A Layman's Explanation of the Ketogenic Diet Intervention for Serious Mental Illness | We're like Hybrid Cars

I'm not a clinician. Even after years of research on the Ketogenic Diet intervention for metabolic health, I still struggle with many of the concepts and vernacular used in the medical profession. I've seen the tremendous benefits of the keto diet first hand and I want to share this information with others. But as I try to explain the 'How it Works' to other medical laymen, I see their eyes glaze over when I mention terms such as mitochondria, metabolic cycle, ATP, glucose and ketones. There's also the challenge of overcoming the stigma of the Ketogenic diet as a fad diet.

We're all familiar with hybrid cars. What distinguished hybrid vehicles from other vehicles is that they have 2 sources of fuel; gasoline or electricity. What happens when a component like a fuel pump malfunctions on a hybrid vehicle? The gasoline flow is restricted to the engine and the engine is starved of the source of fuel that it needs to operate properly. But a hybrid vehicle has another source of fuel, the batteries. If the car switches to the battery as it's source of energy, then a malfunction of the car's fuel pump doesn't matter. The hybrid car still has the ability to operate as it should.

This is a very simplistic analogy, but our body's metabolic process seems very similar to that of a hybrid vehicle. A car needs fuel to run, just like our body. Our body's source of fuel is either glucose or ketones. We eat carbohydrates which creates glucose. We create ketones from fasting or from eating a fatty diet with a low amount of carbs. Both paths lead to the creation energy. There is no shortage of carbohydrates in the Standard American Diet (SAD), a very fitting acronym. While some of us can metabolize glucose to create the energy we need for our bodies to function properly, not everyone can eat a SAD diet and maintain health. What if some of us have a genetic predisposition, that prevents us from effectively using glucose to create the energy that our brain and body need to maintain health? In this analogy, some of us have a faulty fuel pump that keeps our vehicle from running properly on gasoline. By switching to an alternative fuel source, ketones, our bodies may be able to better generate the energy that we need to maintain health. Our brain is a large consumer of the energy that our body creates, even a minor energy interruption can manifest into serious mental health consequences. The Ketogenic Diet is unlike many fad diets and there is evidence that it may be an effective treatment modality for disorders including serious mental illness.

Ground breaking research at Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, and UCLA, to name a few, is being conducted that have shown amazing results. Increasing evidence has shown that a low carb ketogenic diet may be an effective treatment modality for mental health conditions such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, anxiety, and major depression. I encourage you to review the evidence as this is too important to ignore.

Some of the leaders in this field that I follow:

Christopher Palmer , Baszucki Group , Metabolic Mind, Shebani Sethi MD, ABOM , Dominic D'Agostino