As someone with Alzheimer's being quite prevalent on my dad's side [1], I pay attention to pretty much any HN thread on Alzheimer's. But most of them end up not being super conclusive/actionable.
But also ack that Alzheimer's research has been going on for decades, and progress is slow. Still, I look for glimmers of hope anytime I see one reach the front page.
If fasting has even a chance at reducing the risks, would love to know more about the duration/frequency that is needed to be beneficial.
[1] All four of my dad's aunts + grandmother ended up with it, but none of the males to my knowledge, and my dad died at 76 having never been diagnosed with it. The males, however, died relatively young, so it's unknown whether they would've ended up with it.
There are a lot of recent attempts to link Alzheimer's to metabolic diseases and disorders. Insulin dysregulation, liver diseases, LDLs and transport, immune dysfunction, inflammation or sclerosis during extravasation, etc.
We spent an awful long time chasing after amyloid and tau. There are enough eyeballs on these new ideas that I'm hoping we can find a preponderance of evidence soon.
Sticking to a keto diet these days is extremely easy, so I’d suggest trying that first before heading to water fasting which requires relatively more care and preparedness. (Disclaimer: I am not a doctor though and it’s highly possible I misunderstood the article, just offering advice based on familiarity with a keto diet and water fasting.)
As a health care worker at least let me assure you the ones who suffer from Alzheimer's in my honest opinion really have no self awareness of what they are going through. They are just in their own little world and slowly moving through life without much insight as to what they are doing. It is heartbreaking for the family and those who care, but for the individual it is not a painful existence.
I realize you likely mean your comment as a kindness and I appreciate that intent.
However, as the son of a mother who slowly died from early onset dementia, I can attest that just because the ego self has fractured and scattered into a million pieces does not mean that the afflicted person is in some peaceful state of not knowing. That they are somehow not suffering or in pain. It is just that the afflicted can no longer articulate their suffering in ways understood by the rest of us in consensus reality. If one pays close attention, the reality of their suffering is bright and clear.
One of many many examples was when my mother would compulsively pick up a pen and make rhythmic circles on and off for hours. I would watch her and wonder why. Turns out she had a severe (brutally painful) urinary tract infection and was trying to soothe her pain. She was a much beloved English teacher and writing was her refuge. She was doing her level best to alleviate her suffering.
The thought that a person dying from Alzheimer's is not having a painful existence is radically disconnected from reality.
I respectfully ask you and any caregivers for dementia patients to avoid conflating your own understanding of reality with the actual reality of your patients.
My grandfather had Alzheimer's. My grandmother dementia.
My grandfather would, not uncommonly, escape from his care home. He'd be found, miles away, trying to "walk back home" -- and, despite his deterioration, he knew the routes, he was walking the right city streets to get to the right country roads, etc... He wanted to "get home" and make sure his garden was being tended to. Sometimes he'd have shit himself, or pissed himself, but had been walking for hours regardless. That isn't a painless existence. Through what I know of his experience alone, I've understood this to be deeply traumatic.
And my grandmothers experience was something else entirely. I believe I've commented on it here before, but her experience was also uniquely horrific. Bed-ridden, gangrene, do-not-resuscitate orders that were not acknowledged... I am terrified of what they went through.
Personally, I feel that our notions of "pain" don't really get even approximately close to what these patients endure.
When I went through this with my grandmother, I experienced that too. Like others said, it's important to note that in the later stages it may be hard for the patients to communicate their pain, so we cannot be sure, but at least in my anecdotal experience I would say that I can be pretty sure there was no acute pain involved.
The most important thing for me and others around her was to just vibe with her reality. Just give her the space. Not be mad, but laugh or help, again and again. Like you would do with a baby. Don't expect them to learn, don't expect anything.
Until the very end I think she had a good life. The end, obviously, will have been hard for her, because that's a time where they cannot even live their own little life anymore but probably experience higher pain in general, but that's what it is.
Thank you for your expert insight though I must confess--if this was meant to be reassuring it has the exact opposite effect... A disease that makes only your family suffer, wow. I thought cancer was bad.
Maybe you only get to see the sufferers when their condition is already advanced? My Dad is in the early stages of Alzheimer's, and knows it, and is really down about it. He regularly goes off by himself to cry. It's pretty heartbreaking
That hasn't been my experience (n=1 thankfully, I hope it never increases involuntary). Lots of confusion, distress, trying to go outside/go back to where they lived when they were children, not recognizing the people around them ("he can't be my husband, my husband is young!").
