422. Beyond the Anecdote： Keto and Carnivore Saves ｜ Dr. Chris Palmer
Summary
With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way. In his new series, "Daily Wire Plus," Dr. Peterson provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. B.P. Peterson on Depression and Anxiety. Let's take this first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Dr. Chris Palmer is a psychiatrist at the Harvard Medical School and a co-founder of McLean Hospital. He is the author of the 2022 book, "Brain Energy." Dr. Palmer has been pursuing the hypothesis that many mental disorders, especially the really severe ones, like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and intractable depression, with no apparent environmental cause, might be associated with metabolic disorder, mediated primarily by mitochondrial dysfunction. In this episode, we discuss the possibility that dietary factors play a major role in the genesis of such disorders, and the benefits of a ketogenic diet as a means of healing from them. Let's discuss that in detail. Thank you for listening to this episode. I appreciate your support and your continued support of this podcast. Peace, Blessings, Eternally gratefulness, Cheers, Elyssa, and Cheers. -Jon Soraya - Dr. Jonathon Peterson, MD, PhD, CDS, D.D., CFS, CSE, C.D.A. (PhD., MS, MS, M.C. (C.D.) and Dr. C. (D.E. (M.E., D.A., C.M. (A.E.) Dr.S. (F). (C) (A) (A). (P) & Dr. J.B. (R. (P). (C.) (C). (D.) (A.) (B). (P. (B.) (D). (R.) (F.) (P.) (E). (A), Dr. (J.) (M.) (R). (E.) (S). (I). (S.) (L.) (I.) ( ) (P), (S) (C), )
Transcript
00:00:00.960
Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480
Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740
We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100
With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420
He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360
If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780
Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460
Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:57.420
Hello everyone. I'm speaking today with Dr. Chris Palmer.
00:01:13.740
He's associated with the Harvard Medical School and with McLean Hospital, which is perhaps the world's preeminent psychiatric hospital.
00:01:21.920
And we talked today about material associated, for example, with his book, 2022 book called Brain Energy.
00:01:31.800
Dr. Palmer has been pursuing the hypothesis that many mental disorders, especially the really severe mental disorders,
00:01:40.020
schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression, intractable depression,
00:01:45.260
with no apparent environmental cause, let's say, or psychological cause, might be associated with metabolic disorder,
00:01:54.180
mediated primarily by mitochondrial dysfunction.
00:01:59.000
The mitochondria are basically the energy factories in every cell, and that's not all they do.
00:02:05.100
Mitochondrial disorder, therefore, is a very, very serious problem.
00:02:08.260
He's been experimenting with ketogenic diet, akin in some sense to the diet that my daughter has been promoting, the lion diet,
00:02:17.960
making the case that use of such diets can not only reduce the effect of potential toxins on mitochondrial function,
00:02:28.260
but also increase mitochondrial metabolism and also help the body heal by putting it into a state known as autophagy or mitophagy,
00:02:40.800
which are states where the body is actually taking itself apart as a consequence of food deprivation and then rebuilding itself.
00:02:47.740
Anyways, he makes the case, we'll discuss the probability that this kind of hypothesizing has gone beyond the merely anecdotal,
00:03:00.020
to the point where there is a tremendous amount of research supporting the proposition that dietary factors play a major role in the genesis of such severe mental disorders,
00:03:12.360
and not only mental disorders, also physical disorders like obesity, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, you know, the common enemies of mankind.
00:03:22.660
And so we're going to discuss that in detail. Thank you for joining us.
00:03:26.820
Dr. Palmer, let's start out at the level of conceptualization.
00:03:32.400
In your 2022 book, correct me if I get any of this wrong, because I don't want to put words in your mouth,
00:03:38.440
you're concentrating at least on the relationship between, I would say, brain dysfunction, biological dysfunction,
00:03:47.960
metabolic dysfunction, and what we generally think of as mental disorders.
00:03:53.900
And so the typical, more abstract psychological conceptualization would be that a mental disorder,
00:04:02.000
something associated with psychopathology and undue suffering, let's say,
00:04:05.840
with dysfunction in the social environment and so forth might be a consequence of faulty beliefs and perceptions,
00:04:13.100
and so they can get bent to the point where they're indistinguishable from delusions.
00:04:18.080
And then also skill deficits, which is often what behaviorists remediate,
00:04:22.320
and it's obvious that a skill deficit in social ability, for example, isn't equivalent to a metabolic disorder.
00:04:29.060
But let me start by asking you how you lay out your conceptualization of metabolic disorder
00:04:35.620
and what implications you think that has for the diagnosis and further understanding
00:04:47.200
You know, it's a complicated situation, as you even just began to hint at.
00:04:53.700
And, you know, maybe one easy way to outline my conceptualization is that there are mental states
00:05:10.200
All humans will have anxiety at some point or another in their life.
00:05:14.860
All humans will get depressed, or most humans will get depressed.
00:05:19.340
If they experience tragic loss or humiliation and shame.
00:05:27.480
And those are not brain disorders, as far as I'm concerned.
00:05:33.600
That is the normal state of being a human being.
00:05:37.840
And as you alluded to, depending on your upbringing and your experiences,
00:05:44.060
you might learn maladaptive themes or maladaptive lessons in life.
00:05:52.560
You can't trust anybody, and you go through life that way.
00:05:56.220
And that can actually have very serious consequences for people.
00:06:00.920
But I don't think those people have brain disorders.
00:06:07.600
the way that that happened is all obvious once you understand the person's full history.
00:06:16.700
And so there are myriad ways in which humans can suffer
00:06:21.460
and develop maladaptive patterns that do not include brain disorders.
00:06:28.120
And psychotherapy can be helpful and just being human
00:06:32.740
and all of the life skills that you talk about apply to those people.
00:06:40.600
And yet there are other people who have brain disorders.
00:06:56.820
They have crippling, unrelenting depression for no clear reason.
00:07:03.340
They have hallucinations, delusions, manic episodes, and other types of symptoms.
00:07:10.160
And it is largely believed in the psychiatric field
00:07:14.680
that these people do in fact have brain disorders
00:07:52.720
to result in mental disorders or mental illness.
00:08:08.720
And they span a wide variety of different treatment strategies.
00:08:25.560
thinking more kind of in a more sophisticated way
00:08:41.100
Because some of them can improve brain metabolism,
00:08:52.360
with regards to the differential diagnosis of depression.
00:09:10.200
Okay, so one of the things I noticed as a clinician,
00:09:14.660
and I think that this is key to solving the mystery of,
00:09:19.740
of differential response to serotonin reuptake inhibitors
00:09:28.240
I don't think it's one that's been attended to enough.
00:09:45.540
It's associated with grief and shame and guilt.
00:10:37.060
but then imagine that those broke into two classes.
00:11:05.980
might have been twisting their perception of that.
00:32:50.780
get better from a change in diet. What on earth is
00:32:53.860
the ketogenic diet doing? And I was quickly led
00:33:06.620
people know the ketogenic diet as a fad diet or a
00:33:13.640
evidence-based treatment for epilepsy. And it can
00:33:18.520
stop seizures even when medications fail to stop
00:33:22.760
seizures. And the reason that's so important to me
00:33:36.140
originally designed to stop seizures, and we use
00:33:39.780
them for a wide range of mental disorders, including
00:33:48.700
schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and others. And so
00:33:52.780
initially, that was a really important connection
00:33:54.900
because I thought, well, maybe that's why this diet is
00:33:57.680
changing his brain symptoms, is whatever it's doing to
00:34:01.800
stop seizures, maybe that those same processes are also
00:34:11.560
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Like reducing excess neural activity, for example, if you, because you can imagine
00:35:24.760
that that delusional state is a, I'm not saying this is the case, but you can
00:35:30.360
imagine that it is the case, that it is a consequence, at least in part, of excess
00:35:34.700
neural activity. Now, if you have too much neural activity, you're going to get the
00:35:38.240
electrical storm that characterizes epilepsy, but you could imagine that a man could be
00:35:43.200
in a psychophysiological, neurophysiological condition where the spread of ideas around
00:35:49.740
the core idea is too rapid and too wide. And, you know, that delusion certainly looks
00:35:55.120
like that to some degree, especially a paranoid delusion. You even see that to some degree
00:35:59.460
in depression because in depression, one sad idea will trigger an avalanche of sad ideas.
