Category: Ketogenic Psychiatry

We’ve anticipated this world class Metabolic Health Summit 2024 for some time, and it’s finally happened!! Top scientific and clinical researchers and world-class experts on low carb, metabolic interventions, and ketogenic diet treatments gathered to share their research and outcomes. And we listened with rapt attention. Not a minute went by that wasn’t packed with new, exciting and applicable information. It’s all to help you, our patients, get better — and live healthier, happier lives. (Thank goodness there was coffee there!) And there were so many opportunities to create new collaborations and make new friends. You can see us above with Chef Ikaika Molina, who does Culinary Medicine in Hawaii. We’re so excited to see the growth in our field — and so many possibilities when we use food as medicine in treating our patients. (Shout out to Ikaika—stay in touch and let’s find a way to work together!) Now, about the astounding expertise of our speakers …

Valter Longo, Ph.D

Valter Longo, Ph.D., is Director of the USC Longevity Institute. Named one of Time Magazine’s 50 Most Influential People in Health Care. His research on fasting-mimicking diets (FMD) for the improvement of health and prevention of disease has been groundbreaking and his keynote address showed us how use of these FMD cycles to reduce tumor progression. He talked about how those who are undergoing extensive chemotherapy along with fasting-mimicking dieting, are showing greater results with remission.

He also works to identify the molecular pathways conserved from simple organisms to humans to find ways to modulate them to protect against multiple stresses. For example, to treat or prevent cancer, Alzheimer’s Disease and other diseases of aging. The focus is on the signal transduction pathways that regulate resistance to oxidative damage in yeast and mice.

He’s a true leader in our field.

Iain Campbell, Ph.D.

Iain Campbell, Ph.D., from the University of Edinburgh, is a Baszuki Research Fellow. He has personal, lived experience with bipolar 2 disorder and has seen dramatic and sustained benefits of KMT (ketogenic metabolic therapy), often just called KD (ketogenic diet) for over 7 years. He’s the principle investigator on a pilot trial exploring the use of a ketogenic diet for bipolar II disorder. He reports that all patients with bipolar disorder show a decrease in ketone levels, and low levels of lactic acid. Lactic acid is an indicator of mitochondrial dysfunction. These two significantly altered biomarkers show up in bipolar disorder. Lactic acid is one of the most important measured biomarkers.

It’s exciting to see metabolic measurements that tell us about a condition as serious as  bipolar disorder. It also helps us understand why a ketogenic diet can bring this condition into remission. This Metabolic Health Summit brought out the best in the best.

The psychiatric outcomes that he says they saw as the participants adopted and maintained a ketogenic diet (with 91% adherence—amazing numbers!) were highly significant correlations in mood, anxiety,  impulsivity, and energy. His team measured ketones every day and saw them moving every day.  They looked at causation and correlation. And they saw a correlation of ketones to response, particularly in anxiety, as well as highly significant correlations in improved mood, energy and reduced impulsivity.

He just published his paper, The Metabolic Overdrive Hypothesis: Hyperglycolysis and Glutaminolysis in Bipolar Mania, this week in Molecular Psychiatry. (Hooray, Iain—what a win for it to come out just before the Summit began!) He explained that glutamate serves as a sort of metabolic fuel source, and suggested that perhaps when we’re producing ketones, glutamate decreases and this may partly explain the dramatic response we see in bipolar disorder. And there are multiple other mechanisms at play, as we know.

NPR published an article featuring Iain and his work, as well as many others in this field–a superb piece that’s worth reading.

Fascinating. Thrilling!!  

We’ll want to keep reading more of his work going forward. 

Matt Baszuki

And then we got to hear from Matt Baszucki from The Baszuki Group and Metabolic Mind, and who spoke from lived experience—a strikingly well-delivered, honest, funny, and heart-rending 5-year story of living with bipolar I disorder — all of it.

After many hospitalizations, over 40 mental health professionals, 29 medications, and so much pain, he found a way out. And as he did, he began to analyze his symptoms, and what seemed to make them worse. 

Matt talked about how around March as the days become longer, many people with bipolar disorder become symptomatic. And, he realized mania struck him at this time around the Equinox…he called it March Madness. So, he would need to take extra medication at this time of year, and he learned to prepare himself, so he was ready when March came.

Finally, his mom helped him find ketogenic treatment and a psychiatrist and dietitian who could help him with it. That was in January of 2021. He was ready to try something that might actually work.

The ketogenic diet required a lifestyle change—a big one, full of good changes for his body, his sleep, his schedule, and his ability to really flourish, and to work. He was able to very slowly taper meds that he didn’t need anymore. And his symptoms subsided — but if he relaxed with his ketogenic diet, and ate more carbohydrates, his symptoms would start up. So he’d become strict again (his words).

It changed his life. It changed his family’s life.

He offers a compelling message about the freedom in ketogenic living. And the importance of the healthy lifestyle changes he’s made sleep, exercise, meditation and meaningful work — in order to get and stay well. It is about freedom. And it’s about hope.

What a joy to hear his story!

Christopher Palmer, M.D.

Chris Palmer, M.D., who wrote Brain Energy, digs deep. He opened with how 20-60% of patients with psychiatric disorders suffer from treatment resistance. And most psychiatric treatments are not curative… they aren’t disease-modifying therapies, they just reduce symptoms… at best. He said that psychiatry is a mess because the field doesn’t really understand what mental illness is.

