Fueling a Healthy Mind: Ketones, Fasting & Brain Chemistry with Dr. Georgia Ede

Dive into the power of ketones with Dr. Georgia Ede! Discover how the ketogenic diet can revolutionize brain health and mental wellness. Dr. Ede, who teaches and writes extensively on ketogenic diets for mental health, discusses the intricate balance of neurotransmitters like GABA and glutamate, and how ketones can stabilize and enhance brain function. This episode dives into the benefits of a ketogenic diet, fasting, and the importance of metabolic health in addressing mental health conditions such as anxiety, depression, and even severe conditions like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Perfect for women 40+ looking to enhance their midlife journey. To view full show notes, more information on our guests, resources mentioned in the episode, discount codes, transcripts, and more, visit https://drmindypelz.com/ep292 Dr. Georgia Ede is an internationally recognized expert in nutritional and metabolic psychiatry. Her 25+ years of clinical experience include 7 years at Harvard University, where she was the first psychiatrist to offer nutrition-based approaches to mental health conditions. Dr. Ede co-authored the first inpatient study of the ketogenic diet for serious mental illness, developed the first medically accredited course in ketogenic diets for mental health, and is a recipient of the Baszucki Metabolic Mind Award. She is the author of the bestselling book Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind, recommended by the New York Times Book Review. Check out our fasting membership at resetacademy.drmindypelz.com https://resetacademy.drmindypelz.com/. Please note our medical disclaimer https://drmindypelz.com/medical-disclaimer/.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Mindy Pelz?

  On this episode of the Resetter Podcast, I am bringing you Dr. Georgia Heady. Oh, y'all, this is a good one. Those of you that are fasting, those of you that are wondering about the power of ketones and how it can affect your brain health, this is the conversation. I think I've been wanting to bring you all for years. Let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Georgia, because not only is she fun and smart, but she is a, what she calls herself this, a nutritional and metabolic psychiatrist. Have we not needed one of these for a very

• 0:42Mindy Pelz?

  long time? A psychiatrist that understood the power of nutrition, that understood the power of ketones. She is a trailblazer. So, check this out. She has 25 years of clinical experience, which is so important, because a lot of experts have incredible knowledge, but they don't have clinical experience. Well, that is not Dr. Georgia's issue. And she, her clinical experience is at some pretty brilliant universities, Smith College and Harvard University Health Services. She is really trying to bring to the world the

• 1:19Mindy Pelz?

  message that the ketogenic diet is the savior. It is this magic bullet for so many of the brain challenges and mental health challenges that we have today. So, what you're going to hear in this interview is you're going to hear us talk about the ketone. Let's just unpack this ketone. A lot of you are looking for it. A lot of you are trying to measure it when you fast. But what exactly does it do? And what does it do for your brain? So, we go into that. Then, we unpack the ketogenic diet. Okay. Do you have to completely let go of carbs? Or is a little bit of carbs okay to be able to get these

• 2:04Mindy Pelz?

  ketones? And if so, what kind of carbs? Do you have to eat high fat? All of these questions we talk about when we get to the diet. Then we move into a really cool part of the conversation, which is when you have ketones in your system, what is that doing to your neurotransmitters? So we talked a lot about GABA and glutamate and the balance between the two and where ketones come into effect when it's when we look at it through a neurotransmitter lens. And then we ended up on more application of how does this look every single day? What kind of conditions like Alzheimer's and dementia?

• 2:46Mindy Pelz?

  What can we have that ketogenic diet help us with? It's packed. It's a long conversation. I think you're going to love it. She's entertaining. She's funny. I really encourage you to listen all the way through because a lot of times in these conversations, it, the conversation just gets better and better and better as me and the guest continue poking at each other's brains. But on this one, I really feel like the back half of this conversation will be life-changing for you. So here you go. Dr. Georgia Eadie, and I really want to encourage you to go get her new book, which is called Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind. And if you are a doctor, she does do trainings for doctors on this exact topic.

• 3:31Mindy Pelz?

  And I am just so blessed to have sat down with her and I can't wait for you to listen to this conversation. Enjoy. Welcome to the Resetter Podcast. This podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again. If you have a passion for learning, if you're looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you. Well, let me start off by first welcoming you to the Resetter Podcast, Georgia. I'm so happy you're here. We're get, we're going first name because we've already laughed together.

• 4:14Mindy Pelz?

  You've already told me a joke, so I already feel like I'm in your living room, just having a conversation that I'm dying to have with you. So welcome.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Thank you very much. I know we go way back now, about 10 minutes. And so we're like this.

• 4:29Mindy Pelz?

  We're totally like this and we both are using nutrition to keep our minds as sharp as possible. So this is going to be, I'm sure, a spectacular discussion.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  People are gonna have to slow down the speed in order to really get every ounce of information we're going to share.

• 4:46Mindy Pelz?

  You actually bring up a really interesting point because all of my close friends know that when I fast, they can tell by the cadence in which I talk. They start saying, okay, what day of a fast are you on? And it's because I'm powered up on ketones and I'm like, so most people with podcasts actually do two and three times speed. Perhaps with this podcast, they may have to slow it down to half speed. But here's where I want to start this conversation. When about what 10 years ago, maybe a little bit more, I found the work on the ketogenic

• 5:25Mindy Pelz?

  diet and epilepsy. And I thought at the time, it was really interesting that these magical little molecules called ketones could have such a dramatic effect on something that's incredibly scary like epilepsy. And it was the beginning of a decade-long geek out session in my own brain on why ketones are so incredibly powerful for the mind. And I know you've spent a lot of your life dedicated to the ketogenic diet and applying it to mental health. Where I would like to start this conversation with is the hero of the moment, in my opinion,

• 6:07Mindy Pelz?

  which is the ketone. Can you help everybody understand why this molecule needs to be brought into everybody's life?

• 6:17Speaker 01

  And I love the way you put that, by the way, into everybody's life, not just people's lives, not just people who are suffering from a mental health condition, or a neurological health condition, or a physical health condition, but everybody's lives. And I don't mean that everybody needs to be in ketosis all the time. I just mean that all of us, and I made this point in the book because I am convinced of this by the science and the biology of of cells in our bodies and brains. Everybody needs to spend

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Time in ketosis on a regular basis in order for their cells to heal, maintain themselves, kind of do some recycling, some cleanup, some healing. And, and, and without regular periods in ketosis, then, you know, it's as if you've got a factory where you're running the machinery 24/7 and you're never taking time to clean up and you're never taking time to replace the parts and you're never taking time to give the machinery a break and your employees a break from all the hard work of building and maintaining themselves.

• 7:29Mindy Pelz?

  So my first response to that is what's regular? Because we've got both avid fasters that are going to hear that and be like, oh, so I should fast more. And then we've got reluctant fasters that are like, oh, God, do I have to fast more to get this? And we're going to talk about how diet works in to this. But what, can you give me an idea of what regular is?

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Well, perhaps not the best choice of words. So let me back up. So it doesn't, it doesn't mean that you have to be in ketosis, you know, every so many hours or every so many days, you know, with, with like clockwork. It just means periodically and frequently enough that your cells can, can get some healing time and some resting time and recovery time. And so depending on who you are and what your current metabolic state is, that may be once a week, it may be twice a week, it may be every day. It really depends on who you are. It's very personalized. Your, the requirements are really personalized to your needs and your goals.

