Can Cutting Carbs Improve Mental Health? Myths and Facts with Dr. Bret Scher

Bret: 
Are carbs bad for your mental health? Not necessarily. Blanket statements, like carbs are good or carbs are bad, are often misleading and incorrect. But similarly, if I were to say that ketogenic therapy is a powerful treatment for serious mental illnesses like bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or major depression, that’s not the same as saying carbs are bad for our brains.

But they can be in certain situations. So, let’s dig deeper into the concept of carbs being good or bad, and what that may mean for mental health.

Welcome to The Metabolic Mind Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Bret Scher. Metabolic Mind is a non-profit initiative of Baszucki Group where we’re providing information about the intersection of metabolic health and mental health and metabolic therapies, such as nutritional ketosis as therapies for mental illness.

Thank you for joining us. Although our podcast is for informational purposes only and we aren’t giving medical advice, we hope you will learn from our content and it will help facilitate discussions with your healthcare providers to see if you could benefit from exploring the connection between metabolic and mental health.

So, for starters, we have to acknowledge not all carbs are the same, and how people respond to carbs isn’t the same from person to person. So, as with almost any medical intervention, the impact will differ from person to person if you’re removing carbohydrates or adding carbohydrates. But before we get into the details about all this, please remember our channels for informational purposes only.

We’re not providing individual or group medical or healthcare advice for establishing a provider patient relationship. Many of the interventions we discuss can have potentially dangerous effects of done without proper supervision. So, consult your healthcare provider before changing your lifestyle or medications.

And in addition, please recognize that people may respond differently to ketosis, and there isn’t one recognized universal response. So, let’s rewind. But why are we even talking about if carbs are good or bad for mental health? At Metabolic Mind, we share education and resources, including recently published clinical studies that are about the safety and efficacy of ketogenic therapy to dramatically improve symptoms of mental illness, including putting treatment-resistant, serious mental illness into clinical remission.

And ketogenic therapy is usually based on a very low carbohydrate diet, right around 30 grams of carbs per day, although the exact amount may vary for each individual. Now, by reducing carbohydrate intake to this degree, our bodies switch from burning glucose as the primary fuel source to burning fat, both the fat we eat and the fat on our bodies that we store.

And that in turn produces ketones, which our brains can then use as fuel. So, reducing carbs to induce a state of ketosis changes our brain’s primary fuel source, and also has been shown to balance neurotransmitters, reduce neuroinflammation and even improve the number and function of our mitochondria.

Now, reducing carbs to this level can completely change brain physiology, but that’s different from saying carbs are poison or all carbs are bad. But enough of them will prevent achieving ketosis. We can mostly agree that ultra-processed refined carbohydrates and manufactured products that combine carbs and fat really have no role in a healthy diet. But many populations have lived long lives eating a majority of the calories from carbohydrates with caveats, right?

The carbs eaten by these long lived populations tend to be natural, minimally processed, high fiber carbs. So, think veggies and fruit and legumes. But these populations also tend to have very low incidences of metabolic dysfunction, such as insulin resistance, obesity, and type 2 diabetes.

They tend to be physically active. They spend time outside. They have strong social connections, and they don’t over assume calories. So, that’s a far cry from the modern industrialized society, right? So, it’s tough to say that what worked for those societies would work in our completely different situation.

Said another way, if someone is already starting with poor metabolic health and an unhealthy lifestyle, then reducing carbs to induce a state of ketosis can be incredibly beneficial. It may not be the only way to improve metabolic health, but it certainly is one way. And we know metabolic and mental health are connected. So, helping one tends to help the other.

Now, people will say, yeah, but the problem isn’t the lentils or the sweet potato or the melon. And that may be true, but seeing the benefits of eliminating those foods to induce a state of ketosis is different than saying carbs are the one problem. It is not just about taking those foods away because they’re quote unquote bad.

It’s about taking them away to change our body’s physiology and metabolism. Now, if your goal is not to be in ketosis, then the question becomes, are the carbs that I’m eating helping my metabolic and mental health or could they be detracting from my metabolic in mental health? And we can take this one step further when it comes to metabolic health.

Technology can help us learn exactly how our bodies respond to various foods, which can then help guide us in making the right choices for us, as individuals. So, continuous glucose monitors, or CGMs, are small devices about the size of a nickel that you can wear in your abdomen or the back of your arm.

And they can show you nearly in real-time how your blood sugar responds to what you’re eating. Not how populations of people respond, which is where most of our nutritional data comes from, but how you respond. So, do you do okay with lentils and sweet potato? Great. Or does your glucose go up to 180 and stay there for over an hour after your bowl of oatmeal?

That’s not so great. And over time, can probably lead to worsening insulin resistance and metabolic dysfunction. And it makes a difference because science shows that when the body’s insulin resistant, the brain can also become insulin resistant, leading to inefficient energy product and cellular dysfunction.

And this could present as cognitive dysfunction, like dementia or potentially even as symptoms of mental illness, or even blood sugar peaks and troughs can lead to anxiety and irritability. So, how our bodies metabolize carbs and sugar can directly affect our mental health. Now, one more caveat when it comes to how we metabolize carbs, things may also change over time.

So, as someone improves their metabolic health, they may be able to better tolerate foods they previously couldn’t. So, no, not all carbs are bad or poison. But we have to acknowledge that our bodies may not metabolize most carbs well when we are already experiencing insulin resistance and metabolic dysfunction. And if you want to try ketogenic therapy, you have to reduce your carbs whether they’re a problem or not.

The issue is that if you want to change your body’s physiology and try ketogenic therapy, you need to follow nutritional ketosis. Now, if ketosis isn’t your goal, then it may be a good idea to learn how you respond to carbs individually. And work with your healthcare team to design the diet most appropriate for you, which may be low carb, moderate carb, or even high carb, depending on the rest of your lifestyle and your metabolic health.

So, it’s not so simple as to say carbs are good or carbs are bad. The context matters. Okay, so I hope that was helpful. If it was, please and subscribe so you won’t miss any of our future content. And please share this with anyone who you think may benefit from it. And also, please leave a comment as we would love to hear about your experiences.

Thanks for listening to the Metabolic Mind Podcast. If you found this episode helpful, please leave a rating and comment as we’d love to hear from you. And please click the subscribe button so you won’t miss any of our future episodes. And you can see full video episodes on our YouTube page at Metabolic Mind.

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