Keto and MCT for Alzheimer's, One Doctor's Family Journey

welcome back to metabolic mind I'm your host Dr Brett sure today we're continuing with our series on metabolic Health metabolic therapies nutritional ketosis and Dementia or cognitive decline and today I'm joined by Dr Mary Newport now Dr Newport is a neonatologist um and by training and by like 30 years of practice dealing with the the smallest of the patients you can possibly have the newborn baby so why are we talking to her about dementia well she was sort of thrust into this world of dementia when her husband Steve started experiencing symptoms of dementia at age 51 and their story is dramatic that you'll hear her story about how she started him with medium chain triglycerides with coconut oil and eventually went down this whole path of exogenous ketones nutritional ketosis and saw some really really dramatic benefits benefits that we aren't really seeing with Alzheimer's medications and this is one of those you know times in medicine where there really is a shift happening there's been so much focus on What's called the plaques and the tangles that are seen in in people's brains with Alzheimer's and that's where all the research and the drug research has focused on with billions of dollars being spent to really no avail with very minimal if any progress in the certainly not a cure but even the treatment of Alzheimer's symptoms well Dr Newport it feels like she's onto something and the research is starting to show this with nutritional ketosis with exogenous ketones with MCT or coconut oil giving the brain this alternative fuel of ketones seems to help some people again not everybody but in trials they statistically significant number of people improve their Alzheimer's symptoms so this is you know just one of those dramatic stories of of one family the way it impacts not just Steve the patient but her as an individual her family and how she was able to be an investigative journalist a detective a physician and just a brave caretaker all wrapped into one to really help her husband and to kind of help move this whole field forward you can see how she connected with all these experts in the field to start this discussion and I'm getting a little worked up here because you can see for all those reasons I just think this is such an incredible story and so I hope you enjoy this interview with Dr Mary Newport and if you want to learn more about her her website is coconutketones.com and she has a book um coming out or sorry a book The Third Edition now coming out Alzheimer's disease what if there was a cure and another book clearly keto for healthy brain aging and Alzheimer's prevention so there's plenty of stuff out there from from Dr Newport if you'd like to learn more so I hope you enjoy this interview with Dr Marion Port but sorry before we begin remember our challenge for informational purposes only we're not providing individual or group medical or Health Care advice or establishing a provider patient relationship many of the interventions we discuss can have dramatic or potentially dangerous effects if done without proper supervision She'll always consult your health care provider before changing your lifestyle or medications okay let's get on with the interview well Dr Mary Newport I really appreciate you joining me at metabolic mind to share your story your journey and sort of discuss the science of ketones and as it relates to dementia so thank you so much for joining me oh thank you so much for inviting me I really appreciate it now you've you've been so good about telling the story of your journey along with your husband but I want you to sort of give us the the overview for people who haven't heard it because here you were a neonatologist a doctor working with the youngest of the youngest patients but all of a sudden because of your husband being diagnosed with Dementia or having symptoms of dementia age 51 a very young age all of a sudden you're thrust to sort of the other side of care about memory loss and cognitive decline so tell us a little bit about that Journey yeah so my husband was an accountant and that was perfect for our family because he was able to work from home I had a hospital-based practice working in newborn icus and he was our did our billing and accounting and managing and all of that and uh but when he was 51 he started having some memory issues doing some really strange things and he began forgetting if he'd been to the bank in the post office which didn't seem normal to me and we saw had him see a neuropsychiatrist who mentioned dementia but he thought more likely it was related to depression Steve had depression and started him on an antidepressant but looking back it was more likely that he was depressed because he knew he was losing function and he was always aware all throughout that he had Alzheimer's that he I mean know from the time he was diagnosed he knew it and he talked about it and he was very troubled by how much he had lost and his ability to function as an accountant and it got worse and worse by 2006 he couldn't drive anymore he had been on a computer all day every day playing on it or working on it and he couldn't even remember how to turn it on at that point and how would you do anything how old was he at that point so he was at this point he was 56. yeah because this has been going on for five years and just getting worse and worse and worse right yeah right and symptoms for maybe a year or two before that he was officially diagnosed