• 8:33Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. And so what is so powerful about the ketone? Like we've heard some things, you know, out in the zeitgeist that I think we always need to challenge is like it's 50% of the fuel source of the brain and your mitochondria need it as a fuel source. And yours talking about a ketone acting as giving a cleaner and, and giving your cells a break. What, what do we actually know about the brain neurons, cells, and what the ketones actually do for us?

• 9:02Speaker 01

  So a lot of people think about, and I'm glad you started off the conversation about epilepsy, because that's where I began my study of nutrition and ketogenic diets as well, many years ago. So, a lot of people think of ketogenic diets as weight loss diets. Agreed. But the ketogenic diet was, as you point out, originally created, designed, to stabilize brain chemistry and heal the brain. And that was back in nineteen twenty-one, and the first, its first use was to try to help children with their, with very severe epilepsy, who were having multiple seizures per day.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  This was long before the, the emergence of useful seizure medications. So they were using this diet, they designed this diet to get as close to fasting as possible, without starving children to death, because they knew, they'd known for millennia that people with epilepsy, when they fasted, their seizures tended to improve. But you can't fast forever. So they designed this diet to mimic fasting, but still include some nutrition and some calories, so that children could still grow and thrive. So it is originally, its original purpose was as a brain stabilization diet.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  And that's where the power of it comes into play with all aspects of brain health, including mental health. So, so a ketone, you were saying, what is a ketone, why are they so magical? A ketone is just, the body has different fuel sources, different ways it can energize itself. It can use glucose, it can use ketones, it can use many cells, can use a mixture of both. It can use fatty acids. So, with the brain, actually, a lot of people think of the, of glucose or blood sugar as the ideal fuel source for the brain. That if, if the brain had its way, that it would be operating one hundred percent of the time on pure glucose, because glucose is...

• 11:09Speaker 01

  Wonderful. And, and it would only use ketones as an emergency backup fuel in dire situations like you can't find any food and you're out in the wilderness, or you have a serious disease. But that's actually not the way the brain is designed to work. The brain, given, if you surround brain cells with both glucose and ketones, plenty of both, they will choose on purpose to burn a mixture of the two. They will not burn a 100% glucose. And that's because ketones are a cleaner, more efficient fuel source with, they burn with a lot less inflammation and what's called oxidative stress, which can be very damaging

• 11:53Speaker 01

  if you've got too much oxidative stress. So really, the brain is a hybrid engine, as Professor Stephen Funnane likes to say. It really works best when it's able to change the ratio of the fuels as it needs to and burn a mixture of these two fuels.

• 12:11Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, you know, that's the exact analogy I say all the time is with fasting. I always say we're a hybrid car and we need to go from glucose as an energy source and go into ketones. And I think every cell in our body requires that, but it does seem like the brain actually needs that more than any other organ system in the body. So I'm, I'm absolutely in alignment with you on that one. What, when it comes to ketones and actually breaking down, like I've recently, I'm writing a book, or I'd finished writing a book called Age Like a Girl, and I spent a lot of time really looking at the aging female brain. And I came across some incredible research on ketones as being neuroprotective.

• 12:55Mindy Pelz?

  I saw, I saw some incredible research that ketones actually can act like an antioxidant, like they can help you from having that oxidative stress like you talked to. And I thought that's so interesting because we tend, I tend to think of ketones as, okay, I need my brain supercharged. And what the research really showed, that I saw, showed was actually it's a protection. It's not just making your brain work well, but it's actually protecting your brain from all the possible damage that can occur in today's modern world. Is that how you look at ketones for the brain as well?

• 13:34Speaker 01

  It's one of the many health benefits of being in ketosis is that you are taking some of the pressure off of your glucose processing machinery because when you're burning glucose all the time, sugar all the time, that is comes with more oxidative stress. And you were saying that you are studying the, you're, you're writing about the aging female brain and that, that reminds me to talk about the, one of the, one of the flip sides of not being in ketosis is that you're burning usually too much glucose. And so if you're, if you're eating a diet that's bringing your glucose levels up too high after meals or keeping them up too high between meals and you're eating more glucose

• 14:19Speaker 01

  than you really need, then that extra glucose will, the higher your blood sugar, the higher your brain sugar. And that higher level of brain sugar, that when the brain can't handle a lot of glucose, it does need some glucose at all times.

• 14:37Mindy Pelz?

  Of course.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  In order to function optimally, but it doesn't need very much. And so if you give it more than it needs, that extra glucose sticks. It literally sticks to vital components of the brain, including proteins and lipids and some fats in the membranes of cells, DNA particles. It sticks to vital brain cell components and creates these kind of caramelized clusters called AGEs. Appropriately named because these sticky clusters are for premature aging of the brain. And so the more of these AGEs you have in your brain and body, the faster you age. So it's as if you're kind of caramelizing yourself today. And so you're really.

• 15:22Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, that's a beautiful way to look at it. It's a nice way caramelizing yourself. Sounds yummy, but it's not.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  It's a delicious way to go.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  But you know, just as you were saying, if you, so ketogenic diets and fasting have a lot of the same benefits because in both cases, you're generating ketones. And, and, and, and that means, and you can only generate ketones if your insulin and glucose levels come down low enough. And so when you fast, that's the absolute most efficient way to lower those glucose and ketone levels. Nothing, nothing, nothing does it better because, you know, everything, you know this, but of course you know this, everything we eat, with the exception perhaps of pure fat, which nobody really eats, everything we eat raises insulin to some extent.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  And many things we eat raise glucose. And so the best way to lower your insulin and glucose is to not eat anything at all. And, and, and that is really the fastest way to get into ketosis.

• 16:28Mindy Pelz?

  Agreed.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  And, and the cleanest way to do it too, because if you follow a ketogenic diet, depending on how often you eat and which foods you choose, you may still be getting some, some damage from that diet, depending on your food choices, even if you're in ketosis. But if you're fasting, you are not exposing your cells to any kind of food processing pressure at all. Really giving your cells a break from food processing, even if it's processing ketogenic foods, is really healthy and important.

• 17:03Mindy Pelz?

  I feel like we should be neighbors.

• 17:07Mindy Pelz?

  I want to come live next door and I want to talk about ketones forever because I have just found them at 55 to be the most amazing tool. And I feel like the ketogenic diet, which I want to dive into here in a moment, came out of the gates, people started losing weight, we saw the changes with epilepsy, the cancer community got a hold of it. And then all of a sudden, people started saying things like, women shouldn't do the ketogenic diet, it's too hard over time. And there became a lot of backlash at the ketogenic diet. In the meantime, You know, I've teach millions of people how to fast and I absolutely agree with what you just said. If you don't want to do the ketogenic diet, then learn to tack on these

• 17:52Mindy Pelz?

  fasting windows every single day is what I would recommend so that you can get yourself a dose of ketones. It is the easiest way to get yourself a ketone, don't you think?

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Yes, this brings up a great point, which is there are several different ways to get into ketosis. Ketogenic diet is one way, fasting is one way, calorie restriction is another way. So if you get your calories down below, say 725 calories per day, and the food choices aren't too egregious, then you will go into ketosis in many cases. And so prolonged intense exercise will eventually switch people into ketosis. So there are many different ways to get into ketosis. And you can choose and you can mix and match these methods. Pick the one or whichever ones work best for you. But fasting is the simplest

• 18:48Speaker 01

  and the easiest way to do it. And it doesn't cost you anything and you don't need to learn any special rules. And so it's really

• 18:56Mindy Pelz?

