Shadowing Practice: Essentials: Diet & Nutrition for Mental Health | Dr. Chris Palmer - Learn English Speaking with Video
Choose a practice mode
Each mode opens a full-screen practice room.
430 sentences
If sentences are too short or too long, click Edit to adjust them.
1
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance.
2
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
3
And now for my discussion with Dr. Chris Palmer.
4
Chris, Dr. Palmer, thank you for being here.
5
Thank you, Andrew, for having me.
6
I have a lot of questions for you, and I'm really excited about this topic
7
because I think most people know what mental illness is or they have some idea what that is.
8
Most people have some idea what nutrition is.
9
Fewer people certainly know how closely those things can interact.
10
I think everybody is familiar with the feeling of a food
11
or the ingestion of a food making them feel good in the short term.
12
But I believe that very few people understand
13
or are familiar with the fact that nutrition and our mental health interact in this very intimate, maybe even causal way.
14
And that is something that occurs over long periods of time, meaning what I ate yesterday, the day before, maybe even 10 years ago could be impacting the way
15
that my brain and body are making me feel now.
16
So if you would, I'd love for you to just tell us about a little bit of the history,
17
in particular, your history with exploring the relationship between nutrition and mental health.
18
And then we can dive into some of the more particulars of ketogenic diets versus other diets
19
and some of the truly miraculous findings that you
20
and others are coming up with based on real patients
21
and real experiences of people who suffer and then find relief by altering their nutrition.
22
Sure.
23
This story really starts with my own personal story.
24
I don't need to go into great detail, but to set the stage, when I was a kid, I definitely had mental illness.
25
Started with OCD.
26
I went on to have subsequent depression, suicidality, all sorts of things.
27
Somehow or another, I pulled myself together and got through medical school, actually did quite well in medical school, and then was doing my internship and residency at Harvard.
28
And at that point in time, I was diagnosed with metabolic syndrome.
29
So I had high blood pressure, horrible lipids, and prediabetes.
30
And I was doing everything right, supposedly.
31
I was on a low-fat diet and I was exercising regularly.
32
And year after year, my doctor kept telling me diet and exercise.
33
I was doing everything he kept telling me to do.
34
Everything was getting worse.
35
My blood pressure kept going higher.
36
And at some point, he said, you're going to have to go on medication for your prediabetes something for your cholesterol and something for your blood pressure.
37
So three pills, basically you're screwed.
38
It's your genes.
39
You're just going to have to bite the bullet and take meds.
40
As a physician, I knew what that meant.
41
I knew that I'm in my 20s.
42
If I'm already on three meds for metabolic syndrome, I'm going to be screwed by the time I'm 40 or 50 and I'm probably going to be having heart attacks.
43
I'd heard through the rumor mill that the Atkins diet could somehow help people improve their cholesterol and prediabetes.
44
I was highly skeptical.
45
And, you know, I believed everything I was taught in medical school.
46
Why would my professors lie to me?
47
They knew what they were talking about.
48
Low-fat diet was the thing to do.
49
And the Atkins diet was clearly dangerous and reckless.
50
And I had been trying the medical dogma for years, and it wasn't working for me.
51
And so for whatever reason, I decided this is going to be my last attempt at something different.
52
And then I'll just bite the bullet and go on meds.
53
So I tried the Atkins diet.
54
Within three months, my metabolic syndrome was completely gone.
55
I probably lost about, you know, 10 pounds through this process.
56
But everything got normal.
57
And when I went back to my doctor, he was shocked.
58
The thing that was the most striking to me after doing the diet for three months
59
was not the fact that my metabolic syndrome was gone.
60
That was my goal and it was a seemingly miraculous achievement because I got rid of everything with one dietary change.
61
But the thing that I noticed was dramatic improvement in my mood, energy, concentration and sleep for the first time in my life,
62
I started waking up before my alarm went off and feeling rested.
63
That never happened to me before.
64
I was meticulous about planning when my alarm went off
65
and how many times I could push the snooze button in order to be on time for wherever I needed to be, whether it was school or the hospital or whatever.
66
Prior to the diet, I always felt like there are two types of people in the world.
