You know there's something wrong with the state of medicine when doctors don't even consider "recovery" a possibility. That's the state of modern psychiatry.
Dr. Georgia Ede believed it was true and accepted it as reality. That is, she believed it until she was faced with her own health problems. Her recovery from those health issues challenged that belief. She experienced the connection between diet and mental health personally.
That experience inspired her to introduce the same food-based method to her patients. When they got the same positive results she got, she knew she was onto something.
Psychiastist Dr. Georgia Ede leads us through her transition from conventional psychiatric methods to a pioneer in the field of nutritional psychiatry.
Dr. Georgia Ede
Website: https://www.diagnosisdiet.com/
=================================
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
You know there's something wrong with the state of medicine when doctors don't even consider "recovery" a possibility. That's the state of modern psychiatry.
Dr. Georgia Ede believed it was true and accepted it as reality. That is, she believed it until she was faced with her own health problems. Her recovery from those health issues challenged that belief. She experienced the connection between diet and mental health personally.
That experience inspired her to introduce the same food-based method to her patients. When they got the same positive results she got, she knew she was onto something.
Psychiastist Dr. Georgia Ede leads us through her transition from conventional psychiatric methods to a pioneer in the field of nutritional psychiatry.
Dr. Georgia Ede
Website: https://www.diagnosisdiet.com/
=================================
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
He was a morbidly obese surgeon destined for an operating table in an early death. Now he's a rebel MD who is fabulously fit and fighting to make America healthy again. This is Stay Off my Operating Table with Dr Philip Ovedia.
Jack Heald:All right. Well, you're here because you wanted to hear the Stay Off my Operating Table podcast. If that's not what you wanted to hear, hang around anyway. We're going to have a good time. I'm Jack Heel. This is Dr Philip Ovedia, and we have with us today a woman who, according to booksgooglecom, has been in clinical practice for 25 decades Now. By my count, that means she's well over 250 years old, so obviously we need to listen to what she has to say if we want to live long. Phil, that's a setup for you, huh.
Dr. Phillip Ovadia:Yeah, indeed, I'm going to say that our guest today, Dr Georgia Eid, has the wisdom of a 250-year-old for sure. I actually this is another one that I'm very excited for been following Georgia's work for quite some time now and very excited to talk about her groundbreaking work in the psychiatric field and then her new book that just came out as well. So we'll get into all of that, but before we do, Dr Eid, why don't you introduce yourself to our audience and maybe give a little bit of the background into what brought you into the metabolic psychiatry range?
Dr. Georgia Ede:Sure, hi, thanks very much for having me on and I so. I'm my name's Georgia Eid. I'm a psychiatrist, specializing in nutritional psychiatry and metabolic psychiatry, and I have been practicing psychiatry for a total of 25 years, and the first 10 years of my practice were I practiced conventionally you know, medications and psychotherapy and the last 15 years have been nutrition, more and more nutrition focused and now entirely nutrition focused. I became interested in this through my own health journey, which may not be that interesting to your listeners, but that's how I started studying nutrition.
Jack Heald:Actually, I would love for you to give us that part, not because they haven't heard this general story before, they haven't heard this particular one, but I think it's useful to have this particular narrative told over and over again. We're on a mission to save a bunch of lives, and there'll be somebody who hears your story and finally gets it. So yeah, if you don't mind, I'd love for you to tell it.
Dr. Georgia Ede:I don't mind at all, not at all. And so I mean I think you know probably many of your listeners know that in medical school we don't learn much at all about nutrition. We had in medical school maybe two or three hours of nutrition lectures and four years of medical school and then, in residency psychiatry residency four years of specialized training. We didn't talk about food once, and so it really never crossed my mind that what we eat matters to the brain, and I really only thought of, you know, as most women who grew up with a weight problem, which I did I really thought of my food choices primarily as a way to control my weight. So you know, I ate the same diet that all you know women in their early 40s were eating who were trying to watch their weights, was low fat, low cholesterol, high fiber. Counting calories, running three or four times a week and weight resistance training and weight training the alternate days. Doing everything. I thought I was doing everything right.
Jack Heald:You're doing all the stuff you're supposed to do.
Dr. Georgia Ede:All the stuff I was supposed to do, and you know the big salads and the skinless chicken breast and the soy milk and the diet coke. But then in my early 40s, I started developing some mysterious health problems that were quite familiar to me, since many of my patients are struggling with these things as well, things like fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, irritable bowel syndrome, migraine, headaches, and it was really starting to interfere with my ability to work. So I went to I was working at Harvard at the time and I had access to lots of very smart, caring specialists and had every kind of test and they told me everything was normal. So, of course, everything was not normal. I just didn't know what to do, and neither did they. So, you know, I left the offices with the same generic printout about what I was supposed to eat. I was already doing what was on the printout and nobody asked me what I ate. So they handed me the printout as I left the offices. You know, high fiber, low fat, etc.
Dr. Georgia Ede:So I, just because part of my issues were gastrointestinal, I thought, well, something, maybe something I'm eating is bothering my stomach.
