Ali Houston of mets.com has brought together a team to study ketogenic therapy for ADHD and depression let's hear about the study and what its impact may be for psychiatric care welcome to metabolic mind a nonprofit initiative of bazooki group transforming the study and treatment of mental disorders by exploring the connection between metabolism and brain health thank you for joining us on this journey all right Ali Houston thanks for joining me at metabolic mind my pleasure Brett great to be here yeah I'm really excited to hear more about your study you know we keep um wanting
to interview everybody who's running a study in this field and it's just growing and growing and growing the number of studies that are happening which is so exciting and keeping us busy with interviews which is a good problem to have but before we get into that give us a little bit of your background tell us you know the the high level who you are how you got to this point and and what got you interested in in even thinking about this study sure yeah well um I'm from Scotland in the UK and um I originally
was physicist so I um I I got a a Physics degree and went to work in China for a year as an English teacher but then uh got into industry so I was working uh in the laser industry um as a kind of midlevel bond villain henchmen I suppose making laser um and I uh I was kind of always interested in potentially doing a pH PhD started a PhD in 2013 um late 2013 in the gravitational wave group in in Glasgow in Scotland and that's part of an international collaboration they actually kind of uh coincidentally
the year after I joined um discovered gravitational waves which I can't really take any part uh Credit in but uh close to it was very exciting to see um and the the heads of the collaboration ended up getting the Nobel Prize for it but um uh the I was very lucky that my professor uh my supervisor Ken strain had healed his me chronic fatigue syndrome by changing his diet so um he'd basically been told he wouldn't work again in his early 40s and he uh did some some of his own research discovered Gary tabs good
calories bad calories tried a keto diet and within 6 months he was running 10ks again and so fast forward a few years and I arrive with a history since I was a child of um chronic anxiety seasonal depression and um in 2015 I was diagnosed with ADHD which made sense of a lot of my childhood and kind of negative adult um experiences at work and and studying um all of this seemed to be quite cyclical and very detrimental had been suicidal at points and I wasn't functioning properly so he noticed this and kind of thought
well maybe there's something metabolically up here pointed me in the right direction in terms of the literature blogs Etc and I think if you if you read that critically then you can't help but come up thinking there's something in this and I changed my diet as well 2016 uh to a ketogenic diet and within weeks my problems started to melt away so I had gut problems that were that would clear up um that year was the first year I didn't have seasonal depression in as long as I could remember it was an absolute gift and
I was just so grateful I I knew I had to change my career really to help other people to experience what I did but at the time there wasn't really the ecosystem to connect the dots with metabolic health and mental health the only loud voice that I knew of in the space was was Georgia eids and um a very clear and uh and expressive voice it is but still very Fringe at the time and so I would um I I I started a couple of businesses around food um keto and paleo food delivery sugar-free chocolate
and ice cream and um ultimately in 20 and around 2020 started to train as a health coach and put all of this knowledge that I'd kind of developed uh since 2015 when I started reading about all this into practice and then in 2022 of course the bazookis kind of burst onto the scene and made it um cool to link met metabolic health and mental health and so I thought well brilliant and myself and fellow Scot Dr Rachel Brown who's a psychiatrist in the NHS in Edinburgh she'd been involved with Ian Campbell's study on bipolar disorder
and ketogenic diets and we got on well and we thought you know what Now's the Time let's start something so we founded medai which is our coaching company and that kind of brings us up to where we are now wow what a journey and you know I on the one hand I hate to hear these stories right that you only learned about this because of you know hearing it from somebody else not from a doctor not from the medical community but you basically had to find it on your own but on the other hand I
love to hear these stories but because of what you're doing with your own personal experience you just it wasn't enough for you to have this n of one experience and say okay good it helped me but now you're trying to translate that to help so many others with your metai app and now also with this research study so now it makes sense why you are looking into 8 DHD and depression and ketogenic interventions for that because that speaks to your your personal experience but but tell us more I mean beyond your personal experience why is
it so important that that you're studying ADHD and depression specifically yeah well I suppose there's a few reasons um like you say it's kind of my experience r large and I think most people will resonate with this when they discover how powerful ketogenic diets can be for their physical and mental health that they maybe evangelize a little and that it's um it's an unfortunate experience sometimes to find out that your closest friends and family actually are the ones who might listen to you the least and that the power of anecdote doesn't seem to extend even
