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.
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And we know that diet also plays a role. And one of the challenges, and I wonder how do you address this with your colleagues? Because this is something I've found even at Cleveland Clinic, working with some of the researchers, they're like, Well, we can't do everything at once. We can't do diet and exercise and supplements and sleep.
And I'm like, we can only do one thing at once because we don't know what's going to work. And I'm like, wait a minute. If you want to grow a nice garden, you don't just go, I'm going to give the water the plant water only, but no soil or sunlight. And then I'm going to give it sunlight, but no soil or water. It doesn't respect the laws of nature.
So how do you kind of battle that within the medical paradigm? Because it's really tough. We're looking for the single drug, for the single disease, or the single outcome, which is a model based on infection, which can work. But even then it's flawed because it depends on the biological terrain and why some people get sick and don't, or why some people die and don't. We see that with COVID.
Not everybody gets sick
It's like autism, right?
Yeah, you were talking earlier about this idea of comorbidities, which is a term we use in medicine to describe diseases that occur in the same patient. So if you have high blood pressure, diabetes, depression, reflux, we call these comorbidities. But we were talking earlier about how they may not really be unrelated, that in fact, they may be very connected.
And it sounds like from your observations, you made the conclusion that maybe it wasn't a coincidence that the fact that people who were overweight or unhealthy also had mental health issues, maybe there was a relationship, nutritional deficiencies, metabolic issues. You talk a lot about insulin resistance.
So how did you come to sort of understand that that was really going on, that the biology of that was something that was real?
Which is incredible because when you look at the level of mental illness in society, it's one of the biggest causes of disability. And one of the biggest costs is depression and anxiety. And I remember when I was seeing patients early on, treating them for insulin resistance and prediabetes and other issues or gut issues or diabetes.
other factors that were going on related to autoimmune disease or inflammation, and we would get them healthy, they would sort of say, wait, you know, my depression went away. My anxiety went away. My panic attacks are gone. My bipolar disease is better. My ADD is better. And I'm like, well, how did that happen?
And then you begin to go down the rabbit hole and you begin to look at the biology of what's happening. And one of the, I think the greatest discoveries around mental health is that it's an inflammatory problem very often that the brain is inflamed, but the brain can't say, ouch, like you have a sore throat or, you know, a swollen ankle. It manifests as all these psychiatric symptoms.
So I'd love to be sort of take us down the road of how inflammation is connected to mental illness and what the approaches that you're using to help correct that.
Wait, so your brain chemistry gets screwed up when you eat processed food and sugar, is what you're saying?
So what you're saying is people who are overweight and obese often are very malnourished and vitamin and nutrient deficient.
That's sort of a paradox, right?
They're eating all this food. Why are they nutritionally deficient? But they're actually among the most malnourished.
They're looking in all the wrong places for the nutrients. They're eating more and more food. And I think a study from Kevin Hall and others showed that if you let people eat as much as they want and you give them ultra-processed food versus whole foods, they'll eat about 500 calories more a day of ultra-processed food because they'll keep eating and they're hungry and they keep driving.
And you talk a lot about it in your work, about the biology of what these do to your brain in terms of dopamine and the addiction reward pathways in the brain that make you... literally become addicted to these compounds and how that affects you.
And it's more like a coffee filter. You know, it's a sip.
People go, it's like emotional eating. It's not really biological, true addiction. What you're saying is this is really a true biological addiction, just like heroin or cocaine or alcohol, that you get withdrawal, you get cravings, you get increased need for more and more of the substance to receive the same pleasure.
Showing 101–120 of 159 · page 6 of 8
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