Health Longevity Secrets

Can Junk Food Make Us Crazy? with Georgia Ede

• Robert Lufkin MD • Episode 191

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Can our dietary habits be a missing link in the quest for better mental health? Join us for a thought-provoking conversation with Georgia Ede, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist renowned for her pioneering work in nutrition science and brain metabolism. As chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes, and mental health disorders surge, Dr. Ede unravels the hidden connections between our diets and mental well-being. Brace yourself for some bold insights as she challenges the widespread consumption of refined carbohydrates and vegetable oils, revealing their role in inflammation and oxidative stress.

Explore the groundbreaking potential of the ketogenic diet as we delve into its promising impact on severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression. Featuring insights from Dr. Albert Dana, a psychiatrist who witnessed transformative changes in his patients on a mildly ketogenic diet, you'll hear about astonishing recovery stories that suggest diet could be a game-changer in psychiatric care. These compelling findings shine a light on the power of nutrition in achieving better mental health outcomes, emphasizing the need for further research and clinical trials.<br><br>We also tackle common nutritional myths and explore whether carbohydrates are truly essential to our diet. With refined carbohydrates producing addictive effects through dopamine receptors, we contrast the ketogenic and Mediterranean diets, highlighting potential benefits and drawbacks. Our conversation underscores the importance of informed dietary choices and professional guidance, especially for those considering a ketogenic lifestyle. With resources like a clinician directory and educational programs available at diagnosisdiet.com, listeners are equipped to embark on their journey to optimal mental health with expert support.

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Speaker 1:

Welcome back everybody. Our guest today will be speaking on the important topic of how nutrition affects our mental health. You're going to learn that maybe the Mediterranean diet is not so good for our mental well-being when you stay to the end. Our presenter for this discussion is Georgia Ede, a Harvard-trained MD psychiatrist specializing in nutrition science, brain metabolism and mental health. She established the first medically accredited course on ketogenic diets for mental health practitioners, co-authored the first inpatient study of the ketogenic diet for serious mental illness and was honored to be named recipient of the Bazooki Brain Research Fund's first annual Metabolic Mind Award. Her forthcoming book Change your Diet, change your Mind is actually out now. I highly recommend it, so let's go ahead and jump on in. Hey, georgia, thanks for joining us.

Speaker 2:

Oh, thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 1:

I I love your new book. I can't recommend it highly enough to everyone. Change your diet, change your mind. We're going to be talking about a lot of the things that are covered in this book. So, uh, everybody there check it out. But the book makes that a big point of the whole book is how nutrition and what we eat actually affects our mental state and and our mental health. What do you mean by that?

Speaker 2:

what a radical concept. Well, you know, the brain really turns out cares quite a bit about what we eat, because it needs very specific care, just like the rest of our cells do. All of our cells need the same basic nutritional care, and for a very long time we've really thought of the brain as separate from the body. And our physical health has really been going downhill for decades now. Type 2 diabetes and obesity and cardiovascular disease and all kinds of other chronic illnesses have been on the rise, and it probably is no surprise that our mental health has also been declining over that same period of time.

Speaker 2:

And both of those train tracks. They run parallel to the deterioration in the quality of our diet, and so our diet really has been deteriorating over the past 75 years, especially a lot more refined carbohydrates, sugars, flours, cereal products, fruit juices, lots and lots of sweets and starches that are not fruits and vegetables, and then the refined vegetable oils things like soybean oil and sunflower oil have now found their way into almost every processed and prepared food on the market. So now, at this time, let's see where are we? 2024, about 60% of what Americans are eating isn't food anymore. It doesn't come from farms or fisheries or, or fields. It comes from factories and it really doesn't behave like food in the body and it's very damaging to our whole health, our metabolism and our mental health.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So to recap, then, we're having a crisis in these chronic diseases that we never saw before, at these great numbers, that unprecedented numbers of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, heart disease, cancer, alzheimer's disease in the last few years, and the suggestion is, well, our diet has changed radically too, and it might be our diet, but, playing the devil's advocate, well, it might be the internet, or it might be. Some people say, oh, we're just not exercising, we have cell phones and stuff. But you've taken it one step further. In other words, you have some evidence, some research evidence to back it up, and, in particular, you've done some of the research yourself. In fact, some of the first studies were out of your lab, and maybe you could comment on that great study you co-authored about the ketogenic diet and mental health. And how did you come to be using about the ketogenic diet and mental health? And how did you, how did you come to be using a ketogenic diet anyway for mental health? What's the what's the link there?

