Keto Diet
All diets work but to base the premise of a diet on carbohydrate hating is wrong. Broadly speaking, in all human fields of endeavours, the law of conservation of energy is never contested but we tend to suspend disbelief when it comes to diets, as we doggedly assume that the presence or absence of a certain hormone will circumvent metabolism and “melt away the fat”. This is also wrong and unhelpful to innocent diet followers.
As one who had his early life in rural Nigeria, I strongly believe that the diet debates are out of touch elite pastimes, borne out of the food glut in the Western societies. For survival, all living things evolved and adapted to scarcity, and humans have been appropriately described as opportunistic omnivores who would eat whatever is available. How supposedly omnivorous humans turned out to be sharply divided into tribalistic die hard vegan, keto, Mediterranean, paleo and all other kinds of dieters is hard to wrap my brain around. No matter how much label you put on it, food is nothing more than stored chemical energy and my lived village experience and training show me the absurdity of the unending debates about the superiority of one diet over the other, especially when it all boils down to emotions, and not much science.
It is absolutely true that overconsumption is the major cause of obesity, diabetes and heart diseases, which are the current and major silent killers of mankind. However, the labels placed on food, by way of one’s preferred diet, is not as significant as the energy it stores and releases into the bloodstream through digestion and absorption. To buttress the fact that less is better, and not an endorsement by any means, a Nashville man lost 58.5 pounds in 100 days on a half portion of three McDonald’s meals a day. The buzz about the new wonder drug, Ozempic, is largely because it keeps the stomach full by delaying food emptying into the small intestines, where most food absorption takes place, and centrally blocks the brain’s hunger signals. In other words, the weight not gained are the nutrients not eaten or absorbed, which is exactly the same principle of the surgical gutting of the…