He points out that a recent 2023 study by Brandt et al., suggested that there’s a general disease factor playing a role in mental and physical illness.

Dr. Palmer agrees, in that mental disorders are metabolic disorders of the brain. He made the point that all of the risk factors for mental illness are all of the risk factors that adversely impact metabolism. 

The unifying brain energy theory that he proposed in Brain Energy is this: Metabolic dysfunction in cells can explain all aspects of mental illness.

How ’s that for a breakthrough concept?

He wants us to come away with this: metabolic treatment using individualized, psychiatrist and dietitian-supervised ketogenic approaches can be disease-modifying therapies. They can change your present… and they can change your future.

We know this, and we see this every day in our patients.

He suggests we need to think about mental states and mental disorders in the same way that we think about pain. Pain is perfectly normal; all of us have it. It’s not a disorder, it’s not the body malfunctioning.  We might take a pill for it, we might need some help, we might want some comfort. You can have extreme pain if you get surgery; you might have extreme and prolonged pain for clear reasons, but these are not disorders of pain. However, there are, in fact, pain disorders in which the pain system is malfunctioning, and where the brain regions are malfunctioning — and produce the sensation of pain when a person should not be having pain.

He argues that mental states operate in the same way: Anxiety is normal, extreme anxiety is normal (if you’re being bullied, for example) — and yet there are people who experience anxiety for no reason, because the brain regions that code for anxiety are firing, although they shouldn’t or don’t need to be firing.  

Mental Illness and Metabolic Conditions

Mental illness is strongly correlated with obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and decreased life expectancy, and all of these are strongly correlated with higher rates of psychiatric disorders.

When we see strong bidirectional correlations, we need to consider a common pathology: mitochondrial dysfunction. Mitochondria—the organelles in each cell create energy. In the brain, they create brain energy.

His words were pure gold. This was one of the best talks — and there were so many! — at MHS 2024, a true Metabolic Health Summit that pulled together incredible scientific researchers and clinicians from all parts of the world, and from bench to patient care addressing the most challenging issues for human health.

Jocelyn Tan, M.D.

Jocelyn Tan, M.D., is Integrative Oncology Director at the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System on ketogenic diet therapy for oncology. She said research for this began in 1913, with a fascinating study of lab rats. One group was fed bread, and the other was fed a form of protein and lard. Then, they were injected with cancer cells. All the rats got cancer, but in the ones eating bread, the tumors grew. In the ones eating lard, the tumors were small. 

More experiments followed, and in all cases, the rats fed a form of sugar nearly all died. Of the rats who were fed lard, only 6 out of 26 died — and they didn’t die of cancer. 

Pretty remarkable, and in 1913 no less!

Dr. Tan described her feasibility study evaluating the ketogenic diet in endometrial cancer patients. They collected tissues before the diet, then after the diet, and did tissue studies to understand what happens to the tumor during the diet. Then, the exosome analysis to understand why some patients have resistance and others respond to the treatment.

I could go on and on. Each speaker at this Metabolic Health Summit described outstanding, cutting edge, breakthrough research and treatments. There were so many outstanding experts.

Peter Crawford, M.D., Ph.D.

Peter Crawford, M.D., Ph.D., from University of Minnesota, Protective Interorgan, Intercellular, and Intercompartmental Metabolite Shuttles in Obesity described studies conducted to identify metabolic signals that distinguish lean or overweight athletically trained people that indicate latent markers of metabolic dysfunction…who are clinically healthy.

Bret Goodpastor, Ph.D

Bret Goodpastor, Ph.D., Scientific Director and a Senior Investigator at the AdventHealth Translational Research Institute. He researches the pathophysiology of  obesity, insulin resistance, and diabetes. He talked about how both exercise and weight loss improve insulin sensitivity.  So his team then became more interested in this:  when you combine calorie restriction with weight loss, is there an additive effect? 

Andrew Koutnik, Ph.D.

Andrew Koutnik, Ph.D., Research Scientist at the Sansum Diabetes Research Institute, spoke on  Nutrition and Cardiometabolic Health in Diabetes. This subject is near and dear to his heart because he has Type 1 diabetes himself. He’s currently investigating the impact of divergent nutritional interventions on cardio-metabolic health in Type 1 diabetes, pre-diabetes, Type 2 diabetes, and obesity. He points out that if you’re diagnosed with any one of these diseases, your life expectancy is reduced by about 10 years. 

He says there is too little research on diet for Type 1 diabetics, and describes studies of Type 1 diabetics involving diets with carbohydrates, and those that are low carb. They learned that blood glucose control was more difficult with when the traditional carbohydrates were included in their diets. That in spite of the extensive research on diabetes and the technology benefits for glucose control, Type 1 diabetics still have insulin resistance and dysfunction in blood glucose levels. They found that when lower amounts of carbohydrate are included in the diet, there is improved control of blood glucose. 

Franziska Spritzler, RD-N, C.D.E.

Franziska Spritzler, R.D-N., C.D.E., presented a beautiful and practical approach to implementing ketogenic and LowCarb diets. Franziska explained how to determine protein needs, as well as how to determine the carbohydrate needs for a customized diet in certain conditions.  She talked about optimal levels of ketosis, and talked about using ketogenic and LowCarb diets for Type 2 diabetics, stressing there is lots of evidence to support this approach. She also talked about these diet interventions for polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).

