Dr. Chris Palmer
Appearances
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And then even to go further, what impact do those neurotransmitters have on other cells? They are largely regulating brain metabolism. And the way we usually think about it is they are regulating brain activity. But if you ask the question, well, what is brain activity? Brain activity is either, it's fueled by metabolism, that a neuron cannot be active unless it has the capacity to
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
I don't disagree. And I've actually talked to some former NIMH directors about this and some other leading people in this field. And... There's no doubt that this topic has been brought up multiple times at the NIH. So there's this interagency coordinating committee on autism among all of the NIH kind of centers and institutes. It's existed for decades. They have...
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
looked into this issue i've talked to some autism advocates who've said like i was hoping that vaccines might be the cause like i was really hoping to see that vaccines are the cause because that would then give us a cause and it would lead us to interventions um to make vaccines safer or whatever um and she said but it's just not there it's just not there and this
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
former NIMH director that I spoke with, it's just not there. Chris, it's not there. We looked. We looked high and low. Again, I'm not sure that everybody looked with the same degree of scrutiny. Again, the study that I saw looked at people who are unvaccinated by choice.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
So these are rebellious people who are defying state laws, who are risking not getting their children into schools because they're not getting vaccinations. That's the cohort of unvaccinated people. And then they're comparing them to the cohort of vaccinated people. And they only controlled for like two or three variables. They did not control for obesity. They didn't control for diabetes.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And we know that obesity and diabetes play a role in risk for autism. And we know that people who have existing health conditions might actually be more likely to be worried about vaccines and then not get vaccines. Perfectly happy, healthy, thriving people usually just go along with the status quo. They usually don't refuse vaccines.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
So people who are refusing vaccines probably had some pre-existing health condition. They didn't control for that. Did that pre-existing health condition increase risk for autism? Probably.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Like probably. I mean, you look at any pre-existing health condition and does it increase risk for other health conditions? Usually the answer is yes. So we know that like women with obesity, much more likely, twice as likely to have an autistic child. Is that right? Yeah. Meta-analysis, over 3 million people. Women with obesity have double the risk of having an autistic child.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Have rates of obesity been skyrocketing in our population? The answer is yes. Are pregnant women also in that camp of obese women? Yes. Well, that accounts for a doubling of autism. Same deal with diabetes. Women who have diabetes... twice as likely to have autistic children as women who don't have diabetes.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
When you put the two together, obese and diabetic, quadruple the rate of autism in the offspring.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
It is. So men with obesity, twice as likely to have an autistic child as men who are not obese.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Yes. And so, you know, a lot of people are hyper-focused on vaccines cause autism and they come back to rates of autism are skyrocketing. There has to be a reason. Well, I agree. Rates of autism are skyrocketing. I agree. There does have to be a reason. Maybe we're missing the elephant in the room. Rates of metabolic poor health are skyrocketing in our population.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Rates of obesity and diabetes are skyrocketing, but rates of poor metabolic health. So metabolic syndrome has five biomarkers, you know, abdominal obesity, blood pressure, um, glucose, high levels of glucose, and then high triglycerides and low HDL cholesterol. Those are the five biomarkers of metabolic syndrome. Only 7% of Americans are healthy in all five biomarkers. Only 7%.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
to increase its ATP kind of production. And then when you suppress a neuron, when you inhibit its function, the ATP production goes down. So whether you want to think of metabolism as just a consequence of neural activity, I actually think about it as an integral part of neural activity. It's kind of like your car can't go without the engine. A cell can't go without mitochondria.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Poor metabolic health influences neurodevelopment and offspring. We know that. So we see skyrocketing rates of autism. It's not just autism. We see skyrocketing rates of ADHD as well, simultaneously. And everybody's scratching their heads trying to figure out where is all this autism coming from? Where is all this ADHD coming from? Well, look around, people.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
As the metabolic health of the United States population declines, we are going to see more neurodevelopmental disorders.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
That is absolutely correct. And I go back to some of our prior conversation. So a 14-year-old girl who, is severely iron deficient, is metabolically unhealthy. Why? Because her mitochondria can't function properly without iron. She can be thin.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
She can otherwise look like a healthy, attractive girl, but she can be metabolically unhealthy because she doesn't have all of the essential vitamins and nutrients that she needs. to have properly functioning mitochondria and metabolism. And why would that matter?
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
It matters because she might develop an anxiety disorder, or she might develop depression, or she might develop symptoms of an eating disorder. And then we're all scratching our heads, giving those labels, oh, you've got depression, you've got anxiety, you need Prozac, and maybe she really needs iron.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
A cell can't do what it's supposed to do without mitochondria. The other concept that you mentioned, neuroplasticity, neuroplasticity is all about energy and metabolic resources to create new connections, new neural connections between axons, dendrites, somas, other aspects of neurons and cells and other types of cells, astrocytes, oligodendrocytes.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
You know, what you're describing is kind of, in my mind, a really important next step. And the great news is that there are several research groups that I know of that are working on exactly that. One is a commercial company. I'm not going to name any names, but one is a commercial company that has a product of a series of biomarkers, blood biomarkers, that they believe are
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
represent ultimately mitochondrial dysfunction, all of the different cellular pathways that can result in mitochondrial dysfunction and or can reflect mitochondrial dysfunction.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And they believe that their test might be able to predict the development of autism, that every child at age one should get this blood biomarker, and it will tell us who's at high risk of developing a neurodevelopmental disorder. The test itself doesn't tell us what's wrong. It just tells us something's wrong.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And then the clinicians need to go to work and try to figure out what is going on, what is causing this metabolic mitochondrial dysregulation so that we could potentially intervene. I've talked with one of the leading mitochondrial researchers really in the world. He's got a set of 20 biomarkers.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
that he believes represent mitochondrial dysfunction broadly and then there's another research group um that is is actually narrowed it down to just five different biomarkers in men and five slightly different there's some overlap but slight differences in women
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And those five biomarkers alone were able to distinguish people with chronic severe suicidal depression from healthy controls with over 90% sensitivity and specificity. Wow. So I think that is one of the directions we need to go is we need to establish tests with all of these groups.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
I want to just state clearly and plainly because one of the common questions I get is what's the blood test I can get for my mitochondrial health? There isn't one. That's the answer. There is not one. There are... lots of different biomarkers that can suggest dysregulation of metabolism and mitochondrial function. And again, these three research groups are all working on it.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
In order to get those five biomarkers for men and women, I think they measured 400 different biomarkers. So we need to make sure that that gets replicated, that prospectively it can identify people. I'm less concerned about kind of the incentivizing and let's give insurance discounts and other things. I actually think the majority of human beings that I know authentically want to be healthy.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And they authentically, they really want to have healthy children. They will do anything to have healthy children. So I don't think we necessarily need to come up with some incentives right now. I think if we develop evidence-based tools that prospective parents can use to assess their own metabolic mitochondrial health and maybe more importantly, assess their prospective children's health,
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And then we pair that with evidence-based strategies to help them improve their metabolic health so that it will improve the outcomes for those children. I mean, that's the holy grail. What I just said probably represents decades of research. The sooner we get started, the better. And some of it's already underway, as I've mentioned. So it's not like we start from ground zero.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
People have been on this trail for a while. But it is going to require a concerted effort. It's going to require massive NIH funding to support that type of research. We have a new administration that is talking about massive disruption in the way things are done. They're talking about massive changes at the NIH.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
I'm really hoping and praying that we're going to see that type of research as opposed to the current model of research, which focuses on, well, here's your diagnosis. schizophrenia or hypertension and what new pills can we develop to treat this condition or how can we understand this condition? Like, I think we have enough evidence
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
to be able to really start with more effective, to be able to really aggressively pursue more effective treatment and prevention strategies.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
But in order to get neuroplasticity, neuroplasticity implies growth and modulation and even pruning, but it involves change. And in order for a living organism to change, that requires this foundational concept of metabolism. Now, on the surface, to a lot of people, that sounds too abstract.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
I'm more than happy to serve as a consultant if asked. And I have had some conversations with a wide range of people. So I'm more than happy to do my part. I think for the immediate future, honestly, I am I'm focused on some of these lines of research through McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School. I'm really aggressively working on setting up a health care
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
system practice to start where we will treat people with these severe chronic mental health conditions that... I started a wait list about a year ago, and I have over 5,300 people on my waiting list. I can't treat 5,300 people. But I have the privilege of a lot of brilliant clinicians are reaching out, wanting to work with me.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
What I'm hoping to do is to put into practice, into real world practice, everything that we've talked about and more with real human beings to demonstrate this really does work. It really does work. And I've been doing this work as a solo clinician for 30 years now.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And I welcome the opportunity to begin to develop protocols and processes and use artificial intelligence to really try to create algorithms. If we can do that, then, yeah, we hold the potential to help millions, if not billions, of people. And... Thank you. Thank you.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And it sounds like, well, that's ridiculous then, if you're saying that metabolism is everything in biology. And I kind of am. Of course it is. You can't talk about biology without talking about metabolism. But when you talk about metabolic health, it becomes much more concrete, pragmatic, and real when with real tools that you talk about all of the time on this podcast.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Thank you. Thank you.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Exercise promotes metabolic health. Exercise promotes neuroplasticity. They are inseparable. You can't improve your metabolic health without also at least opening up the opportunity for neuroplasticity Improving your diet does the same thing. Sleep or lack thereof can impact this. Substance use can impact this. And so, you know, in a way, it basically says, let's connect all of the dots.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Let's not hyper-focus on serotonin and a serotonin imbalance or deficiency as the singular cause of depression. Because for those of you who don't know, that is ridiculously... reductionistic. And it is absolutely not true. We know that. We know that with certainty now.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
You know, the whole serotonin hypothesis of depression came about not because researchers identified serotonin deficits in the brain. That entire concept came from the observation that medications that modulate serotonin activity or inhibit its reuptake into neurons, those medications, SSRIs, other types of antidepressants, those medications can reduce the symptoms of depression in some people.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
That was just a purely serendipitous finding. It was serendipity. The first antidepressant was actually a tuberculosis treatment. They were giving it to patients on a tuberculosis ward. And an astute infectious disease doctor noticed some of these patients are really depressed. But when I give them this tuberculosis treatment, they perk up.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Within a few weeks, they start looking a lot less depressed. And I don't think it's a coincidence. I think it's the medication I'm giving them. Do you recall what the drug was? Abraniazide. It's the first MAO inhibitor. And I could be saying the name wrong, but it's first MAO inhibitor. And that became the first antidepressant.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
So most people know mitochondria as the powerhouse of the cell, if they know it at all. So these tiny little organelles... And the powerhouse of the cell reference means that mitochondria take the breakdown products of the food that we're eating. They are the primary thing using the oxygen that we're breathing in. They are creating the carbon dioxide that we're breathing out.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And that they are turning food into ATP, which is the energy currency of the cell. So they're taking food and oxygen and lots of other things, but let's just simplify food and oxygen, converting it into ATP. And that is what the powerhouse of the cell kind of refers to. There is no doubt they do that.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
There is no doubt that when that process stops, humans have about six minutes or so, and then we're dead. That process is critical to life. There is no other process in the human body that you can disrupt. that will kill the organism faster. It is central to living organisms, this production of ATP.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
So I don't at all mean to take away or minimize that function, but research over the last 25 years has completely upended that simplistic notion of what mitochondria are doing. They are actually doing so much more. Some people have created the reference that mitochondria are like the workers inside a cell.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
that in order for a cell to work, you need a workforce because there's so much that needs to be done. Signals need to be sent. Like all this work, all of these different things need to be functioning. And mitochondria are absolutely providing the energy for those things to happen, but they're also orchestrating a lot of it. So for example,
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
They play a direct role in converting food into some of the substrates for the production of neurotransmitters. But they also go further. They store some neurotransmitters like GABA within themselves, and that plays a role in GABA's release from a neuron. They actually go to the cell membrane and move along the membrane itself. dispensing vesicles of neurotransmitters.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And when you take the mitochondria away from the synapse but provide that synapse with ATP, vesicles don't get released. Neurotransmitters aren't getting released. The mitochondria are doing more. We don't exactly know what, but they're doing more than just providing the energy They play a role in turning inflammation in immune cells both on and off.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
They help start the process, but they also help coordinate the cessation of that process. They play an instrumental role in both the first and the last step in the synthesis of cortisol.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And they play a role in the first step in the synthesis of all of the steroid hormones, which include estrogen, testosterone, progesterone, so that if you have dysregulation of cortisol or if you have dysregulation of testosterone or estrogen or progesterone, you must...
