Food as Medicine: Using Food to Heal Your Brain

“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.

To the restoration of your best self,