How the Ketogenic Diet Benefits Mental Health
For people with depression and bipolar, the clues are in the past and in the present
Stone-Age humans developed a keen taste for large, fatty animals. They liked nothing better than a woolly mammoth, with its thick layers of delicious, unctuous fat. The further north humans travelled during the Palaeolithic era, the more they relied entirely on megafauna for survival, as plant foods became less available. This was the Ice Age, after all.
Now its 2024, and enlightened experts engage in debates about whether or not it is safe to eat a ketogenic diet. Even though this diet bears a striking resemblance to the one on which we evolved, and studies consistently show that when people switch to a high fat and protein, low carbohydrate diet their health improves dramatically, the experts are concerned that to follow it might be folly, and hasten our demise.
Fortunately for us, our ancient forebears did a remarkable job of surviving, because here we are today, discovering the benefits of our ancestral diet. While the focus has largely been on the weight loss effects of going ketogenic, attention is now turning to what the diet does to the brain.
In January 2024, the news website NPR published an interview with Iain Campbell, a Scottish researcher who has lived with bipolar disorder since he was a child.
Campbell had gone on the ketogenic diet to lose the weight he had gained as a side effect of all the psychiatric medications he was taking. What he didn’t expect were the profound improvements to his mental health that he experienced within just a few weeks.
"I realized it was actually the ketone level that was making this shift in my symptoms in a way that nothing else ever had," he says. "It struck me as really significant, like life-changing", he told NPR.
The diet was life-changing in more than one way. Campbell was prompted to study for a PhD in mental health at the University of Edinburgh. As so often happens, important events, even painful ones, are pivotal to finding direction in life. Campbell learned about lots of other people with bipolar in online forums who had also experienced dramatic improvements in their mental health after following the ketogenic diet. In fact he came across so many anecdotes (141 in total) that he wrote a paper about them in the scientific journal BJPsych Open. He concludes:
“Despite the inherent limitations of the observational data based on self-reports posted online, the association strength and reports of sustained benefit support a hypothesis of a ketogenic diet being associated with beneficial effects on mood stabilisation.”
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