Dr. Georgia Ede:I could at least try to work on that piece. I never expected to work on the migraines or the chronic pain or the fatigue. I just was trying to not have a stomach ache after I ate. So I kept a food and symptom journal and I, by trial and error, changed my diet each a little bit, each day to try, until the stomach pain went away. And as I did that other things improved as well. And by the end of about six months of kind of note-taking and trial and error approaches because this was really before most people had heard about ketogenic diets or carnivore diets or even paleo diets by the end of the six months the diet that I had ended up on was almost exactly upside down from that diet that I was told was healthy. So it was mostly meat, very few plants, very low carbohydrate, high cholesterol, high fat. And not only did it fix my stomach aches, it resolved every one of these strange syndromes that I was living with, and beyond that, it improved my mental health as well, which I didn't even realize was subpar.
Jack Heald:So that got my taste. Unpack that. Unpack that for us. What do you mean specifically? That it improved your mental health?
Dr. Georgia Ede:My concentration, my mood, my energy, my mental stamina. So it was common for me to come home after a day of work and just feel completely spent and not be able to do anything else after five or six o'clock at night. It would be very normal for me to, on a Sunday night before a busy work week, to feel very anxious about starting work the next day. In the winter I would get depressed, not severely depressed, but just I could feel a real kind of curtain coming down. I worked through it, I functioned through it and I was never anything serious, but I just thought all of those things were normal. It's normal to be tired at the end and I was hungry all the time and always watching my weight and struggling with my weight and my appetite came under beautiful control without needing so much willpower.
Dr. Georgia Ede:So all of those things improved and I thought to myself this diet seems to be good for the brain and I'm a psychiatrist. So I wonder if this diet could help my patients, because I've got lots of patients who have a lot of these same issues physical issues and of course I'm their psychiatrist. Most of my patients are not getting better psychiatrically. True, for just about every psychiatric practice our practices are filling up with patients who aren't getting very much better and we really don't know what to do with all of those people except write refills, adjust dosages, give hope, some supportive psychotherapy, come in a few times a year to touch base encouragement, but for the most part those folks aren't getting much better. I thought maybe there's some hope here.
Dr. Phillip Ovadia:Yeah, let's maybe dig into that a little bit because people might not recognize sort of the just the lack of benefit from these treatments that have been widely used in the psychiatric field and honestly it's not that dissimilar to other fields of medicine that we can point to. But give us some insight about what your practice was like before making this shift in integrating nutritional therapy into your practice.
Dr. Georgia Ede:Sure. So at that time I was, I'm in Massachusetts, I'm based in Massachusetts, grew up in Massachusetts and my practice at that time, when I'd left residency, I moved to Cape Cod because it's one of my favorite places in the world to be, and I opened a practice and I worked. I worked three different jobs. I worked as a consult liaison psychiatrist to the local hospital, I worked in a very busy community mental health clinic and I also had a small private practice as well. So, and I was working, you know, 12, 14 hour days, six days a week, on call for myself all the time and very busy, very stressed, but learning a lot and loving a lot of things about my work. But was really difficult about my work was that, no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't seem to solve this puzzle of what is causing these problems in the first place and how and why aren't people getting better. You know I would try medicine after medicine.
Dr. Georgia Ede:Really the what we're trained to do in psychiatry residency is psychotherapy for the psychosocial root causes of mental health conditions, things like trauma and stress, family issues, that sort of thing. Your mother and you know psychotherapy. And then we're trained to address the biological root causes of mental health conditions, which we were taught were something about chemical imbalances that you've. You know that run in your family, vulnerabilities that are biological. We were taught to address these chemical imbalances with medications, but we have no tests. Even today, we have no way to really test your brain's neurotransmitter activity. So we and we don't really understand fully how the medications that we prescribe work, and so what we are doing is literally practicing in the dark.
Dr. Georgia Ede:So when somebody comes in and they have any issue attention issues, depression, ptsd, a psychotic symptoms, mood swings, whatever it is we are writing down your symptoms. We're giving you a diagnosis because the insurance companies require that. We're trying to figure out which box you fit in in our box, in our book of diagnoses, and then we're literally guessing about what to do next, because that giant book that we use to look up your diagnosis tells you nothing about what's causing your symptoms and nothing about how to treat them. So it is trial and error.
Dr. Georgia Ede:It is frustrating for the psychiatrist as well as for the people who come to see the psychiatrist, and it can take in many cases many months or even a year or two to find a medication strategy that is worth taking and even when it helps you, you almost always will pay a price for that relief in side effects that significantly impair your quality of life. So sexual side effects, weight gain, feeling tired, feeling like your emotions are flattened and in many cases, with the stronger medications like the antipsychotics and some of the anticonvulsant medications, sometimes a significant amount of metabolic dysfunction, high blood sugar, high triglycerides, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 100 pounds of weight gain and heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Your blood sugar and insulin levels rise within minutes to hours of taking the very first dose of an antipsychotic medication. So that is how practice is still for most psychiatrists. Most conventionally trained psychiatrists are using trial and error tactics to guide their therapies.
Dr. Phillip Ovadia:Yeah, One of the things that was kind of most surprising to me was the non-specificity of the medications that are used in psychiatry and how they're kind of blanket applied to all these different what are supposed to be different psychiatric diagnoses. And yet we use these medications. They kind of just all get applied and trialed and a lot of the medications weren't even developed for psychiatric reasons. We look at something like seizure medications that have been shown to have some benefits, and it kind of shows you the sort of non-specificity.