Ben Bikman, Ph.D.

Ben Bikman, Ph.D., scientist and professor at Brigham Young University, seeks to better understand the role of elevated insulin and nutrient metabolism in regulating obesity, diabetes, and dementia.

Isn’t it great there is so much work being done in this area?

Dr. Bikman talked about the pathophysiology of fat cells, and how they grow and become suffocated as they get farther and farther from capillaries. He’s the fat cell expert, for sure! He knows the drilled-down details of how they grow, how they proliferate, and how this leads to so many end-problems in our bodies and for our overall health. He talked about obesity in America compared to insulin resistance in India, and how weight gain in diabetics is related to their insulin intake.

 

Richard Johnson, M.D.

Richard Johnson, M.D., Professor of Medicine at University of Colorado, is internationally recognized for his work on sugar and how it plays a role in obesity and diabetes. So delighted to hear him speak. Dr. Johnson has published over 500 papers, and is the author of the book, Nature Wants Us to be Fat. 

He says Metabolic Syndrome is the great precursor—not just to diabetes and cardiovascular disease. There are now newer associations with conditions like Alzheimer’s disease. Also vascular dementia, ADHD, bipolar disorder, depression, cancer, preeclampsia, polycystic ovarian syndrome.

Who knew these were metabolic diseases… until we learned how pervasive metabolic illness really was?

He talked about fructose — a sugar found in fruit — playing a huge primary role in increasing fat.

(Wait—but you’ve no doubt been taught that fruit should be included when you try to lose weight, right?)

But fructose is used in nature to store fat. Bears eat copious amounts of fruit before they hibernate. Fructose drives hunger, thirst, and foraging. Fructose decreases the resting metabolism (to increase fat stores). 

It causes insulin resistance and decreases glucose delivery to the muscle. It causes inflammation (which was probably meant to protect us from infection); it maintains circulation and glomerular (in the kidneys) circulation.  Fructose also switches on glycolysis to protect animals in a low oxygen state.

His talk was fascinating and eye opening.

Tommy Woods, M.D., Ph.D.

Tommy Woods, M.D., Ph.D., Director of the Neonatal Neuroscience Lab, Food and the Brain Dementia Prevention Database gave a wonderful talk on age-related cognitive decline. He says that age-related cognitive decline is often overcomplicated. He says that a conservative estimate of 40% of cognitive decline is preventable. With improved diet with improved nutrients, rest, and late life social and cognitive activity while reducing stress, there is potential for marked improvement in cognitive acuity. Breakthrough concept for the Metabolic Health Summit.

David Feldman, UCLA

David Feldman, UCLA, software engineer, entrepreneur, and founder of Citizens Science Foundation, researches why LDL rises on some people on a LowCarb diet and asks if this rise results in heart disease. He’s doing a study that began in February of 2023, and will continue next month in February 2024, on lean mass hyper responders (LMHR) to understand why some people have elevated LDL and if this is actually correlated with an increase in coronary artery plaque. Absolutely tremendous work, which may finally up-end conventional thinking in medicine.

Nick Norwitz, PhD, (right) who describes himself as “Dave’s brother by another mother” has been captivated by this work and conducted an N of 1 experiment on himself (he’s a lean mass hyper-responder on a ketogenic diet) by eating a sleeve of Oreo cookies every day followed by 6 weeks of high intensity statin therapy. The Oreos reduced his LDL by 71% — twice as much as the statin did. 

In LMHR, we think that the high LDL is triggered by lowering carbs, so his hypothesis is if you add back carbs, it should lower your LDL.  He added back carbs by eating an entire sleeve of Oreos every day, and it certainly did lower his LDL. You can find this all over YouTube (but realize that his experiment was to prove a point, not to promote or suggest that anybody eat cookies, sugar or processed foods).

Nick is a one-man riot—fearless, funny and absolutely brilliant. I crown him the King of Disruption—the guy knows how to get people to sit up and pay attention. So glad he was at Metabolic Health Summit 2024.

Lily Nichols, RDN, CDN

Lily Nichols, RDN, CDN, is the founder of the Institute for Prenatal Nutrition, and co-founder of Women’s Health Nutrition Academy. She gave an outstanding talk on how metabolic health starts in utero. She stressed the importance of real food for pregnancy and for gestational diabetes.

Her work has helped change international guidelines on nutrition in pregnancy. Diabetologists in the Czech Republic used to have national guidelines that set a minimum carb intake of 200g per day for prenatal women, and after they reversed it to be a maximum of 200g, they’ve reported better maternal and fetal outcomes, less excessive birth weight, and less gestational diabetes.  She trains professionals in the Institute for Prenatal Nutrition.

A baby inherits the expression of parents’ genes at conception, and their mitochondria from their mothers (not their fathers). Plus, your genes are further impacted by the environment in utero, and the first two years of life. So, a mother’s nutrients are vital from before conception. This is essential information for us to hear at Metabolic Health Summit 2024.

And Our Poster Presentation

I was so pleased to present our work describing complete remission of generalized anxiety and major depression with Touchpoints 180 and so happy to see how enthusiastically it was received. (The international scientific poster session at MHS 2024, Metabolic Health Summit 2024, was sponsored by Keto-Mojo, and was pretty packed.) 

