Welcome to the Podcast: Dr. Georgia Ede
Dr. Eric Westman: It’s my great pleasure to have Dr. Georgia Ede today.
Dr. Georgia Ede: Thanks very much for inviting me, Dr. Westman.
Introduction and how Dr. Georgia Ede got started
Dr. Eric Westman: Please introduce yourself and explain how you got into this world and this space.
Dr. Georgia Ede: I’m a psychiatrist. I’ve been a psychiatrist for more than 25 years. In the first 10 years of my practice, I practiced the way most psychiatrists do, prescribing medications and doing psychotherapy, which I loved. I loved both. I loved my work. I changed the way I practice for two reasons. One is that I think most psychiatrists would agree that most of our patients don’t get that much better, no matter how hard we try to help them with the usual methods.
The other reason is that I stumbled into a new way of eating quite by accident many years ago, one that had both physical and mental health benefits for myself. This inspired me to start studying nutrition for the first time. This was quite a few years ago now. I studied nutrition and then began incorporating these nutrition principles into my work. Now, I’m a clinical educator, a researcher, and an author. Most importantly, my favorite thing to do as a metabolic and nutritional psychiatrist is to use food to help people reduce, and sometimes even eliminate, the need for psychiatric medications.
My favorite thing to do is empower other people with this information so that they can start improving their own mental health. That’s why I like coming on your channel and talking about it.
Connecting food with mental health
Dr. Eric Westman: I’m an internist, and, when we go through medical training, there’s this sort of artificial split at the neck. I suppose neurology gets into the brain, but it’s not the thoughts and the feelings and the like. So how did that influence what you were interested in? Also, did you get any training in nutrition?
As an internist, below the neck, it’s as if food didn’t really matter. We took care of hearts when they failed, lungs when they failed, kidneys, and all that. It seems like people could figure this out, that you eat something, you feel something, or you have a thought.
Looking back at how you learned this, how does one go about connecting food with mental health?
Dr. Georgia Ede: It’s so interesting. We think when you swallow food, it goes down. Maybe we don’t think about it also going up.
For a long, long time, we’ve thought about the mind and the brain as separate and the brain and the body as separate. But of course, the brain is part of the body, and it’s an organ that can malfunction just like any other organ. Metabolic health, as I’m sure you agree, doesn’t stop at the neckline. The metabolic health of all our cells matters, and all of our cells follow the same rules and need the same basic nutritional and metabolic care. If you’re not healthy below the neckline, you will not be healthy above the neckline.
I didn’t learn anything about nutrition and mental health in four years of medical school or four years of residency training. This is why I say that before I accidentally stumbled into this other way of thinking, as so many of us do, we were not taught really sound, biologically-based nutrition principles and how powerful they are to heal and protect all of our cells.
Dr. Eric Westman: Like a lot of doctors who come into this space, you had some personal experience and improvement.
A lot of doctors just stop right there. For a while, I would speak in public at meetings, and doctors might say, “Yes, I’ve done better, but I can’t talk to my patients about this. That would be inappropriate.” For a while, people feared they would get sued for talking about it. Back 25 years ago, promoting the Atkins diet was so taboo at the time.
These days, times have changed. What was the second patient? Or if you started with yourself, how did you make that leap to doing this with people you were entrusted to care for?
Nutrition and patients
Dr. Georgia Ede: When I first had my own experience with dietary changes improving my physical and mental health, I didn’t immediately run into my clinic or private practice and begin recommending these strategies to my patients. Honestly, at that point, I knew nothing about nutrition. I did not want to harm my patients. I did not want to use a strategy in my work that I didn’t understand. That would have been reckless and irresponsible. So for at least five years, I studied nutrition intensively and independently. I also took a graduate school course in nutrition. I studied intensively so that I could convince myself that these principles were sound, safe, and worth exploring.