Speaker 2:

yeah. So you know a lot of people will say well, you know it's stress or it's our social media environment. You know it's a different, different social factors that are, you know, causing causing these, this rise in mental health problems. But you know, the world has really always been a very, very stressful place and it's not that stress doesn't play a role, it certainly does. But we seem to have become so much more fragile, you know, in our response, our ability to cope with stress, and you know I saw that. You know, for years. You know, working as a college mental health specialist, working with students on college and university campuses, where I mean every year, the students that were arriving on campus seem to be in more and more fragile shape. You know they arrive on campus taking two, three psychiatric medications at the age of 18. Even some of them had been hospitalized already and many of them needing specialized support services to be able to get through a year of school. And so it really does feel as though something is destroying our brains from the inside out. And if you look at the ingredients of the modern diet, it's very clear that you sort of have the ingredients right there for the perfect storm of brain malfunction, you have all the ingredients for inflammation, oxidative stress that's why we're told to eat more antioxidants is we have too much oxidative stress and insulin resistance, or prediabetes, which doesn't just affect blood sugar, it also affects the ability of the brain to process sugar as well, and so you have this sort of triple threat of inflammation, oxidative stress and insulin resistance. And lo and behold, when you look in the modern diet, you see these refined carbohydrates and refined vegetable oils, which there's a lot of really good science on this how these ingredients, these signature ingredients of our modern diet, are directly and powerfully promoting inflammation, oxidative stress and insulin resistance. We now know that those are. It's not the chemical imbalances in serotonin and norepinephrine and dopamine that are really driving our mental health crisis, it's this inflammation, oxidative stress and insulin resistance. And so why study?

Speaker 2:

The ketogenic diet is the only dietary pattern which has the ability to reliably reduce insulin levels that drive insulin resistance in the first place. So if you have insulin resistance, which now more than 50% of us do, what's happened is that, over time, your insulin levels have been have been rising and rising and rising to try to, to try to cope with and and deal with all of this extra glucose that's been flooding your system. So those high insulin levels lead to insulin resistance. When you eat a ketogenic diet, you lower your insulin levels. And you don't just lower them a little bit, your insulin levels, and you don't just lower them a little bit. You lower them down to the point that you allow fat burning to turn on and ketones to start to be produced and released into the blood. And those ketones, which are um, come from the breakdown of fat. They cross into the brain and they they help to energize the brain.

Speaker 2:

Because people with insulin resistance have gradually lost a significant amount of their, a significant degree of their ability to turn blood sugar or glucose into energy. So they develop gradually over time. Those of us with insulin resistance, we develop this sluggish brain glucose processing and our brain starts to lose speed and we start to have difficulty turning glucose into energy. So there's an energy gap. If you eat a ketogenic diet, you're breaking fat down, turning that fat into ketones and bridging that energy gap, because the brain cells can use ketones for most of what they do.

Speaker 2:

Not everything can't replace glucose entirely, but it can replace a significant chunk of what glucose needs to be doing.

Speaker 2:

So if you've had some brain cells that have been kind of sputtering along with not quite enough energy for years, the ones that haven't died yet.

Speaker 2:

You can revitalize those cells and those operations within those cells with ketones, and that's why I think so many people, when they start a ketogenic diet, they feel their brain, they feel more mental clarity, better concentration, better brain energy, better brain stamina, better productivity, and they start to feel that their mood is more stable and brighter. Now, this doesn't happen to everybody, but it happens so commonly that it's one of the most reliable things you can say about a ketogenic diet in mental health is that if you eat a ketogenic diet and you've struggled with, you know, sort of poor concentration or poor mental energy, then many, many times you see this come back within say, three days to three weeks in most cases. So eating a ketogenic diet re-energizes the brain and takes a lot of that pressure off your glucose and insulin system and rebalances lots of other systems inside the brain, fights inflammation, oxidative stress, et cetera. Many, many different reasons to use a ketogenic diet for mental health problems.

