Remember, you can only consume 40% of your caloric intake in proteins ~ the rest has to be in carbs or fats/oils, or a combination of both.
What is most abusive is denying children fats/oils and force feeding them a diet made up mostly of starches and sugars.
I'd like to consider myself nutritionally aware, but I hadn't heard of this one, except once. It was the book Into The Wild, where is suggested that his diet of ground animals was making him skinny because the animals didn't have enough fat.
The sort of kind of “theory and origin” of this diet as ‘splained to us at Hopkins (though we had already heard of it, and suggested to our local neurological deity - who pooh-poohed it) is that it had been observed that some seizures respond to fasting.
However fasting has this side effect where you starve to death. (See “Albigenisians” for details.) ;-)
So some doc(s) asked himself(themselves), “How can we fool the body into thinking it’s fasting?” And the answer was give protein for all the stuff protein does and fats for energy, etc. Withhold carbs so the body keeps thinking it’s starving and runs on a fat-based rather than a sugar based internal economy.
It’s tricky to run. I got so I could detect hypoglycemia by observation and taking my kid’s pulse. One 12/23 she had a tummy bug AND a cold and got very acidotic. She was hyperventilating. So we spent a night in the hospital getting her gasses right. If you didn’t HAVE to try this at home, I’d say don’t try it at home.
The diet was run by a neurologist and a dietitian at JHU and we weighed EVERYTHING our kid ate on a gram scale. But the dietitian had worked out a scheme of three basic menus with about 30 variation and substitutions for each scheme, including a kind of bogus ice cream!
So we were able to supply a LOT of variety and interest in the meals and have celebrations and so forth.
There was probably a slight retardation of growth and weight gain, but it was slight and, since my kid is now 5’9” or so, I’d say the height problem kind of was resolved, a little, maybe.
What was most thrilling to us was to watch her ‘intellect’ move into high gear in what looked like an effort to make up for lost learning time. Her rate of language gain was amazing to behold. And we still talk a little in sign, now and again.
It was a heck of a ride!
What rule book is that in ?
This type of diet, with less fat and much more water, is an excellent weight loss diet (The Doctor's Quick Weight Loss Diet - Stillman/Baker). Expensive, but it works.
If it is so successful in controlling epilepsy, it deserves wider use.