Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Dr. Chris Palmer on How Brain Energy Improves Mental Health EP 216

Episode Date: November 17, 2022

Today I talk to Dr. Chris Palmer (@chrispalmermd), a Harvard psychiatrist and neuroscientist researching the link between metabolism and mental health. He is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the Director of the Department of Postgraduate and Continuing Education at McLean Hospital. What We Discuss with Dr. Chris Palmer If you're interested in alternative health and want to learn more about the role brain energy and metabolism play in our mental health, this episode is for you! Dr. Chris Palmer discusses the surprising discovery of how brain energy affects mental illness in an easy-to-understand way. Thanks for listening! Dr. Palmer has generated the first sweeping theory of what causes mental illness, incorporating existing research into one unifying idea—the brain energy theory of mental illness. You can discover more in his new book Brain Energy: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Understanding Mental Health—and Improving Treatment for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More. -►Purchase Brain Energy: https://amzn.to/3Gppbb4  (Amazon Link) Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/dr-chris-palmer-brain-energy-mental-health/  Brought to you by Indeed, Masterclass, and InsideTracker. --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/5m6Ypo8pP1U  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Did you hear my interview with Robin Sharma, one of the top personal mastery and leadership coaches in the world and a multiple-time number-one New York Times best-selling author? Catch up with episode 209: Robin Sharma on Why Changing the World Starts by Changing Ourselves ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Gear: https://www.zazzle.com/store/passion_sruck_podcast Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/ 

Coming up next on the Passion Struck Podcast, mental disorders are increasing in prevalence as we talked about, but they are now the leading cause of disability in the United States and on planet Earth. And the number one diagnosis that disables more human beings than any other medical diagnosis medical diagnosis is depression, plain old depression. Depression is now the second most common chronic health disorder second only in prevalence to obesity. Welcome to PassionStrock. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week

with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to episode 216 of PassionStruck, recently ranked as one of the top 50 most inspirational podcasts of 2022. And thank you for each and every one of you for taking your time out of your day.

To come back and listen and learn, how to live better, be better, and impact the world. And if you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here. Or you would just like to introduce it to a friend or family member. We now have episode starter packs which are collections of your favorite episodes that we organize in the convenient topics both on Spotify and on passionstruck.com slash starter packs. In case you missed my episode from earlier in the week, it was with Professor Max Bezerman and we discuss his brand new book, Complicit, which just released this Tuesday. I also wanted to thank you for your ratings

and reviews. They go such a long way in helping us improve the rating of this podcast, as well as braiding a more robust passion-struck community. And I know our guests love it when you write reviews about their episodes. Now, let's talk about today's episode, which tackles the new understanding of mental illness, from symptoms and risk factors to what is happening in our brain cells. We will address questions today, such as why classifying mental disorders as separate conditions is misleading. The clear connection between mental illness and disorders linked to metabolism, including

diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, pain disorders, obesity, Alzheimer's disease, and epilepsy. The link between metabolism and every known factor to play a role in mental health, including genetics, inflammation, hormones, neurotransmitters, sleep, stress, and trauma. The evidence that current mental health treatments, including both medications and therapies, likely work by affecting metabolism. New treatments that are available to listeners today that can promote long-term healing and so much more. Our guest, Christopher Palmer, is an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and the director of the Department of Postgraduate and Continuing Education at the McLean Hospital. For the past 25 years, he has been

an academic physician with administrative research, educational and clinical roles. He is the author of the brand new book, which released this week, Brain Energy, a revolutionary breakthrough in understanding mental health and improving treatment for anxiety, depression, OCD, PTSD, and more. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now let that journey begin. I am ecstatic today to welcome Dr. Christopher Palmer to the Past and Strut podcast. Welcome, Chris. Thank you, John.

Thanks for inviting me. Well, I wanted to congratulate you on the release of your new amazing book, Brain Energy. Thank you so much for coming on the show to discuss that. Yeah, thanks for having me. Well, you start brain energy with some pretty shocking statistics on the state of mental illness worldwide. I was even shocked when I read them and I happen to know a lot about mental illness and

I didn't realize just how big an epidemic this is becoming. You've come to the conclusion that the evidence shows that it's not just that recognition of mental illness is rising. Disorders themselves are actually on the rise. Can you discuss some of these statistics for the audience and why you think this is the case? numerous researchers, the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, and many others have been tracking statistics on mental illness throughout the world for decades. And the overarching conclusion is that the disorders are actually increasing.

