Diet and Mental Health with UK Psychiatrist Dr Rachel Brown, the Carnivore Shrink!

welcome to the plant free MD podcast with Dr Anthony chafee where we discuss diet and nutrition and how this affects health and chronic disease and show you how you can use this to optimize your health and happiness both mentally and physically [Music] hey guys just want to take a second to thank our sponsor at carnivore bar I don't promote many products because honestly all you need to be healthy is to just eat meat for those times that you're out hiking road tripping or stuck at work and you want nutritious snack that is just meat fat and salt if you want it the carnivore bar is a great option so I like this product not because it's just pure meat but also because I want the carnivore Market to thrive as well and the more we support meat only products the more meat only products that will be available in the mainstream so if this sounds like something you'd like to get behind check it out using my discount code Anthony to get 10 off which also applies to subscriptions giving you 25 off total all right thanks guys hi hello everyone this is uh Dr Anthony chafee here again with another episode of the plant free MD podcast and today I'm joined by a very special guest Dr Rachel Brown who is a consultant psychiatrist in the UK and um Rachel thank you very much for coming on oh thanks very much for helping me pleasure to be here that was great um I first want to just just uh for people that don't know you can you give a bit of a background on yourself and tell us who you are and what you do yeah sure um so yeah I'm a consultant psychiatrist at the NHS in the UK so I work in Scotland um and I've been a consultant since 2011 I think thinking back um I graduated from University of Edinburgh and then kind of went straight into Psychiatry training 2004. and so I've been working in that field ever since then at the current time I'm a crisis team specialist so I work I've got one other consultant colleague and we aim to keep people out of hospital that's the whole kind of breathe on Detra for the crisis service so we see all sorts of people um a lot of people acutely psychotic suicidal but you know all sorts of different diagnoses and different walks of life um so that's my main main day job um but I've obviously had an interest in nutrition and lifestyle for many years as well and I studied some functional medicine going back two years ago now so so um yeah a huge interest is just root cause for underlying medical conditions be what they may yeah absolutely and I mean I think that's that sort of behooves uh us as doctors and anyone in the medical profession to actually try to understand what's what's causing this as opposed to just putting Band-Aids on things because that's really not helping anyone that's just uh you know find damage control get things get the situation under control uh you have the Hazmat you stop the bleeding but then you have to go and fix the problem you can't just be like oh job's done um because it's obviously a lot of more going on there yeah and and I have to say this as time has gone on that's what's really frustrated me about about my specialty and um the way that that we practice in mainstream Psychiatry because throughout all of my training I don't think I I don't think I really thought about underlying causes all that much obviously you have to study for exams and those certain theories you have to learn to pass exams and jump through the hoops um but a big frustration of mine is just resorting to medication and over prescribing and yeah the list kind of goes on yeah definitely and so how did you come across um that approach you said you studied some functional medicine but what what um obviously you had an interest in in root causes but what made you decide to to search for it in that direction um I believe you would who would go straight to Pharmaceuticals if it was my health or my family's health so I've always had an interest in more alternative type treatments and you know I've had acupuncture over the year the Chinese acupuncture that is and and um you know I've got dogs actually who go to a holistic vet and are on different herbal medicines and there's all just all of that just has always fascinated me um for a long time and and I think I probably grown um increasingly skeptical and a bit suspicious of of the pharmaceutical industry over the course of my career so far so that's another element to it another aspect yeah and and how did you come across uh like a carnivore way of eating yeah so I um so I've been a big follower of Mark Sisson for for as long as I can remember so years and years and years and then so obviously like subscribe to Mark's Daily Apple and and kind of have read all of his books and I've read all sorts of different books within this field over the years I might have been kind of Primal I would say because I'm still including Dairy for for a long time probably about 12 years at least I had a brief stint of being vegan which is the biggest mistake in my life about 12 years ago now um but but prior to that I've been low carb and then kind of went after in a different path and ended up coming back and um probably for about the past six years um I went keto so I wasn't properly very low carb for for most of that but about six years went keto and then I actually hadn't heard of the carnivore diet until um ketogenic girl or Vanessa spinner she she was doing a kind of personal experiment and went carnivore and I think it was some of her social media posts um and when I saw her mention it I thought okay I really respect Vanessa's knowledge within the keto field and um I liked