Mental illnesses of all kinds are on the rise, yet we seem no closer to being able to treat them effectively. My guest, Dr. Christopher Palmer, believes he knows exactly what the root cause of mental illness is, and thus how to finally resolve it for good.
00:05:50.500and the number one disabling disorder of all psychiatric disorders it's not schizophrenia
00:05:58.080it's not bipolar it's plain old simple depression depression disables more human beings than any
00:06:07.500medical illness including heart failure cancer back pain all physical disorders depression disables
00:06:18.060more people than anything else on the planet yeah and as you said there's what when people treat
00:06:24.560mental illness there's basically there's two i guess in the history of mental health there is two
00:06:30.560approaches there's there's a physiological approach and then there's the psychological so like the mind
00:06:36.100body and so the body part is like well you know that what's going on is your brain uh it's not making
00:06:42.640enough neurotransmitters so we'll give you a a drug that will help and that helps some people right
00:06:48.200because maybe that that is a symptom they have lower serotonin for example maybe maybe we don't know
00:06:52.820but then other there's another field of cancer well no it's not a a body or physiological thing it's just
00:06:58.460it's a psychological though your mind it's got uh maladaptive thoughts so if you do talk therapy
00:07:04.440that will help well it helps some people and that's the thing it's like it's hit or miss like you know
00:07:09.760the the medication might help someone but not help another person and then talk therapy might help
00:07:15.100somebody but not the other person and it's because there's doctors are just having to figure out well
00:07:20.860what's the uh the symptom that we need to reduce you're not actually treating the underlying cause
00:07:25.420you're just trying to reduce symptoms so people have a functioning life absolutely i mean i think most
00:07:33.560mental health clinicians who are treating patients are desperately hoping to treat the underlying
00:07:39.320cause you know i think the mental health clinicians who are prescribing pills are hoping
00:07:43.620to address that chemical imbalance and i think the psychotherapists who are delivering psychotherapy are
00:07:49.600hoping to you know relieve the trauma in that person so that the person can let go of their trauma
00:07:57.680and move on with their life but again when we look at the treatment outcome studies
00:08:04.500even with the best of intentions even with the best efforts from all of these clinicians i'm not here
00:08:12.920to fault any of them i i you know i'm one of them we're all doing our best but our current model of
00:08:22.120mental health and mental illness and how to treat it is failing miserably and the other problem with
00:08:31.640mental illness is there's no objective criteria right there's not like a an mri scan where you
00:08:36.180can look on someone's brain who comes in with depression say yeah you've got depression i mean
00:08:40.600there's been some studies saying that you know parts of the brain might light up less if you have
00:08:44.380depression but that there's nothing definitive about or there's not a blood test you could take and
00:08:49.160say yeah you've got ocd and so it's it's really you have to talk to the patient and it's like it's
00:08:55.080there's subjective things in there and you can't downplay the subjective because if someone feels awful
00:08:59.720you have to take them on their word but it gets tricky because like you're trying to a doctor's
00:09:04.360trying to figure out well he says this if we do this will it change the outcome so that's the other
00:09:09.280hard thing there's no definitive test for mental illness unlike cancer where you can look and say well
00:09:14.180you got a tumor or there's a blood test and we still see the cancer there absolutely and it's really
00:09:20.360interesting because if there is a definitive abnormality identified it's no longer considered a mental
00:09:27.140illness so for example people with cancer often have mental symptoms they often can get severely
00:09:35.080depressed and fatigued they can have concentration difficulties they can even have symptoms consistent
00:09:40.700with like cognitive impairment even so far as dementia they can get delirious where they're
00:09:46.880hallucinating or delusional and we don't call that a mental illness because we know that they have
00:09:54.280cancer and they're getting cancer treatment and both cancer and its treatments can sometimes cause
00:10:00.380those symptoms so in those cases we don't call it mental illness and so the sad reality is that
00:10:08.240the people for whom we can't identify an objective cause we we put them in the category of mental disorders
00:10:16.660so the goal is if if we could find an underlying common pathway for mental illness there was this would
00:10:23.080allow us treatment could be more effective right because you could find the underlying thing and