A lot of people question this or debate this or challenge this and they assume that it's just people are talking about mental illness more or screening for it. Celebrities are coming out with their mental illness struggles. So maybe people are just getting recognition a little more or they're getting diagnosed because they feel more comfortable, it's less stigmatized, and all of those things are true, and all of those things are playing a role in more people getting mental health diagnoses and treatment. But the shocking and sad and tragic answer is that the disorders themselves are actually increasing and in some cases skyrocketing. And this is across the board for all mental disorders. It's not just people being stressed and burned out, which yes, those things are true, but this applies to most of the mental disorders. So it applies to bipolar disorder, chronic depression,

but even a disorder, that some people question whether it's even a mental disorder, something like autism spectrum disorder. So rates have tripled in the last 20 years. Rates of autism have tripled in the last 20 years. And so the world genuinely is in crisis right now. Yeah, some of the statistics were just incredible to me. I think you had 800 million people worldwide suffer or have been diagnosed with a mental illness, but yet 20% of those are in

the United States. What caused me even more concern because I have kids in this age bracket is that the highest rise has been in the ages 18 to 24 if I have that correct. So the absolute highest rise is actually in the very youngest population. So the younger the kids, the higher the rates. The study that I think you're referring to was one in which they didn't actually measure the rates of mental illness and people younger than 18 years old. And so in that particular survey where they were dramatic increases in rates of mental illness.

And again, to just give like one shocking statistic, that youngest group, the youngest cohort that usually gets studied, maybe in adolescence or so, rates of serious mental disorders. This includes bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, chronic debilitating depression, rates of serious mental disorders in that cohort have doubled in the last 10 years, double the rate. Well, a lot of the episodes that we have tried to do this year were on some of the things that I think are sitting on the periphery of this mental illness

epidemic, things such as the chronic states of hopelessness, helplessness, and the one I've most recently covered is loneliness. It was shocking to me that there's been a number of 20 year studies that show that 33% of the entire population worldwide, they measure to 113 countries are lonely. ARP showed that 45% of US adults are lonely. How do you think these conditions I just outlined, hopelessness, helplessness, loneliness, intertwine with this mental illness, epidemic. The real answer is that it's complex, and it's complex in two ways. So if we take those states at their face value and assume that they are the things that start the process, it's obvious to most of us that if somebody is hopeless or frustrated and that leads to hopelessness,

or if somebody is lonely, because they are genuinely socially isolated or ostracized, that people aren't reaching out to them. They're not returning their calls or invitations to go out to dinner, that those things can drive mental illness. No question about it. Hopelessness, helplessness, loneliness can lead to mental illness. The challenge is that mental disorders in and of themselves can then cause people to feel helpless, hopeless, and lonely. Even if they actually, in fact, have the same social contact that they used to have. So when people get clinically depressed, they will often say, I feel so empty. I feel disconnected from people, from if they were a believer in God,

I feel like I feel disconnected from that. I feel disconnected from everything. I am so deeply lonely, I feel alone in the world. I feel like nobody understands me. That can be a symptom of a mental illness. And so the way I think about it is it's this feedback cycle, this vicious cycle where helplessness, hopelessness can lead to mental illness, like depression,

but those illnesses can lead people to feel more helpless, hopeless and lonely. Yeah, and one of the things that I wanted to bring up and I think is really important for people to understand is I've shared a lot on this podcast about my own struggles with mental illness and it reached a point where I was being diagnosed with six, seven, eight different mental health conditions. And so I started doing my own analysis on this because it was as if each person I was talking to was treating these as a separate compartment.

And so I started to read the DSM-5 and ended up reading the entire thing, which I was about that thick, and then started doing a whole bunch of research on it. And several of the authors of the actual DSM have come out publicly and said, it is fatally flawed. It's actually a disaster. And so what I wanted to ask you because you bring it up in the book

is that the whole premise of the DSM-5 is to treat mental illness as separate conditions. And when I look at the body and this podcast really looks at the body as an entire system or systems of systems, why, if we're these systems, our mental disorders being characterized as distinct, because I don't think they are. So you and I are 100% in agreement on that and we are not alone just to set the stage. We are joined by powerful forces such as the National Institutes of Health who abandoned the DSM diagnostic categories over a decade ago, recognizing that the diagnostic categories are not valid constructs. And I want to clarify that what I just said. This isn't to imply that mental disorders are not

real illnesses. They are absolutely real things. They cause tremendous suffering and impairment in people. They can ruin people's lives. So by no means am I here to say that mental illness is not real, because I, as a psychiatrist firmly believe it is real, but our labels for different disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolar, depression, OCD, substance use disorders, our labels are not actually distinct and valid different disorders. On the surface, it makes sense that we label them different things. It really does. Because

when I say those things, even in my mind, I know exactly what I'm talking about. Like, oh, somebody was schizophrenia, that they're hallucinating or have delusions. They're out of touch with reality. Somebody with OCD, they're obsessing a lot and having compulsions. Somebody with depression, they're sad and you can almost tell looking at them that they are depressed. So there's all different things. So they have different symptoms and they often require different treatments or different approaches to treatment. So on the surface, it makes sense that DSM exists and that we have this, these labels to help people talk about different symptoms of mental illness. You volunteering your own story just that tiny bit, you are not alone, you are one of numerous millions and

millions of examples of when you actually look at real people with any one of these diagnoses, if they are getting treatment for a mental health condition, on average, they have about three and a half of these different labels. And you can mix and match how ever you like. So if somebody's got an eating disorder like anorexia, guess what? They're probably also depressed, maybe have some OCD, maybe have a substance use disorder. Same for if you get diagnosed with schizophrenia, you're also probably depressed and have OCD

and have a substance use disorder. And when you, the much more important point is that when you look at any of the root causes or the risk factors for mental disorders, they overlap tremendously. So for instance, adverse childhood events or trauma can actually trigger almost all of the mental disorders, not just PTSD, not just depression, but they can trigger eating disorders, personality disorders, they can trigger substance use disorders, and they can trigger eating disorders, personality disorders, they can trigger substance use disorders and they can even trigger bipolar and schizophrenia.