with Alzheimer's early onset Alzheimer's in 2004. yeah so you're in this role now as a doctor and a caregiver and so what was your assessment of the of the care he was getting it was frustrating we kept hearing well he was put on the traditional Alzheimer's medications Aricept and then Namenda a few months later we got a second opinion from the bird Alzheimer Institute in Tampa which is uh um just a renowned facility um and they agree that they you know that he most likely had Alzheimer's they said he had some unusual symptoms like Tremors and his gait was weird um he walked kind of slow um they didn't mention Parkinson's or Lewy Body dementia at that point um I could jump to the end a little bit he did donate his brain and we found out that he had predominantly Alzheimer's but he also had Lewy bodies in hippocampus amygdala you know reasons of the brain that are also affected by Alzheimer's so it explained many of the symptoms that he had then and that he ultimately developed but um he um you know basically in 2008 he was going downhill really fast he could no longer remember to how to even make a sandwich or you know anything like that we had to he would get in trouble it's just you know so many ways of getting in trouble when you have Alzheimer's and um I always hadn't had somebody with them you know all the time so my daughter one of our daughters moved back home reluctantly but she helped us so much um but in 2008 we finally had um two um clinical trials that became available in the area you know it was frustrating because the Alzheimer's Association would say every year or constantly they were saying we're within five years of a cure we heard that for years we're within five years of a cure donate money you know but there weren't any drugs that actually improved Alzheimer's the two drugs that he was taking there was a third one that came along that was similar to the first um they can slow the decline in about half the people that take them for about six months and that's the best they can do they don't really improve um anyone except maybe very briefly some people might have a little bit of improved cognition for a few weeks or something a couple months but um there were two drugs that they um were going to be doing clinical trials and um they both aimed at removing beta amyloid plaques from the brain which are the homework have thought to be the Hallmark and the amyloid theory of um uh Alzheimer's and um they would remove plaque from the brain and they hoped that this would improve someone cognitively and so we were really eager to get into this because there hadn't really been any clinical trials in our area for a while um so I scheduled him two days in a row um to have to try out you know for these two clinical trials and they were different locations different facilities and the night before I thought I'm gonna look up the risks and benefits of the two drugs as much as I can find out because he might get accepted into the both and then we might have a choice so I wanted to find out as much as I could well while I was searching I Came Upon a press release about a medical food that was going to come out about a year later um and uh didn't say exactly what it was or what it did but it improved um cognition in nine of 20 people in a pilot study that took just one dose and it improved there was another study a longer study of 152 people that lasted 90 days and then was extended for some of the people of six months and again almost half the people improved which is better than any of the current medications out there and here it is like a tiny press release right not big news but a small press release exactly so I had to dig deeper and I was able to find their patent application on free patents online and it was very long and it explained um that Alzheimer's is a type of Diabetes of the brain some people sometimes call it type 3 diabetes and they've actually known since the 1980s that there's a problem with glucose uptake in parts of the brain and Alzheimer's yeah but this was like revolutionary even in 2009 like if people weren't really discussing this in 2009 so here was this company with a patent that with the product but still was not even touching the mainstream discussion exactly exactly still isn't enough but um yeah so you know they talked about um you know this this problem but that ketones are an alternative fuel for the brain and that um possibly providing ketones to the brain to somebody with alzheimer's might bring about some improvement this was their idea and there is an oil called MCT oil medium chain triglyceride oil that when you consume it no matter what you eat at least part of it will be converted to ketones and the Brain eagerly takes up ketones and the cells can immediately switch from using glucose to ketones to enter What's called the TCA cycle that produces ATP every cell you know basically nearly all cells need ATP to functions yeah ATP is the energy right yeah so basically ketones are an alternative fuel for the brain and I thought wow this is a brilliant idea this makes sense to me you know I remembered about mctr being converted the ketones I remembered about ketones being alternative to fuel during starvation and fasting um so I thought this this actually makes sense and one time in the patent application they mentioned that mctual was extracted from coconut oil and they said coconut and palm oil but it's really Palm kernel oil um and I thought oh my God I might be able to get this I and the crazy thing was