The best diet is one that you adhere to.

Published 9.1.2026: This was never published, and maybe that’s a hint… Which is the other thing about going through the old website, I have so many articles that I started but never published. Interestingly, the old website allowed you to indicate that it was a draft and it wouldn’t be published. That faunctionality has been removed in the new software. At least it’s not obvious to me.

This is the article that started it all (I think that’s the new link, the other didn’t work) It's online and free to read. At least it was on the date of publication. With this administration, who knows about the future?) Not sure this was the same study, the money for this study came from the NIH (National Institute of Health- back when Health was its goal). Currently, health research is not the goal.

In the trial, Christopher Gardner, who was part of Gary Taubes's Team at NuSi (Nutrition Sciences), compared a whole foods keto diet (lots of vegetables) to a whole foods Mediterranean diet. This was a crossover study where subject ate each diet for 8 weeks and then switched to the other. For the first two weeks meals were provided, then folks were on their own.

I’ve heard Gardner talk about this study on various podcasts, and the fact that Taubes was upset that when the people wanted to increase their carbs they went for whole foods. Gardner wanted the competing diets to be the best (the word they used in the paper was “healthy”), Taubes just wanted to show that low carb was better. As it turned out NO ONE ate the way they were supposed to for the duration; not the low carbers, nor the lower fat diet (it wasn’t really a low fat diet).

The real issue is adherence, and if you can stick with a low carb diet or keto, then more power to you. I know that I could not. I’ve never tried keto, but I did try a low carb diet once for a very short period. I did lose weight because cutting carbs means cutting calories, but when I stopped eating that way the weight came back— rather quickly. It’s not my preferred way to eat, so adherence for me is not great. I am a volume eater, and low carbing it is a lot of energy dense foods, which are supposed to be satiating, but were not for me. That said, I’ve never even tried a low fat diet.

Weight loss and metabolic markers were similar in both diets, though LDL cholesterol was lower on the Mediterranean diet. At least for women (no clue if that's still available, it's a Twitter link), higher LDL correlates with greater death (that link is to a Twitter thread walking through LDL data from the Women's Health Initiative).

The bigger take away for me though, (here's a CNN link to a summary of the results if you don't want to ready the whole study), is that left to their own choices, most subject adopted the Mediterranean diet. They jumped off of the "keto train" as soon as they could. Which means that more people were like me, they can’t do the keto diet for the long term.

From my perspective, eating a keto diet would be extreme punishment. I will note for the record that Gary Taubes has apparently climbed onto the "keto train" now. Apparently low carb is no longer the best way for him to keep the pounds off, so he’s gone keto. And he’s writing another book. (Which might be out by now, I don’t know).

I know that Taubes’s collaborator at NuSi (Nutritional Sciences), Peter Attia, has turned himself into a longevity guru, and a concierge doctor. At least before he got enmeshed in the Epstein files. I don’t follow either man, so I don’t know what’s up with either of them.