Speaker 1:

So then, this study that we did- One point on that, if I could just so. The ketogenic diet helps reverse the effects of the insulin resistance that a large percentage of people have. And insulin resistance, when it crosses a certain point of blood tests it becomes type 2 diabetes. But even before type 2 diabetes, the insulin resistance can interfere with our brain, energy and our thinking. As you say, adult Americans, non-diabetic adult Americans there's a great study that shows their marker for insulin resistance their hemoglobin A1C levels increases with age. So it's almost as if we're all on a path to insulin resistance and ultimately, maybe even type 2 diabetes if we live long enough. But the point is that many, if not all, of us are at risk for this thing and many, if not all, of us might be able to benefit from this ketogenic change.

Speaker 2:

then perhaps Well, yeah, you're making a really good point, which is more than 50% of Americans have insulin resistance, which means their insulin levels have been running too high for too long, to the point that their cells are starting to resist a lot of insulin's messages. They start to tune insulin out a little bit because to protect themselves from being overstimulated by insulin, so they stop responding as well as crisply to insulin's messages, and that happens in the brain too. So what happens in the brain is your blood sugar, your glucose, can still waltz into the brain, no questions asked, but it's insulin that's going to have a harder and harder time crossing into the brain, because that transportation system becomes damaged from having been bombarded by too much insulin for too long, from having been bombarded by too much insulin for too long. So over time, you've got this brain swimming in glucose, but it can still be slowly starving to death because the insulin has a harder and harder time getting through. So you're gradually losing your brain's ability to generate power, and so it's kind of a paradox, or it sounds upside down, but the more sugary your diet is, the harder it becomes for your brain to use that sugar for energy and the more you're going to need to rely on fat and ketones to really have your brain run on all cylinders, and so I think there's a wonderful.

Speaker 2:

A wonderful, a motivating statistic for people is that it takes a very long time to develop Alzheimer's disease decades.

Speaker 2:

It takes about, you know, 10 to 20 years to develop type 2 diabetes.

Speaker 2:

Insulin resistance is often called type pre-diabetes, because it fairly often will eventually lead to type 2 diabetes, as you said.

Speaker 2:

But even if you never get diabetes, there are lots of other things that you're also on the road towards, and one of them is Alzheimer's disease. And so what's happening is that over decades, your brain is very gradually losing its ability to turn glucose into energy, so your brain power is on the decline, but by the time you notice any memory problems, you've already lost 25% of your brain's glucose processing power. So it's never too early to start thinking about this, and it's also never too late, because I've seen even patients with early Alzheimer's in my practice as well as in the scientific research. You'll see this even people with early Alzheimer's can get a lot of that brain power back if they switch their main fuel source from carbohydrates to fat. So this is a very, very powerful and very hopeful intervention, almost no matter how old you are or where you are on this spectrum of insulin resistance or memory issues or diabetes. What have you so, really, within just a few weeks, you can see very, very noticeable improvements in a lot of cases.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and what did you find in your study with a ketogenic or what made you think that a ketogenic diet might be useful in mental health? Is just the things we've been talking about, or was there any other signature moment?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so, you know, I first bumped into ketogenic diets in 2012 when I heard a lecture about ketogenic diets when I was speaking at a conference at Harvard Law School back in 2012. And you know, it was all really about all about weight loss, and I became very curious about these diets, and so I started reading about them, studying them, and I learned for the first time that ketogenic diets had been used since 1921 to treat epilepsy Children with severe seizure disorders. Back before there were any useful medications available to treat seizures, people didn't really have much of a choice except to try to resort to these dietary strategies, and the Q-Tank diet was very successful still is a very successful treatment for epilepsy. More than half of patients experience more than 50% reduction in seizure activity and more than 10% of them the seizures completely resolve. So this is a diet that was originally designed to stabilize brain chemistry, and as a psychiatrist, I thought to myself well, I prescribe seizure medicines all the time, every day, for people with bipolar disorder. Bipolar disorder and epilepsy have a lot in common. If ketogenic diets can help with epilepsy, maybe it would make sense to think about them for bipolar disorder, and so that's when I first started thinking about them and writing about them and dipping my toe in the water, started to try. After a few years of study, started to recommend this to my patients.