At Touchpoints180, we look forward to helping you experience the benefits of therapeutic nutritional ketosis and the metabolic health that goes with it. We’ve learned so much this week at Metabolic Health Summit 2024 — and we’re eager to bring it to you.

If you’re struggling with depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, weight and metabolism, and other conditions we’ve talked about, call us.

At Touchpoints 180, our approach can help you find vibrant, balanced health and joy again.

“I don’t want any more medicine, are you kidding me?” “I’m so sick of hearing I should take a pill.” “You mean I need another med to offset the side effects from this one?” “If one more person tells me I have to take more meds, I’ll scream.” Sound like you? Sometimes it’s you—or someone you know—who’s developed a cascade of symptoms that just seem to stack onto each other, higher and higher and higher… Depression, anxiety, OCD, PTSD, bipolar disorder… it can feel like you’re falling apart, and it can make you think, “Why me? Why is all this happening to me? I wish I could do something instead of taking more medicine.” You can—you absolutely can! You can upgrade your food choices, and you can use food as medicine because…food is medicine. It’s your best medicine.

Sound like hype to you? Stay with me, because this is serious science.

Food as Medicine for Metabolic Illness

You may not have all these ailments, but it’s not uncommon to suffer from more than one at a time. We call it comorbidity. (Sounds like a bad word—and it is.) Since metabolism is at the center of all your body does, when your metabolism is out of whack, the natural result is often a cluster of health problems or disorders. Maybe depression, anxiety, weight gain, brain fog or even dementia, for instance.

You feel so defeated, so targeted, even doomed. And it’s so unfair!

But you may not realize, you do have the power to change your mind and your metabolism with something simple: a ketogenic diet.

Metabolic illness has crescendoed in the 21st century. So have psychiatric symptoms.

Processed, high-carbohydrate foods full of sugars and seed oils actually reduce the energy the cells have to work with, because glucose (sugar) can be an inefficient form of fuel if it can’t get into your cells. When your cells lack the internal energy they need to function well, symptoms of disease begin to appear. The longer that goes on the more serious it gets.

We’re talking about cells in your body everywhere, but for me (and for you!) we’re talking about cells in your brain. Neurons.

Boy do we have good news! The science behind a customized ketogenic diet is all about brain energy. It’s about metabolic psychiatry —ketogenic psychiatry — where we use nutritional ketosis as a treatment. You heard that right. Not as a wild diet fad, not as a YouTube promo, not on a whim. As sophisticated treatment. Turning on brain mitochondria by providing ketones for fuel, so cells can repair themselves and have the energy to function at their best.  

Fundamentally, the brain is an energy demanding organ. More than any other part of your body. By adopting a therapeutic ketogenic diet, you can get your body to transition into nutritional ketosis. This nutritional ketosis changes your metabolism and actually changes your brain chemistry in the most excellent, elegant way.

And those changes can optimize the neurotransmitters in the brain, and the energy levels in your brain. They can tamp down anxiety, mood swings and rage like nobody’s business.

It’s Like Running on Diesel Instead of Gas — 24/7.

That kind of swap reduces systemic inflammation in your whole body, which reduces neuroinflammation — the inflammation deep within and around your brain cells.

Reducing inflammation is critically important, since neuroinflammation triggers a host of psychiatric disorders.

When you consider the impact of therapeutic nutritional ketosis in your brain, you can see why I am so clear about the fact that a ketogenic intervention in psychiatry and in medicine is so much more than a “diet”… it’s a medical prescription. It’s treatment — and arguably, the best treatment — using food as medicine.

What’s the Deal with Mitochondria?

Psychiatrists, neurologists, oncologists, cardiologists, endocrinologists, internists, gynecologists, and fitness experts all gather at scientific conferences to share their data about the results they’ve seen using therapeutic nutritional ketosis (affectionately referred to as KMT, ketogenic metabolic therapy, or KD, ketogenic diet) in treating their patients. We use food as medicine to treat a wide variety of illnesses.

And we focus specifically on using food as medicine to treat depression, anxiety and other disorders in your brain

By drastically reducing carbohydrates and increasing the foods that generate ketones for your mitochondria, your brain switches its energy production in the cells from using sugar to using ketones. Ketones are produced when fats are broken down for fuel, so that process provides fuel and can reduce your body fat. (Especially around your internal organs—so important!)

But there’s more to what mitochondria do than just providing fuel in your cells. They play a role in directing and allocating resources for cells. For one thing, yes, they take food and turn it into ATP, the energy the cells need. But mitochondria can also use your ketones as the perfect fuel for your cells to make serotonin and dopamine, which are necessary for your mood.

And another thing, they make the energy that produces cortisol, a vital hormone. These energy powerhouses regulate these neurotransmitters and hormones as they become imbalanced in people suffering from psychiatric symptoms and disorders. And so important: mitochondria play a role in our response to trauma, and the psychological and social stressors that result.

Ketones are the “Food” that is Medicine

Since excess weight gain is connected to mood and anxiety disorders, and so much more, this weight loss in itself can improve your overall health and wellbeing. But there are so many more benefits than that.

There is research going on all over the world by the best of the best in medicine and neuroscience.