Now, I have an advantage in psychiatry that people in internal medicine, cardiology, and certain other fields don’t necessarily have. In psychiatry, there really is no dietary guideline. It wasn’t as though anybody was saying, “That would be bad for the brain,” because people weren’t really talking about food and the brain. So there was a little bit more flexibility there and more open-mindedness, I think.
The first patient that I can recall who was willing to try this different way of eating was a graduate student with panic attacks, emotional eating, cravings, and insomnia. What felt to her as though she had anxiety throughout the day was that she was also feeling irritable and hungry between meals. She didn’t want to take medication. The medications that are typically prescribed for people with anxiety and panic attacks, many of them fall into the category of benzodiazepines. These are medicines with brand names like Ativan, Klonopin, Xanax, and Valium, medicines in that family, which are really problematic.
They can make people feel tired and dizzy, and they can also cause dependence and even addiction. So they’re not a low-risk option, and a lot of people don’t want to take those medicines. She was very health-conscious and said, “Is there anything else I can do?” So, I recommended that she simply switch her diet to a whole foods, low-carbohydrate diet. This was not a medical ketogenic plan. This was just, let’s take the carbs down to about 20 grams per day. Whole foods, mostly meat and poultry, low non-starchy vegetables, fat, cheese, things like that.
Within a couple of weeks, her symptoms were – this was her own words, and I put this case example in the book – “90% better.” So, no medication whatsoever. This was the first time that I had seen somebody try these principles and have results. Once you have that experience, it’s motivating to try to bring it to more patients and see what else might be possible.
Dr. Eric Westman: That’s interesting. Like most doctors who come across this, we have to retrain until we feel comfortable enough to do it with another person. I was fortunate enough to be able to do clinical trials, meaning, 50, 100 people at a time, but most people don’t have that luxury.
What was your thought process with the third patient? The fourth patient?
Nutrition and metabolism to the human brain
Dr. Georgia Ede: What I gradually came to understand and become so passionate about is that when you apply the truth about nutrition and metabolism to the human brain and body, people feel better.
It doesn’t matter what the diagnosis is because all cells follow the same rules and need the same care, the same nutrients, and the same protection. All cells need you to have your glucose and insulin levels in a healthy range. All cells need you to eat foods that can deliver essential nutrients throughout the body safely. All cells need you to avoid damaging foods, which cause things like inflammation, glucose spikes, and something called oxidative stress, which is why we’re always told to eat more antioxidants.
If you know what these rules are, you can have much more control over your mental health than you thought might be possible in many cases.
Sugar and glucose for the brain
Dr. Eric Westman: It’s almost like you’re talking as if you have to defend the fact that the brain is an organ that needs energy. I understand. I’m the son of a psychiatrist. I think that’s one reason I went into internal medicine.
You couldn’t fake a creatinine (kidney failure) of five or something. Yes, the brain needs fuel. For the longest time, we were taught the brain needed sugar and the brain needed carbs. What’s up with that?
Dr. Georgia Ede: The brain does need sugar. It does need glucose. Glucose is the sugar that’s circulating in the bloodstream, as most of your viewers will probably already know. That is the circulating sugar in your bloodstream.
The brain does need some glucose at all times to function at its best, but:
- A) It doesn’t need very much.
B) If you give it too much, it causes a lot of problems.
It actually physically damages the brain. Too much glucose in the brain will literally stick to vital components throughout the brain, and this will, through a series of chain events, cause waves of inflammation and waves of damaging oxidative stress. It can disrupt neurotransmitters, the chemicals in the brain, causing chemical imbalances. We’re told all the time, we’re trained as psychiatrists, to think of mental health conditions, from major to minor, as chemical imbalances in the brain. Well, what’s causing those chemical imbalances in the first place? It turns out that our food choices have a lot to do with how balanced our brain chemistry is. The funny thing about the brain needing glucose is that the more glucose you eat, the more sugary your diet is, the harder it becomes for your brain to turn that sugar into energy. You can actually damage that glucose-processing system over time.