Dr. Phillip Ovadia:Like you said, we don't have tests for these supposed biochemical abnormalities. We just kind of postulate that they're there, based on some lab studies done on rats, and then try and apply that to humans. So it's one thing to say, okay, I've tried a dietary approach, it benefited me personally, and then it's another thing to take that leap and start applying it to your patients, and especially in an area where it's not commonly applied to patients or there really isn't an obvious linkage between diet and the condition that you're trying to treat. So tell us what it was like starting to introduce this into your practice and what kind of gave you the confidence that it was worth trying.
Dr. Georgia Ede:Yeah, it definitely. It is a big leap, but I didn't jump into it. So I was very careful to study nutrition for several years first, before even thinking about introducing any of these concepts to my patients, because I, honestly, this diet that I ended up on myself was a mostly meat diet high fat, high cholesterol, high meat, low plants, etc. I knew nothing about nutrition at that time. I thought that diet was going to kill me. I mean, I thought, okay, this is a really useful diet, it's helping me, clearly it's helping me, but I can't recommend this diet to my patients without learning more because I could lose my license, I could harm somebody. I don't know anything about nutrition not the first thing but I'm very curious person and I guess as a psychiatrist, I guess one of the reasons I am a psychiatrist is I really like to get to the bottom of things, and so I just started studying nutrition for the first time. I just read article after every article I would get my hands on about nutrition from every angle I could possibly approach it from and, as you know, it doesn't take long. You scratch the surface of some of these studies that are advising us to eat high fiber diets, mostly plants, low saturated fat, etc. There's no there, there, there's no science behind any of those recommendations, and so that got me even more curious. Well, how are we supposed to know what to eat if there's no science to support what we're told to eat? How do we know what's good for us? So I took several years actually it was really between about 2008, 2009 and 2012 before I would even speak about this topic publicly and then started gradually incorporating just very simple nutrition principles into my work. We're not talking ketogenic diets at that point. We're not talking carnivore diets. We're talking whole foods. Let's just see if we can work on sugar intake and refined carbohydrate intake. Let's just see if we can maybe try grain free or gluten free, just giving people different options about how they could gradually make healthy changes to their diet.
Dr. Georgia Ede:But as I learned more, especially about ketogenic diets, which I started studying in 2012, you were just saying that we use seizure medications to treat bipolar disorder, and that is absolutely true, and it turns out that bipolar disorder and epilepsy have a lot in common, and the more I read about it, the more I started thinking about bipolar disorder as really emotional epilepsy that you've got these sudden shifts in brain activity that come out of the blue and are extreme.
Dr. Georgia Ede:They're just emotional rather than muscular. And so I thought well, boy, ketogenic diets have been used for over 100, well, now, over 100 years. Back then it was less than that, but we've known since 1921 that ketogenic diets can stop seizures in their tracks and a good, significant number of people. This diet stabilizes brain chemistry. Now, if this diet can treat epilepsy and we use the same medicines for epilepsy and bipolar disorder, couldn't a ketogenic diet potentially be worth exploring for bipolar disorder? So it was a very gradual unfolding of information and I started writing about it and started a website just to explore these ideas publicly. So it's been a really gradual journey.
Jack Heald:I'm interested in, because I'm a layman, what you mean when you said that then you're researching to the nutrition papers that there's no there, just some examples. You said there's just no science there. Thank you, we are all led to believe that all these recommendations we've been given are based on the science, the experts.
Dr. Georgia Ede:I'm really glad you asked that question, jack, because this is exactly the problem, and most people don't realize that almost every nutrition headline that they read in the media and almost every component of our official dietary guidelines doesn't come from science. It comes from wishful thinking and wild guesses, and I'll explain exactly what I mean by that, because it's important. So the definition of the scientific method of getting closer to the truth about the world we live in requires two steps. It requires a guess about what you think might be going on based on your observations around you. The apple falls from the tree. Gee, the apple falls from the tree. I wonder why that is. And then it requires an experiment to test your theory, to test your hypothesis about what might be going on. You have to have the theory, the hypothesis, and then you have to have an experiment to test your hypothesis. If the test proves you wrong, you change your theory. If the test supports your ideas, you keep going in that direction. You're getting closer to the truth. So good science has experimentation and good science is self-correcting. You can't hold on to a bad idea because your experiment's not going to let you right.
Dr. Georgia Ede:The problem with nutrition science is that they stop at step one. They have a theory. They distribute a bunch of questionnaires to people. These really limited very strange food. They're called food frequency questionnaires. So let's say, you want to understand the relationship between how many blueberries a person eats and whether or not they get dementia. I mean, first of all it's kind of a ludicrous question, but these are the kinds of questions that nutrition scientists seem to really enjoy. Asking their hypothesis then their theory is that Alzheimer's disease is due in part to a blueberry deficiency.
Dr. Georgia Ede:As ludicrous as that sounds, that's what they study. They will then design a questionnaire, food questionnaire that has maybe at most maybe about 130 questions on it about food and you're asked to remember. They'll give it to thousands and even tens of thousands of people through a computer, right? You're then asked on this question if you want to be part of the nutrition study, you are asked to answer a question such as how many half cup servings of blueberries have you eaten in the past year? You're not allowed to say you don't know. You're not allowed to say I can't remember. You're not allowed to say you've got to be kidding me. But you are forced to quantify your answer In exact measurements a number of half cup servings in the past year. So that is the so-called data that is used to generate these headlines and guidelines that we live by. Nothing is measured. Surely they're not all like that.