Speaker 2:

And one thing led to another and a colleague of mine in France, a good friend and colleague, dr Albert Dana. He's been practicing psychiatry in Toulouse, france, for more than 35 years now. Wonderful guy, and you know he had seen a ketogenic diet help a family member with epilepsy and autism. Within just a matter of weeks the seizures resolved and the autism symptoms even improved substantially and he thought this diet seems to be good for the brain. Maybe it would help. You know a lot of my patients, the ones who aren't getting better no matter what else I do. You know he had patients that he'd been working with for 10, 20, 30 years, tried every medicine under the sun, tried every form of psychotherapy he knew how to deliver and they just weren't getting much better.

Speaker 2:

And so he invited 31 of those patients with so-called treatment resistant, severe mental illnesses, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression severe major depression, depression, severe major depression into the hospital the local hospital to try a very simple whole foods, mildly ketogenic diet under his supervision, to see if it would help. And these were patients. They were taking, on average, five psychiatric medications each not at all uncommon in the world of serious mental illness. These were patients who had been in treatment for an average of 10 years already, most of them with Dr Dana himself. He knew many of these patients very, very well over many years, some of these patients he'd worked with for 30 years and so they came into the hospital and 28 of those 31 patients were able to stay on the diet for two weeks or more, which you need to do to sort of start to feel the benefits. And all 28 of those patients improved both psychiatrically and metabolically, meaning their blood pressures came down, they lost weight, you know, their triglyceride levels dropped like a stone. They and they. You know their blood sugars improved and lots of lots of health improvements.

Speaker 2:

But really remarkable I mean we see that all the time with the ketogenic diet. So no surprise really there. The surprise was every single one of these patients improved psychiatrically and 44% of them achieved clinical remission from their primary psychiatric diagnosis. That was just remarkable. And 64% of them left the hospital on less psychiatric medication. Percent of them left the hospital on less psychiatric medication.

Speaker 2:

So you do not see results like this in conventional psychiatric care, no matter what treatment you're using.

Speaker 2:

So this was just a profound observation, and this is why we worked to publish it together a couple of years ago, because we wanted people to see how much hope there is, regardless of your diagnosis, regardless of how long you've been struggling with a mental illness, regardless of how many psychiatric medications you may have tried or may still be taking, regardless of which medicines those are. I mean, these were people who were taking many of the one or two antipsychotic medications really heavy medication. So this is a really remarkable observation. And so now there are studies going on around the world, more rigorous clinical trials, where they're dividing patients into groups and testing this diet against other interventions to see, okay, what is this diet capable of? I mean, I really think that those of us in this field of metabolic psychiatry we firmly believe that this is the future of good psychiatric care is really, you know, addressing the root, the dietary root causes of these mental health conditions. I had a patient tell me today you know, maybe there's nothing wrong with me, maybe there's just something wrong with my diet.

Speaker 1:

Interesting. So the message is getting out there. How was the paper received? I mean, what was, what was some of the pushback, if any?

Speaker 2:

You know it's very interesting. There was actually very little pushback, there was skepticism, and rightly so, I mean. I think this is very important to point out. This was not a randomized controlled trial. A randomized controlled trial is a very rigorous type of scientific study. Where A randomized controlled trial is a very rigorous type of scientific study, where, in order for this to have been a randomized controlled trial, we would have had to have taken these 31 patients kind of randomly, divided them into two groups, given one group a ketogenic diet and given the other group a different kind of diet, and then compared those two branches and kept everything else as similar as we possibly could have managed to do, so that we're only just changing one thing. This was not a randomized controlled trial, but because these patients had been under the care of the same psychiatrist for so many years and they had been hospitalized one or more times in this very same hospital or the sister hospital not far away, where all the protocols were the same. I mean, really the only difference this time when they came into the hospital was the ketogenic diet. So we do think that the ketogenic diet had something to do with the fact that they got better.

Speaker 2:

But skeptical people, skeptical scientists and researchers. You know some of them looked at this paper and thought you know, well, you know you can't say for sure that the ketogenic diet had anything to do with this. You know, maybe it was just they were getting extra attention in the hospital. Maybe Dr Danone was, you know, paying much closer attention. Maybe it was just that it was whole foods. Maybe it had nothing to do with it being a low carbohydrate diet, and these are all fair points. But so this is why we need the randomized control trial.