They have plenty of time to suffer between diagnosis and not being able to be aware of the world at all though. Dad had years of depression due to the gradual decline before being incapable of communicating.
They have repeatet panic attacks, when they "wake up" in a foreign place, surrounded by foreign people. Think of "teleported to a strange city" every 3 minutes.
What worked for me was doing two/three days of juice fast first. During this time you clear the colon. Once "empty" it is much easier to maintain the fast.
I usually the water fast for two/three days, and then do one day of dry fasting. If it goes really well I extend it by a day of two.
I cannot recommend doing some fasting yourself enough. It really changed my attitude to food and "feeling hungry". I made some personal bests in sports while fasted!
>Alzheimer's research has been going on for decades
Based on some recent high profile cases so have massive scientific fraud.
Which rises the question: are we on a wild goose chase due to following fraudulent science from highly published "thought leaders" when it comes to Alzheimers disease?
On many other major disease categories we've had many major improvements from biologicals and immunotherapies. RA, MS? Compared to the past, they're a walk in the park. Cancer mortality dropping like a rock for the brutal killers of the past, glioblastoma is still a gnarly death sentence but there's hopeful news on the horizon even for that.
Alzheimers? Crickets mostly, biologicals where the error bars eat virtually all of the alleged observable effects? Sounds like we're barking up the wrong alley.
fyi, You can set up rss feed searches on pubmed and load them into your favorite rss reader for a much better, more up to date feed of what is actually being published around topics you care about. Its dramatically better than anything you will see on hacker news as long as you can get a good set of search topics so its a trickle of hits, nit a firehosex
There was an interesting article the other day mentioning a study where getting a BCG vaccine as an adult seemed to give a 75% reduction in Alzheimer's. The hypothesis being that it can be set off by an infection and the vaccine boosts the immune system. That's a bit of a simplification but the article is here https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/dec/01/the-bra...
As someone currently on a strict ketogenic diet (gotta cut and get ready for the Christmas fattening)
I can say ketones are something else in the brain. I sat at my desk today for 6 hours straight without even getting so much as a drink of water. I didn't even think about eating. Just in the zone and hyper focused.
A very weird and pleasant experience, that alas can't be sustained forever given how delicious carbs are.
>A very weird and pleasant experience, that alas can't be sustained forever given how delicious carbs are.
why not? it's just a matter of having access to decent meat/fish, discipline, and ignoring peer pressure at social gatherings.
for me, it takes at least two weeks to recover from SAD-like diet and go back to the kind of state you're describing - high energy, mental clarity, complete absence of hunger, etc. the first week is particularly unpleasant - low energy and constant carb cravings, etc.
> why not? it's just a matter of ..., discipline, and ignoring peer pressure at social gatherings.
Both of which are very dependent on willpower, and as much as we would like to believe we have control over, it's highly affected by emotions depending on the individual.
Great that you can sustain it but phrasing it as an easy thing to do is ignoring the fact that simple things are not necessarily easy to do.
I've struggled with "but factory farmed meat and dairy conflict with my moral beliefs" when trying keto. It's nice, but very challenging to do sustainably if you have dietary limits like that.
I used to do a very low carb diet that kept me in ketosis. For the most part it was great but the sleep difference concerned me. At the time my life was structured to where I didn't need to be awake at any particular time so my body would wake up when it had enough sleep instead of when an alarm went off. While I usually sleep seven to eight hours when eating a standard American diet, when on low carb, it would end up being only five to six hours, usually closer to five than six. I'd feel completely rested and fine but most days I'd need to take a short ten to fifteen minute nap, during which I'd quickly fall into REM sleep. When waking up from that nap, I'd feel fine, no post-nap grogginess, but it made me wonder if I was getting shorted on REM sleep during my primary sleep period.
> A very weird and pleasant experience, that alas can't be sustained forever given how delicious carbs are.
I’ve been doing Keto for over a decade now, with one cheat day a year (Christmas market mulled wine with family). I can guarantee you it can easily[0] be sustained if one is so inclined. OTOH, 6 hours without water sounds neither healthy, nor like something I’d ever want to do.
