Latest / Beyond Labels Premium / Episode #162: EVIDENCE that Food Heals Mental and Physical Disease in Humans and Pets

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Episode #162: EVIDENCE that Food Heals Mental and Physical Disease in Humans and Pets · Beyond Labels Premium

0:00
SPEAKER_01: So we see that the mental and physical health, as I said, are inseparable from each other.
0:06
SPEAKER_01: But the great thing is, what what this study, the Stanford Medicine study, is showing, is that you can use diet to improve both the mental health and the physical health simultaneously.
0:20
SPEAKER_00: Hello, everybody.
0:21
SPEAKER_00: I'm Joel Salaton, your farmer friend, here with Dr.
0:26
SPEAKER_00: Cena McCullough, our favorite researcher, on another episode of Beyond Labels, the podcast.
0:33
SPEAKER_00: We're taking listener questions here, and this one is definitely not mine.
0:36
SPEAKER_00: It's for Sina, and it comes from Tiffany Howell, who is a mental health professional who's having a debate with another mental health professional friend about where is the scientific literature basis for um suggesting the outrageous idea that food can actually heal mental and physical disorders.
1:02
SPEAKER_00: She's looking for, I think, some ammunition for this uh ongoing discussion, we'll call it, uh, with her friend.
1:11
SPEAKER_00: And so Cena's been digging and sleuthing, and she's found some cool stuff, like she always does, to help us uh see the the empirical scientific evidence for a relationship between food and healing mental and physical disorders.
1:27
SPEAKER_00: So with that, Sina, take it away.
1:30
SPEAKER_01: Great.
1:30
SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Joel.
1:31
SPEAKER_01: You know, I love this question.
1:32
SPEAKER_01: I kind of feel like we're on a game show where they're like debating, they're trying to come up with the answer, and they're like, call a friend to, you know, to get the answer.
1:40
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
1:41
SPEAKER_01: So she's calling in a friend favor here.
1:44
SPEAKER_01: Um, yes.
1:45
SPEAKER_01: So, and I'm actually gonna tie this question in with another listener's question.
1:50
SPEAKER_01: We have both um both Tina Barnsley and Joe Latrell Jr.
1:55
SPEAKER_01: They also messaged in with a question about um, remember how I talked about how I make my own dog food and I switched my dogs from kibble to real food.
2:05
SPEAKER_01: Um, they want to know more about that.
2:07
SPEAKER_01: Like, what is the recipe?
2:08
SPEAKER_01: What did you do?
2:09
SPEAKER_01: What are you feeding your dogs?
2:11
SPEAKER_01: So these questions are all gonna have the same answer, actually.
2:17
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so let me start with this.
2:21
SPEAKER_01: The um the connection between food and even just mental health.
2:26
SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna start with mental health since since the um Tiffany and her friend are both mental health practitioners.
2:32
SPEAKER_01: So the connection between food and mental health is so strong that two new disciplines have actually emerged.
2:41
SPEAKER_01: One is called psychodietetics.
2:44
SPEAKER_01: So psychodietics, this is a new field that basically says that the there's a concept that psychological problems stem from nutritional deficiencies, and that with proper diet, many of these mental imbalances can be prevented and actually treated.
3:01
SPEAKER_01: So that's a whole new field of psychodietetics centered around this whole concept that food can heal.
3:07
SPEAKER_01: The second new discipline that has emerged more recently is called nutrapsychiatry.
3:14
SPEAKER_01: And this is actually the practice of using food and food supplements as treatments for mental health disorders.
3:22
SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna put some links to a bunch of different reviews and um meta-analyses in the show description so that Tiffany has the ammo she needs.
3:35
SPEAKER_01: Um, but what I want to highlight some of this research here together.
3:39
SPEAKER_01: There was a review published in 2020.
3:42
SPEAKER_01: It was in the journal called Nutrition Review.
3:45
SPEAKER_01: And um, we like to get reviews, there's a hierarchy of studies.
3:49
SPEAKER_01: So when you're looking through the literature and you're trying to find what are like the high-impact articles, um, the highly ranked articles, there's actually a hierarchy that is established in the scientific literature.
4:02
SPEAKER_01: And when you look at a certain types of meta-analyses or reviews, those are some of the highest, most highly regarded um articles that are published in the scientific literature.
4:15
SPEAKER_01: Because what they do is they take a bunch of different studies and they're basically analyzing all those studies to see if there's validity to the conclusions.
4:26
SPEAKER_01: So it's like getting a bunch of studies analyzed at one time.
4:29
SPEAKER_01: So one of the studies I'm gonna share with you today, it's a review, and they reviewed 110 studies, and they're telling you the conclusions from all of those studies.
4:38
SPEAKER_01: So, what I'm sharing with you today are a bunch of review or meta-analyses articles.
4:43
SPEAKER_01: So these are the top of the line when you're trying to find scientific literature.
4:47
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
4:47
SPEAKER_00: So this would be Cena just for the for the layman, just to to um, because I'm our I'm our uh I'm our techno-layman peasant here on this program.
4:57
SPEAKER_00: Um this this would be almost like combing through a whole bunch of studies to try to find what are the common nuggets.
5:06
SPEAKER_00: What's the common nugget in in this research?
5:10
SPEAKER_00: Um, all of them have obviously you know a different uh approach, maybe different goals, different objectives.
5:19
SPEAKER_00: But what's the what's the common what's the common thread?
5:22
SPEAKER_00: Because if you can get a common thread among 110 studies, you can be fairly sure that that's that's something you can go to the bank with.
5:30
SPEAKER_01: That's exactly right.
5:32
SPEAKER_01: Um, and so what so this is how science is.
