 Are low carbohydrate or ketogenic diets bad for your gut health? Hi, this is Dr. Ruscio and let's discuss this question. If low carb or ketogenic diets are bad for, it could be damaging your gut health. In short, the answer is no. Low carb or ketogenic diets are not bad for your gut health. But there's confusion around this and allow me to dispel briefly why there's a confusion and what this means for you. Again, in short, if you're doing a lower carb or ketogenic diet and deriving benefit from it, continue with it. Now, do not continue with that dietary approach if you're feeling fatigued or irritable or having insomnia because a lower carb or ketogenic dietary approach is not gonna be the best approach for everyone. But for some, it will be helpful. And unfortunately, you may come across information on the internet that tells you a number of things. One of which could be that a low carb diet can starve your gut bacteria and be bad for your gut bacterial health. And this is really misleading because while, yes, a lower carb or ketogenic diet may starve certain populations or you may see a dwindling of certain populations of bacteria, other populations of bacteria may actually bloom on a lower carb diet. And there's the data in terms of what population of bacteria are better than the others. And that is so literally speculation that you as a healthcare consumer should not bother waiting in that confusion. But rather, we can look to outcome studies, meaning what happens when people eat a certain way for the answer to the question of what kind of impact could a lower carb diet have. Now, I'm gonna extrapolate a little bit from research on the paleo diet, but there has been research published showing that a paleotype diet, which is oftentimes but not always lower in carb, reduces colorectal cancer risk to a similar degree as the Mediterranean diet. So some good evidence there. Now there's a number of trials showing that a lower carb, oftentimes looking at this through the context of either a paleo diet or a overtly low carb diet can be beneficial for weight loss, metabolism, and cholesterol levels. So more good news there, it can improve your metabolism. Now, how this ties in with gut bacteria, some studies have actually looked at a moderate low and very low carb grouping of patients and tracked what happened in their microbiotas and how did that correlate with weight change. And ironically, and some of the studies or one in particular found that the very low carb diet group saw the most weight loss and had a measurable shift in their intestinal bacteria. And the higher the carbon take went, the less the change on the intestinal bacteria and the lesser the weight loss. So this thinking that if a diet impacts or causes a dwindling of certain bacterial populations that's going to automatically be bad for you, that's really a erroneous premise that doesn't have good evidence to support it. Further yet still, and I review this evidence extensively in Healthy Get Healthy You, when you look at fiber content in the diet as compared to what's known as all cause mortality or morbidity. So your chances of dying from any disease or having any disease, there is no general trend showing that eating more fiber is better for your health. There's about as much data showing that higher fiber intake is good for you as is their data showing higher fiber intake has no impact on your health. So there's no need to subject yourself to a higher fiber diet if you don't feel good on that diet. Now, fiber and carbon taken in the diet don't share this direct relationship but oftentimes what you'll see is when someone's doing a ketogenic diet their fiber intake may become a little bit lower if that ends up being you that's nothing to necessarily worry about. Now, I do think it's a good idea to make sure that you're not eating a unhealthy version of a low carb or ketogenic diet and making sure that you get ample amounts of vegetables in your diets in your diet and some fruits. But when you look at the data comparatively vegetarian diets do tend to have a higher fiber intake than lower carb diets but what that means I think is up for debate. And then finally, if you're someone looking for digestive relief employing a low carb or ketogenic diet if we look at a low FODMAP diet as a proxy we see that those on a low FODMAP diet a diet that by design reduces the amount of fermentable carbohydrates. So many forms of fruits and vegetables are reduced on a low FODMAP diet. We actually see that that can be very helpful for many people with digestive maladies like gas, bloating, constipation, heartburn, diarrhea, loose stools, abdominal pain and what have you. So more evidence showing that a diet that by design restricts foods that feed healthy bacteria can actually cause you to be healthier just tells us that there's quite an ample amount of evidence showing that you do not need to directly feed gut bacteria in order to be healthy. The pots that I put forth in healthy good healthy you is that it's not about just feeding up bacteria and hoping that those gut bacteria make you healthy but rather eating in such a way that makes you the host as healthy as you can be. And when you are healthy as the host that houses the microbiota that the house is your bacteria a healthier host means a healthier environment means healthier bacteria can grow. And that is what you should be focusing on whether it be feeling better on a lower carb or ketogenic type diet or on the other end of the spectrum someone who feels better on a moderate to higher carbohydrate diet. The carbohydrate diet needs to be personalized to the individual. If you as an individual are feeling better on a lower carb diet and that's creating a healthier you and a healthier environment then ostensibly you will see healthier bacteria grow. Conversely, if you're someone who feels better on a higher carb diet then you will likely have a healthier internal ecosystem that will harbor healthier bacteria and that will work well for you. So in short, there is no good evidence to my knowledge and this is after a fairly extensive review of the literature showing that a low carb or ketogenic diet is bad for your gut health. In fact, there's more evidence showing that it could be quite good for your gut health but remember not to be dogmatic regarding diet and if you try that type of diet and don't feel well then you may want to try and moderate to higher carb diet and see how you feel. So the answer, no, a low carb or ketogenic diet is not bad for your gut health. This is Dr. Ruscio and hopefully this information helps you get healthy and get back to your life.