Keto Beat Two Other Diets in a Trial. Read the Fine Print Before You Buy the Bacon.

Your feed spent the last two weeks declaring keto the winner. A real trial put it head to head with the Mediterranean diet and a low-fat plant-based diet, and on several measures of metabolic health, keto did come out ahead.

Then you read who was in the study and how it was run, and the headline gets smaller.

What the study did

Researchers at one hospital in St. Louis took people with obesity, prediabetes, and fatty liver, and put them on one of three diets: very-low-carb keto, Mediterranean, or very-low-fat and mostly plant-based. Every meal was made and handed to participants, which is why adherence topped 95%, a number no real life ever hits. The clever part: they engineered all three groups to lose the same amount of weight, about 10%. That let them ask a real question. If the weight loss is identical, does the food itself still change your health?

The answer was yes. Keto improved liver-related measures the most. Liver fat dropped more, blood sugar control improved more, and more people moved out of the prediabetes range. That's a real finding, and it's the reason this study is worth your attention.

Who was actually in it

Forty-two people finished. Fourteen on ...