5:36
SPEAKER_01: You can pretty much take any topic, any argument, and you can find a study to support either side of that argument, right?
5:45
SPEAKER_01: That's that's how varied the scientific literature is.
5:48
SPEAKER_01: So it's not that helpful.
5:50
SPEAKER_01: You could defend anything with one article.
5:52
SPEAKER_01: So what you want to do is you want to go to the like what's called like a meta-analysis or review.
6:00
SPEAKER_01: And that one takes, like I said, it could be 110 different articles, and they're analyzing them using certain parameters that they think are important, and they're trying to see is there an effect.
6:15
SPEAKER_01: So you might take, um, for instance, um, a meta-training diet and depression.
6:23
SPEAKER_01: Well, you can have one study say it helps and another study say it doesn't help.
6:27
SPEAKER_01: So if you have a meta-analysis where you're collecting a hundred studies and you're saying, over these hundred studies, did it help?
6:34
SPEAKER_01: And if it did help, then that's good evidence that there's some merit to that conclusion that a Mediterranean diet can help with depression.
6:44
SPEAKER_01: All right.
6:45
SPEAKER_01: So it's it's increasing the value of um or the likelihood that that conclusion is accurate when you when you take the studies together.
6:53
SPEAKER_01: So that's what this 2020 review did.
6:56
SPEAKER_01: And when they looked at all these studies, they actually concluded that a poor diet is a quote, risk factor for both anxiety and depression.
7:07
SPEAKER_01: And a poor diet is a risk factor for people's inability to cope with stress.
7:13
SPEAKER_01: They concluded, quote, current evidence suggests that healthy eating patterns may assist in the prevention and treatment of depression and anxiety, and that suboptimal nutrition has been implicated in the underlying pathology of behavioral health disorders.
7:29
SPEAKER_01: So, what does that mean?
7:30
SPEAKER_01: That means poor diet is a cause of mental health disease or mental health disorders.
7:37
SPEAKER_01: So that's what they're concluding from looking at uh a whole plethora of studies.
7:42
SPEAKER_01: In fact, the International Um Society for Nutritional Psychiatry, they actually are now recommending that nutrition be considered in mainstream psychiatric practices because it's so profoundly impacting mental imbalances.
8:00
SPEAKER_00: Wow, so that means if you you've got a if you uh a depressed a depressed teenager, um hide the tortilla chips.
8:09
SPEAKER_01: Yes, I mean, you know, I mean let's let's get let's get real here.
8:14
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
8:15
SPEAKER_01: That's what it means.
8:16
SPEAKER_01: It it means and I'll walk you through this, but the the the conclusion is um like what we've talked about, go back to ancestral diet.
8:25
SPEAKER_01: Like the a lot of this research I'm gonna show today, that is the bottom line, is we need to go back to the ancestral diet.
8:32
SPEAKER_01: We need to get all the artificials out of the diet.
8:36
SPEAKER_01: Um, okay, but so let's walk through some of that so you can so you can um so you can see it for yourself.
8:43
SPEAKER_01: You're not just trusting me, you know.
8:46
SPEAKER_01: So I thought this was interesting.
8:48
SPEAKER_01: Just this year in March, out of Stanford Medicine, there is a groundbreaking uh research clinical trial.
8:57
SPEAKER_01: And what they found was that a ketogenic diet, so a ketogenic diet is one that's very high in fat and it's very low in carbohydrate.
9:06
SPEAKER_01: So they found that it actually has great benefits for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
9:14
SPEAKER_01: Okay, schizophrenia is one of the hardest um conditions to treat, and we're showing that this ketogenic diet can help.
9:22
SPEAKER_01: So this study had 21 adults, so this was a human study.
9:26
SPEAKER_01: 21 adults, they had schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, and they were taking antipsychotic medications, and they had metabolic abnormalities, and and this is common.
9:39
SPEAKER_01: When someone is following a standard treatment with antipsychotic medication, um, according to the lead researchers here at Stanford Medicine, it often does cause metabolic side effects like insulin resistance and obesity or hypertriglyceride, so high triglycerides, um, impaired glucose and glucose tolerance, things like that.
10:00
SPEAKER_01: So the drug itself is causing that problem.
10:02
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
10:03
SPEAKER_01: So what happened was they took these 21 adults, they put them on a ketogenic diet for just four months.
10:09
SPEAKER_01: And you'll love this, Joel.
10:11
SPEAKER_01: They told them do not count calories, right?
10:14
SPEAKER_01: Calories are worthless.
10:15
SPEAKER_01: Do not count the calories.
10:17
SPEAKER_01: Instead, the lead author said that she had them focus on eating whole foods that were not processed and not restricting any kind of fat whatsoever, and they ate non-starchy vegetables, so they weren't eating like potatoes, for instance.
10:34
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so the results were stunning.
10:39
SPEAKER_01: 75% of these adult participants saw, quote, significant improvements in their psychiatric symptoms.
10:47
SPEAKER_01: They improved on average 31% on a psychiatrist's rating of mental illness.
10:52
SPEAKER_01: This it's the rating that they use is known as the clinical global impression scale.
10:57
SPEAKER_01: But after only four months on this diet, their um condition, their psychological condition improved by 31%.
11:04
SPEAKER_01: They also reported better sleep, greater satisfaction of life, a better move, more energy, and they felt more hopeful.
11:13
SPEAKER_01: And this this right here is one of the one of the biggest takeaways for me.
11:18
SPEAKER_01: After only four months on this diet, remember every participant had some kind of metabolic syndrome.
11:25
SPEAKER_01: Okay, probably from the medication.
11:28
SPEAKER_01: Now they're still on the medication when they're on this diet.
11:31
SPEAKER_01: Okay, the medication wasn't helping.