that far a lot of the time and it's not true all the time you know I think I've had close friends and family who responded um amazingly and actually um kind of Taken taken on a kenic diet themselves to try and and and got a lot of benefits but understandably people have to come to these things in their own time and anecdote sometimes isn't enough so it's always been an ambition of mine to you know get involved with scientific research again since leaving physics and um I think I have kind of skills that can be
brought to bear to help as many people as possible in that regard and it felt like what better story to cover if you like than my own but in a rigorous academic setting and so I I got in touch with quite a few academics in the UK and abroad about potential opportunities and it's difficult because the funding available um to academics is usually tied to specific calls for um you know better known conditions or um certainly metabolic mental health is is still extremely niche in that regard although that's changing which is cool and so I
sought to find other sources of of funding and interest and you know bazooki groups been very kind to step forward and and say that they'll help with the study but um I'd got in touch with uh Phil Bernett and Mike Browning both professors at Oxford and they were two of the most Keen out of any of the academics that I spoke to which I thought was great because you know they're very conservative and um careful researchers who see a signal out of the noise here um and they want to try to do something about it
and so I think it would be it'll be a very um rigorous study I hope and one that people will be able to hold up to to friends and family and whoever and say look Oxford says this yeah that's a great point to have the the name and the power of Oxford behind it but you bring up a good point that funding of these types of studies can be very difficult and so again it's a shame of the way the system is but so thankful that we have the bazooki family and and you know anybody
else who is a philanthropic supporter of research I think is so important um but to get back to the ADHD and depression diagnoses I mean the incidence of those diagnoses are on the rise dramatically over the past couple decades and you can make lots of arguments about why that may be but maybe the research and the treatment hasn't caught up with the degree of diagnosis you can make that argument so so I think it's so important that you're specifically looking at these two diagnoses with a ketogenic intervention so give it give us a little bit
of the structure about the trial I mean how many people for how long and tell us about how you're using your app in it and the intervention and give us the the basics sure yeah so I totally agree on the point about ADHD and depression as well because there's a one on the one hand it's kind of my story and the other hand it's so many other people's story unfortunately and it's not getting addressed there's been some um interesting developments on um you know ketogenic diet for depression studies like Aon bames and um Megan Kirk
Changs in Oxford um so I was looking to be complimentary to those rather than just repetitive also ADHD is really sorely under researched there's um there's another one in in Holland that's about to happen but apart from that there's not really any human stuff there's there's one on rats and one on dogs so it's it's kind of it's kind of pitiful at the moment um the the waiting lists in some places in the UK for for even a diagnos a diagnostic check is 10 years and there's a it's it's just you know might as well
be Infinity um people have to spend lots of money with a private psychiatrist to get a diagnosis and even if they do then the options at the moment really are mainly pharmacological people can get coaching to manage symptoms but it's not really root cause treatment and the um the the pharmacological approach is sometimes ineffective and when it is effective can become less effective as tolerance to the drugs build up people need to take more to feel the same effect and ultimately side effects can take over that's certainly my experience of it and I was really
glad to be able to get off them um particularly rlin which is what I was on and um and that you know the um there's a worldwide shortage of these drugs at the moment China stopped making them for the last few years so it's a bit of a mess ADHD and it it's it's um I think it's been slower to be jumped on by the metabolic Psychiatry Community because it is classed as a slightly different thing both in terms of being neurodevelopmental as much as maybe metabolic which is an interesting distinction to make and we
can talk about that later if you like and um that's not seen as as serious understandably because you know it doesn't involve psychosis it doesn't um have as serious a suicidality profile so fair enough to make the distinction but I think it's time we looked at it and I think it's so comorbid with depression that it makes sense to look at these things together and try and tease it out I also think that people are changing their the way they think about the DSM definitions of these diseases and how they actually can overlap a lot