  You just need a book. You just need a good book to teach you.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  I wonder, maybe there's a good one out there we could recommend.

• 19:03Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, I'm just

• 19:03Speaker 01

  What is her name? Dr. Cindy? No, Dr. What is her name?

• 19:09Mindy Pelz?

  Oh. Exactly.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  It's on the tip of my tongue.

• 19:13Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, I'm sure we'll figure it out by the end of the podcast. So what is your definition of the ketogenic diet? Because the other thing I've played with are the macros. And I spent a lot of years coaching very sick people and we really played with the different carb content. And you know, the beautiful thing about the ketogenic diet is nobody knew what a net carb was. And now everybody knows what a net carb is. So although we should repeat it for people who don't. What's the magic carb number? Can protein pull us out of ketosis? Give me your spiel on the ketogenic diet?

• 19:50Speaker 01

  There's a lot of confusion around what a ketogenic diet is. And that's partly because, well, two reasons. One is people confuse low carb and ketogenic all the time. We'll come back to that. But another thing is that

• 20:06Speaker 01

  The rules are different depending on who you are. So some people can get away with more carbohydrate and more protein and more calories than other people. So if I prescribe the very same ketogenic diet for you and 100 of your friends, some of you will go into ketosis and some of you won't. And that's because we're each a little metabolically different. We're different ages, we take different medications, we're different activity levels, different genders, et cetera, et cetera. So the, and, and different weights, different levels of insulin resistance. Some of us are very metabolically flexible and, and metabolically healthy, not many of us anymore. But then others of us are not.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  It might take many days for somebody with severe insulin resistance to get into ketosis and they may need stricter rules. Whereas other people, especially children, athletes, people with really good metabolic health, who haven't damaged their health too much, can go easily in and out of ketosis, you know, in, in 24 hours. So that's why there's so much confusion. So because it's not a one size fits all diet, it has to be tailored. And I, I walk people through that in, in, in my book because I think that there's so much confusion around it that unless you can personalize it, you're gonna get really frustrated and think, well, how come my uncle was able to just glide into ketosis and I spent a week and I'm still, you know, my ketones are 0.3.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  So there's a lot of personal.

• 21:34Mindy Pelz?

  By the way, the number of comments I've received, like hundreds of thousands, literally with that. My sister, my brother, my husband, they all get into ketosis except me. So I really don't want people to lose sight of what you just said, that there is an individual way in. And that's, I mean, this is where we get lost with health is whenever we're trying to do one size fits all, it never works. So I really appreciate what you just said.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, thank you. And, and you know, and I know we agree on this. And so, so I, I think we'll find we agree on a great many things. Another, another, another thing, the other thing that people get confused about is low carb and ketogenic are not the same thing.

• 22:15Mindy Pelz?

  Talk about that.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. Not the same thing. Hallelujah. This is a really, a big obstacle for so many people who are trying to get healthier, mentally or physically healthier. And they, you know, they lower their carbs to say twenty grams a day. We can talk about that in total later. But, you know, they lower their carbs to twenty grams a day. And, you know, all they're doing is eating protein and fat. All day long and they think, you know, they think, okay, I'm gonna get healthier. Well, they may get a little healthier and often they do get a little healthier, but many people who, who eat an unrestricted, low carbohydrate diet, where they're not paying attention to meal timing, food choices, how much protein,

• 23:00Speaker 01

  activity, stress, sleep, anything else. People who are only counting carbs and doing nothing else, most of those people will not be in ketosis most of the time. And many of them will not reach their health goals and they'll feel really frustrated. And they'll say, well, I'm doing a ketogenic diet. How come I'm not losing weight or how come I'm still depressed? Or how come I still have intense cravings and I don't feel like being in good appetite control? And, you know, and so it's because they're not in ketosis. Their carbs are low and that's gonna stabilize, it's gonna lower and stabilize their glucose levels. It's not gonna bring their glucose levels always down where you really want them to be,

• 23:43Speaker 01

  but it's gonna bring them way down and it's gonna even them out quite a bit. And that is huge. That is gonna bring you a lot of health benefits. Especially if you have type two diabetes, where your glucose is running far too high most of the time. It's gonna be a godsend for you. But you may not get to your weight loss goals. You may not get to your appetite goals. You may not get to your mental health goals. Because you won't, in many cases, be in ketosis and you need to check and see if you are. Because a low carb diet is not necessarily automatically always a ketogenic diet. Even a carnivore diet does not necessarily put you into ketosis

• 24:26Speaker 01

  just because it doesn't have any visible carbohydrate in it. So, as you were saying, protein, too much protein. Overeating in general, eating too frequently, not exercising, having too much stress, taking certain medications.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  Hormonal shifts as we go through menopause, all of these things can, will determine whether or not you go into ketosis on a simple low carb diet.

• 24:54Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, you know, in my practice, we used to have little blood sugar ketone readers at the front desk and with all the strips. So when people came in, they could look at, look at it all. And I spent many years thinking that the macros were the magic for, for the key, for getting ketones. This is before I had discovered fasting. And I would agree, I saw a lot of people eating too much protein. And they're, they would do the thing that you just mentioned, where they would say, oh, my God, I'm not eating any carbs. But then when we like, sat down, they were eating two, 300 grams of protein a day, and their fat was off the charts. And so that was too much. Then I saw people who just had, weren't

• 25:35Mindy Pelz?

  eating any, any carbs at all, and were like, white knuckling it. And they still also were not getting into ketosis, which is why I landed on fasting being one of the best ways you can get into ketosis, because you just take, you know, take that diet out of the picture. And I thought, okay, if you could tack a fasting window on in the morning, let's say, and then you could do a low carb diet in the afternoon, maybe you focus on nature's carbs, you moved away from the refined carbohydrates, you would find you're pumping with ketones for most of the day. Is that sort of the way you approach your personal ketogenic diet?

• 26:19Speaker 01

  Everything I do with my, in my clinical work is personalized. So

• 26:24Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  There isn't any one way that I start off with a person. I mean, there's certain rules that, that, that cells need to, that cells obey. And so there are certain things you know, you need to do if you're going to try to get into ketosis. And one is, and really, this comes back to, you'd asked me before, what is my definition of a ketogenic diet? So ketogenic diet is not, it's, it's not about necessarily how much carbohydrate you're eating, although that's important. Ketogenic diet's really not about Carbohydrate level, it's about insulin. And so a ketogenic diet is any way of eating that lowers insulin levels enough to turn on fat burning. You have to lower insulin to the fat burning point.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  And and at that point, if you're burning fat vigorously enough, the liver will break down some of the fat that you're burning and chop it up into little fragments of ready to burn fat called ketones. And you can only generate those if your glucose level comes down. Usually it has to come down below ninety, sometimes even lower than that. Your insulin level comes way down and you burn off a certain amount of the stored starch in your liver. So that the body starts to think, oh, we're running low on carbohydrate here. Let's switch over to fat. It's only gonna do that if all three of those things have happened. And so the fastest way to get there is obviously fasting.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Exercises will help because it'll help you burn down some of that that's stored starch in your liver. And and and avoiding carbohydrate as much as you can because those three macronutrients, the the reason why a lot of people define a low ketogenic diet as a high fat, moderate protein, low carbohydrate diet is because carbohydrate raises insulin the most, so you want to keep keep away from that as much as you can. Protein raises insulin quite a bit and and and and and but you do need to eat some protein, you know, from time to time. And and fat barely touches insulin at all.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  So if you if if you're eating high fat, medium protein, low carb, then you are turning your insulin knob down. And and when you turn it up, you can turn it up with carbs, you can turn it up with protein, you can turn it up with just eating too frequently or too much. Because like we were saying before, almost everything we eat raises insulin to some extent, and that can turn off ketone production. When the body sees energy coming in, it's like, well, why do we need to make any of our own? We can just use this energy that's coming in. So let's switch off our fat burning and let's burn that stuff that's coming in right now. So. I think, you know, it's really important for people to know that just limiting carbohydrate

• 29:16Speaker 01

  is not going to be enough for many people to get where they're trying to go.