some of her meal plans and some of the other stuff that she's done and I at first I thought this sounds absolutely crazy what what on Earth and then I just started to go down that rabbit hole so um I I think it was Michaela Peterson I watched her telling her story at carnival Recon um and then I watched Sean Baker speak at carnival econ as well just two videos on YouTube and at that point that was it that was me sold so that's what made me try and I actually just ended up trying it out of all right so if interest and curiosity because I didn't I didn't think that I had any major health problems at the time like I wasn't really that aware because obviously I'd been low carb for quite some time and keto um being keto I wasn't really aware that I had any health issues but then going carnivore um it's still a learning it's still a learning curve and a learning process but there's definitely like retrospectively looking back I've had quite significant improvements and many things that I wasn't even really aware was an issue so um I like what you said in some other podcasts just about people end up just living with niggly sorts of physical or other health issues and not really realizing it kind of thrown it out and it just goes into the blows into the background but actually my own experience was going carnivore was very enlightening yeah I experienced the same thing as well I you know I didn't I didn't I thought I felt pretty good overall I remember this period in my life where I felt unbelievable but I never really attributed it to you know I stopped drinking at the time I stopped drinking during during the rugby season obviously that has a huge effect on on your health and how you feel and so I I chalked it all up to that and uh but it wasn't just that and even so even subsequently when I wasn't drinking but I wasn't strict carnivore I wasn't feeling as good as I was I really wasn't I mean I was still feeling I was still good I just didn't feel as unbelievably amazing as I normally did and I couldn't figure out what it was I was why am I not working out as hard am I not pushing myself am I I was 25 then I was like am I just over the hill am I dying now and is it my body's just shutting down and I'm gonna figure it out but then when I went back to carnivore all these problems I didn't even know I had went away and and I remember thinking back at my life and just realizing that I felt like garbage my entire life and it really bothered me it made me quite upset about that um that I haven't been doing this the whole time yeah it's really bizarre isn't it because I I think when you think back to years before it's really hard to get your head around the fact that that you were living like that but actually you felt it was absolutely fine and everything felt normal I suppose because she didn't know anything better um and I wasn't somebody who's living with major health problems as I say I didn't really have a a specific why reason to go carnivore other than I was just very curious about it and it made sense to me when I heard all of the theory and and um and it was very powerful listening to Michaela Peterson's and personal testimony as to all the kind of autoimmune health conditions that she overcame by going carnivore I think probably for me one of the the most prominent benefits was actually just in relation to food freedom and sugar addiction so I I for years had been aware I had an issue with sugar and um and obviously going low carb helped with that but I didn't even realize when I was keto that there were certain foods that I think there was still some food noise around and an addictive type behavior is around so like not butter was one of them you know where I'd have a bit more compulsive type eating and find it hard to limit those foods and I I can't remember how long it was after going carnivore but remember there was just one day and I thought you know I don't think about food anymore I don't get cravings for anything I don't I don't feel like there's any compulsion around food and I can go about my life and and just you know there's just a really it's really easy it's just very natural and and um that was something that I hadn't fully experienced before even when Keto and so things have been much better in keto but but still there were some issues yeah um so yeah and I like what Dr Lisa wiederman says to her kind of experience um aligns very much with mine over the years in terms of the benefits she's had for in in carnivore in relation to kind of food addiction and sugar addiction and those issues yeah and then the other thing for me was just my immune health so that that vastly improved so I used to be somebody who suffered from kind of just minor calls and so on quite frequently over the years and um until I was Ill just about four weeks ago had been three years carnivore and just absolutely nothing and then I thought wow this is just amazing like what's what's going on and more people need to know about this yeah yeah I haven't been sick in years I don't I used to get sick I used to get colds all the time and um that's why I was you know I always lived in well I grew up in Southern California but then we moved up to Seattle and I've basically been cold ever since and so and then I was like living in England and Ireland and it was just freezing the whole time and if I get at that time if I got cold if I got to chill I would get I would get sick and if I wasn't very careful I would get pneumonia because if I had asthma that was you know I had to be I had to treat with uh you know inhaled corticosteroids and long-acting Agonist and so it um it uh was always a problem for me and so that's