especially if there's um if there's similar metabolic root causes so what we want to do is recruit late this year after the the ethical approval goes through and minimum 25 people in intervention arm 25 people in control and the um if the funding allows we can go up to maybe 50 people in each arm so 25 people in the intervention arm they'll be coached on using a ketogenic diet by me online in groups we're going to recruit from across the UK um someone they want to take part they have to have an ADHD diagnosis now
we might end up recruiting from waiting lists and testing people to see if they have edhd and then if they do then they'll be allowed on they also need to have depression symptoms that could be self-identified or could be diagnosed with depression we'll recruit all we need for both arms and then stratify so that the level of depression in each arm is is matched as Clos as closely as we can um not only will we coach on using a kenic diet for 16 weeks will um give the intervention arm access to the metsi platform and
so at the moment that consists of a membership area where people can watch live q&as with myself and Dr Brown and interviews with uh experts on specific topics around metabolic mental health the app also allows for uh Forum interaction and uh tracker which is quite r ment at the moment but we're going to develop that hopefully in the next 6 to 12 months so that what the um study participants are using is a little bit more advanced than it is now then the intervention arm they'll be coached online in a similar way but by a
a dietician who'll be coaching what what in England is called Eat Well guide and um it's kind of ironically named because it's you know healthy whole grains quote unquote um you know the rainbow kind of generic healthy advice as it usually comes from the mainstream so that'll be what we we'll be testing against and those people have access to the online resources uh for the eat well guide to hopefully control a little bit for um the digital access that the intervention arm will have to n side all right that's very interesting yeah I like how
you have the control arm still getting coaching and teaching to try and make that as equivalent as possible in the study um so you mentioned you'll be recruit recruiting throughout the UK so is it is it indeed limited to the UK so if you're in the US or other parts of Europe they it can't take place in your study right now right now yeah but something we are looking at at the moment for the next 6 to 12 months is um a pilot data Sprint see what we what we see is um potentially very useful
to understand prior to the Oxford study and to augment the results from the Oxford study is if people are wearing um devices like a continuous glucose monitor and an Ura ring for example then can that data um help to form a a kind of CA causitive uh data set for their mental health so you know we want to run a pilot with maybe 50 to 100 people who already have access to CGM and Aura and put their data and their logged mood record and um ADHD symptom kind of log through our data cruncher and see
if there's correlations that can be inferred as causal and I think what ultimately we want to build after that and the Oxford study is almost a real time um an anzer and Optimizer for mental health using those parameters and I think we're nearly there in terms of weables AI data analysis and giving that real-time feedback loop because ultimately we want a solution that's going to be really safe at scale and so I think when we do that um pilot data Sprint we'll not be looking for people with ADHD and depression we'll just be looking for
people with ADHD because it has a safer profile and we just want we just want kind of people to realize that safety is Paramount and um I hear it all the time in this Channel and I think it's absolutely right that you must work with your doctor that this kind of service shouldn't be thought of as replacing it and that it's um it's a coaching service and so if you like we'll be starting with ADHD to see how people react in the wild and then we can look more at um the formal clinical setting for
more serious disorders further down the line and after Oxford so that's the plan for the next 6 to 12 months yeah it's ambitious I like it I like it so definitely anybody in the UK who's interested should should reach out to you to to see about enrolling in the study but you alluded to it earlier so let's get into this just a little bit here you know with serious mental illness as it's called you know bipolar disorder schizophrenia schizo effective and major depression um you can you can draw parallels with seizure seizure disorders whether it's
the medications um or some of the neurotransmitter imbalances you can you can draw some mechanistic similarities and say well if ketogenic interventions work for one then ketogenic interventions should work for another so that's one sort of rudimentary way of connecting the dots and now we're having research showing that yes indeed ketogenic interventions for those diagnosis can be very beneficial but you alluded to that ADHD has maybe different uh different ideology um you know different root causes so to speak um which may make it potentially Mak some people think oh maybe it won't benefit the same
but yet there still can be some similarities and you know if the brain is healthier and running more efficiently so to speak on on you know more efficient fuel or however you want to phrase it there still can be some you know mechanistic reasons for why it works so how do you connect the dots to say yes ketogenic interventions can still likely be in uh effective for ADHD and here's why H yeah yeah I mean clearly I'm post Evangelical about the fact that ketogenic diets do work for um mental illness and I think I can't
