dzlvur sorry about the loss of your brother and best friend.

I agree that not everyone needs to be on a keto diet. Probably only those of us that are metabolically challenged with insulin resistance and elevated fasting insulin levels. Probably only two out of three adults.

Normal diet? My parents if they were alive today would be around 100 years old. I'm 66. My "normal" diet when I was 6 years old was quite different than what a six year old today would be. And my parents diet as 6 year olds was a world away from what their parents diet would have been at six years old.

I remember in first grade an apple and an orange in a brown paper bag at school for Christmas was a treat. There was some hard candy in there too and maybe a popcorn ball covered in sweet syrup. But we did not have a big bowl of fruit sitting on the table at home year round. Oh there were apples in the store in the winter but they were expensive and truly were a treat. Now by the time I was a teenager that had pretty much changed. But contrast that to my parents young years before refrigeration. I can remember going to the commercial "ice house" (which was no longer an ice house but a refrigerated storage) to pick up bags of potatoes that dad had paid a cold storage locker fee to keep potatoes through the winter. They didn't always make it. But the point is in my dads time as a young kid only way they had fruit in the winter was if they painstakingly wrapped apples from their own tree that fall in newspaper and stored them in their own root cellar. There was no fruit at the grocery store other than maybe in season. If you wanted fruit in the winter you grabbed a glass jar of it that your mom had canned the fall before.

Just a couple of generations ago the food they ate little resembled what we call food today. I can remember my dad saying when he was a kid they did not have the wide variety of food we have now. They ate what they had. Green stuff came out of the garden or along fence lines, not from the grocery store. He said if peas were in season, they ate lots of peas. When potatoes came out of the ground they ate lots of potatoes. When they butchered when the weather turned cool they ate lots of pork or beef. In the winter they ate lots of salted pork.

The generation before me ate seasonally when they were young. My grandpas generation did not have year round fruit at all, other than what they could store themselves from their own harvest. A generation before that fruit was a treat only eaten in season once a year. An orange was unheard of unless you lived in the south. And an orange was not the size of a grapefruit. It was small when I was a kid. Airplanes and banana boats did not bring bananas from South America. Food did not come out of a box. You either picked it or killed it. I remember my dad telling of the very first time he ate breakfast cereal. A guy traveling around promoting it gave out small boxes to kids. He thought it was the best thing he ever tasted. It might have been Wheaties, can't remember for sure, but it was definitely not coated in sugar like so much of today's kids cereals.

Ever read "Little House on the Prairie"? Been a long time ago but as I recall sugar was a definite treat that was used sparingly in pioneer days because it was expensive. A family might buy a few pounds a year. Probably single digit pounds. Now Americans eat something like 60 pounds a year??? Can't remember the figure I read. Our bodies were never designed to consume that amount of sugar. My grandpa would have eaten stone ground wheat for bread. He might have had a little sugar in his coffee if that. He might have had a popcorn ball covered in sugar for Christmas. There would have been NO leafy greens all winter long. Dock and Poke would be the early spring greens that even I remember from my childhood. We might have had a little iceberg lettuce through the winter but my parents nor grandparents would have never been eating leafy greens through the winter nor fruit in abundance.

What is considered a "normal" or "healthy" diet today would look nothing like what was eaten a hundred, two hundred or three hundred years ago. I would argue today's so called "normal" diet is the fad diet. What humans historically ate was much different. It did not come out of a box nor be delivered to the grocery store via airplane or speedy trucks.

When I was in grade school there might have been one fat kid in each grade class. Now look around. When I was a kid my mom would say "don't eat that, it will spoil your dinner". I bet I heard that hundreds of times. Now it is "have a snack". At school they get a snack. When I was a kid we ate three meals a day. Now many people eat all day long. Cokes were 7 oz and NuGrape was 10 or 12 oz. Now a giant drink of sugar is 30 ounces or more and people sip it all day long keeping their insulin levels through the roof all day long, not just raised at meals.

I'm not trying to be argumentative. Just pointing out that our modern diet is a far cry from what humans have historically eaten. I don't think we are designed to process all the sugar and fructose that we do. It is hard on us, and done long enough makes us sick. I am an N=1 experiment in that department. I got sick eating what I did and I cured my sickness by what I eat now.

Our modern diet is mostly a concoction of marketing, not healthy eating. That is my opinion and that is all it is.

John