Yes, and one of the things we're gonna also explore, which I think was a great aspect of your book, is that oftentimes we tend to also look at medical disorders and mental disorders separately. When they're really part of the same system, that's going on. And in my personal case, I was being viewed as this mental illness patient when the bigger cause of my issues was post-concussion syndrome and things that were resulting from it.

But I saw this huge argument start occurring between neurologist who kept pushing that this is a psychological issue and this psychiatrist actually pushing back on them that no, I think he's got a medical issue, but there was no one sitting on top of it who was looking at me as a holistic patient who was driving those decisions. So in my case, I ended up becoming my own general contractor and starting to take control of my medical situation and basically doing my own PhD of research to figure out what the heck was going on with me,

which is why your book is so important because pretty much the findings that you lay out is the system that I implemented within myself to basically cure myself of what was going on. So I can't wait to discuss this, but I think some of the statistics that people need to understand is that these mental illnesses don't have to be chronic in nature.

They don't have to be lifetime sentences that we think these labels give us. Yet what you point out in the book is that two thirds of initial treatment for depression, and I think it's even worse for some of these other mental illnesses aren't solving the issue. And why is that? At the end of the day, it's because right now, if you ask even some of the best neuroscientists

or psychiatrists in the world, if you ask them a really common sense, easy question, what causes mental illness? Yeah, they're going to get a doctor George N. Salts explanation. The good ones will say no one knows for sure. And they'll say we know risk factors. They're the biopsychosocial risk factors, things like genetics, neurotransmitters, trauma, hormones, stress, substance use. But how do those all fit together?

We don't know. Nobody knows what we're doing. And therefore, most of our treatments are we're shooting in the dark in many ways. We're looking for treatments that reduce symptoms, at least a little bit, and we're going with those. I don't mean to disparage the treatments because for some people, the treatments work,

and that's great, and I, by no means, wanna take effective treatments away from anyone, but as you mentioned, if you look at the statistics, nationally and internationally, the majority of people, more than 50% of people getting treatment for a mental disorder end up with a chronic disorder that does not go into full and complete remission. And these people keep taking pills or doing therapy or trying other treatments.

And when one pill works, it might work for a year or two. And then when that hoops out, so to speak, then they go on another pill or they add yet another pill. And this applies certainly to diagnoses like schizophrenia and bipolar, but it even applies to the bread and butter diagnosis of just plain old depression. One study that followed depressed patients for 12 years found that 90% did not get full and lasting remission of their symptoms.

They kept going in and out of depression. Yes, and why do you think it is to follow on with that? Many psychiatric medicines are causing more harm than good. It's a really important question. And the overarching premise of my book is that mental disorders are actually metabolic disorders of the brain. I do a bit of a deep dive into the science of what that means and how that works at the cellular level. But one of the things that we know about many psychiatric medications is that they actually impair metabolism in that they cause weight gain. in that they cause weight gain, they can cause type 2 diabetes, they can cause cardiovascular disease, and at least in the elderly, the FDA recognizes

that they can cause premature mortality. So some of our treatments are actually impairing metabolism. And I do a bit of a deep dive into why those medicines might reduce symptoms in the short run. But I raised serious red flags about what those medicines might be doing to people over the long run, that they might actually be keeping people ill

or worse yet, they might actually end up causing symptoms or causing new symptoms or causing new disorders. And we know this with a lot of the medications, we usually call them side effects, with antisecotic medications for example. Sometimes they can actually cause OCD, a brand new disorder, like out of the blue, is though the person didn't have enough problems already. Now we're giving them a treatment and it's causing another disorder on top of their already existing disorders and then it can cause neurological problems and metabolic problems and all sorts of problems. And the book I raise serious concerns about these treatments. It's not that these treatments should never be used

and I want to say for the record if you're taking any of these medications, please don't stop them on your own, please don't just go cold turkey from all these neds because if that's a disaster and a nightmare, I've seen it million times. having on their metabolism and looking at the long term trajectory and trying to assess whether these might be playing a role in actually you being chronically ill. And then I would want you to work with a professional to try to come up with better treatments and or maybe try to get off these medications in a safe and effective way. Yeah, so I just wanted to give the analogy to the audience. I recently interviewed Dr. Cynthia Lee, who's a very much into functional medicine and the way she looks at the body is as a tree. And a lot of the symptoms that I think we're treating in Western medicine today are all these branches and the leaves of the tree. But what we're not treating is the major tree itself,

