Dr. Wolfgang Marx

This was a dietary intervention that was added on top of the antidepressant and psychotherapy that the participants are receiving.

So it's very much a combination with everything else that we know works.

So essentially what a ketogenic diet is, is a diet where you restrict the level of carbohydrates that you consume to quite low levels.

So it's

various grams sort of differ, but it's somewhere around less than 50 grams per day.

And if we think about what you might have during a typical sort of Western diet, that is quite low.

You know, people might have more than 50 grams or around 50 grams in their cereal for breakfast.

So, yeah, it's definitely a lot lower than what many people might be used to.

But the reason why this ketogenic diet exists

restricts carbohydrates is because when your body doesn't get that energy source from carbohydrates it starts to look around for another energy source because our body is amazing and very adaptable and all the rest of it and what it shifts to is these ketone bodies so it's essentially a shift from our body using glucose as our primary energy source to using ketones which is a

set of compounds that are primarily derived from our fat sources that we eat from our diet.

So if I sort of step back a little bit, in mental disorders, we see from neuroimaging studies, from metabolic studies, from biomarker studies, that there seems to be differences in our metabolism, our energy metabolism.

So the mitochondria, at least in some people with mental disorders,

doesn't behave the same way as what happens in people without a diagnosis.

And so the theory is if we can move to an alternative energy source that doesn't go through these same pathways, we might kind of sidestep some of these abnormalities and be able to provide

our brain cells with um the energy that it needs um compared to uh when it's based primarily on glucose where it's it's not really getting the fuel that it needs sort of directly um i will say i think you know in said it well is that right now there's you know the sort of

preclinical research.

There's some pilot studies.

There's a lot of very interesting published case studies and case reports and the rest.

But we don't have that high quality randomized controlled trial evidence to say which way this is happening.