that because I'm a neonatologist I knew what MCT oil was because in the 1980s early 1980s when I was doing my training we used to add it to the feedings of our tiniest preemies these were babies under two pounds and they would grow faster they'd get home faster and then the formula manufacturers started adding it directly to these premature infant formulas and they also refined the formulas for all babies they were adding coconut oil and or I mean well coconut oil and sometimes also MCT oil to infant formulas and they still do today almost all of the commercial formulas worldwide because they're trying to mimic the fatty acids that are in breast milk and there are MCTS in human breast milk so interesting that you were you were just like the perfect person for this to happen to right you know you don't wish anybody to have to go through something like this but if it had to be anybody you were sort of the perfect person for this to happen to and with good detective work the medical knowledge and the knowledge of the MCTS yeah so how did you then take the take the step to say okay let's try this let's see what happens yeah so um basically it's about 1am when I find all this out and I he had he was scheduled for the screening at 9 00 a.m and this is another remarkable thing that he had a day before in the day that he started coconut oil testing so um um it makes you think about fate and all of that but anyway um you know he I couldn't you know there was nothing to give him that had MCT oil in it uh much less did we have any coconut oil I thought it was an artery clogging bat that's what I was taught in medical school right now you can find MCT oil anywhere you can find on any shelf but then it just didn't exist oh you could hardly find it I could hardly find it at the time and um so we went for the first screening St Petersburg Florida Research Institute there and he um had to take a mini mental status exam which for those who don't know was a 30 point test it's fairly simple if you're normal you get 29 or 30 points it's unusual to even miss a question on that test if you're normal and he scored 14 on the test which was too low to qualify for the study he needed at least 16 points they wanted people with mild to moderate Alzheimer's and the doctor had him draw a clock and I'm gonna see if you can see this so so for those on the audio podcast she's holding up her book that has a picture of the clock okay circles there's not a big circle a few little circles and there are four numbers and that was it that was what he came up with for a clock and the doctor said he's on the verge of severe Alzheimer's she told me this and and I was surprising yet not surprised um because what we were seeing at home and so on the way home I knew I had seen coconut oil in a health food store and we stopped there picked up some and when I got home I um looked up information to remind me which are the medium chain triglycerides I was able to find the fatty acid composition of the coconut oil on a USDA website and I figured out how much coconut oil I would need to give him to equal the dose that they were giving in the medical food studies the pilot studies and it turned out they were giving 20 grams of MCT and I figured the medium chains were C6 to C12 so lauric acid some people consider them only C8 and C10 but um which might not mean anything to anybody but um so I figured that he needed 35 grams of coconut oil which is a little over two tablespoons to equal the 20 ml dose that they were giving of the medical food so the next morning um he was scheduled that day in a different location in Tampa at the bird Institute to have a screening for a different drug The Other Drug and um I gave him 35 grams a little over two tablespoons of coconut oil and some oatmeal and he ate it this was around 9 A.M and he was scheduled for one in the afternoon well it turns out you know we found out later that the levels of ketones are not very high from coconut but they Peak at about three hours and um another fortunate timing um we went to Tampa and he gained four points from the day before including where we were like what city we were in the floor of the of the facility this the day of the week and the season which he had gotten wrong all four the day before and we were in a different location so it wasn't that he learned you know something and this is all from one dose just one dose this is from one dose one single dose grams of coconut oil the medical food one dose that people had almost half of them improved and he um he qualified he got 18 out of 30 points and he qualified for the study so you know I was like well I don't know if this is just really good luck or hope and prayers or if P this really happened but I thought we're gonna keep it going so um then I started immediately getting every cookbook I can get my hands on for coconut oil and learning as much as I could about it as well as ketones and um you know the next day and that every day thereafter I gave him first thing in the morning you know he would get coconut oil with breakfast and um but then I started also giving it to her throughout the day because you know in the patent application they talked about that the Ketone levels from MCT will tend to Peak around 90 to 120 Minutes you know so an hour and a half two hours but then by about three hours the Ketone levels are pretty much gone um I've done since then it seems like I see a pattern where I want to tested myself so many times that MCT comes up it goes down but then