Dr. Jeffrey Gladden explains how a ketogenic diet forces the body to burn fat instead of carbs, producing ketone bodies that cross into the brain. When brain regions develop insulin resistance linked to mental health disorders, ketones can bypass that broken glucose pathway and provide alternative fuel.
So first, what does ketogenic mean? It means that you're eating in such a way that you're, you're basically forcing your body to use fat as its main source of fuel instead of carbohydrates. Mm-hmm. So we're burning fatty acids through— in the muscles and throughout most of the body, and we're converting some of those fatty acids into ketones because long-chain fatty acids don't make it into the brain. They don't cross the blood-brain barrier. And so the, the liver will chop up some of them into these smaller packets, ketones that do get into the brain. And in that kind of metabolism, ketogenic metabolism, ketones become an important fuel source in the brain. And that can in and of itself provide some benefit when there's brain insulin resistance in certain regions. And there are some regions of the brain that are very highly susceptible to insulin resistance, even when there's not insulin resistance measurable in the rest of the body. And those regions happen to be very important for the mental health conditions.
