International Low Carb Awareness Week 2023

01-07 December 2023

In this presentation, I'll take you on an exciting journey through the fascinating realm of the low carbohydrate ketogenic diet (KD), exploring its medical and therapeutic applications, and its profound impact on patients in the fields of neurology and psychiatry. I will give you a captivating glimpse into the world of Metabolic Syndrome (MetS) and unravel its underlying mechanisms, dissect its potential connection to stroke, and discover how the innovative Therapeutic Carbohydrate Reduction (TCR) or Ketogenic Metabolic Therapy (KMT) serves as a powerful tool in my neurology practice, effectively addressing and preventing associated complications, with a special focus on stroke.

This presentation also tackles the important role of Ketogenic Metabolic Therapy (KMT) for patients with epilepsy, dementia/Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD), Multiple Sclerosis (MS), migraine headache and neuropsychiatric/mental health problems.

Christopher Palmer, MD received his medical degree from Washington University School of Medicine. He did his internship and psychiatry residency at McLean Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Harvard Medical School. He is currently the Director of the Department of Postgraduate and Continuing Education at McLean Hospital and an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. For the past 25 years, he has been an academic physician with administrative, research, educational, and clinical roles.

Dr. Palmer leads McLean Hospital’s Department of Postgraduate and Continuing Education. In this role, he has developed hundreds of educational conferences, workshops, Grand Rounds, and other professional educational activities, most of them under the aegis of Harvard Medical School. He has also held numerous leadership positions in the continuing education field beyond McLean Hospital’s program, including serving on leadership, advisory, and strategic planning committees of Harvard Medical School, Partners Healthcare, the Massachusetts Medical Society, and the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME).

Dr. Palmer’s clinical practice has focused on helping people suffering from treatment-resistant mental illnesses, including mood disorders, psychotic disorders, and personality disorders. Most recently, his research interests have turned to the areas of metabolism, metabolic disorders, and their connection to mental disorders. He is focused on combining and understanding epidemiological data, basic science research, and clinical studies in order to better understand what role metabolism plays in mental illness.

Dr. Palmer has been pioneering the use of the ketogenic diet and its applications in psychiatry. He has published case studies, pilot clinical trials, and is actively conducting research in this area. He is also working with researchers from around the world to further explore this treatment in clinical populations as well as pursuing more basic science research.

Filmed at the Emerging Science of Carbohydrate Restriction and Nutritional Ketosis, Scientific Sessions at The Ohio State University

An impressive body of scientific evidence over the last 15 years documents long term benefits of carbohydrate-restricted, especially ketogenic, diets. We now understand molecular mechanisms and why they work. Popular books and articles now challenge the advice ‘carbohydrates are good and fats are bad.’ Circa mid-19th century urinary ketones were identified in diabetics sealing their toxic label for the next 150 years. Despite work four decades ago showing ketones were highly functional metabolites, they are still misidentified as toxic byproducts of fat metabolism. The vilification of fat by regulatory and popular dogma perpetuates this myth. But the nutrition-metabolic landscape is improving dramatically.

A growing number of researchers have contributed to what is now a critical mass of science that provides compelling clinical evidence that ketogenic diets uniquely benefit weight loss, pre-diabetes, and type-2 diabetes. In the last five years, basic scientists have discovered that b-hydroxybutyrate (BHB), the primary circulating ketone, is a potent signaling molecule that decreases inflammation and oxidative stress. BHB has been suggested to be a longevity metabolite, with strong support from recently published mouse studies showing decreased midlife mortality and extended longevity and healthspan. Although type-2 diabetes is often described as a chronic progressive disease, emerging evidence indicates that sustained nutritional ketosis can reverses the disease. There is growing interest in studying potential therapeutic effects of ketosis on cardiovascular diseases, cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. There are even reasons certain athletes may benefit from nutritional ketosis and ketone supplements ─ debunking the long-standing dogma that high carbohydrate intake is required to perform optimally.

With the support of the well-established Ohio State Food Innovation Center, this conference will bring together the top experts in these fields to share what has been achieved and what remains to be done to advance this exciting field of scientific discovery.

What we put into our bodies directly affects our health, how we function and how we think. Can nutrition play a role in certain mental and neurological disorders?  

Our resident expert, Dr. Eric Westman, discusses this topic and answers those questions.

Can fasting and keto heal our brains? Dr Phillips is trialling a radical but simple new treatment approach: using metabolic therapies such as fasting and very low carbohydrate Ketogenic diets. The aim is to restore mitochondrial function, which he sees as the foundation for health.

In this webinar Matthew unpacks his research findings and shares how they may help you.

In this presentation from the 2020 Parkinson's Insight Congress, Dr Matthew Phillips discusses the potential applications of fasting and ketogenic diets to Parkinson's disease, as well as the results of the 2018 Waikato Hospital Parkinson's Dietary Study.

In this video Dr Newport talks about some of the trials which are using MCT and ketogenic diets to address mild cognitive impairment and Parkinson's.

A new preliminary study reports a ketogenic diet significantly improves quality of life and health scores for people with multiple sclerosis (MS). Given the lack of safe and effective therapies for MS, this is very encouraging to have a lifestyle-based therapy that can make a positive difference in the lives of people with MS.