67
There are these happy, peppy people who just are so positive and they've got energy and they have this saying, they like to work hard and play hard.
68
But I never understood who the hell wants to play hard?
69
Like who's got energy for that?
70
Like, aren't you tired from working so hard?
71
I assumed that they were just lucky and privileged.
72
They either had good genetics or maybe they had good childhoods or good parents or something, something that I didn't have.
73
What was the journey forward into the work that you're doing now?
74
So within a few years, I'm, you know, an attending physician.
75
I've got all these patients in my clinical practice with treatment-resistant mental illness.
76
I'm in a tertiary care hospital.
77
So I almost never get somebody off the street with their first episode of depression.
78
Out of the gate as part of my career, I get treatment-resistant mental disorders.
79
So I get people who've already been to six-plus psychiatrists, therapists.
80
They've usually tried dozens of different medications.
81
They've been in decades of psychotherapy.
82
They've often had ECT and other things.
83
And nothing's working.
84
And I'm thinking, you know, well, we're kind of out of options for these other people.
85
And this diet is having this really powerful antidepressant effect.
86
I think I'm going to try it and just see
87
if any of my patients are game to try it to see if it might help them.
88
Sure enough, it did.
89
It didn't help everyone and not everybody was interested and or able to do it.
90
But some of the ones who were able to do it ended up having a remarkable and powerful antidepressant effect.
91
One woman actually became hypomanic within a month.
92
And she had been depressed pretty much non-stop for over five years.
93
Chronically depressed, suicidal, in and out of hospitals.
94
And I saw her become hypomanic and I'm thinking, wow, this really is a powerful antidepressant effect.
95
Like this is amazing.
96
This is like a medication, but better because it actually is working for her.
97
At that point, we didn't have many clinical trials of the safety
98
or efficacy of Atkins diet for even weight loss or diabetes, let alone any mental disorders.
99
And so I really actually felt like I'm on the fringe here
100
and this is not going to be met with praise by anyone.
101
So I'm just going to lay low.
102
I'm going to offer it to patients.
103
And I went along that way up until 2016.
104
So low carbohydrate diet, certainly low sugar.
105
Yeah.
106
I'm assuming you're not a nutritionist.
107
So how did you prescribe a nutrition plan for your patients?
108
The first few patients, it was try this Atkins diet, I want to see ketosis.
109
So I was strongly recommending that patients achieve urinary ketosis.
110
And the interesting thing is I noticed a pattern that when they were trying the diet and not getting ketones, they often did not get a clinical benefit.
111
It was once they got into ketosis that I began to notice the clinical benefit.
112
The thing that completely upended everything that I knew as a psychiatrist though was when I helped a patient in 2016.
113
33-year-old man with schizoaffective disorder.
114
He had been my patient for eight years now.
115
He had daily auditory hallucinations.
116
He had paranoid delusions.
117
He could not go out in public without being terrified.
118
This man was tormented by his illness.
119
It ruined his life.
120
He had already tried 17 different medications and none of them stopped his symptoms.
121
He weighs 340 pounds and for whatever reason he gets it in his head, I'm never gonna to get a girlfriend if I don't lose some weight.
122
He also recognizes I'm never going to get a girlfriend because I'm a loser, I'm schizophrenic, I live with my father, I have nothing going for me.
123
For a variety of reasons we ended up deciding to try the ketogenic diet.
124
He decides to give it a try.
125
Within two weeks, not only does he start losing weight, but I begin to notice this dramatic antidepressant effect.
126
He's making better eye contact.
127
He's smiling more.
128
He's talking a lot more.
129
I'm thinking like what's gotten into you?
130
Like you're coming to life.
131
Like I've never heard you talk this much.
132
I've never seen you so excited or present or alive.
133
I haven't changed his meds at all.
134
The thing that upended everything that I knew as a psychiatrist was six to eight weeks in, he spontaneously starts reporting.
135
You know those voices that I hear all the time?
136
they're going away.
137
And he says, you know, you know how I always thought
138
that there were all these families who were controlling my thoughts
139
and out to get me and they had targeted me and I'm thinking, oh yeah, we've been talking about that for eight years.
140
We could talk about that again.