that's another reason I really really like avoided the cold I have not been sick really once I got I got covered I was down for about a probably about a day and a half I felt pretty miserable and after that you know came out of it and I was just tired and and but yeah it was over I didn't actually feel sick like I normally did and yeah that's sort of what you've noticed or if you just had not sick really at all yeah so apart from just recently and I've got some other theories as to why I might have been sick recently but um yeah the past three years I've kind of yeah similar so I maybe had two or three occasions where I thought oh no am I coming down with something and then 12 hours later like all the Simpsons had gone and they'd be fairly minor and then it didn't turn into anything else as it would have done previously and I also worked face to face with people throughout the kind of last couple of years and didn't take any specific Pharmaceuticals for that um and it was absolutely fine and just out of interest that I did I ended up getting an antibody blood test for myself just to see because I thought it would be nice to know if I've come across across covered in the last couple of years and just not noon and so I did have antibodies and so I must have come across it at some point and but I wasn't aware of being ill throughout that whole time yeah yeah I remember for the first time I I experienced that where I was I was just feeling really tired and run down and I was like what's happening I just need to eat more meat like what's going on like me meet secure what's gonna happen you know I'm doing something wrong and um but then I realized I wasn't really doing anything wrong but everyone around me was sick everyone was down with the flu I was back in Seattle and my you know my sister was sick my her kids were sick her husband was sick my other sister was sick and you know just several people in my family that had been around the whole time were were sick um my parents had just gone carnivore a couple months earlier and I had been carnivore for a while at that point and we were all feeling pretty just run down and tired but not sick and then I realized I was like is this what being sick feels like on Carnivore and then like the next day or two it was completely fine everyone else was sick for a while and so yeah it's it's absolutely fantastic that's amazing yeah and um speaking about uh like food addictions and things like that what you know as a psychiatrist would you have uh experience with Foods addiction and and um and you know disordered eating um and and you know people going through that there are spec for like specific so I haven't I'm not somebody who's pretty particularly specialized in that but I obviously come across people who are in crises for other reasons who happen to have an eating disorder as well um so yeah I can't speak too much about about the the state of treatment at the moment in terms of major Eating Disorders anorexia and bulimia and binge eating disorder and so on but I definitely see people with comorbidities that way and so probably a lot of people with depression anxiety those kind of issues sometimes other issues such as bipolar disorder um and uh yeah it's um it's really difficult just personally because the vast majority of people I see have just highly processed food junk food diets um and you know sometimes we go out and do home visits and see people at home instead of them coming into hospital and you know I've been out on visits in people's homes whether they're in acute crisis they're suicidal they're highly distressed and then you go into their house and there's just bags of sweets lying around and packets of crisps and and [Music] um but yeah that's just the patience I suppose the office is another matters which is quite a lot of that we get in the office as well yeah true yeah yeah so yeah so I mean I my practice has changed over the years so I do now speak to the vast majority of people that I see to say that diet can have a significant impact on Mental Health but um it's it's difficult because I tend to patients tend to be under our care for two or three weeks for example so it's not long-term care before they move on to see somebody else yeah um so my Approach is to try and sow the seed and actually try to try to let people know that there are plenty of people out there with good anecdotal experiences of vastly improving their their General Health as well as mental health by changing their diets yeah um and also speak a bit about some of the evidence around metabolic health and mental health but not everybody's open to that so that message um so yeah that's frustrating yeah it is and I suppose you know when you're because you're sort of in acute care you're not going to have the the repeated encounters with patients and then to be able to build up a long-term relationship um and and be able to sort of slowly but surely sort of walk them in the right direction um yeah I mean we do we do get some people who come back to us again and again over the years so there's that cohort but yeah you're right I'm not kind of working with somebody on an ongoing basis um I did I trained with Georgia Eid last I think it was last year I get 2020 in 2021 all mixed up I think it was early 2021 and I do remember her saying to me that I was in quite a difficult position um just in terms of working with people in the acute crisis and that's not always the best time for somebody to do a complete overhaul of their diet um but also just being able to have an ongoing relationship with people to to support them in changing changing diet but my My Hope Is because I work with people