There was a report in the Wall Street Journal last week about a diet that is sweeping through the White House, from RFK Jr. to Vice President Vance, but also Howard Lutnik and others. The tweets focused on beef and saurkraut.

Before I even read the piece, I knew the health influencer behind it was Dr. Sean O’Mara. O’Mara is YouTube-famous for promoting anti-inflammatory diets that claim to burn visceral fat around the organs. His top recommendations for doing this are periods of fasting (not just a shortened daily eating window, but potentially days of consuming no calories whatsoever) and a diet rich in ruminant meat — particularly beef — and fermented foods, in order to develop a robust gut microbiome.

Because of the explosion of Ozempic-style weight-loss drugs, some outlets are claiming the story must be false. While it is true that some people in the world are surely attributing to sudden-onset discipline what was really caused by pharmaceutical miracles, I tend to buy this story.

The thing about O’Mara’s diet is that it should lead people into a state near constant ketosis. The fat will melt away if you go for long periods without eating and you stick to meat and fermented cabbage or carrots when you do eat.

The point of these diets is that ketosis causes satiety and keeps energy high. A “diet” in which you simply cut calories on a standard American diet is likely to cause a metabolic crash — in which your body demands either more food or more sleep.  The other thing that a fasting-based, ketogenic diet will promise is mental clarity. My guess is that a lot of the people in the White House would fear the rumors that GLP-1 drugs cause “brain fog” or dampen some of the other hormone-driven reward systems in the body.