A diet that stopped children's seizures was found at the Mayo Clinic in 1921, and it took the director of Airplane! to drag it back out of the textbook seventy years later. Doctors had noticed for centuries that fasting quieted epilepsy. Russell Wilder at the Mayo Clinic worked out why. A body without food runs on ketones, made from fat. So he built a diet that kept the body there while still feeding it. Mostly fat, some protein, almost no carbohydrate. He called it the ketogenic diet, and for years it was a standard treatment for children with epilepsy. Then the anti-seizure drugs arrived, and the diet was quietly dropped. It took work to run and nobody sold it. 1993. Jim Abrahams, who made Airplane!, has a baby son called Charlie having seizures every day. The drugs fail one after another. Abrahams finds the diet in a library book and gets Charlie to Johns Hopkins, one of the few hospitals still using it. Within days the seizures stop. Abrahams set up a foundation, made a film about it starring Meryl Streep, and spent the rest of his life asking why nobody had told him. In 2008 a trial in London finally tested it on children whose epilepsy no drug could control. Four in ten on the diet had their seizures cut by more than half. On usual care, six in a hundred. A plate of fat beat the pharmacy on the hardest cases in children's medicine.A diet that stopped children's seizures was found at the Mayo Clinic in 1921, and it took the director of Airplane! to drag it back out of the textbook seventy years later. Doctors had noticed for centuries that fasting quietened epilepsy. Russell Wilder at the Mayo Clinic worked out why. A body without food runs on ketones, made from fat. So he built a diet that kept the body there while still feeding it. Mostly fat, some protein, almost no carbohydrate. He called it the ketogenic diet, and for years it was a standard treatment for children with epilepsy. Then the anti-seizure drugs arrived, and the diet was quietly dropped. It took work to run and nobody sold it. 1993. Jim Abrahams, who made Airplane!, has a baby son called Charlie having seizures every day. The drugs fail one after another. Abrahams finds the diet in a library book and gets Charlie to Johns Hopkins, one of the few hospitals still using it. Within days the seizures stop. Abrahams set up a foundation, made a film about it starring Meryl Streep, and spent the rest of his life asking why nobody had told him. In 2008 a trial in London finally tested it on children whose epilepsy no drug could control. Four in ten on the diet had their seizures cut by more than half. On usual care, six in a hundred. A plate of fat beat the pharmacy on the hardest cases in children's medicine. It is still offered only after at least two drugs have failed.
— Sama Hoole (@SamaHoole) October 31, 2026
It is still offered only after at least two drugs have failed.