11:33
SPEAKER_01: They went on this diet for four months, they saw improvements in the psychiatric disorders, but by the end of the four months, none of the participants had metabolic syndrome anymore.
11:45
SPEAKER_01: None of them.
11:46
SPEAKER_01: So that tells you the power of diet.
11:49
SPEAKER_01: So they lost on average 10% of their body weight, they reduced waste of circumference by 11%, they lowered blood pressure, they lowered their triglycerides, they lower their blood sugar levels, and their insulin resistance improved.
12:03
SPEAKER_01: And this is a big deal.
12:04
SPEAKER_01: We kind of skim over it and we're like, yeah, yeah, insulin resistance, whatever.
12:08
SPEAKER_01: You know, the insulin resistant component is a big deal for mental health.
12:12
SPEAKER_01: So most of us are familiar with insulin resistance in terms of diabetes, right?
12:17
SPEAKER_01: Like type two diabetes, um, consequence of insulin resistance, but insulin resistance can also increase with anxiety, with depression, Alzheimer's disease.
12:28
SPEAKER_01: In fact, some researchers call Alzheimer's disease type 3 diabetes because of the role of insulin resistance in the brain.
12:37
SPEAKER_01: So even if you're just looking at this one marker alone, this insulin resistance marker, this marker is telling us that physical and mental illnesses are related and inseparable from each other.
12:51
SPEAKER_01: And the problem is if someone has this insulin resistance over time, it can lead to things like anxiety, depression, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's.
13:01
SPEAKER_01: And it can also increase your risk of other uh chronic illnesses like cancer.
13:07
SPEAKER_01: And here we have this groundbreaking study out of Stanford Medicine showing that after four months on a ketogenic diet, that you can improve this insulin resistant resistance score.
13:19
SPEAKER_01: And you'll see in some of these studies I'm gonna point out later, you can actually reverse it completely in some instances on a ketogenic diet.
13:28
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so so this is just one one ex one study that I've shown, and that's how much information we've already leaned from that one study.
13:37
SPEAKER_00: Um well, you know, seeing the sorry, this is um this is a big deal.
13:44
SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is what's fueling uh and I want to get all political, but the RFK Jr.
13:50
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, make America Healthy again, uh the Maha uh that he's you know adding to Trump's MAGA.
13:58
SPEAKER_00: Um I don't want to go down a political rabbit hole, but but man, you know, just that one study right there, can you imagine?
14:05
SPEAKER_00: Can you imagine if nationwide the clinical response to schizophrenia, to bipolar disorder, and were was actually a dietary change, yeah, and not mind-altering drugs, farm pharmaceuticals.
14:24
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's that that's that's hundreds of thousands of people.
14:29
SPEAKER_00: It it's it's it's culturally, it would be a cultural tsunami to to have that kind of change at at the at the clinical level.
14:42
SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, by far.
14:44
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, there's so much influence from pharmaceutical companies that I mean, that's gonna be it's almost seems like a pipe dream, but on a one-on-one basis, as people become more aware of this information, they will be feel empowered and be able to choose that path for themselves.
15:01
SPEAKER_01: So, um, I mean, I to me, I think this is just so filled with hope, especially you have you have Stanford doing this.
15:08
SPEAKER_01: Like this isn't some rinking ink college, this is Stanford doing this, right?
15:13
SPEAKER_01: Um, and and what we see overall is that the emotional state, your emotional state is often mirrored in your immune response, right?
15:22
SPEAKER_01: So, another example of the mental health being directly tied to the physical health.
15:26
SPEAKER_01: So, depressed people, for example, they're often more likely to have a depressed immune system.
15:32
SPEAKER_01: Whereas anxious people are more likely to have an overactive immune system, right?
15:37
SPEAKER_01: You you're chronically in fight or flight, you're chronically on alert that the that there's fear, there's danger right around the corner.
15:44
SPEAKER_01: Either way, these two extremes result in increased likelihood of chronic disease, whether that is diabetes or Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or stroke or MS or cancer.
15:56
SPEAKER_01: So we see that the mental and physical health, as I said, are inseparable from each other.
16:01
SPEAKER_01: But the great thing is what this study, the Stanford Medicine study, is showing, is that you can use diet to improve both the mental health and the physical health simultaneously.
16:15
SPEAKER_01: Like this is not hard.
16:17
SPEAKER_01: It's not like you have to do 50 million protocols.
16:20
SPEAKER_01: You can simply do diet alone and remedy both of these conditions because, as we discuss on this show, it's holistic.
16:27
SPEAKER_01: They are intimately intertwined and interconnected.
16:30
SPEAKER_01: You cannot separate them from each other.
16:32
SPEAKER_01: So, yes, changing the diet alone.
16:35
SPEAKER_01: Could you imagine if we all went on like a keto diet, for instance?
16:39
SPEAKER_01: Could you imagine like the money we'd save in the healthcare field and pharma companies would start going bankrupt because we wouldn't need the medicines?
16:48
SPEAKER_01: Like it's amazing.
16:49
SPEAKER_01: But um, but and this brings up a good point.
16:52
SPEAKER_01: I wanted to dive a little bit into the ketogenic diet.
16:57
SPEAKER_01: Now, this is not the only diet that can bring mental um imbalances back into balance or physical imbalances back into balance.
17:05
SPEAKER_01: It's not the only diet, but it is one of the most well-studied.
17:09
SPEAKER_01: So I want to talk about that one for a little bit.
17:12
SPEAKER_01: And then I want to bring this around to comparing it to what we currently eat.
17:18
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
17:19
SPEAKER_01: So um uh because I find some of these similarities fascinating.
17:23
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so a lot of people, when I say ketogenic diet, they're really turned off by it.