00:10:28.100let's start getting into your theory here the the first connection i'd like to make is that one thing
00:10:32.560you note for potential underlying pathway for mental illness is that mental illnesses depression anxiety
00:10:39.820ocd bipolar they all there's some overlap there what do you mean by that what are some examples of
00:10:45.440overlap with mental illness so you know on the surface you know dsm it makes sense so dsm describes
00:10:56.100different diagnostic categories ocd depression schizophrenia alcohol use disorder or alcoholism and
00:11:03.520anorexia nervosa most people know what those things mean and they paint very different pictures of the
00:11:10.860types of people that have those disorders the symptoms that those people are having and the
00:11:17.080treatments that might be effective for those people and so on the surface dsm makes sense but when you
00:11:23.600actually look at real people who have mental illness first and foremost it turns out that most people
00:11:31.140have more than one certainly most people who are getting treatment do so on average one study found that
00:11:38.000people getting treatment for mental health had three and a half different diagnoses so right there we
00:11:45.340start to see some breakdown in these diagnostic distinctions so for example you could have
00:11:52.680schizophrenia or anorexia but if i look at a group of people with schizophrenia they're much much more
00:11:59.420likely to also have depression on top of their schizophrenia they're also more likely to have anxiety on top of
00:12:05.840their schizophrenia and weight i thought those were different disorders with different causes
00:12:11.100now a lot of people think well if you were schizophrenic wouldn't you be depressed and anxious
00:12:15.620but it's not so simple because it turns out that people with depression and anxiety are actually more
00:12:21.680likely to go on to develop schizophrenia too but if i look at a group of people with anorexia
00:12:27.360they're also more likely to be depressed and anxious and you're like well well yeah i guess that makes sense
00:12:35.200too but wait i thought these were all different disorders and now i'm looking at these different
00:12:40.360people and clearly the schizophrenic person is having hallucinations and delusions and the person with
00:12:46.020anorexia is starving herself or himself but and so those are clear differences but a lot of the other
00:12:54.960symptoms and comorbid diagnoses start to overlap i think much much more important is that when we look at
00:13:03.380root causes for mental illness because we do know some genetics is a clear example we have identified
00:13:10.520some high risk genes for mental illness and most people think well you know they must be specific
00:13:20.080to specific disorders like there must be some schizophrenia genes and some bipolar genes and some depression
00:13:25.820genes and some anorexia genes but in fact that's not true at all and we know this we've had the human
00:13:34.100genome mapped for over 20 years the top researchers have been on this we have had artificial intelligence
00:13:41.720on the job we know with certainty there is not one gene in the whole human genome that confers risk for
00:13:51.280any one specific mental disorder instead one gene confers risks for lots of different mental disorders
00:13:59.920so one gene might confer risk for schizophrenia and depression and bipolar disorder and alcoholism
00:14:08.520and epilepsy and cognitive impairment so when we look at a root cause like that it starts to you know
00:14:18.440the the diagnoses really start to overlap a lot and when you start to look at all of that kind of
00:14:24.560scientific data and all of the research that we have it turns out that mental illnesses are actually not
00:14:31.020that distinct from each other after all even though the symptoms can be wildly different i'm not here to say
00:14:38.800that psychosis is the same thing as depression those represent different areas of the brain malfunctioning
00:14:45.920or they different represent different degrees of malfunction in the brain but they are actually
00:14:51.740not as distinct as most people believe okay so let's get into the theory in brain energy and so this idea
00:15:00.560that the all these mental illnesses they have there's something in common there there's overlap so
00:15:04.640suggest that there's some underlying thing that's causing all of them and the argument you're making is that
00:15:09.940that thing could be metabolic ill health and now we're going to dig into the details of how this
00:15:15.920works i think it's really interesting but first you point out this idea that metabolism and mental
00:15:21.260illness are connected this isn't a new idea we've other scientists have you know decades ago have kind of
00:15:26.380made that suggestion how did they make that connection like where does that connection come from that
00:15:30.360okay if you have depression then you have something wrong with your metabolism what how did that