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
understand the role of mitochondria in that dysregulation because they are critical in the production and release of these hormones. They are the primary regulator of epigenetics. So epigenetics are the expression of genes from the cell nucleus. And researchers have long known that that's related to levels of reactive oxygen species. It's related to levels of calcium.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
It's related to other cell signals. Those cell signals are mostly originating within mitochondria. During the development of any cell, mitochondria... They are like a universe unto themselves, and there's so much we don't know about them.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
But what researchers have found is that mitochondria actually line up, literally line up in an organized fashion around the cell nucleus and take on different conformations. And that is somehow sending signals to the genes to result in the expression or the suppression of different genes from the nucleus.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And that when researchers take these mitochondria and like mess them up or something, the cell doesn't develop normally. You know, they've been implicated in all of the phases of the human stress response to psychological stress. So that includes cortisol release, noradrenaline release, It includes inflammation and it includes epigenetic changes.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
So those are kind of the four buckets of the human stress response. Cortisol. adrenaline, inflammation, and epigenetic changes. And researchers actually manipulated mitochondrial genes, two genes in the cell nucleus that control for mitochondrial proteins and two genes in mitochondria themselves. And by manipulating these four different genes, one at a time in mice,
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
they could impact all of the four aspects of the stress response. And so what that means is that mitochondria are somehow involved in regulating the human stress response. And so the way that I think about it is that, and the way that many researchers actually think about it now is is that mitochondria, you know, there are hundreds, sometimes thousands of them in our cells, in each of our cells.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Most neurons have thousands of mitochondria. The mitochondria are actually moving around. They use the cytoskeleton to move around the cell. They fuse with each other. They It's called mitochondrial dynamics. They like change shape. They do all sorts of things. And again, that impacts all of these signaling processes. But that's just within one little cell.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
So you can think of one cell as like almost a village of mitochondria that they're all just doing different things and working together to help that cell function. But in fact, when you think about hormones like cortisol,
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
You can think about it as a way for mitochondria in one cell to produce cortisol, that they can get sent to mitochondria in another cell to make that other cell do something, to either increase its activity or decrease its activity. Some people actually think about human cells as just a network of mitochondria, right?
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
All kind of mitochondria throughout the body and brain are just doing all sorts of things. And at the end of the day, we come back to just common sense. At the end of the day, it's about helping the organism adapt and survive. Ultimately, organisms, rule number one, they need to survive. Rule number two, they need to reproduce. And rule number three, they need to adapt.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And mitochondria are playing a foundational role in all of those basic aspects of organismal survival. And again, to some people, well, that's so high level. That's like what you're saying. It's everything. I'm like, yeah, it kind of is. And mental health falls under it. How could we think about mental health without thinking about the big picture?
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
I could talk for hours on this. So first of all, thank you for – I think you're actually giving me way too much credit though. I don't know about that. I'm talking a lot about it and I think I will accept that maybe I'm able to talk about it in a way that helps people understand it that other scientists haven't been able to. But –
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Like, let's start with the big picture and then let's put health into it. And let's put the lack of adaptation or the lack of survival or the these other things.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
You know, one of the more important reasons I want to say this is because unbeknownst to a lot of people, this field has actually been around for about a century and a half. Researchers in the 1800s, around the turn of the century, well up into the 1960s, were hyper-focused on the role of metabolism in severe mental illness.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
I'm a scientist, one variable at a time.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
So I'm really going to start with the basics, and they're going to sound cliche, and they're going to sound too basic to most people. And I just want to set the stage for even for severe mental illness, we can talk about strategies that will work. And these strategies that I'm going to describe are not really appropriate.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Like when somebody becomes severely ill, these strategies may not be sufficient. But the basics are what we call the field of lifestyle medicine. So there are six pillars of lifestyle medicine. They include diet, nutrition, exercise or movement, sleep, managing substance use, ideally reducing it or minimizing it or eliminating it, stress reduction practices, mindfulness, meditation, yoga.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And the last one is relationships. I throw in the word purpose into relationships because I think even if you don't have a lot of friends or family, you can still have a very full, thriving life if you have a purpose. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, they were actually measuring levels of lactate and glucose and other kind of metabolic biomarkers in people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, these metabolic disruptions is potentially the cause of mental illness. And then our field lost its way. We became focused on neurotransmitters and assumed that they were the primary cause of mental illness.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
while other fields were focused on psychological and social factors. You know, we got cognitive behavioral therapy. We still had psychodynamic psychotherapy. But people were doing research on adverse childhood experiences. That was really taking off, documenting that that's related. And so, you know, the field kind of splintered into these biological, psychological, social camps.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And people really hyper-focused in all of these ways. To me, this field of integrating metabolism with mental health, with physical health, is about unifying that whole story. It's about unifying and building on what these researchers 100 years ago were pursuing. It's about integrating the biological, psychological, and social camps.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
of hyper stimulating their metabolic rate and then trying to suppress that hyper stimulation with sedatives so that they can sleep or calm down and then they're just but they're destroying their metabolic health and does that really play out like and is that you know some will say well chris that's just one of myriad things that they're doing to their cells sure
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
But does it play out in diseases that we think of as metabolic diseases? Absolutely. Type 2 diabetes, yes. Cardiovascular disease, 100%. Premature mortality, yeah. It's kind of like the elephant in the room that we have just failed to look at because we've been so splintered. No, it's biological. No, it's psychological. No, it's social. It's like, it's all of them.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Let's look at the elephant that comprises all of them.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
There are other things, but I actually do think that's a... It's not just the number and density of mitochondria, but it's the health of mitochondria. Because unfortunately... You know, our cells have a process for getting rid of defective mitochondria. It's part of autophagy.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
There's a sub kind of category called mitophagy in which defective mitochondria should be shuttled to lysosomes or shuttled out of cells. Recent paper actually found that microglia in the brain, again, send out these nanotunnels to astrocytes and collect defective mitochondria from the neuron and then take care of the disposal process for that neuron. We are so cool.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
It's about putting it all together and stop being so reductionistic and simplistic to suggest that it's all biological or it's all psychological or it's all social and that if it's one, it can't be the other. It can be all of them. And it's different combinations for different people.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And that when you inhibit that, it appears to increase and accelerate neurodegeneration. And when you enhance that, it appears to improve or reduce neurodegeneration. But I think it is. I think children have more energy because they have healthier metabolism, healthier mitochondrial function. And when we look at, again, is there evidence for that? There's overwhelming evidence for that.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
There are thousands of peer-reviewed, published articles in leading journals, Nature, Cell, all sorts of journals over the last several decades. Just to, again, try to bring this back to just common sense. So we have these things called diseases of aging. What are the diseases of aging? The diseases of aging are obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disorders.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Those are universally thought of as diseases of aging. Interestingly, what often gets left off of that category are the mental disorders. especially today, a lot of people think of mental disorders as primarily a youth problem. But in fact, mental disorders, depression, anxiety, psychosis, are actually diseases of aging. So the Center for Disease Control has put out kind of charts of any age group
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
What is the probability if you are a youth in America today that you will be prescribed an antidepressant, an SSRI antidepressant? If you're between 20 and 40, what's the probability? Among the remaining people who are still 20 to 40, among all the people that age, as people get older— the risk for antidepressant prescription goes up.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
The highest category of people prescribed antidepressants are 65 and older.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Most people do, and that's why I'm saying this, because it's shocking to most people. It was actually surprising to me, but I was thinking, wait, if my theory is correct, then mental disorder should be a disease of aging. And in fact, they are. Antipsychotic prescriptions, what age group is the most likely to be prescribed an antipsychotic? Over age 80. Really? Oh, it goes through the roof.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
So in many ways, I'm just standing on the shoulders of giants who have done groundbreaking work to create the science that allows us to put this all together. With that said, I do firmly believe that we are on the cusp of a revolutionary change in the paradigm of the mental health field, of how we think about mental illness. You know, there are myriad biological things.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Because dementia is associated with 40 to 50 percent of the people with dementia will have psychotic symptoms, hallucinations and delusions. they'll have agitation. The benzodiazepines, the prescription rate goes up. Now, with benzos, there is a dip starting at age 65. And that is really because physicians are explicitly told do not prescribe benzos to people over 65.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
So the rate starts going down. But with antidepressants, It's almost linear. The older you are, the more likely you are to be receiving a prescription for an antidepressant. Antipsychotics, there are some waves and shifts. Women, for example, around the time of menopause, get a peak. So you get a peak around the age of 20, which is new onset schizophrenia. And then it kind of comes down a little.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And then women, around the time of menopause, higher peak. And then it kind of comes down a little. And then late in life, it goes through the roof. Goes through the roof. Again, because of what we call dementia. So the diseases of aging, anyway, are all of the metabolic disorders and, oh, by the way, the mental disorders. And in my mind, we need to tie that together.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
That is not a serotonin problem. We need to tie that science together. And the only way to tie that science together is to look at the bigger picture that we call metabolism. And ultimately, you have to look at mitochondria and mitochondrial biology to understand it.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
I'll throw in a plug before I go deep into the ketogenic diet story. But you also threw a question in there about other dietary interventions or how can diet impact. There is no question diet plays a profound, profound and central role to human metabolism and all of the consequences of human metabolism. And you very eloquently laid out the case for early life.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
A woman who's breastfeeding her infant, that breast milk has a profound impact on whether that baby's brain develops normally or not. That has dire consequences potentially for the outcome and the health of that child. And it's all about nutrition. We've known that for decades, that if women are malnourished during pregnancy, it impacts that infant's, the fetus's lifespan, really.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
It increases risk for mental disorders and metabolic disorders. Increases risk if your mother is starving. while she's pregnant or has to fast or has to go without nutrients, it increases that child's risk for metabolic disorders, obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease. We've known that. And that is, you know, there are lots of theories about obesity around that. It also...
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
The psychological and social things are all obvious and true. Yes, stress, trauma, loneliness, adverse childhood experiences, all of those things come together. Our field has long known that all of those things play a role in mental illness. Exactly which mental illnesses, it's essentially all of them.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Surprisingly, increases risk for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and antisocial personality disorder and all sorts of other mental disorders. In terms of other dietary patterns, I just want to, and we can do a deep dive into any of these if you want, and then I'll go on to ketogenic diets, but ultra processed foods. really bad for your physical health and your mental health.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
We have just growing body of evidence for that.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Are these additives really that bad? So to try to answer your question, are the chemicals and additives harmful? The real answer is we don't actually have adequate scientific evidence one way or another. And why don't we have adequate scientific evidence? Because we're not spending money to research it. So right now, the rules...
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
to this day, are that, you know, there's this concept called GRAS, general regard as safe, that food companies can develop new molecules that will preserve a food, make a food hyperpalatable, make it tastier, make it more shelf-stable, whatever, whatever they want to claim it does, that they can develop molecules
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
They can put these molecules into our food and they can get away with just saying, well, this is just generally regarded as safe without any adequate safety testing whatsoever. And the FDA allows that. Now, the new administration, RFK Jr., just recently said he's going to try to change that rule, and I welcome that change. I think that will be a phenomenal change.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Every one of the labels in DSM-5 can be impacted by biological, psychological, and social factors. So trauma and childhood... increases risk for post-traumatic stress disorder. Duh, everybody knows that. Trauma in childhood also increases risk for neurodevelopmental disorders if it occurs early enough.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
So the reality is that testing hasn't been done on all of these molecules. There are tens of thousands of molecules, like new chemicals, new additives, things that sometimes aren't even on the label that are added to food And we really don't know for sure for each and every one of them whether this one is safe or not safe.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
What we do know overall, and this unfortunately comes down to epidemiological studies where they just look at hundreds of thousands if not millions of people and they assess like how much ultra-processed food Is this person eating? And is that associated?
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
If we look at large populations of people and we stratify them by these people are eating mostly ultra-processed foods and these people are hardly eating any. Are there differences in their health outcomes? And the answer to that is unequivocal. And it is perfectly clear. The more ultra-processed foods you eat, the worse your physical and mental health. Both. It's cardiovascular disease.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
It's obesity. It's diabetes. It's mortality. It's cancer. It's also a broad range of mental disorders. And so we know that we've got more granular data that's hyper focuses on the mental health story. You know, one study over 300,000 people, the more ultra processed foods you eat, a direct linear relationship. It was shocking how linear it was.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
The more ultra processed foods you eat, the worse your mental health. And it was so striking. It was not a subtle difference. It wasn't like, you know, oh, it was a 3% difference between the lowest. It was a threefold difference. The people who consumed ultra-processed foods every day multiple times a day
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
58% of them had poor mental health compared to only 18% of the people who rarely or never consumed ultra-processed foods.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
It increases risk for substance use disorders, personality disorders, psychotic disorders, mood disorders, anxiety disorders, dementia later in life, and everything else, every label. What else do adverse childhood experiences increase risk for? All of the metabolic disorders, obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disorders, premature mortality.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Yeah, I'm not going to give a cliche answer because this is the trillion dollar question that everybody's asking. And And it really, you know, the health of our country really kind of depends on it. With billions of dollars that this industry has in revenue annually,
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
They can spend a lot of that money on really impactful marketing campaigns, getting people to believe that it's not as unhealthy as Chris Palmer and Andrew Huberman are saying. It's fine. Everybody deserves a treat. Within the last couple of weeks, the American Heart Association announced
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
was actively lobbying against a Texas bill that was trying to restrict spending food stamp money on junk food.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And he went on record as saying this junk food, this ultra-processed food is not the root cause of obesity or diabetes or any of these health conditions, which is an absolute abject lie. And when you have supposedly respected organizations being bought by industry, promoting misinformation, It's really hard. You know, everybody's all upset that, like, oh, people don't trust the science.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
They're not respecting the respected organizations. Well, the respected organizations need to step up and start behaving in a respectable manner. They need to stop. The American Heart Association should not be taking a dime from any industry that plays a role in heart disease. Like, it would be like...