Epilepsy treatment using a ketogenic diet began back in the 1920’s and is now used worldwide with extraordinary results. We have more than 100 years of science, patient outcomes, and elegant, randomized clinical trials that prove it. As we study how nutritional ketosis has impacted, improved, and protected brain cells related to epilepsy, we see similar parallels with migraine treatment and a host of other brain and metabolic disorders. Type 2 diabetes, fatty liver, insulin resistance metabolic syndrome, obesity can all be reversed with a KMT, a ketogenic metabolic therapy.

Reversed means gone.

It’s really exciting to see how brain cells respond to this ketogenic fuel to relieve symptoms of bipolar disorder, OCD, PTSD, depression, and anxiety. When brain cells have the fast, easy energy they need, they can really thrive, to bring you a sense of wellbeing and calm. Brain fog evaporates. Joy and energy replace misery.

We see this every day, in person, on telemed, in the office, and when we’re out walking with our patients. (Yep—we go out 4 times a week on nature walks with them. We don’t just talk about this—we do it. We walk the walk.)

Symptoms dissipate. And you gain the power to live a fulfilling and rewarding life. 

Not Another Pill, but Food as Medicine

The ketogenic diet consists of foods that are high in healthy fats, moderate in protein, and very low in carbohydrates. Since carbohydrates are only ever turned into glucose, when your carbohydrate intake is high enough, glucose wins. It’s all there is and your body doesn’t and can’t produce ketones.

By keeping your carbohydrate intake low, and your fat intake high, there’s no competition and your body starts to use fat to make ketones. And your body’s mechanism for burning your body fat and the healthy fats you’re eating — to supply the mitochondria in the cells with ketones — can function smoothly.

Happily, if carbs are low and ketones available, your brain will want to use ketones because it thrives on them. They are easily and rapidly transported into your brain cells. So eat those avocados!

Touchpoint 180™

At Innovative Psychiatry, we offer Touchpoints 180™ in our Metabolic Psychiatry program, and have a small team of experts to give you hundreds of touchpoints so that you can do a 180. There is nothing like this anywhere else in the United States. We know because we’ve been all over in the past year and have seen this for ourselves. We offer ketogenic metabolic therapies personalized for you, body composition analysis, frequent follow ups — in person, with telemed, and in nature — groups, family and friend groups, digital tools, ketone/glucose monitoring (we so believe in this we buy it for you and just give it to you!) walks and talks, recipes, texts, phone calls, and videos. We’re even on TikTok.

Unreal, right?

Oh no, it’s very real.

When you see us, you know we’re not just talking about it, we’re living it.

We’ve seen striking remission of symptoms and restoration of energy, peace, focus, and health in our patients with therapeutic nutritional ketosis, using food as medicine.

They glow.

If your metabolism is off, or if you’re just off and you don’t know how to fix it, call us.

Touchpoint 180™ is our Metabolic Psychiatry program that can treat your symptoms — depression bipolar disorder, anxiety, PTSD, OCD and eating disorders. Our patients with migraine, PCOS, brain fog, weight problems and several inflammatory conditions are thrilled to see those problems are also just no longer a part of their daily lives.

We stay up late, get up early, scour the journals, study, and confer with global experts — all to find effective treatments for you. (And because we love it.) So we can offer the best treatments that medical and neuroscience evidence supports. 

We’re here to help you get better, and relish being your best self.

Have you ever felt like you were drinking from a fire hydrant? Where the supply was so abundant you were overwhelmed at even trying to take it in? This is an understatement for the Symposium for Metabolic Health in San Diego hosted by LowCarbUSA with the Society of Metabolic Health Practitioners, August 17-20. Without question, this is one of — if not the — most powerful and informative conferences I’ve ever attended. Its impact on the care that we provide our patients has been extraodinary.

So much of the value in the vast amounts of information, data, and research results that were shared, was in the depth of the science described and communicated by each speaker. The reasons that these strategies work.

If I were to attempt to explain everything we heard at the Symposium for Metabolic Health, this blog would be 50 pages long! So while I hit a few of the highlights, know that what is here only scratches the surface from a throng of scientists and clinicians. Brilliant, dedicated professionals who delve into the biology and chemistry of life-changing strategies to restore health — and improve life — one person at a time through low carb and ketogenic interventions.

The first day of the conference was dedicated to exploring ketogenic strategies in the treatment of cancer.

Dominic D’Agostino, PhD talked about hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and how oxygen under increased barometric pressure can oxygenate a tumor and killl it from the inside out with oxidative stress.

The Warburg Effect — tumors consume tremendous amounts of glucose compared to normal tissues, and the majority of glucose consumed by tumors is fermented to lactate.

Tumor growth increases in relation to the amount of glucose in the blood.

Ten years ago, there were 6 studies using a ketogenic diet in the treatment of certain cancers. Today, in August 2023, there are 62! Research is growing, and we’re learning more effective strategies to induce therapeutic ketosis effectively against some of the most aggressive and deadly tumors, like glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer.

Nasha Winters, ND FABNO, talked about the impact of light on our metabolic health and how well our red blood cells receive light.

She says we are living solar panels, and the red light we receive can penetrate our mitochondria. Light is the same as food for our cells. Photodynamic therapy uses a drug that serves as a photosynthesizer in the patient. Then, when the patient is exposed to light, the photosynthesizer makes a form of oxygen that can kill cancer cells.

For example, niacin.. or niacinamide … is a possible photosynthesizer.

