Metabolic Mind: Metabolism and Mental Health

Bret: 
Welcome to the Metabolic Mind Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Bret Scher. Metabolic Mind is a nonprofit 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.

Metabolic Mind is an initiative of Baszucki Group, started by Roblox, founder and CEO, David Baszucki and his wife, Jan Ellison Baszucki, after their son recovered from mental illness with a metabolic intervention, called nutritional ketosis. We’re working to provide resources and education in an emerging field within mental health, called metabolic psychiatry.

This field is predicated on science demonstrating that patients with mental illness are much more likely to have metabolic dysfunction, such as insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, and type II diabetes. And vice versa, those with metabolic dysfunction are more likely to live with mental illness. Now, we know one of the best nutritional therapies for metabolic disease, a ketogenic diet, is also effective for treating brain-based disorders, like epilepsy or seizures.

Ketogenic interventions have been used for over a hundred years for this purpose and are backed by decades of high-quality evidence. it turns out, there’s a crossover in the medications and the mechanisms between epilepsy and serious mental illness, and it goes beyond mechanistic theories. Dozens of published case histories and growing clinical experience demonstrate that a ketogenic diet can dramatically improve symptoms of mental illness.

It’s a therapy that’s given people, living with serious mental illness, their lives back. A quote we hear often is, medications saved my life, but a ketogenic diet gave me my mind back. And that’s what we want to explore in this podcast. We want to be a source of education and inspiration, a place for stories, science and hope.

If you are a loved one lives with mental illness or you’re a clinician treating those with mental disorders, we want to be your source of trusted and practical information so that together, we can safely and effectively improve psychiatric treatments and better the lives of those living with mental illness.

So, follow us here at Metabolic Mind to hear from the experts, better understand the science, and find the practical information you need about how metabolic therapies, including a ketogenic diet, can help improve the lives of those living with mental disorders. A quick and important caveat: our channel is for informational purposes only.

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

Now we’ll kick off our podcast series with an inspiring interview with Dr. Iain Campbell, the recipient of a four-year clinical fellowship from the Baszucki Brain Research Fund. And he’s studying ketogenic interventions as a treatment for bipolar disorder. But Iain isn’t just a scientist studying bipolar disorder.

He also lives with the condition. His lived experience is an inspiration to everyone experiencing mental illness and is a prime example of how you don’t have to be defined by your illness, and how you can live a full and productive life. He’s also a shining example of how sharing your experience with the world may seem intimidating.

But the benefits to others and yourself are immeasurable. So, listen to our podcast with Dr. Iain Campbell. and if you find it helpful, please subscribe and leave a review so you won’t miss an episode and you can help others find us as well. That way, we can spread the message of metabolic psychiatry far and wide to reach all who may benefit in their journey to mental health.

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.

Lastly, if you know someone who may benefit from this information, please share it as our goal is to spread this information to help as many people as possible. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll see you here next time at The Metabolic Mind Podcast.