[0]: With the caveat, that your circumstances need to allow it. I’ve been working from home and cook all meals myself.
"easily be sustained" - for you maybe. I have done keto for long periods, 4 times in my life, and i find it personally extremely unsustainable. Boring, extremely restricting in social situations, and cuts you off from one of the greatest joys in life - the vast array of food, tastes and experiences available to the modern human existence. Casting wide generalizations from your own personal experience is bad, and unfortunately par for the course in any internet discussion of diet.
There are so many caveats to your "guarantee" that it isn't really guaranteeing anything.
People are wildly diverse when it comes to food traditions, actual state of intestines and also cravings. What worked for you may not work for a Vietnamese guy who ate rice for 50 years of his life.
Extrapolating carelessly from N == 1 is a bad idea.
I was diehard keto for over a year straight. Chronic inflammation that I’ve lived with my entire life disappeared totally after a few weeks. I became pretty dogmatic about the whole thing and eventually my body started to suffer. I don’t believe it to be a long term sustainable diet, at least not at the level i was doing it (sub 20g carbs a day).
My blood tests got very worrying towards the latter part of the year and I started to have regular panic attacks and what I can only presume is chronic low blood sugar that ultimately left me feeling pretty lifeless and scared.
Anyways just my personal anecdote to remain cautiously optimistic
My mistake was I gravitated to eating mostly fatty pork and chicken after a year. Turns out those are very high in omega-6’s. Does not play well with my mental health, skin (exacerbated my pollen allergy related eczema), resulted in starting to regain weight around my stomach despite maintaining a loss of 50 pounds for two years, and becoming cold all the time (yes, my thyroid and calories were fine).
After some research on wtf might be going on, I had my suspicions and took an omegaquant test which revealed my circulating phospholipid omega-6 levels were crazy high, just a few percent below their max reference range. Moving to beef only halted my issues after 1-2 months.
I like beef and monotony, but even I can’t eat just beef. I now cycle between keto and carbs (mostly potatoes, carrots, onions and glass noodles, sometimes pasta or bread buns). I generally have carbs near workout days. Now that I’ve shed the omega-6 pounds, I have some tolerance again but end up still mostly use beef, eggs, and frozen seafood blends (no fish, which when farmed tends to be high in omega-6).
Oh, and if you are looking for a salad dressing that isn’t just flavored vegetable oil (high omega-6), give the “skinny girl” brand a try.
I'm at 3 years with occasional breaks. At a certain point my weight wouldn't go lower and I started feeling terrible. I think I was producing more ketones than I could use. I'm not sure exactly what fixed it, but now I'm sustaining a low-carb, low-but-nonzero-ketone mode, and still getting 50-75% of the mental/energy/anti-inflammatory advantages.
I think it was either changing my diet to focus on veges instead of meats (still 15-30g net carbs/day though), or adding artificial sweetener to maybe fool my body to making insulin? The science says that shouldn't happen, but idk what else it could be.
“Early human studies of ketogenic compounds have improved cognitive scores in patients with mild to moderate AD.”
While it requires behaviour changes (for the diet), this is something that's relatively easy to test & validate, and with a good sample size.
Edit: To elaborate -- getting on a keto diet results in production of ketone bodies; the keto diet is (IMO) hard to adhere to, but not impossible.
And if it is ketone bodies in the brain that are important, iirc, you can supplement the body with exogenous ketones (which the article alludes to, and the authors appear to be planning to test) which could potentially help.
If there's a measurable, significant effect with just consumption of exogenous ketones without even having to enter ketosis via diet- wow!
I'm all keto / very low carb for 4 plus years. I have been on dozens of different diets, not an exaggeration. Other than the eat whatever I want diet this has been by far the easiest for me to maintain long term. For me eating just a little bread is an insurmountable goal, but eating none I can do. I wouldn't have always traded carbs for a few extra years of cognitive function, but post addiction it feels like a good deal, if I can still get it.
Am just a hobbyist with some personal investment in AD, but the genetic basis for Alzheimer's seems like too strong a confounding factor to be looking for behavioral differences between ethnic/religious groups IMO.
I don't think daily fasting heals the body. I believe it has to be multi-day. The Fasting Cure by Upton Sinclair was a nice introduction to the topic for me.