00:36:06.540
So, so, so, well, just a thought with regard to the potential overlap with epilepsy. Okay.
00:36:11.680
So you started looking at the dramatic, as you pointed out, dramatic effects of ketogenic diets
00:36:17.440
on epilepsy treatment and started to think if that, given that that dramatic effect on brain
00:36:27.000
states exists, which is clearly documented, right? And no one disputes it, that there's no reason to
00:36:33.160
assume that there couldn't be more subtle, but still important effects of dietary transformation.
00:36:38.860
And then you became partly convinced of that as well because of the, I mean, the story you tell
00:36:44.940
about one client. And that's a ridiculously dramatic story because schizoaffective, personality disorders
00:36:50.680
disorders are notoriously difficult to treat. Schizoaffective disorder is a complete bloody
00:36:54.800
catastrophe because it has all of the aspects of personality disorder that'll produce social
00:37:01.540
alienation, plus all the intense suffering that's characterizes the whole hallucinatory nightmare
00:37:07.800
of delusion. So it's a very, very serious personality disorder, neuropsychiatric condition. And then you saw
00:37:14.960
this dramatic transformation in this one individual, not only on the weight side, which is dramatic
00:37:20.120
enough and unlikely enough, given that most people never lose their weight, right? They'll lose it for
00:37:25.280
a time, but they gain it back and more. And also the cessation of the symptoms. And also this makes it
00:37:31.740
even more complex because it took two months. This is not an easy thing to discover, right? I mean, the person
00:37:38.660
has to be pretty damn committed to the dietary transformation and also unlikely to cheat in the
00:37:44.640
interim. So, okay. So you, you, you, you encountered those. Let's return to the metabolic story.
00:37:51.300
And so, so initially, well, and I want to back up just a little bit and just forgive me, but I want to
00:37:58.580
just correct something that you said. So, cause I'm talking about schizoaffective disorder, which is
00:38:04.660
really the full bred cross between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Oh, so, oh, so this is more than
00:38:12.180
the personality disorder. As opposed to the personality disorder, which is schizotypal
00:38:16.000
disorder. So he had. Oh, I see. So you, it was even more serious. It was even more serious. He
00:38:21.400
basically had full-fledged schizophrenia. Full-fledged psychosis. Full-fledged psychosis.
00:38:27.820
I see. Oh, okay. And so as I went on, you know, initially I'm starting to use it with other patients
00:38:35.460
and I'm seeing equal, equally transformative and sometimes even more transformative results.
00:38:41.000
So I know I'm onto something, but I also recognize nobody's going to believe this.
00:38:47.100
Nobody in the medical field is going to believe that a diet could change something as devastating
00:38:53.740
as schizophrenia. So I need to come up with at least a potential mechanism of action. I need to
00:39:01.180
understand enough science to be able to make the case, to be able to report this in the medical
00:39:09.280
literature. And so the great news is that I had two bodies of literature to call on. So there's an
00:39:17.660
entire body of literature in the neurology field on how on earth does the ketogenic diet stop seizures?
00:39:24.920
And there are all of these known mechanisms of action, including changes in neurotransmitters,
00:39:32.160
changes in the gut microbiome, decreasing inflammation, all of these things. But one thing
00:39:40.600
stuck out at me. It improves mitochondrial function, which basically means it improves brain metabolism.
00:39:51.080
The other body of literature that I had to look at, though, was the schizophrenia literature and the
00:39:57.400
bipolar disorder literature to see, well, what do we know about the neurology, the neuroscience of
00:40:04.960
those disorders? And is there any overlap? And the widely held view is that schizophrenia is just
00:40:15.600
too much dopamine. That's what schizophrenia is, too much dopamine. But that didn't sit with this
00:40:23.520
kind of observation that the ketogenic diet is dramatically reducing symptoms. The dopamine
00:40:31.900
thing didn't fit in. And so I had to look elsewhere. And I was led to this entire body of literature,
00:40:39.720
two decades long now, documenting that mitochondrial problems may in fact be the central root cause of
00:40:51.640
schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Okay, let me let me ask you a question there. So, well,
00:40:57.360
the dopamine hypothesis has been around for a very long time. And it is the case. And it's been a
00:41:03.160
while since I reviewed this. So if if I have if there's anything that I'm saying that's no longer like
00:41:08.640
that's out of date, let me know. Part of the evidence for that was that at least with some
00:41:14.600
forms of schizophrenia, you could exacerbate the symptoms with amphetamines and that you could also
00:41:19.660
produce amphetamine related psychosis. That's part of the body of evidence. The other part of the body
00:41:24.600
of evidence is that the antipsychotics, the major antipsychotics do seem to work like anti cocaine or
00:41:30.860
anti amphetamine. And they do quell the more florid symptoms of schizophrenia, especially in its
00:41:38.620
acute manifestations, rather than the sort of burnout schizophrenia that's characteristic maybe
00:41:46.000
of the much longer term illness. So so and so given the prevalence of that hypothesis and the support
00:41:54.920
for its validity, did you see any overlap between the metabolic hypothesis and the dopamine hypothesis?
00:42:02.240
Like is the is the dopaminergic malfunction in your estimation, a secondary consequence of a deeper
00:42:08.620
mitochondria malfunction? Or do you think that the dopamine hypothesis is more something, you know,
00:42:15.380
more akin to observation of a symptom pattern rather than the core cause? Because no one knows why the
00:42:21.340
dopamine system dysregulates. Right. So in the final analysis, it's not an explanation anyways.
00:42:27.060
I think that's the key is that, you know, so first and foremost, I want to say that everything that
00:42:34.240
you just said is true. And that is, in fact, the basis for the dopamine hypothesis. However,
00:42:40.520
it doesn't fully account for all of the information that we currently have. We know that serotonergic
00:42:46.600
antidepressants, things like Prozac and Zoloft, can also exacerbate psychosis in people with bipolar
00:42:54.560
disorder or schizophrenia or schizophrenia or other disorders. We know that sleep deprivation can
00:43:00.820
exacerbate psychosis in a wide range of people, certainly people with schizophrenia, but even in
00:43:07.460
normal healthy people. If we sleep deprive them long enough, they will begin to hallucinate or have
00:43:13.620
delusions. So that that starts to suggest, wait, serotonin now plays a role and sleep deprivation.
00:43:21.880
How does that all fit together? Does that all converge at dopamine? It does not. It does not
00:43:28.260
converge at dopamine. However, if we think about, well, what could cause dopaminergic neurons to be
00:43:36.000
overactive and spew out more dopamine than they're supposed to be spewing out, then we actually come
00:43:44.000
back to the mitochondrial or metabolic theory that I'm proposing. The metabolic theory can actually
00:43:51.780
explain to us exactly why neurons might be overactive or the neuroscience term is hyper excitable.