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
It would be like the American Heart Association taking money from tobacco companies and then coming out and say, smoking doesn't really cause heart disease, people. Everybody calm down. There's still a lot that we don't know. We need more research. We need more research. Smoking doesn't cause heart disease, people. This is just scaremongering. This is just paranoid conspiracy theories.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
That is exactly what's happening now. They're taking money from food companies that have no vested interest in the health of the population that they are feeding. They know perfectly well that these foods are highly palatable. And what does that mean? It means addictive. And again, if I was selling food, I would want people to be addicted to the food I was selling. Why? Because you sell more.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
You know, we have statistics that just sticking with that theme, adverse childhood experiences. If you have six or more adverse childhood experiences compared to somebody who has no adverse childhood experiences, now that's a rare group, granted. But for the people who have six or more, on average, they live 20 years longer.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Higher margins. If you sell food that people aren't addicted to, they'll just move on to the other food that is addictive and then you'll be out of business. So it's not an easy problem to solve. I don't mean to imply it's easy because if one or two companies steps up and does the right thing, they'll just go out of business.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
I'm hopeful. I mean, my understanding, by no means am I an expert, but my understanding of what really drove the reduction in tobacco use.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
was the taxes and the ban on advertising the ban on television advertisements interesting that that when you get rid of the advertisements you're no longer tempting people with it um you're no longer able to spread misinformation um and when you make the product so expensive
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
People just – even if they want to try it, even if they're already addicted to it, now they are highly motivated to get off of it. Why? Because it's costing them an arm and a leg. Yeah, money hurts. And they realize that I just don't want this. We could do similar things with ultra-processed foods. If rebellion, education, whatever, I don't care what works. All of the above.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
But we're all of the above. We're really fighting an uphill battle. So ultra processed foods, that's just one story. Vitamin, nutrient deficiencies. Do you want to go to ketogenic diet? You asked me about that and I got sidetracked.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
shorter, they lose 20 years of life because of those adverse childhood experiences. And so is that a mental health issue? I would say it's a physical health issue. It's both. It's both a mental health issue and a physical health issue. And so how can we understand that? How can we understand that trauma in childhood increases risk for heart disease and obesity and diabetes and dementia?
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
The quick summary story for people who don't know ketogenic. So ketogenic diet is a 100-year-old evidence-based treatment for epilepsy. It can stop seizures even when medications fail to. We have... over a dozen controlled trials of ketogenic diets in children, in particular with treatment-resistant epilepsy. We have two Cochrane reviews that came out positive.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
So Cochrane reviews are the gold standard in the medical field for meta-analyses, very rigorous, and they analyzed the data that exists and came to the conclusion that ketogenic diet, if somebody has treatment-resistant epilepsy,
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Compared to treatment as usual, which is try another anti-epileptic medication, the ketogenic diet is six times more likely to result in seizure freedom than just trying yet another epilepsy pill. So the ketogenic diet is a powerful anticonvulsant treatment. We use anticonvulsant treatments in psychiatry every day in tens of millions of people. Lots of these medications are used.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
So at this point, we now have... Over 50 published pilot trials, case series, case reports, other lines of evidence of the ketogenic diet for psychiatric disorders, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety. anorexia nervosa, surprisingly. These 50 reports represent over 1,900 people.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And on balance, the ketogenic diet appears to be an effective treatment, sometimes an extraordinarily effective treatment, like able to induce remission of schizophrenia or bipolar. in people who otherwise had treatment-resistant disorders. And they're going off medication simultaneously? Some of them are.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
So there are, you know, I have heard probably from thousands of people around the world since my work has become more public. And actually, our first podcast together, hands down, the most cited reason people know who I am As they should. Well, I know about you, but it's Huberman, that Huberman Lab podcast.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And because at the end of the day, I'm hearing from thousands of people who simply listened to that podcast, made changes, started a ketogenic diet for their schizophrenia or other treatment resistant mental disorder. Reach out to me. You saved my life. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten handwritten notes, emails, messages from people who use those words. You saved my life.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
I never met this person. All I did was share this knowledge. And then they saved their own lives with knowledge. Coming back to your question now in a roundabout way, does ketogenic diet impact mitochondrial health? We have strong evidence that it does. So the ketogenic diet is mimicking the fasting state. And I just want to say that again. The ketogenic diet mimics the fasting state.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
What does that mean? It means the ketogenic diet is mimicking no food consumption. So is the ketogenic diet the healthiest diet that everybody should follow? No, that's not the way I think about it. The ketogenic diet is an intervention. It is shifting metabolism. It is shifting countless kind of systems, signaling pathways, other things, gene expression.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
in the human body and brain, and that results in effects. And the good news is these effects appear to be life-changing and life-saving sometimes. So they're highly beneficial effects. Again, dose and the way you do it matter because fasting, the extreme version of fasting is starvation, and that results in death. So that is not at all a good thing. Not feasible.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
So let's make sure that if you're going to do a ketogenic diet or a fasting regimen that you're not— depriving yourself of essential nutrition, that you're getting enough calories, you're getting enough nutrients, that you're doing it in a medically sound way so that you're optimizing your health and not hurting your health.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
and PTSD and ADHD and substance use disorders and the only way to connect it is through metabolism and ultimately through mitochondria. Unfortunately, people like simple answers, and they're like, so diet will fix everything. I'm like, no, I never said diet will fix everything. But it can help. It can help, and it can be life-changing and life-saving.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
But we have, you know, it's hard to measure this in humans in vitro because we can't, like, do an intervention to a human and then dissect their brain and, like, biopsy it and look at the mitochondria under the microscope. So we mostly have animal data that supports this. But animal data strongly supports that ketogenic interventions improve mitophagy.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
So getting rid of these old and defective mitochondria. So you're kind of cleaning house. You're getting rid of the bad, and then you're replacing them with new fresh ones, mitochondrial biogenesis, so that at the end of the day, the cell will have more healthy mitochondria. Now, some researchers have really hyper-focused on the ketogenic diet might be working through the gut microbiome.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
this gut-brain connection. And we have some evidence that that is true. So researchers actually took feces from human children with epilepsy before starting a ketogenic diet and then afterward while they were stable on a ketogenic diet. And then they transferred these fecal samples to mice who were predisposed to epilepsy or predisposed to seizures.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
When they took the feces from the children while the children still had or seizing, the mice were more likely to seize Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
I don't want to minimize or step back from my work with dietary interventions. There is no doubt in my mind it can dramatically change people's lives. But it's not just diet. It's lots of other things. And so it's putting it together and trying to make sense of the science for what does cardiovascular disease have to do with depression or PTSD.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
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Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And as though it doesn't matter what they're eating. And some people are binging on ultra-processed foods and others are eating like an adult. And then you've got everything in between as though that doesn't play a role. And so you get these studies that say it doesn't do anything useful.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
On the surface, a lot of people scratch their heads and they really don't know. They assume that, well, one's a brain disorder and one's a heart disorder. And it's like, no. We need to integrate that because all of the risk factors, essentially the same biopsychosocial risk factors that increase risk for heart disease also increase risk for brain disease. And we need to start putting it together.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
We need to be more sophisticated. We have computers. We have AI. It's 2025. We can do better. Yes.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
You get other studies that say maybe it does something useful. So I think... I mean, at the end of the day, I will say this. You know, I've been talking a while with a really seasoned, established expert in the nutritional space, in the conservative nutritional space. He's held several government positions. He's helped presidents and presidents. others with campaigns.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And he has made a very strong case to me that, you know, less than 5% of the research budget from the NIH is spent on nutritional research. The NIH has an office of called the Office of Nutritional Research, focused on organizing collaborations among different NIH institutes and centers. And their annual budget for a major government organization, their annual budget is $1.3
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
million with an M dollars, which is a joke. It is a laughable joke. Can't do much with that. And without trying to make this political, there have been people who've tried to increase the funding for nutrition research. Recently was proposed to increase that funding to $130 million. And it was cut. That idea was killed by the lobbyists. of the food companies.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
We know what we need to do, but yeah, we have not had the political will to do it. I think the hope is that one, hopefully of many good things that could come out of Maha is separating industry interests from the health and welfare of the American population.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
I think if we can do that and we can begin doing unbiased research to really determine what is it about ultra-processed foods that results in harm. We know they result in harm. Is it just that they're so delicious that people consume extra calories and it's still just as simple as calories? Or is it that there's something in those chemicals that makes the foods addictive?
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Or is it that there's something in those chemicals that actually impairs mitochondrial function? I think we have evidence to support all three of those hypotheses. Do people consume extra calories? Yes. You cited one of now many studies documenting that. Are they addictive? Yes, unequivocally they are.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
I mean, the most common eating disorder diagnosed today in the United States is called binge eating disorder. What are the criteria for binge eating disorder? basically addiction to ultra-processed foods is really, if you look at the criteria and if you look at the behaviors, when people engage in binges, they're not binging on steak and broccoli. Ever.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Like never, never are they binging on steak and broccoli. They're binging almost exclusively on ultra-processed foods. And then they go through these cycles where they binge on them and then they beat themselves up and they feel disgusting and they're ashamed and they're humiliated and... And then they try their best. They white knuckle it to avoid those foods.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And then something bad happens in their life. They get stressed. Somebody cuts them off in traffic. They've had a hard day at work. Their boss came down on them, whatever. And and then they go home and they're like, you know, screw it. I hate my life. I hate myself. I don't. Health doesn't even matter for me. I'm worthless. Classic addiction cycle. And I may as well just enjoy myself.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And just like an alcoholic would, just like a cocaine addict would. It's not that people are using every single day. You know, they go through cycles. And it's really tragic. Harvard Medical School just literally two days ago came out with an article, Is Sugar Addictive? And their conclusion, no, no, because sugar is found in fruit, so it can't be addictive. I'm like, really? Not the same sugar.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
They went out of their way to say, well, you know, it's not addictive like alcohol and nicotine because people sometimes have trouble stopping those completely. And I'm thinking, and what do you think is different about sugar? Do you really don't understand that some people can't stop consuming ultra-processed, high-sugar foods? You really don't understand that?
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Like, are you living in an ivory tower?
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And if you won't, then- I very much appreciate it. Well, it's true. Thank you very much.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
So creatine is... a molecule that is foundational to energy transformation in cells. So creatine goes into the mitochondria and there it gets combined with ATP to become phosphocreatine. And then it leaves the mitochondrion and goes to places in the cell where energy is needed, like a synapse or a ribosome that's trying to make some new proteins or something else.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
It goes to places in the cell where energy is needed, and it can combine with ADP to be converted back into ATP. So it's basically a phosphate shuttle. Creatine is a phosphate shuttle that is foundational to energy metabolism. It is foundational to mitochondrial function. Our bodies can produce creatine on its own as long as we have the essential vitamins and nutrients that make it up.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And there are several of those. Or we can consume creatine. Creatine is found only in animal-based products, animal-sourced foods. It is not found in plant-sourced foods. So what we know is that from... Because creatine is found in large quantities in the brain, so we can actually measure it using mass spec kind of scans. And we know that... There's a range.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Some people have low levels of creatine and some people have higher levels of creatine. People who consume less animal sourced foods like vegans and vegetarians on average tend to have lower levels of creatine in their brain and muscles and other tissues. People with neuropsychiatric disorders
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
schizophrenia, Alzheimer's disease, depression, have been found to have lower levels of creatine than people who do not have those disorders. So we have reason to believe that creatine from studies like that, that there is an association, meaning a correlation between low levels of creatine and brain disorders that we call neurological or psychiatric disorders.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
So the next question, logical question from a scientist should be, Well, if we supplement with creatine, can that improve symptoms of neuropsychiatric disorders? And we do have evidence to support that. Not huge, randomized, controlled trials in tens of thousands of people, because, again, that would require government funding, because creatine is off-patent.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Nobody's going to make a lot of money from doing a creatine study because... Anybody can sell creatine. Anybody can make it and market it. It's off patent. But we do have randomized controlled trial data with creatine showing that it can improve symptoms of major depression. It can augment antidepressants. It can improve symptoms of bipolar disorder.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
It can improve symptoms of neurodegenerative disorders like cognition and Alzheimer's disease or mild cognitive impairment. But again, the studies are on the smaller side. They're not super robust quality. But unless the government steps up, unless the NIH steps up and funds a large, well-done, well-controlled study
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
randomized controlled trial of creatine versus placebo for any of these conditions the skeptics and the hardcore scientists are always going to say well we don't have good quality data well we're never going to have good quality data because there's no product that's where we're at as a field do you recommend it to your patients Not right away.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
You know, there's more research coming out and there's more reason to believe that maybe I should be recommending it to patients more often than I currently do. It certainly lines up with a metabolic response. kind of mitochondrial, improve metabolic health, improve brain health simultaneously. It lines up perfectly with that.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And I just want to remind people, before you focus on what to take, focus on what you should be doing with your lifestyle. What is your diet and nutrition? Are you getting adequate sleep? Are you getting some bright light in the morning? Do you have relationships and purpose in life? Are you overusing harmful substances?