which was what I found in my case was the underlying issue all along is that the whole system is made up of protocols to treat very limited scopes of practice. And so you start applying all these different scopes, but you're not looking at the fundamental issue, which is wrapped around how your gut is performing with your brain is performing with your epigenetic system is all of it together and how all of that needs to be examined to figure out what's going on, which is exactly what your book and your research is doing. I love the chance to read this because it lines up with so much of my own personal findings and observations. But before I dive deeper into the book, I just wanted to anchor this into the audience just a little bit more. By asking you, what did Dr. Tom Insul, who was the former director of the National

Institute of Mental Health, actually say after he left that position where he served for 13 years. I won't get the quote exact, but he said something along the lines of, in my time as the director, I published a lot of really cool research studies and a lot of really cool papers at the expense of maybe $20 billion. And I don't think I moved the needle in terms of the suffering that people go through with mental illness in terms of reducing suicides in terms of reducing hospitalizations. And it was really brave of him and noble of him to acknowledge that our current approach to understanding and treating mental illness is very flawed and is failing to make progress.

And I just wanna like buffer that with another statistic that we hinted at a little bit ago, but I'll drive at home and make it abundantly clear. Mental disorders are increasing in prevalence as we talked about, but they are now the leading cause of disability in the United States and on planet Earth. And the number one diagnosis that disables more human beings than any other medical diagnosis

is depression, plain old depression. Depression is now the second most common chronic health disorder second only in prevalence to obesity. Well, and as someone who has suffered with severe depression, I can tell you just how tough it makes your life. And so I don't want to sugarcoat it for anyone who's in the audience who is dealing with that or anxiety or bipolar or schizophrenia or anything else. Let me tell you, a lot of people like mock people who claim they have mental illnesses. And I know firsthand how dark a place it can be when you're suffering from this, how your cognitive abilities seem to go away.

You have chronic fatigue. You just don't feel like yourself and sometimes you don't even want to get out of your bed. It's a huge issue. I bring all of this up for the audience because I really wanted to make this real, but I wanted to now explore with you. It doesn't have to be this way. There are things that we're gonna talk about today that the audience can start implementing

that can change their lives. But I wanna hunker this down with you telling the story of the events that led up to your development of the origins of brain energy. Because I think it even shocked yourself and other doctors around you at Harvard Medical School what ended up happening. The real answer is it was a long work in progress for 20 years but the pivotal moment for me was in 2016 when one of my long standing patients with schizoaffective disorder,

which is a cross between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, he asked for my help to lose weight. So this man had a chronic debilitating mental disorder. He had hallucinations and delusions every day of his life. He could barely leave home because he was terrified that people were trying to harm him, people were out to get him. That there were these technologies that could read his thoughts and broadcast his thoughts to others. And he was tormented. He had tried 17 different medications,

but they failed to work, but they did cause him to gain a lot of weight. So weighing 340 pounds, we're looking to lose weight, we decided to try the ketogenic diet. Within two weeks, not only did he begin losing weight, but I began to notice pretty dramatic changes in his level of depression. He was making better eye contact, he was talking more, smiling more, and I thought wow that's really interesting that this is happening, that's fascinating, but he was still having hallucinations and delusions, and the shocking dumb-founding thing to me was about six to eight

weeks into the diet. He spontaneously reported to me that his longstanding hallucinations were going away and that his longstanding paranoid delusions were also going away. He began to realize they weren't true and probably never had been. This man went on to lose. Yeah, just hold on, hold on there.

So you're talking 10 plus years this person has been having delusions has been thinking they're absolutely out of their mind. And then within six to eight weeks of going on a simple diet, I shouldn't say simple, but a diet, all of this starts going away. It's like, like, remarkable. I'd be dumbfounded if I were you thinking that could be the cause. I was dumbfounded and quite honestly it was great because his father was highly involved in his life and his care and so was another psychologist who had been working with this patient and I actually had to go to both of them on more than one occasion and just reality tests myself with them. I'm like,

are you guys seeing what I'm seeing? Because I can't believe what I'm seeing. This is impossible. There is no way that he can be getting this much better and it appears to be somehow related to this diet that he's doing and it doesn't make sense to me. I can't understand how or why this would be working. Well, I'm gonna just bring this up for the audience. A few weeks ago, I released an episode with Dr. Dom, Dogistino. I'm not sure if you know Dom. I do.

Another one of the leading experts in the world on ketosis and the ketogenic diet. And in that episode, you talked about how not only can it help with mental illness, I think it was first prescribed for epilepsy, but it's also now helping people counter cancer, counter arthritis, and other joint pain issues. And he has now been on it, I think it's 10 plus years with that going off it. And just his physical transformation that you see this guy, he looks like Mr. Olympian. Yeah.