00:44:03.380
But we've got decades of science, neuroimaging studies, cell biology studies, and others where we know for
00:44:11.820
sure that people with these brain conditions have hyper excitable neurons, that there are parts of
00:44:19.700
their brain that just start firing when they should not fire, kind of like a pain cell starts firing when
00:44:26.980
it shouldn't fire. And so in order to understand, well, what would make a cell start to fire for no
00:44:35.560
reason? What would make it hyper excitable or overactive? We actually can turn to the metabolic
00:44:43.140
or mitochondrial theory because that actually connects all of the dots. That can help us understand why
00:44:51.140
would Zoloft or Prozac cause psychosis? That can help us understand why would sleep deprivation
00:44:57.740
cause psychosis? And it certainly confirms what you outlined. Why would amphetamines or cocaine cause
00:45:05.320
psychosis? So I think that, you know, the way that I came to this is I started looking at the entire
00:45:13.860
field, initially just trying to connect the dots for how on earth could a ketogenic diet stop psychotic
00:45:21.780
symptoms in somebody who presumably had a lifelong genetic disorder. That is what most people think
00:45:29.660
of as schizophrenia. It is a lifelong genetic disorder. It's permanent. It's fixed. There essentially is no
00:45:37.960
hope for this person. So I'm trying to understand how on earth could a diet do that? As soon as I put all of
00:45:47.660
that together, though, and started focusing in on mitochondria and metabolism, I started branching out
00:45:57.060
to other diagnoses. And the reason I started branching out to other diagnoses is because we have a problem
00:46:05.900
in the mental health field. Although we have all of these nice diagnostic labels like schizophrenia or
00:46:12.500
bipolar or alcoholism or anorexia or OCD, and we pretend that they are all separate and distinct
00:46:21.340
disorders, the reality is that a lot of the people that we treat in mental health clinics have more
00:46:30.300
than one of those diagnostic labels. It is rare for somebody to have schizophrenia and only schizophrenia.
00:46:36.720
Almost always they have schizophrenia and some substance use problems and some OCD. Oh, and
00:46:44.920
depression. Well, wouldn't you be depressed too if you had schizophrenia? Oh, and anxiety. Well,
00:46:50.220
wouldn't you be anxious if you had schizophrenia? I mean, we rationalize it away, but it cuts across all of
00:46:57.840
our diagnostic categories that there's this overlap. And so I started looking into, is there any
00:47:04.840
meta, is there any evidence that metabolism or mitochondria could play a role in these other
00:47:10.560
mental disorders? And at the end of the day, what became overwhelmingly clear is that we for decades
00:47:19.480
have been accumulating this evidence and nobody to date has really put it all together. But it is in
00:47:28.160
fact a way to put all of the evidence that we have accumulated for decades. It's a way to put it
00:47:34.640
together and have it together and have it fit and have it make sense. But once you understand that
00:47:41.680
science, it leads to solutions that may actually help people heal and recover from disorders that we are
00:47:51.860
currently telling people are lifelong incurable disorders. Okay. Okay. So let me, I want to step
00:48:00.580
through that in a, in a sequence. The first thing, okay, let me recapitulate. So you pointed to first
00:48:08.880
the fact that there's a tremendous amount of comorbidity or diagnostic overlap between the
00:48:13.900
hypothetically separate categories that we describe as the various mental illnesses. Now we know that's
00:48:20.100
true, not least in the fact that for the mental illness to come to the attention of a, um, of a
00:48:26.500
psychiatrist or a psychologist or an MD for that matter, it's usually a consequence of the
00:48:31.640
exacerbation of negative emotion and the decrease of positive emotion. So there is a place where
00:48:36.480
there's immense overlap, right? Because it's just not a problem with the possible exception of mania.
00:48:42.220
It's just not a problem that comes to people's attention unless one of the major areas of overlap
00:48:48.380
is a preponderance of negative emotion, the suffering we described. But then you describe that even more
00:48:53.960
densely pointing out that these hypothetically separate diagnostic categories, when you, when you,
00:49:00.180
when you aggregate them, they have a tremendous area of even symptomatic overlap. I know, for example,
00:49:06.300
can't remember the study now, but showed that if, if you do have a person with a so-called personality
00:49:12.100
disorder, imagine you could make a list of all personality disorder symptoms. And the one thing you
00:49:18.560
would get to know from that list checklist was how many symptoms the person in front of you had,
00:49:25.060
that's a much more useful prognostic indicator than diagnostic category, right? So there's tremendous
00:49:32.460
overlap of symptomatology. Now you think that points to an underlying commonality of cause,
00:49:38.780
right? And that, and that, and you're hot on the trail of this metabolic insufficiency.
00:49:45.120
So let's start, if you would, walk us through what the mitochondria do. Tell us why deficits in
00:49:54.020
mitochondrial function, like what they would produce, because, well, one of the things that
00:49:57.980
happens just as you age is your mitochondria start to become less and less effective. So,
00:50:02.720
and not everybody who ages shows signs of mental disorder, although depression and pain,
00:50:08.360
et cetera, associated with aging are far from uncommon. So take us down to the mitochondria.
00:50:14.540
Tell us what they do. Tell us how that would manifest itself in neuropsychiatric disorder.
00:50:20.800
And then maybe we can move to that because the next question is, okay, fair enough. Why does the
00:50:26.960
keto diet specifically work? And is that the best of all possible intercessional diets? And then we can
00:50:35.040
think about, well, where should that also fit conceptually in the armament of diagnostic and
00:50:41.020
treatment practices? Okay. So let's start with what do mitochondria do?
00:50:46.180
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Most people who are even familiar with the term mitochondria know them as the powerhouse of the
00:52:13.680
cell. And what that means is that they take food and oxygen and they turn it into ATP.
00:52:21.040
So mitochondria are the things that are actually using oxygen. So we breathe in oxygen and we breathe
00:52:27.520
out carbon dioxide. Mitochondria are using that oxygen and they are producing carbon dioxide that
00:52:35.540
we breathe out. Mitochondria are taking the food. So we have, you know, our digestive tract and other
00:52:42.640
kind of enzymes throughout our bodies that are breaking food down. But ultimately, most of the food,
00:52:49.460
at least 90% of the food that we consume ends up inside mitochondria. So mitochondria are the
00:52:57.200
processors of food. And when they get food, they convert it into one of three things. I could probably
00:53:06.020
come up with more categories, but one of three things. The three things are they convert it into ATP,
00:53:12.240
which is the power unit of the cell. And that's why they are called the powerhouse of the cell. They're
00:53:19.660
creating energy or ATP. The second thing that happens to food that we consume is it may not go
00:53:27.580
all the way to ATP. We might just break it down into smaller molecules. And then we use those smaller
00:53:35.000
molecules to produce enzymes or proteins or neurotransmitters or hormones or cell membranes.
00:53:42.760
So our bodies are, in fact, composed of food that we ate. The food that we eat gets broken down and it
00:53:53.100
turns into our cells and our neurotransmitters and everything else. And the third thing that can happen
00:53:59.460
is that mitochondria actually can sometimes divert that energy. And instead of making ATP or making
00:54:08.100
molecules to build cells, they make heat. And in fact, mitochondria are the reason we are warm-blooded
00:54:17.220
animals. Without them, we would not be warm. They can shuttle. They are the things that are making heat.
00:54:26.100
If you get a fever, they are creating that fever. If you're too cold, it's because they're not firing
00:54:32.480
enough. There's something wrong with their kind of system. That's what most people know. Research over
00:54:40.920
the last 20 years has completely shattered that simplistic notion of what mitochondria are.
