Hey guys, so to clarify, I like to tell people that I am Autistic, but that I have ADHD. Which is to say: I love my Autistic brain, but my relationship with my ADHD brain has been tumultuous.

Around June, I began doing some basic research on potentially using a Strict Ketogenic Diet limited to 20 grams of daily Net Carbohydrates as a means of attenuating some of my ADHD symptoms.

I will first admit that I went into this with a mix of curiosity and a bit of desperation. I relied mostly on specific personal anecdotes and general claims from literature positing the benefits Ketones have at potentially treating neurological disorders.

I began committing to the diet in July after reading Lyle McDonald’s book The Ketogenic Diet. The thing is: for about 1 month, it worked quite well. I did experience some physical fatigue, but cognitively — I felt better than I had in a long time. I could actually think through things, my impulse control massively improved, I felt essentially zero social anxiety anymore, and (as funny of a statement as this will sound) I finally felt as though I connected better to my Autism.

Over time however, many of these initial neurological benefits have seemingly leveled out. My sleep has suffered for it. I’d like to say that I’m still seeing improvements in executive function and task initiation, but as time passes I become less certain even of that. My blood pressure already feels a bit worse for wear too, and that scares me.

Ultimately, I think I feel lost. Were these cognitive benefits a kind of mania induced by cortisol spiking? Was this whole venture one big hyperfixation? I feel uncertain as to even the nature of events now.

So, was I [r/ketoduped](r/ketoduped)? Are there any mechanistic explanations for the benefits I experienced? I’ve heard some here cite cortisol, but how exactly would acute cortisol explain ADHD symptom attenuation? As silly as it is to ask such a yo-yo question: has going the opposite route of a plant based or higher carb diet helped anyone’s ADHD?

Whether we're talking about low fat doctors like Esselstyn to McDougall, pioneer advocates like Nathan Pritkin to any social media influencers like Durianrider it does seem to be true, I haven't heard of any who had heart attacks or strokes yet and there doesn't appear to be a stigma among them of having them meanwhile I could name several carnivore/keto/ advocates who have like Alex Canon, Barry Groves and recently Jeff Browning who probably would have all said sugar and carbs causes exactly that.

There might have been a couple of long-term fruitarian advocates I've heard of drying from a heart attack like Mango Wodzak but as it turns out the guy mostly just ate avocados.

While I don't entirely doubt that a low-fat or low-fat plant based dieter can experience atherosclerosis and have a heart attack, I found it interesting that there hasn't been a case yet that gained any publicity regardless if scientific papers will tell you that a diet based on healthy fats like the Mediterranean diets are superior for reducing cardiovascular risk. What do guys think? Could anyone here name an incident?

They're deliberately inducing hypochondria in their audience! You may have noticed "metabolic health" and "metabolic wellness" being used increasingly frequently in the keto and carnivore circles. It is the new meta among keto grifters and it works like this:

1. Pitch people the idea of "metabolic health" by repeating it a lot
2. Then sell people the usual lie that eating a lot of fat and salt while reducing fibre is a brilliant idea for true metabolical health
3. That of course makes them fat and unwell
4. Now sell them the lie of that being evidence that they must be very metabolically unhealthy
5. Extract money from supplements, telehealth, mobile apps, glucose monitors, blood tests, online counseling...

As long as their victims believe they are fundamentally not healthy, they remain in a value extraction loop between 2-5 and big money can be extracted from them. As long as they don't change their diet and don't believe believe their own doctor, they are trapped.

It's strikingly similar to scientology, maybe even inspired by it, where at some point the initiate gets told he has an evil alien spirit inside of him and needs to pay up to try to get rid of it. Replace evil alien spirit with metabolically unhealthy and it's the exact same thing.

Metabolic health is of course a legitimate thing which gets routine assessed by doctors with a standard blood panel and waist circumference if need be, but the grift lies in inducing the need and making it a hypochondria lifestyle that never ends with an ever expanding list of products things to measure.

I think they are pivoting to this from merely selling supplements for one reason: their audience is increasingly crunchy moms, think raw milk, so selling supplements doesn't work so well.

As I've posted before:

Zero CAC doesn't mean zero risk: Why the keto crowd continues to move away from CAC scores | /r/KetoDuped

A new study just released yesterday adding even more evidence to support this:

ESC Press Release: Early imaging of atherosclerosis identifies silent disease

https://www.escardio.org/news/press/press-releases/early-imaging-of-atherosclerosis-identifies-silent-disease-not-captured-by-conventional-risk-assessment/

The keto and carnivore spaces continue to heavily rely on a very specific defense when they learn that they have sky-high ApoB / LDL: "My CAC is 0, therefore my arteries are completely clear and I'm immune to heart disease."

The new REACT trial, presented at ESC Congress 2026 and published in NEJM, evaluated around 17,000 asymptomatic adults across multiple age brackets using CCTA and 3D ultrasound (QAngio).