Depends, I'd say. The research fraud around amyloids aside, there is still a strong chance that Alzheimer has a genetic link, and in that case you might have to differentiate between Arabic, African, Asian and Western Muslims first.
Only if you find similarities in lower Alzheimer rates among all of them, you can draw a conclusion pointing to something in Muslim culture helping to reduce Alzheimer rates (say, the yearly fasting acting like keto diet, or not eating pork, or not drinking alcohol/consuming other drugs), but if it is only found in specific heritages I'd assume a genetic component... or environmental factors similar to higher natural lithium content in the water leading to lower suicide mortality [1].
They are only doing intermittent fasting (from sunrise to sunset), and a lot of them binge eat as soon as the sun is set. Not sure if this can be used as a baseline for a study.
There is a (relatively small) subset of Muslims that fast every Monday and Thursday, in addition to fasting the month of Ramadan. Perhaps that’s a better population sample to study?
I don't think that is true. Some expert (Dale Bredesen maybe) said somewhere that a healthy person lacking the bad habit of eating late in the evening will tend to start producing and burning ketones during sleep every night.
Also, many experts are saying that if your body cannot burn fats and ketones, which is unhealthy, you can get it start being able to again by restricting carbs for a while.
Can't remember if this was on HN previously or I saw it somewhere else ... but a few weeks back there was a research PR article about some researchers feeding mice a high sugar/far diet and letting them solve a swimming task, and found that the high sugar/fat diet mice performed worse, and attributed this to memory / cognitive degradation, a la Alzheimers.
They therefore concluded that Alzheimers is effectively "diabetes of the brain" (i.e. with or without concomitant diabetes 'of the body'.)
So this news is interesting, since it both supports the "diabetes of the brain" interpretation, as well as debunking it at the same time (i.e. it's not the high-sugar, but the lack of ketones which you only get when you avoid sugar?).
I wonder if this subtle distinction has any practical importance. E.g., perhaps you don't need to avoid sweets more generally as a diabetic would have to, as long as you have enough days where you produce ketone bodies (e.g. through intermittent fasting?).
Equally, one has to wonder if the whole lack of ketones bad might be a mechanism for diabetes itself ... (maybe this is an actual hypothesis being researched? I haven't done the research to have an educated answer to this).
This doesn't surprise me, I'm long term carnivore and you only need to pay attention to your skin improvements when switching from carbs to fats
Mental health is harder to self diagnose, that diagnosis is better coming from someone close to you, but you should notice changes over time
My friends also think Keto is unsustainable, the way I think it about it is sugar/carbs are more addictive than alcohol, pay attention to the language use "sugar rush" "sugar crash" this is how we talk about addictive drugs not food
You wouldn't tell an addict to have drinks in moderation, once you're out of the woods and stable into ketosis then "normal" foods test like chemicals and hyper sweet to the point of being unpalatable
It's a horrible way to go. As an early teen my grandma went through it. We would find her hiding from her abusive ex husband who had been dead for forty years. She would call the house at 3am, I was told to not answer the phone and of I did answer to hang up on her nectar she would talk at great length about how she could feel the worms eating her skin in her grave. It was really awful to watch as a kid and I'm sure it was much worse for her. She didn't do well in a home after that and would attack the nursing staff negate she didn't know who they were. That shit of horrifying. I think if nothing else, Alzheimers is one hell of a great reason for assisted suicide.
Readit News
But also ack that Alzheimer's research has been going on for decades, and progress is slow. Still, I look for glimmers of hope anytime I see one reach the front page.
If fasting has even a chance at reducing the risks, would love to know more about the duration/frequency that is needed to be beneficial.
[1] All four of my dad's aunts + grandmother ended up with it, but none of the males to my knowledge, and my dad died at 76 having never been diagnosed with it. The males, however, died relatively young, so it's unknown whether they would've ended up with it.
We spent an awful long time chasing after amyloid and tau. There are enough eyeballs on these new ideas that I'm hoping we can find a preponderance of evidence soon.
However, as the son of a mother who slowly died from early onset dementia, I can attest that just because the ego self has fractured and scattered into a million pieces does not mean that the afflicted person is in some peaceful state of not knowing. That they are somehow not suffering or in pain. It is just that the afflicted can no longer articulate their suffering in ways understood by the rest of us in consensus reality. If one pays close attention, the reality of their suffering is bright and clear.
