A"keto-friendly" diet plan
 

I just ran across an advertisement in a popular Sunday magazine supplement. It offers "Get the benefits of keto without the pitfalls!" It mentions keto eight times in the main parts of the ad for a subscription food-delivery plan.

But wait!! There's the fine (tiny, tiny) print. As follows: Menu options that are suggested to be included in a keto-friendly plan that delivers about 40-50g of net carbs per day. These meals are not intended to allow individuals to achieve or maintain nutritional ketosis.

I wonder when the subscriber discovers that he/she still has to figure out what keto actually is and how it works? Does the phrase "keto-friendly" absolve them from responsibility for factual representation?

Buyer beware, as always.

I agree with you, but for some people 40-50 is better than 300-400 they were eating. :lol:

There is a natural food store here in Prescott, Arizona, that is a vegans delight called "Sprouts". Surprisingly it also advertises keto and offers keto diet recipe magazines for sale. I shop there for its fresh vegetables not for all the wheat plus sugar products or sugarized nuts. People shop there because they believe veganism is "healthy" without actually looking into the products on sale.

This is true. And for some, 40-50g may be low enough to enter into a ketogenic state. But even this ad notes that "these meals" (and there are probably many permutations) are "not intended to achieve or maintain ketosis."

So...what's the point of all that keto-friendly talk?? Misdirection.

To tell the truth, I don't object to pay-as-you-go diet plans, with or without provided food. My guess is that most people who subscribe to them have just a few pounds to lose. They succeed. Everybody wins: the customer loses weight, and the advice company makes money.

Then, back to their "normal" way of eating. Perhaps ever-so-slowly, back come the same pounds, with friends. Cycle repeats. Does anyone actually calculate the per pound cost of that sort of weight management scheme? But then, people with money to burn can burn it however they like.

The problem from my perspective is the combo of the misuse of language (keto but not really keto) and the misdirection that results from that misuse. People often do not go beyond the words themselves to research what they really mean in a given context and therefore make erroneous assumptions about what they are buying. "Caveat emptor" is always a good approach but lots of people don't use it. It happens all the time with the headlines of articles about research. People don't go beyond the headlines to what the study actually showed. Language is misused and unjustified conclusions are reached. Fake news abounds, fake products abound. Caveat emptor!

Well, doesn’t this mean low carb has really gone mainstream?

I was excited to see Hellman’s mayo recently —made with olive oil, the excitement ended when I read the label of course. But I was still happy that they weren’t bragging that it was low fat. I see 100% avocado oil mayo in my supermarket routinely now.

It’s small steps in the right direction.

Many people are also misinformed, or their perspective leads them to wrong conclusions about what constitutes various versions of LC.

For instance, a friend was telling me that someone she knows was extolling the virtues of her keto diet, and how she'd lost a lot of weight in the last several weeks eating keto. When they got to talking about what she was eating on her keto diet, her friend claimed that she didn't need to take any supplements, that everything she needed was coming from her food - for example, she was getting massive amounts of magnesium from molasses, which she was using to sweeten her oatmeal (and claimed it was keto oatmeal, because it was made from steel cut oatmeal, rather than made from rolled oats). Of course neither molasses or oatmeal (whether it's steel cut or not) is remotely keto diet friendly, and my friend knew this from years of attempting to do LC that those were not keto foods, but her friend still insists that she is doing keto. :bash:

For another example, my brother has eaten LC for many years, and has done much better with his weight than I have, so he's been in maintenance for quite a while, and he's able to eat a little bit of starchy food without it causing a problem. When we were trying to find a place to eat after our mother's funeral, his daughter shot down the idea of just getting pizza (I'm used to eating just the toppings, thought he did the same thing), because "Dad won't eat pizza. He won't eat anything but meat." With that comment, I thought he must have gone completely carnivore. So we settled on a restaurant, and DB and I both ordered steaks, with the "vegetable medley" on the side. Of course it came with a potato choice - I gave my potatoes to DH, and DB ordered a baked potato with his meal. We both ate our entire steaks, he ate all of his veggies (so obviously he's not carnivore), I picked out the bits of yellow squash and zucchini from my veggies, left the french cut green beans and bits of carrot because they weren't very good. Then I saw DB start to eat a little of his potato (I'm sure he didn't eat more than 2 Tbsp of it - he only had a few tiny little bites of it), and I'm back to realizing that he's actually eating on a LC maintenance WOE... but my point is, that in spite of him eating his entire serving of veggies, and a little of his potato, his daughter still perceived what he eats as "nothing but meat".

Ads like the one referenced above certainly don't help with people's confusion about what constitutes keto (I suspect that the supposedly keto diet the friend's friend talked about was at least 40 or 50 carbs, like the supposedly keto diet referenced in the ad above), or LC in general, but there's also the way that DB's daughter perceives his eating patterns as being "nothing but meat", simply because he doesn't eat huge chunks of bread, and big piles of potatoes or pasta like she eats.

No wonder there's so much confusion out there about what constitutes carnivore, keto and LC. :daze:

I'll put in a plug here for Diet Doctor. This impressive site provides accurate, science supported, and user friendly information about all forms of LC, from Atkins to Keto to Intermittent Fasting, and other variations. NO advertising or product offers! That's why I keep sending them my subscription.

If anybody wants to know "everything" about LC, send them to Diet Doctor.

Totally agree :thup:

I do the exactly the same when anyone asks me about my weight loss and what I'm doing to achieve it.