23/11/2023
🍩🍩🍩🤔🍩🍩🍩
*This Is What Happens To Your Brain When You Cut Out Carbohydrates*
Mental and physical health are linked — here’s how.
Treatment for mental health conditions is not always effective.
Sometimes the meds work, sometimes they don’t.
When they don’t, science has to look beyond the usual parameters for the solutions needed.
That’s why, between 2019 and 2020, French psychiatrists carried out an experiment on adults with *“severe, persistent mental illness”.*
These various illnesses included major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, and schizoaffective disorder.
Their symptoms had responded poorly to intensive drug treatment.
Twenty-eight adults (thirty-one originally, but three dropped out for personal reasons) were admitted to a psychiatric hospital and *put on a very low carbohydrate, ketogenic diet for between two and eleven weeks* .
*They ate no more than 20 grams of carbohydrate a day, sourced from vegetables, nuts, dark chocolate and lemon juice.*
*Protein made up 15%-20% of daily calories, and fat the rest.*
The scientists monitored the participants’ mental health using standard clinical rating scores.
They also applied consummate joined-up thinking to the study by simultaneously assessing measures of metabolic health.
These were measures of obesity, high blood sugar, and high blood fats, all *“commonplace”* in people with severe mental ill-health.
🤔 The results❓
_*“Noticeable improvements in mood and psychotic symptoms were observed in all 28 patients (100%) during the intervention, typically within 3 weeks or less of initiating the KD.”*_
Furthermore, the treatment was:
_*“…associated with significant and substantial improvements in… multiple markers of metabolic health.”*_
*In 64% of the patients, psychiatric medications were reduced.*
Other medications, for example for diabetes, *were either reduced or eliminated.*
Before the start of the trial, mean body weight was 198.5 lbs.
*By the end, all participants except one had lost weight.*
🔹 *The mean weight loss was 10.8 lb.*
🔹 *Blood glucose had normalised,*
🔹 *Blood pressure was down.*
🔸 *Even markers for liver health had normalised.*
*Everything is connected, as this study elegantly demonstrates.*
If you are working towards achieving good mental health, *get your weight and metabolic health in order first.*
🧠 *Mind and metabolism*
*Many people today follow a ketogenic* (low carb, high fat/protein) *diet in order to lose weight.*
It’s a simple technique: *when you deprive the body of dietary glucose as a fuel, it will switch to burning fat instead.*
If, on the other hand, *you keep eating carbohydrates, your body has no need to draw on its fat reserves, so doesn’t.*
The ketogenic diet was first used medically in the 1930s as a treatment for intractable epilepsy.
Interestingly, it is well established that epilepsy and bipolar disorder share many *“neurochemical underpinnings* ”, and often the same medicines used to control epilepsy are prescribed to stabilise mood.
Numerous studies have demonstrated that the ketogenic diet improves behaviour and working memory in rodents, as well as improving metabolic health.
*The first, small trial on humans was 55 years ago,* when ten women with schizophrenia were hospitalized and put on the ketogenic diet.
The results were encouraging: *after just two weeks they experienced a significant decrease in their symptoms.*
*What is it about carbohydrates that’s so damaging❓*
🤔 *How it works*
If your diet is based on sugary (or savoury) refined carbohydrates, you can expect regular spikes in blood glucose, followed by a rush of insulin to deal with that glucose.
Eventually, this relentless sugar saturation
🔹 *can lead to a phenomenon called insulin resistance* ,
🔹 *a precursor to the condition “metabolic syndrome”.*
Metabolic syndrome is characterised by
▪️ *high blood pressure,*
▪️ *high blood sugar,*
▪️ *high blood fats,*
▪️ *overweight* and
▪️ *obesity.*
*Insulin resistance is a sign of carbohydrate overload.*
It is a prediabetic condition that arises when insulin metabolism goes awry — the body no longer responds to insulin, so glucose remains in the blood instead of being processed normally.
The body, sensing that there is still too much circulating glucose, pumps out even more insulin in an attempt to deal with the excess, but to little or no effect.
Insulin resistance is a phenomenon that also occurs in the brain, *where it is known as brain insulin resistance.*
It’s something that’s now happening to children.
You see it in the soaring rates of childhood obesity, across the globe.
What you don’t see is the profound effect it has on their brains: *chronically high insulin levels in children have been linked to greater risk of developing depression and psychosis in adulthood.*
*There is a high prevalence of metabolic syndrome in people with psychoneurological disorders, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, ADHD, and autism.*
*Mental health disorders are rising in tandem with metabolic disorders, especially obesity.*
The link has been established.
The *“radical”* new treatment given to the twenty-eight subjects of the French study could — should — *prove to be a game changer.*
The effects that the ketogenic diet had on the participants were described as large and *“unprecedented”* across all measures of mental health.
*The great thing about the diet is that it doesn’t require a clinical setting. A kitchen will suffice.*
🍩🍩🍩🤔🍩🍩🍩