00:15:36.220connection happen so interestingly those connections go back centuries so in the 1800s it was well
00:15:46.240documented that diabetes and insanity run in the same families and insanity was the term they used for
00:15:57.860what we would now call schizophrenia and bipolar disorder largely but the researchers noticed that
00:16:05.340in one family there seems to be a much higher likelihood of both diabetes and psychotic symptoms and it goes
00:16:19.280both ways so if you have somebody with psychosis and they have children those children are more likely to
00:16:25.400go on to develop diabetes but vice versa if you have somebody with diabetes and they have children
00:16:32.000those children those children are more likely to not only develop diabetes but also develop a psychotic
00:16:37.920disorder beginning in the 1940s we have had an accumulating and growing body of evidence that there are
00:16:47.140metabolic abnormalities in the brains and bodies of people with mental disorders especially the chronic
00:16:54.060serious mental disorders but it goes across the board depression anxiety PTSD all the way to bipolar and
00:17:01.580schizophrenia you know we've done all of these brain imaging studies pect scans spec scans functional MRI
00:17:10.620guess what those scans are measuring they're measuring brain metabolism so all of those studies are showing
00:17:17.700differences in metabolism and cutting-edge research over the last 20 years has gotten much more specific
00:17:26.280and granular all the way down to genes specific risk genes all the way down to the cellular level
00:17:33.160identifying innumerable metabolic problems in people with mental illness so yeah just refresh your
00:17:40.780metabolism is just your body's way of using energy or taking food and converting into energy and i think
00:17:45.940people typically when they think about metabolism they think about things like diabetes because your
00:17:50.680insulin is not working right or your cells aren't responsive to insulin or obesity if you have a
00:17:56.120problem with obesity something's wrong with your metabolism where it's storing more fat than using the
00:18:00.020energy but a point you make is that the big metabolic conditions we typically think of like diabetes
00:18:05.520obesity even cardiovascular problems if you look at these people who are getting treated for those
00:18:10.760issues oftentimes they have their there's mental health issues going on there right depression anxiety some
00:18:17.460other serious ones and you know it's a it's correlation right so people would say well you know of course
00:18:23.480someone who had a heart attack is going to be depressed right you had a heart attack but you said well
00:18:28.500you're saying well hold on here well maybe there's something else going on there like maybe there's an
00:18:32.580under like there's a connection beyond just having a heart attack but maybe the heart attack
00:18:37.300and the depression has an underlying underlying cause it's that metabolism absolutely and we have an
00:18:44.600abundance of evidence this is not speculation at all we have decades of research looking at the
00:18:51.180connection for instance between heart attacks and depression and the you know as you said on the
00:18:59.520surface a lot of people are like well if you had a heart attack wouldn't you be depressed and as
00:19:03.760intuitive as that seems it the relationship actually goes the other way too people with depression
00:19:10.660are twice as likely to have heart attacks and people with all chronic all mental disorders all of them
00:19:18.700across the board whether they're chronic or not all mental disorders on average they die early deaths
00:19:26.100on average men are losing 10 years of life women are losing seven years of life and guess what they're
00:19:33.460all dying of the primary number one cause of death in the mentally ill across the board whether you've
00:19:41.180got anxiety adhd schizophrenia bipolar alcoholism the number one cause of death is heart attacks
00:19:48.980but in the mentally ill they are occurring almost a decade earlier on average so i think a lot of people
00:19:55.960want to be thinking this is how does metabolism affect your mental health because i think most people think
00:20:01.280metabolism they think well diabetes blood sugar weight gain so how does the metabolism affect your brain
00:20:07.800what's going on there so at the end of the day metabolism you know is as you said it's about
00:20:14.200taking food and oxygen and turning it into energy or building blocks that get used to maintain or grow cells
00:20:21.180and energy and building blocks are essential to the function of all cells and that includes brain cells
00:20:29.560if your brain cells are not getting enough energy or they aren't getting enough nutrients
00:20:35.740guess what they aren't going to function properly and at the end of the day that is the easiest
00:20:43.180simplest way to i can explain my theory is that if your brain cells aren't getting enough energy