17:28
SPEAKER_01: They think of it as a fad diet, but a keto diet is actually not a fad diet, it actually has a long history, it dates back to the 1920s, in fact, and it's deeply rooted in our understanding of human metabolism.
17:43
SPEAKER_01: The concept of the ketogenic diet is closely related to fasting.
17:48
SPEAKER_01: And fasting has been used since ancient times to actually treat epilepsy.
17:53
SPEAKER_01: I mean, for spiritual and religious purposes as well, but it's been used to treat epilepsy since ancient times.
18:00
SPEAKER_01: So, in in more modern times, what happened was there were these two physicians in Paris, and this was in 1911, and they were using starvation to treat epilepsies, and it worked.
18:12
SPEAKER_01: When you starve a patient, they had less severe seizures and less frequency of seizures.
18:16
SPEAKER_01: So this was actually the origin for the ketogenic diet.
18:20
SPEAKER_01: In 1921, there was a scientist named Roland Woodyat, and he discovered that starvation and a high-fat diet both led to the same state of what we call ketosis.
18:33
SPEAKER_01: So that's when the body is making ketone bodies as fuel.
18:36
SPEAKER_01: So you start sparing glucose or carbohydrate, so you're using less carbohydrate as fuel, and the body starts using more fat, in particular, ketone bodies.
18:46
SPEAKER_01: This is a cleaner energy source, right?
18:48
SPEAKER_01: So you can make the analogy to, you know, modern day where we're trying to stop burning coal and find clean energy sources.
18:57
SPEAKER_01: You ketone ketone bodies are more of a clean energy source, and there's many reasons why, but one reason I'll just touch on briefly is when your body metabolizes fat versus metabolizing carbohydrates.
19:11
SPEAKER_01: When it metabolizes fat, it produces more metabolic water.
19:17
SPEAKER_01: So it is more hydrating to the body, and um it has the metabolic water is the highest quality water you could actually have.
19:27
SPEAKER_01: So it's better than consuming water.
19:30
SPEAKER_01: Your body making its own metabolic water is healthier for it than consuming even the healthiest, cleanest structured water.
19:37
SPEAKER_01: So this is one way in which it's a it's a cleaner, cleaning, it's a fuel that it clean that burns cleaner in the body.
19:44
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
19:45
SPEAKER_01: So, okay, so we have Rollin, who discovered that starving somebody and giving them a high-fat diet both resulted in ketosis.
19:54
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
19:54
SPEAKER_01: Around that same time, you have Dr.
19:56
SPEAKER_01: Russell Wilder at the Mayo clinic who theorized, well, why don't instead of starving the people, maybe we give them a high-fat diet?
20:05
SPEAKER_01: And maybe there could be a therapeutic benefit for that.
20:07
SPEAKER_01: So he's the one that actually coined the term ketogenic diet.
20:11
SPEAKER_01: It became really popular, really popular to treat childhood epilepsy, and it worked.
20:18
SPEAKER_01: In roughly over half of all the children that had epilepsy when they went on this diet, uh, it it remedied it.
20:25
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so they knew it worked.
20:27
SPEAKER_01: So it was widely used at that time until the first epilepsy drug was came about, and that was in 1938.
20:37
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
20:38
SPEAKER_01: Then then they started to use the drug instead.
20:40
SPEAKER_01: And then as more and more medications for epilepsy were developed throughout the 20th century, the ketogenic diet lost prominence as an epilepsy treatment.
20:49
SPEAKER_01: It got pretty much replaced by the medication.
20:53
SPEAKER_01: The good news is by the end of the 1900s, the scientists were beginning to research the keto diet again for therapeutic purposes for all different kinds of neurological disorders.
21:05
SPEAKER_01: So not just seizures, like beyond that.
21:08
SPEAKER_01: So any of these mental health conditions we're talking about, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, MS, all of those.
21:13
SPEAKER_01: So they started, but they started with they started with um conducting research on patients with seizures, okay, to try to see does this actually work?
21:23
SPEAKER_01: Let's replicate the data.
21:25
SPEAKER_01: And it and it worked.
21:27
SPEAKER_01: They had um, so somebody studied the keto diet on children between the age of one to eight who were having seizures.
21:34
SPEAKER_01: Um, 40% of the children had a reduction of seizures by 50%, and 10% of the children were totally healed.
21:43
SPEAKER_01: Um, you you'll see this across the board.
21:46
SPEAKER_01: Another study, 150 patients, 90% of them had decreases in seizures.
21:50
SPEAKER_01: Like so one after the next, it's working for seizures, right?
21:54
SPEAKER_01: Um, and then if you applied the keto diet to other conditions, it worked as well.
21:59
SPEAKER_01: Those Conditions include depression, anxiety, migraines, Alzheimer's disease, and Parkinson's disease.
22:07
SPEAKER_01: All of these have been studied now, and there's literature to suggest that the ketogenic diet can reverse symptoms and in some cases fully reverse the condition.
22:21
SPEAKER_01: So they would say put it into remission.
22:24
SPEAKER_01: It's also been shown to improve memory and cognitive function.
22:28
SPEAKER_01: Oh, go ahead, Joel.
22:29
SPEAKER_00: Well, I was just gonna uh say at some point here, I want just so because I know we have listeners on at all different levels of understanding here, and I don't want to leave uh describe for me what a what a ketogenic diet a person would eat in a day.
22:47
SPEAKER_00: Oh okay, okay.
22:49
SPEAKER_00: Let's just say here here here's here's the here are the main whatever uh 10 things or five things that a that a person uh on a ketogenic diet would eat in a day.
23:00
SPEAKER_01: Okay, and so this is actually the um the really cool part that I wanted to talk about.