it can go back up later the Ketone levels you know it's six hours or so and so was this just on like a standard diet though so he wasn't on a low carb diet yet there was just on a standard diet with coconut oil he was on a Mediterranean diet so it's lower carb than your average you know sad American diet but um we were doing a whole food Mediterranean diet for a couple years at this point at any point did he transition to a full keto diet with coconut oil or not really he did because he was um getting so much of the Oreo and he was reducing the carbohydrates just kind of naturally um so um yeah so he you know we just started um I just started giving it to him at different times of the day because I thought if the ketones are only available three hours a day what does your brain do the other 21 hours you know and it's very active even when we sleep so um I started giving it to him with each meal and then we had all kinds of snacks that had coconut and coconut oil and coconut milk and I mean everything became coconut in our house luckily we both really liked it a lot not everybody does but we liked it and um around the fourth or fifth day he was improving so much it was just remarkable he said it was like a light switch came on in his brain the day he started coconut oil he told me that many times his mood improved he had been very depressed I mean even suicidal you know um and you know it was it was pretty serious he was on a couple of antidepressants at that point and um but his mood lifted very quickly and he started talking about having hope for the future that maybe he was not going to die soon after all and he um there were just things like in the morning he'd be very sluggish when he would come out he'd walk very slow not animated uh you know a lot of people have kind of a dead look on their face when they have Alzheimer's you know that's what people call it anyway and he um he perked up he was more animated he started whistling he started telling jokes he started being able to finish sentences um he just you know um there were things like getting utensils out of the drawer he'd be so confused he'd forget which one he was going for like a spoon or whatever he could do that he could get water out of the dispenser from the fridge which he hadn't been able to do so this is after a continuous decline for years now all of a sudden within days within days it's like wow I mean it's so dramatic even the first day improving on the mini mental status and then over four to five more days we saw all these things he had Tremors in his face his jaw when he would talk and that stopped like um right away he had a hand trimmer that he would have in the morning and after he'd get the coconut oil within 20 or 30 minutes it would go away and so you know we just talked about our life had changed something had changed and you know in the meantime I had um come across the name of Dr Richard Beach an MD PhD he had done his PhD at Oxford um but he uh had been at the NIH since he finished all that training for years and he was in his 70s at this point still working and he had um he had worked with Hans Krebs on on the Krebs cycle you know uh working out the Krebs cycle he was very familiar with ketones and in the 1990s he became interested in what the possible therapeutic benefits of ketones might be and he had kind of come to the conclusion that it could help diseases like Alzheimer's Parkinson's ALS multiple sclerosis um um and you know heart failure recovery from heart attacks you know that the heart also uses ketones as do the kidneys and um so he had written several hypothesis papers and I was looking on Wikipedia for him and found him on there and it actually had his phone number and I picked up the phone and called him and he answered himself and um I I didn't tell him you know what I had done with the coconut oil but I asked him theoretically do you think I had a whole list of questions but do you think the ketones from coconut oil could help somebody with alzheimer's and he said uh I said I don't think the levels would be high enough to make any difference um and he then he told me about you know Sam Henderson Dr Sam Henderson who had invented the MCT oil that he had called him a few years earlier to ask him the same question about MCT oil and he said yeah I told him that it wouldn't be high enough and Dr Veach had been working on a ketone Ester for quite a while at this point um probably about 12 or 13 years that would get the levels quite High quite high like within 30 minutes you would have a high a level comparable to of what you would get with starving for 10 or 12 days or a very ketogenic diet and um so uh but he he sent me his hypothesis papers and about two weeks after Steve improved I mean yeah after he first got the coconut oil we had he drew a second clock it's a little hard to see but much better it's one one clock face with the numbers and the lines yeah a whole bunch of lines a whole bunch of lines he later told me um that the lines he was trying to line up the numbers across from each other that's what the lines were for I thought they were a whole bunch of hands on the clock you know so clear clear dramatic Improvement and and so you know you're on to something right you're on to something that nobody's really publishing about nobody's really talking about so where'd you go from here like how did you process all this and move forward well I sent the clocks the comparison to Dr Veach and he called me and he said well this is unexpected and