The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - 41. How Does Physical Health Affect Mental Health? | Dr. Christopher M. Palmer, MD & Gary Brecka

Episode Date: March 5, 2024

Get weekly tips from Gary Brecka on how to optimize your health and lifestyle routines - go to https://www.theultimatehuman.com/ For more info on Gary, please click here: ⁠⁠https://linktr.ee/thegarybrecka ECHO GO PLUS HYDROGEN WATER BOTTLE http://echowater.com BODY HEALTH - USE CODE ULTIMATE10 for 10% OFF YOUR ORDER https://bodyhealth.com/ultimate Are you struggling with mental health issues that don't seem to be improving with conventional treatments? In this thought-provoking podcast, Gary Brecka interviews Dr. Chris Palmer, MD about his groundbreaking work connecting mental illness to mitochondrial health. Dr. Palmer is the author of, “Brain Energy: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Understanding Mental Health--and Improving Treatment for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More.” He shares compelling evidence that mental disorders may actually be metabolic disorders of the brain. He discusses how addressing diet, lifestyle factors, and mitochondrial function through approaches like ketogenic dieting could completely transform the future of psychiatric treatment! 01:00 - Who is Dr. Chris M. Palmer, MD? 03:30 - Why is our country seeing an increase in mental illness? 06:45 - What treatments are already available for people? 08:00 - Is there a link between mental health and obesity? 13:45 - What is the, “Brain Energy Theory?” 15:45 - Does metabolism impact mental disorders? 22:20 - What’s the difference between just feeling feelings and actually having mental disorder? 27:00 - Why do brain cells malfunction? 29:00 - If you’re feeling stuck, where should you start? 33:45 - What motivated Dr. Palmer to study mental illness? 38:00 - Is the ketogenic doet dangerous? How has it been used for epilepsy?  42:30 - How does Gary Brecka’s team use the keto diet? 45:15 - What disorders need to the most help and monitoring? 51:30 - Where is the research going for the future treatments? 59:00 - Is there a one size fits all solution? 01:00:50 - What nutrients should people supplement with? 01:05:00 - What is driving long-covid symptoms? 01:07:20 - Why we should all focus on the basics. 01:09:30 - What is the future of psychiatric treatments? 01:13:15 - Why you should never stop taking medication without consulting your doctor. 01:17:00 - What can we learn about anti-psychotics from chemo-therapy? 01:19:00 - Are pharmaceutical companies incentived to keep you taking medications? 01:23:00 - Hope for the future of supplements and medications. 01:25:00 - What is the economic impact of getting people healthy? Grab Dr. Chris Palmer’s Book: https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Energy-Revolutionary-Understanding-Health/dp/1637741588 Connect with Dr. Chris Palmer, MD: https://www.chrispalmermd.com/ Connect with Dr. Palmer on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chrispalmermd/ Gary Brecka: @garybrecka The Ultimate Human: @ultimatehumanpod Subscribe on YouTube: @ultimatehumanpodcast The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka Podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing or other professional health care services, including the giving of medical advice, and no doctor/patient relationship is formed. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from this podcast is at the user’s own risk. The content of this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice for any medical condition they may have and should seek the assistance of their health care professionals for any such conditions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Being depressed is not a mental illness. Being depressed for no good reason is a mental illness. It's so fascinating to me that you have areas of medicine that think this is somehow not connected to this. Prior to the pandemic, about 1 billion people on the planet suffered from mental or substance use disorder. Almost 50% of Americans said that they were suffering from depression, anxiety, PTSD,

or substance use symptoms. I get this image of a bicycle wheel with all of these spokes that have all of these conditions, ADD, ADHD, OCD, manic depression, bipolar, all of these conditions, but they all kind of meet at one hub. We know too that cancer cells are metabolically sick cells. There is evidence that it can be that cancer cells are metabolically sick cells. There is evidence that it can be turned back into a metabolically healthy cell. It is tragic because actually the United States has one of the highest rates of antidepressant use in the world. Dr. Christopher Palmer is an MD. He's made significant contributions in the field of psychiatry. He focuses on the intersection between metabolic health and mental health.

He has over 25 years of experience as an academic physician. He holds various roles within the administrative, research, educational, and clinic settings, primarily at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Palmer has been a pioneer in exploring the use of ketogenic diet as a treatment for mental health disorders. You heard that right. The ketogenic diet as a treatment for mental health disorders. Proposing that many psychiatric conditions may be metabolic disorders of the brain.

His works led to the development of the metabolic and mental health program at McLean Hospital, aiming to further research and provide metabolic treatments for mental health conditions. Dr. Palmer's groundbreaking work is encapsulated in his book, Brain Energy, which is a must-read, where he introduces the brain energy theory of mental illness. This theory suggests that mental disorders are closely linked with metabolic dysfunctions, challenging the traditional diagnostic categories and offering new avenues for the treatment that focus on metabolic health for long-term improvement rather than merely symptom management. Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm

your host, human biologist Gary Brekka, where we go down the road, everything anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. And today you are in for a real treat. Right before the podcast started, Dr. Palmer was actually blowing my mind with not just some of the things that we share in common about mitochondria, but the impact that health has on mental illness. His book, Brain Energy, is a must-read in his work at Harvard University and his work on metabolic syndrome and the metabolism, the mitochondria, and how the mitochondria is linked to so many conditions that we face as society today is just astounding. I am really excited to have you on the podcast, Dr. Palmer. I'm excited to be here.

Welcome to The Ultimate Human. So your life's work is as an academic physician, Harvard University, and your book Brain Energy really taps into the impact that mitochondrial health has on not only your mental state, but actually this mental illness crisis that we face. So talk a little bit about the mental illness crisis that is going on, not just in America, but kind of globally. And why, if so many conventional treatments have been around for so many decades, why are we seeing such a parabolic increase in mental illness?

And conditions we might not even think are mental illness conditions, things like ADD, ADHD, OCD, more severe manic depression, bipolar, schizophrenia, but those conditions that are just nibbling away at people's everyday life, like tiny little anchors off their stern, that a lot of times they'll say, this is just a consequence of aging, this is a consequence of stress or my environment. And it may not be a consequence of any of those things. So talk a little bit about the rise in mental illness

and why we're not seeing conventional therapies, which are becoming more and more popular, having a dramatic impact on it. So huge, huge question. That is a big, big question. Huge question. And I could go on for days on that. So I'll try to do it concisely.

So for people who don't know, we actually do have a mental health epidemic and it's a growing crisis. Prior to the pandemic, about 1 billion people on the planet in any given year suffered from a mental or substance use disorder. And that represents about 13% of the world's population. But in Western countries, such as the United States,

rates are even higher. About one in five people suffer from a mental disorder in any given year. If you look at lifetime prevalence, it's about 50%. One in two people will meet criteria for a mental illness at some point or another during their life. Wow. Wow. Wow.

And in the country that is the biggest spender on healthcare worldwide, that is astounding to me. It is tragic because actually the United States has one of the highest rates of antidepressant use in the world. And we also have one of the higher rates of depression in the world. So it's not surprising that we're using so many antidepressants because our people are more likely to be depressed. But clearly antidepressants aren't solving the problem.

And so the pandemic happened, and there's no doubt that took a toll, and things are even worse today. We don't have exact figures. At the peak of the pandemic, the CDC was doing annual household survey or monthly household surveys, actually. And at one point during the peak, almost 50% of Americans said that they were suffering from depression, anxiety, PTSD, or substance use symptoms. 10% of all Americans surveyed of a representative sample,

10% at the peak said they had seriously considered killing themselves in the last 30 days. And among people 18 to 25, because they didn't interview children, people 18 to 25, one in four, said that they had seriously considered taking their life. 18 to 25-year-olds. Wow. So we have a crisis,

and we do have a lot of treatments. And as an academic psychiatrist, I am not going to back down from that. We do have treatments, and the treatments do work for millions of people. We've got antidepressants, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, anti-anxiety medicines. We've got psychotherapies.