It sounds upside down, but that’s how it is. A lot of people think, “My brain needs sugar.” Yes, it does, but the more sugar you eat, the harder it will be to use it. The other funny upside-down thing is that the most powerful way to balance your brain chemistry is to unbalance your diet. That’s also something that’s hard for people to wrap their heads around, but it’s true. If you take the carbohydrates down nice and low, where you can start to burn more fat for energy and turn that into ketones, those ketones help. They energize the brain, and they help bridge that energy gap that so many of us have from damaging our glucose processing system over so many years.
Dr. Eric Westman: Such an important concept, that the brain can use glucose. There was a thought for decades that it had to be hundreds of grams in the diet. No, your body can make its own glucose. It is really important that you said in the same sentence that too much glucose can be a problem.
Now we’re getting over into neurology, aren’t we? The brain. I’m thinking more of insulin resistance over time causing dementia. There’s that funny crossing between disciplines where neurologists think in terms of dementia and delirium, and psychiatrists more in terms of mood.
It’s all the same organ, isn’t it?
The brain is one organ
Dr. Georgia Ede: Yes, the brain isn’t divided into neurology cells and psychiatry cells. It’s one organ, and it can malfunction in various ways. Neurologists have studied brain conditions that have physical symptoms, for example, seizures or tremors. Multiple sclerosis, where you might have numbness and weakness in various places in the body, presents with physical symptoms.
Psychiatrists study brain conditions that cause problems with thought, emotion, or behavior rather than physical symptoms. But these are all brain cell malfunctions. They’re all the same. It’s an imaginary line, really.
Good nutrition for brain cells could improve both neurological and psychiatric issues
Dr. Eric Westman: Again, crossing kind of epilepsy, 100 years ago, about the same time this diet was used for weight loss and diabetes reversal, the ketogenic diet for epilepsy, kind of a kissing cousin, had a different upbringing or pedigree with Russell Wilder and Johns Hopkins.
Even then, fasting as a treatment for fits and seizures, some argue, goes back to biblical times, when people would have fasting instituted. There’s no question that what you eat can affect the brain. It can reverse childhood seizures. Again, a seizure, as long as there’s no tumor or something, is not an anatomic thing you can put your finger on, typically. Yet, I can see how great nutrition can cross neurology and psychiatry. I hope that a viewer who isn’t into the details of all this will just accept that good nutrition for brain cells could improve both neurological and psychiatric issues.
Dr. Georgia Ede: A lot of people, when they hear “ketogenic diet,” think of weight loss. It can certainly help people lose weight, although, depending on how you build it, it can also help you maintain weight or even gain weight. If it only caused weight loss, then all of us who had been on a ketogenic diet for several years would have long since disappeared into thin air. So it’s not necessarily a weight loss tool, though it’s really useful to help people burn fat and lose weight. But it was originally created to stabilize brain chemistry in 1921 for children who were having seizures, before the availability of useful seizure medications, which came many years later. As you said, people have known since biblical times, maybe even longer, that when people with seizures fasted, their seizures would often improve. So this diet was created to get as close to fasting as possible without starving people to death because you can’t fast forever. That was the original version, the epilepsy version, of the ketogenic diet.
There are many more relaxed forms of the ketogenic diet that we use today, in psychiatry as well as in neurology. The ketogenic diet exists on a spectrum, from very strict to more relaxed. Which version works for you is just going to depend on who you are. Some people need a much stronger dose of ketones, and some don’t. There’s so much potential here for all kinds of brain conditions, and the research is bearing that out.
The research is exploding in this area across all kinds of diagnoses in psychiatry. Clinical experience is mounting, and we’ve got more and more published cases, along with our own experience seeing what’s possible across just about every diagnosis you can imagine.
