval by the FDA.

They're likely referring to a ketogenic diet. They were quite common in the past before anticonvulsant meds were created, and are still used in intractable cases today, particularly in pediatric care. There's lots of information out there about their use in epilepsy.

Some to get you started:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2898565/

http://www.epilepsy.com/learn/treating-seizures-and-epilepsy...

http://www.mayoclinic.org/medical-professionals/clinical-upd...

Interesting - thanks.

[Edit] - The ketogenic diet is interesting. And I can see how some would want to substitute sugar for an artificial sweetener to help achieve a low carb diet. But given Aspartame is a known trigger for many types of seizures, it should be introduced carefully.

Do you have a source re: aspartame and seizures? I did a cursory search and the only non-anecdotal thing I could find was a study[1] that showed there was no link in people who described themselves as sensitive.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7614911

To add, most of the studies done on rats had "normal dosages" of aspartame for Humans not Rats. In other words the dosage was not relative to the rats mass it was relative to ours.

http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/efsajournal/pub/2089.htm

Unfortunately I can't point to an official study - just many anecdotal claims from people like me. When you google, I am sure you will see many such claims - including the 'internet hoax'. (The internet hoax is unfortunate because it takes away credibility from the many anecdotal claims like mine that sincerely feel real. More carefully constructed studies should occur.)

That's tricky to evaluate, because you get the exact same narratives from people who claim sensitivity to glutamates, where we can be somewhat certain that there isn't a health connection.

It's easy to evaluate if you have seizures. You don't need to wait for it to be definitively proven to make use of the anecdotal evidence. If you learned that aspartame could trigger a seizure, wouldn't you be cautious and want to see if a change to your diet would reduce your seizures?

It is not at all hard to find people who believe MSG triggers seizures.

The key thing to search for is "keto" or "ketogenic," the name for the high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet that puts you in a fat-burning state called ketosis.

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketogenic_diet

- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2898565/

- http://www.drperlmutter.com/study/dietary-treatment-adults-r...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ketoscience

The validity low carb diets is generally orthogonal to artificial sweeteners and probably should not be conflated.

Thus the phrase "often including..."

I wasn't attempting to disprove or contribute to his claims. Just to point out an interesting intersection of diet and seizures.

Can you give a source for aspartame/artificial sweeteners being often included with low carb diet for treating childhood epilepsy? It doesn't seem intuitive to me that a diet to treat such a disease would often include something like aspartame.

> It doesn't seem intuitive to me that a diet to treat such a disease would often include something like aspartame.

It's the avoiding carbs part that means they look to eat something sweet that isn't a carb. They don't prescribe aspartame; they just say don't leave ketosis.

Well a ketogenic diet is used to treat epilepsy, and artificial sweeteners don't generally conflict with ketosis. I didn't mean to imply artificial sweeteners are prescribed to epileptics. Maybe they're even specifically forbidden as well, I'm not sure.

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