We've got group therapy. We've got addiction recovery treatment programs. We've got ketamine. We've got psychedelics. We've got ECT, TMS. We've got nerve implants that will stimulate certain nerves like your vagus nerve. We've got deep brain stimulators. We have treatments. And these treatments actually do work. I just got paralysis of analysis. I literally did. They really do work. The tragic news is that they fail to work for tens, if not hundreds of millions of people

every year. There are people who are getting treatment after treatment. They are getting pill after pill. They are talking and talking and talking in psychotherapy and group therapy offices, and they are not getting better. And we have a crisis and this crisis is across the board. A lot of people think this is just about depression. Well, yeah, rates of depression in 2023 reached an all-time ever recorded high. 2023. 2023, just last year, Gallup polled as an annual survey. And that annual survey showed that rates were increasing steadily prior to the pandemic. The pandemic saw a huge jump,

and then it stabilized and things are on the rise again. So in 2023, all-time ever recorded high of current prevalence and lifetime prevalence. But it's not just depression. Anxiety disorders in children and adolescents have tripled over the last 15 years. Rates of autism spectrum disorder have quadrupled in the United States in the last 20 years. Rates of bipolar disorder have doubled in adults in the last 20 years. They're up exponentially in children and adolescents. So we're talking about all of

these different mental illnesses that most people think are completely separate from each other. They must have different causes. They're not the same thing. And yet the rates of all of them are increasing in exponential ways. Wow. And the one just bottom line nutshell for people who are scratching their heads trying to figure out what in the hell's going on, at the exact same time, rates of obesity are skyrocketing and rates of diabetes and prediabetes are skyrocketing. And I don't think that those things

are separate coincidences. You know, it reminds me of, I get this image of a bicycle wheel with all of these spokes, right? That have all of these conditions, ADD, ADHD, OCD, manic depression, bipolar, all of these conditions, but they all kind of meet at one hub.

I have a feeling that's what we're about to find out. We are. But you have to buy my book. No, no, no. I will give you all of the information I possibly can. Million copies just got sold. So I love where I feel like this is going. And I didn't mean to cut you off,

but you really touch on what seems to be dispartite things going on, disconnected things in the human body, obesity, mental illness, and now we're seeming to bring these together. And we need to bring them together. And we've got a tremendous amount of evidence that already brings them together. And we've got a tremendous amount of evidence that already brings them together.

And so we know that people with mental illnesses, on average, chronic mental disorders, such as chronic depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, two to three times the rates of obesity going forward. We know that they have two to three times the rates of developing type two diabetes. We know that they are more likely to die early deaths

from cardiovascular disease. We know that they're more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease. That's been well known. But all of those relationships go in the reverse. People with obesity have 50 to 350% increased risk for developing a wide range of mental illnesses, all the way from anxiety, depression, ADHD,

to psychotic disorders, like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. People with diabetes more likely to develop, it doesn't matter which type, type one, type two, take your pick. People with diabetes are more likely to develop mental illnesses. Which ones? almost all of

them wow i read it i read it i read a study about um almost a nine-fold increase between um type 2 diabetics and alzheimer's the incidence of alzheimer's and type 2 diabetics yeah it's um and and we have increasing evidence that alzheimer's disease is a quote-unquote metabolic disorder. And we've long known that all the risk factors for Alzheimer's disease are in fact metabolic in nature. So if you have cardiovascular disease or cardiovascular risk factors, those increase your risk for Alzheimer's. If you have type 2 diabetes, as you just mentioned, that increases your risk.

If you have obesity in midlife, that increases your risk. And actually, the ApoE4 gene, the ApoE4 gene allele that we know increases risk for Alzheimer's disease. If you actually do a lot of kind of deep dive into what is that doing? It's actually helping to regulate the transportation and metabolism of cholesterol and fats. And it is central to mitochondrial function. And so even the risk genes that people are just born with are impacting metabolism and specifically brain metabolism. And then that's increasing your risk

for developing all of these different disorders. And we know too that cancer cells are metabolically sick cells. They were a healthy cell that had interrupted cellular metabolism and a metabolically sick cell, there is evidence that it can be turned back into a metabolically healthy cell, there is evidence that it can be turned back into a metabolically healthy cell

or it can continue to progress. Sometimes the immune system recognizes it and eats it, you know, through cellular autophagy. And sometimes in a weakened immune system, you know, it sort of slips by and is allowed to proliferate. But I'm really drawn to your brain energy theory of mental illness. And I'd like to go down that road a little bit because what is the brain energy theory

and how does that impact mental illness? So the brain energy theory is trying to answer a millennial old question of what causes mental illness. And the answer that most of the leading psychiatrists and neuroscientists will tell you today is that no one knows. It's just too complicated. All we know are risk factors.

And we put the risk factors into something called the biopsychosocial model. And we say that there are biological, psychological, and social factors that all come together to cause mental illness. And they include things like genetics or epigenetics. They include things like neurotransmitters. Those are the chemicals and the chemical imbalance theory. Hormones play a role, but they also include psychological and social things. Trauma, rape, stress, childhood adversity, loneliness. All of those things play a role in mental illness too.

But if you ask these leading psychiatrists and neuroscientists, how do all of those things fit together to result in a wide range of mental disorders? Because all of those factors, everything that I just listed, plays a role in all of the mental disorders. Wow. Schizophrenia, bipolar, autism, depression, ADHD, trauma and adversity, increased risk for all of those things. But neurotransmitters, hormones, genetics also increase risk. How does it all fit together?

Right now, nobody knows. What I propose in the brain energy theory is that based on cutting edge research over the last 20 years in the metabolic and mitochondrial biology fields, once and for all, we can finally answer that question of how those things fit together. And what I'm arguing is that mental disorders, meaning the brain disorders that we call mental illness,

that those are due to metabolic dysfunction impacting the brain. When you say metabolic dysfunction for the people watching this podcast that don't understand, they understand metabolism as how many calories do I burn? Yeah. Right? I think that's probably the fundamental basic understanding.

If I have a high metabolic rate, I burn more calories. If I have a high metabolic rate, I burn more calories. If I have a low metabolic rate, I burn less calories. But give a little bit more context to metabolism when you talk about what do you mean by metabolism? So I think you're right. Most people don't really have a good appreciation or understanding of what metabolism is. So they think it's burning calories and or they think that it relates to metabolic syndrome.

So it's about obesity, diabetes, or heart attacks. And that's what metabolism is and that's what metabolic health is. But in fact, metabolism is fundamental to the definition of living organisms. It's a process, a simple definition. It's a process of taking food and other things, nutrients, oxygen, and turning it into energy. Usually we call it ATP or building blocks for cells. Sometimes that process gets turned into heat.

So energy, building blocks, heat, and managing the waste products of it. And it is foundational that actually some biologists will say, for instance, viruses are not living organisms. Why are they not living organisms? Because they cannot do metabolism by themselves. They take over another cell's metabolism. organisms because they cannot do metabolism by themselves. They take over another cell's metabolism. They have to use another cell's metabolism in order to reproduce and thrive.

