Dr. Shebani Sethi
speaker
159 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Dr. Shebani Sethi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
And that by giving them mitochondrial nutrients, basically the cofactors and helpers that actually help you turn food and oxygen into energy, like CoQ10, for example, or B vitamins, and just some really simple things that are very inexpensive, that these kids would literally get better from autism.
That's not to say that all autism is just caused by these nutrition deficients or mitochondrial issues, but it's one of the things that we see. So there's a lot of people coming at this from a lot of different areas. You're in the psychiatric lane, but you know, the neurological lane is seeing this too, and so is pretty much every other, the other issue.
I mean, whether it's your weight or whether it's heart disease or diabetes or Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, so many diseases are really related to mitochondrial dysfunction. So it's great. It's really amazing. And I think that this is such a breakthrough. And I think, you know, there's, how besides the ketogenic diet are you approaching addressing mitochondrial function? Because for example,
In autism, they're using these mitochondrial cocktails and supplements to help.
Or genetics or other things we may not even understand. Yes. Right? Yeah, it's so true. And I just remember being in my clinic, you know, looking at the patients I saw and seeing not really treating their psychiatric problems, but they would come in with autoimmune disease or digestive problems or arthritis or whatever, migraine. And I would just do what I did.
And they would get better from other stuff. Like you're saying, you were treating this guy's weight loss and his schizophrenia got better. And I was like, wow, I call myself the accidental psychiatrist. I never intended to figure this stuff out, but I could not ignore what was in front of me. And I had a patient with ADD once who was...
so severe and he had you know really terrible inflammatory symptoms as well asthma and allergies and gut issues and migraines and you know of course the doctor who was treating him the psychiatrist just treated add with the stimulant and ignored the other things because of course they're not related but i treated it i just cleaned up his diet i gave him some vitamins i cleaned up his gut i you know very simple things and the mother brought home his homework and we'll post in the show notes because it's pretty impressive
about his homework before and after two months just of changing these few things. And these kids often have what we call dysgraphia. They're handwriting. You can't read it. He's 12 years old. It looks like somebody who's got some kind of severe disorder with writing or something. I don't know. And it went from severe dysgraphia to perfect penmanship in two months. And I'm like,
Holy crap, what is going on in the brain? How does it go from being chaotic and disorganized and asynchronous, to being completely coherent? And it was really a mind-blowing concept for me, and that's where it gave me the idea of the book. I don't know if you know this, Chris, but the origin of functional medicine was in psychiatry from Abraham Hoffer.
Yeah. So I'm going to tell you this quick story. I don't want to dive into some more of your work. I don't want to take too much of a sidetrack. But it's fascinating. Abraham Hoffer was a Canadian psychiatrist who treated schizophrenia. And he sort of somehow got the idea that there was some abnormal molecules going on in the brain and that it was related to some kind of nutrient problem.
So he gave high dose of niacin and zinc and B6 and magnesium. And many of these patients would improve or get better. And so he began to write about this, talk about this, and then he was friends with Linus Pauling. And Linus Pauling is a two-time Nobel Prize winner.
He discovered the structure of proteins and he almost discovered the – well, he kind of did discover the double helix of the DNA and he told his son about it. But then they went – his son went to London and hang out with Watson and Crick and they kind of took it. That's a whole other story. And then he wrote an article in Science magazine.
I mean, Science, which is a very prominent medical journal, which I don't know if you've actually seen. It's called Orthomolecular Psychiatry written by Linus Pauling. Have you seen that?
Yeah, well, that was the genesis of that. And essentially, the idea was that we could correct ortho means to straighten, and molecular means molecules, to straighten the molecules of the brain by using high doses of nutrients to move chemical reactions to their completion. Now, it was a very simple idea, and it was super complicated paper, very scientific, but it sort of started this process.
And then Jeffrey Bland, who was really the father of functional medicine, was a student of Linus Pauling's. And Linus Pauling was kind of thought of as a crackpot later in his life. I mean, I don't know if you're going to call anybody who won two Nobel Prizes a crackpot, but he was kind of dismissed for his ideas about vitamin C and everything.
But he was onto something, and this is what we're seeing now. So I think your work is so important, and your ability to actually communicate this, to look at the science is so important. So talk about how we can think about some of the inflammation process in mental health and metabolic health and what we need to do to fix that.
People are listening, well, I hear this, my mitochondria aren't working, inflammation's connected. How do I start to address that in myself?
By the way, the brain has got the most mitochondria per cell of any organ in the body. So it's really important.
But you can do something about it when the baby's born and you can fix the baby afterwards.
One of the best doorways to the mitochondria is... Exercise, right? It stimulates the growth of new mitochondria, improves the function of mitochondria. It's quite important. And it also cuts down inflammation and activates your antioxidant enzymes. It has so many benefits. And we know it's better that they quill into many drugs for depression if you just exercise regularly, vigorously, right?
Showing 81–100 of 159 · page 5 of 8
← Previous
Next →