I love podcasts and the first one I started listening to years ago was The Tim Ferris Show, but stopped after I found Ferris increasingly unrelatable.
However, the title of his most recent episode “Optimizing Brain Energy” caught my eye, where he interviews Harvard Psychiatrist and researcher Chris Palmer about his upcoming book Brain Energy and the emerging field of Metabolic Psychiatry, which is basically how food impacts brain function and mental health.
Long-time readers of this blog know I’ve had struggles with my mental health, and the title got my attention because I believe I only struggle when the energy in my brain is really low for a long time.
So I tuned in and loved it, as it helped me make sense of my journey, and not feel like a lunatic for tracking my food and energy, as I’ve felt huge improvements in my mental health as a result of improving my diet.
I enjoyed it so much that I’ve done a summary of it to share the parts I think are most important, and as a reminder to myself that I’m not crazy for thinking what I eat plays a huge role in my mental health, and that I should keep putting energy into gradually improving my diet.
I, nor is Palmer, are claiming that mental health has a simple fix.
But to summarize his theory, he believes all mental health issues are the result of metabolic issues in the brain.
Now after a quick Google search, I learned that Metabolic means ‘how the body changes food and drink into energy’ and I can’t claim I understood all the science Palmer mentions.
But I learned that Mitochondria in our brain play a huge part in brain health because their primary role is to take the energy from food and drinks and turn it into energy our brain cells can use.
Read more on Mitochondria here
If the brain cells don’t get enough energy (or the right type), then the brain starts to misbehave in different ways depending on our genetics, or from trauma experienced earlier in life.
Palmer goes on to say he’s treated many patients with varying mental issues such as bipolar and PTSD using a keto or low-carb diet, and that keto was started as a treatment for people with serve epilepsy.
He also says that he absolutely does not encourage people just to stop taking their meds, but he’s become increasingly frustrated that the medical community is merely treating symptoms, and not addressing the root cause of what he believes is causing an explosion in mental health issues.
Lifestyles that lead to a lack of brain energy.
Now despite being unrelatable, Ferris is incredibly bright and open about his own mental health issues, and Palmer agreed when he summed things up by saying:
“So if you have 20 children in a preschool class, and you don’t feed any of them lunch, that 3hrs later you're going to have 20 grumpy kids and each grumpy kid is going to have a different behavior. Maybe one is throwing blocks, maybe one is crying in the corner, but the underlying cause is fairly straight forward that can explain all the emerging behaviors, rather than trying to treat the block throwing and crying all separately with a different combination of drugs.”
Palmer replies:
“That is a perfect analogy because right now, the mental health field says, ‘This child has block-throwing disorder.’ ‘This child has grumpy disorder.’ ‘This child has handwriting disorder,’ and ‘This child has defiant disorder because he spoke back to me in a really poor manner.’ We label those different things and then we assume they are different disorders. They’re certainly different behaviors and they might require different interventions; one child might need discipline and another maybe not, but you can solve all of it by feeding them.”
Palmer goes on to say that diet is just one of many levers we can pull for improving our brain energy, with others including sleep, exercise and relationships.
He also says group exercise has huge mental health benefits, which reinforces my belief why parkrun and
have been so successful. A double whammy of good brain energy!And if you can't get to group workouts or prefer to exercise on your own, he also says Zone 2 cardio is awesome for mental health. Something that will come as no surprise to 2Zoners advocates
and .
If you don’t know, Zone 2 cardio is when you exercise with your heart rate between 60%-70% of its max (which is at a pace where you can still comfortably talk) for at least 30 minutes, which will get you the endorphin hit or “runners high”.
If you’ve struggled to exercise regularly in the past, it might be because you're pushing yourself too hard or exercising alone.
But if feel like giving it another go, please give the Zone 2 approach a try, regardless of what exercise you chose, or come join us 6pm tonight at Running 4 Resilience from the Arc de Resilience.
Calculate your Zone 2 heart rate here
Takeaways:
Mitochondria play a huge role in mental health.
Diet is used to treat a number of psychiatric conditions.
There are many levers we can pull to improve our mental health.
Group exercise is great for mental health.
Zone 2 cardio is awesome too.
Thanks for reading. If you find this summary useful, let me know if the comments below and I’ll do some more.
Listen to the episode here
Or watch it 👇
Nice Read and great information to learn today. Yeah after Brent insisted, I tried many times to run in Zone 2.
People who DON'T think what they eat affects their mental health are the crazy ones. I'm far from perfect but my general rule is food in plastic packages that isn't frozen or refrigerated is bad for the brain.
Zone 2 4 Lyf, Son.