(in case it helps anyone else...)
About half a year ago I discovered that a brutally low carb diet -- leading to being in ketosis -- drastically helped my ADHD as well as other mental health things I've struggled with for my entire life. I wish I knew earlier!
I don't think I actually put this together until I read your comment. My actual diagnosis came just after I went off keto after having been doing it pretty steadily for about 3 years. I wonder now if the reason I noticed the symptoms of lack of focus more prior to seeking help and my diagnosis now was because it was better controlled while I was on keto and in ketosis.
I know looking back I still had symptoms. I can remember days during those 3 years just sitting in the office and realizing I had not gotten a single thing actually done and it was mid-afternoon already. But also had stretches of incredible productivity also.
Thanks for the prompt - been considering going back on keto, one of the reasons I went off is the mixed scientific evidence for its efficacy over other diets (not specifically for weight loss, just diet in the context of "way of eating") and some warnings about the lack of long-term study data because it's so hard for individuals to stay on long term. But this gives me another data point to consider and something to watch if I do try it again.
My random opinion: It's best to go on Keto intermittently; say 2 month on, 2 months off, or similar variation. I would be hesitant to be on it permanently, but doing it off and on feels safer to me.
One of the nice things, for me, in terms of having been on Keto occassionally, if that it's given me the ability to go for extended periods without needing to eat. I don't crash, in terms of blood sugar, the way I used to. Even when I'm not eating super low carb.
Supplement MCT oil. This turns into keytones in the body. See The Complete Book of Ketones by Mary Newport for all the science. She's got into it for Alzheimers, but the applicability is wider than that.
Go gluten-free and casein-free. That's eliminating wheat and dairy in your diet. Both of these turn into a form of morphine in the body. Look up glutomorphine and casomorphine. A slightly easier diet to stick to than keto. This cured my aspergers.
>Go gluten-free and casein-free. That's eliminating wheat and dairy in your diet. Both of these turn into a form of morphine in the body. Look up glutomorphine and casomorphine. A slightly easier diet to stick to than keto. This cured my aspergers.
This cure for Autism is broadly related to the leaky gut hypothesis of autism, rather infamously propagated by Andrew Wakefield in the 90s more generally and Jenny McCarthy more specifically went after gluten/casein in the 2000s. PETA made an infamous ad saying that milk causes Autism [1] because milk has Casein. This is to say that enough noise got made about this specific claim it got researched a bit.
Generally this diet has specifically been studied for autism treatment and the efficence of it's efficacy is very lacking for me [2][3]
This all being said, this doesn't necessarily mean that nobody can benefit from a casein or gluten free diet, there's simply insufficient evidence to say that people who avoid milk and bagels are autistic less often/less autistic.
The problem with those studies is that a Gluten free or a gluten and dairy free diet is not enough to actually treat "leaky gut" or similar issues. It's a bit like saying you can fix an ecosystem by removing two invasive species from the environment. Sure, it might work, but it's such an oversimplification that the results will appear random, or, "inconclusive."
Studying diets is notoriously difficult, and rarely done in a helpful way. Everybody has a different internal ecosystem -- as well as different dietary stimulus, even if they're following the same diet. This makes it incredibly difficult to draw broad conclusions based on controlling just one or two dietary factors.
This is rather unfortunate -- because the right dietary treatments can be truly transformative for many people, for a variety of conditions. However, because of the difficulty of proving this scientifically, such treatments are ignored by the medical community, leaving patients to figure this avenue of treatment out on their own.
The answer, in my opinion, is massive funding -- the kind of funding that can compete with billion dollar drugs (such as Humira). However, that's really not going to happen. Oh well. Sorry for the rant!
They have done studies that showed that it "helped" about 60% of the time (sorry I don't have the reference). "Helped" is a far weaker term than cured. I've read some of McCarthy's books and this is often the first thing to be tried. Often there is a long path to finding a workable cure for a specific person.
I went GFCF for other reasons (IBS and excess mucus production) and was surprised when my Asperger's started to go away. My personal theory is that the small, but frequent, morphine effects interfere with learning. When you take that away, low level learning can begin again.
I was "face blind" (i.e. didn't automatically recognize familiar faces) and didn't pick up on social cues. Both problems when away after 6-12mo on GFCF. A lot of social awkwardness comes from not picking up on these fundamental inputs.
Gluten and dairy are in almost all packaged foods. They drive cravability in a big way. So I'm guessing any "debunking" was funded by someone making money from this.
There are a few people who are immune to the effect. You can pick them out because they either dislike or simply don't care for cheese (which is mostly casein).
Andrew Huberman recently had a Harvard educated psychiatrist on the podcast. This psychiatrist specialized in treatment resistant mental health conditions. He was trying to help a patient lose weight and inadvertently found it helped their psychiatric symptoms as well. Fast forward 5 years and he had written a book, and the tl;dr is that he has seen many patients improve their conditions be going low / no carb. For patients with less extreme disease they can often get by with low carb and eliminate fructose but keep some healthy complex carbs in their diets. Seriously ill patients may benefit more from full ketosis. In any case, he often reports patients are able to reduce or sometimes eliminate medications on this diet which helps when they have trouble with the side effect profiles.
Dr. Chris Palmer: Diet & Nutrition for Mental Health | Huberman Lab Podcast #99
> My guest this episode is Chris Palmer, M.D., a board-certified psychiatrist and assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He explains the important connection between nutrition, metabolism and mental health and his pioneering work using the ketogenic diet to successfully treat patients with various mental illnesses, including depression and schizophrenia. Dr. Palmer explains how the ketogenic diet is an evidenced-based treatment for epilepsy, mimics the fasted state and can offset the cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s. He describes the key roles of mitochondria in mental health, how certain conditions likely arise from mitochondrial dysfunction, and how low-carbohydrate diets increase mitochondrial turnover to improve mental health. He also explains how low-carbohydrate diets positively impact the gut microbiome and weight loss, important risk factors for mitochondrial health such as marijuana and alcohol, and the best way to increase circulating ketones depending on individual needs. We also cover how a ketogenic diet impacts mood, sleep, and fertility. Dr. Palmer’s work stands as a revolutionary approach to mental health and disease that, given the prevalence of mental health challenges, should be of interest to people of all backgrounds and ages.
I've been trying a ketogenic diet since listening to this episode and over the past few days have noticed an improvement in not only my ADHD symptoms, but a decrease in anxiety as well. I'm very optimistic about this, though I'm skeptical about being on keto in the long term.
I've seen similar effects with intermittent fasting combined with a whole foods plant-based diet. This will likely be my long-term strategy.
You wonder if it's mostly the weight-loss that solved the problems, and if a person loses weight by strict calorie counting, carbs or not, would it have the same effect.
I would recommend "why we get fat" by Gary Taubes. Calorie counting has be disproved so many times, but it sticks around despite the science being against it. If you're a doctor or researcher, "Good calories, bad calories" is the same material but at a clinician's level.
Low carb diets get insulin down and ketones up. These factors are more likely to be driving these other changes.
Also, low carb diets generally eliminate wheat and therefore gluten. Gluten becomes gluteomophin, which causes it's own problems (as an opiate). The standard American diet micro-doses an opiate at every meal. What could go wrong?
(in case it helps anyone else...) About half a year ago I discovered that a brutally low carb diet -- leading to being in ketosis -- drastically helped my ADHD as well as other mental health things I've struggled with for my entire life. I wish I knew earlier!