And therefore, some biologists will say, by definition, because they can't do metabolism themselves, they are not living. And so in that sense, metabolism is ridiculously complicated. It involves many of our genes, all of these chemical pathways and hormones and enzymes and... Methylation. Signals and everything. And so in that sense, some people will say, well, Chris Palmer, you're not really telling us anything that useful. If you're saying that mental disorders are somehow or another related to metabolism, but you're using that kind of a broad definition of metabolism, that it's everything in biology, then what are you really telling us?

That's not really useful. In fact, I think it's extraordinarily useful. And when we look at, like when you ask common sense questions, well, what exactly controls metabolism in the human body? If it's this really complicated orchestra of all of these different pathways and things going on, where is the hub?

Or how can we understand what is controlling or regulating metabolism? If you ask metabolic scientists that question, you'll probably get different answers from all of them. So there's by no means what I'm saying is scientific fact, it's certainly not widely agreed upon, but what I'm saying, I think many people would agree with and some scientists would absolutely passionately agree with.

So I just want to paint that picture that what I'm saying is not universally accepted, but I think we've got very strong evidence for it. I would answer the question, what controls metabolism by saying, is these tiny things in our cells called mitochondria. And that when we look at all of the evidence that's accumulated over the last 20 years about what are mitochondria doing,

we can actually not only understand metabolism and metabolic health, but we can once and for all connect all of the dots of the mental illness puzzle, the biological, psychological, and social factors. And we can put them all together to understand why would the brain malfunction in a way that causes symptoms that we call mental illness. And once we understand that big picture, it's kind of see the forest from the trees is what I'm saying. Yes, there are lots of trees and there are weeds and there's dirt and there are animals and insects and all sorts of things in that forest.

So yes, it gets really complicated and messy fast, but let's see the forest from the trees. And when you see the forest from the trees, the answers become obvious and they're not that difficult. And there are things that you and your audience already know about. Hey guys, if you've been watching the Ultimate Human Podcast for any length of time,

you know that one thing I do not do is push products. I do not just let any advertiser into this space because I believe that the products that appear on the Ultimate Human Podcast should be things that I use every day in my life to improve my own physiology. One of them is something called the Echo Go Plus. The Echo Go Plus is a hydrogen water generator that you can take on the go. You essentially take the top off of this bottle, you pour bottled water in this and repeatedly it will make high part per million hydrogen water you press this little button you'll see these bubbles going up in the water that's hydrogen being created in the water there are all kinds

of peer-reviewed published clinical studies on the benefits of hydrogen water including reduced inflammation better absorption of your supplements better absorption of your supplements, better absorption of your foods, better balance of the stomach acid, and it feeds an entire class of bacteria in your gut. Hydrogen water, in my opinion, is the most beneficial water that you can drink, and now you can take it wherever you go. You can go to echo, E-C-H-O, H-2-O.com. That's echo, E-C-H-O-H-2-O.com. Enter the code ULTIMATE10 for a discount. Echo H2O, enter the code ULTIMATE10 for a discount. What I like about where this is going,

and it's often what I try to do for people with like diet, nutrition, lifestyle, spiritual wellbeing, all of these different avenues that they go down, because you can get paralysis of analysis is just keep simplifying it. And you're getting down, you know, we're through the cell wall now through the cytoplasm into an organelle through the walls of that organelle. And we're inside of the mitochondria and we're saying, this is where metabolism occurs. And this may be the genesis of, or at least partially the genesis

of all mental disease and disorder. Am I overstating that? I would, I think what you said is true, but I'm worried that people won't fully understand how that fits together because they're still fixed on trauma or drugs and alcohol. And what the hell does that have to do with the inside of mitochondria? And so maybe if it's helpful,

another way to phrase what I'm trying to let people know is that I, so I'm not talking, I guess, first and foremost, I need to clarify that mental symptoms can be normal human reactions in the right place and the right time. All of the symptoms of mental illness can be normal. If you lose a loved one, you are going to be depressed. If you're not depressed, there's actually something wrong with you. There's something abnormal about your brain.

So being depressed is not a mental illness. Being depressed for no good reason is a mental illness. So if those same pathways in the brain that code for depression or that trigger the depression response, if they start misfiring, that is mental illness. Same with anxiety. Everybody gets anxious, but not everybody has panic attacks out of the blue for no reason. So I think first and foremost, I need to make clear, I'm not talking about normal human suffering. That's normal human suffering. The answers and solutions are obvious. If people are suffering because their not gonna do anything when your country is being bombed, your loved ones are being slaughtered and killed in front of your eyes. The solution is obvious.

But when people have mental disorders, their brains are malfunctioning. Their brains are causing crippling depression for no good reason. Their brains are causing panic attacks or for no good reason. Their brains are causing panic attacks or hallucinations or delusions or mood episodes or hyperactivity or inability to concentrate, inability to remember things.

Their brains are not functioning properly. Those are the things that I call mental disorders. And in order to understand that, we need to understand why would the cells in the brain malfunction? That's ultimately what we're trying to answer. Why would those cells malfunction? And right now, the leading theory is a neurotransmitter imbalance, a chemical imbalance.

Too much dopamine, too much serotonin, too little dopamine. That's the answer. But if you get into details of why would that neurotransmitter imbalance exist, what causes it, why does it wax and wane? Why does it come and go? Why wasn't it there from birth? And why doesn't it have a trigger? I mean, you know, I mean, why doesn't it have an obvious trigger because what you're saying about depression is, obviously there are times where you can point to a specific trigger, loss of a loved one, normal human life events that should result in depression. Like your normal reaction would be to be depressed

if this event happened to you. But very often, and we see this in our clinics and my clinical team deals with this all the time. We see people suffering from massive anxiety or bouts of depression, mood numbness without a trigger. Like they're not afraid of heights and they get triggered by walking to the edge of a 30th floor balcony. They're not claustrophobic and they have to step on a crowded elevator, they are feeling these sensations of terror or fear without the presence of a fear. Yes. And I think this is the direction that you're going. That's the direction I'm going. Okay. And so bringing it back to mitochondria,

at the end of the day, the fundamental question we have to answer is why is the brain malfunctioning? And really we have to answer why are the cells in the brain malfunctioning? And what I'm saying is that there is a central theme. It gets complicated fast, but the central theme, the simplest way to explain it is that the cells

do not have enough healthy mitochondria. And that when cells have enough healthy mitochondria, they in fact will almost always function properly. They will do what they are supposed to do. They will repair themselves. They will maintain themselves. They will keep up with demand. They will do what they are expected to do. And that when cells begin to malfunction, a unifying theme across numerous disciplines in the medical field is that mitochondrial dysfunction

seems to be playing a central role. And we know that this is true in obesity. We know that it's true in diabetes. We know that it's true in cardiovascular disease. We know that it's true in autoimmune disorders. We know that it's true in Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease. And guess what?

It's also true in people who have what we call mental illness. Their brains are malfunctioning. Those cells are malfunctioning because of mitochondrial dysfunction. And understanding that opens up an entire new world of therapeutic options that you know a lot about.

Yeah. So, I mean, but the exciting thing is that what I think I hear you saying is that this may be fixable. Yes. Because I happen to know that mitochondrial dysfunction in many cases is fixable. We've seen it thousands and thousands of times, not anecdotally, but objectively. And so it begs the question, if I'm watching this podcast and I'm affected by,

or a loved one of mine is affected by one of these myriad of conditions that we've been talking about, what are some of the things that I could do, either aside from going the conventional therapy route, or if I've already gone the conventional therapy route, and I'm on Adderall, Vyvanse, Ritalin, antidepressants, SSRIs, what have you, what are some things that I could do to augment that, to support maybe the other side of the equation, the mitochondrial health.

