Metro doctor's study finds keto diet may worsen osteoarthritis
OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) - The Ketogenic diet has been a famous way for people to try losing weight. However, if you have osteoarthritis, one metro doctor and researcher said it’s a diet you might want to stay away from.
"I used to recommend a ketogenic diet for weight loss and now I don't,” Dr. Matlock Jeffries with the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation said.
Jeffries is the director of the foundations arthritis research unit. For the first time in his career, he said findings from his study have made him change his advice to patients. He’s now telling his osteoarthritis, or OA, patients, to stray away from keto.
"You really ought to go towards a more Mediterranean diet or something that we have good data helps arthritis as well as weight loss,” he said.
Famous for weight loss, keto is a very low, or even no carb diet that turns away from things like bread and rice. Instead, it pushes more fats like meat, eggs or nuts. Jeffries said a lot of OA patients deal with being overweight, which make symptoms worse. So, he and his patients often talk about changing their diets up. So, he decided to test it with mice on keto diets, thinking that combined with weight loss would improve their OA compared to mice on regular diets. However, he found the exact opposite and that it got worse. Why that’s the case? They’re not entirely sure yet.
"We have some early hints that it might be inducing inflammation,” he said.
The diet has shown in the past that it helps patients with multiple sclerosis and pediatric seizures. These stunning results though, have brought Jeffries to want to dig deeper into the complex disease.
"We're going to try to chase that with future grants,” he said.
Jeffries study went on for about a couple years and was published in the Journal of the American College of Rheumatology. He said Keto alone isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the general population, but urges people to be cautious. He also still urges OA patients to manage their weight.