Speaker 2:

But I still think the results were so, so striking. I mean, it wasn't just that people, you know that everybody got better. It's how much better they got. So when you look at the magnitude, like how much better the magnitude of the response, the improvements to the ketogenic diet we saw five to seven times, is that right? No, I'm sorry. I think seven to 10 times, excuse me, seven to 10 times stronger effect in terms of the degree of improvement, how much better patients got compared to medications, when you see study after study of antipsychotic medications, antidepressants, the degree of improvement in the medication studies overall is usually quite small. With this, with this, this group of people on the ketogenic diet seven to 10 times better results than with antipsychotic medications and antidepressant medications.

Speaker 2:

And the paper has really, I think, really resonated with lots of people in the community, research community and in the clinical community. It's been it's been viewed more than 99% of all of their articles in that journal it's been. It's gotten a lot of really positive attention. A lot of people have been interested in it. So and I think rightly so, because it really challenges so many of our beliefs about what mental illnesses are and what's possible. I mean, we're not taught in psychiatry school that recovery, full recovery from serious mental illnesses is even possible. So to have everybody improve and nearly half of them recover is just something that most people didn't think was even something they should aim for.

Speaker 1:

Well, I mean, that's so remarkable and given you described these effects in mental health and then before you mentioned that this type of diet will help out with insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes and also other brain things like Alzheimer's disease risk and other things, why isn't everybody on a ketogenic diet? What's the downside of this kind of diet?

Speaker 2:

Well, a few challenges. So one challenge is, of course, that we've eaten carbohydrates the majority of us anyway our entire lives, so it's just part of our. It's very hard to change a lifelong habit.

Speaker 1:

Aren't they necessary for life? Do you have to eat a certain amount of carbohydrates? So one of the food groups, a balanced diet right.

Speaker 2:

Right. So what you said was aren't they necessary for life and do we need them in our diet, which are actually two different questions. So, yes, they are necessary for life, but we don't have to get them from our diet because, um, our bodies can make all the carbohydrate we need out of protein and fat. Um, it it's. You know so. So you actually can, you? You don't never, you never really need to eat another gram of carbohydrate for the rest of your life, unless you want to.

Speaker 2:

Carbohydrates are completely biologically optional. You can make them from the inside of your body or you can get them from the outside of your body, but it is hard to give them up because they've not only have we been eating them forever, so they're just kind of part of what we do, but the types of carbohydrates that most of us have been eating a large amount of for so many decades now are the refined carbohydrates, like sugars, flours, fruit juices, cereal products, polished grains like white rice and instant oats, those types of foods which are now 40 to 60% of our diet, depending on who you're talking to. Those types of carbohydrates are really addictive, because they give you this big tsunami of glucose molecules coming into your bloodstream all at once and that really hits your dopamine receptors in your brain and feels like a bit of a rush and when you've been eating that way since you're a child, you miss that and that's a really special feeling that you don't get from whole foods and it's really challenging to break that. They're not addictive for everyone, but most people have a very difficult time passing these types of things up and giving them up. So and that's, I think, the hardest part of my job is supporting people through that transition phase of letting go of those processed foods. So I think a sugar addiction and refined carbohydrate addiction is a big challenge.

Speaker 2:

But the other challenge is all the nutrition, all of the nutrition myths that we have been led to believe over the years about fat being bad for you, about whole grains being good for you. You know about the importance of, you know eating lots and lots of fruits and starchy vegetables. You know eating a rainbow of fruits and vegetables to be healthy. So all eating a balanced diet. So you said oh, you know, don't we need to eat a balanced diet? And it turns out.

Speaker 2:

This is fascinating to me as somebody who studies brain chemistry. Is that one of the most reliable ways to stabilize your brain, to balance your brain chemistry, is to unbalance your diet. So if you unbalance your diet by, you know, getting rid of the carbohydrate or almost all of it, and tilting your diet almost entirely towards protein and fat, your brain, your brain chemistry stabilizes in these really profound ways that many people have never experienced. So many patients tell me that it's like a completely different state of mind, and I think this is a state of mind that people with mental health issues deserve to experience for themselves, to see what might be possible for them.