One of many many examples was when my mother would compulsively pick up a pen and make rhythmic circles on and off for hours. I would watch her and wonder why. Turns out she had a severe (brutally painful) urinary tract infection and was trying to soothe her pain. She was a much beloved English teacher and writing was her refuge. She was doing her level best to alleviate her suffering.
The thought that a person dying from Alzheimer's is not having a painful existence is radically disconnected from reality.
I respectfully ask you and any caregivers for dementia patients to avoid conflating your own understanding of reality with the actual reality of your patients.
My grandfather would, not uncommonly, escape from his care home. He'd be found, miles away, trying to "walk back home" -- and, despite his deterioration, he knew the routes, he was walking the right city streets to get to the right country roads, etc... He wanted to "get home" and make sure his garden was being tended to. Sometimes he'd have shit himself, or pissed himself, but had been walking for hours regardless. That isn't a painless existence. Through what I know of his experience alone, I've understood this to be deeply traumatic.
And my grandmothers experience was something else entirely. I believe I've commented on it here before, but her experience was also uniquely horrific. Bed-ridden, gangrene, do-not-resuscitate orders that were not acknowledged... I am terrified of what they went through.
Personally, I feel that our notions of "pain" don't really get even approximately close to what these patients endure.
The most important thing for me and others around her was to just vibe with her reality. Just give her the space. Not be mad, but laugh or help, again and again. Like you would do with a baby. Don't expect them to learn, don't expect anything.
Until the very end I think she had a good life. The end, obviously, will have been hard for her, because that's a time where they cannot even live their own little life anymore but probably experience higher pain in general, but that's what it is.
I usually the water fast for two/three days, and then do one day of dry fasting. If it goes really well I extend it by a day of two.
To get back to my regular diet (which is mostly "WFPB" https://www.doctorsfornutrition.org/general-public/what-is-w... ) from a dry fast, I usually take one day of fruit-only. This to gently start the GI back up.
I cannot recommend doing some fasting yourself enough. It really changed my attitude to food and "feeling hungry". I made some personal bests in sports while fasted!
Based on some recent high profile cases so have massive scientific fraud.
Which rises the question: are we on a wild goose chase due to following fraudulent science from highly published "thought leaders" when it comes to Alzheimers disease?
On many other major disease categories we've had many major improvements from biologicals and immunotherapies. RA, MS? Compared to the past, they're a walk in the park. Cancer mortality dropping like a rock for the brutal killers of the past, glioblastoma is still a gnarly death sentence but there's hopeful news on the horizon even for that.
Alzheimers? Crickets mostly, biologicals where the error bars eat virtually all of the alleged observable effects? Sounds like we're barking up the wrong alley.
I can say ketones are something else in the brain. I sat at my desk today for 6 hours straight without even getting so much as a drink of water. I didn't even think about eating. Just in the zone and hyper focused.
A very weird and pleasant experience, that alas can't be sustained forever given how delicious carbs are.
why not? it's just a matter of having access to decent meat/fish, discipline, and ignoring peer pressure at social gatherings.
for me, it takes at least two weeks to recover from SAD-like diet and go back to the kind of state you're describing - high energy, mental clarity, complete absence of hunger, etc. the first week is particularly unpleasant - low energy and constant carb cravings, etc.
Both of which are very dependent on willpower, and as much as we would like to believe we have control over, it's highly affected by emotions depending on the individual.
Great that you can sustain it but phrasing it as an easy thing to do is ignoring the fact that simple things are not necessarily easy to do.
I’ve been doing Keto for over a decade now, with one cheat day a year (Christmas market mulled wine with family). I can guarantee you it can easily[0] be sustained if one is so inclined. OTOH, 6 hours without water sounds neither healthy, nor like something I’d ever want to do.
[0]: With the caveat, that your circumstances need to allow it. I’ve been working from home and cook all meals myself.
People are wildly diverse when it comes to food traditions, actual state of intestines and also cravings. What worked for you may not work for a Vietnamese guy who ate rice for 50 years of his life.
Extrapolating carelessly from N == 1 is a bad idea.
Not sure how much evidence is for claims, but sounds somewhat reasonable.
I suggest high electrolyte food, such as a nice salty soup. Seems to help.
My blood tests got very worrying towards the latter part of the year and I started to have regular panic attacks and what I can only presume is chronic low blood sugar that ultimately left me feeling pretty lifeless and scared.