remember who said it but you know there's no real difference between a neurological neuron and a psychiatric neuron and so when you're talking about Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or epilepsy or bipolar disorder you're not really crossing a massive line there and there's genetic V Vari ability between individuals that depending on their environmental exposure they'll Express one illness or another but the root causes may be very similar you know it's absolutely clear in the literature that Parkinson's one route into Parkinson's is through um your gut health deteriorating and things that should stay in the gut or maybe
should never have been in the gut in the first place pathogenic microbes um along with environmental exposure to things like gluten can break down gut Integrity get into the systemic bloodstream and start causing all sorts of Havoc around um damage and neuroinflammation so I think that pathway is very common to multiple of these illnesses and um that once the gut gets damaged you can start getting um uh deficiencies in certain vitamins and minerals that can then lead to further problems and it's a downwards viral and I think to the extent that your genetics predicts you
know uh how ill you're going to get in life we didn't evolve over millions of years to have fatal flaws in the system Here There and Everywhere I think it's just poot luck which genes you get that will um interact negatively with the environment that we live in today you know whether that's being born cerian um being bottle fed and not judging there's good medical reasons and social reasons why these things happen but they affect gut health profoundly yeah a good rounds and rounds of antibiotics there definitely a connection between so many different parts that
it's it's hard to say here's the one mechanism when there's so many interactions and but I like how you bring up a great point though about a neuron's a neuron and a healthier neuron is going to manifest different ways than an unhealthy neuron and and you know it manifest differently in different people it's ADHD and and autism spectrum disorder are interesting in there um people say well you can't say that it's environment because they're neurodevelopmental but then you can point to potential positives in certain aspects of ADHD and autism spectrum disorder so I'm not saying
that it's a blessing or that it's a superpower or that it's a gift you clearly for most people with either ADHD or Autism Spectrum Disorder which are obviously very different um it's a curse and people hate it but then very often with ADHD there's uh there's like a double-edged sword where people say well I feel creative and I feel like I can take on multiple projects and um lateral thinking when I'm at my best and then but there's all this brain fog and rejection sensitive dysphoria and mood issues and stuff that I hate but then
what happened for me was those negative things quieten down to you know very quiet and the positives kind of remained so um yeah I think there is neurodevelopmental thing going on there but not necessarily pathologic I think it could be that it's and I know Ian Campbell's done some interesting stuff on this with bipolar disorder genes you can see how with the positives of ADHD there's potential massive evolutionary advantages in having them and certain um you know autism spectrum disorder hyperfocus uh you know very um sort of Niche skills um to a very high level
in certain individuals who are high functioning could be seen as a a big evolutionary advantage that that might remain in the gene pool but then when it's mixed with the modern environment leads to potentially catastrophic negative uh expressions and that's my take on on the sort of difference between ADHD and ASD and the the sort of some of the other uh ones that are not seen as neurodevelopmental yeah yeah but I I I think that lays it out well and um but very interesting to see that a ketogenic intervention by changing the brain's chemistry and
fuel can impact so many different disease States um beneficially but not for everybody so then maybe that's another thing you can start to learn from research is who responds and who doesn't and such an important point to be able to sort of Define that um so I'm really excited to hear more about the study as it as it transpires and and to see how your results come out um where can people go if they want to learn more about it or to see if they can qualify to sign up so everything will be expressed on
mets.com and there's another way to get involved too Beyond just um signing up for the the mailing list or uh downloading the app and getting onto the mailing list that way because we're crowdfunding for the study as well so bazooki group has very kindly offered to match the first 10,000 of of crowdfunding money so that means that for every pound or dollar that that um people give it's getting doubled so it's it's brilliant um and the crowdfunding page is up and running the address for that is bit . L ADHD Kito bit.ly ADHD Kito and
if if people give something on there then we'll keep them up to date as well on the um being involved with the study and the the uh potential sort of Citizen science study that we're doing as well awesome well thank you for all that information and uh please keep us updated as as things transpire and best of luck absolutely BR thanks so much