Dr. Eric Westman: As an internist, I opened a clinic treating obesity and diabetes reversal. To my surprise, about 10 days in, back in the days when I could see people in two weeks (now it’s longer, I’m afraid), this one patient came in to me, and she looked at me and said, “My voices are gone.” Back when we had paper charts, I looked under the chart, and it turns out I was treating her for obesity, but clear throughout her chart, she had had schizophrenia, some version of it. The other thing, psychiatrists seem to needlessly bicker about what type of schizophrenia or psychotic disorder a patient has. It didn’t matter to me. Her voices were gone. She had also had visual hallucinations, which made it a complicated diagnosis. Anyway, all those things improved within two weeks of changing her diet.
That opened my eyes to this whole world of perhaps helping psychiatric issues. We wrote up the case. Other cases were written up about that at the time. It’s been fascinating to see that grow, although I don’t see the penetration in the internet sphere. The internet, Twitter, and X. I don’t see a lot of pre-post studies being discussed. Back in about the year 2000 when I started getting into this, there were innumerable before-and-afters of weight loss, even back in the kind of rudimentary internet at that time. I’m not seeing a whole lot of before-and-after mental health things. “My schizophrenia is gone” and all that. Is it because it’s harder to do? Or that it’s not as powerful as weight loss, where everyone gets a benefit from it? What’s your sense now that it’s sort of been out there as a concept? Or do we really need to wait for these clinical studies to know how effective it’s going to be, and how difficult it will be?
Helping people with psychiatric issues
Dr. Georgia Ede: There are three things I want to say to that.
One is to come back to the case that you published in 2009 because you were saying that case really changed the way you thought about this. I want to just say that that case changed the way a lot of us thought about this. It was the first well-documented case of a person with mental illness responding to carbohydrate restriction, full stop.
There was some vaguely described paper in the 1960s mentioning ten hospitalized women with psychotic conditions who improved on a ketogenic diet, but there was very little information in that paper to go on. Then the field lay silent from 1965 when I believe that paper was written, until the 2009 case that you published. That was Case Zero. I want to thank you for publishing that because it was one of the papers that I came across when I first started studying this for myself.
Now we’ve got lots and lots more cases published, clinical trials published, and we’ve got randomized control trials in the works. Even a couple of small ones have been published in certain conditions. The science is really mounting.
Another thing I wanted to respond to is what you were saying. We see before-and-after weight loss testimonials online all the time. We still see a lot of those because this diet is a wonderful diet for burning fat. If you want to lose weight, you’ve got to be able to burn fat.
There are two things to say about why you don’t see more mental health testimonials. One is that you have to know where to look, and I can point people to a place to look. The other is that there’s still a lot of stigma around mental health. Many people who improve a mental health condition may not want to be public about it. But that is changing. Through the age of social media, people are becoming more comfortable, some people, anyway, sharing those kinds of benefits.
One place I can point people to, and this was very moving and inspiring to me, is a few weeks ago, I was on a podcast called Diary of a CEO. The podcast isn’t a nutrition podcast, but it has a large reach. The kinds of people who listen to that podcast aren’t necessarily in the keto sphere, so to speak. Thousands of comments appeared underneath that video, hundreds of testimonials from people saying a ketogenic diet, a carnivore diet, or different types of carbohydrate restriction resolved not just multiple mental health conditions but multiple physical health conditions as well. Even I was surprised. I’ve never seen that many come through in such a short period of time. I do think we’re at a turning point where people are starting to come out of the woodwork and say, “This happened to me too.” So, I do think things are changing that way.
Dr. Eric Westman: What a great point, it depends on where you look. I’m still at the point where I don’t quite believe that every time there’s a comment on a video, it’s real.
Dr. Georgia Ede: Of course not.
Residential treatment homes
Dr. Eric Westman: Why would someone lie? It could be someone trolling. It could be the same bot doing the same thing over and over. But I doubt that. So, there’s a bit of skepticism, but you also have to stay positive at the same time. I think it’s awesome to count up those hundreds because, honestly, I probably didn’t find hundreds of pictures of before-and-afters 25 years ago.