So the... It's actually, I almost wanna say the really sad- I love that you're about to say keto diet. The great news, but almost the tragic news because these solutions are so simple and obvious. I say this all the time. People attack me. There's a huge hit piece in the Daily Mail today and saying that I'm trying to oversimplify.

And that's the thing. And that's what makes this so incredible. There is so much human suffering. And sometimes the solution could be look at your diet and clean up your diet. Sometimes the solution could be get better sleep. Sometimes the solution could be lay off the substances that are harming your mitochondria. Sometimes the solution could be, you know, the obvious ones, stress reduction, get out of traumatic relationships. So on the surface, all of those things sound like generic health and wellness tips. A lot of people are going to say, we already knew that, Chris. We already knew all of that. We didn't need to listen to this podcast.

Eat healthy. But that's not going to do anything for schizophrenia. That's not going to do anything for bipolar disorder. That's not going to do anything for my kid with serious ADHD. Serious ADHD, that's a neurodevelopmental disorder. He's got a legit disorder. His psychiatrist told me so. And everything I've read says that. And what I'm saying is that those legitimate

crippling brain disorders, whether we call them neurodevelopmental, whether we call them severe mental illnesses, whether we call them mild mental illnesses like depression, anxiety, whether we call them brain fog, burnout, whatever you're experiencing, they all represent your brain not functioning properly. And at the end of the day, we can, in fact, get a lot of those people better through simple solutions. The devil is in the details. And so I am not by any means saying

if schizophrenic people just ate a little more broccoli, we would cure their schizophrenia. It's not that simple. And so I'm not saying generic health and wellness diet advice. Eat a healthier diet. Add a little more fruits and vegetables to your diet, and that'll fix you up. That is not true.

I can assure everyone that is not true. Maybe it'll work for one or two people on the planet if lucky, but for the majority of people, that type of an intervention, that type of a change in diet is worthless. Right. And I don't want people to come away from this thinking, just if I eat a better diet, like eating more broccoli, that that's going to fix everything. So, but the solutions are, in fact, identifying, do you have food sensitivities? Do you have reactions to food? Are you able to tolerate and process carbohydrates in a normal way

compared to other people? And so the devil gets in the details and the devil is in the details, but we can use to give people examples of what I'm talking about. So for some people just cleaning up your diet, lay off the junk food, lay off the sugar, eat a little more broccoli.

That may help their depression or their anxiety or their OCD. Right. It will not help schizophrenia. Right. I can almost assure people it probably won't help schizophrenia. But I have heard you talk about a specific case

that you had in 2016 with a morbidly obese patient. I was fascinated by it. I watched your podcast on Andrew Huberman and who's a, I'm a huge fan of Andrew's. And you described a patient that, I don't wanna mislabel the disorder, had a major schizophrenic disorder. I forget the exact category of his schizophrenic disorder,

but he had a schizophrenic disorder. And essentially what, he came to the realization one day that I might be able to get a girlfriend if I could lose weight. He was morbidly obese. And for whatever reason, he was highly motivated to lose weight. And paraphrasing your story, but then you, as his clinician, came on board and thought, okay, I'm going to help him lose some weight. And his disorder was relatively progressed because he heard voices. As I recall, he had this paranoia that there were families that were watching him. And so we were talking about somebody who was

mentally ill. Yes, severely mentally ill. Severely mentally ill. And this, you know, you sort of credit this patient as being one of the sparks that lit the fire for you to really start taking a deep dive. Absolutely. And I wanna talk about that journey because here was a morbidly obese patient with a very severe mental illness that,

as I recall, was drug resistant. Yes. He'd been on every kind of antipsychotic and conventional therapy of the time. And yet he was just absolutely tormented. And the weight loss journey sparked the journey to fixing his mental, severe mental condition. Yes.

Okay, I wanna make sure that I summarize that accurately. All of that is accurate. And so for a variety of reasons, we ended up deciding to try a ketogenic diet and that was initially mind blowing to me when I saw the results. Within two weeks, he was losing weight. And I was started noticing tremendous mood improvement. Within two to three months, he just started spontaneously reporting that his chronic auditory hallucinations were going away. The voices that he heard in his head were going away, that he was no longer paranoid. He, as he thought about it, that didn't, it sounded kind of crazy. He started recognizing that maybe he's had schizophrenia all along. So that man went on to lose 160 pounds, has kept it off to this day.

He was able to complete a certificate program, perform improv in front of a live audience, go out in public without being paranoid. He moved out of his father's home for a while. That man started something that has been transformative. Some people will say, well, that's just an anecdote. And I've had a lot of people say, oh, maybe he was vitamin B12 deficient or something. And that's what fixed him. And yeah, all of, yes, I can think of hundreds of reasons that may have played a role. Maybe he was gluten sensitive and that was the magic ingredient.

But in fact, we now have hundreds of patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, chronic depression, and other disabling illnesses. Hundreds, if not thousands of patients coming forward, sharing their stories. Some of them are written up. We have case reports, pilot studies that have already been published. We have between 12 and 15 controlled trials occurring throughout the United States and throughout the world, including at prestigious universities like Harvard, Oxford, Johns Hopkins, Stanford. So for any of your listeners who don't know this, a lot of people know the keto diet as that fad diet to lose weight. The American Heart Association hates it. They think it's a toxic diet. It's going to give everyone heart attacks.

Nobody should do it. So there's a a toxic diet. It's going to give everyone heart attacks. Nobody should do it. So there's a good chance that any of your listeners have probably heard from their doctors or healthcare professionals. They should not do a ketogenic diet. It's dangerous. It's not a sustainable diet. Don't do it. So unbeknownst to most people, the ketogenic diet is actually a 100-year-old treatment for epilepsy. Yeah, epilepsy, yeah. And it can stop seizures even when medications and surgery fail to stop seizures. And the reason that's so important to me as a psychiatrist is because we use epilepsy treatments in psychiatry every day in tens of millions of people.

We use medications that were actually initially developed for epilepsy. Depakote, Tegretol, Lamictal, Neurontinor, Gabapentin, Benzodiazepines, all of these medicines are actually seizure medicines, but we use them in psychiatry for a wide range of mental illnesses, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, substance use disorders, dementia. We use them for everything. And so in many ways, using the ketogenic diet to treat serious mental illness is nothing new. It just happens to be using a dietary intervention to treat a brain condition that we call mental

illness. But the science is there, the evidence is there. The kind of the way that we practice psychiatry, the way that we think about psychiatry, this is not new, innovative. It's just something that's been hiding in plain sight. And sometimes when I talk with like leading researchers, clinicians, when I talk with them about this, and I point out everything I just pointed out, they say, duh.

Yeah. Why haven't we been using this diet in people with mental illness? The next question always is, well, nobody can do that diet. That diet is just way too hard. And people with mental illness, they're weak and they're vulnerable and they're lazy

and they're unmotivated and they're disorganized. And there's no way in hell they could do a ketogenic diet. Well, the reality, the wake-up call that I have for all those people is that I am getting lots of patients with chronic serious mental disorders who have been disabled by their illnesses, who are poor because of their illnesses, who have been unemployed for years or decades because of their illnesses.

And maybe more importantly, drug resistant. And drug resistant. They're taking their pills. They're doing their therapy. They're shocking their brains with electroconvulsive therapy. They are getting ketamine injections and they are still disabled. They are still tormented. Their lives are ruined and decimated. I am getting those people to do a ketogenic diet.

Why? Because they are fighting for their lives. They will do anything. If they will allow people to shock their brain with electricity, guess what, everyone? They will do a diet. Delete avocado. Like have a little more faith in them.

Have a little more faith. Give them the benefit of the doubt. Yeah, ribeye, not so bad, right? And the electroshocks to the hypothalamus, little more intense, right? It's so frustrating and infuriating to me as somebody who has tried to advocate for these people my whole career.

