More health benefits for a low carb diet - protection against mitochondrial mallfunction

Here is another one to think about with respect to the protective aspects of a low carb / primal / paleo diet (I know it is mice and we are not mice....but still worth thinking about):

Ketogenic diet slows down mitochondrial myopathy progression in mice

Mitochondrial dysfunction is a major cause of neurodegenerative and neuromuscular diseases of adult age and of multisystem disorders of childhood. However, no effective treatment exists for these progressive disorders. Cell culture studies suggested that ketogenic diet, with low glucose and high fat content, could select against cells or mitochondria with mutant mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), but proper patient trials are still lacking. We studied here the transgenic Deletor mice, a disease model for progressive late-onset mitochondrial myopathy, accumulating mtDNA deletions during aging and manifesting subtle progressive respiratory chain deficiency. We found that these mice have wide-spread lipidomic and metabolite changes, including abnormal plasma phospholipid and free amino acid levels and ketone body production. We treated these mice with presymptomatic long-term and post-symptomatic shorter term ketogenic diet. The effects of the diet for disease progression were followed by morphological, metabolomic and lipidomic tools. We show here that the diet decreased the amount of cytochrome-c-oxidase negative muscle fibers, a key feature in mitochondrial respiratory chain deficiencies, and prevented completely the formation of the mitochondrial ultrastructural abnormalities in the muscle. Furthermore, most of the metabolic and lipidomic changes were cured by the diet to wildtype levels. The diet did not, however, significantly affect the mtDNA quality or quantity, but rather induced mitochondrial biogenesis and restored liver lipid levels. Our results show that mitochondrial myopathy induces widespread metabolic changes, and that ketogenic diet can slow down progression of the disease in mice. These results suggest that ketogenic diet may be useful for mitochondrial late-onset myopathies.