The stigma around mental health will make it a little harder. The other thing I can think of is that, especially if it’s a family unit, or if someone is on their own and quite disorganized, they may need assistance in doing it, depending on the severity of the mental illness. That gets me to the idea of group homes. Or even now, there’s a signal about retirement homes helping with keto. What an awesome place for that. People are captive, basically, and with permission, you feed them meat and some veg. Maybe they lose weight, get off their diabetes medications, or improve their Alzheimer’s or pre-Alzheimer’s symptoms. Are there still behavioral centers where this is happening? I know there are some rehab centers where people might be able to check-in. Has this penetrated into those areas, to your knowledge?
Dr. Georgia Ede: This is a very new field, but there are people setting up small residential treatment programs, and app-based coaching programs with intensive outpatient work, mostly remote. Then there are clinic systems, a couple in the country, that are starting to branch into metabolic psychiatry.
When you talk about assisted living facilities, there’s a group run by Hal Cranmer in Arizona, where he is using nutrition to help people become more independent and go back home. Going into assisted living and then actually coming back out again because they get well.
Dr. Eric Westman: Most people think it’s a one-way ticket in.
Dr. Georgia Ede: Yes, exactly.
There are these innovative programs being established by forward-thinking, progressive, entrepreneurial-minded psychiatrists and metabolic practitioners. Some of these are gathering research and data, they serve a dual purpose. They help people clinically while also gathering data that can be published to bolster these ideas and help them spread. These programs are all in the very, very early stages, but there are a number of them in the United States, and they’re even starting to crop up in Europe and other places around the world.
We’re at a really exciting time. It’s a really exciting time to be a psychiatrist and a hopeful and empowering time to be a person with a mental health issue or to have a loved one with a mental health issue. We now have a brand-new way of thinking about things, a brand-new way of approaching things that is bringing unprecedented relief to most people who are willing to try it and give it a good, long go.
Dr. Eric Westman: Thank you. I see your book in the back on the table. How did you get the idea to write a book? Can you summarize it, the process, and the content? I highly recommend people check it out.
Summary of Dr. Ede’s book
Dr. Georgia Ede: I started studying nutrition in 2007, and 2008, and the more I learned, the more I began incorporating these principles into my work. The more excited I got about it, the more I wanted to write about it. But I really wanted to make sure that I had enough experience and enough knowledge to put together a book that was worth writing. Because the field is very new, I took my time with it. It’s been many, many years, 15 or more years, of study and practice. Then, the book itself took two years to write.
My goal with this book called Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind, was to put everything in one place about brain food that people need to know. About half the book is about the truth of nutrition, pulling apart all these myths, wiping the slate clean, and installing the truth in its place. It covers which foods are good for us, which foods are bad for us, and the real risks and benefits of grains, red meat, etc. The other half of the book is really about mental health, how food affects the brain, and what you can do to improve your own brain health. It includes not just a ketogenic diet because I know that’s a non-starter for some people, but also a more relaxed plan that people can start with if they’re not keen on keto. It’s much healthier than what most people are eating now. There’s a modified paleo plan called the Quiet Paleo Plan, a Quiet Keto Plan, and a Quiet Carnivore Plan for people to explore. What I’ve tried to do in the book is show people who think they’ve tried everything that if they’re willing to try one more thing, hope is on the menu. There’s guidance, there’s information, and there’s a lot of practical help in the book. I packed in as much as I could for patients, families, physicians, nutrition professionals, and practitioners.
Dr. Eric Westman: That’s important to know, that it’s not just for someone with mental illness. I think this is a great read for anyone just curious about the brain and how to help brain function over time, with anecdotes. It’s extremely well-written and very engaging.
Were you a writer by background, or did you get assistance as well?
Dr. Georgia Ede: I am a very slow writer. Writing is painful for me. But I also did write the book myself. That’s probably why it took so long to write. I really wanted it to be my own voice in this book. I wanted to have a lot of control over the expression of these ideas. I would have loved to have someone help me with it. I did have editorial help. I hired a professional editor to read and give me feedback on every chapter because I’m not a professional writer. That was useful to me. Tone and context, I’m very close to these ideas, so when I would write a chapter and send it off to him, he would say, “Why do we even need to be talking about this right here?” or, “I’m not really sure I understand what you’re saying,” or, “Why do I need to know this?” That was valuable. If I had written without that kind of support, it would have come out perhaps not as effective as I think it has been.