Right. It is so infuriating to me when people undersell their determination to improve their lives. No question. Yeah. People who just want to lose 10 pounds, it's really hard to get them to stay on a diet to lose 10 pounds. Yeah. Because they don't have that much skin in the game. It's not that their lives aren't ruined by weighing 10 pounds too much. It just doesn't matter that much to them. The people I'm working with, they're desperate.

They are desperate to get better. And I'll tell you, anecdotally, we have seen, because our clinics and my clinical team treat thousands and thousands of patients. We get about 20,000 new patients a month. So we do have a large pool of patients and a large clinical team. And we don't, you know, as a matter of habit,

put people on prolonged ketogenic diets, but we do use ketogenic diet resets and 10 weeks, 12 weeks, 14 weeks of keto dieting. I was most famously did that with Dana White, brought his triglycerides down from, you know, in the upper 800s to in the 130s, which is kind of a hard concept for a lot of people to grasp that you have really, really, really high fat in the blood. So we're gonna put you on a high fat diet to bring the high fat down in the blood, right?

It's sort of contrary to conventional thinking. Yeah, you're gonna eat mostly fat, a little bit of protein and virtually no carbs and the fat's gonna go down. But you know what I've been stumbling upon recently is that getting back to your mitochondrial theories that in a state of ketosis, when the body's using beta hydroxybutyrate as a fuel source and the mitochondria is making intracellular water, and it makes a type of water called deuterium depleted water.

It's a light water, has one less neutron. And that this water, the absence of this extra neutron, which is created when someone's in ketosis, creating mitochondrial water, water inside of the mitochondria for use in the Krebs cycle, that this doesn't break the Krebs cycle, that this doesn't break the Krebs cycle. It doesn't damage the motor. And you have this upstaging of mitochondria of which, you know, 10% of your body weight is mitochondria. I mean, they're not just the powerhouse of the cell. I mean, there are a life force. And so I could see that ketosis, you know, being a way to increase mitochondrial efficiency

ties into your theory about metabolic insufficiency being tied to all mental disease. So I guess my question to people would be, why not try this? You know, what is the downside? We know what the downsides are of some of these medications and SSRIs and amphetamines and what have you and benzos. What's the downside of a keto diet? You might lose some weight and get sick of avocados, right? Yeah. And the real answer, I have to say this as the clinician, the real answer is for people

suffering from mild to moderate symptoms that have never been dangerous or life-threatening. So ADHD, depression, anxiety, brain fog, burnout, absolutely. There is very little downside they should try a ketogenic diet see if it works for them and that's it's a it's a real no easy kind of no risk low risk intervention for the people who have really serious brain conditions that can be life-threatening so epilepsy threatening. So epilepsy, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, suicidal depression. I don't say this to be obstructive. I know people get mad at me for saying this, but I really do want them to work with a clinician, a clinician who understands their illness, who understands ketogenic and other metabolic therapies, other ways to enhance metabolism, who understands any medications that they might be taking and knows how to manage those medications safely, whether we're increasing doses or decreasing doses or trying to get you

off those medicines. I want people to do that. And it's not because the ketogenic diet is quote unquote dangerous, but it's because their illnesses are dangerous. And because the ketogenic diet is a powerful treatment that does come with some risks early on. The keto adaptation for some people with serious mental illness can actually make their symptoms worse before they get better. I just have to say that and put that out there.

Sure. And I don't want people to be afraid of it. I just want people to know it and then manage it in a safe way. And that's why I want people to get professional help from somebody who knows how to keep them safe. If a child is seizing, I wouldn't want their parents to have to figure out how to treat that epilepsy on their own, even if they end up using a ketogenic diet. And so likewise with schizophrenia and bipolar, the tragic news, unfortunately, is that since I've been

doing this work for the last several years, there aren't clinicians. We don't have clinicians who know how to integrate mental health with metabolic health. And so the reality is a lot of patients are stuck and they're desperate and they are doing it on their own. For some, it's working out beautifully. And I'm hearing from them and they are sharing their stories of recovery. They're sharing that. I mean, some of them are saying, Chris Palmer, you saved my life. And I'm delighted and glad that it's working out for them, but I am aware of patients that get into trouble. And it's heartbreaking because I listened to those stories and I think, well, I fully understand why you got into trouble. Why didn't somebody do anything about your sleep deprivation? Or why didn't somebody stop that medicine? Or why didn't somebody do this obvious

intervention that any decent mental health professional would know to do. And it's because, well, I couldn't find anybody to work with me. I couldn't find anybody to help me. Yeah. And so I just had to wing it. And, you know, it's like people coming to you for your practice. Yeah. You know, a lot of stuff. Yeah. You know, a lot of stuff that they don't know.

But I don't know everything, that's for sure. Nor do I, nor does anyone. But they benefit from going to somebody who knows what they're doing, who's at least seen other patients go through it, who knows the upsides and downsides, who knows this intervention might be the better one for you. You've got different symptoms. I'm going to give you a different intervention than I just gave that other person. Because I know, because I've seen hundreds or thousands of people. We know what works. We know what doesn't work. And we're going to use our experience, our knowledge, our wisdom to help you. And that's what I want for this field. I want there to be professionals. They don't have to be physicians.

They don't have to be psychiatrists. They don't even necessarily have to be mental health professionals. But I want professionals who know what they're doing, who know about metabolic interventions, and who know about the dangers of mental health conditions and know how to integrate it all and help people heal and recover. So tell me about where you see this brain energy

theory of mental illness going. I mean, do you plan to put this into wide scale practice and educate other psychiatrists and psychotherapists? Are you already doing that? You know, where does somebody go to get this information other than reading your book? And how could they find a clinician that might have some kind of understanding of this?

Because there are a lot of people that will be watching this podcast that either are or have a loved one who is desperate for help with a mental health issue, mental illness issue. And they have already gone as far as they can go in the conventional route, and they've either been told to deal with it, to live with it. This is just how it is. I mean, I see this all the time. You're just going to have to learn to live with this. And so to that person, number one, where do they turn? And number two, what is, where do you see this brain energy theory of mental illness going in a dream world? how would you see your work that you're doing manifested as a way to impact society?

So the great news is that this is taking off. I'm really happy to hear that. This is getting traction. It is. And over the last year, since I published the book, as I've said, we've got at least 12 to 15 clinical trials of the ketogenic diet for a wide range of mental illnesses underway. There is one philanthropist family, the Buzuki family in particular. I treated their son with treatment-resistant bipolar disorder and he's better.

He's in remission for three years now. Treatment-resistant bipolar, wow. Treatment-resistant bipolar. This is a very wealthy family that had access to the best of the best clinicians. They are funding clinical trials. They have started a nonprofit organization called Metabolic Mind. They have at least the beginnings of a clinician directory. So for some people

looking for clinicians, they could go to metabolicmind.org and look for information there. But the great news is that I am collaborating with researchers from around the world. Other research groups are getting underway. I currently have the privilege of working at McLean Hospital, which is the flagship psychiatric hospital of Harvard Medical School. We are currently ranked number one in the nation by U.S. News and World Report.

I don't say that to brag, but I say that because I know we're fighting an uphill battle. You know we're fighting an uphill battle. Very much. And the number one ranked psychiatric hospital in the nation is going to be starting the metabolic and mental health program under my leadership and directorship. We are going to have clinical services. We are going to be starting the metabolic and mental health program under my leadership and directorship. We are going to have clinical services.