141
He says, now that I think about it, I don't think that's true.
142
And now that I say it, it sounds kind of crazy.
143
It probably never was.
144
I've probably had schizophrenia all along like everybody's been trying to tell me and I think it's going away.
145
He's now lost 160 pounds and kept it off to this day.
146
He was able to do things he had not been able to do since the time of his diagnosis.
147
He was able to complete a certificate program.
148
He was able to go out in public and not be paranoid.
149
He performed improv in front of a live audience.
150
At one point, he was able to move out of his father's home and live independently.
151
Did he stay on any kind of antipsychotic or other medication?
152
We have slowly but surely tried to taper him off his meds.
153
He has been on meds for decades.
154
He started medications when he was a young child.
155
His brain is developed in response to all sorts of psychiatric medications.
156
And it has not been easy to try to get him off.
157
And I just want to say for any listeners, getting off your meds is very difficult and dangerous
158
and you need to do it with supervision with a mental health professional or a prescriber.
159
To stay in ketosis, what sort of blood levels of ketones do you like to see in your patients?
160
What is the range that you think most people could aspire to?
161
So it really depends on the patient and what I'm treating, quite honestly.
162
And I don't think every patient needs the ketogenic diet.
163
For some patients, simply getting rid of junk food can make a huge difference in a mood disorder, for instance.
164
So a junk food meaning highly processed food, food that could last on the shelf a very long time.
165
Highly processed foods that are usually high in both sugar, carbs and fats.
166
Those seem to be the worst foods.
167
That combination, high sugar, high fat, seems to be the worst combination for metabolic health and lo and behold,
168
we've got emerging data that strongly suggests it's also bad for mental health.
169
So to step back from that.
170
So for some patients, I might just want to decrease glucose
171
and insulin levels and I can do that by getting rid of sweets.
172
For other patients, like patients with schizoaffective disorder or schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, especially if it's chronic, if I'm using it as a brain treatment,
173
then I do want a ketogenic diet and I usually want reasonably high levels of blood ketones.
174
For depression, I want to see at least greater than probably 0.8 millimole.
175
For psychotic disorders and bipolar disorder, I usually want to see levels greater than 1.5.
176
That's what I'm shooting for, if at all possible.
177
I think that for a lot of listeners
178
and people out there who are familiar with how changing your diet
179
or changing your exercise can positively impact sleep and weight and all these things.
180
And it cascades into feeling better.
181
That makes perfect sense.
182
But for a lot of the world still,
183
the idea that changing or using nutrition as a dissection tool or as a treatment tool
184
to understand and treat mental illness is still a kind of heretical idea.
185
That to them, it kind of falls in the, okay, well, that's like a woo science or something like that.
186
they immediately think, didn't Atkins die of a heart attack?
187
You know, I hear that a lot, you know, which I do think is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but it's an interesting thing nonetheless.
188
And then I think that the majority of people sit in the middle
189
and just want to see science and medicine come up with treatments that work.
190
And I have to say, I'm very relieved to hear what you said earlier, which was you never said that people should come off their medication and just become, go on a ketogenic diet and everything will be cured.
191
You're certainly not saying that.
192
No. and rather you're saying, if I understand correctly,
193
that nutrition needs to be considered one of the major tools in the landscape of effective tools
194
and that it can be very effective.
195
Let's talk about epilepsy and how the ketogenic diet is not just used for epilepsy, but is one of the oldest,
196
if not the oldest examples of the use of nutrition to treat a condition of the nervous system
197
that can be incredibly debilitating, even deadly.
198
The reality is that this literature and this clinical history
199
and all of the research we have was the godsend that I needed to do the work that I'm doing.
200
Otherwise, I would have been discredited on day one.
201
The ketogenic diet, unbeknownst to most people, was actually developed 100 years ago,
202
1921, by a physician for one and only one purpose, to treat epilepsy.
203
It wasn't developed as a weight loss diet.
204
It wasn't developed as the diet that all human beings should follow.
205
And the reason it was developed is because of this long-standing observation since the time of Hippocrates that fasting can stop seizures.
206
Most people think going without food is bad and they equate it with starvation.
207
But in fact, when we go without food, it causes tremendous shifts in metabolism, both brain and body metabolism.