Yeah, no, exactly. Most people know keto as they think of it as a fat diet or a weight loss diet, or maybe even it's a dangerous diet. And in fact, it's a 100 year old epilepsy treatment. The reason that was important to me as a psychiatrist is that we use epilepsy treatments in psychiatry all the time. And so that was one of the first clues to me

that helped me start connecting all of the scientific and neuroscience dots of why this diet might be helping my patients. This is the PassionStruck podcast with our guest, Christopher Palmer. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsoredStruck podcast with our guest, Christopher Palmer. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by InsideTracker. And when it comes to your health and longevity, you hold nothing back.

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I love hearing from all of you. And I love the fact that you all have been very tourist sponsors because they're the ones that keep the show going as well. You can check out all the sponsors at passionstruck.com, slash deals. You'll find all the codes and URLs, all those things are there. So please consider supporting those who support this show. Now, back to my interview with Christopher Palmer. Yes, well, I'm going to jump to chapter four because I thought it was a very pivotal chapter in the book because you discussed when I brought up before the bidirectional relationship between medical disorders and mental disorders.

Can you set some light on that? And we've alluded to it, but why is this so important for a listener to understand? It is critically important to understand the connections between mental health and physical health. And although most people think mental health is just in people's heads, maybe they're making it up, maybe they're just not strong people, maybe whatever, I actually take a very different stance

based on these connections to give a few examples. We know that people with mental illness are much more likely to develop diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, and they're much more likely to die early deaths. On average, men lose 10 years of life and women lose seven years of life. And this is across the board for all mental diagnoses. This includes anxiety, ADHD, personality disorder, all of them. Everyone, when you look at the more serious mental disorders, like schizophrenia,

bipolar disorder, that really horrible chronic debilitating depression, those disorders actually take even more of a toll on a person's lifespan. And we've sometimes people think it's because of the treatments that we're giving them, the pills that we're giving, cause weight gain, cause type 2 diabetes, and make no mistake, they do. But in fact, these connections have been known

since the 1800s before those pills even existed. And so it's not as simple as it's the pills we're prescribing. Other people think it's just laziness. That people with mental illness are just lazy slabs. And they're overeating and under exercising and that must be why they've got all these physical problems. And I am here to tell you no, it is not so simple. Once you understand the science and the biology, you can understand that the same

processes that are causing obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease are causing the brain to malfunction. And that results in what we call mental illnesses or mental symptoms. And that can result in some people feeling depressed, other people having PTSD, and other people having symptoms of schizophrenia. Yeah, and I will tell you in my own case, it would finally unlock all of this for me is I started partnering for being treated by a foundation that treats veterans called the Warrior Angels Foundation.

And Dr. Gordon, who came up with the treatment plan, starts it out by looking at your blood, but it's not like the typical blood samples that you're giving to the doctor. It was this comprehensive panel where he was looking at hormones, vitamins, supplements, trying to get a whole picture of what was going on. And he found that in me, I had widespread inflammation

that was happening, particularly because of my head trauma, inflammation on the brain. And what ends up happening is when you don't deal with that, you get this amyloid plaque buildup because typically you're not sleeping well and when you're not sleeping well, your brain isn't, your brain is mostly made up of water, but it's not washing and cleansing itself. And so all these amyloids and this plaque at stuck at the base of your skull, which is one of the leading reasons that I've researched into why people are having dimension Alzheimer's and CET and other things, is this inflammation is

prohibiting you along with other things, I'm dealing with it. But I bring that up only because you've got to look at this holistically and what worked for me was changing diet, adding deficient hormones and adding better sleep regimen in. And we're going to discuss all these things, getting into a circadian rhythm, sleep regimen in, and we're going to discuss all these things, getting into a circadian rhythm, getting on a right balance of supplementation with things that would trigger my body to have better metabolism, to process the foods, to get my gut health where it needs to be. And I think it's not just one of these things that worked. It's the combination of all of them. And that's exactly what your book found as well. So how in the world did you jump from this patient and the ketogenic diet to under uncovering that it's really metabolism

that's at the heart of everything that's going on here? that's at the heart of everything that's going on here. You know, that is the journey that I've been on for six years. So the first thing I'll say is that as soon as I saw this having such a dramatic impact with my patient, I began using it in dozens more patients and was seeing equally impressive and sometimes even more impressive results. I also started collaborating with researchers from around the world and hearing their stories of success using this same intervention. And some of them had used it long before I knew about it. I started also hearing spontaneously from other patients

who just said they tried the keto diet for weight loss and found that it put there by polar or other disorders into full and complete remission. So I knew that there was a strong and powerful signal and so I went on a journey to try to understand how on earth am I going to get the medical field to take this seriously because this is a diet for weight loss, number one, number two, it's actually used for type two diabetes as well. And it's working for a wide variety of mental disorders. That doesn't make sense, because they're all different. And it's also like even being studied for something like Alzheimer's disease. And at first, I was genuinely confused and a little overwhelmed. I'm like, how on earth can we make sense of all of this? But I went on a deep dive to the science to try to understand, are there any common threads among these different disorders?