We are going to have research program. And so anybody who says this is all quackery, that I'm skeptical, you just, well, if it's good enough for the leading Harvard, number one ranked psychiatric hospital in the nation who treat treatment resistant mental illnesses maybe it's good enough for you and your psychiatrist too but I am hoping to start clinics outside of McLean Hospital

McLean Hospital is a large conservative, academic, bureaucratic organization has its role ranked number one I love it. I have no plans of leaving. I love McLean Hospital. I'm going to stay there to do the academic and research work and really advance this theory. But I am really hoping to start some outpatient scalable clinics. Maybe someday we'll get to the point where we're treating 20,000 patients a month. I'd love to, man. I would love to.

I'd love to go out to our patient community and say, hey, because we don't hold ourself out as a mental health clinic, you know, or wellness, bio-optimization. But we definitely see, again, anecdotally, we have not done, you know, a controlled randomized trial. But when you get enough data, and I come from a big data background, I was a mortality expert with large life insurance, a probabilistic expert, and we used large data to predict mortality, very accurately, I might add. And we would put people into polls of a thousand

lives and we would put them on a mortality curve and we would predict their month of death accurately enough that large financial institutions would put tens of millions of dollars in risk on these predictions. But what we have seen again, massively anecdotally, but in large population is when we've fixed the hormones and we fix the metabolic issues. We reduce C-reactive proteins. We reduce inflammation in the liver. We improve the hemoglobin A1C.

We create a greater level of insulin sensitivity in the liver. We improve the hemoglobin A1C. We create a greater level of insulin sensitivity in the body. The patients lose weight. That one of the biggest things that they report is an improvement in their mental health. And I won't say that we treat patients with drug-resistant severe mental disorders, but everything else that you could imagine, ADD, ADHD, OCD, reported periods of

feeling depressed, what we would call mood numbness, flat affect, where people just don't have any positive motivation towards much of anything. And they're like, dude, I am on fire. I feel amazing. And the intention wasn't for them to feel amazing. It was to fix biomarkers in their blood and you fix them and you see it. So I'm, I mean, I there's, I'm, I'm absolutely delighted to, to hear that the allopathic community, the conventional community is maybe recognizing your work and now can become more mainstream. Absolutely. And so back to your metabolic theory

and mental disorders and brain health. So aside from ketogenic dieting, what are some of the things that you're investigating? What are some of the key nutrients that you're seeing that you're either supplementing with or encouraging people to take? What are some of the other activities you encourage them to engage in

that are having a positive impact on mental health? Most of us have a very difficult time meeting our protein needs and certain protein sources like whey protein and others can be as little as 20% absorbable. This is 99% absorbable and it has all of the essential amino acids that the body needs to build lean muscle, to recover, to improve our exercise performance, and most importantly to repair after we have intense exercise. So this is called Perfect Amino by Body body health it's like i said 99 absorbable it only has

two calories eventually the caloric intake has virtually no caloric intake it will not break a fast it tastes amazing you mix it in water i take this literally every single morning if you're working out in a fasted state you have to take a full spectrum amino acid prior to your workout to preserve your lean muscle and make sure that you're recovering properly and again it will not break your fast so the caloric impact is virtually zero you get all the full spectrum amino acids it tastes wonderful i use it every single day you can go to bodyhealth.com forward slash ultimate that's body health dot com forward slash ultimate and look for the perfect aminos they actually come in capsules if you're on the go or it becomes in several flavors

that they make in a powder which i love it's flavored with natural um uh means of flavoring so there's no artificial sweeteners in here so this is one of my absolute favorite products give it a try if you're working out at all you need a full spectrum amino acid go to bodyhealth.com forward slash ultimate that's bodyhealth.com forward slash ultimate i love their lab tested products you can actually see the absorption rate for all of their products they've got great electrolyte protein combinations my favorite is the perfect aminos bodyhealth.com forward slash ultimate. And now back to the ultimate human podcast.

Wow. So the real answer, as I think you already know, there's a whole world of options. And there's not a one size fix all solution. And I don't say that to frustrate people because they hear that. I think some people hear that and think,

so you're saying it's impossible. Just tell me, Dr. Palmer, just tell me the three steps to get rid of my son's schizophrenia. I'm like, no, it's not that simple. It's not that simple. Four avocados, a little bit of olive oil and a ribeye. Yeah, I'd like to know some biomarkers.

I'd like to look at, you know, maybe do some genetic testing. Maybe do, it's certainly biomarker testing, inflammatory biomarkers, metabolic biomarkers, a common sense mental health assessment. Just, you know, what symptoms are you having? Because that all gives us information about what might be happening. I'm gonna look at the person in front of me. Is this an overweight or obese person? Is this a thin emaciated person?

Because it can go that way too. Being malnourished, being underweight, anorexia, or cancer and severe crippling depression. The cancer patient with severe crippling depression who loses a tremendous amount of weight, that person is metabolically compromised in part, obviously due to the cancer, but in part due to the malnutrition.

And the remedy for that person is calories and nutrients and protein. We've got to build you back up in order to get your brain functioning properly. So just there, there's not a one size fits all solution. Some people need to lose weight. Keto might be a good solution for that. But other people need to gain weight. Maybe I use a weight-gaining ketogenic diet, but maybe I use just a regular kind of whole food, Whole30 or Paleo or lots of options.

Lots of options. If people want to be vegan or vegetarian or Mediterranean, I can work with lots of different things, but we're going to use dietary strategies that ultimately are improving the biomarkers, that are getting people better. And if our dietary strategies aren't working, we're going to change, we're going to adapt,

we're going to flex, we're going to figure out what works for you. But absolutely, I mean, key nutrients that we have known for decades are involved in mental health. Vitamin B12, folic acid, thiamine, those are all central to mitochondrial function. No doubt, methylfolic. And yes, and then they need to be methylated

in order to function optimally. And so we might wanna start thinking about looking at homocysteine and methylmalonic acid in order to see, are they having trouble processing? And is this even mainstream in psychiatric medicine? Do they usually pull blood biomarkers? It's so fascinating to me that you have, you know, areas of medicine that think this is somehow not connected to this, right?

I mean, 90% of our neurotransmitters are actually made in the gut. So somehow they've got to get from the gut to the brain. And we know about, you know, signaling pathways between the gut to the brain. And we know about signaling pathways between gut bacteria and the brain, sugar cravings, addiction, dopamine. I mean, these are well-documented. And it seems to me that this sort of holistic,

comprehensive approach that you're having, saying we don't just treat from the neck up, right? We treat from the toes to the top of the skull. We treat the whole body. The whole body. The whole body. The whole body is one interconnected system. The brain is communicating with the liver and the gut and the heart and the pancreas

and your ovaries and testicles. And we know that, like the basic pathways of that start in the brain, the pituitary gland and others, like, and then they go to the testicles. Like something like that simple is a brain testicle communication. But it goes the other way. All of those organs,

all of the organs in the human body, even muscles are communicating with the brain and they're sending signals to the brain. And like, it's incredible that there are people who don't understand that. Well, it's not incredible there's people that don't understand that. It's incredible that there are clinicians

that don't understand that, right? Yeah. Even worse, that's the thing. I think it's incredible that any human being doesn't understand that the whole. Yeah. Even worse. That's the thing. I think it's incredible that any human being doesn't understand that the whole body is an interconnected organ and that it all matters. It is infuriating that there are clinicians, healthcare clinicians who don't understand that this is all interconnected. And therefore, yes, what you put in your mouth is going to affect your gut microbiome,

may or may not cause inflammation in your digestive tract. And that may somehow get a signal, whether it's through the vagus nerve, whether it's through inflammatory cytokines, whether it's through serotonin levels, whether it's through neuropeptides, there are lots of ways that inflammation in the gut can be communicated to the brain.