208
And it puts the body into a mode of autophagy
209
and conservation of resources and all sorts of things that are beneficial to human health.
210
And this is why fasting has been used as a therapeutic intervention in almost every culture and almost every religion for millennia.
211
But for the most part, that was all thought to be religious folklore.
212
In 1921, one physician used intermittent fasting on a child with seizures and found that,
213
oh, lo and behold, this religious folklore stuff has something to it.
214
It actually worked.
215
The problem with fasting is that you can only fast for so long before you starve to death, and that's not a very effective treatment.
216
As soon as people start eating a normal diet again, their seizures usually come right back, oftentimes with a vengeance.
217
And so it can be a good short-term intervention.
218
The fasting can take a few days because it can take a few days to get ketosis.
219
And then you can get some relief from chronic seizures.
220
But it's not a good long-term treatment because, again, people will starve to death.
221
As soon as they start eating, seizures come back.
222
So it was actually Dr. Russell Wilder at the Mayo Clinic who developed the ketogenic diet with one and only one purpose.
223
He wanted to see can we mimic the fasting state using this special diet
224
to see if it might stop seizures long term.
225
And lo and behold, it worked.
226
Early results were extraordinarily positive.
227
50% of patients who use the ketogenic diet became seizure free
228
and another 35% had a 50% or greater reduction in their seizure frequency.
229
So about 85% efficacy rate.
230
By the 1950s, pharmaceuticals were coming out and we had many more anticonvulsant treatments.
231
And there's no question they work for a lot of people.
232
That's great.
233
And taking a pill is so much easier than doing this diet.
234
But lo and behold, even to this day, people with epilepsy, about 30% don't respond to the current treatments that we have available.
235
30% will have treatment resistant epilepsy, which means they continue to have seizures no matter how many anticonvulsants they're taking, even if they've had brain surgery.
236
It just doesn't stop their seizures.
237
And so in the 1970s, the ketogenic diet was resurrected at Johns Hopkins for these treatment-resistant cases.
238
And lo and behold, it works.
239
Not for all of them, but it works.
240
And about one-third becomes seizure-free.
241
And these are people who've tried everything and nothing's working.
242
So one third becomes seizure-free, another third get a clinical benefit, meaning a 50% or greater reduction in their seizure frequency,
243
and the other third it doesn't seem to work.
244
And so the reality that God send for me is
245
that we have decades of neuroscience research on the ketogenic diet and what it is doing to the brain.
246
We know that the ketogenic diet is influencing neurotransmitter levels, in particular glutamate, GABA, adenosine.
247
It changes calcium channel regulation and calcium levels, which is really important in the function of cells.
248
It changes gene expression.
249
It reduces brain inflammation.
250
It changes the gut microbiome and there are.. gut microbiome is a huge topic right now
251
and there are some researchers who argue that is the primary benefit of the ketogenic diet.
252
It's changing the gut microbiome in beneficial ways.
253
So it's doing a lot of things.
254
It obviously improves insulin resistance, It lowers glucose levels, lowers insulin levels, which improves insulin signaling.
255
The key for my research that I've outlined,
256
the real magic, is that this diet stimulates two processes that relate to mitochondria.
257
It stimulates a process called mitophagy, which is getting rid of old and defective mitochondria and replacing them with new ones.
258
And it also stimulates a process called mitochondrial biogenesis, which means that after people have done the ketogenic diet for a while,
259
months or years, many of their cells in their bodies and brains will have more mitochondria and those mitochondria will be healthier.
260
And I believe that is the reason the ketogenic diet is such a powerful treatment,
261
not only for epilepsy, but also for people with chronic mental disorders.
262
If you're looking for randomized controlled trials documenting efficacy in large numbers of patients with these disorders, we don't have them.
263
They're underway now, but we don't have them yet.
264
Maybe we could just talk about mitochondria for a moment and then talk about these two major effects.
265
What are some of the other things that mitochondria are important for in neurons and maybe other cells of the brain?
266
If you think of the cell as a computer, a lot of people think of mitochondria as the power cord to that computer
267
because they're providing the power and they are in fact the power cord to that computer.