Dr. Georgia Ede:Well, most nutrition studies come from this field, this very flawed, unscientific field of nutrition epidemiology. Most headlines do come from that field. There are some exceptions. There are some experimental nutrition studies. Those are the ones we can pay attention to, those are the ones worth paying attention to, but they are not the lion's share of the nutrition science that we see. What we see almost, I'd say at least it's got to be 80, 90% of what we see in our guidelines and on our headlines comes from these food questionnaire-based studies.
Jack Heald:I knew it was bad, but come on, 80 to 90% of what the experts tell us, that the science says and for those of you who are merely listening, I'm doing the air quotes around both those phrases is based on food frequency questionnaires.
Dr. Georgia Ede:Yes, Most of us can't remember what we had for lunch Exactly. I eat a very limited diet. I have a lot of food sensitivities. There's only a really short list of foods I eat. I can't tell you what I ate last week, let alone a year ago. So there's nothing. Science requires data. Science requires data, things that you can measure, concrete pieces of information like how tall are you, how much do you weigh? How many jelly beans are in this jar? Something you can count, measure, weigh, quantify. Nothing is ever measured in these studies. People are asked to simply guess how much of XYZ they've had and then pick a very specific number. That is the data that is in these studies.
Jack Heald:I guess the justification is. Well, we asked 10,000 people.
Dr. Phillip Ovadia:Yeah, if you massage the data hard enough from a large enough data set, you can pretty much get it to show you any conclusion you want it to.
Dr. Phillip Ovadia:I think that's one of the other issues that comes in here is that oftentimes nutritional science is based on these massive databases like this and then the scientist goes in to find the data that supports their hypothesis.
Dr. Phillip Ovadia:Instead of, as George has said, the proper way to do the scientific method is you run a test of your hypothesis, trying to disprove it is really the goal of good science is trying to disprove your hypothesis. And if you run an experiment and it ends up supporting your hypothesis and then enough other people run a similar experiment and these results become reproducible, that's how we get to real science. And it is a challenge around nutrition, because nutrition is a hard thing to control and to vary in just one factor, and that's some of the challenges around it. But again, I think one of the criticisms of the field of nutritional epidemiology is the hypotheses that get tested and the results that get published are very much cherry-picked. And when you look at, something like meat is bad for your health and yes, there are some epidemiologic studies that would suggest that, but there are many others that show that you can't demonstrate that correlation and those kind of get ignored. I think is really one of the issues that we've run into.
Dr. Georgia Ede:Absolutely right, and so I go ahead, jack.
Jack Heald:Just about the time I think, okay, I've heard it all. Something like this comes along, and I mean truly. I'm a skeptic Most of the time. If it's a headline, I assume it's the excrement of some sort of bovine, and I'm still.
Dr. Phillip Ovadia:So you went through the process, you educated yourself, you had this solid hypothesis, you tested it on yourself. So then talk about what some of the effects you started to see when you did start to introduce this into your practice.
Dr. Georgia Ede:Yeah, that's what really got my attention because I was used to practicing in a way that didn't have a whole lot of impact, or at least not enough impact, on most of my patients. I mean, medicines have their place. I've seen them work. I still use them in my practice. I still use psychotherapy in my practice, but I had never seen anybody fully recover from any mental health condition without medication before and I'd never seen anybody fully recover from a mental health condition with medication before. What I'd seen was people having Reaching, using medication and finding a reduction in symptoms, but I never saw anybody truly recover and become well, fully, like really well. They were always sort of living with sort of traces at least of the condition, sometimes much more, and, of course, dealing with a lot of side effects of medication and paying lots of money every month for medications and coming to visits and so forth.
Dr. Georgia Ede:I had never seen people recover from a mental health condition sometimes years or decades of symptoms, even of some very serious mental illnesses simply by changing their diet. I'd never seen that before. I'd never seen a medication bring that kind of relief before. The things that people tell me when they follow these certain principles are I've never felt this good before in my whole life. They don't say, oh, the depression's a little better, I'm sleeping better. Oh my endless anguish. They say I feel great. I've never felt this well before in my life. That was new to me and now I hear it all the time and that should be our standard. That should be. What we're aiming for is to heal the brain and help people recover as many people as possible.
Jack Heald:I can't help but wonder how your colleagues in the world of psychiatric practice have received your message.
Dr. Georgia Ede:Well, it depends on the psychiatrist. I have psychiatrists, some of whom are good friends of mine and who don't seem to be interested in this way of practicing. And reading between the lines, I think they feel it's a little strange. I've kind of gone off the deep end, I'm not practicing conventionally and I've kind of lost my way. I think some of my colleagues feel that way.
Dr. Georgia Ede:Then, of course, I teach a training program. I teach clinicians how to use these strategies, these ketogenic diets in particular, to care for people with mental health conditions. And those clinicians are extremely excited about these interventions. They are hungry for new solutions. They are tired of not seeing their patients get better enough and they're really excited to use these methods in their practice. And then I'd say most people are in between the very skeptical and the very enthusiastic. Most people are just kind of cautiously skeptical. They might ask a few questions and they believe what you're saying, but they don't feel comfortable with the ideas because they're so foreign. We were not taught that mental illnesses were curable. We were not taught to expect this level of response to a treatment. And of course most doctors know nothing about nutrition and so they don't understand how powerful a biochemical intervention it can be. So I think we've got a long way to go, but we're making progress.