Dr. Eric Westman: I wonder about the feedback you’ve had. I’ve had many patients come in already having read your book. It helped them personally, but also as a family unit, a family with a child with schizophrenia, for example. That’s often a barometer or a temperature. I’m hearing people read it, and they come to me to talk about it. How has your feedback been?
Positive feedback
Dr. Georgia Ede: That is music to my ears, what you just told me. I wrote the book to help people.
I’ve been getting positive feedback about the book from individuals, families, and colleagues. The book’s also recommended in The New York Times Book Review, which I was very, very pleased to see.
I’m very relieved that it has been well received, but mostly that it’s helping people. I love that it’s helping people with mental health conditions, but I also love that it’s helping colleagues open their minds to a new way of practicing. Because we psychiatrists, most of us, if we’re being honest with ourselves, we need new ways. We need a new way forward. Our treatments don’t help enough people, they don’t work well enough, and they do fail. They do fail most people, ultimately.
It’s not about throwing all those other strategies away and replacing them with nutrition. These strategies work well in combination with psychotherapy. They work well in combination with medications. In fact, in most of the clinical trials and case studies that have been published, people start with their medication and then add the diet to the medication. In some cases, they’re able to come off the medication; in other cases, not. You don’t need to choose one way or the other, you can combine these two strategies in very effective ways.
As we showed in the paper that you helped me publish in 2022, Dr. Albert Danan’s work in France, where 28 of those 31 patients with serious mental illness improved substantially on a whole-food, very mildly ketogenic diet patterned after the work that you’ve done over many years in your research. All of those people were taking multiple psychiatric medications, they were on five psychiatric medications on average. Adding the diet to those medications allowed them to improve the side effects.
We saw that a lot of these medications cause obesity, they cause type 2 diabetes and they cause metabolic problems. Even though most of these people were taking powerful antipsychotic medications, medications notorious for causing weight gain and high blood sugar levels, almost every one of those people lost weight when they added the diet to the medication. And 64% of people left the hospital on less psychiatric medication. You don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. You can incorporate these nutrition and metabolic principles into your work and see if that helps people tolerate their medications better, or maybe even need less medication over time.
Dr. Eric Westman: That was a great experience. I just helped with the data collection and analyses, and thanks for doing the heavy lifting of writing it up and getting it published. That was an impactful article, except you never know if it’s just for the moment and whether it will have legs.
Most of my clients or patients may have grandkids, may have children, and the stories I hear are that it’s hard to always influence what’s happening through your children and grandchildren. How do you use what you’ve learned?
There are movies like The Magic Pill, where there’s a very dramatic improvement in a real behaviorally difficult child, just by cutting out carbs – the “magic pill” being the keto diet.
How would you advise a patient of mine who otherwise is curious about this but maybe doesn’t have a diagnosed mental illness but might be anxious? Also, seeing their family, what would the alerts be that maybe their grandchild should pay attention to whatever is in the food? Is there a way for you to look at that with a psychiatrist’s lens?
Understanding the truth about nutrition
Dr. Georgia Ede: If I understand you correctly, you’re asking, if you’ve got a family member or someone you care about who is reluctant to look at dietary changes or may not be motivated or convinced that food matters to the brain and mental health, how do you approach that?
This is probably most of what I spend my time talking about. We’ve been led to believe that food doesn’t matter that much to the brain. We think about food as, “It’s a way to control my weight,” or, “It’s a way to control my cholesterol levels.” That’s certainly how I thought about it for my entire life, especially growing up with a weight issue. I thought of my food choices as a way to control my weight, full stop. I wasn’t doing a very good job at it either, because I had the wrong information about how to manage weight. So, most people don’t understand how important it is.