And the more I dove into that science and research, the more connections I uncovered. And at the end of the day, the broad overarching connection is they are all powerfully influenced by metabolic abnormalities or metabolic problems. And when you do a really deep dive into what does that mean, like at the cellular level, you end up in this place of better understanding these tiny things in our cells called mitochondria. And most people know mitochondria as powerhouses of the cell. They're actually so much more than that. But once you understand it, once you understand what they actually do in cells, the shocking thing to me is that you can actually start to connect all of the dots of mental illness. You can start to connect all of the biological factors, neurotransmitters,

hormones, stress, inflammation, but you can connect the psychological and social factors too, trauma, neglect, substance use. All you can connect all of the dots of mental illness and understand them in this overarching paradigm. Yeah, can you deep dive a little bit more on mitochondria because this is where I was going to go next? How do they affect every cell in the body and what is their significance if you can expand upon it to this mental illness because people might be thinking, how do these things in my gut impact illness because people might be thinking, how do these things in my gut impact everything else about me? Yeah, so mitochondria are again, a lot of people from biology class might remember they're the powerhouse of the cell and what

that means is that they take food and turn it into ATP and they're the things that are actually using or oxygen or transferring electrons to oxygen. And we breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. Most of that is happening with mitochondria. But in fact, mitochondria, over the last 20 years, there has been an explosion of research in terms of like shocking roles that mitochondria appear to play in human cells. And again, this was, this is cutting edge. Most of it was highly unexpected. And that's in part why I think this

theory is so revolutionary is because it combines a lot of really cutting edge research that most clinicians don't even know about, that most people don't know about. When you look at all the roles of mitochondria, mitochondria play a powerful and direct role in the production and regulation of neurotransmitters. They play a powerful role in the production and regulation of hormones, key hormones like cortisol, estrogen, testosterone, progesterone. They also play a role direct role in inflammation. They directly, through their activity, turn inflammation on and off. They play a role in the gut microbiome appears to be communicating with mitochondria in cells mitochondria are one of the big roles that I forgot is they are one of the major factors that control

epigenetics we all have genes in our cells But really the thing that drives illness or health is actually which genes are getting expressed when. And it turns out that mitochondria are the most powerful regulators of gene expression. And they do this directly through a variety of signals. But so as I learned more about all of these different functions of mitochondria and what clear and direct roles they're playing in all these different functions of mitochondria and what clear and direct roles they're playing in all these different things. As a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, it was like just shocking to me

because I'm like, wait, that neurotransmitters, wait, that's what we're talking about in mental illness all the time, hormones, cortisol, wait, we talk about that too. And gene expression, we talk about that. Oh my gosh, this is connecting the dots of mental illness. So basically, mental disorders, if I have this right, are metabolic disorders and mitochondria,

the common pathway to creating that fit between metabolism and these mental disorders. Perfect. Absolutely correct. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So I then wanted to deep dive on a couple of these different areas that you brought up. You discussed both epigenetics and we have discussed this in several past episodes. One of the ones I would encourage listeners to go back to is with Dr. Cara Fitzgerald, who talks about DNA methylation and how epigenetics not only is tying into what you're talking about, but it's tying into reducing our biological age, something I think the audience would

want to pay attention to. So how do genetics and epigenetics work together or not? And what do you think has the bigger influence on us experiencing mental illness? So genetics are the things, the blueprints that we all inherit from our parents. And one of the kind of facts of the mental health field is that we all inherit from our parents. And one of the kind of facts of the mental health field is that we know that mental disorders run in families. Like bipolar disorder tends to run in families, but so does depression, so even alcoholism can run in families.

And for a long time, we have assumed that that must be genetic. It must be you're inheriting these genes from your parents. And that must be why these disorders run in families. We map the human genome project that was done over 20 years ago. And researchers have been scouring the human genome, they have been, they've got artificial intelligence on the job. And with all of that research, the overarching conclusion is that genes do not provide answers to the mental illness challenge, the mental illness puzzle, they just don't provide concrete answers. the mental illness puzzle, they just don't provide concrete answers.

And so in that huge, that is huge, because that's where so much of the previous discussion has been for decades and decades. Yes, and many people are still clinging to that as the answer. And they're doing all this fancy hand waving and rationalizing. And well, it must just be thousands of genes. And they must just interact in very different ways and different people. But the real answer, if you understand the science and if you have an ounce of common sense,

the real answer is that genes are not the answer. Now that doesn't take away this fact, but mental disorders are running in families. So if it's not in the genes, then where is it? And how is that happening? And that leads to epigenetics. And it turns out that epigenetics can actually be inherited. You can inherit epigenetics from your parents, and that can influence the expression of genes in the children and even grandchildren. And that, if you start doing a deep dive into that science, you can actually start to understand,

oh, this is how and why mental disorders are likely running in families. The reason this is such an important distinction is because epigenetics can be changed. You can change your epigenetics through lifestyle interventions alone. And many of the ones, John, that you just mentioned, in terms of your own path to healing and recovery, many of those things can change epigenetics expression. And what that means is that right now we're telling people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder that they have lifelong disorders

because it must be a genetic problem. And therefore, it's permanent and fixed and you're gonna be this way forever. And you're just gonna die this way. You're gonna need medication for the rest of your life and that's just the way it is. And what I'm here to tell people is that is not true based on science,

based on evidence. If you look at and understand the science and evidence, that is not true. And that means that we can heal people with these labels of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, chronic depression, and other labels. Okay, and I'm gonna just refer one more time to Dr. Kera Fitzgerald.

