One diet is being praised by leading health experts as an effective tool in battling the epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. That diet is the keto diet and experts say it even helps improve brain health, crucial to the fight against Alzheimer’s.

The keto diet is a high fat, low carb eating program and may be the key to lowering risk for developing diseases.

“Keto diets have been shown, in peer-reviewed studies, to significantly improve insulin resistance, a hallmark of diabetes, obesity, heart disease and Alzheimer’s which is now being referred to as type 3 diabetes,” Jonny Bowden Ph.D., a nationally known board-certified nutritionist and expert on diet and weight loss tells Newsmax. “They also improve many markers that are considered risks for heart disease such as triglycerides which drop like a rock on a keto diet.”

Bowden added that Dr. David Perlmutter, an integrative neurologist and author of “Grain Brain,” has emphatically stated that he believes the ketogenic diet is ideal for brain health. And, although the research is still emerging on this, keto diets may have some anti-cancer power since cancer cells feed on sugar, and the keto diet is pretty much no sugar.”

Bowden points out that for decades we’ve been to told eat a high carbohydrate/low fat diet by many organizations including the American Heart Association and the government’s Dietary Guidelines.

“But recent evidence — including a scathing review in the British “Journal of Medicine” this year — shows clearly that those dietary guidelines were never based on any science. Meanwhile, these very same guidelines have led to the greatest epidemic of diabetes and obesity we’ve ever known.”

Prior to the 1920’s, Bowden says that Americans ate lard, butter, beef and cheese but both strokes and heart attacks were less common than they are now,

“Maybe it’s time to consider we’ve been demonizing the wrong component of our diet,” he says. “The keto diet literally changes your metabolism so that your body becomes a fat-burning machine. And that’s where health and weight loss begin.”

Bowden, the author of “Living Low Carb” has appeared on the Dr. Oz Show, Fox News, ABC and CBS as an expert on nutrition, 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, like accessing an ATM for energy.

“When you stop eating sugar which as we know is also one of the most inflammatory foods on earth, you start losing all those fat calories you’ve stored for fuel,” says Bowden. “This is what is called nutritional ketosis.”

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, egg yolks and grass-fed beef.

“One hundred percent grass-fed meat has healthier omega-3 fatty acids, fewer inflammatory omega-6’s, and no extras like hormones that come from its factory farmed brethren” says the expert.

Bowden acknowledges that in the beginning it may be tough to stick to a high fat, low carb keto diet, but says that eating a strategic “carb feast” every 10 days can actually keep you in hormonal balance and prevent plateaus that affect all diets.

“When people know they can eat whatever they want on that 10th day, their compliance goes through the roof,” he says. “Once you get through the adaptation period you’ll feel great.”