What To Say To The Low Carb Keto Critic: Helping You Debunk Common Misconceptions

Change the way you eat, and everyone around you suddenly becomes a nutrition expert.

The moment someone notices the steak without the sides, or your doctor asks what changed because your blood work improved, the opinions start arriving. Most come from a good place. People genuinely worry because they have heard the same messages we all grew up with. On a recent episode of Lessons from the Ketoverse, we walked through the criticisms we hear most often and how we answer them, calmly, from research and lived results rather than from defensiveness.

One thing before we start: you never have to win these conversations. Your results will speak louder than any argument. But it helps to have answers ready, so here is your trail guide.

"All that saturated fat will give you a heart attack"

This is the big one, and it deserves a real answer. The idea that saturated fat causes heart disease took hold in the 1950s and 60s, driven largely by Ancel Keys and observational research, long before anyone ran the kind of rigorous randomized controlled trials we would demand of that claim today. The science has been contested ever since, and it is far less settled than the headlines suggest.

What we have both come to believe, after years down this research rabbit hole, is that the more compelling story of heart disease runs through insulin resistance: chronically elevated blood sugar and insulin, driven by decades of sugar, refined starch, and ultra-processed food. That is the mechanism we watched play out in our own blood work, in the wrong direction, and then, after changing how we eat, dramatically in the right direction.

Our answer to the critic is simple: here is my before, here is my after, and here is my doctor saying keep doing whatever you are doing. Then we invite them to do their own reading rather than take our word for it.

"You'll get scurvy without fruits and vegetables"

We have been waiting for the scurvy for a couple of years now. Still nothing.

Here is what surprised us in the research: fresh meat, especially organ meat like liver, does contain vitamin C, and people eating very low carb appear to need less of it than someone running on a high sugar diet. Scurvy was historically a disease of sailors living on preserved rations like hardtack, not of people eating fresh meat. And plenty of us get vitamin C from simple additions anyway; a daily squeeze of fresh lemon in water covers a lot of ground. Carbs compete with the same receptors that absorb vitamin C. You will likely need more vitamin C the more carbs you consume.

The honest answer to this one is an invitation: check back with me in a year. The critics have been checking back with us for two, and dinner keeps being delicious.

"You need fibre, or you'll be constipated forever"

Most people believe fibre is essential for regularity, but very few can say why. They just know they have always been told so.

Here is what made us question it: a small but striking study took people suffering from constipation and split them into groups eating more fiber, less fiber, or none at all. The no fiber group improved the most, by a wide margin. The researcher's analogy stuck with us: treating constipation with more fiber can be like treating a traffic jam by adding more cars.

That does not mean fiber is evil or that vegetables cannot be part of a healthy plate. One of us happily uses soaked chia and flax alongside Greek yogurt every day. It means "required" is doing a lot of unearned work in that criticism, and digestive health on a well-built low-carb diet is, for many of us, better than it ever was before. In one case in this household, years of IBS ended entirely.

"I could never give up ______ (insert favourite food here). What about pizza? What about ice cream?"

Notice something about this one: it is not actually a criticism of you. Nobody asked them to change anything. It is the sound of someone imagining their own climb and feeling daunted, and it deserves kindness.

Our answer: then don't give up the ice cream. Start with the things you eat out of convenience rather than love, the packaged foods you would not miss. Swap in foods you were told were off limits that turn out to be wonderful, like eggs, ground beef, and real butter. Leave your favourite thing for last, or never give it up entirely.

And here is the secret nobody believes until they live it: the cravings fade on their own. After a few months of eating this way, a bite of cake tastes overwhelmingly sweet, and one spoonful is genuinely enough. It is not willpower. Your taste and your hunger signals recalibrate. We would also gently say to hosts and family: offering us dessert six times in an afternoon is like offering a scotch to a friend who quit drinking. We are not deprived, we are content, and the kindest support is simply letting us be.

"Your diet sounds so boring"

From the outside, eating from a shorter list of foods looks like monotony. From the inside, something else has happened: the relationship with food has changed.

Much of what we call variety is really entertainment eating, a parade of packages and flavours engineered to keep us reaching for more. Somewhere between 17 and 23 eating occasions a day is now common when you count every snack. When food becomes fuel first, meals get simpler, and the entertainment moves to better places: the walk after dinner, the energy to actually do things, the absence of the afternoon crash.

And simple does not mean joyless. A perfectly cooked steak, eggs done a new way, and a great taco night with the family. We eat wonderfully. We just no longer need the middle aisles of the grocery store to keep us amused.

"It's way too expensive"

This one falls apart with math. Yes, good meat costs more per package than boxed food. But count everything: you eat far fewer meals because the food is satiating, the snacks disappear from the cart entirely, and the daily fast food and takeout stops, which for many households quietly add hundreds of dollars a month, mostly vanish because you are rarely hungry and home cooking tastes better.

One friend did this math out loud with us: two people, one fast food stop each per day, roughly forty dollars a day that never got counted as food budget. Add that to the grocery bill, and the comparison flips completely. Our total food spending is about what it was before. It just buys much better food now, and much better health.

"There's no science behind it. It's a fad."

When someone cites an article claiming there are no rigorous trials proving this way of eating is healthy, we like to ask a friendly question in return: Can you show me the randomized controlled trial proving the Standard American Diet (SAD) is healthy? There isn't one. Meanwhile, roughly 40 percent of adults are prediabetic or diabetic, eating the conventional way. The default diet does not get to claim the scientific high ground.

Much of nutrition science rests on food frequency surveys, asking people to recall what they ate over months or years, which even the researchers admit is unreliable. So we hold every study, including ones that flatter our side, to the same standard, and we anchor on the one experiment that matters most: n equals one, run carefully, with real blood work, in partnership with a doctor. Get your baseline tested. Make your changes. Test again. Numbers are hard to argue with, in either direction.

The two kinds of critics

Over time, you learn to tell them apart. The first kind is genuinely curious: they have noticed your energy, your weight, your calm, and their questions are a door opening. Give those people everything, patiently, and watch some of them transform over the next couple of years. The second kind is only looking for the gotcha. Smile, stay kind, and let your results do the talking. You cannot climb anyone else's mountain for them.

And that wish we keep coming back to: if everyone could feel, even for one day, what genuinely good health feels like, most of these conversations would end themselves. Until then, walk the walk, share generously when asked, and keep climbing.

If you would like a guide in your corner for those conversations and for the climb behind them, that is what we do at Ascent. You are the climber. We carry the map.

Want to go deeper? Listen to the full conversation on Lessons from the Ketoverse, available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

This article shares personal experience and general education. It is not medical advice. Always work with your healthcare provider on significant dietary changes, and never start, stop or adjust medication without them.