268
But actually their real function is the motherboard of that computer.
269
So mitochondria are directing and allocating resources throughout a cell.
270
That is their primary function and then they happen to be powerhouses as well.
271
To give some clear examples,
272
mitochondria play a direct role in the production and release and regulation of some really key neurotransmitters,
273
including serotonin, dopamine, glutamate, acetylcholine.
274
Those are pretty powerful neurotransmitters.
275
Yeah, I would call those, I would consider those the, I know you listed more than three, but the sort of primary colors of neurotransmission.
276
Yes.
277
You know, any one of those in excess or deficiency is going to have profound negative effects on a nervous system.
278
Mitochondria are providing both some of the building blocks, if you will, for some of those molecules.
279
They're part of the Krebs citric acid cycle.
280
Some of the intermediate products actually go into making those neurotransmitters.
281
Much more importantly, mitochondria provide the energy for the production of those neurotransmitters and fascinatingly,
282
mitochondria are directly related to the release of neurotransmitters.
283
ATP alone is not enough.
284
There have been some research studies that have actually found
285
that mitochondria move along the membrane of the synapse to release batches of vesicles of neurotransmitters
286
and that if the mitochondria are removed from the synapse and researchers flood that cell with ATP,
287
neurotransmitters usually are not getting released.
288
Mitochondria are doing other things.
289
We don't entirely even understand what all they're doing or how they're doing it.
290
But they're doing other things than just providing the power.
291
Mitochondria at least play a role in all of the aspects of the human stress response.
292
So when humans are stressed, either physically or psychologically, there are several things that happen.
293
Increased cortisol, increased adrenaline, noradrenaline, inflammation, and gene expression, in particular in the hippocampus,
294
occur with the stress response.
295
And one group of researchers actually genetically modified mitochondria in four different ways
296
and found that all those four buckets of stress response were impacted in one way or another.
297
implying that mitochondria are somehow playing a role in those.
298
In terms of their role in cortisol, we know that mitochondria actually have the enzyme required for the synthesis of steroid hormones.
299
So that includes cortisol, estrogen, testosterone, and progesterone, some names that maybe everybody's heard of.
300
So that means that if mitochondria are in short supply or dysfunctional,
301
the production of those hormones may become dysregulated.
302
Mitochondria play a direct role in inflammation and they turn the inflammatory system both on,
303
or they at least play a role in turning the inflammatory system both on and off.
304
One paper in Cell actually identified mitochondria as the key regulator in turning certain inflammatory cells off.
305
and that when you inhibit mitochondrial function, those cells don't turn off.
306
Mitochondrial levels of reactive oxygen species are a key signaling process to turn the inflammatory process off.
307
Another study found that macrophages, so macrophages are an important immune cell that play a role in healing.
308
So if you cut yourself,
309
your body will send inflammation that way and send immune cells that way to try to heal your skin.
310
And macrophages play an important role in that healing.
311
One group of researchers tried to figure out how do macrophages know to switch between the different phases of wound healing?
312
Because the macrophages do different things in the different phases of wound healing.
313
And the conclusion of all of their research was
314
that it's mitochondria mitochondria are sending the essential signals
315
that change the state of the macrophages to induce these different phases of wound healing.
316
So I've just talked about neurotransmitters, hormones, epigenetic expression, inflammation.
317
For anybody familiar with the mental health field, they know these are like some of the key variables
318
that researchers have been struggling with for decades trying to figure out how do these fit together.
319
We know that all of those buckets
320
can be disrupted in people with mental disorders and our field has struggled to understand but how do they fit together?
321
How can we make sense of this disruption?
322
I believe once you understand the science of mitochondria,
323
you can actually connect all of the dots of the mental illness What I'm hearing is that mitochondria,
324
in addition to being important sources of energy production and output in cells, which of course they are,
325
probably have other roles and that maybe someday what we call mitochondria will actually be two or three different little subcellular organelle.
326
In the landscape of science education, oftentimes people think, okay, energy production, there'll be a picture or a cartoon of mitochondria, like flexing its muscles.
327
People go, okay, energy, mitochondria, mighty mitochondria.
328
And then they'll think, oh, you know, they're just sort of like a dumb jock portion of the cell, right?
