Alisha Wainwright

Ian discovered by accident that following a ketogenic or keto diet helped with his bipolar symptoms.

This led to him researching the history of keto diets and eventually to a pilot study testing their impact on bipolar disorder when used in combination with other treatments.

I want to know if you could just sort of expand on what is the keto diet and how does ketosis help mental health?

It's like a slice of toast, right?

I also just love whenever I hear of a study being led by someone who has lived experience with the condition that's being researched.

And I think that Ian is such a fantastic example of how you can use your own life experience to offer insight into your clinical research.

I do wonder, what is the risk of...

doing a ketogenic diet and what should people consider if they're considering it at all?

So the keto diet is just one example of a diet being examined for its potential use as an intervention for diagnosed mental health conditions.

To get a sense of the different approaches in nutritional psychiatry, we spoke to Professor Sherry Johnson.

Sherry is a psychologist and chancellor's professor at UC Berkeley.

Like Ian, she's been leading a research project looking at diet's effect on the symptoms of bipolar disorder.

But this project, called Healthy Lifestyles of Bipolar Disorder, is examining a totally different mechanism.

How time-restricted eating could be used, in combination with existing treatments, to help reset the body clock in people with bipolar.

She told us about the idea behind this mechanism and how the study is focused on real-world implementation.

Wow.

Sherry's note about how does this work in real life human beings, I think, is a really tricky question because you can compile a lot of research.

But in what you study, this has to be implemented in your average person experiencing, in this instance, bipolar disorder.

So how do you do that?

How do you how do you take this evidence that you've learned and implement that in a real life human being?