My whole point in even posting the story here is that they thought this was a whole different diet from regular keto, in that you really could eat it as a "plant based diet", since that seems to be the trendy buzz-word terminology to include all the different permutations of diet that are derived mostly from plants, whether they call themselves vegan, vegetarian, ovo-lacto-pescatarian or some combination of those exceptions to strict vegetarianism/veganism.
[Ironically, the truth of the matter is that SAD is for all intents and purposes plant based too, since practically everything you can buy these days is made from corn, wheat and/or soy, or contains either corn, wheat, or soy. The typical fast food meal is still based almost entirely on plants - sure there's a burger or some chicken nuggets in there somewhere, but we've seen the meals, know the ingredients used, done the math, and it's obvious that other than that little patty of meat or the bits of mechanically separated and glued back together bits of chicken in the nuggets, it's all plant derived carbs, and plant derived oils - hence, even the epitome of what's considered to be the worst diet possible is still plant based.]
But aside from that fact, the ketotorian diet was meant to appeal to the righteous eaters among us, those who proudly proclaim that they don't eat meats (beef, pork, chicken), that they're some permutation of "-tarian", or the most righteous of all, vegan. Whatever the case, they're sure they're eating a
healthy plant based diet, meaning it's composed mostly of plants, and therefore the key to perfect health and perfect weight control. Which of course should cause one to question why they'd ever need a keto diet, if merely eating some version of a plant based diet is the key to all that is good...
And yet apparently there must have been some kind of jealousy there that people who eat meat can do a keto diet and lose weight quickly, or there would never have been a book written about doing keto on a plant based diet.
I had just about decided it would be nearly impossible to eat a vegan version of keto without nearly starving yourself to death (despite eating 75% fats), but went out searching for information on it, and came across
this page of vegan keto recipes made without soy. Soy products were the big thing that I thought would probably make vegan keto nearly impossible, mainly because the net carbs are so high on those - you'd be using so much of your net carb count just on your protein that you wouldn't have enough carbs left over for more than a little of the allowed nut milk, and a handful or two of greens. But at least the recipes on there showed it was possible.
The thing that disturbed me about the vegan keto without soy page though is that they're counting heavily on the protein content of vegetables in most of the recipes. They're counting on that measly 2.5 g of protein in a cup of broccoli, or 1 g of protein in a cup of spinach to help see them through. Flax, hemp, and chia seeds do a good bit better on the protein count, but an ounce (compared to meat, that's a lot of any one of those to eat at one sitting) still only has about 10 g protein.
So I still don't see it as a sustainable way of eating. We have members here who have been eating carnivore for years. I somehow doubt that anyone doing ketotarian will be able to sustain such a low protein diet for more than a few months (if that long), especially if they're vegan.
The real problem is that if Ketotarian ends up being lumped in with regular keto (you know that will happen), we're likely to see even more media backlash against the sustainability and safety of keto, just because so many who are attempting to do it without animal products end up worse off in the end.