But we know all of those things that I just said are true. And that impacts the way your brain functions. And it can also impact whether your brain malfunctions and produces depression for no good reason or produces anxiety for no good reason or produces anxiety for no good reason or produces hallucinations or delusions. Is it that simple? No, because it could be you get an infection, you could get COVID and end up with long COVID. And that can inflame your brain and can cause brain symptoms. But at the end of the day, if you do a deep dive into the science

of what exactly is driving long COVID symptoms, more and more researchers publishing in the top biological journals are zeroing in on mitochondria as the driving factor in something like long COVID. So yes, for some people it can be complicated. They got an infection or they're exposed to heavy metals or other toxins or pesticides,

or they're exposed to things that are causing inflammatory reactions or mitochondrial dysfunction. And so again, forest from the trees. The trees and the weeds get really messy and dirty and it gets complicated fast. And I think it's important. I think it's important to build credibility for this work. I think people need to understand it is complicated.

Infections, hormones, diet, exercise. But again, once you understand, you yourself have figured out and your clinicians have figured out, yeah, it's complicated, but we've got protocols, and we know how to help people. We know what to do. We know that if we try step one and step two and step three,

a lot of people are going to get better just from those three steps. And then if those don't work, we go on to step four, five, and six. Or maybe we do a more comprehensive assessment in those patients. Since it's not working now, maybe we do a more comprehensive assessment in those patients. Now, since it's not working now, maybe we didn't measure the right biomarkers. Maybe we didn't, this person needs the million dollar workup. Whereas step one is maybe a $500 workup

or a $20 workup, whatever it is. You know what is repeatedly fascinating to me is to oversimplify things. You know, the further we get away from the basics, the sicker I've noticed people become. And I feel like all human beings need 91 essential minerals. We need what, three essential fatty acids. We need eight essential amino acids, which are not proteins. They're the building blocks of proteins, but we need um eight essential amino acids which are not proteins

they're the building box of proteins but we need eight of them and as to be over simple as we become deficient in these basics we get the expression of disease um my core competency is certainly not in mental illness but you see the expression of certain conditions because of deficiencies in the human body. And a great place to start is to fix the deficiencies, the basics, vitamin D3, the 91 essential minerals, which you can get from mineral salts, the eight essential amino acids,

the building blocks of proteins, which by the way are not just our muscles, it's all of our connective tissues, our blood, our red blood cells, our nerves, our brain, and the essential fatty acids. And I feel like it would make sense to me that people that have significant mental illness are probably not adhering to the basics.

There's a lot more going on up there that they have to worry about than whether or not they have their basic nutritional needs covered or they're getting any sunlight or whether they're challenging their bodies with exercise or they're getting adequate levels of sleep. But therein might lie the fix

to some of these drug resistant conditions. So for, I guess my question to you to sort of bring it all back to your brain energy theory of mental illness, in a perfect world, how would you see psychiatric medicine evolving to be more inclusive of the whole patient, right? The whole body. What are some things that you feel have yet to be adopted

that 10 years from now you hope are part of a mainstream psychiatric eval or psychiatric consult or mental illness evaluation? So probably first and foremost, no one practitioner can do it all. And we're not gonna be able to train psychiatrists or psychotherapists to do all of this stuff themselves. And so instead I'm really strongly advocating

for multidisciplinary teams to treat people. So that you may have a psychiatrist or another type of physician or prescriber, psychiatric nurse practitioner or physician assistant, somebody who might be managing psychotropic medications and knows how to manage those. Even if the goal is to get them off of those medicines, we need somebody to do that

who knows how to safely taper medicines and get people off. But that person might be working with a psychotherapist if psychotherapy is indicated. But those two people are also gonna be working with a dietician, maybe a health and wellness coach, maybe a fitness trainer, maybe a biohacker expert, maybe a mitochondrial expert, maybe an endocrinologist who's going to help with manage the diabetes or the thyroid hormone deficiency or whatever. But I'm really hoping

that we will get multidisciplinary teams who all understand and respect we are treating the whole human being. And together as a team, we're going to win. But if any of us try to play alone, we're probably going to fall short, just like a football team or any other team. They all need to work together. And that means mutual respect for each other.

That means mutual appreciation that it's not, I'm the doctor and I'm going to bark orders at everybody and everybody's going to listen to me. It's we are really an interdisciplinary team and we're all going to bring our expertise and kind of our strengths to the table to help people heal and recover. So bringing psychiatric medicine below the neck.

And ideally, we're gonna come up with systematic protocols because I really do want this to be cost-effective and I want it scalable for the masses. And that means we can't do a million dollar workup on everybody. But as you said, most people don't need a million dollar workup. They need basic common sense strategies. What's your diet? Oh, you just changed to a shit diet and all of a sudden you're feeling worse. Gosh, I wonder what could be going on. Maybe we can change your diet back. And it's not rocket science. That person doesn't need much of a medical intervention.

They just need common sense. Oh, you changed your diet. Everything got worse. Let's fix your diet. Put it back to the way it was before. If everything gets better, problem solved. Don't eat that kind of a diet again unless you want to feel that way again.

Could we optimize their health? Yes, we could. Could we try to help them achieve better longevity? Yes, we could. Is that essential? Is that medically necessary? Is insurance going to pay for that? Probably not soon.

Those are kind of considered more cosmetic or whatever. That's fine. Yeah. We don't treat pre-diabetes. We only treat diabetes, right? But I'm really hoping for the day when we're going to do that. I do think one of the more disruptive aspects of the brain energy theory is to take a really hard, serious look at some of the treatments that we are delivering. And before I say anything further, I just want to say, if anybody's listening to this

and you're taking psychiatric medications, please, please do not change them on your own. Stay on your medicines, work with your provider, figure out what's right for you. If you're going to change your medicine, you must do it in a safe, gradual way. People can be, if they stop their medicines too fast, even if they think they're doing a taper over two weeks, that's way too fast of a taper for most people. If they do that, they can end up depressed, psychotic, suicidal. Yeah. I mean, so don't change your meds.

However, anybody with common sense already knows we prescribe medicines that cause metabolic harm. They come with metabolic side effects. We prescribe medicines to tens of millions of people that cause massive amounts. They come with metabolic side effects. We prescribe medicines to tens of millions of people that cause massive amounts of weight gain, that cause type 2 diabetes, that increase risk for cardiovascular disease. They worsen your inflammatory biomarkers.

They worsen your lipids. They increase your blood pressure. They are associated with increased mortality in the elderly. And for anybody who hears me say that and thinks, how dare you say that? It's right on the package insert issued by the FDA. If you read the label for a lot of the antipsychotic mood stabilizing medicines, all of those are right there. They say what? Warnings. This medicine can cause weight gain. This medicine can cause type two diabetes. This medicine can worsen cardiovascular disease, risk factors. This medicine can result in premature mortality in the elderly.

