Despite questionable benefits for weight loss and a poorly understood propensity for causing weird rashes, the ketogenic diet has remained an article of faith for gym rats, fitness influencers, and ambitious nerds hoping to one day look like they’ve been cast in a Marvel movie. But Keto’s defenders faced a serious setback this March with the retraction of a controversial peer-reviewed study—walked back to little fanfare earlier this spring, but now the subject of a detailed postmortem by Avery Orrall at the science news nonprofit Retraction Watch. The retracted study asserted that arterial plaque build-up recorded in the circulatory systems of 100 otherwise healthy participants, all following ketogenic diets, somehow bore no relationship to the elevated cholesterol levels associated with keto’s low-carb, high-fat weight-loss strategy. Those counterintuitive findings, naturally, had been fiercely debated ever since the study was first published by the Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Advances on April 7, 2025.
‘A collective mess’ As UC Berkeley metabolism researcher Kevin Klatt told Wired back then, the ensuing drama was “a collective mess” exacerbated by the social media prowess of the study’s coauthor, entrepreneur Dave Feldman, “a conflicted party with no training in the biomedical sciences.”