Jack Heald:Well, we're undoubtedly making progress. It's astonishing to me. My first shock was that this even could work, and then I'm becoming. I'm surprised at the number of medical professionals who are getting on board and affirming the message. It's exciting to me to see it. I'm sorry, Phil.
Dr. Phillip Ovadia:No, I was just going to say. Georgia phrased that looking at nutritional intervention as biochemical modulation, which is what we're always trying to do with medications, and that, I think, is a powerful way to frame that, to get practitioners to understand the impact that it can have.
Jack Heald:Say that again. Biochemical modification yeah, basically, yeah, Georgia was saying that nutritional therapy is a biochemical modulation.
Dr. Georgia Ede:It's a very powerful biochemical intervention meaning and the science is fascinating and complex and beautiful, certainly not beneath even the most sophisticated medical professional. But the way we were taught to think about nutritional interventions in medical school was to look down on them as not real medicine. But nothing could be further from the truth. We're talking about root cause interventions. We're talking about applying all that fascinating biochemistry you learned in medical school to heal your patients, to healing your patients. And why else would you want to learn about the Krebs cycle? What else are you going to do with that information? So I think it really is.
Dr. Georgia Ede:We have a long way to go in terms of piquing curiosity about these interventions, but I like to say, yes, medications can change brain chemistry, but the most powerful way to change brain chemistry is through food, because that's where the brain chemicals come from in the first place, and we never stop to think in our training. What's causing these chemical imbalances in the first place? And it turns out that the modern diet. There's lots of good, strong scientific evidence for this. There are elements of our modern diet which directly promote root causes of brain problems. I mean inflammation in the brain, something called oxidative stress, which is why we're told we need to eat antioxidants. Insulin resistance, which I'm sure your listeners know a lot about already. Insulin resistance has a profound impact on the brain's ability to produce energy.
Dr. Georgia Ede:So these are really important root cause interventions that are powerful and empowering. Because I can't change your diet for you, I can give you information, I can try to help motivate you, I can support you, I can help manage your medicines while you're changing onto these diets, but you're the only one who can change your diet and then, when you get better, you're going to feel so proud of yourself. You're going to take ownership of that intervention and you can make me obsolete. That's my goal Make yourself like I, just obsolete. It won't happen in every case, but I do find many more people able to transition out of my practice rather than just kind of having my practice fill up with people who aren't getting better.
Jack Heald:It reminds me of how, I don't know, I forgot his name. He runs some senior care facilities.
Dr. Georgia Ede:Oh, hal Pannmer, Hal Pannmer, yeah, yeah, pannmer.
Jack Heald:He has people actually leaving his home because they got too healthy to be there.
Dr. Georgia Ede:Isn't that great. I love what he's doing. I love what he's doing.
Dr. Phillip Ovadia:Yeah, very powerful stuff. Talk about how your patients receive this information when you talk to them about we can do the traditional approach with medications and psychotherapy, or you can, and or I guess I'll say you can implement these nutritional changes. How is that usually received?
Dr. Georgia Ede:Well, two different answers to that, depending on which time period we're talking about. Because when I first started incorporating these principles into my practice, I was a specialist in college mental health. So I was working at the Harvard University Student Health Service at the time and I also had a private practice a part-time private practice in addition to that. So my private practice was really focused on nutrition so that I could gain more experience working with motivated people. My college practice I was hired, of course, like most psychiatrists are, to prescribe medications, Not even to do psychotherapy, because there were therapists who were hired to do psychotherapy. I was hired to write prescriptions and so when students came to me, they weren't expecting a nutrition consult and I often wouldn't offer. I would offer the conversation, but many of them were busy and were looking for a medication and weren't interested in dietary interventions. But I was allowed at this service to put on my profile on the website. I was allowed to say that I also offered nutrition consultation and once I did that, some students were starting to come to me and they didn't want medication, they wanted to talk about diet and that was really. That was wonderful, because we had some just really deep and wonderful conversations about food and brain chemistry and mental health. So, especially among graduate students, I have to say so, for people who were coming in looking for medicine, most of those students were not interested. To be honest, it was. Some of them were, but they were busy. They were hoping for a quick fix, a prescription, and they are really busy and really stressed. And changing your diet is hard, Changing your diet is hard, especially on a college campus where campus food culture and colleges in this country is just atrocious. So they were up against a lot of obstacles in terms of changing their diet and I didn't have time to coach them or give them a lot of education about it. We had these 20-minute appointments essentially. But I had good luck and good results with students who were coming to me already interested in nutrition interventions.
Dr. Georgia Ede:And then, when I transitioned out eventually I worked at Harvard for six, seven years and then I worked at Smith College for five years. Because at Harvard the director at the time, who's no longer there, said the directorship changed and the new director said to me nutrition is beyond the scope of psychiatric practice. We need you to stop offering these consults. So I left and went to Smith College. I left for that reason and a couple of other reasons as well, I was wanting to live in a different part of the state and I went to Smith College, where they were perfectly happy to have me do nutrition consultation there.