00:54:50.040
And this is the reason. So some people ask, like, Chris Palmer, how on earth are you coming up with
00:54:55.200
this? And if it's really true, why hasn't somebody else come up with it? Part of it, number one, a lot
00:55:01.520
of other people have kind of sort of come up with what I'm arguing. And they are hot on this trail and
00:55:07.800
continue to be hot on this trail. So I am not alone. But one of the reasons most people have not put it
00:55:14.180
together is because this is a cutting-edge area of research over the last 20 years. Not really in the
00:55:21.740
mental health field. It's more in the obesity field, the cardiovascular field, the aging field,
00:55:29.980
the Alzheimer's disease field. All of these are looking at what do mitochondria do so that they
00:55:36.660
can better understand their kind of diseases. And let me just give you a brief snapshot of what
00:55:44.100
mitochondria do, and you'll begin to understand how it starts to connect the mental health field.
00:55:49.400
Mitochondria make and they help create, regulate, and release neurotransmitters,
00:56:02.140
including serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, GABA. And in fact, those neurotransmitters then
00:56:10.400
impact mitochondrial function. So it's a two-way street. The neurotransmitters affect mitochondria.
00:56:16.380
Mitochondria are making and releasing or helping to release those neurotransmitters.
00:56:22.420
Mitochondria help control the expression of genes from the cell nucleus. That's the whole area of
00:56:29.040
called epigenetics. Mitochondria are central to epigenetic expression in cells. Mitochondria help
00:56:37.040
turn inflammation both on and off. Mitochondria control the first step in the synthesis of some key
00:56:45.220
hormones, including cortisol, estrogen, testosterone. So we've long known that HPA axis
00:56:57.520
kind of dysregulation, so too much cortisol or too little cortisol, that we've known that that's
00:57:03.920
dysregulated in people with mental illness. What would cause that dysregulation? Actually,
00:57:10.200
mitochondrial dysregulation is in fact the leading theory for what could cause that dysregulation
00:57:17.580
because they are controlling the first step in the synthesis. They are affected by our diet,
00:57:24.200
our exercise, drugs, and alcohol impact their function. But here's the kicker. Trauma,
00:57:31.320
childhood adversity directly impact mitochondrial function and health. And so it is a way for us
00:57:45.560
to begin to integrate the biopsychosocial risk factors that we know can play a role in what we call
00:57:55.900
mental disorders. In mitochondria, their function or malfunction can begin to help us piece the puzzle
00:58:04.220
together. Okay, so let me summarize that and tell me, you tell me if I've got my understanding right.
00:58:11.120
So you pointed out that classically speaking, mitochondria regarded as the furnace, the energy
00:58:16.560
source of the cell, and therefore the body, have been studied in relationship to their ability to
00:58:22.400
produce from the food we eat, ATP, which is the fundamental molecule by which we fuel ourselves,
00:58:30.380
let's say, and then a plethora of chemicals and molecules, and also produce heat. Now, it sounds
00:58:35.760
to me like what you've claimed is that over the last 20 years, that chemical and molecular production
00:58:42.660
function of mitochondria has been differentiated and delineated far more comprehensively. So now we
00:58:49.460
understand that mitochondria are crucial for the productions of various hormones and neurotransmitters.
00:58:57.060
They're part of the factory that does that. They're also associated, as you said, with the
00:59:01.580
initiation and cessation of inflammatory responses, and also the regulation of gene operation. And that's
00:59:09.020
where we got into a discussion of epigenetics. So for everybody watching and listening, and correct me if
00:59:13.580
I've got this wrong, Dr. Palmer, it's like, genes are part of the biological code that lays out our
00:59:22.140
physical, psychophysiological function from the ground upward. Genes can be turned on and off, and they're
00:59:30.000
turned on and off, according to environmental demand. There's other reasons they can be turned off and on, but
00:59:35.020
that's one of them. And so you're pointing out that mitochondria play a role in the switching on and off
00:59:42.480
of genes like they do in the switching on and off of inflammation and the production of hormones and
00:59:47.180
neurotransmitters. So that's another reason why delving into the cell down to the level of the
00:59:52.620
mitochondria is a good place to be looking for the common pathway that we're searching for with regards
00:59:58.420
to the generation or the initiation of mental illness. Okay, so I've got that right? Yes. Is
01:00:04.760
that a reasonable? That is all perfect. Okay, good, good. Well, then let's go to diet. Now, I want to lay
01:00:11.560
out another question for you. So as you may know or may not know, and the same would apply to people who
01:00:17.240
are watching and listening, my family has been experimenting a lot with a radical keto diet, and
01:00:23.660
that's an all beef diet with salt. And there's a variety of reasons why it's all beef, which I won't go
01:00:29.780
into. But here's the fundamental issue from the scientific perspective. And you can tell me what you
01:00:34.620
think about this more broadly, and why you're investigating a keto diet, which is less strict than a carnivore
01:00:40.040
diet. So one of the things we've thought and experimented with when we were trying to sort out my daughter's
01:00:46.780
autoimmune illness was, well, see, we had her tested at one point for allergies to foods, for
01:00:53.420
example. And the basic test came back and skin test and showed she was allergic to everything.
01:00:59.780
Now we thought, well, what's the probability that she's going to be allergic to everything? It's like
01:01:04.280
that just seems unbelievable. But I did know at that point, and this is to your point with regards to
01:01:10.060
diet, one of the most reliable treatments for arthritis, and this works with virtually everyone
01:01:15.780
is if you fast, your arthritis goes away. Now, the problem is it comes back when you eat anything.
01:01:23.200
It's like, well, wait a second. Anything is a lot of things. So then you might say, well,
01:01:28.020
if you were going to investigate a potential dietary link with pathology, you'd want to find
01:01:35.520
the simplest possible. We had her on some so-called elimination diets, but they made no conceptual sense.
01:01:42.400
And so what we decided on eventually was to search for the simplest possible diet that could actually
01:01:48.780
sustain you over some reasonable period of time. Now, a carnivorous diet can do that. As we know from
01:01:55.080
the Inuit, for example, and the Mazi, you can live virtually forever on a carnivorous diet. Now,
01:01:59.980
the advantage to that diagnostically is that it eradicates a tremendous number of variables,
01:02:06.680
right? So you could try a carnivorous diet. If it worked, you'd know that diet is a reason.
01:02:13.700
And then knowing that it worked and being in a condition where now you've recovered to some degree,
01:02:18.040
you could conceivably add foods back one by one and see if you could regenerate the symptoms.
01:02:23.320
Now, I'm curious what you think about that practically and as a diagnostic and a step in
01:02:31.580
scientific reasoning, but also how you see the relationship between that extremely
01:02:36.120
restricted diet and the keto diets that you describe. It's a really important question.
01:02:46.940
And it gets a little more complicated than sometimes people talk about it. So bear with me.
01:02:53.640
So the ketogenic diet and certainly a carnivorous diet like you just described is probably a ketogenic
01:03:02.080
diet. Unless you're eating very lean meat, if you're eating meat with fat, ribeye steaks,
01:03:10.520
other types of meat, if you're frying it in beef tallow or anything like that, it is a ketogenic diet
01:03:19.280
as well. And I just want to start with the observation that a ketogenic diet is actually
01:03:25.720
trickery in a way. It's tricking the body into thinking that it is fasting when it isn't fasting.
01:03:36.100
Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, that's very interesting. And so you also get all the advantages of,
01:03:41.720
what is it? I can't say it properly. Autophagy? Autophagy?
01:03:46.080
Absolutely. Self-devouring. You do. Okay, so it does mimic fasting.