Next up, Anthony Chaffee, MD spoke at this Symposium for Metabolic Health about the Metabolic Theory of Cancer. He pointed out that there are cancer driver genes in normal cells as well as malignant ones. And that cancer is rare in wild or properly fed zoo animals. In fact, there are no reports of breast cancer in chimpanzees. So why is that?

Warburg’s Metabolic Theory of Cancer says that cancer arises due to damage to respiration in the cell. Cancer cells continue to ferment lactate in the presence of oxygen, and enhanced fermentation is the signature metabolic malady of all cancer cells. Since cancer cells need 400 times more glucose than normal cells, depriving them of glucose is a death sentence to cancer cells.

Cancer cells cannot ferment ketones for energy. So, if ketones are increased, and glucose is reduced, then the lower glucose makes cancer cells unable to grow, while normal cells are unaffected.

Regarding brain tumors, the more ketones available in your brain, the more your brain will run on ketones. Why? Because it will choose ketones over glucose when ketones are available.

For example, a glioblastoma is the most aggressive malignant brain tumor. If you leave it untreated, most people will have a prognosis of 3 months. With traditional treatment removing it surgically, combined with radiation, you may have 15 to 18 months. Long story short, this diagnosis is not survivable with traditional treatment. It’s such defeating news for patients to hear. So they ask, “What can I do?”

So, Dr. Chaffee then explains to his patient how a therapeutic ketogenic diet combined with strategic fasting can starve cancer cells in the brain.

A full-time clinical neurologist in New Zealand, Matthew Phillips, FRACP stressed that a person needs hope, but hope alone isn’t enough. That person also needs a plan, not just in terms of “how”, but also he needs to know “why.”

Currently, the Standard of Care includes surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, not necessarily in that order.

But metabolic strategies are methods that induce physiological ketosis. These include prolonged fasts, intermittent fasts, and ketogenic diets very high in fat, with adequate protein, and very low in carbohydrates (ideally, free of processed foods.)

He described a case study. This woman received a diagnosis of a metastatic thymoma (a malignant tumor of the thymus gland). They treated her with a prolonged 7 day fast every 1-2 months, using a ketogenic diet in between fasting times. The tumor shrank. After a time, she relaxed the ketogenic diet to some degree, and the tumor grew again. So she returned to the ketogenic diet, and now six years later, the tumor has regressed 95% with no other treatment.

The rest of this symposium was chock-full of digestible chunks of metabolic health and healing…

Jayne Bullen, PhD, talked about the Gut-Brain connection. She described how the enteric nervous system has between 100 and 500 million neurons, which is the largest collection of neurons in the human body, outside the brain. This is why we call it the “second brain.”

The gut represents the largest surface area exposed to the external environment. The length of your GI system (from mouth to anus) is 30 feet. That’s a lot of surface area! And what’s surprising is that 90% of your serotonin, that beloved neurotransmitter that helps you feel right with the world, is located there!

The GI tract contains the largest population of microorganisms in the human body. That ecosystem is comprised of microorganisms, including bacteria, fungal and arachaea, or single-celled organisms.

This system knows when you’re stressed and reacts to how you feel. You can’t differentiate your digestive health from your mental health. They’re intertwined. So a happy gut co-exists with a happy brain, and by the same token, digestive issues can lead to problems with mood or behavior.

And she discussed how 90% of diseases originate and are related to this microbiome.

So about the vagus nerve. It’s a critical part of the parasympathetic nervous system, which soothes the sympathetic nervous system after it has activated the flight or fight response. When the vagus nerve activates, blood flows and  you can rest…and digest food.

The vagus nerve controls digestion, heart rate, swallowing, and even your immune response.  Also it contributes to spitting, vomiting, coughing, and sneezing. So with that in mind, when the vagus nerve is quiet, and the sympathetic nervous system is activating flight or fight, you can’t digest food well. 

So during this response, you should not be eating. The vagus nerve needs to quiet this response so you can rest and digest.

She reports that within 2 years of developing Type 2 diabetes, most of her patients had suffered trauma.

She stresses that human beings need to not eat when they’re stressed. They’re the only mammal on earth who does eat when they’re in an activated/sympathetic state. Their gut knows that when they’re in a sympathetic excited state, they cannot digest food; they should not be eating.

She recommended an excellent article about this: Vagus Nerve as Modulator of the Brian-Gut Axis in Psychiatric and Inflammatory Disorders published in Frontiers in Psychiatry.

Chris Knobbe, MD spoke on the apocalypse of vegetable oils and omega 6. He emphasized that vegetable oils are chronic biological poisons. He says we keep supplementing our animal fats with vegetables oils and we keep getting fatter and sicker.

Omega 6 is linoleic acid (LA). Native populations consume less than 2% of their fats as LA, whereas western diets today consume 7-12% of their fats as LA.

They are pro-oxidative, pro-inflammatory, toxic, and nutrient deficient, and put this together:  it is the ultimate recipe for metabolic disease and physical degeneration.

He mentioned a review of the Maasai group of western Tanzania:

They eat a diet of milk, meat and blood:  3000 kcal/day diet, 66% animal diet until 34, 40—46% saturated animal fat, and it is the highest fat diet in the world, but they have no heart disease. Most importantly, they have no vegetable oils.

He talked about how the real culprit causing obesity and Type 2 diabetes is not sugar but seed oils. He said the sale of sugar has been falling since 2004, but obesity is rising. Since 1997, carbohydrate consumption has steadily declined and sugar consumption leveled off in 2016, but diabetes has increased 35 fold.