Oof. It's right there on the package insert. Do we know with certainty that the medications are harming mitochondria? Is that one of the possible mechanisms of action? We know that they're doing lots of things. They're changing all these biomarkers. So again, metabolism is super complicated. Can it really be just as simple as all it's all mitochondria? It's not just all mitochondria. It's metabolism is all of these different enzymes pathways, but they're converging at mitochondria in numerous myriad ways in different cells and different ways. But we do know with certainty based on some basic science research studies that some of the medications that we prescribe are in fact causing mitochondrial harm. And those are the same medicines that are resulting

in obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and premature mortality. And if metabolic mitochondrial dysfunction is the cause of mental illness, it begs the question, what are we doing to people when we are prescribing medicines that cause metabolic and mitochondrial harm? Wow. And in my mind,

I don't think that those treatments are going to go away anytime soon. I think that there will likely still be a role and a place for those treatments even 20 years from now. But I think about some of those treatments more like I think about chemotherapy. Chemotherapy is a poison. Deadly poison. But the goal is to poison the cancer before you poison the patient. But oncologists who are using chemotherapy fully recognize and understand I am giving this person poison. I'm doing it to try to save their life. So I need, but I need to be very cautious. I understand I'm delivering poison and I am going

to remove this poison as soon as possible. As soon as I think I've achieved the result I'm looking for, I'm going to get them off this poison. And then I'm going to try to help them heal and recover from the toxicity that I just caused to the rest of their body. And I think that we need to think about medications like antipsychotics maybe in a similar way, that when somebody is floridly manic and psychotic and a danger to themselves or others, if they're assaulting other people because they are paranoid and hallucinating, I am all for using antipsychotics to contain that situation and keep people safe. Keep both that patient safe and other people safe. But we need to do it in the same way that we would use chemotherapy.

We need to understand that we are delivering a mitochondrial and metabolic toxin to this person. And that we're going to do it to keep this person safe in this situation. But then a few days later, a month later, I want to start looking, how are we going to help this person heal and recover? How are we going to rebuild their mitochondria? How are we going to rebuild their, yes. How are we going to get them better? And maybe that for people who are dangerous to themselves and others, maybe that is an inpatient unit so that we can keep everybody safe. So I'm not trying to say it's simple solutions, but that would be a completely different way of thinking about mental illness. It would be a completely different way of treating mental illness.

It is disruptive. And there are a lot of people who hate disruption. Trust me, I know. Trust me, I know. Disruption puts multi-billion dollar industries out of business. And multi-billion dollar industries have a lot of resources to fight disruption. And they will fight it with education campaigns. They will fight it with research that says,

this is nonsense, don't listen to Chris Palmer, don't listen to the brain energy theory. They will fight it passionately. At the end of the day, hundreds of millions of lives are devastated by chronic mental illness. Those people are hoping and praying for disruption. Those people are hoping and praying for disruption. Yeah. Those people are hoping and praying for something better.

They deserve disruption. They deserve better lives. They deserve better treatments. And so at the end of the day, I'm hoping that disruption will win. I think when disruption has evidence-based outcomes behind it and and sadly the money is not flowing to dietary and lifestyle um you know changes as an alternative to conventional therapies or as in support in conjunction with conventional therapies. And, you know, a lot of, I think the challenges are we can't build an industry around prevention, right? I mean, prevention is kind of the idea

that we should slowly put ourself out of business, right? I mean, we should slowly seek to lose clients and to lose patients. so you know from a business scaling metric it doesn't really work right and i think that's a lot of uh of of the issue in my opinion that we see with disruption i mean we you know i talk about clinical studies that show there's an inverse relationship between sodium and migraine headaches. And I've seen my clinical team supplement patients with Celtic sea salts and Baja gold sea salts and have a positive impact on their incidence of migraines.

I'm saying all migraines are caused by sodium deficiency, but there's a mineral deficiency that actually has an impact but it's a if it was a 15 solution to a 50 billion dollar industry and um and i think that's the big force that people like yourself are fighting is not just conventional um wisdom per se right but it's it But it's this massive industrial machine that the fuel is money, you know, it's funded. And until we can find a way to create a profitable industry around prevention, I think that's going to be this uphill battle for folks like yourself. Because would you say the most mainstream psychiatric facilities, maybe even the most inpatient psychiatric facilities are, would you say as a, in large part, they're considering things like this, like mitochondrial dysfunction, dietary interventions,

and some of the things that you're proposing? Right now they're not. Yeah. But I think that's because this is new to a lot of them. They don't understand this. And as you said, we have to have evidence that it actually works. We have to demonstrate, to get back to the disruption and the economic disruption. We have to demonstrate that this has economic advantages. And I want to at least comment on that just a little bit because, yes, I am hoping, looking to disrupt

some parts of the pharmaceutical industry. I want mitochondrial toxins to be used much less frequently. I do not want them at all to be lifelong treatments anymore. However, with disruption comes opportunity. There are lots of biotech companies already in existence who are very hot on the trail. Great. Mitochondria and human health. And they are developing molecules that will stimulate mitophagy,

that will stimulate autophagy. Bravo. That will improve human health. And so I am all for that. And we've got supplement companies, and you even mentioned just Sea Salt. That's a company that has a product to sell. But much more importantly than products. So that's just normal business.

Typewriter industry is thriving and doing well. Personal computers come along and put them out of business. Yeah, the typewriter industry wasn't happy about it, but the personal computer business thrived and turned into something that who would have ever imagined employs so many more people than the typewriter industry ever employed. So with disruption, yes, it sucks

if you own a typewriter company, but that is the lifeblood of our economy is innovation and new and better and more efficient and better opportunities. And so just from the product side, I want to disrupt products that do not promote health and healing. I want them to become obsolete.

And instead, I want products that promote health and healing. And there is a buck to be made there. But in my mind, the much bigger financial incentive is not about products. The much bigger financial incentive is about taking the millions and millions of people who are disabled and crippled by their mental illnesses and turning them into taxpaying citizens. Imagine what would happen in our economy and our world if we no longer had the burden of using tax dollars to basically support these people in poverty and provide their housing and provide their food and provide

their cost to the mental health and a detraction from the lack of contribution. But if we instead turn them into taxpaying citizens. And didn't have to support really expensive psychiatric care. Yes. Right. They don't need psychiatric care anymore. They are self-sufficient. They could just eat an avocado.

An avocado. They are taking care of themselves. They are working. Yeah. They are paying into the system. They are hopefully finding decent, meaningful work so that they feel like they have a purpose in their life, that they're doing something useful and worthwhile.

They have dignity. They have self-respect. Yeah. Like that is the financial gain of disruption. That is the financial gain of actually stemming the tide of the mental illness epidemic and doing something about it. Wow, amazing. I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation.

I feel like there is so many more synergies that you and I have and so many of the people in my sphere have in terms of the approach to human optimization. And for those folks that are watching and want to find out more about your work, where can they, where can they find you? Where can they find your, your, your book? I'm going to put a, put a link to your book on, in the show notes, but where can they find you? Where can they find out more about your work? Where can they take a deeper dive? So two websites. One is brainenergy.com. You can learn more about the book. You can sign up for a newsletter. You can see lots of podcasts that I've done, including this one now.

But they could also go to chrispalmermd.com, which is more my professional site. Once I get that clinic up and running, I've got a wait list going. People can sign up for the wait list if they really want to hold out for the Chris Palmer Brain Energy Theory of Treatment. But they can see some academic publications and other work there too.

That is amazing. I sort of wind up every podcast by asking every guest the same question. And there's no right or wrong answer to this question. And that is, what does it mean to you to be the ultimate human or an ultimate human? I think my mission in life is to try to help people who are suffering in some way and improve their life. And if I can do that, I've done that a lot already as a psychiatrist. I've done that just in the last year. People have reached out to me and let me know that.

The ultimate, see how much I can scale that. See how much I can scale that by educating other mental health professionals, other healthcare clinicians, other people, politicians, insurance companies who are funding this work, if I can convince them that there is a better way to help suffering human beings improve their lives, that I will be the ultimate human. Awesome. Well, I really enjoyed this.

I'd love to have you back as your work progresses and you get more meat on the bones of your clinics and you see this dream come to fruition. I'd love to be a part of helping you get the word out to the world. Awesome. And as always, that's just science.