Speaker 1:

So with a ketogenic diet, as you said, you minimize the carbohydrates in your diet and shift towards fat and um and protein. But earlier you mentioned there were two other things you you introduced with with the recommendations of the diets, and that was seed oils and grains. How did those fit in, or or is that wasn't studied in this study right, or did you exclude those also?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so this was a whole foods European ketogenic diet. So so it really was. And if people are curious, if they go to the study, they're there and it's an open access study so anybody can read it in the supplemental materials If you click on the supplemental. But you can see, you know, sort of a sample menu of what people were eating and it's just whole foods, it's meat, it's vegetables, it's, you know, cheese, eggs, nuts, and you know there are no vegetable oils in this diet. It was olive oil and dairy fats and the natural fats that come with meat, seafood and and and dairy fats and the natural fats that come with meat, seafood, poultry and eggs, and so it was really very simple whole foods diet.

Speaker 2:

So there was that that sort of confusing variable right that well, was it just that it was a super squeaky clean diet, whole foods, or was it the fact that it was also very low in carbohydrate? I mean, I would argue and I argued in the paper that you know, maybe you know, maybe it was you know some other aspect of the diet, but it would be very hard to explain all of the other metabolic improvements we saw that you that you really only see with ketogenic diets in in other fields of medicine in terms of, you know, dramatic drop in triglycerides and blood sugar and so forth, that you don't really see in Mediterranean diets, say, for example. Mediterranean diets are a little bit better for metabolic health, but you do not see the dramatic reduction in metabolic, dramatic improvement in metabolic markers that we saw in this particular study.

Speaker 1:

Wait a minute, oh, excuse me.

Speaker 2:

No, please, please, please.

Speaker 1:

Mediterranean diets. I think many, if not most, doctors in this country. That's sort of the standard quote healthy diet that many people believe is healthy. What's the problem then? Are you saying with the Mediterranean diet that we should be concerned about?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so you know, study after study has shown that the Mediterranean diet is better, is better for our overall health and even for clinical depression. There have been three now randomized controlled trials at least last count any one of three of the Mediterranean diet for clinical depression. That showed that if you switch from a kind of junky standard American diet full of ultra processed foods to a Mediterranean diet then you will see improvements in some patients in clinical depression and you can even see some cases of remission. But just because the Mediterranean diet is better than the standard American diet for the brain does not necessarily mean that than the standard American diet for the brain does not necessarily mean that it's the best diet for the brain. And there are good reasons to believe that you could do much better.

Speaker 2:

And just one of those reasons, for example, is that the Mediterranean diet sort of sends a mixed message about refined carbohydrates. So it suggests that you base your diet on starchy staples like whole grains and legumes and refined grains like breads and pastas and cereals. It discourages sugar, added sugars and things like soda and candy and things like that, but it encourages breads and pastas and rice and things like that which turn instantly into sugar in the body. The body can't really tell the difference. So it really contains lots of refined carbohydrate which is very dangerous for our metabolic health and, just in general, it contains far too much carbohydrate of all kinds to be safe for the growing majority of us who now have insulin resistance and can't process that amount of carbohydrate safely anymore. So the problem, one of the many problems with the Mediterranean diet, is that it really pays almost no attention to metabolic health.

Speaker 2:

So and I think this is a serious problem, because if you try the Mediterranean diet and if that's where you want to start, please do. It is much better than the standard American diet because it does have a lot less junk in it. But you know, in my opinion, the Mediterranean diet really what it's doing is it's kind of just nibbling around the edges of a standard American diet. It's really not going far enough. If you want real, fundamental, meaningful change and even possibly recovery from a mental health condition, you can't just nibble around the edges of your diet and you can't just like sprinkle some super foods on top. You have to fundamentally restructure your diet from the ground up. If you want real change. You have to make real change.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's such a good point. I want to be respectful of your time here and one question that I mean I think it's beautiful the work you're doing with mental illness and just remarkable changes with these nutritional things. I wonder, though, for the majority of us who don't have a diagnosed mental illness, let's say but we just live our lives with our daily stresses, our anxieties, our depression that are not clinically diagnosable, but we all have them everyday. People like me on this, doing these changes in nutrition as far as mental health goes, do you think that that's valuable?

