🧵A new JAMA meta-analysis synthesized findings from 50 studies and more than 40,000 participants to evaluate whether ketogenic diets influence anxiety and depression.

Full Study 👇
doi.org/10.1001/jamaps…

The results?

✅ Modest improvement in depression symptoms across different populations and diagnoses in both controlled and real-world scenarios.

✅ Greater symptom improvement was observed in trials that included ketone monitoring.

✅ A larger effect was seen in “very low carbohydrate” diets compared to just “low carbohydrate” diets.

✅ Improvements in anxiety were also observed in most studies, but with less consistency than depressive symptoms.

Here’s more on what they found 👇 🍽️ The ketogenic diet, originally developed in the 1920s for epilepsy, induces nutritional ketosis, shifting the brain’s energy use away from glucose and toward ketone bodies.

Because many psychiatric conditions involve mitochondrial dysfunction, insulin resistance, impaired glucose metabolism, and inflammation, researchers are increasingly interested in whether ketogenic interventions can target these metabolic pathways and improve clinical outcomes in mental health disorders.

What if the cycles of depression and mania in bipolar disorder reflect not a fixed “chemical imbalance” but rather a metabolic crisis in the body that could be reversed? 🧠🧵

@drmarkhyman spoke with neuroscientist (and expert by experience) @IainCampbellPhD to explore the science that helped him reclaim his life from bipolar disorder.

In this thread we’ll cover the 5 key takeaways from the interview. Dr. Campbell offers a rare and powerful perspective.

As @EdinburghUni researcher and Baszucki Research Fellow exploring the metabolic roots of mental illness and as someone who has his own success story treating bipolar II disorder, his story bridges science and lived experience.

For Dr. Campbell, standard medications weren't enough. His symptoms persisted.

But everything changed the day he stumbled into nutritional ketosis.

“It felt like the lights in my brain were kind of clicking back on.”

This was something no drug had ever accomplished for him. That one shift launched his scientific quest and helped fuel a growing field called metabolic psychiatry.

Here are the 5 key takeaways from the interview 👇

🧵 Can ketogenic therapy help with OCD?

This thread dives into two case series on ketogenic therapy for OCD—one from @chrispalmermd and another from @loricalabresemd.

Across both publications, people with severe, long-standing OCD hit clinical remission (virtually no symptoms, no significant daily impairment)—a level of recovery that’s rare in psychiatry.

Let’s unpack how it happened. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a misunderstood, often devastating neuropsychiatric condition. It involves intrusive, unwanted thoughts (obsessions) and repetitive behaviors (compulsions) that feel impossible to resist.

OCD affects ~1–4% of people, but standard treatments like therapy and medication don’t work for everyone.

What if OCD reflects a deeper connection between brain and body, not just the brain alone?

🧵🧠 New research published in PNAS reveals something profound about the aging brain, the power of nutrition, and why midlife may be the most powerful time for metabolic intervention. Brain aging is not linear. 🧠

Many people think brain aging is a slow, steady process that progresses at the same rate as we get older.

This study found something different.

Using data from over 19,000 participants across four major neuroimaging cohorts, researchers found that brain networks begin to more rapidly destabilize in the early to mid-40s, accelerating sharply into the 60s.

What does “destabilize mean?” 👇

Can ketogenic therapy be use to treat OCD?

A recent case series suggests that the ketogenic diet may significantly reduce symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and even bring some individuals into remission. Here’s what happened. 🧵👇 OCD is a complex psychiatric condition. Current treatment options are effective for some, but for many, medications only help partially, or not at all.

But in this report, 3 individuals experienced dramatic improvements after adopting a #ketogenicdiet, putting their symptoms into remission and eliminating the need for medications.

frontiersin.org/journals/nutri…

🧵 Groundbreaking New Brain Metabolism Findings

🧠Your brain runs on energy, and tiny power plants inside your cells, called mitochondria, make it happen. But not all parts of the brain have the same energy needs.

🔍A new study mapped mitochondrial activity across the brain to see what that means for health & disease. 🔋Mitochondria take fuel from food and oxygen and turn it into ATP, the body's energy currency.

⚡️This is especially important for the brain, which needs constant energy to function properly, or neurological and psychiatric disorders can ensue.

1/ Wow. It just keeps getting worse. Since we made this video about the "keto causes heart attacks" news story, more info has surfaced about the study 2/ As described on the ACC website, participants filled out a food questionnaire once and then were followed for 11 years but never updated their nutrition information! acc.org/About-ACC/Pres…

1/ Roblox Founder @davidbaszucki & his wife @janellison share how a keto diet sent their son’s bipolar disorder into remission. Hear their welcome remarks at the 1st Metabolic Psychiatry retreat, May ‘22 2/ “We traveled with Matt on his mental illness journey. We watched him go into it & come out the other side. Having an idea of what made his recovery possible enables me to stand up here and have something to offer you all, which is his story.” @janellison #ketoformentalhealth

1/4 Metabolic Psychiatry has the potential to transform treatments not only for depression and anxiety, but also serious mental illnesses like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. #KetoforMentalHealth #MetabolicMind #MetabolicPsychiatry
2/4 Understanding the connection between metabolic & mental health could transform how we diagonse and treat mental illness. We can do better that just using drug therapies. Targeted medications with nutritional ketosis could prove to be a gamechanger for psychiatric treatments.