A physician said a recent dementia trial found the ketogenic diet beat the American Heart Association diet across every marker the study tracked, a result that looks strong on paper but still stops short of proving better memory or thinking in daily life. The same update also took aim at the AHA plan’s emphasis on canola oil, a point that lands squarely in keto circles where fat quality and carbohydrate restriction are the whole game.
The backdrop matters here. A BEAT-AD protocol, drafted on Feb. 16, 2018, set out to test a ketogenic diet against a low-fat diet in Alzheimer’s disease under the leadership of Suzanne Craft, PhD, of Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with Laura Baker, PhD, also named in the study plan. The protocol was funded by the National Institute on Aging, and trial listings described it as a 16-week study looking for 120 participants.
That earlier design helps explain why the new result is being watched so closely, but it also shows why caution still rules. A systematic review in Frontiers in Neurology on Feb. 9, 2023, found ketogenic interventions in mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease had mixed but promising evidence. Back in June 2019, the University of Washington Memory and Brain Wellness Center said there was not enough evidence to recommend keto as an Alzheimer’s treatment.
More recent work has added fuel without settling the question. Nature Communications Medicine reported on Jan. 9, 2025, that a modified Mediterranean ketogenic diet reversed the peripheral lipid signature of Alzheimer’s disease in humans. Nature published a July 1, 2024, metabolomics analysis showing a Mediterranean ketogenic diet may mitigate risk factors linked to Alzheimer’s disease. ClinicalTrials.gov also lists a randomized, double-blind, placebo-parallel, multicenter China study of a ketogenic diet in mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease, which shows the field is still moving.
For keto readers, the practical contrast with the AHA diet is easy to understand: keto pushes carbs low enough to drive ketosis and leans hard on fat, while the AHA style is lower fat, broader on carbs, and built around a very different food pattern. That makes the ketogenic approach harder to live with for some families, but it also makes the marker-level win more interesting, because the real unanswered question is whether those biomarker shifts can translate into something patients and caregivers actually feel.
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