00:20:50.540they aren't going to function properly and that that malfunction can paradoxically be one of two
00:20:59.020things cells can actually become underactive but cells can also become overactive or something we call
00:21:07.100hyper excitable and and those two states kind of under activity of a cell or over activity or
00:21:16.040hyper excitability of a cell can result in all of the symptoms all of them that we call symptoms of
00:21:23.800mental illness so that is the easiest way for us to understand symptoms of depression or post-traumatic
00:21:30.780stress disorder or even schizophrenia well what you do in this book you kind of walk people through
00:21:36.480is how metabolism affects these different underlying causes of what we typically think of mental illness
00:21:41.800so for example neurotransmitters right like you know there's something off with your dopamine or
00:21:46.720serotonin but you point out research that metabolism plays a role in our neurotransmitters how does metabolism
00:21:54.040affect our neurotransmitters so at the end of the day you know when metabolism is extraordinarily
00:22:01.080complicated and in order to really start to understand what controls metabolism or what it means to have a
00:22:10.100metabolic malfunction you actually have to start to go to this other level of the cell in these tiny
00:22:16.700little things in most of our cells called mitochondria and mitochondria actually help us understand the
00:22:24.440connections between metabolism and brain function so to answer your specific question what does metabolism
00:22:32.500have to do with neurotransmitters I'm going to focus on metabolism but more importantly on
00:22:38.900mitochondria which are these master regulators of metabolism and it turns out that mitochondria are
00:22:44.880instrumental in producing the building blocks that make neurotransmitters so they produce the building
00:22:52.040blocks and the energy required to make serotonin and dopamine and norepinephrine and GABA and
00:23:00.120acetylcholine and other neurotransmitters but they also are directly involved in the release and the
00:23:11.200regulation of these neurotransmitters and when researchers take mitochondria out of a cell but
00:23:18.320kind of infuse artificially infuse energy or ATP into that cell the neurotransmitters actually do not get
00:23:27.200released so it turns out that mitochondria are playing a critical role not just in metabolism but
00:23:34.680in brain function broadly gotcha okay so the mitochondria can be off in that it's not it's not
00:23:42.200producing enough energy right or it's producing too much so like the hyper excitability would be
00:23:47.880something like bipolar disorder when you're having a manic phase like the cells your mitochondria is
00:23:52.580probably producing too much energy for the cells in your brain and example of it being not enough be
00:23:57.700like depression is that right it starts to get to it so hypomania and our mania is the one clear
00:24:05.560example of the brain actually producing too much energy broadly almost every other disorder is actually
00:24:13.460not producing enough energy and one of the paradoxes of this theory based on rigorous science and
00:24:21.860you know decades of clinical observation one of the paradoxes is that when a cell is energy deprived
00:24:28.000it can actually become overactive which is counterintuitive but cells have kind of an on cycle
00:24:39.280and they have an off cycle they they get turned on but they also get turned off and energy is required
00:24:47.820to do both of those things so cells needing energy to get turned on that kind of makes sense to most
00:24:54.200people most people will get that but one of the paradoxes is that once a cell gets turned on it
00:25:01.200actually has to have enough energy to turn itself off and that is a paradox because that can result so a cell
00:25:10.780can get turned on and be on very weekly maybe it's only really operating at 60 capacity but it may not
00:25:18.980have enough energy to fully turn itself off and that results in hyper excitability which can result in
00:25:27.960some of the symptoms of mental illness we're gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors
00:25:32.340and now back to the show so sometimes brain cells don't get enough energy and paradoxically this means
00:25:47.240that they can't turn off which leads to them being to have hyper excitability right and then hyper
00:25:54.040excitability can lead to mental illness do we know what it is about the hyper excitability of brain cells
00:26:00.700that causes something like depression because like your depression you think well there's low energy
00:26:04.840so what's going on there yeah it's a great question hyper excitable means that that cell is doing
00:26:11.960something in an exaggerated way or it's doing something at the wrong time when it really shouldn't
00:26:20.000be doing that so let me give you an easy example that i use in the book and that is pain so pain is a
00:26:28.540normal human sensation we all experience it whenever we injure ourselves but people who have pain