• 29:21Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, so well said. When I first got into educating people on this, people were doing like 10 net carbs a day. And this was what was actually becoming really detrimental to women. This is how I found the whole fasting cycle that I wrote about in Fast like a Girl. And the challenge is that progesterone needs glucose to be high in order for her to make her appearance. So the week before a woman has her menstrual cycle, you need to bring glucose up so that estrogen can do, I mean progesterone can do her job. The interesting thing about progesterone is she also stimulates GABA. So technically, we should feel calmer

• 30:05Mindy Pelz?

  if we mind by her rules, which is more carbohydrates. And I always recommend better carbohydrates. You will feel calm. You won't have those PMS symptoms. Then when you go into the rest of the menstrual cycle, what I found so interesting about a ketone is that ketones, and I really want to know your opinion on this, also stimulate GABA. Just ask anybody who does a three day water fast. Nobody's going to kill anybody on the third day of a water fast. Where you'll find them is meditating on the side of a mountain. They don't want to talk to you because their GABA levels are so high because as ketones go up, GABA will go up as well. So what I love about what you're saying is that we really need

• 30:49Mindy Pelz?

  to personalize this. That was just an example of how women can personalize it. But what I'm hearing from you is could we all just scratch from our head that the ketogenic diet is a high fat diet?

• 31:06Mindy Pelz?

  Is that what, you know how it got that reputation that you just eat a bunch of butter and you're gonna be fine?

• 31:14Speaker 01

  So, there are three things they respond to. So, the first thing to respond to is, is the ketogenic a high-fat diet? Well, you can get into ketosis without eating anything at all, so you don't need fat. You don't need to eat fat to get into ketosis. However, if you are eating a ketogenic, when you break your fast and you're eating food, if you choose to try to stay in ketosis, which some people choose to do and some people need to do, especially with certain health conditions, it can be very beneficial to stay in ketosis all the time, or for most of the time, anyway, then you've got to eat a diet that is going to, is not gonna break your keto, your ketone production. In those cases, the majority

• 31:56Speaker 01

  of your calories will have to come from fat, because fat is the macronutrient that stimulates insulin the least. And so, you, the, then you have to follow those rules, which are relatively high in fat, only moderate in protein, only to your protein requirements, not high in protein, and, and, and, and low carbohydrate. So, when you're eating a ketogenic diet to try to stay in ketosis or be in ketosis most of the time, yes, that is a high-fat diet compared to the standard that we are accustomed to being recommended.

• 32:31Mindy Pelz?

  And not a fat-only diet?

• 32:33Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 32:34Mindy Pelz?

  Right. I just want, I want people to hear that. Yeah.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  No. A fat-only diet is not gonna meet your nutritional requirements.

• 32:42Mindy Pelz?

  Right. Yeah. Okay. Great.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  So, another thing you put, so another thing you commented on, right. So, you brought up three things. And so, another thing is the GABA. So, GABA, so, so I'm a metabolic and nutritional psychiatrist. I specialize in, you know, I, I really study, specialize, work in this field, write about this, speak about this, teach about this. It's it's all about understanding how our nutritional choices and our metabolic health affects our mental health. And so, mental health conditions like depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, PTSD, panic attacks, many different types of mental health conditions.

• 33:25Speaker 01

  What you'll see in brain chemistry is an imbalance between GABA, which is the brain's calming neurotransmitter. The the brain contains dozens of neurotransmitters, but the the two major neurotransmitters in the brain, and we don't hear a lot about them. Yes, there's serotonin, there's dopamine, but we don't often hear very much about glutamate and GABA. So glutamate and GABA, you can kind of think of people out there listening. GABA is kind of the brain's brake pedal, so it's calming the brain. And glutamate is the brain's gas pedal, which is stimulating the brain. And, you know, the brain needs to be able to regulate that ratio depending on the circumstances.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  So if you're a parent and your child runs into the street, you're going to get a glutathione. You want to want your brain to be stimulated to do something about that. You don't want to be sitting, meditating on a mountaintop while your child's going to be trapped. So and and and and and you also, you know, want to be calm when there's no reason to be upset, and that's where GABA comes in. So so really, unless something unusual is going on, you have kind of a nice balance between these two neurotransmitters, GABA, which is the brake pedal, and glutamate, which is the gas pedal. Now, one of the ways that you can regulate your own brain chemistry is by one I one of the things I like to say is, one of the most powerful ways to balance your brain

• 34:51Speaker 01

  chemistry is by unbalancing your diet. Because if you're eating a diet that's too high in carbohydrate, particularly refined carbohydrate, or any diet that's causing your glucose levels to run too high too often, or your insulin levels to run too high too often, you will see that that's going to overstimulate GABA, and you're going to get an imbalance in in glutamate and GABA. So you're actually eating in a way which is destabilizing your brain chemistry and putting your brain into overdrive. And you can see this, people get very anxious. In between meals, they can have panic attacks if they don't eat sugar frequently enough. If they're really on that roller coaster of glucose and insulin all day long.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  And, and, and then you can really see destabilized brain chemistry. So you can calm your, your brain chemistry naturally without medications or alcohol. You know, with, without benzodiazepines like, like Klonopin and Xanax and Ativan. Those, and alcohol works the same way. Benzodiazepines, which are very commonly prescribed anxiety and sleep medications and alcohol. They work the same way by stimulating GABA. But why is your GABA not working well enough? It's because the glutamate GABA system is out of balance. So if you bring glutamate down by following a ketogenic diet or by fasting, or doing other

• 36:20Speaker 01

  things that are good for your metabolic health, you can, you have a lot more control over your brain chemistry than you may realize. And, and that's a really hopeful prescription for people who either don't want to take medication for a mental health issue, can't tolerate medications for a mental health issue, have become dependent or addicted on some of these benzodiazepines can be very addictive and can create physical dependence. But you can get that same calm, focused energy in many cases, if you understand the powerful relationship between food, metabolism and brain chemistry.

• 37:01Mindy Pelz?

  You know what, I'm, I'm, you have me really thinking about something that is recently coming into the cultural zeitgeist that I haven't been able to square my head on, which is that people who are neurodivergent. Now, I look at neurodivergent as just a brain that thinks different, learns different, like, you know, I don't, I don't know if we have, and maybe you have a well-formed definition of neurodivergency. But if they take progesterone as they go through menopause, that it can actually make them have more ADD and more brain fog.

• 37:41Mindy Pelz?