329
They're not doing anything sophisticated.
330
And everything you listed off is that they are doing many sophisticated intricate things within cells.
331
So now that everyone is well aware
332
that mitochondria are doing a large number of very important things in a very regulated way,
333
let's talk about mitophagy, which I have to presume is the intentional, or not, gobbling up of mitochondria,
334
presumably to replace them with newer, healthier mitochondria.
335
Is that right?
336
It is.
337
In many ways, mitophagy is a subset of autophagy, but it's got its own name because it is specific to mitochondria.
338
There do appear to be some unique regulators of mitophagy compared to autophagy more broadly.
339
Mitochondria actually are playing a role in autophagy itself.
340
and this makes sense because the global picture of autophagy is stimulated by fasting states
341
or fasting mimicking states so when your body senses that you don't have enough food,
342
it actually hunkers down
343
and starts to recycle dead old parts in this kind of in a carefully orchestrated way and it takes them to lysosomes,
344
they get degraded and then those degradation products get used for either energy or to build new things.
345
Ontophagy is always occurring at a low level, but you can really hyper stimulate the process through fasting,
346
calorie restriction, fasting mimicking diets, other things.
347
And this is why fasting and calorie restriction is
348
so kind of such hot topics in the medical field now is
349
because they've been shown to induce longevity and we think it's probably through that process
350
that you're stimulating the body to become lean and conservative in terms of its allocation of resources.
351
And the body doesn't just destroy the healthiest tissue along with the old dead stuff.
352
It has these processes that identify the old and defective parts first
353
and they go first and that's what's beautiful about the whole thing and that's why fasting is so important.
354
So mitophagy we know plays a really important role
355
because there's this term called mitochondrial dysfunction
356
which some researchers are actually wanting to get rid of and move away from because as you just said, mitochondria do so many different things
357
and different mitochondria even within the same cell may very well be specializing in different tasks
358
And mitochondria from one cell to another are sometimes doing very different things.
359
Like not all mitochondria can produce cortisol.
360
That's specific to specific cells where those genes are getting turned on.
361
So it's not like all mitochondria are producing cortisol.
362
Just the ones in your adrenal gland, for instance, are producing cortisol.
363
And it has long been known for decades that mitochondrial dysfunction is associated with everything that ails us, essentially.
364
So David Sinclair published a paper in one of the cell journals, I think, saying that, oh,
365
mitochondria are actually the unifying link of everything that we know about aging.
366
Defective mitochondria or defective mitochondrial function,
367
mitochondrial dysfunction is possibly the unifying cause of aging and all of the aging related disorders.
368
So mitophagy is trying to address all that, is trying to say, okay, this is bad.
369
We don't want defective mitochondria.
370
And how can we get rid of old ones or defective ones and replace them with new ones?
371
And I think the most powerful signal and tool that we have right now is in fact related to diet.
372
It's calorie restriction.
373
That is the oldest, truest, best proven way to prevent aging in a wide variety of animal species.
374
Fasting and intermittent fasting.
375
And again, you can only do those things for so long.
376
And then fasting mimicking diets can also stimulate this process of mitophagy.
377
So what about the typical person who's an omnivore eating some rice, some pasta?
378
Do you think that those people might feel far better
379
or even a little bit better if they were in a lower glucose state?
380
I ask this because I think there are a lot of people out there who suffer from full-blown depression,
381
but there are also a lot of people who suffer from moodiness and feeling not so great, subclinical depression.
382
Yes, burnout is what I would call it.
383
Yeah, and just feeling like some days are great and then other days they feel lousy for reasons they don't understand.
384
I kind of break this field and I'm probably getting too nerdy right now, but I kind of break this field into cause.
385
What's the actual root cause and what are effective treatments?
386
And I really see them as two separate things.
387
calorie restriction, ketogenic diet, carbohydrate restriction are inducing metabolic changes in the brain and body.
388
And regardless of what the person was eating,
389
they are inducing metabolic changes that can be really beneficial to brain health.
390
So going to your broader question about adults modern day, if it's an average person who is not currently under psychiatric care,
391
not taking prescription medicines, but is saying, I'm burned out.