um he became very interested and then he connected me with several other researchers Dr George Cahill who was quite up in age who was the one who discovered that ketones fuel the brain during starvation in the 19th 60s he had reported that he called me Dr theodoreman Italy a nutrition researcher who along with Dr Sammy hash and both of them independently called me they had were the ones who discovered that MCT oils converted the ketones in the 1960s and they were all involved with Dr Veach and trying to get this message out but you know publishing papers they were in Fairly obscure journals that most Physicians wouldn't even read um so you know it just kind of became my life my life's purpose to get this message out to as many people as possible and um so I started writing um first uh to Justice Sandra Day O'Connor my sister suggested her because her husband had Alzheimer's and she was on the Alzheimer's study group at that point you know which was affiliated with the Alzheimer's Association and um I wrote a really long letter I think it was about seven pages long talking about the medical food how my husband had improved I know he's only one case and what I'm asking is for you to get your medical and people and scientists in this group to evaluate this to look at these results because this is on the Shelf you know coconut oil was on the Shelf mcto had been on this shelf for decades not very obvious but bodybuilders were using it to increase their lean body mass since about the 1970s so it was out there some people were using it for weight loss and um these were available on the Shelf why should somebody have to wait another year for this medical food to come out which was going to be an expensive prescription they were going to have to go to a doctor who knew about it to get it um so you know basically to me it was all very urgent and you know got no response from her I meant for months I mean I I hounded I hounded them and finally somebody wrote back Alzheimer's Association numerous politicians it was an election year 2008 you know so I was writing to everybody I was writing to all the major stations uh everybody trying to get some kind of attention basically saying this needs to be studied urgently and people need to know that medium chain triglyceride oil and and coconut oil which happened with my husband could potentially improve somebody with alzheimer's and um you know with Steve Dr ravich encouraged me to and well he wanted me to stop the coconut oil because of that you know myth that it is an artery clogging fat and just use MCT oil well Dr Van Italy who was in his late 90s at that point he said he said you know there might be something else about the coconut oil and that was my feeling too that's what my husband improved with so maybe there's something else in coconut oil that facilitates all of this that has something to do with it and if I just limit it to the medium chains and assume that it's only ketones that are the factor that you know um he might lose ground he might not do so well so I started mixing the two I just started adding some MCT oil to the coconut oil and we were you know and he he told me Dr Veach said push it until he has diarrhea and vomit so I'm like okay so we I increase it a little bit you know at a time in over a few months he was getting a mixture of coconut and MCT oil about um three tablespoons with each meal and another two in the evening eventually two tablespoons that was a lot of fat and um he you know he was worried about gaining weight which was understandable when you add that much oil and he had already started you know stopped eating you know he had been eating massive amounts of fruit before this happened he cut way back you know um he was eating some berries blueberry strawberries um and already eating a lot of vegetables but he started leaving behind the bread the rice the pasta you know anything like that that we were eating and he basically was effectively on a ketogenic diet you know we didn't have a handheld home monitor to prove it you know but I'm quite sure that he was um and you know so he he just steadily improved he had um by uh two months after he started the coconut oil he could tie his shoes again I had to tie his shoes for him up to then his gate completely normalized he started walking normally and he could pick up his feet and run again and um around three and a half four months he announced that he could read again he hadn't been able to read for about a year and a half and uh you know but I didn't know why and I said can you tell me why what was going on and he said well he said the words on the page it was like they would go into pixels and move all around on the page and um I had a hint of this one time when we were at the bird Institute he pointed to a thermostat on the wall and he said look at that it's shaking all over the place and I'm like oh my gosh she's got some kind of visual disturbance going on and that's common with Lewy Body dementia um they have visual disturbances so that's what was happening when he was reading and at like three and a half months after he started the coconut oil he said I can read again and and he said the shaking stopped and so he could actually read and he did start reading again and around nine or two months he started remembering what he'd read three four hours earlier like I have an example of you know um that we were in uh I had a doctor appointment he was in the waiting room and he read a Scientific American about Albert Einstein and