23:06
SPEAKER_01: And so you brought it up, which is great.
23:09
SPEAKER_01: It in comparing um in comparing the diets to what we consume today, okay.
23:15
SPEAKER_01: So okay, so I don't want to complicate it.
23:20
SPEAKER_01: There are different types of ketogenic diets, okay.
23:26
SPEAKER_01: So there's a classic diet, so we'll start with that one.
23:30
SPEAKER_01: The the classic diet you would have get this 90% of your calories are coming from fat.
23:37
SPEAKER_01: So nine literally 90% of your calories come from fat.
23:42
SPEAKER_01: Uh, compare this to the diet of the typical American today, where 33% of the calories are coming from fat.
23:56
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so 90% versus 33%.
24:00
SPEAKER_01: There's the classic keto diet has about 7% of the calories coming from protein, and Joel, only 3% of the calories coming from carbohydrate.
24:12
SPEAKER_01: So 3%.
24:14
SPEAKER_01: Today, the average American consumes about uh 51% of their calories from carbohydrate.
24:24
SPEAKER_01: So uh that's quite the contrast, right?
24:29
SPEAKER_01: Uh we're way, way our far off from from being on the the keto diet.
24:36
SPEAKER_01: But um, but like I said, there's different forms of the keto diet.
24:42
SPEAKER_01: So one of the forms, and this is the one I want to talk about, one of the forms is called the low glycemic index treatment.
24:52
SPEAKER_01: This one has 45% of their calories are coming from fat, so 45%.
24:57
SPEAKER_01: So in this, in this diet, you're not in a continuous state of ketosis, you're kind of going in and out of ketosis, but it's easier to maintain and it still is showing benefits for both mental and physical health.
25:10
SPEAKER_01: And the reason I bring this up is because this is what I think is fascinating.
25:15
SPEAKER_01: On this low glycemic index treatment, this modified keto diet, the fat intake is 45%.
25:23
SPEAKER_01: In the 19 in 1900, in America, our fat intake was roughly 45%.
25:32
SPEAKER_01: Okay, same percentage of fat in 1900 that we see in this modified keto diet.
25:40
SPEAKER_01: And if, you know, Joel, you're a fan of history, so you would know that in 1900, heart disease and heart attack were rare, right?
25:48
SPEAKER_01: All these chronic diseases that we're talking about, mental imbalances, they were all rare at that time.
25:54
SPEAKER_01: Now, of course, there's other factors involved, of course, like more chemicals in the food, you know, GMOs, uh, cell towers, like there's a lot of other confounding variables, but this was a huge shift in our macronutrient intake, where we went from 45% of our calories from fat to today, we have 33% from fat and 51 from carb.
26:21
SPEAKER_01: So back then we had 39% of our calories from carb, which is close to this modified keto diet at about 30%.
26:30
SPEAKER_01: So, my point is in 1900, when we didn't have that many diseases, they were consuming what looks very similar to this modified keto diet.
26:42
SPEAKER_01: Okay, very similar.
26:44
SPEAKER_00: So um, well, we didn't, you know, we didn't have uh we didn't have think about what we did not have at that time.
26:52
SPEAKER_00: I mean, first of all, we didn't we didn't have you know fast food and french fries, uh, we didn't have potato chips, we didn't have uh all that whole panoply of of chips, you know, that whole aisle in the supermarket that's that's all these you know plastic fluffy bags of of taco chips, nachos, potato chips.
27:15
SPEAKER_00: We didn't have any of that.
27:17
SPEAKER_00: We didn't have Cheerios, we didn't have uh Fruit Loops, we didn't have, I mean, we didn't, we didn't have think about it, you know, a third of a third of what's in the supermarket didn't even exist in 1900.
27:32
SPEAKER_00: That's how radical our food system has changed.
27:36
SPEAKER_01: That's crazy.
27:38
SPEAKER_01: That's crazy.
27:38
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, you're right.
27:40
SPEAKER_01: I mean, if you think about it, like even what were the fats that they ate back then, right?
27:44
SPEAKER_01: Butter, lard, cream, versus we had Dr.
27:48
SPEAKER_01: Kenobi on the show saying that now a quarter to a third of the the calories that uh um an American consumes is coming from seed oils, right?
27:59
SPEAKER_01: And they didn't exist in so much in 1900, right?
28:02
SPEAKER_01: A little bit of olive oil, but that was it.
28:04
SPEAKER_01: So huge differences in in our um in our dietary patterns, um, in in the foods for the keto diet are more similar to what they would have consumed in 1900 versus today.
28:17
SPEAKER_01: So you asked for examples.
28:19
SPEAKER_01: So you can find like keto-friendly food lists.
28:22
SPEAKER_01: These would be things like um beef, eggs, salmon, turkey, chicken, pork, albore, tuna, sardines, um, for fruits and vegetables, it'd be things like it could be avocado, um, it could be broccoli, cauliflower, green beans, you can have cheese, butter, heavy cream, yogurt, sour cream, um, olive oil, nut seeds.
28:50
SPEAKER_01: So if you think of just the foods that I've listed here, these are uh more, these are the whole foods, these are foods that are high in naturally occurring fats, right?
29:03
SPEAKER_01: The foods that they would have eaten more likely in in 1900, um, versus versus today, what we're eating, what you just laid out for us, all these processed foods and seed oils, you know.
29:14
SPEAKER_01: So even that's a stark contrast um in and of itself, even regardless of the percentage of the calories, right?
29:22
SPEAKER_01: The source of the food, the type of food that you're eating, but then also the percentage of calories.
29:27
SPEAKER_01: So there's a huge difference in what we ate then versus now, and we're seeing a huge difference in the disease um prevalence, mental and physical.