01:03:50.720
It does mimic fasting. And that's actually, so that was actually the basis for the development
01:03:56.340
of the ketogenic diet originally, is that a neurologist 100 years ago, he knew that fasting
01:04:04.560
could stop seizures. But if you fast people for too long, they starve to death and it's a really bad
01:04:12.880
treatment. So he actually tried to figure out, is there a way to trick the body into thinking that
01:04:22.980
it's fasting, get those benefits of fasting, but not have the people starve to death? And like you
01:04:31.620
said, is there a way to actually provide adequate nutrition? And when we're thinking about these
01:04:38.400
interventions in children with epilepsy, for instance, we not only need to think about adequate
01:04:44.400
nutrition, we need to think about nutrition that can help those children grow and thrive and gain weight
01:04:50.680
and develop their bodies like they should. And so it was this ingenious neurologist who developed the
01:04:59.880
ketogenic diet for that purpose. And so first and foremost, I want to say that there are kind of
01:05:07.700
two big issues. One is that some people are allergic to things that they are eating,
01:05:14.520
or maybe they are having a toxic reaction to things that they are eating. And we can get into processed
01:05:22.820
foods and all of the artificial stuff. And that is absolutely happening in some cases. And therefore,
01:05:31.640
the treatment plan with that model in mind is figure out what the problematic foods are,
01:05:40.880
eliminate them from the diet, and then you're good to go. But actually fasting and fasting-mimicking
01:05:48.680
diets, like the ketogenic diet, like your daughter's kind of heart lion diet that she's, the lion diet that she
01:05:59.960
does, that that is actually mimicking the fasting state. And what that's really doing is it's actually
01:06:10.340
changing metabolism in the entire body. It is dramatically reducing inflammation.
01:06:17.300
It is highly upregulating autophagy. And from my hypothesis, really important, something called
01:06:27.640
mitophagy, which is mitochondrial repair. So it's basically getting rid of old and defective cells, but also
01:06:37.860
old and defective cell parts, including defective mitochondria. That when you're in this fasting state or
01:06:45.360
fasting-mimicking diet state, your body is doing all of this repair, it's getting rid of old parts,
01:06:53.700
and then when you eat, replacing them with new ones. And that can actually have profound
01:06:59.700
healing potential, independent of whatever you were eating. Whether you were eating a healthy diet or an
01:07:08.160
unhealthy diet or anything in between, those benefits can be helpful to people. And the fascinating thing,
01:07:20.000
people have known this for millennia. Every culture on earth, pretty much, just about,
01:07:29.140
has used fasting as a healing intervention or a religious intervention. It was often paired with
01:07:39.520
healing for millennia. Hippocrates knew about this. Jesus knew about this. In one of the versions of the
01:07:52.120
New Testament, his disciples called him to say, this child is seizing and we are praying and it's not
01:08:02.260
stopping this child. They thought it was demon possession, actually. So they described frothing
01:08:07.920
at the mouth and demon possession. And they said, Jesus, we're praying, we're praying and it's not
01:08:13.300
working. And he said, this child needs fasting plus prayer. And the fasting plus prayer stopped the seizure,
01:08:24.020
stopped the demon possession. So this has been known for millennia that fasting can help. And it's,
01:08:33.560
people back then weren't eating processed foods. So it's not a processed food problem. It is,
01:08:40.000
it is a physiological way to induce healing. And you basically are tapping into the body's innate
01:08:50.940
ability to heal and repair itself. That's what you're doing when you fast.
01:08:59.240
So we need periods of eating and not eating. And the not eating periods are, are the repair periods.
01:09:05.660
And so in a culture like ours, where you can eat any damn thing you want all the time and everyone
01:09:11.280
does, what that implies is that not only are we making ourselves obese and, and, and increasing
01:09:18.600
our proclivity to diabetes at a rate that's absolutely staggering, but we're also perhaps never allowing
01:09:25.280
ourselves to enter into the bio biological condition that's associated, as you said, with the repair
01:09:32.040
processes that go all the way down into the cellular. And now with regard to the relationship between
01:09:38.800
fasting and the ketogenic diet, is the ketogenic diet, a sufficient replacement for fasting or a
01:09:47.020
carnivorous diet? Like is, do you know, and maybe we don't know this yet, are there benefits to ceasing
01:09:53.660
food intake altogether that can't be accrued from merely eating, let's say a carnivorous or a keto diet?
01:10:00.280
There are. And, and even the, even the epilepsy researchers have found this and they were
01:10:08.240
initially a little surprised that that was the case. But fasting is in fact different than maybe
01:10:17.800
the carnivore diet, which is different than a ketogenic diet, which is going to be different than
01:10:24.000
maybe a whole food plant-based diet or, or the paleo diet or the CrossFit diet or whatever diet you want
01:10:31.360
to talk about. And the reality is that range of dietary interventions can play a role for different
01:10:42.080
people. And people don't need the same dietary intervention for their whole life necessarily.
01:10:50.820
So sometimes you can do a fast, get some healing or repair, or just a reboot, if you will. And that
01:11:00.360
may be enough. And there are plenty of health and fitness gurus who say that they do a two or three
01:11:07.920
day fast once or twice a year for that reason, that they are trying to stimulate autophagy. They're
01:11:14.540
trying to reduce their risk for cancer based on this science. We don't have long-term studies to know
01:11:20.720
for sure if that really works, but the science suggests that it might. But I think, I think
01:11:27.380
other people in fact are really sensitive to different types of foods. Your daughter is a
01:11:33.760
perfect example of somebody who might be sensitive and she may do best with an all meat diet and a very
01:11:40.860
simple diet. And are there other things that she might be able to eat and remain healthy? There might
01:11:48.460
be, but she would have to go on that kind of exploratory pathway and one at a time introduce
01:11:55.680
a new food and see, can I tolerate this food? Can my digestive tract tolerate this food? Do my autoimmune
01:12:04.840
symptoms start coming back when I eat this food or not? And so I think first and foremost, I do want to
01:12:13.980
just point this out, that I think that there's a range of options for different people. I'm not here
01:12:22.160
to say there's any one diet for all human beings because I don't believe that there is one and only
01:12:28.820
one dietary pattern that's optimal for all humans. I think different people need different diets or can
01:12:35.100
benefit from different dietary patterns at different times in their lives and depending on what health
01:12:40.380
conditions they have. And I think on one hand, that's really hopeful and useful. On another hand,
01:12:48.460
some people get really frustrated with me because they say, Dr. Palmer, just tell me what to do
01:12:52.920
exactly. And I don't know them at all. And they're just on social media or whatever. And they tell me
01:12:58.940
exactly what to do. And I'm like, I don't know you. I don't know your health conditions. I don't know
01:13:03.500
what your digestive tract is like. I don't know what your food preferences are. How should I know what you
01:13:08.660
should eat? It doesn't mean it's not a solvable problem. It is a solvable problem. It's not rocket
01:13:16.100
science. It really isn't rocket science. Your daughter has put out amazing information for people,
01:13:23.080
very practical step-by-step instructions for people who want to try her dietary pattern to see if it might
01:13:31.000
help them. There are plenty of other people who also put out similar kind of instruction manuals,
01:13:39.020
if you will. How to follow a whole food plant-based diet. How to follow this diet. How to follow that
01:13:43.520
diet. So what I would encourage people to do is kind of experiment. Figure out, well, what works for
01:13:50.100
you? Where are you at in terms of your health? What sits well with you? What are your overall
01:13:57.760
fitness goals? If it's a man who's trying to build a lot of muscle and he's working out a lot,
01:14:06.700
he needs more protein if he really actually wants to achieve building muscle. You can't build muscle
01:14:12.900
from non-protein kind of plant-sourced foods. You just can't. So it's a range of options.