A new study reports a ketogenic diet can significantly improve depression, bipolar, and schizoaffective disorders. More evidence continues to accumulate showing the potential use of ketogenic diets in various mental health conditions. It's time to take this seriously. Ongoing research will soon provide even more data to support if keto diets should be a standard treatment option.

If you’re considering starting a ketogenic diet to treat symptoms of psychiatric illness, it is important to find a practitioner who can help guide you through the process. In this video, appropriate for both clinicians and individuals, expert clinicians share their recommendations for getting started with a ketogenic intervention. Featured in this video are Georgia Ede, MD, Chris Palmer, MD, Ignacio Cuaranta, MD, dietician Beth Zupec-Kania, licensed mental health counselor Nicole Laurent, and others. If you are curious about using the ketogenic diet to improve symptoms of psychiatric illness, this is the video for you!

Therapeutic nutritional ketosis can be part of a comprehensive treatment for a broad spectrum of psychiatric illnesses – from anxiety, OCD, PTSD, and mild or moderate depression to Bipolar Disorder, Schizophrenia, Major Depressive Disorder, and everything in between. So, who should consider using therapeutic ketosis to treat mental illness?

In this video, Dr. Bret Scher speaks with Metabolic Psychiatry experts Drs. Georgia Ede and Chris Palmer to help you better understand who may benefit from a ketogenic diet.

In this private feed episode of The Metabolic Link, psychiatrist Dr. Georgia Ede shares groundbreaking research on using ketogenic diets to treat psychiatric disorders. She makes the case that emerging science shows many psychiatric symptoms may be rooted in treatable metabolic dysfunction.

She takes us through evidence that conditions like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression share common biochemical imbalances that can be targeted with ketogenic diets.

Many patients in case studies and early clinical trials have shown reduced inflammation, balanced neurotransmitters, enhanced insulin sensitivity, and improved psychiatric symptoms. Thanks to this encouraging preliminary data, the ketogenic diet is being studied clinically, but large human trials are needed to fully understand its safety and efficacy in psychiatric disease.

Interventions like ketogenic metabolic therapy (aka ketogenic diet) are being used to treat serious mental illnesses like major depression, bipolar and schizophrenia.  Georgia Ede, MD is a pioneer in Metabolic Psychiatry, and has used a ketogenic diet to help hundreds of patients improve their symptoms of mental illess. 

Dr. Georgia Ede is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and worldwide expert in nutritional psychiatry. Dr. Ede has over a decade of real-world experience using nutrition as a treatment for mental illness. In her talk, she describes her real-world experience using ketogenic metabolic interventions to restore brain function in psychiatric disorders.

Is the key to optimizing physical and mental health eating so-called superfoods like dark chocolate, red wine and blueberries? Dr. Georgia Ede, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and metabolic psychiatry pioneer, shares counter-evidence to mainstream views on the optimal human diet. In this interview, she discusses nourishing the brain by eating the right foods, protecting it by staying away from the wrong foods, and energizing it by cultivating a healthy metabolism. Ede argues that the key to healing, protecting, and enhancing brain function is keeping blood sugar (glucose) and insulin within a healthy range.

Drawing on over a decade of treating patients with a metabolic approach to mental health conditions, Dr. Ede shares the clinical and scientific evidence behind brain food in Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind. It is a practical, comprehensive guide for anyone interested in optimizing brain health If you’re interested in how nutrition can lead to improved mental health.

Early data from the first clinical pilot trial of the ketogenic metabolic intervention for serious mental illness shows promising results that could transform how the field of psychiatry understands and treats serious mental illness. 

“In this pilot study, we taught 22 patients with severe bipolar disorder or schizophrenia how to maintain a ketogenic diet. It was all real-world, meaning we didn’t control food intake in a temporary inpatient setting and we didn’t deliver meals, but instead taught patients how to buy and prepare their own food. Despite the severity of their mental illness, our patients were able to successfully adopt the ketogenic diet as a lifestyle change. However, there is a selection bias, as those who entered the study may have been a more motivated population.

After four months, our preliminary results were very encouraging: They included a 30% reduction in central abdominal fat, an 11% drop in BMI and a 17% drop in cardiac inflammation, as measured by a marker called high-sensitivity C-reactive protein. Perhaps most importantly, we saw a 30% improvement in our patients’ clinical global impression inventory, which is the gold-standard psychiatric assessment we use to evaluate symptoms of mental illness. Additionally, we saw improvements in sleep.”

Dr. Shebani Sethi is a board-certified physician in psychiatry and obesity medicine, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, and the founding director of Stanford's metabolic psychiatry clinic. In this talk, she describes the preliminary findings from her pioneering study on ketogenic diets and mental illness.

The ketogenic diet may help reduce depression and other symptoms in bipolar disorder. The ketogenic diet also helps metabolic health and reduces the risk for cardiometabolic diseases. The risk for cardiometabolic diseases is elevated in people with bipolar disorder when compared to the general population. Dr. Iain Campbell, Dr. Bret Scher, and Dr. Dominic D’Agostino discuss how the state of ketosis has beneficial effects on brain neurotransmitters and how those benefits have been life-changing physically and mentally for Dr. Campbell, who has bipolar disorder.

Ketogenic diets may be the most effective lifestyle therapy for mental health disorders. International expert Dr. Chris Palmer and I discuss the state of the field and how he sees keto diets fitting into mental health treatment programs.