29:38
SPEAKER_01: So that's my that was that was one of my points was that a keto diet is not a fat diet.
29:44
SPEAKER_01: It's been around for a long time, and it's actually more closely related to what our ancestors would have consumed, right?
29:51
SPEAKER_01: Even if you go back beyond 1900 to the ancient ancestors, like if you're talking about hunters and gatherers, they would have gone in and out of ketosis, right?
29:59
SPEAKER_01: They they would have not had food during certain parts, you know.
30:03
SPEAKER_01: And if they killed a fatty animal, they're not gonna leave it behind because they thought it was too fat, right?
30:08
SPEAKER_01: They're gonna eat it.
30:10
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, you know, you know, Cena, I was I did a I did a uh speaking engagement out in Nebraska, and uh it included a a dinner, and uh they had an after dinner speaker for entertainment, and he was a he was a park ranger for one of the Native American sacred sites there.
30:30
SPEAKER_00: It's now National Park Monument there in Nebraska.
30:33
SPEAKER_00: And his whole talk was about uh the title was something like bison, um supermarket on hooves or something like that.
30:42
SPEAKER_00: And he was talking about how how the the the bison were literally the tools, the food, the shelter.
30:50
SPEAKER_00: I mean, they they were literally you know life for those for those prairie Native Americans uh at the time.
30:58
SPEAKER_00: And um, and he said but but the problem was you know they had to be hunted and they weren't always in an area.
31:06
SPEAKER_00: And so he said, when they could get when the hunting was good, the Native Americans, you ready for this number?
31:15
SPEAKER_00: They would eat 10 pounds of bison a day, a day, knowing that they might go, and and I just I just read an amazing book.
31:29
SPEAKER_00: It's uh look at this.
31:31
SPEAKER_00: It's um a guy gave it to me.
31:34
SPEAKER_00: I was uh speaking somewhere, and a guy gave it to me.
31:37
SPEAKER_00: It's um it's nine years among the Indians, 1870 to 1879, the story of the captivity and life of a Texan among the Indians.
31:46
SPEAKER_00: This guy was this guy he was captured at like 10 years old, and um and and actually chose to live among the Indians rather than going back home.
32:00
SPEAKER_00: Uh he didn't he didn't try to escape.
32:03
SPEAKER_00: And um, and it's amazing you talk about uh fasting.
32:11
SPEAKER_00: I mean, their food intake was so sporadic.
32:15
SPEAKER_00: We can't imagine today, Cena, we can't imagine today sporadic food intake.
32:21
SPEAKER_00: No, like like like having having plenty to eat for like 10 days and then not having anything to eat for 10 days.
32:30
SPEAKER_00: But but this is how many indigenous people lived for centuries.
32:36
SPEAKER_00: They had this feast, you know, they they killed something, they trapped something, they got something, and they were able to eat voraciously for you know 10 or 12 days, and then literally it was 10, 12, 15 days till they got something else.
32:51
SPEAKER_00: It it just we we can't wrap our heads around that, but but that that's the way people have lived for way longer than they lived with Walmart.
33:02
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and there's a beauty to that, like there's a physiological beauty to that because that time off from food resets the body, right?
33:12
SPEAKER_01: It's it's almost like a a renewal, a spring cleaning that happens in the body.
33:17
SPEAKER_01: You know, you'll you'll have like the extra bouts of peristalsis that comes through the gastrointestinal tract to literally spring clean that thing out, you know?
33:25
SPEAKER_01: Um, and and the body can now shift instead of trying to put all this energy towards digesting, absorbing, assimilating those nutrients, it now gets to shift to other things like repair, you know, prioritize that instead.
33:41
SPEAKER_01: But we constantly eat, and it's like this feeling of insecurity.
33:45
SPEAKER_01: We're not safe if we don't have the food right there, you know, like it's also a convenience thing, but there is a security thing that's been associated with it as well.
33:53
SPEAKER_01: And so we're constantly bombarding the GI tract and the bombody and the body with different food, like some of us graze all day long, you know, that does not give the body a break, like so that it can repair itself.
34:06
SPEAKER_01: You then are choosing to prioritize the digesting and the simulation simulation of food, which is not the same as actually repair, right?
34:16
SPEAKER_01: So it's it's no wonder that the body will break down over time.
34:20
SPEAKER_01: It needs that beauty of the time off, like like everyone needs a break from time to time, right?
34:25
SPEAKER_01: The body needs a break from it.
34:28
SPEAKER_01: Um, but but yeah, I mean, this this is actually this is a beautiful thing.
34:32
SPEAKER_01: And so so so what happened then was at the beginning of the discovery of this ketogenic diet or the creation of it, was they superseded the fasting.
34:43
SPEAKER_01: They're like, oh, you know, people are uncomfortable fasting, so let's make this more convenient and more doable.
34:50
SPEAKER_01: And not that that's necessarily a bad thing, it just has a snowball effect, right?
34:55
SPEAKER_01: So now instead of actually doing the fasting, we could do the keto diet.
34:59
SPEAKER_01: So each one has a benefit on its own.
35:02
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, each one has a place and a time and a purpose, okay?
35:06
SPEAKER_01: So I'm not putting the ketogenic diet down.
35:08
SPEAKER_01: I'm just telling us, telling you how we kind of moved away from this concept of fasting, which is actually a biblical concept as well.
35:16
SPEAKER_01: But so now, so and I'm gonna connect this with the dogs, okay?
35:20
SPEAKER_01: So now a keto diet is so um is is is so beneficial for numerous conditions that um I'll include this as well in the show notes.
35:33
SPEAKER_01: There's another review in Frontiers.
35:35
SPEAKER_01: This was from August of 2022, and this is what they concluded.