  And now I'm thinking, well, progesterone stimulates GABA. So is it possible to get too much GABA? That would throw this glutamate GABA balance off and send your brain into more anxiety and more lack of focus? That you really nailed the way you said that for my brain to go, oh, it's balance. Just like everything else in the body, it's balance.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  So it's about the eating and living in a way that's going to support your brain and body finding its own happy equilibrium. Yeah. Whatever that is and whatever it needs to be from day to day and hour to hour. Like you said, you don't want it to be exactly the same all the time. Sometimes you want the brain to be stimulated and, and really focused. Other times you want it to be calm, sleeping. And so it, it needs to be flexible and it needs to be resilient. And it needs to be, I mean, the, the, if you understand how to eat to kind of keep from throwing monkey wrenches into the system. Cause many of the foods that we think of as healthy and some of the, and many of the foods that we already know are not healthy.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  They can really cause problems. They can really work against your brain's efforts to try to regulate itself. And so the more of those monkey wrenches you throw in there, the, you know, refined carbohydrates like sugars and flowers, the seed oils, the cereal products, the, you know, chemical additives, the, you know, so many of these, these, these ultra-processed food ingredients are causing AGEs to form. They are causing glutamate and GABA to become unbalanced. They are causing glucose levels to, to become unbalanced. And, and when glucose is on a roller coaster, insulin is also on a roller coaster.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  And therefore many other hormones that listen to insulin are also on a roller coaster. And you're unstable from within. It feels like it's coming from inside of you, but actually most of that is because you had the wrong information about what a healthy diet, healthy diet is supposed to look like.

• 39:55Mindy Pelz?

  So I'm thinking like the the standard Western diet, we call it now, is because of the ultra-processed foods is glutamate stimulating. And then I think it's interesting that if we're on that train, then the glass of wine is something we're going to crave at night because it's GABA stimulating is and and all the medications you were talking about. So I really love where your brain is going right now with this glutamate GABA conversation because the behaviors we're doing, are we trying to naturally balance this out through food and drinks and drugs?

• 40:35Speaker 01

  I love that you brought that up because that's exactly what's happening for most people is that we're unstable and internally unstable, our neurotransmitters, our appetite hormones, our stress hormones, our reproductive hormones, our blood pressure regulating hormones, our inflammatory system, our immune system, everything is out of balance if we don't eat the right way. And so we're chasing that all day long. We wake up and we're too tired in the morning. So what do we do? We have coffee. Later in the day, we get sleepy after a meal because we've eaten the wrong way. So we have another cup of coffee. And then at the end of the day, we have a high carbohydrate meal, we get very sleepy and and and or or and and and and we can be in between meals as the sleepiness is wearing off, the calmness

• 41:20Speaker 01

  is wearing off, you can feel overstimulated. And then you're reaching for, you know, for example, a nightcap so that you can get to sleep. And so you're you're trying to regulate yourself using substances without realizing that so much of that instability is coming from food. And and so it's one of the fascinating things about the relationship between the way we eat and our internal balance is that most people are eating in this way that is profoundly destabilizing.

• 41:59Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Profoundly destabilizing. And so and it takes a few days to to to step off. This roller coaster, but it is so worth it because you have no idea how much calmer, how you can feel, how much more energy you can have, how much better regulated you can feel, how much easier the day is. If you're not throwing these monkey wrenches into your hormonal system and your neurotransmitter system. And you let your body calm down. And fasting is one of the best ways to, it's a, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a detoxification, really.

• 42:36Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  And of the most profound type.

• 42:40Mindy Pelz?

  Yep. You know, it's funny, I've been studying fasting now for over a decade, very intimately. And I'm convinced more than ever that it is one of the greatest free health tools that we have. And it is based around this ketone. And it's, it's just, and to watch people who don't have financial resources to, you know, help themselves, turn around and help themselves is, is just incredible. Are there, when we look at the, I'm, I'm going to go back to GABA and glutamate. Cause I'm probably going to geek out on this for a really long time in my own mind. Are there foods we can add in that are glutamate, that are healthy, that are glutamate producing when we need a little more focus or punch in our, in our brain?

• 43:25Mindy Pelz?

  And are there foods that are healthy that we can add in that are GABA producing? Or is it more about a complete diet that allows you balance to balance both?

• 43:34Speaker 01

  I love this question because this is the, if you ask most people what a brain healthy diet looks like, you know, what's the best diet to, you know, prevent depression, treat depression or prevent, prevent dementia, promote healthy aging of the brain, et cetera. They'll usually start talking to you about things you're supposed to add to your diet that are good for the brain, things like blueberries and flaxseed and walnuts. And, you know, all of these superfoods, right? Some brain foods, superfoods. And there's a whole chapter in the book, so the, the.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind is the book that I wrote about this topic. There's a whole chapter on this topic called the antioxidant myth. And, and really the most, so we are told that all we need to do to fight off this villain called oxidative stress. So oxidative stress is why we're told that we need to eat so many antioxidants. Oxidative stress is a, it's a very damaging force. It's a, it's a, it's a healthy force in small amounts. We need a certain amount of oxidative stress as part of our immune system. But like any alarm system, you don't want it to be going off all the time. And so the oxidative stress is normal and natural in small amounts. But if you eat the wrong way, if your glucose and insulin levels are running too high,

• 44:49Speaker 01

  you're, you, you will be generating a lot more oxidative stress. The same was true if you smoke or if you drink alcohol, if you live in a very polluted area. There are lots of things that can raise oxidative stress. But, but eating the wrong way is the number one cause of this problem. So if you're eating the wrong way, your glucose, insulin running too high, too much oxidative stress, and really what it, what it is, is it's like little bulls in a china shop that you've let loose inside your brain and they're kind of bumping into everything and damaging structures, important cellular structures throughout the brain willy nilly. They're kind of terrorizing the village. And so we have our own antioxidant defense systems inside our own cells.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  And as you were saying before, when you're in ketosis, those antioxidant systems boost, they get a boost. So we have more, we have more power to mop up, anti, mop up those, they're called oxygen free radicals that are running around and terrorizing the village. So when people say, okay, in order to fight this oxidative stress, I need to eat more antioxidants. There are two problems with that belief. One is that the antioxidants that come from, that, that are inside some of these so-called plant superfoods, they work in plants, but they really don't work well in the human body.

• 46:09Mindy Pelz?

  That's interesting.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  We don't absorb them very well. We eliminate them very quickly. Research behind this is actually extremely weak. And so. If they help you and you enjoy them, that's, you know, I'm speaking to people out there who might have, you know, used, used some of these antioxidant supplements and superfoods, that's fine, but I want you to know that there's a much more powerful way of going about this, which is understanding where that, all that extra oxidative stress is coming from in the first place and removing that villain, which is the, the, the high glucose levels. So if you get your glucose levels down where they need to be, your level of oxidative stress

• 46:51Speaker 01

  will come down on its own and you, and your own antioxidant defense system will easily be able to handle the, the, the oxidative stress that is being, that's generated naturally in the course of, of daily life. And so get, it's about that balance again. So we have antioxidant defenses in our brain and we have oxidative stress in our brain. They're both there and normally if we're eating properly, living the right way, these will be in healthy balance. There'll be enough mops to mop up the mess. But if you're eating in a way that's generating all these oxygen-free radicals, these bulls in a china shop, adding more antioxidants that are very difficult to absorb and are

• 47:36Speaker 01

  quickly eliminated is really not the best way to go about it. The best way to go about it is put out the fire in the first place by stop pouring the fuel on the fire. That's the way to do it.