And the audience, if you don't wanna listen to that episode Okay, and I'm going to just refer one more time to Dr. Cara Fitzgerald. And the audience, if you don't want to listen to that episode, buy yourself a copy of her book, Younger You, because about 300 pages of it is heard laying out exactly the diets, supplements, and other things that you can take to take your epigenetics to a new level. So I just want to put that out there. So another area I wanted to talk to you about is the impact of sleep. Because people, even though we're aware of it,

don't treat sleep as seriously as they should. It's one of the most important things that I myself had to fix, because if your sleep is off, everything else is off, because when you're sleeping, that's when the body is doing so much repair to itself. And if you're not getting sound sleep, it has a cascading effect on everything, practically. And I'll just give another reference to the audience. I had Dr. Sarah Medneick, who's one of the leading experts in the world on sleep on the show.

So go back and look at that. But I wanted to ask you, Chris, how does sleep from your research impact mental illness and metabolism and all the things that we've been talking about? So we have long known that sleep deprivation can exacerbate every known mental disorder, but also every known metabolic disorder. So sleep deprivation can make Alzheimer's worse,

it can make depression worse, it can make substance use disorders worse, it can make schizophrenia worse, eating disorders worse, across the board, all mental disorders get worse with sleep deprivation. But likewise, all of the metabolic disorders get worse with sleep deprivation. So if you have diabetes, your blood sugar will go up

if you're sleep deprived. If you have heart disease, you're more likely to have a heart attack if you're sleep deprived. And if you have obesity, you're more likely to gain even more weight. Even if you're eating the exact same amount, you're more likely to gain weight just from sleep deprivation alone. And so we've known on a clinical level these things are connected. But the science over the last ten years in particular, has directly connected sleep deprivation with mitochondrial dysfunction.

And what that means is that it finally connects the dots for us. So we can understand how and why sleep deprivation affects mitochondria. And when they are impacted in this negative way, how that can lead to an exacerbation of all of the mental disorders and all of the metabolic disorders, and result in so many problems. Like you mentioned not too long ago, the accumulation of plaques and tangles in the brain. And that's been well documented in particular in animal studies where we can easily manipulate how much sleep animals are getting. If you sleep deprived,

an otherwise healthy animal, they actually start accumulating more beta-amaloid plaques in their brains. And that we know is a risk factor for the development of Alzheimer's disease. Yeah, and I think it's also showing up on FMRIs now that they're using that technology to examine it. Another area I wanted to cover was hormones, and I will just say in my personal case, one of the most alarming hormones I was extremely deficit in was testosterone.

It was so bad that when Dr. Lewis looked at the results, I think I was at 100, maybe 102. And he's like, John, you like to get A's when you were in college, right? I said, of course, who doesn't want to get an A? He goes, not only do you have an F, he goes, you have an F that's so bad that it'd be like sinking a ship and he goes, we need to get you back to an A. But what I wanted to ask you are,

testosterone is just one of these important hormones. What are some other ones that the listener should be cognizant of that could be affecting the situation. Yeah. So a lot of the big hormones are cortisol, but thyroid hormone in particular, we know that if you have low From low thyroid hormone, low thyroid hormone can also, is also a risk factor for dementia, like Alzheimer's. It's also a risk factor for bipolar and schizophrenia and other disorders. Insulin, insulin is a huge one and insulin resistance appears to be a really important biomarker at least and that if people have insulin resistance, it is a metabolic

problem. And it means that your cells, likely, all of the cells in your body and brain are likely not getting enough energy. They simply don't have enough ATP. That is a serious problem. And again, the reason it's important to measure these types of hormones, things like testosterone, cortisol, insulin, thyroid hormone, is because for all of them, there are things we can do about these hormones. There, once we understand that there's a problem, just like your doctor recognized,

whoa, you just got an F in your testosterone level, there's a problem, just like your doctor recognized, whoa, you just got an F in your testosterone level. There's a fix. There's something that we can do for that will help restore health, that will help restore normal functioning of the body and brain. And likewise with these other hormones that once we know there's a problem,

there's often something we can do about it. Yeah, and the interesting thing is how different doctors look at this. So my primary care physician, when I showed him the results, I asked him what would he would do and he said, nothing, he would just leave it as it is. It's within the medical limits and therefore he wouldn't touch it. So it's interesting how different expertise are looking at this. So my advice to a listener as well would be, don't just take one opinion on this.