35:41
SPEAKER_01: They they analyzed 110 articles, okay, 110 different articles.
35:48
SPEAKER_01: Their conclusion was this, and I quote the effectiveness of the ketogenic diet has been proven in epilepsy and in other neurological diseases, such as depression, migraine, and neurologic, sorry, and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
36:07
SPEAKER_01: Ketogenic diets should be considered as an adjuvant therapeutic option in other neurological diseases as well.
36:15
SPEAKER_01: So they, after reviewing 110 different articles, are saying that it's quote unquote proven uh you know, to work on all those different conditions.
36:24
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
36:25
SPEAKER_01: And so now I want to try to, I'm gonna share my screen with you, Joel.
36:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'll put this link in the show description as well for anybody who's listening and can't actually see this.
36:33
SPEAKER_01: But this is this website I'm showing, I'm sharing right now is keto pet sanctuary.com.
36:40
SPEAKER_01: So I found out about um, I realized what I was feeding my dogs when I was feeding the McKibble when I watched the truth about pet cancer.
36:51
SPEAKER_01: And they had this group, the Keto Pet Sanctuary, on the show, and they were explaining what they do.
36:57
SPEAKER_01: So this sanctuary was started in 2014, and they basically rescued shelter dogs that had terminal cancer, and and the hope was to give them a forever home.
37:09
SPEAKER_01: So they put these dogs on a ketogenic diet, right?
37:12
SPEAKER_01: The high-fat, very low pro the very low carbohydrate diet, and they used PET, positron emission tomography.
37:21
SPEAKER_01: This is imaging so that they can track what's happening with the disease, so they can validate um is this diet working or not.
37:29
SPEAKER_01: And they actually have great success.
37:32
SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna scroll down and show you.
37:35
SPEAKER_01: Anyone who was interested, like one of the listeners said they wanted the recipe, my recipe.
37:41
SPEAKER_01: And what I did was I actually calculated what my what each of my five dogs would need to go into a state of ketosis.
37:53
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
37:53
SPEAKER_01: And they have, um, I'll show you down here.
37:56
SPEAKER_01: They actually have somewhere here.
38:00
SPEAKER_01: So ketogenic diet.
38:02
SPEAKER_01: They have a thing where you can learn more.
38:04
SPEAKER_01: Oh, here, create a ketogenic diet.
38:06
SPEAKER_01: It's a calculator, it's a free online diet calculator to create a ketogenic diet for your dog.
38:12
SPEAKER_01: So you could just use their calculator and come up with your, you know, get get the ratio.
38:18
SPEAKER_01: Um, and that tells you how much protein, carbon, fat you need to give your specific dog.
38:22
SPEAKER_01: So on this website, they show this.
38:27
SPEAKER_01: This this is what I saw in um one of the images I saw in that documentary that kind of woke me up.
38:33
SPEAKER_01: So uh you can see on the right, Joel, the kibble diet, right?
38:37
SPEAKER_01: You see the kibble in the bowl.
38:39
SPEAKER_01: On the left, it says ketogenic diet.
38:41
SPEAKER_01: And the average blood glucose on the kibble diet is 92 nanograms per mil.
38:47
SPEAKER_01: So 92.
38:48
SPEAKER_01: On a ketogenic diet, the average blood glucose is 62.
38:52
SPEAKER_01: And remember, I started off the show talking about insulin resistance, you know, in high glucose levels.
38:59
SPEAKER_01: Well, this is critical.
39:01
SPEAKER_01: As we mentioned, insulin not only affects the um your your organs that we think of, uh like the pancreas, but it affects the brain.
39:11
SPEAKER_01: Uh, insulin is a it can be used as a fuel to grow cancers, for instance.
39:18
SPEAKER_01: So in science, we tend to label, as I hesitate to say that, but that's what we do in science.
39:27
SPEAKER_01: We tend to label insulin as inflammatory.
39:31
SPEAKER_01: It's an inflammatory marker and it can lead to chronic inflammation.
39:35
SPEAKER_01: So, chronically elevated levels of insulin, which is what occurs when you're consuming a high carbohydrate diet, it can lead to chronic inflammation, which is associated with all these mental and physical health conditions we're talking about, including cancer.
39:50
SPEAKER_01: So, here you can see that in their research, they've shown you can decrease the blood glucose level if you put these diets on a ketogenic diet.
39:57
SPEAKER_01: So get them off the kibble and get them on real food.
40:00
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
40:00
SPEAKER_01: And then so what happened is 55% of the dogs that they took in that graduated from their keto pet program, they're they they lived.
40:13
SPEAKER_01: Like they ended up healing from the cancer, you know, going back to a normal life.
40:18
SPEAKER_01: And you'll have these case studies down here.
40:21
SPEAKER_01: So here's one this little cute little dog, Sasha.
40:24
SPEAKER_01: She had grandma seizures, and um, they started about a year after she suffered from a brain injury um at six months old.
40:34
SPEAKER_01: And once she went on the ketogenic diet, she now is seizure free.
40:39
SPEAKER_01: So, seizures all her life, ketogenic diet, now she's seizure seizure free.
40:43
SPEAKER_01: Here's another dog that had grade two mast cell tumors.
40:46
SPEAKER_01: Now he's got no evidence of cancer.
40:48
SPEAKER_01: Here's another dog, Callie, uh was given six weeks to live, another cancer diagnosis.
40:54
SPEAKER_01: She's alive and cancer free.
40:56
SPEAKER_01: Anyhow, those are just more examples.
40:57
SPEAKER_01: It's not just in humans, right?
40:59
SPEAKER_01: It's also it can be in our pets, in animals.
41:02
SPEAKER_01: These are like real clinical examples.