00:26:36.280disorders have hyper excitable pain nerves or hyper excitable pain systems in their brain and what
00:26:44.800that means is that they experience pain for no good reason or if they just twist or turn the wrong way
00:26:52.880they can experience excruciating pain and that pain can go on for minutes or hours even it just doesn't
00:27:01.420stop all of those are representations of a hyper excitable pain system so when we think about something like
00:27:09.900depression depression is actually hardwired into the human brain it is a normal human emotion
00:27:18.220depression it is and and it is hardwired in our brains it's actually hardwired in the brains of
00:27:24.320many other animals like rats and mice and those serve as models for researchers who are trying to
00:27:31.220understand depression so like pain depression is a normal thing but when it gets turned on for no reason
00:27:41.000or when it fails to stop or when it kind of gets you know going in an exaggerated way those can all be
00:27:50.560reflections of a hyper excitable depression kind of pathway or depression system in the human brain and so what
00:28:00.200that means is that if your depression systems or networks are hyper excitable that is somebody who will
00:28:06.760experience depression for no good reason and or they might experience depression for a clear reason
00:28:12.620maybe somebody was mean to them or somebody scolded them but they have a hyper kind of exaggerated
00:28:21.240response that they get super depressed and it lasts for days or hours whereas most people would you know
00:28:28.840move on and be able to to be okay with that okay so a metabolic ill health can cause a neurotransmitter
00:28:36.740imbalance and also another thing that you know psychologists psychiatrists know that influence mental
00:28:43.360illness are hormones cortisol thyroid hormone testosterone estrogen but that's also driven by metabolism correct
00:28:52.620absolutely yeah so one of the things that is so wonderful about this theory is that it connects all of the
00:29:01.160dots that we know in the dots that we know in the mental health field so it turns out that you know
00:29:06.740mitochondria again play an instrumental role in the production of key hormones like cortisol estrogen and
00:29:14.020testosterone but a hormone like thyroid hormone like you mentioned actually plays a critical role in
00:29:20.900metabolism and the function of mitochondria even a hormone like insulin which most people think of as a
00:29:28.020diabetes thing it turns out insulin is actually located throughout the brain and plays a powerful
00:29:33.920role in the way your brain functions and also plays a powerful role in brain metabolism okay so we would
00:29:41.240have with insulin like how does it influence mental illness or mental health do we know that we do so we we
00:29:48.260have again so that's probably one of the clearest connections that goes back to the 1800s this connection
00:29:54.980between diabetes and mental illness we know that people with type 2 diabetes or even type 1 diabetes are
00:30:02.180much more likely to develop mental disorders and pretty much all of them across the board depression
00:30:09.000ptsd substance use disorders but also bipolar and schizophrenia you know over the last 20 years we have
00:30:17.260neuroimaging research showing that people with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia have abnormalities and insulin
00:30:23.580signaling in their brain here's a very clear study that i just want to share with people that really
00:30:31.080drills this home for everybody and why this matters you know one study looked at 5 000 kids and followed them
00:30:39.720from the ages of 1 to 24 and they found that the kids who had the highest levels of insulin resistance
00:30:46.140since beginning at age 9 were five times more likely that's 500 percent more likely to develop
00:30:53.820bipolar disorder or schizophrenia or be at risk for those disorders 500 percent more likely that is not
00:31:04.800trivial and that kind of information gives us clear strategies to possibly prevent mental illness in young
00:31:15.340people it also gives us you know lots of treatment options as well well another cause or symptom that
00:31:25.100mental health practitioners have been treating in recent years to decrease mental illness symptoms is
00:31:30.900inflammation so there's been research showing that people with you know major depression for example
00:31:36.060are some people some of them are highly inflamed and inflammation goes back to metabolism correct
00:31:42.900absolutely so metabolism influences inflammation and inflammation influences metabolism now you know
00:31:52.720everybody's heard inflammation that's what that's the cause of everything that ails us these days
00:31:57.860and yes in fact people with mental disorders are more likely on average to have higher levels of
00:32:04.320inflammation but i'm here to argue that inflammation in and of itself is neither necessary nor sufficient