If you don't like what your MD is saying, go talk to a DO, go talk to a nurse practitioner, go talk to someone in a different field to get a different point of view on the results that you're getting. But by all means, I highly advocate getting

these widespread blood tests so you understand where you have deficiency limits. It could even be deficiencies in vitamins like vitamin D, which is a common one or magnesium. Things that are extremely important to us. Now, I wanna cover just one other area and that is something that probably a lot of people in the audience don't want to talk about is the impact of alcohol and drugs on these

conditions. And I know for myself, I sleep a lot worse when I drink. I feel a lot worse overall when I drink and we all know drinking is a depressive agent. So what did your studies find was the impact that alcohol and drugs were having on this entire system? Yeah, I'm sorry to rain on everyone's parade for those of you who like to drink, but alcohol is actually a mitochondrial toxin. In very small doses, it's probably fine, but it really needs to be very small doses up until

even a few years ago, the prevailing wisdom, and you probably still hear this from some people. Two drinks a day, two glasses of wine, red wine in particular. Two glasses of red wine every day. That's good for you. That's good for your health. Can lower your blood pressure. We'll make it less likely that you'll have a heart attack. That's good for you.

New research on huge populations of people actually says, oops, wait, turns out that's not true. Actually, there were flaws in the prior studies. They didn't control for the right things. And it turns out, oh, no, that alcohol actually is not good for human health. And unequivocally, it is not good for brain health. And, and we know that the primary toxicity of alcohol is on mitochondria, and that means your metabolism

is being impaired. Now, this passes the common sense SNIF test. If you've ever tried to lose weight, and you were struggling to lose weight, and then somebody told you, if you give up alcohol, it might go a little better. There's a reason that really works well is because you're less likely to be impairing your metabolism when you stop drinking. And so weight loss gurus have known this for decades. It coaches and athletes have known this for decades. They know that if they're

training for a marathon or a high impact event, they are not drinking. They're not drinking two glasses of red wine every day. They're not drinking at all. They're drinking zero alcohol because they know with certainty. Alcohol impairs metabolic performance. It impairs athletic performance. And so does that mean people can never, ever drink alcohol? No, it doesn't. If you are really determined to drink alcohol, fine. Okay, I know the world's not gonna change overnight, but it's important to understand what you are doing

to your body and your brain. And what I can tell you is that if you are suffering from medical disorders or mental disorders that are really impairing your life, I really do want you to consider the strong possibility of giving up alcohol altogether at least for a period of time to see how much of a difference

it might make in your symptoms, because there's very strong scientific reason to believe it may really help you a lot. Okay, well, I always like to end with an author on this question. If there was one thing that you hoped a reader, or in this case a listener, would take away from brain energy, what would it be? The most powerful message is that mental disorders are not permanent fixed disorders that you are just burdened with for the rest of your life. You can overcome a mental disorder. You can put it into full and complete remission.

It may not be as simple as just taking a pill and having everything evaporate because that's not the way it's going to work. But if you make a decision to learn the science and implement the strategies, John, that you even talked about, a lot of your kind of multifaceted treatment approach, people can get better. They can heal their brains and they can live good, stress-free, suffering-free lives. Yes, and I will just end with my firm belief is that I believe if nature is creating some of these things that we're experiencing, these disorders, that nature can cure it, but you've got to embrace those different aspects about this and look at it holistically, because as you just said, it's likely not going to be

one thing that's going to impact it. It's going to be a combined approach of looking at your sleep, looking at your diet, looking at your hormone levels, looking at how you take that epigenetics that you have and make it the most profound that it can be. And the other side of fact of this was, will be you'll live longer if you do this correct because, as you said, mental illness has a direct correlation on this, as does your epigenetics overall in how your biological age is performing. Well, Chris, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing this incredible new research and book to our audience. Thank you, John, for having me. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Dr. Christopher Palmer, and I wanted to thank

Chris and 4-A for giving me the opportunity to interview him today on the podcast. Links to all things Chris will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the authors that we feature here on the podcast. It helps support the show and make it free for our listeners. Videos are on YouTube at JohnRMiles. Please go there, check them out, and subscribe, and view the over 400 videos that we have.

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and a serial entrepreneur. He is the best-selling author of Post-Corona, the four, and the algebra of happiness. And we discuss his brand new book, A Drift. Unfortunately, there's an economic incentive around turning us into Tyrannosaurus Rexys where we're drawn towards movement and violence rather than having a civil conversation. And of all these problems, whether it's teen depression or that's failing young men, income inequality, exploding costs in higher education. The problem I would argue is the biggest problem

relative to the attention it's getting. Is it if America's problems are a horror movie, you would say the call is coming from inside the house. And that is a third of each political party sees the other party as their mortal enemy. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends or family members when you find something that's interesting or educational.

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