Keto Diet Specialist: What The Keto Diet Is Really Doing To Your Body! Can It Cure 43% Of Mental Illnesses? The Truth About The Keto Diet!

**Georgia Ede** (0:00)
Most people will experience tremendous reductions in anxiety within three days to three weeks of starting a ketogenic diet. In fact, we did a study where patients with bipolar disorder, major depression, or schizophrenia, tried the ketogenic diet, and 43% achieved clinical remission from their chronic mental illness, and 64% of them left on less psychiatric medication, because it improves the balance of chemicals in the brain. But the question is, what's causing those chemical imbalances in the first place? And so let's start there.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:28)
Dr. Georgia Ede is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist who specializes in nutritional science and mental health. She was one of the first psychiatrists to offer nutrition-based approaches as an alternative to psychiatric medications to optimize brain function and enhance performance.

**Georgia Ede** (0:40)
People need to know how powerful nutrition strategies can be for the brain, because if you're feeding it the wrong way, things will go wrong, and that's exactly what happened to me. My health was declining in my early 40s in ways that is true for a lot of my patients. Chronic fatigue and IBS, being really anxious and depressed. And so I did all kinds of tests and they said there's nothing wrong. Of course, there was something wrong. So I instinctively started experimenting with my diet. And the diet that I ended up on was backwards from what we're told is healthy for us. It should theoretically kill me, but it resolved every single one of my symptoms. And so I studied for years, learning things about food that most people don't know, and which foods contain the nutrients the brain needs, or the ingredients that damage the brain, and found three principles of nutrition. They can help you in ways no medicine can, as well as improve mood, memory, concentration, stamina, productivity. So let's unpack them.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:33)
Dr. Georgia Ede, how do you define what it is you do?

**Georgia Ede** (1:39)
I'm a psychiatrist specializing in nutritional and metabolic psychiatry. So how food affects the brain, and how food affects brain metabolism, and how brain metabolism affects our mental health.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:52)
This is a fairly new phrase, metabolic psychiatry. Am I right in thinking that?

**Georgia Ede** (1:57)
Yes, it's a really, it's a very new field and really exciting field. The term itself was coined by Dr. Shabani Sethi, who's a metabolic psychiatrist at Stanford University. And maybe five years ago or so, maybe a little longer than that. So it's a very, very new field. It's even newer than the other exciting new field in psychiatry, which is nutritional psychiatry. And so, and this is a really exciting time to be a psychiatrist.
And it's also a really exciting time or a hopeful time, an empowering time for people with mental health conditions. Because we're finally able to explore root causes, the real root causes, the deeper root causes of mental health conditions that go beyond things like what we're told all the time, which are these mysterious chemical imbalances, you know, that need to be addressed with medication. We now understand that the real drivers, the primary drivers of mental health conditions are inflammation of the brain, something called oxidative stress, which is why we're always told to eat more antioxidants, and insulin resistance or prediabetes, which is now affects more than 90% of Americans.

**Steven Bartlett** (3:09)
In your work, you talk a lot about the ketogenic diet. Why is that so prevalent in your work?

**Georgia Ede** (3:15)
Because the ketogenic diet energizes the brain differently, so it really fundamentally changes the brain's operating system. So when you switch from a high-carbohydrate, high-insulin diet to a low-insulin, which is usually a low-carbohydrate diet, ketogenic diet, the way that cells receive energy, their mixture of fuels that they're using changes, and that has profound influences on just about every pathway, just about every chemical pathway inside of that cell. So it is as though you are fundamentally changing the brain's operating system in very healthy ways that allow brain cells not only to work better, but for brain cells to heal. So the longer you stay on a ketogenic diet, the more healing, the more brain healing can take place.

**Steven Bartlett** (4:12)
And what is your sort of academic and career experience? What's that? Can you run me through that sort of timeline? Yeah.

**Georgia Ede** (4:18)
So I got a degree, an undergraduate degree at Carleton College in Minnesota in biology. So I always have loved science and biology, understanding how things work. And then for years, I worked as a laboratory research assistant, different types of research labs around the world, Boston, Munich, including in diabetes research. Until I figured out what I wanted to do, and I decided that I wanted to go to medical school. So then four years of medical school at the University of Vermont, in Burlington, Vermont, which is a great place to go to medical school. And then four years of psychiatry residency training at a Harvard program called Cambridge Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And then, so it was 25 years ago that I finished my psychiatry residency training, and I've been practicing psychiatry ever since.