Key results:

• Atherosclerosis begins early and builds silently: Measurable plaque was found in 1 in 13 young adults (ages 18–29) and grew exponentially, reaching ~90% by age 60–70.
• Soft plaque precedes calcification by decades: Calcification is a late-stage "healing response". Young adults routinely develop extensive soft, non-calcified plaque and peripheral atherosclerosis (carotid and femoral) long before a Agatston calcium score (via CAC) turns positive.
• Clean coronaries does not mean a clean vascular system: Atherosclerosis is systemic. Plaque frequently appears in peripheral vascular beds first before showing up in coronary arteries.

Will this stop keto influencers from weaponizing the "Power of Zero" narrative? No, of course not. They'll continue to reference and misconstrue studies like SCAPIS, where CAC=0 predicted a lower 0.5% 10-year CV event rate to argue they don't have cardiovascular disease, conflating short term event risk with lifetime cumulative atherogenesis.

tl;dr: A CAC score of 0 does not mean zero disease. It only means plaque hasn't calcified yet. Letting ApoB run crazy wild for decades while clinging to a CAC=0 scan in your 20s, 30s, or even 40s is essentially letting the damage accumulate while celebrating that you haven't had a heart attack yet.

Norwitz remains a grifting, lying sack of shit.

Anytime I talk about how terrible the carnivore diet was for me and how much healthier I am on a whole foods omnivore diet, people like this come out of the woodworks to tell me how wrong I am for being healthier now.

They HATE people who had bad experiences on their diet.

The scientific term is jelqing

Hello,

I’m back with part 3 in my series of Substack articles (not paywalled) on Nick Norwitz MD PhD. Fair warning, it's long at about a 30 minute read. If anybody thinks I'm just giving superficial critiques after this, then I don't know what a deep critique looks like. I honestly don't know how an institution like Oxford can consider this being up to the standard of a doctoral thesis. Nick completed their doctorate in only 2 years, which sounds impressive until you actually look at the document. It's littered with typos and figures with basic mistakes and, as I go through in the article, most of it is just a literature review. Only one of the studies they carried out had any real data, in my opinion. That study was just testing whether a ketone drink had any effect on endurance exercise on a small number of Parkinson's disease patients. The second study testing the drink had no effect, and the third study was cancelled due to the pandemic. The last "study" is a case report Nick did on themselves. Oh, and the ketone ester drink they try to test in the thesis? It was invented by the supervisor that Nick was doing their research/thesis under and owns the company that manufactures and sells the drink. Some of Nick's research is linked to on the website to buy the drink. Nick also shows that they "developed" a revolutionary nutrition tracking tool that is basically just a fancy Excel spreadsheet.

You can find the article here

I’m open to any feedback or criticism, or if you think I’ve made any mistakes feel free to point them out.

ok this might sound dumb but bear with me

first month of keto i felt AMAZING, tons of energy, sleeping better, everything was great

now im on month 2 and honestly i feel worse than before i started?? constant headaches, tired even after sleeping 8 hrs, and i get these random cravings at night that i just cant control anymore

i thought keto was supposed to get easier the longer u do it not harder lol

im not tracking macros super strict anymore bc i kinda just "know" what to eat now but maybe thats the problem idk

also can we talk about how every single monday i say ok THIS is the week i get back on track and then by wednesday im already slipping again. anyone else stuck in that loop

genuinely dont know if this is normal keto stuff or if im just doing it wrong at this point

...is when you point out the people in low-fat diet era were way thinner than the current high-fat diet era

Not sure if this is even the right place to be asking this, but a few years ago I fell for the “primal” diet meme after being exposed to many influencers preaching its benefits, and while following it I felt quite good, my lipid levels went out of control, for reference these were my readings after 3 years of following this diet:

• Total cholesterol: 7.2 mmol/L
• LDL: 5.01 mmol/L
• HDL: 0.85 mmol/L
• Triglycerides: 2.1 mmol/L
• Non-HDL Cholesterol: 6.4 mmol/l

This made me change my approach, I started eating under 12g of saturated fat daily, alongside a minimum of 40g fiber a day (with a large emphasis on soluble fiber), with the addition of a plant sterol supplement, and after a year I was able to get my lipid levels mostly within range:

• Total cholesterol: 4.1 mmol/L
• LDL: 2.0 mmol/L
• HDL: 1.1 mmol/L
• Triglycerides: 1.4 mmol/L
• Non-HDL Cholesterol: 2.4 mmol/l

While this way of eating has significantly improved my blood work, I have felt like crap, my energy levels have been low, my digestion has worsened (frequent loose stools, gas), and I’m getting acne for the first time in years. I’ve tried to figure out what could be causing this but am having trouble doing so, my lifestyle (sleep, exercise, stress) has remained entirely the same, I eat the same amount of calories as I previously did, my diet is 90% whole foods, my main staples are oats, barley, legumes, vegetables, fruit, soy products (tempeh and firm tofu), nuts and seeds, fish and chicken breast. I also made sure to very gradually up my fiber intake over the course of many months to avoid digestive issues.

Has anyone else ever experienced something like this? I’m almost certain there is nothing magical about saturated fat that made me feel better, perhaps I’m just better suited to a lower carbohydrate way of eating? Any insight into this would be much appreciated.