Anyways just my personal anecdote to remain cautiously optimistic
After some research on wtf might be going on, I had my suspicions and took an omegaquant test which revealed my circulating phospholipid omega-6 levels were crazy high, just a few percent below their max reference range. Moving to beef only halted my issues after 1-2 months.
I like beef and monotony, but even I can’t eat just beef. I now cycle between keto and carbs (mostly potatoes, carrots, onions and glass noodles, sometimes pasta or bread buns). I generally have carbs near workout days. Now that I’ve shed the omega-6 pounds, I have some tolerance again but end up still mostly use beef, eggs, and frozen seafood blends (no fish, which when farmed tends to be high in omega-6).
Oh, and if you are looking for a salad dressing that isn’t just flavored vegetable oil (high omega-6), give the “skinny girl” brand a try.
I think it was either changing my diet to focus on veges instead of meats (still 15-30g net carbs/day though), or adding artificial sweetener to maybe fool my body to making insulin? The science says that shouldn't happen, but idk what else it could be.
were you using supplements? on keto in particular, a decent multivitamin and some extra vitamin C, magnesium, and potassium are a must.
“Early human studies of ketogenic compounds have improved cognitive scores in patients with mild to moderate AD.”
While it requires behaviour changes (for the diet), this is something that's relatively easy to test & validate, and with a good sample size.
Edit: To elaborate -- getting on a keto diet results in production of ketone bodies; the keto diet is (IMO) hard to adhere to, but not impossible.
And if it is ketone bodies in the brain that are important, iirc, you can supplement the body with exogenous ketones (which the article alludes to, and the authors appear to be planning to test) which could potentially help.
If there's a measurable, significant effect with just consumption of exogenous ketones without even having to enter ketosis via diet- wow!
There does seem to be some kind of link between GLP-1s and Alzheimers: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11242057/
Some people also seem to like nicotine-related hypotheses: https://discoveries.vanderbilthealth.com/2019/09/nicotine-to... and hypotheses with other kinds of drugs that have appetite suppressant characteristics: https://jnnp.bmj.com/content/93/10/1080
The whole field is kind of a gigantic mess these days, though. Seems like everyone and their cousin has a pet theory.
Only if you find similarities in lower Alzheimer rates among all of them, you can draw a conclusion pointing to something in Muslim culture helping to reduce Alzheimer rates (say, the yearly fasting acting like keto diet, or not eating pork, or not drinking alcohol/consuming other drugs), but if it is only found in specific heritages I'd assume a genetic component... or environmental factors similar to higher natural lithium content in the water leading to lower suicide mortality [1].
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32716281/
- They don't drink alcohol
- They fast every year
No idea if these help or not.
Is the month of Ramadan enough have an effect on Alzheimer's or is more frequent fasting required?
Is intermittent enough? 12 hours? 18 hours?
Or do we need frequent (e.g. weekly or 2-3 times weekly) 24-hour fasting?
Also, many experts are saying that if your body cannot burn fats and ketones, which is unhealthy, you can get it start being able to again by restricting carbs for a while.
They therefore concluded that Alzheimers is effectively "diabetes of the brain" (i.e. with or without concomitant diabetes 'of the body'.)
So this news is interesting, since it both supports the "diabetes of the brain" interpretation, as well as debunking it at the same time (i.e. it's not the high-sugar, but the lack of ketones which you only get when you avoid sugar?).
I wonder if this subtle distinction has any practical importance. E.g., perhaps you don't need to avoid sweets more generally as a diabetic would have to, as long as you have enough days where you produce ketone bodies (e.g. through intermittent fasting?).
Equally, one has to wonder if the whole lack of ketones bad might be a mechanism for diabetes itself ... (maybe this is an actual hypothesis being researched? I haven't done the research to have an educated answer to this).
Mental health is harder to self diagnose, that diagnosis is better coming from someone close to you, but you should notice changes over time
My friends also think Keto is unsustainable, the way I think it about it is sugar/carbs are more addictive than alcohol, pay attention to the language use "sugar rush" "sugar crash" this is how we talk about addictive drugs not food
You wouldn't tell an addict to have drinks in moderation, once you're out of the woods and stable into ketosis then "normal" foods test like chemicals and hyper sweet to the point of being unpalatable