a few hours later he told me about it I mean details of this article about Albert Einstein and he'd remember that a volcano had happened a couple weeks earlier just different things like that yeah so the change in his quality of life is night and day and how that affects your life as a as a loved one and a caretaker and you know having your daughter maybe not having to be around him all the time you know for 24 7 care anymore I mean like dramatic dramatic changes and you know Mr America yeah and so but I mean to bring it back to to sort of the real life right not a cure-all it didn't cure it wasn't it wasn't gone so you know tell us sort of the core course of how this progressed and how long it lasted so um you know basically he seemed to level off at about like 10 months or so but he was doing so much better he was able to work as a volunteer at the hospital where I worked he worked in the Supply Warehouse he put stickers on supplies he'd help with the deliveries to the different units and that made him he was so happy because he felt useful again you know he wanted to work and now he was doing something he was a little dismayed he wasn't getting a check but but he he did really well um and he did get into one of the studies you know I mean he and uh tested for the other study again and a couple months later and he got an mmsc of 20 that time so it bumped up even more and he was accepted as the study and I they knew what we were doing we chose the one called stomach gasostat which was an oral medication and we picked that one because it was a crossover study we knew he would get it eventually if he didn't get it right away he would get it and we were very hopeful that this would be it you know this would bring him back and the people there had done a study with the medical food they were involved in that particular research so they were very familiar with it and you know when I told him what we were doing they said Oh Yeah we actually participated in that study so um uh even though he was taking all this coconut and MCT oil they let him in the study which was amazing amazing but actually it was probably a bad thing as it turned out because um we found out later he was on the placebo for 18 months and um all of his Improvement happened during that time um the 18 months I didn't know absolutely for sure I knew he had approved the first two months before he started the study you know he had clearly improved and after that I could never be sure until we knew he was on Placebo that that's what had you know resulted in his Improvement um but then um at um 18 months we and we he switched over to the drug and the reason I knew he had switched over is his hair started growing out like kind of a gold white color which was a um one of the common side effects of the drug and so even the people you know they said we we have a feeling of who's on it or not because of this hair color change and he was on it for probably six weeks and he started having all kinds of strange side effects like wounds that wouldn't heal and abrasion that wouldn't heal for a month he would dick himself shaving it would bleed for three or four days and then he fainted and he had a really high muscle a CPK enzyme which could be from brain or muscle you know I actually had to get our own testing to sort that out it turned out it was probably from muscle but um we were worried about his heart you know that CPK can be Consolidated with you know when there's this was a concern in this this study such a sad story because he was doing so well then gets this new exciting new drug and all of a sudden starts doing worse when he starts the medication so the irony is the coconut oil helped him get into the study but then the study actually caused a lot of problem for him so he had a really big setback he started having some new Alzheimer's symptoms at this point um and kind of reverting back on some um not completely I mean you know he regressed but not to the point of you know where he was before you know we started this um so then Dr Beach had he had he we dropped out of the study and then later we were told a few months later they called us and they said that this drug had actually accelerated Alzheimer's when they analyzed the first 18 months of data it accelerated it so fortunately we did drop out after about six weeks well so and this brings up a really interesting point about sort of the mechanisms right because this was a drug looking at the the plaques and the tangles and so you know Alzheimer's research is focused on okay we see these plaques and tangles in Alzheimer's brains so those must be the problem so let's create drugs to take them away but it turns out maybe that's not correct at all and that maybe those are you know reactionary or protective even and that taking them away could do more harm but instead instead why are we focusing on this concept of mechanism as brain fuel and and the you know the cells not being able to produce energy well and then the Ketone so now how has the research sort of started to started to look at this and and progress over the time it's just barely making a dent but it's it's starting to improve um under Stephen cunane has done a whole lot of the um the research um he has his the ability to do Ketone and glucose pet scans and so he has been studying people um he began by studying adults of all ages I think he studied well the last I heard well over 300 people he's have had these dual scans so um healthy young adults healthy older adults um older