Keto Pros & Cons
AKA: You’re Probably Doing Keto wrong
In a previous essay, I discussed the history and mechanisms behind the keto diet.
Let’s do a quick pros and cons list for this popular diet, for all my friends out there who are interested in giving it a try.
Keto
Pros:
- you get to eat everyday and at any time.
- It is effective for therapeutic interventions
- Easier in the long term than water fasting
- Trains your body to use fat for energy
Cons:
- High fat diet means you can still get heart disease and other risks from consuming saturated fat
- Limited nutrients from lack of fruits and vegetables – you need supplements long term
- Constipation. kidney stones
- Almost everyone who tries it without clinical observation does it wrong
- I’m not joking
- One study of over 30 thousand American’s diets found that only 4.1% of those who claimed to be on a low carb diet actually adhered to the diet. 4.1%!! [Kowalski, Corina, Dakota Dustin, Alaa Ilayan, et al. 2025.]
Why on earth is it so hard to follow the keto diet??
For starters, people are generally bad at dieting. There’s more references to this than I can list, but first off people under report calories like crazy.
A general average of 18-54% of calories go unreported [Macdiarmid, J, and J Blundell. 1998.].
That’s the equivalent of someone saying they are eating 1500 calories and actually eating 1800 to 2300 calories. You guys…
But lets be real: calorie counting is hard!
You need to weigh everything individually, meal prep, measure cooking oils, and godforbid you make a stir fry, or soup. Those are literally impossible to divvy up into meal prep containers equally (not for lack of trying!1)
The keto diet is also notoriously difficult to maintain and track: there is a very limited number of carbs that you can consume (conventionally less than 50g but those with lower calorie needs are closer to 15g a day). Unless you are eating straight up meat/fish, most foods have a non negligible number of carbs. For example, eggs have 0.6 grams, which is sometimes rounded down to 0, but if you have multiple eggs per day those partial grams add up quick!
As an added bonus, nutrition labels are misleading as hell.
Take a look at this “keto bread”, or as my abeula calls it, “pan de la marka keto”. It says here in great big letters that there is NET 1g CARBS.
What the hell is a net carb?
Simple. It’s fake math. As best described in the Journal of THE AMERICAN DIETETIC ASSOCIATION,
“The relatively new phrases “net carb,” “low carb,” and “impact carb” are not defined by the FDA; they were created by companies to give their products more shelf appeal”
and,
“To calculate the “net carb,” companies subtract the grams of fiber and sugar alcohols from the total carbohydrates.”
The argument is that you don’t digest fiber so fiber carbs don’t count.
This package of bread literally has 10 grams of carbs per slice!!
But because 9 of them are fiber they get away with marketing them as 1. So someone who is genuinely trying to follow keto for health reasons might have a sandwich with 2 slices and think they’ve consumed 2g, but actually had 20g, which is already near the tipping point of losing ketosis.
Told ya you’re probably doing keto wrong
Beautifully Boorish Science 
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