01:14:23.680
But we have enough science. We have more than enough science for me to be able to say it is very clear
01:14:32.820
and understandable why your daughter experienced such tremendous health benefits by doing the
01:14:42.760
diet that she did. It is not quackery, which I know people accuse. I actually know your daughter.
01:14:54.300
Well, no wonder. Well, because it's so preposterous. It took us a long time to swallow the fact that,
01:15:01.000
first of all, she couldn't eat anything. And my wife and I basically have the same diet. I mean,
01:15:06.140
it's a very radical solution and everyone should be skeptical of radical solutions. So let me agree
01:15:11.860
with you for a second and then point out a potential area of confusion or disagreement,
01:15:17.540
if you don't mind. Sure. Well, you pointed out very clearly that the advantages of a reductive diet
01:15:23.360
are twofold. One is you may well be not able to tolerate a given food. So your body's actually
01:15:31.280
treating it like a toxin. And that's going to be a more or less serious problem for all sorts of
01:15:36.940
people in different ways in relationship to all sorts of different foods. Okay. So a restricted
01:15:41.700
diet can enable you to start to evaluate where you might be reactive. And then there's a separate
01:15:48.360
set of benefits that go along with the keto diet slash fasting. And that's the encouragement of
01:15:54.340
autophagy. Say that again. How do you say that?
01:15:57.940
So autophagy, mitophagy. Autophagy. And mitophagy. Yes. Okay. So you want to initiate that. Now,
01:16:07.540
the point I'm less, I'm more confused about is, you said there's multiple pathways and that there
01:16:17.700
is a point in experimentation. And I agree wholeheartedly with that, but the practicalities
01:16:22.620
tend to get in the way. And so the reason that we concluded that it was worthwhile, let's say,
01:16:28.520
to publicize the carnivorous diet is because it's actually, it's the fastest and simplest way to
01:16:34.720
reduce the variable problem to unity. It's like, okay, if you just eat beef, that's all you're eating.
01:16:42.300
It's one thing. And you can do that for a long time. That seems to me to give you the optimal chance
01:16:47.480
to experiment. Because when we played with like the, I don't remember what the other diets were
01:16:53.120
called. There's one FADMOP. Is that right? FADMOP diet? FODMAP. Yeah. FODMAP. FODMAP diet. Right.
01:17:02.700
Well, it made no sense logically. And there were still things within it that looked very contradictory.
01:17:08.340
So, so I understand your impetus, your, your, your insistence on the utility of experimentation and
01:17:17.280
your proclivity to presume that there's no one size fits all solution. But we have said that
01:17:24.800
having said all that, a keto diet and a carnivorous diet does produce autophagy and mitophagy. And
01:17:31.980
that's a very necessary thing. And it also is a very simple approach, even though, you know,
01:17:37.540
it's behaviorally complex and that's a problem because it's actually hard to only eat meat.
01:17:42.360
So, so what do you think, like, what do you think, are you willing to speculate on what
01:17:48.180
might constitute a reasonable generic approach to dietary experimentation? Because it is a complex
01:17:54.560
thing to undertake. So I completely agree with your approach and your kind of, I agree that
01:18:07.520
a carnivorous diet may in fact be the gold standard elimination diet to see, to see if, to see if a change
01:18:22.860
in dietary pattern can produce the health benefits that a person is seeking. The reason I'm hesitant
01:18:32.740
to recommend it for everybody is because I already know the nutrition experts will vilify, vilify me
01:18:40.660
along with you and Michaela and others. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and so I want to throw them a bone.
01:18:47.480
Are those the same experts that recommended the food pyramid?
01:18:50.580
Don't get me started. Don't, don't even get me started on that because that food pyramid really messed up
01:18:57.340
my own personal health. But, but so for the people who say, well, no, there's no way I'm only going to eat
01:19:05.020
meat. Then I, I want to, I want to at least meet them where they're at and say, fine, you don't have to
01:19:11.040
only eat meat. There are lots of options. You could try the FODMAP diet. You could try other diets. You could try a
01:19:16.600
whole food plant based, like, Oh, I don't want to give up on them. And I don't want to let them know
01:19:20.860
that it's like carnivore or nothing. So I want to, I want people to understand. However, if somebody is
01:19:27.200
really, really sick and needs an, a drastic intervention, doing a water only fast, maybe with
01:19:38.520
some electrolyte supplementation and other things doing a, maybe a medically supervised, even because
01:19:44.780
if this person is really sick, they're already down and out. And so maybe we need to monitor them. But doing
01:19:50.580
a water only fast is really the ultimate elimination diet because we're eliminating all food. We're really
01:19:57.740
letting the digestive tract rest and repair. If the digestive tract is inflamed, we're allowing maybe that
01:20:05.540
inflammation to subside. We know that there is a gut brain connection, and that that plays a role in a wide range of
01:20:13.720
mental disorders, all the way from autism, to depression, to anxiety, to schizophrenia, to binge
01:20:19.860
eating disorder, to bulimia, nervosa. Like, there's a wide range of mental disorders. We have growing,
01:20:27.480
a growing body of evidence that the gut actually, problems in the gut get transmitted through the vagus
01:20:36.620
nerve and through other endocrine pathways, through serotonin actually, and other pathways.
01:20:43.300
Up to the brain, and that that directly impacts brain function and our brain metabolism, brain
01:20:51.500
metabolic function, which then impacts neurotransmitters and everything else. So water
01:20:57.060
only fast would be maybe the most dramatic intervention. But again, you can't fast for too long
01:21:04.280
because you're going to starve to death. And I wouldn't want to do that in an underweight person.
01:21:08.460
And the second best version is exactly what you've described. The lion's diet, which is meat,
01:21:17.280
just meat, beef alone. It's enough nutrition to sustain a human. There will be people already,
01:21:27.600
I can hear people already saying, fiber, fiber is really good, Dr. Palmer. How dare you get rid of
01:21:33.060
fiber? Or this? I'm not saying. You don't need it if you don't produce much waste. And you don't
01:21:39.620
produce much waste on a carnivore diet. And well, and so the thing is, is I think you're right,
01:21:45.260
though, that if somebody's really in trouble with serious symptoms, or if somebody just wants to do
01:21:53.580
maybe a one-month or three-month experiment to see, will this improve my symptoms? I would actually
01:22:00.400
encourage people to give it three months. Right. That's about what we've concluded, too. It's about
01:22:05.220
three months. Do a carnivore diet or a ketogenic diet if you don't want to do that. Because I have
01:22:12.180
some patients who, you know, I've talked about the carnivore diet with them, and they're like,
01:22:15.820
no way, no way. I'm like, okay, well, let's do a therapeutic ketogenic diet. The therapeutic
01:22:21.320
ketogenic diet I can solidly stand behind. And the reason I can solidly stand behind that,
01:22:26.600
you know, the carnivore diet is a ketogenic diet. But there are other variations of ketogenic diets.
01:22:33.460
And the reason that I can solidly stand behind the ketogenic diet is because we have an enormous
01:22:38.480
evidence base, all the way from animal models, cell biology models, to human clinical trials
01:22:47.020
of ketogenic diets for seizures, for weight loss, for type 2 diabetes, for type 1 diabetes,
01:22:55.920
for kidney disease, for cancer, and other conditions. And we have good evidence that a ketogenic diet
01:23:06.160
can, in fact, be safe, can be highly effective for many of those conditions. And so I just stand
01:23:15.540
solidly behind that science or on the shoulders, so to speak, of that science. But I don't disagree
01:23:24.280
with you in terms of what you're saying about the carnivore diet and some of the benefits.