392
I'm exhausted.
393
I want some of that brain energy that Andrew Huberman's talking about.
394
He talks about feeling good.
395
I want some of that.
396
I'm probably actually going to recommend, let's see if we can just carb restrict for a while and see if that produces clinical benefit.
397
I have one, he's not even a patient, just somebody who read my book, had chronic anxiety, was trying meditation, was trying all sorts of things.
398
He was ready to go on prescription medicine.
399
He read an early copy of the book.
400
He took it upon himself without consulting with me to restrict carbohydrates alone.
401
He did not go ketogenic.
402
He is a vegetarian.
403
He restricted carbs.
404
Within three weeks said, I don't need prescription medicine.
405
I can't believe how much better I feel.
406
And all I did was cut out some of the high carb foods in my diet.
407
So I think for some people, it can be that simple.
408
For people with serious mental disorders, if they are chronically depressed, if they're on lots of prescription meds, if they're disabled by their symptoms,
409
and certainly if you're bipolar or have schizophrenia or something,
410
those are the people I really do want them to work with a medical professional because meds may need to be adjusted.
411
They really need a real shot at this diet.
412
It's not like weight loss.
413
Weight loss, everybody wins it.
414
And either you're successful or you aren't.
415
You look on the internet or you read a book and seeing whether it works or not.
416
If you're using it to treat a serious disorder, I think you need serious help.
417
On behalf of myself and the listeners and certainly just on behalf of everybody out there, because everyone does need to be concerned about mental health issues,
418
whether or not they have them and in their family themselves or otherwise because they impact everybody.
419
Just really want to thank you for doing the work that you're doing.
420
You've given us a lot of hints into the underlying mechanisms that suggest as to why it would work.
421
And you've given us examples as to how it has worked in patients that you've worked with.
422
So thank you for being brave and for taking this on
423
and doing it in such a structured way
424
and for communicating it here today and with the general public through your book
425
and your online presence we will certainly point people in the direction of those valuable resources.
426
Thanks so much.
427
I really appreciate it.
428
Thank you, Andrew, for being brave and having me on your show.
429
It's been a pleasure.
430
And for a great conversation.
Download App
Everything you need to speak fluently
AI PronunciationScore every sentence
IPA PracticeMaster every sound
VocabularyBuild your word bank
Vocab GameLearn while playing
Same Channel
C11,316
Why Reading (Books) Makes Us Better at Speaking
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C157
Why Women Over 30 Should Consider Freezing Their Eggs
University StudentsWorking Adults
C13
Your Memories & Emotions Impact Immune Status
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B2Dr. Arthur Brooks: The 3 Macronutrients of True Happiness
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C14
How Foods & Nutrients Control Our Moods | Huberman Lab Essentials
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C12
Food & Supplements for Brain Health & Cognitive Performance | Huberman Lab Essentials
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C13
The Science & Treatment of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) | Huberman Lab Essentials
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C129
The Cure for Addiction
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C14
Essentials: Neuralink & Technologies to Enhance Human Brains | Dr. Matt MacDougall
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C134
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C117
You Can Learn New Habits Very Fast: Brain Circuits Rewire Faster With Urgency
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C13
Essentials: Science of Mindsets for Health & Performance | Dr. Alia Crum
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B21
Tools for Managing Stress & Anxiety | Huberman Lab Essentials
Daily ConversationWorking Adults
C11
Essentials: The Biology of Slowing & Reversing Aging | Dr. David Sinclair
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C12
Essentials: How to Assess & Improve All Aspects of Your Fitness | Dr. Andy Galpin
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C12
The Science of Making & Breaking Habits | Huberman Lab Essentials
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C18
Build Muscle Size, Increase Strength & Improve Recovery | Huberman Lab Essentials
Daily ConversationWorking Adults
C121
Tools to Improve Your Focus & Concentration | Huberman Lab Essentials
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C14
Essentials: Micronutrients for Health & Longevity | Dr. Rhonda Patrick
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C120
Tools to Set Your Cortisol Rhythm
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
FOR YOU
Recommend Video
C12
188 sentences
I wish I'd learned this mental exercise in medical school
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C13
514 sentences
Dopamine Detox and Addiction with Dr. Anna Lembke | The Neuroscience of Addiction
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C13
613 sentences
S2 E16: Healthy Eating & Diets - Important Vocabulary in Advanced English Podcast - American British
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
C16
49 sentences
A neuroscientist’s guide to reclaiming your brain | Nicole Vignola
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
96 sentences
Peter Fonagy: What is Mentalization?