00:32:12.040meaning inflammation can't explain all mental illness and not all people with mental illness even have
00:32:19.020higher levels of inflammation at least not that we can measure so inflammation is an important factor
00:32:24.920it clearly plays a role for some people but i don't think in and of itself it is the key instead we have to
00:32:33.620rise above that and see the broader connections through what we call metabolism and mitochondria
00:32:39.660okay so i think people are seeing here now that metabolism it underlies a lot of these things
00:32:45.120it connects a lot of these things that we often treat as disparate things so let's talk about like i mean
00:32:50.740what what are the things that mess up our metabolism and then maybe we can walk through some of these things
00:32:56.660and how you've used you know diet or exercise or reducing stress to not only fix people's metabolism
00:33:04.880which can help their diabetes or obesity or cardiovascular but it also fixes or can treat
00:33:11.780the mental illness so let's talk about diet for example how does our diet mess up our metabolism
00:33:16.720and in turn can cause mental illness yeah so i think everybody knows if you eat a bad diet
00:33:25.260you're more likely to become obese or diabetic so i think most people intuitively know a bad diet
00:33:33.040can mess up metabolism what i think most people probably don't know is that a bad diet can also lead to
00:33:40.620higher rates of mental illness so i just mentioned that study in kids so a bad diet can lead to insulin
00:33:47.980resistance which can then go on to lead to much higher rates of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia
00:33:54.380but much much more common are depression and anxiety disorders and other types of disorders
00:34:03.060so a bad diet can do all of those things and what do i mean when i say a bad diet
00:34:08.820i mean a diet that causes metabolic dysfunction so a diet that causes higher levels of inflammation
00:34:16.660inflammation or a diet that impairs hormonal status or a diet that impairs mitochondrial function
00:34:24.500and you you're probably wondering well what the hell are you talking about chris palmer like what what
00:34:29.960does that mean what is a bad diet well a bad diet can include a lot of highly processed foods
00:34:38.180that are high in sugar high in fat that's kind of the deadly combination is that sweet spot lots of
00:34:47.160sugar and lots of fat that is not a good diet for any human being on the planet or animal on the planet
00:34:53.980for that matter but you know unfortunately we have added all sorts of chemicals and processed things
00:35:00.760you know i i i outlined some of the literature on trans fatty acids those actually are really
00:35:08.040horrible for physical health like heart attacks but they're also really horrible for mental health
00:35:14.020they result trans fatty acids have been found to result in higher rates of depression irritability
00:35:20.240even alzheimer's disease in people so again so mental symptoms and so clearly our diet you know
00:35:29.100it's not rocket science in a way i think everybody understands what you eat can affect your heart
00:35:36.640like in a very clear and concrete way like what you eat can actually clog up the arteries of your heart
00:35:44.120and result in a heart attack on some level it's kind of a no-brainer to just understand that what you
00:35:51.880eat can also affect your brain if it's affecting your heart it's probably affecting more than just your heart
00:35:58.700it's going throughout your body and the brain happens to be connected to everything and and the brain is
00:36:05.460actually one of the more energy consuming organs and so a lot of what you eat a lot of those calories
00:36:13.400and substrates and all the breakdown products a lot of that's going up to your brain to fuel your brain cells
00:36:19.920well another thing you point out in this the diet section of how what we eat can influence our mental
00:36:26.960health or because it's in its influence our metabolism is that doctors have known for a long
00:36:33.020time that if you want to treat epilepsy one thing you can do is do fasting or like a ketogenic diet
00:36:40.100right there's something about a ketogenic diet that reduces epilepsy symptoms particularly in children
00:36:44.660they know this with kids and again that shows like well there's a metabolic thing going on there
00:36:48.680right absolutely to drill some of this home and make it like real for people to help them understand
00:36:57.440it might actually be helpful to share a story if i may yeah sure that'd be great you know i think most
00:37:03.200people understand that if you eat a healthy diet it might help depression or anxiety or even adhd symptoms
00:37:09.220i think most people get that but what i'm saying is that diet especially a dietary intervention like the
00:37:15.300ketogenic diet can actually impact what most people think is an incurable chronic mental disorder
00:37:21.920so you mentioned we have decades of research showing that the ketogenic diet for instance can stop