There’s a lot of resistance to changing diet in this particular way, meaning the low-carbohydrate way, because carbohydrates are delicious, addictive, convenient, and inexpensive parts of our lives. There are a lot of barriers.
One of the reasons I wrote the book is because, as I said, about 50% of it is about helping people understand the truth about nutrition. Whether you’ve had a mental health issue or not, what is a good diet for human beings to eat? To lay the groundwork for a life of good mental and physical health? What foods do children need to eat to be well? Children, just like adults, need their cells to follow the same rules. What does a healthy diet look like for a kid? Most of us, I think, would agree that it shouldn’t contain junk food and ultra-processed foods and things like that and that it should at least be a whole foods diet. If parents can’t bring themselves to go there, they’re certainly not going to go on a low-carbohydrate whole foods diet. Even getting families to go to whole foods can be very tricky.
One of the fields that I think is motivating in this way is, there were several studies conducted in the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s in Europe by different researchers looking at children with ADHD, children, and teenagers with ADHD. It’s a pretty common, unfortunately, condition, more and more common all the time. Some of these kids had ADHD to the point that they were hospitalized. They were so severely impaired by their condition. ADHD, like everything else, exists on a spectrum of mild to moderate to severe. Some of these kids were having a lot of difficulty.
Different researchers in different places, working with these children, recommended for them something called a “few foods” diet. This “few foods” diet was essentially a diet with just a few foods in it, mostly whole foods, free of foods that are thought of as common allergens, food allergy, and food sensitivity culprits. They took out the dairy, the nuts, the chocolate, they took out things that tend to bother, or can bother, sensitive people. Essentially, it was things like turkey, lamb, vegetables, fruit, some apple juice, margarine, and rice, things like that. It wasn’t a perfect diet, but it was very simple and mostly whole foods. It was not a low-carb diet. It was not a ketogenic diet. It was just a simple, mostly whole-food diet. The response rate was 62% to 82% within weeks on that diet. I can’t remember now the percentage, but I want to say close to three-fourths of kids, depending on the study, achieved remission from ADHD within weeks of starting these diets, depending on which study you looked at.
That doesn’t necessarily tell us which aspects of the diet were the problem. When you go from a regular diet to this very special “few foods” diet, you’re making an awful lot of changes. But what does it tell you? It tells you that food matters to the brain. That food can be the problem in most children. Who doesn’t have a few weeks to give that a try? It’s 100% safe. Think of the potential benefits. One of the research studies that I’m involved in right now is a research study being run by the Children’s Mental Health Resource Center. The principal investigator is Elizabeth Errico, and we’re now on our second cohort. These are children with bipolar disorder who are trying a ketogenic diet to see if it helps. The preliminary results are really astonishing, what we’re seeing so far. I’m very excited about being able to play a small part in helping families understand how critically important nutrition is to children’s mental health.
Dr. Eric Westman: That’s great to hear, and I’m glad you’re involved in the new data collection. I’m heartened to hear that you’re dealing with children.
When I step back, I don’t see a lot of pediatric involvement with keto. If anything, there are a few books here and there, but I don’t see pediatrics, even the Duke Pediatric Group, which is an endowed, funded area for obesity. They’re looking at the microbiome.
We should mention the Baszuckis, the Baszucki Group – Metabolic Mind. In a nutshell, how has this advanced? We’re going to see a whole lot of research hopefully soon.
The Baszucki Group
Dr. Georgia Ede: Yes. This is really important work that’s being done. It’s trailblazing. This is a trailblazing organization. The Baszucki Group launched, not too long ago, a platform called Metabolic Mind. Metabolic Mind is growing all the time with new resources. It’s a website, a YouTube channel, and now it even includes a self-help platform, a self-help framework called Think + Smart, which was just launched last week. If you go to the Metabolic Mind website, you can read or watch videos of testimonials from people, even with very serious mental illnesses, who have recovered using ketogenic diets. And other special diets as well, but primarily ketogenic diets. You can hear the voices, and see the faces of real people who have put their mental illnesses into recovery. You can listen to interviews with specialists, experts, scientists, clinicians, and entrepreneurs who are doing exciting work in this space.