In 1965, omega 6 (LA) consumption was 1.1%. By 2008, it had increased 10000%, which is 11-fold. 

His declaration is that to be disease free, be seed oil free.

I wish I could go on and on, sharing all I heard and learned from all the spectacular and knowledgeable speakers at this Symposium for Metabolic Health. (But I’d go on too long and you wouldn’t have time to read it all, anyway!)

About  Brenda Lennerz, MD, PhD, who talked about Type 1 diabetes in children, and the unique risks of a ketogenic diet in these patients, the contrast between ketosis and ketoacidosis, the first being physiological and the other being pathological.

About Robert Cywes, MD, PhD, and fitness vs. fatness, insulin resistance in heart disease, sudden cardiac death in people with diabetes, and the danger of excessive consumption of sugar and carbohydrates…a ketogenic low carb high fat diet and physical exercise restores insulin sensitivity, treats obesity and Type 2 diabetes, and reduces risk of cardiovascular disease.

And about Joe Wortman, MD, who was vegan for 17 years and still developed Type 2 diabetes, so he switched to a ketogenic diet.

About Tony Hampton, MD, who talked about 15 lessons why vegans and carnivores should live in harmony! Great points!

And about Stephen Phinney, MD, PhD,  who talked about low carb, keto, or nutritional ketosis, and how most humans can safely live with a low carb diet for decades. He explained the difference in ketone levels with these nutritional approaches, compared to the pathologically high ketone levels in ketoacidosis. 

and Mr. BenBo (Ben Bocchicchio), fitness pro bar none and author of Metabolism at a Glance, who talked about how, “exercise is working all of the muscle fiber types to a point of failure, to a point of threshold, so that we can activate all of these metabolic pathways.” Great and very practical talk about exercise and metabolism.

…And of course, Mark Cucuzzella, MD a powerhouse whom I love listening to, speaking about the pathophysiology of coronary artery disease. He shared the beauty of a CAC, a Coronary Artery Calcium score — a $99 CT scan test that can measure the actual plaque in your coronary arteries. It blows away anything else they do in preventive cardiology looking at cholesterol.. 

And I’m still just scratching the surface. There were so many who invested their time to teach so much and so many volunteers and sponsors who made it all possible! The talks, the groups, the exhibits, the break-outs, the chats in between… the new friends we made, the volunteers, the delicious dinners. Doug and Pam Reynolds are the superpowers who put this together. Thank you!

At the top of this post, you can see us with friends in front of the research poster we presented from our Metabolic Psychiatry practice describing our results with Ketogenic Metabolic Therapy in Patients with Complex Psychiatric Comorbidity.

I couldn’t resist bringing you these little nuggets. Keep checking back as we discuss more concepts brought forward during this conference.  The impact on health and longevity using ketogenic nutritional interventions for metabolic and psychiatric illness is staggering, and full of hope for your future.

If you suffer with psychiatric symptoms, if your metabolism is off, if you can’t lose the weight you’ve gained along the way, and you’re sick of it, call us.

Touchpoints 180™

We can introduce you to our Touchpoints 180^TM program, and the possibilities for your dramatic health improvement.

Check out our new TikTok account @loricalabresemd as well as our Instagram reels!

Hosted by LowCarbUSA and the Society of Metabolic Health Practitioners

August 17 – 20, 2023

This exciting Symposium for Metabolic Health San Diego 2023 is all about metabolic health. It includes up to the minute information about low carb treatments in oncology, neurology, cardiology, and psychiatry, including ketogenic psychiatry. The Symposium is hosted by LowCarbUSA and the Society of Metabolic Health Practitioners. It’s a strategic conference of experts on prevention as well as remission of metabolic disorders. Metabolic strategies can target conditions like cancer (including glioblastoma), obesity, Type 2 diabetes, and hypertension. Cardiovascular disease, epilepsy, and fatty liver can — and do — go into remission. We will cover Alzheimer’s, neurological disorders, mental health conditions, and more… Nutritional interventions and metabolic protocols address, and can dramatically improve mitochondrial functioning. They are literally life-saving and life-changing.

Speakers represent a veritable “Who’s Who” in metabolic health breakthroughs and medical and nutritional interventions from around the world.

Let’s get to know a few on a first-name basis. 

Miriam Kalamian, EdM, MS, CNS

Miriam is a leading voice in the keto movement, and she tells the story of her son’s brain cancer. She’ll be hosting a panel on the first day of experts using low carb approaches in cancer treatment. She has first hand experience in using a ketogenic diet to fight her son’s malignant brain tumor, write a book about it, and share her experience. It’ll be so wonderful to have her moderate the speaker’s panel on the first day of clinicians and scientists studying ketogenic metabolic therapies in cancer.

Matthew Phillips, FRACP

Matthew is a physician and research neurologist in New Zealand, and an innovator. He proposes a need to radically rethink the concept that cells are the building blocks of life. Instead, he argues that mitochondria are the fundamental essence of complex life. And — if you have good mitochondria and cell health, you’ll have good health. This Symposium, he says, is “not just about listening to presentations; it’s about engaging in critical discussions, questioning old paradigms, and being part of the shift towards more comprehensive health strategies.” He is a trailblazer, and the first physician to conduct randomized trials to examine the benefits of ketogenic strategies for people with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. He’s currently conducting a trial using ketogenic diet and fasting in patients with glioblastoma multiforme. Remarkable!!