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Because I want to be the first to say, if you're not doing those things, creatine doesn't stand a chance in hell of helping your health. It just does not stand a chance to improve your health. There is no supplement that you can take that will undo the damage that a harmful lifestyle will have on you and your health. And the reality is the statistics are abysmal.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
I mean, one-third of American adults are not getting adequate sleep. Sixty percent of the foods that Americans are consuming are ultra-processed foods.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
know the real money is not in the question what should i take the real money is in what should i do how can i change my life and my lifestyle to improve my health and um so i just yeah i just want to drill that home for people for better or worse i first learned about methylene blue from owning fish tanks you clean fish tanks with them or it's a thing you use um
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
I don't take it either, and I've not used it in any patients so far, but I'm very interested in possibly starting to use it in controlled ways in patients who clearly need something more. We're doing all of the right things. We're doing the lifestyle things. We're doing ketogenic interventions or other things, and they still are not well. There's still room for improvement.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
So methylene blue, as you said, has been around for a long time. It's relatively cheap as a fish tank cleaner. Methylene blue, fascinatingly, is primarily exclusively a mitochondrial agent. So it is an electron acceptor and donor, right? So that is what methylene blue does. It can accept electrons and it can donate electrons. So it's an electron shuttle, if you will.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And how does that relate to mitochondria? Mitochondria, as they are producing ATP, electrons are flowing down the electron transport chain. And that is what results in the production of ATP. If it gets shuttled through the uncoupling protein, it results in heat production.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And when electrons flow out of that system, when they leak out of that system, it creates reactive oxygen species, which again are very harmful to both mitochondria and cells. So if you have dysfunctional mitochondria, that don't seem to be able to contain the electrons appropriately. Electrons are leaking out.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
We've got decades of evidence that aging, neurodegeneration, even obesity, type 2 diabetes, and a wide range of neuropsychiatric disorders are associated with that process. The increased levels of reactive oxygen species, often referred to as oxidative stress. So we got decades of evidence strongly supporting that. Can methylene blue play a role in that?
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Absolutely, because methylene blue can come in and take some of these wayward electrons and prevent them from creating reactive oxygen species, which might help calm things down. One of the challenges with methylene blue, as we discussed before, you can have too little and too much. Same with methylene blue. You can have too little and too much. You don't want to accept too many electrons.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
These electrons need to be flowing to the places they should be flowing. As opposed to oxidative stress, the polar opposite of that is called reductive stress. And that, too, has been found in people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and some other disorders. So it's really about dysregulated kind of balance between oxidative and reductive stress.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And methylene blue, if you take it in overdose, could become a reductive stressor. So you don't want too much. So we do have pilot trials. Again, small, not super well done pilot trials in a wide range of neuropsychiatric disorders. Depression, bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's disease, others. Many of them suggesting a benefit.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Well, and that's actually one of the warnings with methylene blue is that if taken to have a dose, you can actually get serotonin syndrome. Could you explain what serotonin syndrome is? So serotonin syndrome is just like really excessive deluge of serotonin in the system. More often than not, it's completely unrecognized. Really?
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
It gets mistaken for psychiatric symptoms. So people can have anxiety. They can have panic. In extreme cases, you can get nausea. You can get fevers. You can get, I mean, in extreme cases, it can be fatal. So it's a serious thing. But more often than not, it gets dismissed because serotonin syndrome is most commonly experienced by people taking SSRIs.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And by definition, they are psychiatric patients or they have a mental health condition. And so when they come in and say, I'm feeling nauseous, I feel anxious, I feel jittery, I don't feel right, they get written off more often than not. Or given more medication. Yeah, let's say increase your dose or whatever. So it's actually really tragic. I mean, one woman actually reached out to me who
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
To both her and her psychiatrist. So the meds were causing the problem. And the meds were causing the problem and nobody really recognized it. Goodness gracious. Again, so it's... So anyway, methylene blue can cause serotonin syndrome. So I think if people are going to... If people want to consider using it, I would... Number one, make sure you get a very reputable source of it.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Make sure you're consuming it in a way that makes sense. I mean, it can stain your teeth blue and all sorts of stuff. I heard it makes your urine blue, your tongue blue. But people will do IV infusions of methylene blue. Whoa. So, yeah, I've seen people kind of hooked up to IVs with a bag of methylene blue. Do they turn blue? I hope not. Smurfily. But it is a medically approved treatment. Mm-hmm.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And I think it can be done in safe ways. Again, it's off patent. Nobody's going to stand to make any money off of doing large, well-designed trials of methylene blue. But I'm really interested in it as it has these properties.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
In addition to just being this electron acceptor and donor, there's some evidence that it may improve mitochondrial biogenesis, that it has anti-inflammatory effects, and that it can do other things that may be beneficial.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
There's a company, Timeline, that puts out this product. And to their credit, they have actually done some pretty – well-designed, robust, randomized, controlled trials of urolithin A, they've primarily focused on muscle health and aging. And so they actually have reasonably good data published in reasonably good journals.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
documenting that urolithin A, when given to elderly people, people over 55, 65, that it can improve muscle mass and performance within, I think, like eight weeks. And that that has... overarching metabolic benefits in terms of biomarkers that have been associated with slowing of the aging process.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
So urolithin A, I think, is definitely a supplement among all of the supplements that should be considered if people are looking for something to take. I'm going to repeat myself. Before you take urolithin A, I've said this to the chief scientific officer of the company when I was talking with him about this, and I said... but you know that diet and exercise are much more.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
He said, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Harder to sell. People have to do the diet and exercise and everything else, but then this could give them an advantage. And I don't deny that at all. I think it may very well give people an advantage. And again, the way that I think about it, it's not that diet and exercise are going to cure everybody because they won't cure everybody.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Some people are really ill. And the way that I think about that is that their mitochondria, their metabolic processes are really disrupted. They are severely dysregulated. And that a quote-unquote healthy diet and good exercise and good sleep and good relationships are a phenomenal prevention strategy.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
For some people, they can be a phenomenal treatment strategy, but I think on average that applies to people with mild to moderate mental health or metabolic health conditions. Once people get into the severe category, severe heart failure, severe...
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
mental health condition like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, crippling depression, my sense is just a clean diet and good sleep and good exercise is not going to be sufficient. And then we do need to start thinking about Can we use this supplement or this methylene blue infusion or even neurostimulation, which can stimulate mitochondria and stimulate neuroplasticity?
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
It is non-invasive. And so can we use those types of strategies to try to improve someone's mental health? And we've got plenty of evidence that... especially with TMS, that it can be very helpful for some people, but again, is not a panacea. None of these things are a panacea. And although I just said that, none of these things are a panacea.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
One of the biggest criticisms I get is, Dr. Palmer, you have not given me the recipe to cure my crippling X disorder. And it's like, well, I'm trying to teach you the strategies and the science so that you can put together your own treatment plan. I am not here to sell any one thing as this is the panacea to cure all mental illness. The ketogenic diet can be life-changing, life-saving.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
It can be nothing short of miraculous for some people, but it is not a panacea. I've seen people do ketogenic diets and not get cured, not get remission. And so I'm always looking for what else, what else can we do? How else can we use this model to further enhance mitochondrial function, metabolic health,
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And I think the reason I'm getting traction is because when you come back to it, we just keep coming back to these pillars of common sense. For the most part, yeah. Like diet might actually make a difference to your brain health.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Thank you, Dr. Huberman.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Before I get into the complex part of the story, let me just start with basics. So, and this relates to nutrition, that a lot of these basic vitamins and minerals are like vitamin B12, folate, and iron. I'll just stop there. B12, folate, and iron, these are all essential to mitochondrial function.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
They play a role in numerous enzymes and other cellular reactions outside of mitochondria, but they are all central to mitochondrial function. And so if you are deficient in these vitamins, your mitochondrial will not function properly. So it's at least – it doesn't prove the mitochondrial theory of neuropsychiatric disorders, but it's consistent with the mitochondrial theory.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And the reality is a lot of Americans are – You know, a lot of different populations within America and then certainly in other countries can be highly deficient in some of these. So iron, you know, there's a study in JAMA just last year, 40% of females age 12 to 21 in the United States are iron deficient. Wow.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
It really depends on the definition of iron deficient, but their overarching conclusion, based on what they thought was a reasonable definition... that the journal JAMA went ahead and published was 40% of young, of girls and young women, 12, so this is menstruation, obviously. It's menstruation. They are losing blood.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
They are losing blood and they are not consuming enough iron or there's something wrong with the way they're processing iron. So let me just stick with that. And what does that have to do with neuropsychiatric disorders? Well, Boys and girls pre-puberty have the same rates of mental illness.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
If anything, boys are maybe a little more because they're more likely to have autism and they're more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. But for the most part, we'll say like depression and anxiety, exact same rates. Puberty hits and girls just skyrocket. The rates of mental illness skyrocket in girls. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Or you say they have an autoimmune disorder like lupus and psychosis. And why is that so important? Because there's a treatment for these other things other than just antipsychotic medicines.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And what I really hope and implore our field will do is we will come into the 21st century and begin to recognize that there is a cause
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
of schizophrenia, there is a cause of bipolar symptoms, there is a cause for chronic depression, and that we will begin to look for those causes and we will begin to treat those causes, as opposed to just putting people on antipsychotics or antidepressants or mood stabilizers and telling them, well, we're really sorry. We know these medicines don't cure your illness.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
We know these are not disease-modifying treatments.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
It is a contentious... Maybe it's a different episode. No, no, no. I'm definitely going to answer it, but I'm going to give a long-winded answer if that's okay, because I want to give credible information. That's the only information we're interested in.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And I don't want to come down on one side that vaccines are 100% safe, there's no question about it, or yes, vaccines cause autism, and that's why we've got skyrocketing rates of autism, because I don't think either of those extreme positions is true. So I want to first back up and just ask a slightly different question.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Is there any evidence that high levels of inflammation impair mitochondrial function? The answer to that is unequivocally yes. High levels of inflammation, inflammatory cytokines like TNF-alpha, interleukin-6, and others impair mitochondrial function. We know that. It is clear and unequivocal. And there are physiological reasons for it. The organism has to adapt.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
So when you have the flu, do you have neuropsychiatric symptoms? Yes, you do. You're going to feel exhausted. You're going to be less risk-taking. You are not going to want to reproduce more than likely. You're going to completely lose your libido. Completely lose it. Like zero interest. And what are you going to want to do?
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
You're going to want to hide in bed and pull the covers over you and just retreat from the world for safety. Those are all effects on your mood, your motivation, rewarding behaviors, all sorts of things. The inflammation, the infection is doing that to you. And we know that it's inflammation because this happens with cancer. It happens with treatments that cause inflammation.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
If we give treatments that cause high levels of inflammation, people experience these symptoms acutely. If we give interferon, for example, which can be a treatment for some disorders, people will acutely develop all of these symptoms. So we know that interferon itself will produce all of these neuropsychiatric symptoms.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
We also know from basic cell biology interferon interferes with mitochondrial function. We know that. It is unequivocal. Now let's go to autism. Is there any evidence that inflammation can lead to autism? We have decades of evidence for this. We know that over the course of the last century, as there were
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
kind of outbreaks of bacterial or viral infections in the population, we saw higher rates of neuropsychiatric neurodevelopmental disorders in the offspring of the pregnant women. So we've long known that, and that evidence is pretty well established.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
But then there was a rubella outbreak that resulted in much higher rates of autism in the offspring. I think that was in the 1960s. And now we have really decades of animal models. So they take mice and And they inject them with lipopolysaccharide, which causes an inflammatory reaction. And when they do this to pregnant mice, the mice that are born to those women, those female mice,
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
are at much higher risk for showing signs or symptoms of what looks like a neurodevelopmental disorder. It's different diagnosing or whatever a neurodevelopmental condition in a mouse. Is it 100%? No, it's just we increase the risk. So if you inject a pregnant mouse with lipopolysaccharide, Can that mouse still have a normal appearing mouse? Yes.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
But the probability that the offspring will have a neurodevelopmental, symptoms of a neurodevelopmental condition increase. That is where so much of the autism research has been focused. It's trying to understand this, trying to understand what is happening with inflammation. How does that impact neurodevelopment? We know that. So now back to the question that you posed.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
Is there any possibility that vaccines could contribute to that process? Do vaccines increase inflammation? I think the answer to that is yes. Is there variation in the inflammatory response between different people? I think the answer to that is yes. Can some people have a hyper-exaggerated inflammatory response in response to a vaccine? I think the answer to that is yes.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
In that condition, so in that rare condition, less common condition where somebody is having a hyper exaggerated inflammatory response to a vaccination, could that impact neurodevelopment? The science right now says yes. We have no reason to think it wouldn't. There's one case of a young child who already had an existing mitochondrial disorder. It was already known. She got vaccines.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And I think within days or weeks of getting the vaccinations, she developed profound neurodevelopmental symptoms. That case won a lawsuit. It went to court. It was tried in court. And she won. And the court ruled that the vaccine did, in fact, contribute to this girl's neurodevelopmental condition. Now, they assumed it was because she had a preexisting mitochondrial disorder.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And I would support that. It lines up perfectly with what I've been talking about all along, that people who have vulnerabilities with mitochondria or metabolism. You can only absorb so many hits. And when you get that final hit that tips kind of the balance to impact neurodevelopment, you can get that. Now, coming back to the bigger question, so should people get vaccinated or not?
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
We do have reasonably good evidence that that unvaccinated people are more likely to develop autism than vaccinated people.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
The problem with that study is that it's a retrospective cohort epidemiological study. And the biggest critique that I have of that type of research is that the researchers decide what they control for and what they don't control for.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
But the existing research right now, as published and as designed, suggests that if you don't get a vaccine, you're more likely to develop autism than if you do get a vaccine. And how would I understand that? I just talked about it. Infections themselves can cause neurodevelopmental disorders. So if a child gets measles...