Dr. Brett Scher hosts the Metabolic Mind YouTube channel. He conducts a lot of these interviews himself. You can be right up to the minute with everything that’s going on in metabolic psychiatry. All of this is thanks to Jan Ellison Baszucki, who is a pioneer in the field, and an intellectual powerhouse in her own right, whose son recovered, and has now been at least three years, from severe bipolar disorder using a ketogenic diet. That was what inspired her to spearhead this movement, this metabolic psychiatry movement. She funds a lot of the clinical trials going on around the world.
Dr. Eric Westman: If only two people like that, two families, would be philanthropic. We would have a hundred times more research in this area. That’s been so great to see. We don’t have to wait for governmental agencies, but, the old saying is that you have to already have done what you’re going to get funded to do through the NIH. It’s a very conservative thing. Maybe this will be the pilot work that the NIH or other governmental agencies will start ponying on, leapfrogging, if you will.
I mentioned the lack of pediatricians, I take that back. We were invited to a meeting in Indonesia, and I met a pediatrician there who was telling me about keto babies. What do you remember about our trip to Jakarta and to Tyo Prasetyo?
Trip to Jakarta and Tyo Prasetyo
Dr. Georgia Ede: That trip was a highlight of my life, my personal life as well as my professional life. It was great to be able to spend time with you, both in Jakarta and then in Bali afterward, which was an amazing experience.
That conference is etched in my heart because there’s something about being there, surrounded by people who were so passionate and so committed and so excited about the healing properties of the ketogenic diet. Remember how everybody would stand and make this “K”, they were keto warriors. They would stand in a group, and they would hold up their “K,” and they would make this hand signal. That was their way of symbolizing that that was going to be their shield against the high-carbohydrate world, right? It was an affirmation, we are going to eat this way, not that way.
Tyo Prasetyo had hundreds of thousands of followers he had inspired to follow, what he called ketofastosis, the power of a low-carbohydrate diet plus intermittent fasting, which had helped his own son’s condition. I can’t remember what but I know it was a neurological issue. That conference was so full of heart. The love of the people, how warmly welcomed we were, how colorful, beautiful, and how generous everybody was.
Dr. Eric Westman: After three days of grueling talks, it was high science, they brought out the flower arrangements and all that.
Then there was Alif, the son who was told that he would never be able to walk and talk, and he came walking up onto the stage. What a memorable experience.
Best I can tell, it was Tyo, the father of someone who loved biochemistry, someone affected by and helped by the diet, he went and lobbied and taught these doctors all around Indonesia. Which is an inspiration. If you want to teach your doctor, you can, or other people. Yes, what a great meeting.
Dr. Georgia Ede: It was. Our time zone was upside down. We were so jet-lagged and so exhausted, and yet so invigorated by the people. Tyo had gathered policymakers and people from the government, people from public health, and people from the medical community. It was a high-impact conference, where you had representatives from all these different sectors that could influence the way things are done. It was, like I said, a highlight of my professional life.
Dr. Eric Westman: I’m hopeful it helped a seed to grow, or a seedling to grow, and helped folks in that part of the world.
I’m a member of that Facebook group, Ketofastosis Indonesia, it’s all mainly Indonesian, but from time to time, I can see what’s going on there. What a wonderful time to go there and to be with you as well. I think back fondly on that trip.
Dr. Georgia Ede: Me too.
Dr. Eric Westman: Thank you for your time today.
Thanks for your effort in the psychiatric space, although it’s just another internal organ. Spoken as an internist. Your book has been wonderful, it has helped so many people.
Dr. Georgia Ede: Thank you very much for everything you’ve done to support metabolic psychiatry, for helping get the movement started with that very first case report, and for helping with that research paper. I’m immensely grateful.
You can listen to the full video here.