Jayne Bullen

Jayne is managing director of Nutrition Network with a research, science and MBA background. She’ll be speaking about “Gut-Brain” inspired by her own journey to achieve remission from metabolic illness and its connection to psychiatric conditions. “It’s obvious that all diseases begin and end in the gut, once we really start to look at it,” said Jayne. “So from an immunity perspective, every digestive disease that’s known is caused by and replays into the diet. And the massive increase in gut problems and dysfunctional digestive system conditions that we’re seeing in the world today is obviously directly correlated with the gross overconsumption of carbohydrates.”

Brian Lenzkes, MD

Brian is an internal medicine physician in San Diego who shares his own battle with metabolic illness. He is open about the fact that that in spite of his medical knowledge, he’s struggled with obesity all his life. In 2017, he even became prediabetic. Even so, he was voted “Top Doctor” in San Diego for 11 years, and yet saw more and more patients declining and needing more and more medication. Something was missing. Fortunately, he attended LowCarbUSA  two years ago, and what he learned there changed his practice and transformed his life. As a result, he is now a co-host on Low Carb MD, is Medical Director for TriSystem Nutrition, and has been a speaker on Nutrition Network and many podcasts. As you can imagine, he’s excited about the prospect of working with medical professionals to reverse the healthcare crisis the world is facing.

Robert Cywes, MD, PhD

Robert trained in South Africa and currently practicing in Jacksonville and Palm Beach, FL. He’s a pediatric surgeon, and adult bariatric surgeon, who developed the Carbohydrate Insulin Model of Obesity and Diabetes (CIMOD). He speaks internationally on the physiological impact of carbohydrate consumption as the primary cause of the Chronic Non-Communicable Disease (CNCD) epidemic. He developed a program for adolescents that treats carbohydrate addiction and obesity, and families with obese teens seek him out as a foremost authority on the treatment of adolescent obesity.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

Nasha is a global healthcare authority and best-selling author in integrative cancer care. After creating robust educational programs for both healthcare and the public, she has a new focus: opening a comprehensive metabolic oncology hospital and research institute. Explicitly unique, it will offer the best standard of oncology care along with the most advanced integrative therapies.

Chris Knobbe, MD

Chris is an ophthalmologist and researcher, formerly from University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and is known for his work connecting westernized diets and polyunsaturated vegetable oils to numerous chronic diseases. Conditions like coronary heart disease, hypertension, stroke, cancers, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, obesity, Alzheimer’s disease, autoimmune diseases, and age-related macular degeneration (AMD) can all be linked to seed oils. Don’t miss his presentation, “Omega-6 Apocalypse: Vegetable Oils, Overweight, and Chronic Disease – What’s the Evidence?”

The list goes on… and on!

Dominic D’Agostino PhD, Anthony Chaffee, MD, Wafaa Abdel-Hadi MD, Patrick Philips, FRACP, Brad & Maggie Jones — and those are the giants speaking on just the first day. Jay Wortman, MD, Peter Ballerstedt, PhD, Michael Hoffman MD, Gary Taubes MD, Belinda Lennerz MD, Mark Cucuzzella MD, Tony Hampton MD, Steve Phinney, MD PhD…. does it get any better than this?

This gathering is rich with world-renowned experts who have personally witnessed the gamut of diseases and catastrophic illnesses brought to remission by nutritional interventions focused on restoring metabolic health with a low carbohydrate / healthy fat lifestyle — for some that’s a ketogenic diet, or what we call a KMT (a ketogenic metabolic therapy used seriously as treatment), but there are other low-carb strategies we can use to achieve metabolic health.

The first day of the Symposium for Metabolic Health will focus on cancer treatment. (Yes, cancer!)

After that, for the remaining 3 days, we’ll hear from everyone I’ve mentioned and more — doctors, nutritionists, fitness experts, researchers… about insights, protocols, treatments, outcomes, emerging research, and significant successes with patients. And we’ll bring it home and use what we learn from these experts to enrich our care and treatment of you.

We can’t think of any better way to learn the most up-to-date science, absorb the clinical research, and come back better.

Our Presentation

We’re excited to present our own clinical results at this conference. Our research poster showcases how we use metabolic approaches and Ketogenic Psychiatry to treat anxiety and depression across the board. Our results highlight how to figure out who gets better with this nutritional ketogenic approach — real life folks with complex and multiple psychiatric symptoms and disorders. We’ve got data on what it takes to engage, get into ketosis, get your symptoms into remission, and achieve metabolic health.

And we’re so excited to share it at this Symposium in a veritable feast of trailblazers who are brilliant, passionate, and highly professional.

Just imagine: Every person who is speaking at Symposium for Metabolic Health San Diego 2023 has seen the kind of dramatic remission that most people think is just not possible in a long list of life-limiting and life-threatening conditions: Alzheimer’s, stroke, epilepsy, brain injury, obesity, addiction, OCD, eating disorders, diabetes, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, cardiovascular disease, cancers like glioblastoma multiforme.

We’re truly in a new era of healing and restoration based on scientific research into metabolic therapies.

It’s changing lives. And it could just change yours.

Everything we do is to improve our patients’ outcomes with more effective treatment… so you can enjoy a healthier, richer, more rewarding life. You’re why we get up in the morning.