Background and history of the ketogenic diet
The concept of Ketogenic diet originates from fasting; indeed, it was a dietary regime developed by physicians in order to mimic it. It all started in 1921 when the Mayo Clinic was passing through a critical point as physicians tried to come up with new dietary solutions that can be as successful as fasting in treating epilepsy. Many breakthroughs and discussions were witnessed when a doctor suggested applying The Ketogenic diet as an alternative to capture the same effects of fasting. And if we look back at history, we will find that the human kind had always suffered from epilepsy since the primitive stages of life on earth. However, due to illiteracy and due to the ignorance of humans at all the levels, people used to believe that epilepsy was rather due to the presence of supernatural effects of evil spirits. The legend of epilepsy as an evil attack was only changed with Hippocrates, the Greek Physician. Hippocrates was the first to declare that Epilepsy was a biological rather than an evil spiritual illness and Hippocrates was the first to discover that fasting was the only means to control that illness. Hippocrates wasn’t the only physicians were also unfolded after him. And thanks to the hard work and continuous experiments as well as research, Ketogenic diet found its way to the daily habits of people around the globe. The breakthrough of the Ketogenic diet might have taken place exactly at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Marie and Guelpa, two French doctors helped around twenty people in minimizing the effects of their own epileptic conditions and recorded their healing process in a detailed report. And after a short time, similar experiences and conclusion were found and revealed in the United States when a number of doctors experimented fasting in order to improve the health conditions of their patients. And to better understand the gradual transition from the fasting method to the dieting method, it is crucial to find out the connecting thread between them. The scientist William Lennox, who belonged to Harvard’s Medical school, dedicated his life to studying the relationship between dieting and fasting. William Lenox found out that seizures started subsiding after around three days. He deduced that after following a specific Ketogenic diet, the human body started fuelling itself on its fat. And it was in the year 1921 that Dr. Rollin Woodyatt, an endocrinologist, found out that the betahydroxybutyric and acetone were two elements that were found in patients who followed a specific diet high in fats and low in carbohydrates. And beta hydroxybuttyric and acetone are known for belonging to the Ketogenic family. And later Dr. Wilder suggested that the human body can produce similar ketone elements within our blood similar to the elements produced in fasting. And with this discovery, Wilder gave the new diet a name and called it the Ketogenic diet. As the Ketogenic diet positively impacted the human body, it soon became an unquestionable weapon in the medical fight against epilepsy. The efficacy of the Ketogenic diet was proved in the practical level within the industry of pharmacology starting from 1938 when the first anti epileptic drugs were finally released to the market. And over the following thirty years, Ketogenic diet started to spread out to allow epileptic patients to live their lives without the need to andhere to a severe and a very strict dietary regime. Later, in 1971, and oil diet was developed. Scientists tried to discover more proprieties of the Ketogenic diet so that it wouldn’t be consecrated to epileptic patients. And it took a few years to develop the Ketogenic diet and to prove that it not only a medicinal dieting method, but rather an entire style of life.