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
they're not only at risk of dying of measles, they're also at risk of impacting their mitochondrial function and developing a neurodevelopmental disorder as a result of getting a severe infection.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
I mean, the science that I just laid out is true. It's clear. And again, we've got decades of research to support most of what I've just said, all of what I've just said, I think. If you understand the biology... When a child begins to show symptoms of a neurodevelopmental disorder, instead of assigning a label, this is autism. It's a life sentence. Good luck. We should be intervening.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And what could we do to intervene? What you just said in terms of prevention strategies, absolutely. Let's make sure that even before you're going to the doctor, even before you're exposing yourself to any of these vaccines, that you're healthy. Why? Because we want you to be healthy. Why wouldn't you want to be healthy? So let's just be healthy.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
But I would actually go much further and say as soon as a child begins to show signs or symptoms, especially when it's an abrupt change, when they were developing in a neurotypical way and then all of a sudden they got an infection or they got a vaccine or something happened and now they are falling off the trajectory of And that's what we hear from these parents who are saying, no, this is real.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
That's why they believe vaccines cause it. Do I think it was just the vaccine on its own? I suspect a lot of them have had other hits. They probably had other vulnerabilities going into that vaccination. And that the vaccination, if we even entertain the possibility that that vaccine did contribute to their autism, I'm doubtful that it was the sole only cause.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
I would say the concept of metabolism, metabolic regulation, mitochondrial function, mitochondrial health, actually is an umbrella concept for everything you've just said. It's an umbrella concept for, well, how do we create neurotransmitters? Where do these neurotransmitters come from? What regulates their production release from cells?
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
I'm doubtful that it was the sole cause. But regardless, once the kid starts showing signs or symptoms... we should be doing a full workup. We should be looking for vitamin and nutrient deficiencies. We should be looking for this central B12 deficiency. Did the vaccine somehow cause an autoimmune reaction to CD320 so that now this kid has central B12 deficiency?
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And that is why this kid is falling off the chart. Should we entertain a ketogenic diet for this child? I would say yes, we should. That should be on the table of options. We might want to put this child on a ketogenic diet. Does that ever happen? It happens all the time in kids with epilepsy. So why not do it for neurodevelopmental conditions?
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
But again, it's not just keto diet is going to save the day and we don't have to think about central B12 deficiency or any of these other things. Like, let's put it all together. And especially with AI now, we can do this. This is a solvable puzzle. It is a complex puzzle, no doubt. But it is a solvable puzzle and we should start to solve it.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
But right now, the state of the field is that we assign a label autism and And we tell the parents to just prepare for a disabled child. Just prepare yourself to take care of a disabled child for life. We're really sorry. We don't have anything more to offer. We can do some ABA training. We can do some basic, you know, we'll try to teach them some social skills.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
The real outcome data on that is pretty bad. If your brain's not working right, it's hard to teach people how to do the skills that the brain is designed to do. And that's the challenge is that it's all well and good to recognize a problem, but now we need to come up with effective treatments.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
And we know that a lot of the, you know, people talk about early intervention with autism as though early intervention is going to save the day. I don't mean to bash the people doing that work. Let's do anything we can. It might help a little. But when you look at the outcome data, it's not helping much. And when you look at the statistics of the prevalence of autism, it's going through the roof.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
So those strategies are just not working. They're not working for prevention. They're not working to improve long-term outcomes. They're not, I mean, we have a lot of work to do, so.
Huberman Lab
Transform Your Mental Health With Diet & Lifestyle | Dr. Chris Palmer
People will take the sound bite.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
It's a really important question. And the real answer is I'm kind of wildly guessing. But I'll at least share with you the basis for my wild guess. At best, it's maybe... 20% don't need them who 20% who do need them 80% who probably could get by if we as society take a different
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
stance and use different strategies for human health care integrating physical health and mental health wow and the reason i say that is because the rates of many mental disorders are at all time ever recorded highs the rates of depression all-time highs the rates of anxiety especially in children have tripled in 15 years anxiety disorders diagnosed by pediatricians tripled in 15 years.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
The rates of ADHD have tripled since 2010, 14 years, triple the rates. The rates of autism spectrum disorder have quadrupled in 20 years. The rates of bipolar disorder in adults have doubled in 20 years. In children and adolescents, it's up exponentially because bipolar disorder largely wasn't recognized or diagnosed 30 years ago. So it's up like literally like thousands of percent.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
It's crazy how much that's up. The rates of eating disorder, five-fold increased risk for eating disorders. In case people have been hiding under a rock, Opioid overdose deaths through the roof, five-fold increased risk in 25 years. Five-fold increase in opioid overdose deaths. We've long known how to recognize that kind of thing. There's this statistic.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
So a lot of people are like, oh, this can't actually be true. We're just recognizing all these diagnoses. Well, we knew how to recognize eating disorders and people starving themselves to death 30 years ago. Yeah, we could see it. There was no problem diagnosing that. We knew how to recognize opioid overdose deaths 30 years ago. People were dying. They're dead on the street. the bloodstream.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
It's not rocket science. It's not that we were stupid 30 years ago and didn't know how to recognize it or diagnose it. There's another statistic called deaths of despair, which include the opioid overdose deaths, but includes suicides and other causes of death, alcohol-related deaths. That is at an all-time high, at least since the Great Depression.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
I think we actually just a year or two ago surpassed the Great Depression. And the reason that's important is not because the Great Depression was a lot of metabolic health conditions. The Great Depression was tremendous pain, suffering, despair, lives being destroyed, 25% unemployment rate, people standing in line for food to feed their children, people losing all of their life savings.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And there was no social security program back then. There were no government resources to make sure people weren't homeless. And when people are facing that kind of monumental despair, their lives are ruined. They go out and drink themselves to death. They kill themselves on purpose. They do all sorts of things. We are nowhere near that level of pain and suffering in theory.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
You look at our economy, there's no comparison.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
We do. And we have safety nets. If nothing else, safety, it's not like you're living a life of luxury with a safety net.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
But you are in a home with electricity, with heat. You're in a home with food. Yes. you're not standing on the street begging people for food so that you can feed your starving child the deaths of despair are higher than that period why what is the root cause as a psychiatrist would you say is the root cause of you know all these different mental health disorders and diseases
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
You know, I think those two statistics and those two periods, Great Depression and now, are really telling because the real story is complicated. I'm not here to say all of mental health is due to eating bad food or people being overweight or diabetic. I'm not here to say that. Because the Great Depression tells us a familiar story that most people know.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
When you lose everything, when you're poverty-stricken, when you lose your life. So these are people who, say, take a man who had a wife and two kids. He's the provider. He loses his job. He can't feed his wife and two kids. The wife wasn't working. She was staying home, raising the kids. They are furious with him because he had $100 in the stock market and lost it all.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And that was their life savings. And now he's drinking every night. He's now an alcoholic. or maybe using opioids, because we actually had an opioid epidemic back at the turn of the century too. So now he's numbing his pain and his humiliation. It's easy to understand. So those are psychological, social causes of mental illness or mental health conditions.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Those still exist and those can still cause mental illness today. But again, there's a disconnect We have all time ever recorded highs now, higher than the Great Depression. That doesn't make sense. And what is that? And what I'm saying is that sometimes biology, more than psychology or social factors, sometimes biology can drive mental illness too. Is that a sometimes or a lot of the times?
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
I think it's a lot of the times because I actually think they're all interconnected.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
They're staggering, as everyone knows.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
So right now the statistics are about 70% of adult Americans are overweight or obese. About 40% of adult Americans are obese. The rates in children, it's about 40% of children now are overweight or obese.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
So that's also... And it's even more challenging for parents because even if you're one of those parents who's trying... your hardest to give your kids real whole foods at home at school. They go to school and get pop tarts and Fruit Loops and mac and cheese and chocolate chip cookies and pizza for lunch or their snack or their breakfast or whatever. A lot of those foods
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
The researchers will call them hyperpalatable. Others will call them addictive. Whichever term you prefer, those foods are designed to make people eat more of them than they should. And not feel satiated or full. And so once you start eating those foods, even if you come home to mom who's got...
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
chicken or turkey and vegetables on the table, you look at that, you might even eat it and you're still hungry. And then what do you want? You want a bag of chips while you're watching TV or playing your video games. And your mom is going to probably ultimately give in because you're going to be whining. This kid's going to be whining about how they're still hungry.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And no parent wants to hear their child say, I'm hungry.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
I'm hungry. Why are you starving me? Every parent wants their children to grow and thrive. That is just an instinctual thing. We feed our children. We make sure they're not hungry. That is an instinctual thing. And so when your kids are getting hooked in other food environments that you have no control over as a parent, and then you're trying to feed them healthy food,
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
It's an uphill battle at best and probably a losing battle for most people.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
The reality is it gets really complicated fast and... There are a lot of mental health professionals who are still skeptical about this field. I'm going to just say that up front.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And is there research or science that you've seen that's... There is a tremendous amount of research and science clearly documenting these links.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
So let's build on what we were just talking about, obesity and mental health. Because there's a correlation there. Most people understand that nutrition is related to obesity. that what you're eating plays a role in obesity. I don't have to go to, I don't have to fight too hard to convince people of that.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
So if we can assume that that is true, what you put in your mouth day to day plays a role in whether you have obesity or not. Once a child has, or an adult has obesity, they have no history of mental illness at all. They start out with obesity. Once you have obesity, you are at dramatically increased risk for a wide range of mental disorders. Really?
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Nicotine use disorder, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression, anxiety disorders, personality disorders, eating disorders, essentially all of the mental health conditions, all of the major categories of mental health conditions that we have are included. So if you have obesity, you are at much higher risk of developing a wide range of mental health conditions. Wow.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
If your parents have obesity, their offspring are at much greater risk of having neurodevelopmental disorders, meaning autism, ADHD, learning disorders, and others.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
So honestly, the real details of that get down to what age is the person? Are they at an age where this disorder is more likely to occur or even be diagnosed or recognized? Sure. But the rates range anywhere from the low end is 50% more likely to have a mental health condition.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
The high end is 350%, 3.5 times more likely to have mental health conditions, including things like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
So we have a really good longitudinal study of children. So researchers followed over 5,000 kids from birth to age 24. So even before they have obesity, they have insulin resistance, which we can measure. The children at age nine who had the highest levels of insulin resistance were five times more likely, it's 500% more likely to develop a psychotic disorder. Holy cow. By the time they were 24.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Wow. That's bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. The children who gained the most weight around the time of puberty, four times more likely to have major depression by the time they turn 24. You could mix and match those statistics, but those were the statistically significant findings.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
But children who gained a lot of weight around puberty were also more likely to develop psychotic disorders and all sorts of other disorders. And likewise, children with high levels of insulin resistance More likely to develop mood disorders and other disorders But the bottom line is that and a five-fold increased risk.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
I want to be clear When we talk about statistics like oh, maybe eating so much red meat is bad for you Those epidemiological studies at best find 10% 15% increased risk over years We're talking 500% increased risk. This is not trivial. This is like slap in the face. This is a stronger connection than genes, genetics, than family history, than other things.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
I think there's truth in, there are some risk genes that we have identified. And interestingly, almost all of them can be linked directly to metabolism or specifically mitochondria. We can get into the nerdy biology if you want, but almost all of them can be linked to metabolic health.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
I believe we can. Wow. And that is... That's huge. That, in my mind, is the hope.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
There is... So we don't have massive, randomized clinical trials with thousands of patients yet.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Yes.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
So some will say, you know, until we have a randomized controlled trial of 10,000 people with schizophrenia, we're not gonna believe it. Fine.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Based on my practice, based on the thousands of people that I'm hearing from, based on the pilot trials that are getting done,
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
yes a hundred percent wow i know this these strategies metabolic treatment strategies can save lives literally can save lives and and these require no drugs yeah if anything the challenge sometimes is getting people off of drugs that they've been on for years or decades so their body can start to heal and and get into a cycle of harmony
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Yes. Again, because of this, again, I'm not anti-medication. And if somebody is taking medications and is thriving on that medication. keep doing it. I love people thriving. And if somebody is saying, I take a stimulant for my ADHD and I'm thriving now, great, keep thriving.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
If somebody else says, I have anxiety or depression and I take Prozac and it has saved my life and I'm doing great on it and I don't have any side effects, great, keep doing it. But more often than not, a lot of people are not thriving on psychotropic medications. At best, they are managing what they are being told are chronic mental health conditions.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
You're going to be like this for the rest of your life. You just have to accept that, oh, it must be genetic. You know, the researchers and the clinicians who say that I have zero doubt. They actually have such good intentions when they say that. And the intention is, I don't want to blame people. And I want them to know this isn't your fault. This isn't your fault.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
But by telling people it's genetic.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
So I think that's, again, I think that a lot of people think that that's benevolent. I actually think it's harmful because you're making people hopeless. You're telling people that you are defective. That's not good. Your genes are defective. It's not your fault. It's your parents' fault and their grandparents' fault and their parents' fault and their parents' fault.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
But you're going to have to take medicines for the rest of your life. I don't like that. And we're sorry that these meds aren't working ideally. This is the best we got. We're sorry that you're in the hospital every other year. Oh, man.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
We're sorry that you can't work because your depression and anxiety are so bad or because your mood instability is so bad or because your ADHD is so bad or because your learning disorder is so bad. We're sorry you can't work. We're sorry you're not thriving. But that's just the way it is. And you're just gonna have to accept it and accept that you've got this unfortunate condition.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Again, in the last 25 years, we're telling that to four times more people. Four times more people than we were 25 years ago. And it's not because we're just recognizing it more. people's brains are being impaired. That's what I think. At the same time that we have skyrocketing rates of obesity and diabetes,
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And we see impairment and appetite signaling and satiety signaling and fat cells and everything else. Obesity is that. Obesity is a biological pathological process. It is not good for you. By and large, I think for most people, it's not their fault.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
If somebody's telling you, eat this food, eat these chips, eat these Pop-Tarts, these are good for you, and you're eating them, and those things are making you sick, I think the first step is somebody needs to inform the person that these are not good for you. These are actually toxic for you. They're harming your health. And so we need to start there.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And then we need to start with like schools aren't passing out cigarettes. They're not passing out vapes. Why are they passing out other harmful substances to our children?
