You may have heard a lot of information about the Keto Diet. A Keto (or ketogenic) Diet is essentially a method of monitoring what you eat based upon eating high-fat, proper protein, and low-carbohydrate foods. (Read more details on Wikipedia’s Ketogenic Diet.) It was originally created to treat patients with epilepsy since ketogenic diets can reduce the frequency of seizures. Recently, there has been a huge interest in ketogenic diets as a means to help people improve their health.
One recent research program published in 2018, “Investigating the Ketogenic Diet As Treatment for Primary Aggressive Brain Cancer: Challenges and Lessons Learned,” looked into the use of the Keto Diet (KD) to help and/or support treatments for a brain tumor. Their findings stated that “[t]he value of KD to treat humans with these malignancies has yet to be proven in clinical trials. There is currently a lack of standard KD protocols so that comparison of different trials is difficult.” Overall, their finding was that the only way to properly research KD would be a patient staying with a strict diet along with documentation of what exactly what was eaten in order to determine the true effects of KD.
WUSF Public Media shared an interesting interview with a professor, a researcher, and a dietician. Listen below:
Angela Poff, a Research Associate at USF’s Department of Pharmacology and Physiology, shares, “I think more than anything there is just a unique response that any individual will have…. Some people do seem to respond very well to the ketogenic diet, but it’s not always the case, it’s not a blanket, one-size-fits-all kind of thing.”
There is also a great conversation about the connection in “Ketogenic Diet and Brain Tumors: What You Need to Know”. This Cancer.Net post shares a lot of information based on the link between the two.
Here is just over fifteen minutes of the discussion:
Overall, there are potential benefits of a ketogenic diet, but the best idea is to reach out to your physician or surgeon to ensure any decisions about food and health can support you and your current treatments.