• 47:46Mindy Pelz?

  It's so funny, yesterday I had a bowl of blueberries and I thought to myself, oh, it's good for my brain. And then the next thought I had was, do I know that to be true? And I was like, well, Jim Quick told me on my podcast that it was good for my brain and he's, you know, the brain guy. And then I was thinking, you know what? I think blueberries has a really good marketing team because I'm not sure that me eating a bowl of blueberries is going to translate into me having a better functioning brain. And you, you just gave me this and I think, I really want to point this out that when we're looking at antioxidant levels in food, they measured them in food, but we don't know what they do once they go into the body.

• 48:31Mindy Pelz?

  And even if they measured in the body, everybody's microbiome is different, everybody's stress levels are different. So eating to get more antioxidants is, is not, is not all it's cut out to do. Is, is that what I'm hearing you say?

• 48:46Speaker 01

  So and you know, putting putting your faith in a brain superfood like like blueberries or flaxseeds or red wine, heaven forbid, or or dark chocolate.

• 48:56Mindy Pelz?

  Right, doesn't mean I get to drink more red wine.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Well.

• 49:00Mindy Pelz?

  What are you talking about? Now I don't like you.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  I know, I I really do run the risk of becoming everyone's least favorite person. And but but you know, the the the truth will set you free, right? So that so that these these it's not that those things are necessarily going to be harmful. I mean, red wine is harmful, but you know, having some blueberries, if your metabolic health can tolerate blueberries, if you enjoy them, they they taste good to you, and they're not raising your blood sugar too much. A blueberry is it's perfectly delicious thing to have, it's a whole food. But the problem, there are two problems with believing in this in this approach. One is that it really doesn't work. The research is not about adding whole blueberries to your diet.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  The research is about special extracts and powders and blueberry drinks that have been souped up to try to boost the antioxidant content. And and even those studies find inconclusive results about brain health. The the the the dark chocolate studies are not done with dark chocolate that you can buy in the grocery store.

• 50:04Mindy Pelz?

  They don't take dark chocolate.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  They they are done with with you know, fortified these special candy bars that have extra flavanol content. You can't buy these in the store. They're very bitter, and that's why people don't that's why they don't sell them. And so they have extra antioxidants in them. They're not they're not using regular dark chocolate in most studies. And the studies that do use regular dark chocolate have found no benefit. And then the red wine is another example. Red wine contains an antioxidant called resveratrol. And but but the studies don't use red wine. The studies use resveratrol concentrate. And and the amount of red wine that you would need to drink to reach the level of resveratrol

• 50:49Speaker 01

  that they use in these studies to try to show a brain health benefit is 500 bottles of red wine per day.

• 50:57Mindy Pelz?

  What?

• 50:58Speaker 01

  These are the types of scientific studies which are, which marketers, food marketers, use to sell you their chocolate, their wine, their, everything that they're trying to sell you. Really, good health in most, most cases, it's not about addition. It's not about adding something magical to your diet. It's about taking things away. It's about subtraction. And fasting is the ultimate subtraction recipe. You're subtracting everything. And that's why it's so powerful. It, it, power is in subtraction. And, and so that's where people are really going to get the most bang for their buck.

• 51:42Speaker 01

  And as you said, it's free. So no bucks required at all.

• 51:46Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, exactly. So when we're looking at brain health, then we're looking at the ketogenic diet, higher fat, moderate protein, low carbohydrate. We're looking at tack, you know, I'm, I'm going to say this, tack on a little fasting window. And what, then that does lead, like, do we need to look at, like, processed carbs versus what I call nature's carbs? Like, does the carb quality matter? Because if I have a donut, and I'm like, oh, well, I just had a, one donut today. I didn't have the whole box. And then I ate some more protein. Like, do I still need in my diet to make sure that I nail the quality of food?

• 52:30Speaker 01

  For carbohydrates, the quality of the carbohydrate matters, and the quantity matters. So the quantity and the quality both matter. So, and, and, and the reason is that the body was designed to process food for you. It wasn't designed to take in pre-processed foods. It wasn't designed to take in predigested naked carbohydrates. It was designed to eat a piece of fruit or, or a starchy vegetable and break down those cells, um, and digest that food for you and slowly access the nutrients and the sugars and starches inside of, of those cells.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  If you strip, if you predigest that food, if you, if you're drinking juice, a big glass of juice, which would have been very, very difficult to come by for our ancestors. If you're, you know, eating products made with flour all day long, imagine how much work it would take to make a bag of flour. And so there's, there's a whole chapter in the book about the difference between processed carbohydrates, refined carbohydrates. And as you say, call them natural carbohydrates, these are carbohydrates from whole foods. Big difference, the body can tell the difference. The body responds differently to foods that have had their cellular integrity destroyed. There are some hormones in the gut that pay attention to the quality of food, not just the quantity.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  And so you're exactly right. It is, and your satiety hormones and your fullness, your, the fullness sensors in your gut. You're, if you're eating an apple that's got lots of fiber and lots of water in it. It's much harder to, you know, it, it's hard to eat 10 apples where it might be very easy to drink 10 apples worth of apple juice.

• 54:22Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  It's just easier. And so there isn't all that fiber in, in the way. And so whole foods principles are really, really important.

• 54:32Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. Thank you for pointing that out. What, you've, you've now trained a ton of doctors, you've written a book, you've been on big podcasts talking about this. What do you see in our modern mental health crisis? Which is, I think, hopefully everybody realizes that's what's going on. What do you see is really being helped? Like, is Alzheimer's optional? Is dementia optional? Anxiety, mood disorders? This type of diet you're talking about, leaning into the ketone. Could we make all of that go away if everybody changed their diet?

• 55:08Speaker 01

  I don't know. I think that I would like to believe, and I'm convinced by the science and the history of the matter, that many mental health disorders may be largely preventable. And particularly Alzheimer's, there's a lot of really robust science there. It's hard to know how many people would be spared mental health issues if we had the correct information about what a brain healthy diet is supposed to look like. But I would be willing to bet that it would be the majority of people would either be able to prevent serious mental health conditions, or they would be able to experience much less serious

• 55:53Speaker 01

  symptoms from them. And one of the reasons I can say this with some sort of confidence is that if you look backwards in time, we were much more mentally healthy in the past than we are now. And so something, something's going terribly wrong. Something that we should be able to figure out and reverse. And our diet has been the thing that has changed so drastically, especially in the past 50 years.