Dr. Georgia Ede:Until they weren't anymore, the dietitian on campus became aware of what I was doing and the wellness director. I got called into the office and said we believe in everything in moderation. You're going to be asking people to eat less sugar, which was all that I was doing. All that I was doing at Smith because I had my own private practice where I worked on nutrition. But I was called in the office for what was the word? Something like when we believe in everything in moderation here. So when you're asking students to restrict a certain area of their diet, you're going to be promoting eating disorder thinking and eating disorder and behavior.
Dr. Georgia Ede:So I decided that if I wanted to really do what I knew was going to work the best and what I was most passionate about, I was going to need to leave my beloved specialty of college mental health. So I left and opened up a private practice in 2018, focused entirely on nutrition. The cornerstone is ketogenic diet, but I use other diets as well Helio elimination diets, carnivore diets all of which are in the book, by the way and so that's what I've been doing since 2018. And absolutely love it. But, to answer your question, the people who come to me now are coming to me because I offer nutrition interventions. They're not coming to me for medication and they know that's not the goal of working with me. So I don't have that initial barrier anymore of getting people interested. I still have to help motivate people. I still have to help. It's still not easy, but I'm starting at a different place than I was in these mixed practices.
Jack Heald:Well, I want to talk about the book, but I have a layman question. Phil, you talked about oxidative stress. That's why we're told to eat to have antioxidants, and maybe I got the wrong impression. But I got the impression that perhaps that's not the best nutritional advice either. Did I have that right?
Dr. Georgia Ede:You surmised correctly, sir. So we are told that we have to eat lots and lots of colorful plant foods because they're loaded with these very powerful antioxidants that are unique to the plant world, and that's why we need to eat the rainbow, a great diversity of these molecules, because they fight this thing called oxidative stress. So you've got oxidative, you've got oxidation and you've got antioxidation. So we're told we've got a lot of oxidative stress, we need antioxidants and that's why you need these foods. So what we're not told is that A okay, what is this oxidative stress and where is it coming from? What's causing us to be so oxidatively stressed? Why are we so out of balance? Why is our oxidation system so out of balance in the first place?
Jack Heald:It's not just because my job sucks and my mortgage is too high. That's not what they're talking about. I'm dead serious.
Dr. Georgia Ede:I know you are and I'm going to I assumed.
Jack Heald:That's all we're talking about. I have a difficult personal relationship. That's not what we're talking about when we talk about oxidative stress.
Dr. Georgia Ede:And I'm going to give you a serious answer, which is there's stress and there's oxidative stress and they are related. So stress in your life can promote a certain degree of oxidative stress. But most of what we're talking about when we talk about oxidative stress is a chemical what it is when your cells break down food molecules to turn them into energy. Your cells have different types of fuel molecules they can use for energy. They can use glucose, they can use ketones, some of them. They can use fatty acids, some of them right. So they're these different molecules.
Dr. Georgia Ede:And when your cells are running those small fuel molecules through their machinery in their mitochondria, both inside and outside the mitochondria, to extract the energy from those molecules, that process naturally creates something called oxidative stress, meaning that process naturally releases a certain number of what are called oxygen-free radicals. And these are like little bulls in a china shop. They just kind of randomly bump into everything in the neighborhood and they damage everything around them. But mother nature isn't stupid. She knows that when you eat you get some oxidative stress as part of the process. So she has wisely armed your cells with their own antioxidants to keep your system in balance and mop up those free radicals. And so, when things are going well, these systems are in balance. What happens if you overwhelm your system with refined carbohydrates? What you're doing is you're flooding the system with too many glucose molecules at once. You get that there's a spillover of these oxygen-free radicals that overwhelm your cells' natural antioxidant capacity. Now you've got excessive oxidative stress.
Jack Heald:Now you're at the top. The natural question then is well, so then of course I should be eating antioxidants, right?
Dr. Georgia Ede:Well, yes, if you could, that would be a lovely strategy, but it's actually very difficult to use external antioxidants as internal antioxidants. So most of the plant what I call plant antioxidants, these antioxidants that are inside plants those work well in plants to protect them from oxidative stress that they might be exposed to. From sunlight, for example, is a very powerful promoter of oxidative stress. That's how we get sunburn. It's a certain type of radiation Oxidants. Why don't plant antioxidants work as a strategy? Because plant antioxidants are for plants. Plants are exposed to damaging radiation from the sun and they expect to see that and of course, they have to burn their own fuel molecules for energy. They expect to see some oxidative stress.
Dr. Georgia Ede:They work well in plants, but they do not work well in the human body and the reason for that is they are very difficult to absorb and once we absorb them, we eliminate them very rapidly, almost as if they're an unwanted guest that we don't need. So we don't have receptors for these molecules. These molecules provide no nutritional value. They are not essential. We can live without them. They are completely unnecessary. Beyond that, they are poorly absorbed and rapidly eliminated.
Dr. Georgia Ede:So it's very difficult for those to get a plant antioxidant, a plant antioxidant to make it all the way through your digestive system, across your digestive lining and into your cells to function as an antioxidant. And furthermore, to make matters worse, most of them aren't even antioxidants, so they actually promote oxidative stress. Many of these. A good example is broccoli sprouts, the antioxidant, and broccoli sprouts called self-o-refane. That antioxidant is not an antioxidant at all, it's a promoter of oxidative stress. So what it does is it promotes oxidative stress so that our own antioxidant system will kick into gear to deal with the oxidative stress from the molecule. So it's all very strange and upside down.