people with mild cognitive impairment with mild to moderate Alzheimer's um and you know basically what he's found is very interesting as we age we develop what he calls a brain energy gap uh compared to younger people and it's the difference between how much energy your brain needs and how much it actually gets and even in cognitively normal healthy older people in their 70s the Gap is about it can be like uh seven to nine percent Gap in energy which kind of explains some maybe some of the age-related memory issues the little fogginess that people report um but people with mild cognitive impairment that increases to 10 or 12 percent and people with Alzheimer's mild at the mildest stage are about 20 deficit in brain energy and that just worsens you know as the disease progresses so it's almost like aging and age is the greatest risk factor for Alzheimer's you know that that this aging process and and um effect on the brain is you know explains Alzheimer's in many respects and um it's been found that it's due to insulin resistance is a big part of the problem there's a problem with getting glucose even into the brain um and uh their glue glutes glucose Transporters that are deficient in Alzheimer's glute one and glute three glute one gets uh glucose into the brain free into neurons um and um you know insulin indirectly is involved directly or indirectly you know with these various glucose Transporters and then there's another thing that pdh complex that has to do with converting the fuels glucose to ATP that's deficient so it's almost like there's a conspiracy of getting glucose into the brain well and that's what makes the the treatment so interesting right do you just give ketones to give the alternative fuel or do you correct the insulin resistance so the brain can start using the glucose better or do you have to do both right and that's what I guess a lot of the research is looking at now yeah and that that's what I that's what I have come to the conclusion of um and you know I've been writing a lot about this the various books that I've been writing but you know trying to attack both a ketogenic diet a low carb ketogenic diet will help reduce insulin resistance and and this um Dr Eric Westman for example at Duke University he has helped for over the last couple of decades more than 4 000 people with type 2 diabetes get their diabetes under control get off insulin off medication completely normalize their hemoglobin A1c their fasting blood glucose fasting insulin levels and as long as they stay on the diet they can sustain that if they go off but they're not cured you know if you revert to your old habits it can come back but there are also some case reports of people that had diabetes and Alzheimer's mild Alzheimer's that completely reverse that many mental status going from 21 or 23 to 28 or 29 almost normal and rehearsing all of these other symptoms of diabetes as well so um you know approaching this with a low carb diet can be very beneficial and then providing the fuel is ketones you know a lot of people improve just with that without you know changing their diet very much the Ketone ester's been out since 2018 and my husband had a dramatic heat It reversed almost all of this the new symptoms that he had you know when he first started the Ketone Nest or Dr Beach he said it's past toxicity testing let's see if we can get him back and he the day he started it within 24 hours he was able to do things independently again like taking I had to talk him through a shower talking through shaving step by step he just could do it he could just do it the next day and just other symptoms over about six weeks improved and he felt much better he said he could do things again with how he put it so you did you did earlier say sort of you so did fast forward to the end a little bit you said he had donated this brand and they looked at his brain so hinting that that he did eventually pass but but looking back from the time he was diagnosed from the from the time he passed how much time do you think he gained of quality Life by your experimentations with coconut oil and and everything that followed what do you think the time gain was I feel that it was close to four years at least wow um because he he improved basically for that almost four years after he started the coconut oil he was better than he was the year before and the things that he could do um and you know and then unfortunately you know what happened with Steve that um he had a seizure for the first time ever even though he had taken the Ketone Ester there was an idea that the Ketone Esther might prevent seizures or you know um but in this case he had taken it an hour or two before you know um and I had just gotten to the hospital to work and I had a lady with him and she called me and she had called 9-1-1 and she said he fell straight back and went into a full-blown seizure he had a seizure that lasted 20 minutes and he was had stopped breathing he turned blue uh he had a head injury with it you know he hit his head um I thought maybe it had a stroke but it didn't show nothing showed up like that you know on the CT scan um and he had another seizure on the way to the hospital I was told later and he was really out of it for a few days and I I thought that was going to be the end I really did but he um got up out of bed and he started walking again and I thought I'm getting him out of here before anything else happens and and he was on anti-convulsive so you know and they did a number on him too