High-fat, low-carb ketogenic (“keto”) diets are gaining praise as an effective tool for battling obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

“Keto diets have been shown to significantly improve insulin resistance, a hallmark of diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s,” said Jonny Bowden Ph.D., a nutritionist and expert on diet and weight loss. “They also improve many markers that are considered risks for heart disease, such as triglycerides which drop like a rock on a keto diet.”

For decades, we were told to eat a high-carb, low-fat diet. Prior to the 1920s, Bowden says that Americans ate lard, butter, beef, and cheese but both strokes and heart attacks were less common than they are now. He explains that when you eat sugar, your body becomes adept at using sugar for fuel and lets the fat store in the body.

On the keto diet, your body uses stored fat as a fuel. While the keto diet resembles the Atkins diet, it’s more sophisticated because we now recommend higher quality fats such as Malaysian palm oil, coconut oil, olive oil, butter and dairy fat, and egg yolks.