Jack Heald:So we're not going to have big broccoli after us.
Dr. Georgia Ede:No, but we need to stop eating the stuff that's causing the oxidative stress in the first place.
Dr. Phillip Ovadia:Exactly, and on top of the sugar and the refined carbohydrates that you mentioned, I would also put the polyunsaturated oils, the vegetable and the seed oils high on that list as well. I wanted to just circle back. You had mentioned something that I've heard way too often, where you're demonstrating success in your practice with these nutritional interventions and then you get the kibosh from the dietitians that are like these dietary recommendations that you're making are promoting disordered eating, and as a psychiatrist, you obviously deal with disordered eating. What has your experience been on these diets and whether they cause people to develop or worsen, maybe underlying disordered eating when you suggest something like a ketogenic diet?
Dr. Georgia Ede:Thank you for asking this question because A there is no published evidence whatsoever that eating a low carbohydrate or ketogenic diet are any kind of making these restrictions so-called restrictions to your diet. There's no evidence that these diets cause a worsening of disordered eating or the appearance of disordered eating. In fact, quite to the contrary. We have some published, emerging published evidence, case reports, and we have lots and lots of collective clinical experience in my own field, as well as my primary care, my brothers and sisters in primary care and in all aspects of metabolic health. We see every day that when you use low carbohydrate and ketogenic and carnivore strategies in your practice, these are some of the most powerful and effective interventions for over-eating disorders. Let's talk specifically about over-eating disorders because when you eat properly, when you're nourishing and energizing yourself properly, your appetite is much better regulated, so you're less likely to binge, you're less likely to gain weight, you're less likely to feel out of control and you're removing the addictive, ultra-processed foods, ideally that are promoting disordered eating in the first place.
Dr. Georgia Ede:When it comes to under-eating disorders, there's even some emerging case study level information about there may be a place even in under-eating disorders for ketogenic diets if they're constructed in a certain way where certainly I am certainly not recommending to anybody out there who has active underweight anorexia that they follow a ketogenic diet. Please do not do that. This is, in my opinion, still not a safe recommendation, but it's being looked into on a research level Eating disorders so much of our disordered eating is being caused by the foods or the non-foods that we are eating. I think that's a very simple concept, not necessarily easy to implement to avoid these processed foods because they're so addictive and they're everywhere and they're cheap and we've been eating them since we were two years old, but it is really the best way through that.
Dr. Phillip Ovadia:Again, the macro level evidence that we have is that these disorders largely didn't exist when the processed food didn't exist. So to say by suggesting that eliminating the processed food is then going to cause these disorders is really pretty nonsensical, but it's something that I hear repeated over and over again. Yeah, so let's talk about the book here Change your diet, change your mind just released and talk a little bit about. A lot of the science that you talked about is in the book, and I think you did a great job kind of outlining why these diets can have an impact on mental health disorders, and then you make some recommendations about how people can implement this into their daily lives. Maybe hit on some of the highlights of what's in the book for people.
Dr. Georgia Ede:Sure. So I wrote the book because people with mental health issues many people with mental health issues think they've tried everything and that nothing is working for them, and so they start to lose hope. But what I want people to know is that there are some very powerful strategies that are well worth trying, and if you haven't tried them yet and most people haven't, most people don't even know about them then you don't know yet what's possible for you. I mean everything from substantial improvement to reduction in medication usage, to elimination of a need for medication in some cases, to complete recovery. You don't know what's possible for you until you try and it doesn't take long. So that's why I wrote the book, and so I've got a lot of strategies. And then the fourth.
Dr. Georgia Ede:The book is in four parts. Part four of the book is all about how to how do you change your diet and which diets or which dietary changes are most worth making and why, and kind of walk you through a roadmap of kind of an experimental roadmap, if you will seeing if you can improve your mental health using these special dietary strategies. But the first three parts of the book are all leading up to that, giving you all the scientific information that you need to feel comfortable and confident that these interventions are safe. They're not just safe, they're superior in every way to the general recommendations that we have been given about nutrition, and it took a lot of work to put that information together, because there are a lot of myths out there about what causes mental health disorders, what a brain healthy diet looks like, what a healthy diet looks like, which foods have the most nutrients in them, which foods are safest for you to eat, which foods are most likely to cause disease. So there's a whole chapter about meat, because even though if I were to say meat is good for you and that's really all I need to say, because that's all you need to know, I have to spend an entire chapter telling you why meat is good for you and why all the things you've ever heard about meat are incorrect. And so I don't, because I don't just want you to take my word for it, I want you to see where that information comes from for yourself so that you can decide what you think makes the most sense for you.
Dr. Georgia Ede:And I'm very careful in the book to explain what we actually know and don't know about plant-based diets, so-called plant-based diets, vegan and vegetarian diets, particularly vegan diets, can be very dangerous to, especially to the developing brain. So I spent a whole chapter on the plant-based brain and what the risks are. Because there are molecules, vital molecules, missing in plants that are critical for the developing brain, particularly during the first thousand days of life. And if you do not have, during that critical window of brain development, if you don't have exactly the right molecules available in exactly the right amounts at exactly the right times, you've just missed your window of opportunity for good brain development. You cannot get, you don't get another opportunity to form that particular connection or build that particular structure, or you know what I mean. So it's-.
