A legitimate, closely supervised medical therapy — decades before it became a mainstream wellness trend.
Before it was a mainstream weight-loss trend, the ketogenic diet had a very different original purpose: a medically supervised treatment for drug-resistant epilepsy, developed at the Mayo Clinic in the 1920s, decades before "keto" became a wellness buzzword.
Very low carbohydrate intake shifts the body into producing ketones for fuel instead of glucose — in some patients, particularly children with epilepsy not responding to medication, this metabolic shift meaningfully reduced seizure frequency, and medically supervised ketogenic therapy remains in clinical use for this purpose today.
The original medical protocol was far stricter and more closely monitored (with a medical team tracking ketone levels and nutritional adequacy) than most people following keto for weight loss today — a reminder that a legitimate medical therapy and a popular wellness diet using the same underlying mechanism aren't automatically the same level of rigour or risk.
See our FAD vs. Keto comparison for how the modern, general-population version of this diet compares to THE FAD's scoring model.