41:04
SPEAKER_01: So it's not just me reading from the scientific literature, these are actual examples.
41:08
SPEAKER_01: So I oh go ahead, Joel.
41:10
SPEAKER_00: So the thing I sorry, I can't help it, Zena.
41:13
SPEAKER_00: I I know we're out of time, but um, but um I can't help looking at that.
41:19
SPEAKER_00: We've got a new um there, there's a new category of American food.
41:24
SPEAKER_00: Um, most Americans are are eating kibbles.
41:29
SPEAKER_00: They're that that's our problem.
41:31
SPEAKER_00: We're eating kibbles.
41:32
SPEAKER_00: We need to get off the the the kibble diet.
41:34
SPEAKER_00: It might make a new kind of you know, a little edgy kind of uh uh a way to communicate what we're trying to communicate here is um, you know, I I couldn't help but think, you know, McDonald's is like a kibble's diet.
41:48
SPEAKER_00: And uh so here, you know, here we are.
41:50
SPEAKER_01: It's so true because so on that documentary I was telling you about, it showed uh so it showed the bowl of dog kibble, and it showed a bowl of human breakfast cereal.
42:04
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, like cheerleading.
42:06
SPEAKER_01: Right by side, and and it just clicked, it just clicked for me.
42:09
SPEAKER_01: I was like, oh my gosh, we're doing the same thing to our pets that we're doing to our children and and ourselves, you know.
42:16
SPEAKER_01: If to me it was clear as day, we're all on these kibble diets, you know?
42:20
SPEAKER_01: Like the kibble diet is the death of us.
42:22
SPEAKER_01: So yeah, no, it's uh that's a great point.
42:25
SPEAKER_01: I'm glad you brought that up.
42:26
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's it's so obvious.
42:27
SPEAKER_01: And and the dogs don't like it, the dogs eat it because that you're not giving them any other choice.
42:32
SPEAKER_01: Like if you gave them a choice between the kibble and the real food, my dogs eat the real food hands down, like they don't want to be on the kibble, you know.
42:41
SPEAKER_01: So what I did was I first put my dogs on this keto diet, you know, and and I got five of them.
42:46
SPEAKER_01: And that's when I just saw all kinds of improvements.
42:49
SPEAKER_01: And I remember telling you, like, I didn't even know that two of my dogs were bloated, and all of a sudden they lost all this weight, like within a week, they weren't bloated anymore.
42:57
SPEAKER_01: One of them was having chronic ear infections, couldn't get rid of it.
43:00
SPEAKER_01: Ear infections gone, never had one since.
43:03
SPEAKER_01: I mean, they became more playful, like puppies.
43:06
SPEAKER_01: You see the same thing in humans, right?
43:08
SPEAKER_01: That's the equivalent of feeling hopeful again, feeling like you have energy again, you know, having motivation again.
43:15
SPEAKER_01: You see that in humans and the dogs.
43:16
SPEAKER_01: So it is the same.
43:17
SPEAKER_01: I don't put my dogs on a keto diet all the time anymore.
43:20
SPEAKER_01: I um, and so this is just a side thing.
43:23
SPEAKER_01: I am not um I'm not trying to promote a keto diet.
43:27
SPEAKER_01: We're answering that listener's question of is there science to back that diet can remedy mental and physical conditions?
43:37
SPEAKER_01: The answer is yes.
43:39
SPEAKER_01: But as you know, I do not support any one diet.
43:42
SPEAKER_01: I support trusting your intuition.
43:44
SPEAKER_01: Trust your intuition and what it's telling you, because there's also evidence that sometimes when people are on a keto diet long term, it stops working for them.
43:54
SPEAKER_01: So we also see that in the scientific literature.
43:57
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's because the body is not designed to be in a chronic state of ketosis.
44:02
SPEAKER_01: This is my personal opinion from what I have researched and what I've seen.
44:05
SPEAKER_01: And it makes sense to me because our ancestors would not have been in a chronic state of ketosis.
44:10
SPEAKER_01: We should all have metabolic, well, I don't want to say should, because that's a shaming word.
44:14
SPEAKER_01: The optimal state of health is to have metabolic flexibility, where you can go in and out of ketosis, where you can say, you know what, today I'm gonna binge on carbs, like healthy carbs, you know, my my fruits and vegetables, and my body's okay with it because I have metabolic resiliency.
44:31
SPEAKER_01: That's metabolic flexibility.
44:33
SPEAKER_01: That's when you know you are optimally healthy, is when it doesn't matter if you like don't follow one diet all the time.
44:40
SPEAKER_01: You can go up and down on on change your macronutrient content.
44:44
SPEAKER_01: Um, you can even eat a Twinkie every now and then, and you and your body can be resilient to that.
44:49
SPEAKER_01: Not that I'm recommending that, but you know what I'm saying?
44:51
SPEAKER_01: That's to drive the point home is that the body is resilient, and that's one way you know that you actually have optimal health and wellness, is that you have that metabolic flexibility.
45:03
SPEAKER_01: My dogs have that now, so I don't keep them in ketosis.
45:06
SPEAKER_01: We we go in and out together, actually.
45:08
SPEAKER_01: We go in and out of acidic ketosis.
45:11
SPEAKER_01: So I hope I didn't overwhelm.
45:14
SPEAKER_00: Oh no, I think I think it's wonderful, and I think uh I think it's a great answer for Tiffany.
45:18
SPEAKER_00: I think Tiffany's got um got enough uh um whatever savvy here to now uh talk to her friend and um and and make the point for it.
45:32
SPEAKER_00: So thanks, Cena, for digging into this and uh getting us the literature, and we thank you uh for joining us for another Beyond Labels podcast, and we'll look forward to visiting with you again next week.