Jack Heald:That alone sounds worth. It's worth reading, especially if you're an expected parent or a new parent.
Dr. Georgia Ede:Yeah, you know the people I worry about the most.
Dr. Georgia Ede:You know I worked in college mental health for many years, including at Smith College, which is a women's college, where the culture on campus I mean, there were very many students on the campus who preferred to eat plant-based diets or vegan, vegetarian diets, but not for health reasons.
Dr. Georgia Ede:They chose these diets for compassionate reasons, which I completely understand that motivation, but they were also told because the compassionate reasons are complicated and we won't go into them today, but I do address the pros and cons of thinking about animal foods that way, but I but that's a personal preference, right, and a decision really made from the heart, right.
Dr. Georgia Ede:What they thought, though, was that better health was icing on the cake, that it wasn't just about animals on the planet, it was also that they were going to benefit, their health was going to benefit. They didn't realize that better health was exactly what they were risking, what they were compromising. So because nobody says, nobody tells them that actually there are risks involved to this dietary strategy that you need to be aware of, and young women, especially women who are planning pregnancies or who get pregnant, have children, those are the people who are most vulnerable, not only to this messaging because I find young college women to be very compassionate and intelligent and fabulous people to talk with and admirable in their goals and motivations. But these are the people who are most vulnerable to that incorrect messaging and these are the people who most need particularly if they're planning a family most need these indispensable animal nutrients, which are very hard to supplement your way around.
Jack Heald:That sounds like a good conversation all by itself in its own right. All right. Well, tell us about there's folks who are going. All right, I'm convinced I need to know more. The book is.
Dr. Georgia Ede:Oh, it's. Change your diet, change your mind. So, if anybody's watching it rather than listening, this is what it looks like and the best way to learn more about it. I have a website called DiagnosisDietcom, so you'll find DiagnosisDietcom, all right.
Dr. Georgia Ede:DiagnosisDietcom. That's because years ago I thought the book that I would eventually write would be called Diagnosis Diet, which never materialized. So I'm stuck with my website name, so hope you like it. But anyway, you can find information about the book there, about my clinician training program and about this is really important the clinician directory. So if you have people listening, there are people listening who are looking for a mental health practitioner who will help you with a metabolic, with a ketogenic diet or a low-carb diet, other special diets. These are people who specialize in helping you transition safely onto a ketogenic diet, who have the skill and the training and the knowledge to be able to do that with you safely. So look at the directory. It's free to search the directory. It's an international directory and if you're a practitioner out there who practices this way, please submit your listing to the directory. That is also completely free. There's a free public service to help people find the services that they're looking for.
Jack Heald:That all by itself was worth listening to the podcast. I had one question I wanted to ask those who are currently taking psychiatric meds are listening? Those who are taking it and listening will go. Oh, maybe I should be looking into this. My question is because you experienced this mental clarity as a result of changing your diet. What are some of the signs for the people who maybe aren't currently under the active care of a mental health professional that this might be something that would help you in terms of your mental health? What are some of the symptoms that we can self-diagnose?
Dr. Georgia Ede:Well, you know this is an easy answer.
Dr. Georgia Ede:Do you know why? Literally any mental health issue that you are struggling with, regardless of the nature of it or how long you've had it, whether or not you take medications for it, these dietary interventions are worth considering for you. Because these dietary interventions I'm talking specifically about these lower carbohydrate and ketogenic and carnivore strategies which are aimed at improving your metabolic health these change brain chemistry for the better across the board, meaning it fundamentally improves your brain health. So, whether you're having trouble concentrating, or whether you feel plagued by a very real trauma in your past, or whether you are just irritable and fly off the handle easily, or you're just tired all the time or you have mood swings, whatever it is, improving your brain health through better nutrition should always be step one. Because you know what I mean, and we even published a study last year that we had a colleague of mine in France 31 patients with severe chronic mental illnesses, on an average of five medications each, volunteered to come into the hospital and try a ketogenic diet under my colleague's supervision in France, and every single one of them who stayed on the diet for two weeks or more improved and 44% of them achieved clinical remission.
Dr. Georgia Ede:It didn't matter how long they'd been ill, it didn't matter. Some of these people had been ill for 10, 20, 30 years. It didn't matter what medications they were taking. It didn't matter what their diagnosis was. These diets when you feed the brain properly, the brain thanks you in all kinds of ways you might not have expected.
Jack Heald:I can't think of a better way to wrap it up, Phil.
Dr. Phillip Ovadia:That's a great quote to wrap on. Very good Well, this really been enlightening. I highly recommend the book really for anyone, whether or not you're maybe suffering from mental health issues. But change your diet, change your mind, and the website diagnosis diet a great lots of resources there. We encourage people to check it out.
Dr. Georgia Ede:Thank you. Even if you don't have a mental health issue right now, how would you like to prevent dementia? I think all of us want to do that. Thank you very much for letting me share information about the book. I really appreciate it. I hope that people will find the book useful.
Jack Heald:Well, I think we're going to For Dr Georgia Ede, dr Phillip Ovedia. This has been the Stay Out of my Operating Table podcast. We'll talk to you guys next time.