Speaker 2:

Absolutely so. You know, one of the reasons I first became interested in in nutrition at all was because I was experimenting with my own diet to try to solve some of my own physical health issues that had cropped up for me in my early 40s. I didn't think I had any significant mental health issues, I thought it was, you know, like most people, I got kind of depressed in the winter. You know I kind of ran out of steam by around five o'clock in the afternoon. You know I got very anxious. You know, before a stressful workday you know those sorts of things. Before a stressful workday, you know those sorts of things. And you know it's kind of. It took me a little longer to bounce back from, you know, from stressful things in my life than I wish it had, but that seemed to be pretty normal to me looking around right. But when I changed my diet all of those things improved and so I mean there are tremendous benefits to feeding the brain properly. And so I mean there are tremendous benefits to feeding the brain properly.

Speaker 2:

Most of us have been feeding our brain improperly our entire lives because we've been given the wrong information about food, and so you really have no idea how you actually feel, you know what your mood and your temperament and your capabilities are really like, until you, until you see what it feels like to feed your brain properly. And you know, I've had patients, you know, for their whole lives thought they just had sour dispositions, or they just, you know, weren't very productive, or they just you know, they're just you know got more easily irritated. You know it all disappears in so many cases and and it really if you're, if it really, if you're feeding your brain these very damaging ingredients, how can you expect it to work at its best?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, this has been some great, great food for thought. You have some. I recommend your book to everyone, certainly and also you have some great programs for training physicians in this space, as well as a directory for patients that they're curious about finding a metabolically oriented psychiatrist in their area on your website, and how can people find that and how can they follow you on social media?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so you know I have a lot of resources on my website that accompany the book. So the book lays out, you know, lots of information about nutrition myths and lots of you know interesting facts about food and mental health, history and brain chemistry and even food plans and ideas about how to improve your brain health through not just ketogenic diets but other types of diets. For those who aren't interested in ketogenic diets, there are lots of wonderful changes you can make to your diet to help yourself if you're not interested in a ketogenic diet or don't need to eat a ketogenic diet. But I do say in the book that if you want to try a ketogenic diet, to please seek professional support to do that, because it is a powerful biochemical intervention which is exactly what you want. You want the power of that diet. But when you're transitioning to that diet, especially if you are taking any prescription medications or have a history of any serious psychiatric symptoms or if you have an existing health problem of any kind, if you're under medical care for any type of medical issue, transitioning onto a ketogenic diet can be dangerous unless you have good medical supervision to kind of guide you through that process right as your body and mind are shifting gears from one source of energy to another.

Speaker 2:

So on my website, the website's called diagnosisdietcom, and so on that website there's a tab clinician directory. So if you're looking for a clinician in your area, it's an international directory. It's free to search. You can look in your area. It's growing all the time. Every week we get new listings. So if you don't see somebody, check back to see if there's someone who can help you and or your local care team support you on to ketogenic diet. So that's free. And then the other thing on the website is the training program. There's a training tab. If you are a clinician who wants to learn how to use ketogenic diets to treat mental health conditions, then I do offer a CME accredited clinician training program if you're curious to learn more about that. And there's more information about the book also on the website if you're curious to learn more about the book.

Speaker 1:

Well, thanks so much, Georgia, for taking the time to chat with us today, and also thank you so much for all the great work you're doing in this space.

Speaker 2:

Thank you very much for inviting me. I really have enjoyed the opportunity to speak to all of your followers and I love my work, so I'm glad it's helpful.

Speaker 1:

Wow, that was a great conversation with Dr Georgia Eadie.

Speaker 1:

We learned about the significant role that our nutrition choices can play in our mental health, not only for clinically diagnosable mental illness, but for all of us in just our everyday mental ups and downs.

Speaker 1:

So it was great. We also learned about how to avoid the dangers of, according to Dr Edie, the high carbohydrates, what they can do to us, and the seed oils and the grains, and how the Mediterranean diet, while it's an improvement over the usual junk food diet that most Americans eat, it's still not all the way there and it misses a lot of the potential that some of these other dietary choices could make. So I want to thank Dr Georgia Eade for joining us today and sharing her amazing knowledge with us all. Remember that Dr Eade is giving a bonus to our VIP Pass members, so if you haven't claimed your VIP Pass or access to recordings, transcripts, mp3s and our must-have bonus package, you can get it now by clicking this page to upgrade before it's too late. Remember that when the event is over, the recordings and all the bonuses go away. So make sure you claim your VIP pass before it's too late.