00:37:28.460seizures that's a real thing seizures are real and people can actually die from them and so doing
00:37:35.340a specific type of a diet like the ketogenic diet can actually stop seizures but the work that i've been
00:37:42.040doing over the last six years is using the ketogenic diet in people with chronic serious mental illness
00:37:47.540and so the story that i'll share with you as a woman i used a different name i used fake names for
00:37:53.300everybody in the book but she actually gave me permission to use her real name so in this interview
00:37:58.440i'm going to use her real name her real name is doris doris was diagnosed with schizophrenia when she was 17
00:38:04.240years old she had daily hallucinations and delusions over the ensuing decades she tried numerous
00:38:11.460antipsychotic and mood stabilizing medications but none of them worked to stop her symptoms they did
00:38:17.600cause her to gain a lot of weight doris was tormented by her illness and between the ages of 68 and 70
00:38:25.120she tried to kill herself at least six times when she turned 70 her doctor referred her to a weight loss
00:38:31.900clinic at duke university where they were using the ketogenic diet and for whatever reason she decided
00:38:37.580to give it a try within two weeks not only did she start losing weight but her hallucinations and
00:38:45.100delusions started going away within months all of her symptoms of schizophrenia were in full and complete
00:38:52.200remission within six months she was off all her psychiatric medications and remained in full and complete
00:39:00.220remission doris went on to live for another 15 years medication free symptom free out of hospitals no more
00:39:13.040psychiatrists or psychologists no more suicide attempts when i last spoke with doris she said she was happy to be
00:39:23.120alive and she actually asked me pleaded with me to share her story with anyone who would listen in the hopes that
00:39:32.080her story might help even one other human being sadly doris passed away this past january at the age of 85 of
00:39:42.240covid pneumonia i want to let people know doris is not alone i now have dozens of cases of similar patients
00:39:52.860achieving seemingly miraculous recoveries from what we know is what we currently think of as chronic mental
00:40:01.280disorders there are clinical trials underway at least five controlled clinical trials some of the
00:40:07.660leading psychiatrists and neuroscientists are hot on this trail but i'm passionate about making these
00:40:13.820treatments and these in this theory and this information available to people now because people want help now
00:40:21.660that's really powerful so i mean it's a perfect example you treat a metabolic condition
00:40:25.700you treat the mental illness and that was just the diet intervention changing to a ketogenic diet
00:40:30.620and that's again to say you know ketogenic might not be for everybody right like i don't want i don't think
00:40:36.220you don't want to give the impressions like well you know if you have depression going to keto diet it'll cure
00:40:40.660depression maybe but that's something you have to talk to a psychiatrist or psychologist about
00:40:45.740so we've been talking about how mental illness may be caused by metabolic problems and how these
00:40:52.400metabolic problems can be caused by things like poor diet and things like that and i think when most
00:40:57.640people think about metabolic problems we associate them we associate with things like you know obesity
00:41:02.700and diabetes as we discussed but we probably all know people who are they got a healthy weight
00:41:08.920they seem to eat a healthy diet but still deal with things like depression so what's going on there
00:41:15.220if mental illness is possibly caused by metabolic problems why are there some people who don't have
00:41:21.640the typical metabolic problem markers nonetheless experience mental health issues so the first thing
00:41:29.620that i want to clarify in that in this person that you're saying is depressed so i want to understand
00:41:35.120is this a normal depression or is this a depression disorder and so in the way that i described pain and
00:41:44.960hyper excitability same deal goes for depression so depression can be a normal response to adversity
00:41:51.960so if if a kid is getting bullied and teased relentlessly or if somebody just got dumped by the love of their
00:42:00.360their life they are going to be depressed that is all normal they do not have a brain disorder they are
00:42:08.240having normal reactions to adversity it doesn't mean they don't need help i think a lot of those people
00:42:16.200do need help but the help is obvious and common sense it is human compassion and support whether that
00:42:23.940is through friends family whether it's through a psychotherapist really doesn't matter to me
00:42:29.620but that person needs compassion and support because they you know are experiencing adversity in their