01:23:28.680
Well, also, I should say too, like as a behavioral psychologist, I mean, there's no sense suggesting
01:23:35.000
something to someone they won't do. And so if you can generate a plethora of alternatives,
01:23:41.880
some of which aren't quite so extreme, and they might work, more power to you. So, okay,
01:23:46.660
so let me ask you a specific question. I have a specific reason for this. So I'll start with a
01:23:51.280
bit of a prodroma. So my wife had a very rare form of cancer, a Bellini tumor in her kidney. And
01:23:58.120
the 11-month mortality rate for Bellini tumors, which have only been reported about 200 times,
01:24:04.760
is 100%. And she lived through it. Now, she had surgical interventions, and it's a complex story. But
01:24:11.560
we believe, tentatively, that the reason that this didn't kill her, apart from the surgeries and
01:24:19.720
various other factors that came into play, was perhaps because she was on the carnivore diet,
01:24:25.020
and very religiously, so to speak. Now, I have a more personal reason as well,
01:24:30.800
more specifically personal at the moment, for asking you this question. I know of someone who's
01:24:36.800
in very deep trouble, who's suffering from cancer. And I'm wondering, you know, if you have a loved
01:24:44.860
one who's afflicted in that way, and they're starting to run out of options, by the way, on
01:24:51.760
the treatment front, and facing the proliferation of their cancer, I know you can starve cancers.
01:24:58.300
So as a practicing physician, at what point in the progression of cancer do you think it's
01:25:03.800
reasonable or unreasonable to say, look, you got nothing to lose from a water fast for three days,
01:25:10.480
followed by like, a month or two months of pure carnivore diet. And then we could re-evaluate
01:25:17.420
your circumstances at that time. And so what, because I'm, I'm thinking about having a chat with
01:25:24.540
this person about exactly this. And so I'm wondering, like, what do you have to say? I'm not a
01:25:30.360
physician, right? And so I'm wandering out of my territory to some degree on the dietary front,
01:25:35.160
although that became necessary for all sorts of reasons. But I'm also extremely interested in the
01:25:39.740
neuropsychiatric implications. So what do you think on the cancer front?
01:25:45.620
So I'm not an oncologist. So I want to, I want to, I want to say for the record, this is way out of my
01:25:56.440
territory. And I've, I've actually been asked this question by some close friends, even,
01:26:01.180
should I do a ketogenic diet? I have cancer, I'm fighting cancer, I'm going to do the chemo or
01:26:08.420
radiation or surgery or whatever, but should I also do a ketogenic diet? And, and my, my honest advice
01:26:16.840
is because I am out of my area of expertise, I really encourage people to work with their oncologist.
01:26:24.200
And the reality is that we, we have an increasing number of clinical trials that are ongoing
01:26:32.180
right now where they are adding ketogenic and other dietary interventions to the chemotherapy or
01:26:40.840
radiation or to see if in fact, it may play a role. And we know that, you know, in general,
01:26:49.100
my sense from the published literature, um, Dr. Thomas Seyfried is kind of an expert in this area
01:27:01.720
of ketogenic diets for cancer. What's his name? Thomas Seyfried, S-E-Y-F-R-I-E-D, I think.
01:27:12.720
Um, Thomas Seyfried. And he, so he's written a book on cancer is a metabolic illness. In general,
01:27:23.500
once cancer gets started at that point, it's probably too late for a dietary intervention
01:27:32.580
in most cases to cure the cancer. However, we have strong reason to believe, and this is why these
01:27:43.080
clinical trials are getting started. We have strong reason to believe that a dietary intervention like
01:27:49.880
a ketogenic diet or a carnivore diet or water fasting or intermittent fasting may slow the growth
01:27:56.920
of that tumor may, and slowing the growth of a tumor gives us more time to do the definitive
01:28:05.780
intervention to get that cancer out of that person's body. Well, also there's good evidence
01:28:12.180
that fasting reduces chemo and radiation induced nausea. So that also makes the treatment more
01:28:19.900
tolerable, at least in principle. Absolutely. And, and these dietary interventions are decreasing
01:28:25.760
inflammation. They are decreasing insulin and insulin is a growth factor and it is a growth factor for
01:28:34.760
tumors as well. So again, we're basically doing everything we can to try to slow the growth of
01:28:42.420
this tumor while the oncologists are trying to kill the cancer with surgery, chemo, or radiation.
01:28:52.420
And it, you know, it sounds, you know, thank you for sharing your wife's story. It's, it's a really...
01:29:00.760
Well, it's an anecdote, you know, but anecdotes are good. Well, look, man, they're not data, but they're
01:29:06.620
good sources for hypothesis generation. I think they are great sources. They are fantastic sources
01:29:12.840
for hypothesis generation. And again, you, anybody who says, well, that's just an anecdote, I would
01:29:21.060
want you to push back and say, no, actually there are clinical trials underway. And that is not anecdote
01:29:28.940
anymore. She is an example of a scientific theory that is progressing through the oncology field
01:29:37.800
already. So anybody who tries to say, well, you know, that's just an anecdote. Well, no, it's not
01:29:43.320
just an anecdote. There's a tremendous body of science. There are clinical trials underway now.
01:29:49.380
There are animal models supporting that ketogenic and other dietary interventions can slow the
01:29:55.820
progression, can actually shrink tumors. The reason I'm hesitant to say cure is because...
01:30:04.800
So Dr. Seyfried, the reason I brought him up is, you know, he has published a couple of
01:30:10.220
case reports in the medical literature. And there was one woman who had what was billed as an incurable
01:30:17.640
brain tumor, a glioblastoma. And she went on a very, very strict medically supervised ketogenic diet,
01:30:27.400
calorie restricted even. And in fact, her glioblastoma shrunk to the point that it was
01:30:34.160
undetectable. But after about nine months, so they thought maybe she was cured, because it shrunk a lot.
01:30:45.840
She stopped the diet, the tumor came back with a vengeance, and she died. So I just point that out,
01:30:56.440
that I think that we still have to encourage people to work with oncologists and try their best to kill
01:31:03.420
all cancer. So maybe we could close this off. Well, first of all, we can close it off if you
01:31:10.840
have anything else that you need to bring to people's attention. But one of the other things
01:31:14.480
I'd like to hear from you, you know, you told that story of your patient with schizoaffective
01:31:21.280
disorder and his remarkable recovery with regards to his accompanying obesity, as well as his mental
01:31:27.500
illness. What else have you seen that was part of what motivated you to pursue this so assiduously?
01:31:38.680
Well, so I can tell you lots of stories, but I don't want anybody to come away from this thinking
01:31:47.400
For me, as a professional, it started with that anecdote. It is no longer in the realm
01:31:55.240
of anecdote anymore. We have hundreds, if not thousands, of patients with bipolar disorder,
01:32:02.880
with schizophrenia, with chronic unrelenting depression, with OCD, with anorexia nervosa,
01:32:09.700
with alcoholism, for God's sakes of all things. We have people with all of these different diagnoses
01:32:17.760
who are coming out of the woodwork, sharing their stories of recovery and sometimes remission.
01:32:25.960
Some of these people are able to get off all of their psychiatric meds and remain in remission.
01:32:30.820
We have clinical trials underway of at least, I think, 15 clinical trials underway now at Harvard
01:32:42.120
Medical School, at Oxford, at Johns Hopkins, at UCLA, at UC San Francisco, and many other institutions
01:32:54.380
literally around the world. We've got clinical trials underway. So anybody who wants to say,
01:33:00.400
well, this is just anecdotal evidence. No, it's way beyond anecdotal evidence now at this point.
