{"id":987658,"date":"2026-05-27T08:28:22","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T08:28:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/987658\/"},"modified":"2026-05-27T08:28:22","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T08:28:22","slug":"journal-retracts-controversial-study-claiming-keto-diets-dont-clog-arteries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/987658\/","title":{"rendered":"Journal Retracts Controversial Study Claiming Keto Diets Don\u2019t Clog Arteries"},"content":{"rendered":"

Despite questionable<\/a> benefits for weight loss and a poorly understood propensity for causing weird rashes<\/a>, the ketogenic diet has remained an article of faith for gym rats, fitness influencers, and ambitious nerds hoping to one day look like they\u2019ve been cast in a Marvel movie.<\/p>\n

But Keto\u2019s defenders faced a serious setback this March with the retraction<\/a> of a controversial peer-reviewed study\u2014walked back to little fanfare earlier this spring, but now the subject of a detailed postmortem<\/a> by Avery Orrall at the science news nonprofit Retraction Watch.<\/p>\n

The retracted study asserted that arterial plaque build-up recorded in the circulatory systems of 100 otherwise healthy participants, all following ketogenic diets, somehow bore no relationship to the elevated cholesterol levels associated with keto\u2019s low-carb, high-fat weight-loss strategy. Those counterintuitive findings, naturally, had been fiercely debated ever since the study was first published by the Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Advances on April 7, 2025.<\/p>\n

\u2018A collective mess\u2019 <\/p>\n

As UC Berkeley metabolism researcher Kevin Klatt told<\/a> Wired back then, the ensuing drama was \u201ca collective mess\u201d exacerbated by the social media prowess of the study\u2019s coauthor, entrepreneur<\/a> Dave Feldman, \u201ca conflicted party with no training in the biomedical sciences.\u201d<\/p>\n

Medical professionals who spoke to Retraction Watch were even harsher in their assessment. Michael Mindrum, an internal medicine specialist and an assistant professor with Dalhousie University, described<\/a> Feldman and his coauthor Nicholas Norwitz as \u201csocial media influencers\u201d who would \u201ctry to fit whatever data is there into their \u2018narrative.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018A number of anomalies\u2019 <\/p>\n

Norwitz, a Harvard- and Oxford-trained doctor, has since taken<\/a> credit for the retraction, asserting on Substack that he and his colleagues had actually asked the journal to take down the article themselves\u2014after Feldman performed \u201ca deeper analysis and found a number of anomalies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, their critics had been leveling allegations of \u201cselective\u201d data reporting and questionable statistical methods since nearly the beginning, including a letter<\/a> published by JACC: Advances one month after their study ran. According to the letter\u2019s authors, public health researchers Miguel L\u00f3pez-Moreno and Jos\u00e9 Francisco L\u00f3pez-Gil, the study appeared to use questionably serious control groups to test against its population of keto dieters, \u201coften involving very small subgroups (e.g., n = 17).\u201d<\/p>\n

Undaunted by the haters, Norwitz, Feldman, and other members of their team have already published a preprint reanalyzing<\/a> data from their retracted paper. They\u2019re currently<\/a> promoting<\/a> their ongoing keto research<\/a> on X.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Despite questionable benefits for weight loss and a poorly understood propensity for causing weird rashes, the ketogenic diet…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":987659,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4318],"tags":[1579,39278,26741,105,218437,4434,16,15],"class_list":["post-987658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nutrition","tag-cholesterol","tag-controversy","tag-diets","tag-health","tag-keto","tag-nutrition","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116645600689185063","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/987658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=987658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/987658\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/987659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=987658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=987658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=987658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}