• 56:22Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, I so agree with you. And I'm really troubled by the fact that we just keep pointing the finger at social media. And I'm not saying social media isn't the problem. But you know, I was just, I have a membership group called the Reset Academy, and I was just talking about this, that we have shiny object syndrome. We tend to look outside of us and say, oh, I'm going to do this. Or we tend to blame things outside of us. And we have completely lost the fundamental way in which the human body and brain work. We're so able, we're so willing to outsource our mental and physical health, or blame our mental and physical health on another person, or because our favorite politician didn't make it into office,

• 57:07Mindy Pelz?

  or whatever. But we have lost sight of the fact that we are in control of how this thing works. And I am so 100% behind you that the Diet has to be the starting point when you're looking at brain fog, anxiety, depression, Alzheimer's, dementia, all of that, the starting point has to be the diet. Why are we not doing this? Why? Where's the medical profession? Where are the healthcare leaders? Why haven't we brought this to the culture? And instead, we're just pointing fingers at, oh, they have too much of a phone in their hand, or that their social media is making them crazy. Like, we have to come back to the basics.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  And all of, I wrote about this in the book as well. I mean, all of these things matter. Of course, it matters, you know, how you spend your time and who you spend your time with. And, and all the aspects of, your brain is paying attention to everything you're doing. And that's a good thing, because that means that if you change something in your lifestyle, you're, you're going to get a payoff. And that's beautiful, right? But where we, where we don't spend, where we don't spend most of our mental energy thinking, it is, what about the food? And so, we all know that, you know, stress, you know, can, can exacerbate mental health problems. We all know that if you, if you do nothing else but sit in your room 24/7 and play video games, that's not good for your mental health. We know, we know these things, right?

• 58:31Speaker 01

  And so, there are many different real stressors in the world, but there have always been stressors in the world.

• 58:38Mindy Pelz?

  Well said.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  And so, and if you look back, some of the stressors that people, our ancestors dealt with for, in some ways, much worse than some of the things that we're doing now.

• 58:46Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, getting attacked by a, by a tiger, or not knowing when you're getting food again? These are bigger stressors than somebody you, you know, didn't like your post on Instagram.

• 58:58Speaker 01

  Yes. And, you know, I, I worked in college mental health for many years. And one of the trends, very disturbing trends that we saw, is that year over year, Incoming students, first year students, were coming into college campuses already taking two, three, four psychiatric medications. Unable to get through a day of college without extra support and special services. We have become so fragile, our brains have become so fragile that we are not able to function well anymore, many of us, and this is tragic. So, you know, our brains were not designed to disintegrate on such a grand scale.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  We have nearly a billion people in the world with a mental health disorder so serious that it's interfering with their ability to function. And that's not even counting all the people who don't qualify for a diagnosis or who have never made it into the system to get a diagnosis. Most of us are walking around expecting and living with suboptimal mental health. And the beautiful thing that I, if I, if people remember, nothing else.

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  There is so much you can do in such a short period of time to turn that around in many cases. We have studies now showing tremendous improvement within days to weeks of changing your diet in even very serious, chronic, severe mental health, mental illnesses. I helped publish a study, a co-authored study in 2022. Thirty-one patients, severe, chronic bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, major depression, taking an average of five psychiatric medications, ill already for an average of 10 years.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  Come into the hospital, they start a ketogenic diet, Whole Foods mildly ketogenic diet. We're not even talking epilepsy-level ketogenic diet, just essentially a carefully controlled low carb diet. Whole Foods, within three weeks, every single one of them began improving. Forty-three percent of them achieved clinical remission from their so-called treatment-resistant, serious, chronic mental illness.

• 1:01:19Mindy Pelz?

  Can a drug even get that kind of result?

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 1:01:23Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  No, the results that we saw in this study were seven to 10 times more powerful than the medications used for psychosis and depression.

• 1:01:32Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. You know, I had a really conversation with my son when he was in university. He was in a civil engineer program and was struggling. And he told me, you know, Mom, all the kids in my class take Adderall. And so I'm having, my brain is having to compete against an Adderall brain. And it just broke my heart.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  This is a really common issue. So I was saying that I used to work in college mental health. So for 13 years I worked at Harvard University and then at Smith College. Worked with college students, university students. And I'm very, very, very familiar with this, with this issue. And so there were many students who were coming in requesting Adderall, saying they had ADHD. And some of them actually do have ADHD. And some of them actually do better with Adderall. I am not saying that that's not a real thing. What I'm saying is that there were quite a few students also who had come in requesting Adderall or trying to, you know, they'd look up the symptoms of ADHD and they come in saying, I have these symptoms.

• 1:02:32Mindy Pelz?

  Ah, trying to get the diagnosis.

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  Looking for the diagnosis and the stimulant prescription. Partly because stimulants can help people, people, you know, stay better on top of their studies. I mean, there's, there are risks and there are side effects and so forth. But also because they didn't feel like they were competing on an even playing field. Because so many students now take Adderall. And, and again, I'm not saying that there are, there are plenty of students who actually do better with Adderall. And Adderall can be very helpful in some cases. But my, I'd rather ask a different question, which is, why? Why are so many students feeling like they need to take Adderall to function?

• 1:03:12Mindy Pelz?

  That's right. That's good.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  Why are their brains not functioning properly? And this is what we really need to get to the bottom of. And so much of this, I'm convinced by years and years and years of research, is...

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  Environmental in general and diet in particular.

• 1:03:30Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  The diets that we are eating, starting from a very young age, are destroying our brains from the inside out.

• 1:03:37Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, so well said. What do you think of exogenous ketones?

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  So they can be a useful tool in some cases, but A, they are expensive. B, they only work for about ninety minutes if you're lucky. And so you, if you want to be in ketosis for longer than ninety minutes, you have to take them multiple times per day. And really, the big drawback to using exogenous ketones instead of fasting or a ketogenic diet is that exogenous ketones do not lower insulin levels.

• 1:04:10Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  And that is the root of so much of poor metabolic health. And so if you're eating a regular diet and you take an exogenous ketone supplement, yes, your ketones will probably go up a little bit. But your insulin's not going to go down. And, and, and that's, that's the culprit. So what you're doing is you're putting a Band-Aid, an expensive Band-Aid, on top, a short-acting expensive Band-Aid on top of your unhealthy, brain-damaging diet. And you might be, you might be get, feel a little bit better for an hour. A lot of people don't, but some people do. You might feel a little bit better. But this is not the answer. I mean, if you combine exogenous ketones with a healthy lifestyle plan, that, that can be in some cases, some benefits to that.

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  And there are some people who can't follow a diet or don't, don't have the ability to, or don't have the, the environment where they can do that. So for example, people in residential care may not be able to change their diet or they, or their memory issues may have gotten to an advanced enough stage that without support, they can't change their diet. So exogenous ketones have their place. And I sometimes will have people use them to try to get back on the horse if they kind of slipped off their healthy plan. That, that can be useful tool, but they're not the answer. And, and I think that, you know, it, it's really important for people to know the difference because yes, ketones can be beneficial.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  But if you're still living that high insulin lifestyle, the damage is marching forward.

• 1:05:44Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, and that's why I always tell people if you're gonna do exogenous ketones, do it in your fasting window because now you're working with your biology. So we weren't meant to have high dose ketones with high glucose and high insulin.

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:05:59Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. Is there a magic ketone number? I've been asked this perhaps a million times. Please help me understand. I have my opinion, but I'm very curious yours.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  I am sure we agree on this one too. So in any case, what I teach a training program for clinicians and ketogenic diets for mental health, and this is as you're just saying, the number one question. What is the therapeutic level of how high do the ketones need to be to treat a mental health condition? So first thing, first answer is, we don't know. It depends. It depends on the person. It just depends. I have some people who can alleviate multiple mental health symptoms for various different types of conditions without ever getting into ketosis at all, just by lowering and stabilizing their glucose levels and cleaning up their diet.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  I have other people who need to have their ketones in a very specific range in order to get the benefits. And then I've got everybody in between. And we know from the epilepsy world, because there are decades of experience using ketogenic diets with epilepsy, that even in the epilepsy world, there is no consensus answer to this question. And I think this speaks again to our individual differences. And it speaks to, okay, what's causing the mental health issue in the first place for that particular individual? If your mental health issue is being caused by unstable glucose levels and glucose levels that are spiking too high, then all you need to do is stabilize your glucose levels, even

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  if you never go, even if you don't lower your insulin levels enough to get into ketosis. If that's the damaging force and you take that away, you might not even need to go into ketosis.