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
I don't know. You were lucky or... you were self-medicating i could almost say i mean that the food was self-medication no the exercise that was my medication that you noticed i feel crappy i want to go run and sprint and jump and other stuff and now i feel alive now i feel good yeah and that's why you didn't stop unfortunately other kids get sucked into this
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
pit where it just drains you of all your energy and now you're becoming overweight or obese and pre-diabetic and now you don't have energy to go run. and you're getting more and more out of shape. And it's harder for you to run because you're overweight or obese. And now other people are making fun of you.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
You're not getting any kind of positive reinforcement for anything athletic that you're doing. If anything, you're getting laughed at and made fun of.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Which makes you then say, well, why am I doing this? I may as well just give up. I'm not a jock. I'm not an athlete. that's for other people. I'll just focus on school or I'll just focus on whatever. And then a few years later, they're getting diagnosed with depression, anxiety, ADHD, whatever, and they're getting medicated. And now they're on that path.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
You know, I want to, I want to come back to this concept of obesity because one of the One of the most strongly kind of recommended remedies to the obesity epidemic is acceptance. Acceptance of what? Acceptance of obesity. It's this movement called body positivity. I was just going to ask you this. Body positivity.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Let's all be positive. Let's just stop fighting this uphill battle. Let's accept that obesity is around. Some will go so far as to say it's genetic. Again, well-intentioned. It's not genetic, people. We do. We didn't have the rates of obesity 50 years ago that we do now. Anybody who tells you it's genetic is living in a fairy tale.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
It is terrifying for me because, not because I don't want people to be able to be overweight or obese and be happy and healthy and go through life and be accepted and not be made fun of. If somebody can be obese and otherwise healthy and their brain is intact and they are functioning in life and they have friends and they have romantic relationships and everything that they want,
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
and it's all going well, I have no problem with that person. It's free country. Make your choices. We're all different. We've all got our strengths and weaknesses. Leave that person alone. But the statistics we talked about earlier tell a very different story. It's not just their body shape that's at risk. It's not just societal stigma. It's not just fat shaming that is the risk.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Obesity is a symptom that your metabolism is disrupted. And something is disrupting your metabolism and at the same time it is causing the symptom of obesity. The same time that it's causing your fat cells to just get larger and larger and larger and just unrelentingly.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
larger and larger and larger, meaning more and more weight gain, those same processes are affecting the way your brain functions and putting you at risk for depression, anxiety, burnout, psychosis, bipolar symptoms. And those are the labels that will then ruin your life. And nobody will even think to connect those two dots.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Nobody will even think those two dots are even related despite the abundance of research that we have. And again, many in the mental health field are terrified to talk about this. Because they know that the pills we're prescribing are causing obesity. We are contributing to this problem. So little Susie comes in, normal weight, with some mood instability and depression,
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And we start putting her on pills and those pills make her gain 40 pounds. And then two years later, she develops her first psychotic episode. And we think the mental health field right now just says, well, she just had a bad illness. Our treatments, the obesity, none of that had anything to do with her illness. new brain symptoms, it's painful to think about that.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
It's been painful for me as a psychiatrist to think about that.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
I was trained a certain way and I was prescribing those pills and I still prescribe those pills in some situations to patients. And to think that I may have contributed to people's chronic mental health conditions, it goes all the way from I feel guilt-ridden, I feel disgusted with myself, I feel nauseated.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
If I really let myself think about the patients and the level of suffering and pain they experienced, the decimation to their lives, the suicides, the people who are dead, when I really think about that, it's nauseating to think that our current treatments contributed to that or may have contributed to that. And what I'm saying is that the science is finally coming together.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
So if there are any clinicians, psychiatrists, please do your research. Google it, PubMed, search it, do whatever you need to do. Most of your listeners are not psychiatrists and scientists. But what I'm here to tell everyone is that the science has come together. The science is coming together. We have this outline which calls for a paradigm shift.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
A paradigm shift in how we think about mental health and how we treat it. And to put it in the simplest terms, we need to pair and integrate physical health and mental health. All your listeners are gonna say, yeah, duh, of course. Well, then why are we prescribing pills that are causing physical health conditions?
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Why are we prescribing pills that are causing massive weight gain, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, premature mortality? On average, people with mental illness, anyone, take your pick, any mental illness, people diagnosed with a mental illness are dying early deaths. On average, men are losing 10 years of life. Women are losing seven years of life. And the primary cause of death
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
is not suicide, the primary cause of death are heart attacks and strokes, just 10 years earlier than everyone else. And we are turning a blind eye to this. I'm less concerned, quite honestly, I'm less concerned about the end of life if you die happy at 70 instead of 80, whatever. I mean, to the people who love you, it's a big deal. And I don't mean to minimize that or be dismissive of that.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
If you've got children, I mean, they care. And yes, I want everybody to live long, healthy lives. But what I'm much more concerned about as a psychiatrist is what happened to that person for the 40 years prior to their death. Were they thriving or were they suffering with unrelenting mental anguish? Were they suffering or were they just even just like you described when you were younger?
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Were they muddling by? They're getting by. They're doing okay. But they constantly chronically feel I'm less than everyone else. I'm not smart like everyone else. I'm not motivated like everyone else. Maybe I just, you know, there's something wrong with me. Maybe I'm depressed or I'm anxious or I've got ADD or whatever. I've got a learning disorder.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
But there are millions and millions of people getting through life feeling like they're not good enough, feeling like they don't measure up.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
I really think it's because You know, I think that movement, again, it's good intention.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
That they think that all of the bad outcomes of obesity are because of fat shaming and societal stigma. And if society would just come around and learn to be kinder and nicer to people with obesity, if everybody could play nice together, we would have a happier world. What I'm here to tell you is that's not true. Obesity is a symptom.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
It's like smoke coming out of your house and ignoring it and saying, let's have a smoke positivity home. Let's just celebrate the smoke coming out of our homes and ignore that there's a fire burning. Wow. that may burn down our foundation, that may burn down our home. What I'm saying is let's not ignore it. It is a symptom of metabolic dysfunction or dysregulation.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
We can understand it and we can do something about it. And again, we can help people thrive. A lot of people quickly then go to Ozempic. Let's just prescribe Ozempic for everybody. Put everybody on Ozempic. That'll save the day. No, that won't save the day. there is still a root cause of the obesity.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And if we don't address it, if we just ignore it and treat the symptom with Ozempic, and I'm not anti-Ozempic, If people need Ozempic to get a leg up on the lifestyle changes that they need to make, if that helps them get over their addictive cravings for the junk food that they should know they can't eat, then I'm all for it.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
But what I want to be clear is that our dietary advice for too long has been too simplistic. We tell people eat less and that'll solve the problem. So you can have Doritos still, but just eat fewer of them. Instead of eating the whole bag, eat half the bag. You can have your chocolate chip cookies, the ultra-processed kind, not the kind that grandma's making, the ultra-processed kind of chocolate.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
You can have those chocolate chip cookies, but just have two or three instead of ten. The problem is that people can white knuckle it for a few weeks or a few months. They can, and this is the illusion, is that people can white knuckle it. They can white knuckle it and eat less of that crappy food. And sure enough, their weight will go down a little bit.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And then everybody will say, see, see, it's a willpower thing. But that person will slip back 95% of the time. That's what the statistics tell us. 95% of the time when they lose weight in those ways, they will slip back. Why? Because their cravings will come back. Their cravings actually never left. They were just white knuckling it. And people can only white knuckle it for so long.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
So instead, what I would argue is that people need to be given better advice. And that advice means some foods are going to be healthier for you than other foods. You can't eat bags of Doritos every day and think that you are going to be healthy. You can't eat ultra-processed chocolate chip cookies every day as your treat and think that you are going to be healthy.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And it's not because those foods are so delicious. So some people will say that. They're just really delicious. Well, grandmas made delicious food 100 years ago. We had Thanksgiving celebrations 100 years ago.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
People weren't obese at nearly the rates that we have now. So it's not just delicious food versus bland salad. That's not the decision point. The decision point is the ultra-processing There's lots of debates about what exactly is happening, but there's a researcher at the NIH, Kevin Hall, who's done some research on ultra-processed foods.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
He basically takes people, locks them up in a metabolic ward and feeds them, explicitly feeds them the exact same macros. So the same protein, fat, carbohydrate. Calories. Calories, everything. Giving them like 6,000, the option of 6,000 calories a day. 6,000, wow. With meals and snacks and then just says eat whatever you want. Try not to lose or gain weight. Just eat whatever you want.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
He did a study that was published over four years ago now, and when he gave them unprocessed foods, same macros, same calorie content, all that, when he gave them unprocessed foods versus ultra-processed foods, on average, the people ate 500 calories more of the ultra-processed versions, and they gained on average about two kilograms, which is about almost five pounds. In just two weeks.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
in just two weeks. When they were given the real whole food, on average, they lost about the five pounds. He just began replicating this study. He's not done with it, but he just published some interim results. The interim results are even worse. When the subjects were given the ultra-processed, highly palatable foods, on average, they ate 1,000 calories extra a day.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
The interesting thing is that he asked the participants through the whole study, how do you like the food that we're giving you? How full are you? How hungry are you? How are you feeling? The ratings on all of the different foods were similar. They were not different. So when people were being given real whole foods, it wasn't that they were complaining saying this food sucks.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
They weren't saying, I'm hungry all the time. They weren't saying any of that. It's just they stopped eating because their metabolism was healthier and their brain told them, you're full, you're done, stop eating. When they were eating the ultra-processed stuff, there are very likely, based on that research alone, I think it's fair to say, there are chemicals added
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
It's about integrating physical health and mental health. And when you put it together, more often than not, you can actually help people heal and recover.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
that just make the foods hyper-palatable or addictive. Now, when I say that, most people are like, well, yeah, we kind of get that. That's probably true. If I'm selling food, if I'm a food company CEO, what's my goal? Sell the most food possible. Get people to eat the whole bag so that they have to go back to the grocery store tomorrow and get another bag. And then the next day, get another bag.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And then the next day, get another bag. Just keep... Fine, that's good for my profit margin. That CEO doesn't really care about your health. They certainly don't care about your brain health or your child's brain health. And right now we're not even holding them responsible or accountable for what their chemicals might be doing to our children's brains.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And when your child ends up with a severe chronic mental health condition, at a minimum, we call it failure to launch. Millions of those people out there. All these men more than women, unfortunately, all these guys are sitting in their parents' basements playing video games, failing to launch. That's the minimum.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
The maximum is your kid is going to psychiatrists, trying medication after medication, going to therapists, in and out of hospitals, maybe in and out of jail or prison. Right. Maybe in and out of ERs with overdoses. and the parents are terrified that they are gonna lose their children.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
I think it's linked, so I would go broader, I would say it's linked to metabolism, But yes, there's no doubt. Sleep, movement, sleep. Nutrition, movement, sleep are huge. And so, you know, screens come into it. Everybody's glued to their phone. And what do screens do? Well, one, they prevent you from moving. You're not running outside in the sunshine when you're on a screen.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And then, sure, the cyberbullying and everything that's going on when you're in that screen, sure, yeah, that doesn't help. But I think it really is more physiological. I think the cyberbullying, the trauma, the stress, all of that is playing a role on our biology. That when you are traumatized, when you are stressed, it is taking a toll on your body. Most people get that.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And what I'm saying is if you dig deep, it's actually taking a toll on your metabolic health. It's making your blood glucose go up from stress hormones and cortisol. It's making your heart rate go up. It's increasing your blood pressure. And if it's occurring over long periods of time, I mean, those are metabolic biomarkers.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
is the million-dollar question because some people will say, I'm struggling with my mental health, I'm burned out. That is very different than I'm struggling with my mental health because I had a really horrible childhood, which is different than I have a mental illness
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Like what you just laid out. And I know you're like a shining example of all of this. So you're like everyone's role model for all of this. But yes. And what I'm saying is that you don't have a chemical imbalance that you need to medicate. Yes. And you don't necessarily need to be in therapy for the rest of your life every week. You're not a defective human being.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