01:33:08.460
But the stories that I want to share that I just alluded to, a woman who had bipolar disorder
01:33:14.660
had become psychotic when she got manic. So awful, awful illness. She is sharing her story publicly
01:33:26.800
about how the antipsychotic medications and mood stabilizers that she took made her clinically obese,
01:33:35.320
made her gain massive amounts of weight. She felt awful. She had low-grade depression.
01:33:43.520
She was plagued with recurrent suicidality after starting some of the medications that she had to start.
01:33:51.500
And she has now put her bipolar disorder into remission for over two years. She heard about me. She heard me on a podcast.
01:34:03.280
She has read my book. She implemented the treatments that I've outlined. And she is off all her medicines
01:34:10.120
in full remission. I have literally, I have thousands of people reaching out to me for help.
01:34:21.060
So I should say for the record, unfortunately for your listeners, I'm not taking new patients
01:34:26.060
or consultations. I'm really sorry, because I've literally got a wait list of over 2,600 people already.
01:34:33.320
But I have treated, I've treated patients, you know, one person in particular, I can share their story publicly
01:34:43.980
because they are very public already. So I am not breaking any confidence. They are billionaires, literally billionaires.
01:34:54.280
Their son had bipolar disorder, a really bad case of it. He had tried 29 different medications
01:35:06.080
in and out of hospitals, in and out of residential treatment programs, seeing the best bipolar specialists
01:35:15.180
in the world. And they as a family, he is an individual, she is a mother. We're told in no uncertain terms,
01:35:26.840
your son has treatment-resistant bipolar disorder. He is going to be disabled for life. You need to accept
01:35:34.700
that he is going to be sick for the rest of his life. You are in denial. Your denial is the problem.
01:35:43.500
Stop denying that your son has a serious mental illness and he's never going to get better. Just accept it
01:35:51.040
and move on. They came to me about three years ago now saying, we heard about you and this diet and
01:36:02.120
bipolar and we're not giving up yet. We're not ready to give up, even though everybody's trying to
01:36:09.880
encourage us to give up. Will you help us? I talked with them. I met with his treating psychiatrist and
01:36:20.160
we partnered together because I'm in Massachusetts, they're in California. So I wasn't legally allowed
01:36:26.160
to treat him as the treating psychiatrist. So I was a consultant. It is now three years.
01:36:33.780
Within four months of starting a ketogenic diet, his bipolar symptoms were in full and complete
01:36:40.500
remission. He is off of probably 75% of the medicines that he had been taking. So he's not
01:36:48.460
completely off medicine at this point, but he is slowly but surely tapering off. But he has not had an
01:36:56.060
episode since. He does not have bipolar symptoms. His illness is in remission. He has finished college.
01:37:05.900
He works full time. He has a full life. He's excited to be alive. And this was a man that was being told by
01:37:14.720
the best experts. They were, they are billionaires. They had access to the best of the best. And the
01:37:24.620
best of the best in the mental health field were encouraging them to give up hope. They were
01:37:30.540
encouraging them to just give up, just write him off, just accept that he's going to be disabled for
01:37:36.640
life. And they refuse to accept that. And he's living a new life now. And so they have created a
01:37:46.900
nonprofit organization called Metabolic Mind. They have funded, they don't share their financials with
01:37:54.960
me, but to the best of my knowledge, at least probably $70 million of research now focused on
01:38:01.560
bipolar disorder and metabolic strategies. They are really helping to move this field forward.
01:38:09.160
And we've gotten an international team of psychiatrists, neuroscientists, mitochondrial
01:38:15.340
biology experts, metabolism experts, all working together to move this field forward. I just got
01:38:23.880
a major gift, a $3 million gift from a different philanthropist to start a new program at McLean
01:38:31.140
Hospital, the Metabolic and Mental Health Program. And we are going to be launching this. So for
01:38:40.000
people who listen to this and are skeptical, I get it. You have every reason to be skeptical.
01:38:46.060
This is new and shocking information. And I am trying to encourage people to not give up hope.
01:38:53.400
I am trying to encourage people that even if you're told that there is no hope, that you just need to
01:39:01.360
accept that you've got a chronic, horrible, debilitating illness, and that's just the way it is.
01:39:07.120
I want you to rise up. I want you to learn more about this work. I want you to learn more about what you
01:39:14.800
can do. And I want to empower people, first and foremost, with hope. And then with knowledge.
01:39:21.040
And then with practical strategies that they can implement, just like you and your daughter and
01:39:26.400
your wife and others have implemented, you take control. You learn things, you take control.
01:39:33.780
And sometimes it really works out beautifully and people get amazing health outcomes. And that's the
01:39:39.720
way it should be. Hey, Dr. Palmer, that's a very good place to stop. And so we're going to stop with
01:39:47.580
that. Thank you very much for taking my questions and walking everyone through that. Congratulations
01:39:53.140
on the new gift. And I'm very much looking forward to seeing what happens with your center.
01:39:59.980
Please don't hesitate to stay in touch and let me know whenever you come across something that you
01:40:05.160
think is new and particularly compelling. I mean, this is a ridiculous... I mean, I've seen
01:40:09.400
literally hundreds of people on my tour now who've come up to me in the meet and greets afterwards
01:40:15.100
and have said, you know, I've lost 150 pounds in the last 10 months. People told me that was
01:40:20.760
impossible. I've got my life back. My psychiatric disorders are in remission. I'm wondering, maybe
01:40:26.300
this is a closing thought. Tell me what you think about this. Because I think we're at this point and
01:40:30.820
I think this is perhaps what you're pointing out. My sense is that with the really severe mental
01:40:36.020
disorders, so intractable depression, especially in the absence of life circumstances that would point
01:40:42.700
in that direction, manic depressive disorder, the serious psychosis, that as mental health
01:40:49.240
professionals, as physicians, our primary assumption at the moment should be that these are metabolic
01:40:56.240
related or other physiological disorders until there is compelling proof otherwise.
01:41:02.100
100%. I am firmly committed to that. And again, there's decades of science to confirm this. The
01:41:13.960
neuroimaging studies, all of the genetic studies, when they look at the genes that increase risk for
01:41:20.360
schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, and when they look at what do these genes do, guess where they
01:41:26.480
converge? Metabolism and mitochondria. It's not dopamine. It's not serotonin. It's metabolism and
01:41:34.600
mitochondria. And in many ways, this is a game changer. And the reason it's so important is because
01:41:41.360
there are solutions available today, like dietary strategies, that people can implement. We don't
01:41:49.960
have to wait 50 years for some novel treatment to work its way through the development and kind of,
01:41:57.560
you know, review process with the FDA. We don't need to wait. We've got things we can do today.
01:42:04.520
All right, sir. Well, I'm going to continue my discussion with Dr. Palmer on the Daily Wire Plus
01:42:09.440
side of the interview dividing line, let's say. And so I want to find out from him a bit more about what
01:42:16.260
shaped his interest in the medical community, in medical practice. I want to find out why he focused
01:42:21.360
on mental health. I want to see what his vision is for his new center into the future, and so on.
01:42:27.860
If you're inclined to join us for that additional half an hour, please feel invited and welcome to do
01:42:34.280
so. Thank you very much to the film crews here. And are you in Massachusetts? Are you in Boston today?
01:42:46.600
My hometown. Yeah, yeah. So that's great. All right. All right. And so thank you to the film
01:42:50.280
crew here up in Northern Ontario as well. And thank you to everyone who's watching and listening.
01:42:55.060
Your time and attention is much appreciated. Thank you very much, sir.