• 1:07:50Mindy Pelz?

  Boo.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  And you know what I mean? But then there are so many people who have something called cerebral glucose hypometabolism, which just is a fancy way of saying sluggish brain glucose processing. They're insulin resistant, they have prediabetes, or they've got a lot of metabolic damage, and not just in the body, but in the brain as well. And that, what that means is that you can flood that brain with glucose, but that brain can no longer use glucose to full capacity anymore. Some of the metabolic machinery has been broken. And in those cases, your only hope is ketones, because flooding more, your system with more glucose is not

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  going to solve the problem, it's going to make it worse. The only alternative supplemental fuel source, if you've got so sputtering along with not quite enough energy, they're trying to do their best, they've got some glucose coming in, plenty of glucose coming in, but they can't burn it efficiently, they can't burn it to full capacity, you need a supplemental fuel source, and the only option is ketones, whether it's exogenous ketones, or ketones from, generated from within, which is always best if you can, or else your brain will not be functioning on all cylinders.

• 1:09:07Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, God, so well said. People that are listening right now and are just excited about the freedom and control you just gave them to help their mental health situation, regardless of what it is, how do they take this information back to their doctors? We seem to have a disconnect between the, what I primarily, let's just call it out, the medical world is so ingrained in pharmaceuticals, that they've lost sight of the power of nutrition. Is there a way for us to talk to our doctor, I mean, you can share this podcast, share your book, but how do we get this across to the healthcare profession? And do you

• 1:09:51Mindy Pelz?

  see that changing? I know you're trying to change it from within.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I'm very hopeful about this, because, because, you know, there are plenty of skeptical people, plenty of skeptical psychiatrists, and physicians, and other types of healthcare practitioners who are skeptical about this, this way, this approach to mental health conditions. But A, the research is exploding in this area, and the results, the preliminary results we're getting out of these studies is really, it really gives one pause, and really, I hope, opens minds to this very low risk, very high potential benefit, all natural, lifestyle-based intervention.

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  And and and it's not about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's not about instead of medicine in all cases. Or, you know, I still use medicines in my practice. I still use psychotherapy in my practice. It's about laying a foundation, a healthy foundation, metabolic and nutritional foundation for better brain health, regardless of what other treatments you are using or finding helpful or or like to use in your practice. And so it's not an either or. In fact, all of the studies conducted so far have taken people who are already taking medication and are already in psychotherapy treatment in many cases and adding the ketogenic

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  diet to that existing treatment and seen wonderful results. So you don't necessarily have to choose between. There we really want to have as many tools in the toolbox as we can. And psychiatry, we all know in psychiatry that our treatments are failing most patients. Oh, wow. And we need new ways forward. So if if if we can all agree that we need to make things better, it doesn't mean that we have to throw out everything we've learned over the past, you know, seventy five years about medications. Medications still have their place.

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  But wouldn't it be nice if more people could use less medication? Or if many people may not need to start medicine in the first place? Or could or or could eventually reduce or perhaps even eliminate the medication that they're taking? And this is a this is not an easy or quick thing, but it we this is possible in clinical practice. We're seeing it every day. I really am very hopeful, especially since I have so many clinicians coming into my training program wanting to learn how to do this because we know we need more tools. We know that so many people do not respond fully or even sometimes partially to our standard medication

• 1:12:41Speaker 01

  treatments and the treatments come with significant side effects, metabolic side effects often. And so this is a wonderful addition and foundation to good mental health care.

• 1:12:54Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, and it involves the patient in their own treatment. And I really point this out to the patients all the time is like, you can't expect your doctor to be the one that's responsible for your health. And what I just heard is a beautiful way for the doctor and the patient to collaborate. And if you are a patient walking into a doctor's office and you think it's the doctor's responsibility to heal you or help you and you have no responsibility, you've already set yourself and that doctor up for failure.

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  Thank you, Mindy. This is a really powerful message. You know, if you passively go into your doctor, nurse practitioner, healthcare provider, and you expect them to fix the problem, then you're just part of the problem. It's really, really, one of the most wonderful things about practicing this way is it's not just a powerful intervention, it's an empowering intervention. It puts the power back in the patient's hands.

• 1:13:59Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 1:14:00Speaker 01

  I can't change your diet for you. I can't get you into ketosis. I can't make you exercise. I can't do, only you can do that. And if you're willing to do those things to get yourself healthier, then I can help you. I can support you. I can give you information. I can connect you to other people who can help you. I can encourage you. I can help you adjust your medicines along the way. I can do all that, but I can't get you healthier. Only you can do that. And that's a beautiful thing.

• 1:14:31Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. And if we could just bring everybody to that awareness, wow, we would, we would help so many people. So Georgia, thank you. I could talk to you forever. I really feel like I'm like the president of the ketone fan club.

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  We'll have to get T-shirts, Mindy. We'll have to get T-shirts.

• 1:14:52Mindy Pelz?

  We need T-shirts. You can be co-president with me. And I just adore what you're doing in psychiatry. It is so needed and we need it from within your own industry. So, thank you so much for that. Where do people find you? And talk a little bit about your book and what people can find in your book.

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, and thank you very much for having me on. Thank you for all the work you do to educate people about metabolic health and how simple it can be and how to take back your health. This is really, really important. So, the book is called Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind. And, you know, we were talking about like how to convince your doctor. So, the book walks the fine line. It really has a lot of self-help. It has recipes. It has three different meal plans, not just ketogenic. It has a paleo plan. It has a ketogenic plan. It even has a carnivore plan, all with exactly how to figure it out for yourself. But it also has lots of science and explanation for your doctor or your nutrition professional and

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  for you. If you're curious about how the brain works and how food works and is why are whole grains good for you, but powdered grains bad for you? Is red meat really bad for you? What does the science actually say? All of those things. So, what about blueberries? All of that. So, the book is there and anything you might want to know about the training program about I have a clinician, free clinician directory, international, free to search, free list for clinicians of all backgrounds who use ketogenic diets to treat mental health conditions specifically. I have a clinician directory on my website. So, the directory is there. Information about the book is there. The training program is there. It's all,

• 1:16:36Speaker 01

  my website is called diagnosisdiet.com, diagnosis diet, or just type my name in because I have a kind of an unusual name. It'll come up. And so, really, it's about getting information and tools into the hands of patients and clinicians now so that everybody can start working their way towards better brain health.

• 1:16:57Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, amazing, amazing. Well, thank you for everything you're doing. And I hope our paths cross in person someday. And if I ever need a good ketone discussion, I'm calling you. So, I just appreciate.

• 1:17:12Speaker 01

  Operators are standing by.

• 1:17:14Mindy Pelz?

  Exactly, exactly. So, thank you for everything you're doing.

• 1:17:18Speaker 01

  Thank you very much, Mimi. It's been a great conversation. Thanks a lot.

• 1:17:22Mindy Pelz?

  Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it. So, please leave us a review, share it with your friends, and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.