What Is the Ketogenic Diet for Epilepsy? Who Should Think About Trying the Ketogenic Diet? What Foods Can Your Child Eat? How Does It Work? What Are the Side Effects? Is the Ketogenic Diet Right for Your Child? Could the solution to your child's epilepsy be a diet loaded with butter, cream, oils, and mayo? It might sound weird -- and maybe not so appetizing -- but the ketogenic diet is real. And in many kids, it works. But the super high-fat, super low-carb ketogenic diet is not for everyone. It's strict and complicated. And it's not really "healthy" in the normal sense. If you're considering it, you need to think through how it affects your child's life -- and the impact on the whole family. Who Should Think About Trying the Ketogenic Diet? Some parents of children with epilepsy are skeptical of the ketogenic diet when they first hear about it.

A diet that can control epilepsy and stop seizures without any medication? It almost sounds like a scam. But the ketogenic diet is real and legitimate. The catch is that it's demanding and hard to follow. In fact, it is so difficult to follow that most doctors recommend it only for people who haven't been able to control their seizures with medicine. The ketogenic diet has been curbing seizures since it was first developed in the 1920s. About half of kids who follow it have a big drop in how many they get. As many as 1 in 7 stop having seizures completely. The diet helps with many types of epilepsy, but works especially well with Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, myoclonic astatic epilepsy (Doose syndrome), and others. Some pediatric epilepsy syndromes respond very well to the ketogenic diet and most adult epilepsies do not. Because the ketogenic diet is so demanding, doctors usually only recommend it if a child has already tried two or three medications and they haven't worked.

When the diet works, kids can often lower their medication doses or Supraketo.org stop taking them. What's more, most kids who stay on the ketogenic diet for at least 2 years have a good chance of becoming seizure free -- even after they go back to eating normally. What Foods Can Your Child Eat? Your child's diet will have a lot of fat. To put it in perspective, in a healthy diet for kids, about 25% to 40% of calories come from fat. In the ketogenic diet, about 80% to 90% of calories come from fat. So your child's meals are loaded with fats while portions of protein and especially carbs are small. In the typical ketogenic diet, kids get three to four times as much fat at each meal compared to carbs and protein combined. What does that mean in practice? Most high-carb foods -- like bread, Supraketo.org pasta, kummeling.nl sweets, and more -- are off the menu.

Your doctor Keto by Supraketo will usually start with this first, but there are also modifications. If it works, you can usually step down to more of a modified Atkins and slow introduce carbs. This usually involves carb counting and monitoring ratio of carbs to fats. Your child may start the diet in the hospital so nurses and doctors can observe the first few days. They will probably need to go without any food for 36 to 48 hours before beginning the diet. After that, food is increased over a few days. This diet does not provide all the vitamins a body needs, so your child will probably have to take sugar-free vitamin supplements. How Does It Work? Even though it's been around for about a hundred years, we still don't know. Many experts believed it had to do with a process called ketosis. That's where the diet's name comes from. Ketosis happens when your body runs out of carbohydrates to burn for energy and burns fat instead.