Most Replayed Moment: This Diet Could Fix Your Mental Health! - Dr Georgia Ede

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Steven Bartlett** (0:33)
This keto diet, you did a study on the ketogenic diet. Got the study here. The ketogenic diet for refractory mental illness, a retrospective analysis of 31 inpatients. What is the ketogenic diet for someone that might not know?

**Georgia Ede** (0:50)
So a lot of people think or they've heard about a ketogenic diet as a weight loss diet. They think of it maybe it's a fad weight loss diet. They think of it as a very, very low carbohydrate diet. They might think of it as a diet that's very high in meat and dairy products. But actually, the ketogenic diet was originally created in 1921, more than 100 years ago, to stabilize brain chemistry in children with severe seizures, and this was long before the availability of useful seizure medications. So these were children who were having multiple seizures per day in many cases. And so the ketogenic diet was designed back then, created back then, a very strict version of the ketogenic diet, to get as close as possible to fasting without starving children to death. Because for millennia, people had noticed that those with epilepsy would often improve if they were fasting. But you can't fast forever. So how do you get close to fasting? This is the original fasting-mimicking diet. How do you get as close to fasting as you can while still providing some nutrition? So that was the original goal of the ketogenic diet. It was very successful for seizures.
More than 50% of children had more than a 50% and adults as well, it's since been shown, more than 50% response rate in children and adults and 10 to 20% completely free of seizures following a ketogenic diet.

**Steven Bartlett** (2:27)
How is it acting on the brain? What's it doing to the brain?

**Georgia Ede** (2:30)
The ketogenic diet does many, many things. It's like a multipurpose tool for brain health. So one thing it does, because we talked about how some of the root causes of mental illnesses, which are only relatively recently a focus of research, are inflammation and oxidative stress and insulin resistance. The ketogenic diet reduces inflammation, it reduces oxidative stress, and it reduces insulin resistance. It also improves the balance of chemicals in the brain. So, a lot of people think of mental illnesses as problems with chemical imbalances in the brain. And these are the chemicals that they're talking about. You might have heard of serotonin or dopamine or norepinephrine. There are others, glutamate, GABA, many different chemicals in the brain are associated with, or in some cases even very much causing mental health symptoms.
But the question is what's causing those chemical imbalances in the first place? And one of the things that's causing those chemical imbalances is that inflammation and oxidative stress. But another thing is that the brain is, if you're feeding it the wrong way, it will not be able to, in many cases, produce energy reliably. And if it can't produce energy reliably, all kinds of things will go wrong. And in quite spectacular fashion, what actually goes wrong is going to depend on who you are. And that's where our individual differences come in. So if you and I eat exactly the same bad diet, depending on what runs in your family and how you've lived your life to this point, you might develop Alzheimer's disease, you might develop bipolar disorder, you might develop type 2 diabetes, you might develop fatty liver disease, I might develop completely different conditions. I might develop cardiovascular disease. I might develop depression. I might develop ADHD. And that's where the individual differences are. But all of these conditions are just metabolic malfunction. Really, at the heart of it, that's what's going on. If cells aren't functioning properly, you will develop a disease, physical and mental diseases, and which ones you get, it's really kind of luck of the draw. But you have tremendous control over what you are at risk for if you understand how to help your cells operate at their personal best.

**Steven Bartlett** (5:03)
Why is it so hard to stay on the ketogenic diet? I've managed to do it for, I was saying to you before we start recording, once a year, around this time of year, I do it for about eight weeks. And it has a really profound impact on a lot of my life. It helps me feel more focused. My body composition radically changes faster than any other diet or thing that I've ever tried faster than just exercise alone. I sleep a little bit better as well, I noticed. But you've been doing it for a long time. You've been doing it for roughly, what, almost ten years?