very lethargic you know after he'd been on for a while he'd get very lethargic and people with Lewy Body dementia it turns out are very sensitive to sort of medications like antipsychotics can can cause acute parkinsonism you know somebody that has Lewy Body dementia and um you know we had some some bad experiences with those types of medications and so he was never the same after that we were worried about letting him walk very much he we would put a gate bill on him to help him walk I had caregivers by this time in our house you know helping me with them and spending the night and everything and um he um just gradually gradually you know um got worse he he lived for another two and a half years after the seizure and um so I think it may even because we kept the Ketone Ester going I did and giving him the coconut and MCT oil too just not quite as much while he was taking the Ketone Ester stayed on a very healthy diet he he would eat for an hour hour 15 minutes is how long it would take he'd have to be fed and I had the greatest caregivers that were willing to do all of that and help help him and me in that way and his body was from the neck down he looked perfect I'm so sorry to hear about the the eventual Decline and and passing but such a a and despite that such an inspiring story and such a sort of a wonderful example of of one family you know on The Cutting Edge of of what is possible and what's followed since in terms of the research and the attention which still isn't enough and your books and so so I guess as to wrap all this up like you know with your books with your writing with your advocacy with the research what do you hope you know Physicians and individuals will walk away from from this story and and learn well I think you know one of the big things is that what you eat does make a difference it makes a big difference I mean I had not a clue that nutrition had anything to do with Alzheimer's we started a Mediterranean diet when I read that the Mediterranean diet can prolong somebody's life by four years with Alzheimer's I had read a study about that in 2006. well it didn't slow it down for Steve and I don't know if if I mean as far as we can tell he's still progressed but um but that there you know providing fuel to the brain reversing insulin resistance could make a huge difference um I mean it doesn't seem to work for everybody but many people it does you know seem to help um that trying this ketogenic approach and now there are Ketone Esters Ketone salts out there you know that can uh get you know the Ketone Ester that Steve Took um uh can you know get the level up you know quickly within 30 minutes and um very high and you know he was on it uh for a couple years now actually for the rest of his life but it kept them stable for about 20 more months you know after he started taking it and you know so there are things like that can you can do overnight fasting will put you in ketosis in the morning you can extend that by um not eating solid food with carbohydrates right away you can add coconut or MCT oil to the coffee um supplements can with Ketone salts or Ketone Esters can boost your levels even further and then maintaining a healthy you know low carb whole food diet you know is is basically what I recommend and you know it's hard to maintain an extremely strict ketogenic diet you know which would be 85 or 90 fat but you know people can uh I think relatively easily cut their carbs down to maybe less than 60 grams a day and increase their fat intake and be in mild nutritional ketosis and if you include coconut and MCT oil as part of that fat that will help maintain your ketosis and then you can build on that you know with supplements and exercise also stimulates Ketone production right and it's a different it's a completely different world now because you can get coconut oil MCT oil the drop of a hat you can get Ketone monitors at the drop of a hat so much easier to to test and tell so we've come a long way and and I I mean I thank you for for your journey sharing your journey something we can all learn from and and I'm encouraged by the research that's happening and um it's one of those you know things you know sort of like same thing we talk about with serious mental illness while the research is happening there are people who are looking for answers now who are desperate for answers now so it's almost like why wouldn't someone try this you know talk to their doctor about it talk to a nutritionist about it talk to a dietitian learn about it and make sure you can safely start on it but if you're looking for answers it could be a potential for people so in your story I think will give people that inspiration to do that so thank you so much I really appreciate you joining us today and sharing your journey with us you're welcome and even the Alzheimer's Association is funding some of this research now not enough but some of it so it's it's encouraging it's it's starting to get out there it's been mostly a Grassroots effort but you know it's starting to get attention slowly but surely person by person so thank you for um giving me the chance to help spread this message of course

Channel: Metabolic Mind

Views: 105,663

Keywords: metabolic psychiatry, keto, ketogenic diet, keto for mental health, nutritional psychiatry, mental health, mental illness, bipolar, schizophrenia, depression, alternative psychiatry, metabolic health

Id: r3-5GQfeJ68

Length: 46min 15sec (2775 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 13 2023