Stanford Keto Study is Revolutionizing Mental Health

Metabolic health and mental health are inexorably linked. This is a biological fact, but one that's often underappreciated. Our brains are part of our body, and although brain metabolism might seem like a black box, it's concrete, physical, and the metabolism in our brain serves as the foundation for the stability of our minds. In this video, I want to tell you why I literally have goosebumps after minutes ago reading a new study that just came out of Stanford by first author Sethi et al. about how ketogenic metabolic therapy can be used to treat mental illness. I want to tell you why these results are so stunning, but also unsurprising, and why I think they are relevant to you. Welcome to my channel. Stay curious. First, for a little bit of background, this paper is about people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. These are diseases with very high morbidity. So there are about 24 million people living with schizophrenia and about 50 million living with bipolar disorder. Otherwise, statistically framed in kind of a quirky way, for every blue whale on the planet, there is about, or are about, 7,500 people living with one of these mental health disorders. And I frame it like that sometimes because it's a helpful memory trick, and this is really a blue whale-sized problem with not only high morbidity and high mortality, but not really many great treatment options. A lot of patients with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder are refractory to standard pharmacotherapy and really without hope, which is where metabolic therapy, ketogenic diets, might be coming into the picture. Metabolic health and mental health, like I said in the intro, are inextricably linked, and there is reason to believe that metabolic therapy could help with these disorders. First of all, we see a tight association between things like metabolic syndrome and these mental health disorders. Also, metabolic therapies, ketogenic diets, have been extremely effective for other disorders of the brain like epilepsy. Or even there are randomized controlled trials on Alzheimer's disease. So it stands to reason that it might help in various mental health conditions. And indeed, there are growing data on that idea and a growing field of metabolic psychiatry, which is arguing, yeah, especially for these patients who are refractory to standard therapy, ketogenic diets, metabolic therapy might be effective in treating things like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. But this new study really impressed me. It included 21 participants overall who completed ketogenic diet therapy. 5 had schizophrenia and 16— I actually don't have that many fingers, so I don't know why I was doing fingers— had bipolar disorder. Again, 21 completed the ketogenic diet therapy, which was limited to 20 grams of net carbs or less, and ketones were measured throughout the study. Average age of the participants was 43.4 years. 38% had prior suicide attempts, and 81% had obesity, and 29% had metabolic syndrome, a constellation of features that suggests a really dysfunctional underlying systemic metabolism. The results, first focusing on the metabolic Metabolic results were incredibly impressive. They really amazed me. 100% of those starting with metabolic syndrome had no metabolic syndrome by the end of the study. Fat mass decreased massively. Average 17 pounds of fat mass lost, corresponding to a 3.4 absolute decrease in BMI level. Even cooler, visceral fat, that inflammatory fat that's kind of around your abdominal organs, dropped by 27%. With also reductions in inflammatory markers like hs-CRP and reductions in triglycerides. And HOMA-IR, a marker of insulin resistance, improved by 17%. So across the board, there were broad-spectrum metabolic improvements. But now getting on to the really exciting results, the mental health results. In terms of the mental health results, Clinical Global Impression Scale, a marker of severity of mental illness, improved by 31.2%, with 33.2% improvements in depression and improvements in sleep quality, anxiety, and quality of life. Overall, really, there was just a massive improvement in mental health scores corresponding with improvements in metabolic health markers. And of note, of critical note, these are the data— all the numbers I've shared with you are the data for all 21 participants, irrespective of ketone levels achieved. But among the two-thirds, the 14 who had ketone levels above 0.5 millimoles,— qualifying them for nutritional ketosis above 80% of checks, results across the board were even more impressive. So as an example, there was a 36% drop in visceral fat among those 14 and 38% improvement in severity of mental illness scores. This is really incredible and emphasizes a potential dose-response relationship, which further helps support the idea of causality and is consistent with the view that the metabolic state of ketosis might actually be healing for metabolic health and mental health, which again are inexorably linked. So I hope you can see why I'm just so excited about these results, why I have goosebumps. And in closing, I just want to issue a thank you to the participants and the people who are supporting this research. I think it's really important to appreciate the fact that there isn't much support much funding for studies on diet in general, especially diet and mental health. So studies like this are really, really hard to conduct. Big Pharma isn't throwing money at them. So we need generous people. And, you know, for better or worse, I don't want to say it's for the greater good or that I'm happy about, you know, past events, but there are certain people with resources whose families have been affected. I want to call out the Bizuki family in particular. If you haven't heard Matt Bizuki's story, he's the son of the family, and he really struggled with bipolar bipolar disorder and has been a vocal advocate about his journey and really helped to, I think, inspire people to do this research. And the resources his family have provided to help do research like this, it's just really, it's really incredible. It's what we need. And while I wouldn't wish that sort of medical history on anyone, it's really heartening to see what someone can do with their own experience and use it to help other people so they don't suffer. And with that, I actually do want to conclude with reading just some quotes, because as part of this study, I think the authors thought it was important to include quotes from some of the patients so you can hear what they have to say from the horse's mouth. So I'm going to read a couple right now. One patient said, "My opportunity to participate in the metabolic psychiatry study transformed my life. I gained knowledge, became able-bodied again, and my mood disorder and eating disorder symptoms lessened dramatically." I became sexually active again for the first time in 16 years of celibacy. A different patient said, I can tell you that I have never felt better than I have since using ketosis. It worked far better for me than lamotrigine ever did. Lamotrigine being a psychiatric medication. So I hope you share this research. I hope you share these data. They're really impressive. We need more of this, and I am just so heartened that this research is being done. Again, metabolic health and mental health, they're inexorably linked. Our metabolic health sets the foundation for a healthy mind. I think that's a really important message to get across. I hope you do too.