The ketogenic diet is an extremely low-carb diet that consists of almost no carbohydrates, a moderate amount of protein and a lot of fat. It has now been well documented that this treatment can have a beneficial effect on epilepsy in children.
Studies in recent years have also shown that the diet works for some adults with intractable epilepsy.
When you switch from a normal diet to a ketogenic diet, major changes occur, both in the intestinal flora and in metabolizing energy in the body. The cells switch from producing energy from glucose to making energy from fat.
The ketogenic diet involves large-scale re-regulating of a number of molecular mechanisms in the body. And they can in turn cause a cascade of other changes downstream in our bodily systems.
So given all these complicated processes, what reduces the epileptic seizures in some people?
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“One hypothesis,” says [researcher Kaja] Selmer, “is that you change the bacterial flora in the gut and that this in turn affects the epigenetic pattern. We didn’t examine intestinal flora in this study, but will be doing so in another study on children.”
