Brian Johnson breaks down Chris Palmer's research on how fasting and ketogenic diets affect your metabolism and mental health. A woman named Mildred recovered from severe, lifelong mental illness after switching to a ketogenic diet. Palmer argues your gut produces serotonin and your mitochondria drive mood more than most doctors realize.
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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another heroic plus one, continuing our quick tour through my all time favorite book, Brain Energy by Harvard psychiatrist Chris Palmer. Today we're going to talk about practical tip number two to boost your mitochondria and metabolic functioning to combat psychological and of course, physiological challenges. In our last plus one, we talked about sleep. Today we'll talk about fasting. In our next plus one we'll talk about purpose. Let's get straight to work. Dr. Palmer tells us, and I quote, what we eat, when we eat and how much we eat have direct effects on metabolism and mitochondria. Everyone knows that diet plays a role in obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. What most people might not know is that diet also has profound effects on mental health in the brain. He continues by saying this field is massive. Tens of thousands of research articles and countless textbooks have explored the effects of diet on metabolism and mitochondria. Most of this research has been focused on obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's disease, aging and longevity. Although these researchers don't usually see the connection with mental health, by now, I hope you do. Andy says the connections go far beyond correlations. They overlap at the level of neural circuits in the brain and of course, the entire network of metabolism and mitochondria within the human body. Now that's from a chapter called food fasting in your gut. Here's the short story. Food, as we know, plays a huge role in optimizing our physical and mental health. So does not eating, aka intermittent fasting. And as we've discussed, your gut has 90% of your serotonin, so pay attention. Check out our notes on the happiness diet, the comfort Crisis, and this +1 on the optimized food rules for more, all of which are linked. And of course, our notes on the circadian code and the plus one on time restricted eating for now, what's one thing you can do to optimize your nutrition today? Get on that hero Little P.S. here. And this is powerful. Each of the practical chapters features a success story, a case study. The one from this chapter is all about Mildred, a woman who suffered from debilitating mental illnesses from the age of 17 to 70. Then her doctor encouraged her to go to a weight loss clinic. Again, this is a woman who suffered from psychological issues who also happened to be obese. So she went to this clinic at Duke where they were using a ketogenic DIET and within two weeks she noticed significant improvement. And after 533 years of struggle, she has been thriving psychologically for the last 13 years. As Palmer says, and I quote, stories like Mildred's just don't happen in psychiatry even with the best treatments we have to offer. This is unheard of. Mildred's story and the theory of brain energy say it is possible. It is a new day in the mental health field, one filled with hope. For more stories like Mildred's, I asked Chris to share more on this story in our chat. It was super powerful to hear him tell this story live. Check it out.
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