that you may have had vulnerabilities, you may have had a less than optimal brain function, and the strategies that you've used allowed you to thrive. Again, does anybody get to perfection? No, we're all human. We've all got our strengths. We've all got our weaknesses. That's just the way it is. And that's never going to change. But you can still have vulnerabilities.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
You can still struggle with reading, for example, like you mentioned a little bit ago. You can still struggle with reading and be quite successful.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And especially nowadays, and with learning and with education and all of the technology that we do have, if reading's not your thing, you can acquire information or learn in other ways.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And that's the thing. So some of it is just recognizing what are people's strengths, what are their weaknesses, what are their vulnerabilities. If you're a little overweight, Okay, maybe you're not going to be the super thin athlete. That's okay. You don't need to be. You don't need to be that in order to thrive. Other people may not be good with reading.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Other people may have trouble sitting still for long periods of time. Other people, you know, whatever. I mean, it's fine. We can help people thrive. It's really strange because... There are people who want to deny all of mental health conditions. There's no such a thing as mental illness. It's all made up. And I'm like, I'm definitely not in that camp.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
So I am in the camp that some people can have pretty significant mental health conditions, mental disorders is what I would call them, mental illnesses, whatever term people wanna use, where their brains are not functioning properly, where they can't pay attention, where they're having psychotic symptoms, where they're having panic attacks for no reason, where their brain is just ruminating on past trauma or past painful events
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And even though they say to themselves, stop it, stop doing that, stop thinking about it, just go on with life. Like if you could just forget about that, everything would be fine. And their brain won't let them forget. Their brain just keeps bringing it back up. I do think that people can have conditions where their brains aren't functioning optimally.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And what I'm here to say is, yes, medications, we can still use them. If they can help people achieve remission and recovery and thrive in life, I'm all for it.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
But far too many people are not getting any of those three things. They are not getting remission. They are not getting recovery. They are not thriving. They are being medicated. They're being told you've got a severe, a chronic mental health condition. We will manage it the best we can. And I want those people to hear loud and clear there is a new way.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
which is different than I have a mental disorder or my son has a mental, a severe chronic disabling mental disorder, which is different than I'm neurodivergent. I'm just neurodivergent. People need to accept me. I have a different brain. I'm autistic or I have ADHD or I have a learning disorder. We have these different labels, these different words, And they can mean vastly different things.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
I think ADHD in its classic form is considered a neurodevelopmental disorder, meaning you're either born that way or it's something that's happening to you early in life. There are biological, psychological, and social causes of it. So the biology can include everything we've talked about. Diet, exercise, and those things are way off base and skyrocketing in our population.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And I think that is a big part of the reason why we have skyrocketing rates of ADHD.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Again, if your parents have... With the lack of the things we talked about, nutrition, sleep, movement.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Yes, nutrition, sleep, exercise. That if children are being fed from birth highly processed, ultra processed baby food formula with added sugars and other things... You know, right now the World Health Organization and the American guidelines, dietary guidelines for Americans say that children under two should have zero foods with added sugar. Zero.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Gerber, if you look at the ingredient list of Gerber baby foods, a lot of them have sugar. It's not all sugar, but a lot of them have added sugar. We are not following these common sense guidelines. And so we're setting these young brains up for not thriving. And again, this is not impossible. Japan does a very different job.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Wow. Japan knows something we don't. And what they know is that they feed their kids broccoli and seaweed and fish and other things. They're giving them real food. And so that's part of it. Some of the other biology could be infections. If you get an infection early in life, you're much more likely to have a whole range of neuropsychiatric disorders, including ADHD.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
But then psychological and social factors play a role. Trauma, stress, childhood adversity, poverty, those things, yes, they do play a role. So for some kids, you're going to look at some kids who get diagnosed with ADHD, and if they're in a crappy, abusive household, yelling, screaming, shootings on the street, but yelling, screaming in the household. Wow.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
It's pretty clear why that kid is having some mental health condition. And I don't care what it is. It's probably more than just ADHD. It might be PTSD, anxiety, depression, a lot of it. I mean, that's obvious. So I'm not here to take away from those obvious cases. Those situations have not increased in our society. We've had a tripling in ADHD diagnoses since 2010.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
those poverty-stricken abusive households have not tripled so what is the root then of that the root is metabolic dysfunction which means diet exercise lifestyle other things have you seen people who've come in to your clinic or other psychiatrists that you know are working with patients that come in and are diagnosed with adhd that have gone on this
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
So that should not be controversial. The psychiatry field has long said a lot of people will outgrow ADHD. Wow. Other research shows, like I just attended a summit on ADHD with world-renowned experts, cutting-edge research, the ADHD brain just appears to be five years behind other brains. Huh. But that's big when you're in school. If you're five years behind the other kids.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
I might have been like 10 years behind. I was like struggling. You're five years behind the other kids. That's huge. And it's really huge for the teachers. So the teachers see you as a problem. They see you as five years immature. all the way through. But adults are getting it now.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And yet, they're all interconnected. They can't be separated. And I think that's one of the more complex areas because even the surgeon general is saying things like, we have a mental health epidemic and one of the root causes is loneliness. If we just address loneliness, we'll address this mental health epidemic.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Well, so that is the thing, is that what I think is happening is that as we have skyrocketing rates of metabolic disorders in humans and adults, 70% of adults are overweight or obese. It impacts their brain function at the same time. We know this. This is not speculative. We have neuroimaging studies documenting this. We have cognitive tests documenting this, controlled trials.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
This is really not kind of up for debate, if you will. If you believe in science, if you believe in research, this is not controversial. Obesity affects the function of the brain. I would argue it goes the other way, that obesity may be a reflection of brain dysfunction, that the appetite centers and our feeding behavior centers are in the brain.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And when those are dysregulated, that makes people eat more than they should. But that dysregulation doesn't stop at just those two little areas. It goes to the rest of the brain.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
It's all connected. And so at the same time that you have dysregulation in your appetite signaling, you have dysregulation in paying attention, concentrating, motivating yourself, sitting still. And so adults will, I think, rightfully go to psychiatrists saying there's something wrong with me. A lot of times they probably struggled with metabolic health since they were kids.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
So it's not, they're not making it up. Like, yeah, I was eating Captain Crunch and Fruit Loops and drinking Kool-Aid and Dr. Peppers and all that stuff when I was a kid. And yeah, now in hindsight, I realized, yeah, I did struggle in school and nobody knew it. And the psychiatrists today are saying, aha, we've diagnosed ADHD that just got missed. And what I'm saying is, no, it's bigger than that.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And whether the person had it since childhood, I think some adults are developing it now, newer. We need to put it together. And again, the reason we need to put it together is because we are prescribing more psychiatric pills than ever. We are delivering more psychotherapy than ever. More people are getting psychotherapy than ever before. We are distributing treatments. We are scaling treatments.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And the rates are skyrocketing. It's a losing battle. The answer is not more pills. The answer is not even better pills. The answer is let's understand the biology of what is happening to the human brain and the human body and let's address it. And at the end of the day, it's not rocket science solutions. It's diet, nutrition,
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Exercise, movement, sleep, refraining from harmful substance use, and the social stuff, the relationships, the connection, the purpose in life. You've got to have a purpose. You need to have a passion. Everybody needs that. You put those things together. I'm not even going to keep going on. Those are the lifestyle medicine buckets.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
You put those together and you've got a winning package for most people.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Exactly. There's more to mental health than just loneliness. So yes, I don't disagree with the Surgeon General that loneliness is one piece of the puzzle. I don't think that we have a loneliness epidemic that is driving autism, that is driving ADHD, that is driving bipolar disorder. I don't think the loneliness epidemic is driving all of those things.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
I think that, yeah, so we have, we do have good research studies on this. The real answer is it's complicated. So first and foremost, I wanna say, women have a right to contraception, to effective contraception. We don't want lots of unwanted pregnancies. Let's start there.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
There is. And so there are some women, probably a lower percentage than half, who will benefit from birth control pills. How many percentage? 50%. It's hard to say. I want to say anecdotal. It's more than anecdotal because OBGYNs and reproductive psychiatrists will actually use birth control for women who have really erratic periods or other things. And some women can benefit tremendously from it.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
The bad news is we do have large population studies. If you are a younger woman, less than 20, on birth control, the chances that you might attempt suicide Three times higher. Come on. If you're on birth control than if you're not on birth control.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Now there are confounding variables in that because if you're on birth control, it means that you're probably dating and maybe some of those suicide attempts are because you know, the love of your life just broke your heart and dumped you or whatever.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Yeah. And people who aren't dating are being fat shamed and lonely and feeling feeling ugly. Not enough. You can play those lots of different ways. Three times the suicide rate is massive.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
So the reality is estrogen and progesterone have massive effects on the brain and body. Most people think of them as reproductive hormones and they play a role in the ovaries and the way the ovaries function. And yes, they do. And that's why women are taking them for reproductive control.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And those estrogens and progesterones are affecting the function of of your brain, numerous areas, including mood regulation, attention, cognition. So this is one of the reasons. So we know that estrogen, for example, impacts brain function. I mean, the strongest evidence is later in life. So when women go through menopause,
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Depending on whether you go through menopause early or late, that will impact your risk for Alzheimer's disease, for example, because estrogen is playing a direct role in brain metabolism. So it comes back to what I'm talking about overall, brain metabolism, It's a hormone. It's a well-known hormone. Everybody knows it.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
So again, this kind of thinking about mental disorders as metabolic disorders is about putting all of the pieces of the puzzle together. It's not about replacing them. But so women will know this. When I talk about this with women, they're like, you're a man saying this? Right, right, right. Either they're angry at me for how dare you even talk about it. You're a man. You don't have any rights.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Or thank God a man finally gets it and is speaking the truth because we women have been trying to shout this from the rooftops and everybody dismisses us. And we do have brain symptoms. and it's not our fault, and we shouldn't be ashamed of it, and we shouldn't be shunned for it, and people shouldn't be telling us we're hormonal, like we're defective because we have hormones.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
I think there's much more to the equation than that.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
We can use this knowledge, we can use this science to come up with better strategies to be more patient, compassionate with people. Again,
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
people are still going to go through menopause women are going to go through menopause like it or not yeah and you're going to have some decisions to make about do you want to take hormones do you not want to take hormones are they indicated that transition is going to affect your brain whether you like it or not so i'm not here to say that we can make everything perfect
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
and everybody can live perfect lives and not have any struggles and not have any adversity at all. I'm not here to say that. But what I am here to say is that if you understand, you can come up with treatment solutions, you can come up with accommodations, if you will, that if we know that this period is happening, like pregnancy and then postpartum period, that's something we can all anticipate.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And we can all rally to support that woman to get through the postpartum period. If she's vulnerable to mental health episodes in the postpartum period, we can all rally to support her. And the easiest thing we can do is to make sure she's not sleep deprived.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And, I mean, there are so many clear common sense things. Again, that's not rocket science. doesn't cost too much money, just needs some supportive husband, boyfriend, family, whatever, to come to the rescue and help her out, knowing that you're vulnerable right now. Because of hormones and other things.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
At the end of the day, it is metabolic dysfunction. And what is metabolic dysfunction? So that even gets really complicated fast. The easiest way to explain it is that most people think of metabolism in simple terms. And they think about it as either you've got a fast metabolism or a slow metabolism, and that makes you lose weight or gain weight.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Suicidality, yeah.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
So 100%, everything you just said, and maybe even more concretely, or just to add to that,
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
to say if you are a woman and you've chosen to go on birth control and now all of a sudden, a few months later or a year later, you're having mental health struggles, anxiety, depression, suicidality, anything, mood instability, talk to your healthcare practitioner about could this birth control pill be playing a role in my new onset mental health condition
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And could I maybe go off of this and let's see?