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B22
119 sentences
Why you’re always tired (+ food fixes!) 🍜
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
C18
105 sentences
Emotional and mental health needs
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
746 sentences
Blindboy discovers the link between gut health and mental health
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C12
155 sentences
The #1 Habit for Productivity - Dr Andrew Huberman
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B26
65 sentences
How To Build a Strong Mind: New Focus on Resilience
American AccentBusiness EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 430 sentences and 5412 words to shadow. The speech runs for 34:40. The speaker talks at a natural 156 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. Only 81% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 less common words from the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
- disorder /dɪsˈɔɹdɚ/ (noun) — Absence of order; state of not being arranged in an orderly manner.
- seizure /ˈsi.ʒɚ/ (noun) — The act of taking possession, as by force or right of law.
- med /mɛːd/ (noun) — Medications, especially prescribed psychoactive medications.
- medication /mɛdɪˈkeɪʃən/ (noun) — A medicine, or all the medicines regularly taken by a patient.
- nutrition /njuːˈtɹɪʃ.ən/ (noun) — The organic process by which an organism assimilates food and uses it for growth and maintenance.
- metabolic /mɛtəˈbɒlɪk/ (adjective) — Of or pertaining to metabolism.
- illness /ˈɪl.nəs/ (noun) — An instance (episode) of a disease or poor health.
- heal /ˈhiːl/ (verb) — To make better from a disease, wound, etc.; to revive or cure.
- researcher /ˈɹiˌsɝ.t͡ʃɚ/ (noun) — One who researches.
- defective /dɪˈfɛktɪv/ (adjective) — Having one or more defects.
- behold /bɪˈhəʊld/ (verb) — To look at or see (someone or something), especially appreciatively; to descry, to look upon.
- restriction /ɹɪˈstɹɪkʃən/ (noun) — The act of restricting, or the state of being restricted.
- inflammation /ɪnfləˈmeɪ̯ʃən/ (noun) — The state of being inflamed.
- gene /d͡ʒiːn/ (noun) — A theoretical unit of heredity of living organisms which may take several values and (in principle) predetermines a precise trait of an organism's form…
- syndrome /ˈsɪndɹoʊm/ (noun) — A recognizable pattern of signs, symptoms and/or behaviours, especially of a disease or medical or psychological condition.
Phrasal verbs you will hear
- talk about (verb) — Used to draw attention to the speaker's characterization of someone or something.
- go on /ˈɡoʊˌɒn/ (verb) — To continue in extent.
- come up with (verb) — To manage to produce, deliver, or present (something) by inventing, creating, thinking of, or obtaining it.
- end up (verb) — To bring to a conclusion.
- figure out (verb) — To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce.
- fit together (verb) — To put the appropriate parts of (something) into a whole; to combine pieces that go together to create a finished object.
- get into (verb) — To move into (an object), such that one ends up inside it.
- go away (verb) — To depart or leave a place.
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 112 contractions and reduced forms, such as I'm, you're, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: seizure /ˈsi.ʒɚ/, medication /mɛdɪˈkeɪʃən/, nutrition /njuːˈtɹɪʃ.ən/, restriction /ɹɪˈstɹɪkʃən/, inflammation /ɪnfləˈmeɪ̯ʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: medication /mɛdɪˈkeɪʃən/, metabolic /mɛtəˈbɒlɪk/, inflammation /ɪnfləˈmeɪ̯ʃən/, inflammatory /ɪnˈflæmət(ə)ɹi/, beneficial /ˌbɛn.ɪˈfɪʃ.əl/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like disorder, seizure, med.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | we've been talking · everybody's been trying · have been struggling |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | who've already been · They've usually tried · They've been |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was diagnosed · be screwed · was taught |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | people who suffer · people who just · ones who were |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.