00:42:38.180life if we're talking about somebody who has depression for no good reason or that depression is really
00:42:45.620exaggerated and unrelenting then i'm going to say that person does have a brain disorder
00:42:51.360and that that brain disorder is due to a metabolic problem in their brain and i'm really glad you brought
00:42:59.460up this point about well doesn't a metabolic problem mean people are fat and diabetic well people who
00:43:08.520are overweight or obese do on average tend to be more metabolically unhealthy and certainly people with
00:43:16.480diabetes type 2 diabetes are more metabolically unhealthy but there are many other causes of metabolic problems
00:43:26.040in the human body so let me give you a clear example that will hopefully kind of help people understand
00:43:34.740this so one of the other causes of metabolic problems are toxins things that are toxic to these things in
00:43:43.380our cells called mitochondria and they cause any toxin will cause metabolic problems and one clear easy to
00:43:52.440understand example is smoking cigarettes so smoking cigarettes is actually associated with weight loss
00:44:00.820on average people who smoke cigarettes weigh less than people who don't smoke cigarettes so this is not a weight
00:44:10.880issue anymore this is a smoking issue and yet we know with certainty based on decades of research people who smoke
00:44:21.780cigarettes are more likely to have heart attacks and strokes those are metabolic disorders they're also
00:44:30.480interestingly more likely to have insulin resistance and develop type 2 diabetes even though most people think of
00:44:40.420insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes as being related to weight or obesity smokers even though they're thin
00:44:49.060tend to develop higher rates of insulin resistance and diabetes but guess what else smokers are more likely
00:44:57.520to develop depression so one study actually followed over 14,000 Korean adults over several years and they measured
00:45:08.960whether they were smokers and or whether they were depressed and the people who were not depressed but they
00:45:16.020were smokers were much much more likely to go on to develop depression in the subsequent years however the reverse
00:45:26.060association was not found so people who were depressed were not necessarily more likely to go on to become smokers and so the researchers in that study concluded
00:45:35.960concluded that smoking seems to cause or contribute to an increased risk for the development of depression
00:45:44.460so if i summarize all of that one metabolic toxin smoking cigarettes results in higher rates of cardiovascular disease
00:45:56.160insulin resistance type 2 diabetes and depression even though smokers weigh less
00:46:05.060so we need to stop thinking about metabolic problems as a weight issue because it is much more than just weight
00:46:13.800well another toxin obvious one would be alcohol as well right
00:46:18.580absolutely and believe it or not people who drink high amounts of alcohol are more likely to what have heart attacks
00:46:28.980they're also more likely to develop type 2 diabetes interestingly they're more likely to develop mental disorders
00:46:37.220including depression so again one metabolic toxin alcohol we know with certainty based on decades of research
00:46:46.740is a mitochondrial poison and that is poisoning your metabolism and that can result in both mental and metabolic disorders
00:46:57.540and then other things too you talk about in the book that could affect metabolism but you might not see someone with the obvious signs that they have a metabolic issue like weight gain
00:47:06.280if you're lonely right i think there's studies that show that your likelihood of cardiac problems goes up
00:47:12.360insulin resistance also goes up and that can cause things like depression as well
00:47:16.960absolutely so everybody knows that loneliness could be associated with depression that just kind of makes sense
00:47:24.980and that's usually what people think but loneliness as you mentioned also results in higher rates of metabolic disorders
00:47:32.480heart attacks strokes and actually premature death and so that is one of the major themes of brain energy
00:47:53.720that we can't talk about mental symptoms or mental disorders without talking about metabolic
00:47:59.680but we also can't talk about metabolic disorders like heart attacks or even obesity without thinking about mental symptoms and mental disorders
00:48:10.420okay so even if you're not overweight you can still have metabolic problems because there are metabolic disruptors that don't show up in weight gain
00:48:19.480things like smoking and drinking can damage your metabolism
00:48:23.140something else that can damage your metabolism is stress and lack of sleep
00:48:28.480a lack of exercise can damage your metabolism
00:48:31.600and you know that's why exercise can improve mental health
00:48:35.280so a bunch of things beyond diet can affect metabolism
00:48:38.460and that in turn can affect your mental health
00:48:41.980how do you imagine this brain energy theory