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Exactly. Let's take the worst case scenario. That's not good. A birth control pill is going to adversely affect a woman's mental health. Yes. She is... 18 years old. We'll make her an adult so we don't piss anyone off. She's 18 years old. She decides to go on birth control. She had never had mental health symptoms before.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And now at 18 and a half or 19, all of a sudden she starts having new onset anxiety or depression. She goes to her doctor to talk about this. Yes. because she's talked to her friends and all her friends say, oh, you've got to go and get on some Prozac or Zoloft. It really helps.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
So now she goes to the doctor and now the doctor prescribes her Zoloft on top of the birth control pill. The Zoloft maybe kind of sort of works, but then three months later, now her sleep is really disrupted because of the Zoloft or she starts gaining weight. But now her sleep is disrupted. And so what does the doctor do? Well, let's put you on a sleeping pill now.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Let's put you on a sleeping pill so we can help you sleep. And now she's on three pills all because somebody didn't recognize what the root cause was, which was a bad reaction to a medication. I cannot tell you how many people I've seen that this has happened. Really? My estimation is millions and millions of people are in that situation where they, again, they go on uphill for a good reason.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
She, you know, she's 18. She's dating somebody. She wants to be responsible. She wants to make sure she's not going to get pregnant. And that's our society would say that she's being responsible. That's great. The boyfriend wants her to be on the pill. Everybody wants her to be on the pill. Everybody. So she's on the pill. And now it starts having adverse effects.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Nobody even considers that possibility. And now she's going down this road where she's getting more and more meds. developing more and more health conditions. Again, she started off a happy, healthy, thriving woman. In love, in a relationship. Now she's got depression, anxiety, whatever. She's got insomnia because of the side effect. Maybe she's starting to gain some weight.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
If the boyfriend does dump her, then she gets even more depressed because of grief. And so what do we do? We increase the dose of your Zoloft or we start a new medicine. We have to add a medicine. We need to do something to treat that.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Athletes might think about metabolism in a somewhat more sophisticated way. They might talk about VO2 max and some other things. If you've got a good metabolism, a healthy metabolism, a superior metabolism, you can run faster, you can lift more, you can do more. You have endurance. You can run for 30 miles instead of the person who can only make it two miles and then peters out.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Well, and I am going to endorse that. So I am all for responsible... Family planning. And that means planning when you are going to have a baby. I mean, 50%, for those of you who don't know, 50% of pregnancies in the United States are unplanned. More often than not with married couples, but they are unplanned.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
So there are IUDs, a man can wear a condom. I mean, there are all sorts of other contraceptive methods that people can use. And I'm not here to say there's a one size fits all contraceptive method for everyone. But what I'm here to say is that, as you pointed out, understand that there are risks with contraception. That if you're taking a pill that is impacting your hormones,
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
that impact not just the function of your ovaries, but also impact the function of your brain. So that's unequivocal. I'm not making this up. It's science. Let that sink in. This pill that I'm taking is not just affecting my ovaries, it's affecting my brain. Just let that sink in and then just be mindful of it.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And if something's happening with your brain function over the next year or two, like you're developing new onset psychiatric symptoms, be open to the possibility that could it be that the contraceptive pill that I'm taking? And be open to at least having that conversation with your healthcare provider Really pushing them, don't let them dismiss this. This is a real thing.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
This pill is affecting my brain and now all of a sudden I'm having new onset psychiatric symptoms. You say that and most healthcare professionals will, if you put it together like that for them, most healthcare professionals will say, yeah, you're right. Let's try a different pill or let's stop the pill. Maybe we could try an IUD or maybe you and your boyfriend could find some other.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Or whatever. Maybe, yeah, we can find a new solution. And I really would strongly push that the new solution should not be let's add an antidepressant to the mix.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
I just see it go wrong too often.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And the reality is metabolism is those things and is related to those things and does largely influence those things. But metabolism is so much more than just those things. You know, the simplest definition is probably it's a process that all living organisms use to take food, oxygen, and some other critical ingredients like vitamins and nutrients and turn those into food.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
No, I mean, this is really helpful. I want to thank you so much for, I mean, serving me is serving people who are struggling with their mental health.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Yeah.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Because there are millions of them. Yes. So if we can help those people, I love the idea of sending this episode to a friend or family member. And then I would actually just add, follow up with them. Yes. Say, how are you doing? And when they, after they give you their polite answer, I'm fine.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
I'm fine. How are you really doing? Yeah, yeah. I actually sent this to you because I really sometimes worry about you or I've noticed this, whatever concern you had about them that made you send this to them. And ultimately what that's about is I want you to just be a really good friend and resource to people.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Even if you yourself are struggling with your own mental health, you can be a rock for someone else. Just let them know. Like I'm here for you.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Yes.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
I've got your back. We can get through this together. And, um, that, In extreme cases, that can save a life.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
energy or building blocks for cells and that that is what fuels our bodies it's how our bodies grow it's how our cells repair themselves but it's also how our cells end up making hormones it's how they make neurotransmitters it's how our muscles move in a way metabolism is biology So in that sense, it's like this overwhelmingly complicated thing.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
Depending on where in the body it's occurring. Yes. When your, when your biology is off or when your metabolism is off, you are likely going to have signs or symptoms of a problem somewhere in your brain or body. And that could be high blood pressure, high blood glucose in the form of prediabetes or diabetes. It could be obesity.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
It could be depression or anxiety or ADHD symptoms or seizures or Alzheimer's disease. It spans all of those. Again, not because metabolism is simple, but because metabolism is ridiculously complicated and all-encompassing when it comes to biology. So in that sense, some researchers will even push back on me and say, Chris, come on, that's not very helpful.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
If you're saying that all of this is related to biology, then that doesn't really help us much. But once you see this big picture and you see these different puzzle pieces and how they all fit together, you can actually come up with shockingly revolutionary treatments sometimes for people with mild mental health conditions all the way to severe, crippling, disabling mental health conditions.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
And at the same time you're helping them improve their mental health, you can help them achieve a healthy weight and lower their blood pressure and live longer and live healthier.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
That is exactly right. That's the way most people think of...
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
You're a shrink and you lay people on couches and you talk to them about their dreams and their past and their childhood and everything else. Or you're focused on these chemical imbalances, all these neurotransmitters, and you're prescribing pills. Lithium, Prozac, Zoloft, Xanax, Klonopin, Depakote, whatever. You're just prescribing pills. to try to modulate the brain activity.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
I think that is... You know, what you just said is 100% correct. And what you just said, when you say it like that, it sounds so obvious. Most people are going to think, well, duh. But we in the mental health field, I just want to make clear how disruptive this is to the current paradigm. We in the mental health field prescribe pills that cause obesity. That cause it. Cause it.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
We give people pills and they gain 100 pounds in one year. Really? At the same time, they have dramatic increase in cardiovascular risk factors. They develop prediabetes or diabetes. And at least in the elderly, some of the medications we prescribe cause premature death. Wow. And this is not like conspiracy theory stuff. These warnings are all listed on the package inserts issued by the FDA.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
They take it anyways because that's what the doctors are telling them they need.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
They're desperate. Yeah. They're desperate. And they are, you know, in extreme cases, lives are ruined. Families are ruined also. Families are, like, lives are ruined. So this broken, vulnerable family, whether it's your parents, your spouse, your children...
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
take this vulnerable human being to a doctor and say please I'm begging you help us right and the doctor says we're gonna issue we're gonna use these pills and these pills are gonna help your symptoms they are antipsychotics they are mood stabilizers they are antidepressants they are whatever And again, not all of the pills have the same side effects.
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
So I'm not here to berate psychiatric meds altogether. I think psychiatric meds can save people's lives. I think some people really benefit from them. So I can play both sides of that fence. But the most disruptive part about linking physical health with mental health
Serialously with Annie Elise
238: The Facebook Killer: Murder or Self-Defense? | The Twisted Case of Derek Medina
are linking metabolic health with mental health, is that so many of our standard treatments are doing exactly the opposite of what we want to do. And that needs to change. And it needs to change as soon as possible because lives are at stake and human beings are suffering.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
This Stuck With Me: Harvard Psychiatrist Reveals The #1 Foods You Must STOP Eating To Heal Your Brain
And it also might provide an avenue of hope and healing and recovery. And I use the word might as the scientist in me, as the clinician in me. I know without certainty it can heal and recover people who have had chronic, horrible, debilitating mental illnesses.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
This Stuck With Me: Harvard Psychiatrist Reveals The #1 Foods You Must STOP Eating To Heal Your Brain
And I know from my own personal story, when I was in medical school and residency, I'm still suffering from low-grade depression, OCD, other symptoms. But I also developed what's called metabolic syndrome. I developed high blood pressure, high cholesterol. pre-diabetes. And I wasn't really overweight. I was exercising.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
This Stuck With Me: Harvard Psychiatrist Reveals The #1 Foods You Must STOP Eating To Heal Your Brain
I was following a low-fat diet, mostly of processed foods because they're cheaper. But that was the diet that was touted as a healthy diet. It was low in fat. And as long as it was low in fat, that was supposed to be good for us. And my metabolic syndrome just kept getting worse and worse. And so at some point,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
This Stuck With Me: Harvard Psychiatrist Reveals The #1 Foods You Must STOP Eating To Heal Your Brain
In order to treat my metabolic syndrome, I changed my diet to essentially a low carbohydrate diet. And within three months, my metabolic syndrome was completely gone. But the thing that just dumbfounded me was that my mental health was better than it had ever been in my entire life. And I just couldn't believe what I was experiencing. I didn't know that I could be that kind of a person.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
This Stuck With Me: Harvard Psychiatrist Reveals The #1 Foods You Must STOP Eating To Heal Your Brain
I didn't know that I could be happy and positive and energetic and confident. I had no idea. I didn't think that was in me. And by changing my diet, all of those things happened.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
This Stuck With Me: Harvard Psychiatrist Reveals The #1 Foods You Must STOP Eating To Heal Your Brain
Most people have no clue that diet plays any role in mental illness or mental health. 95% of mental health clinicians think it's laughable that anybody would suggest that diet can play a role in mental illness. They think it's laughable. What do you think? I think if you do a deep dive into the science... all of the science that we have accumulated over the last 100 years and longer sometimes.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
This Stuck With Me: Harvard Psychiatrist Reveals The #1 Foods You Must STOP Eating To Heal Your Brain
100%.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
This Stuck With Me: Harvard Psychiatrist Reveals The #1 Foods You Must STOP Eating To Heal Your Brain
So I actually don't have a one-size-fits-all prescription. Okay. And so I want to say that up front. So I would want to know who am I working with and how is their mental and metabolic health now? Me. So you. Yeah. So I would want more details. Are you having symptoms of any mental health condition?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
This Stuck With Me: Harvard Psychiatrist Reveals The #1 Foods You Must STOP Eating To Heal Your Brain
And so I would want to know, do you feel like you have anxiety for no good reason?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
This Stuck With Me: Harvard Psychiatrist Reveals The #1 Foods You Must STOP Eating To Heal Your Brain
But you think of something adverse or stressful? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the one thing I would say about that And we could get into a lot more details, which we probably don't want to do now. I don't mind. Podcast. But my strong guess, based on just what you've said, is that that level of stress and anxiety... is quote unquote normal.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
This Stuck With Me: Harvard Psychiatrist Reveals The #1 Foods You Must STOP Eating To Heal Your Brain
If you do a deep dive into all of those neuroimaging studies that we've been doing, all of the genetic studies we've been doing, all of the neurotransmitter and hormone studies and trauma studies and adverse childhood experiences studies, if you do a deep dive into the science, And you understand what is happening in the brains and bodies of people as a consequence of those things.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
This Stuck With Me: Harvard Psychiatrist Reveals The #1 Foods You Must STOP Eating To Heal Your Brain
Because you are sensing, I have to go do something that's really scary right now. Or I have to go do something that's going to ruin someone's life or that might threaten my success. It is normal and actually healthy to have anxiety and stress in those situations.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
This Stuck With Me: Harvard Psychiatrist Reveals The #1 Foods You Must STOP Eating To Heal Your Brain
The anxiety and stress can sometimes be quite helpful and adaptive because it can make you pause and reflect on, is this really what I want to do? As opposed to being overly confident and just proceeding. Your own personal history almost certainly informs your level of stress response. And again, so if you go back to your own traumas,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
This Stuck With Me: Harvard Psychiatrist Reveals The #1 Foods You Must STOP Eating To Heal Your Brain
you're going to remember when I'm facing a situation like this, it's helpful to be on hyper alert. It's helpful to be hyper vigilant. And your body and brain will remember that helped you navigate this safely and effectively.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
This Stuck With Me: Harvard Psychiatrist Reveals The #1 Foods You Must STOP Eating To Heal Your Brain
Yes. I think yes. We've got... there's no way we will ever be able to do a human randomized controlled trial to test that precise hypothesis. But we have large epidemiological studies that strongly suggest that people who eat a lot of ultra-processed food have higher risk for developing depression, anxiety, and other mental disorders.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
This Stuck With Me: Harvard Psychiatrist Reveals The #1 Foods You Must STOP Eating To Heal Your Brain
And based on the science, the granular science, based on animal models, so we can do that to mice and rats. And in fact, that's exactly what we see in mice and rats. We feed them an obesogenic diet, which is usually high in fat, high in carbohydrates, ultra-processed foods. Some researchers have fed rats and mice cafeteria diets where they feed them a lot of delicious junk food.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
This Stuck With Me: Harvard Psychiatrist Reveals The #1 Foods You Must STOP Eating To Heal Your Brain
And those mice develop higher rates of obesity, but also higher rates of Diabetes and prediabetes. And oh, by the way, also higher rates of depression and anxiety. Because those are the two things that we can kind of measure in mice and rats. We can't necessarily measure ADHD symptoms. It's really hard to actually measure psychotic symptoms.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
This Stuck With Me: Harvard Psychiatrist Reveals The #1 Foods You Must STOP Eating To Heal Your Brain
But we can measure depression and anxiety symptoms pretty well in animals. And so in animal models, we know that that's unequivocally true.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
This Stuck With Me: Harvard Psychiatrist Reveals The #1 Foods You Must STOP Eating To Heal Your Brain
Yes. And insulin resistance at age nine. increases your chances of developing a psychotic at-risk mental state, which is like meaning you're at high risk for developing schizophrenia or bipolar disorder 500%. And Alzheimer's? All mental disorders are associated with an increased risk of Alzheimer's disease. Anywhere from the lowest is 50% increased risk and the highest is 2000% increased risk.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
This Stuck With Me: Harvard Psychiatrist Reveals The #1 Foods You Must STOP Eating To Heal Your Brain
Or what could be causing those things. If you put it all together, you come to this soundbite that mental disorders are metabolic in nature. And there is no reason. questioning whatsoever it is incontrovertible that diet plays a massive huge role in metabolism and therefore i believe very strongly that diet might be playing a role in the mental health epidemic that we are seeing
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
This Stuck With Me: Harvard Psychiatrist Reveals The #1 Foods You Must STOP Eating To Heal Your Brain
Metabolism. And at the end of the day, you have to talk about mitochondria in order to understand metabolism. Only 7% of U.S. citizens have no signs of metabolic health problems, meaning 93% or so of U.S. residents will have at least one of the biomarkers of metabolic syndrome.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
This Stuck With Me: Harvard Psychiatrist Reveals The #1 Foods You Must STOP Eating To Heal Your Brain
meaning they have prediabetes or abnormal lipids or high blood pressure or abdominal obesity or abdominal fat, excessive abdominal fat.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
This Stuck With Me: Harvard Psychiatrist Reveals The #1 Foods You Must STOP Eating To Heal Your Brain
So those people, diet interventions would absolutely be a part of a healing strategy. a part of it, not the only strategy. I would wanna know about their sleep. I would wanna know about substance use. I would wanna know about medications, lots of things. But for dietary interventions, I would wanna meet them where they're at and just find out, well, where are you at? What are you eating?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
This Stuck With Me: Harvard Psychiatrist Reveals The #1 Foods You Must STOP Eating To Heal Your Brain
Do you have preferences or demands for what your diet should be?