fairly short term we do get a large volume of people coming through our service so at least sowing a seed hopefully um and people might come back to it or you know like plant a seed and then somebody might actually decide to look into that further at a later stage yeah so how are you incorporating this into your practice now is it is it just sort of that those chance encounters with people and you sort of see that there's a you know something that they they might be able to improve upon they could help them and then you try to like how would you how would you sort of approach that and counsel someone yeah so I mean I I tend to always ask about what somebody's diet is like at the moment so actually in a traditional psychiatric training sense we don't tend to ask that so we tend to just ask heyger appetite is it is it any better any worse than usual have you lost weights or is your weight change then that would be the limit of the inquiry um so so now I do try to inquire a bit further and sometimes you can get you can get an in so I had somebody just very recently with bipolar disorder tell me that he he doesn't follow any specific diet but he limits cards carbs after 6 p.m so I thought oh okay hang on yeah maybe there's something to work with here um but I have I have leaflets from Georgia Eid from that training so patiently flips that I hand out to people I just give a brief explanation as to to why metabolic health is really important for mental health and I'm also involved in a local trial so with a multi-center trial going on at the moment looking at ketogenic diets and bipolar disorder and so that's quite nice to be able to say to people you know I'm part of some legitimate research at the moment that's ongoing and I think there's just you know there should be some good results from these studies that are happening um but I also like to emphasize that there's so much anecdotal experience out there and other psychiatrists across the world who are working in this manner that that people should really take it seriously and look into and so the reasons why um diet can be a huge factor in terms of optimizing their mental health longer term I'm also I trained with Tim Knox Foundation the nutrition Network it's a South african-based nutrition Network so I have some leaflets from them as well that I give out to people um yeah yeah so so what are some of the reasons that metabolic Health has as such a role in mental health okay quite a few quite a few um and that's that's the thing about this so I think it's I just think the body's so complex as a whole and so I'm just gonna harp on for a second about my frustrations with Western medicine or allopathic medicine so we we separate um we separate the body systems into silos and have all these tertiary Specialties that don't really consider about the interactions of the different bodily systems as one all together and so that's that's the reason why I like functional medicine because you tend to take a holistic View of the body but yeah it'll be nice when Chris Palmer's book comes out next month so I know he's um putting a lot out there in social media in terms of um his theories and the evidence that he's pieced together in terms of the close relationship between metabolic health and mental health um but this there's enough research out there at the moment so we know that people with mental disorders are much more likely to have insulin resistance we know the insulin resistance in itself reduces your chances of responding to well to certain treatments like lithium being a major one in bipolar disorder and so people with insulin resistance are much less likely to have a good response to lithium and lithiums are called standard mood stabilizer and Psychiatry for prophylactic treatment of bipolar disorder um and you see people with Rapid Cycling illness and you're much more likely to have Rapid Cycling illness if you have insulin resistance and then there's a huge association between Type 2 diabetes and depression and just insulin resistance in general and all sorts of disorders so PTSD anxiety and a lot of it comes down to inflammation in the body if I try to explain to people about how kind of diets where you're eating constantly throughout the day constantly spiking your blood sugar is going to result in the release of insulin by the body and eventually over time you end up in this High insulin State over time and your cells eventually become insulin resistant and aren't really able to use use the the glucose that's in your body um and I suppose Alzheimer's is one of the the kind of most research examples of that where um they've demonstrated that there is clear um insulin resistance of the blood brain barrier and your your proportion of glucose in the brain is always um a constant proportion of what's in your blood and you end up essentially when you have insulin resistance with a brain that's swimming in glucose but unable to access the energy and when you change over to a ketogenic diet you and change the the fuel that your body is able to use so and and keto and you know so many benefits for ketos or anti-inflammatory um you improve the number of mitochondria in your body and so the mitochondria of the powerhouse pair of houses of energy production so you can increase the accessible energy to your brain um it just the list goes on and on and on so you get neurotransmitter imbalances as well when you're in an inflammatory state um so kind of tipping more towards good to me excited toxicity and um kind of adrenaline fuel anxiety States so also key to being an estate of ketosis um has the opposite effect and comes down the inflammation and and helps to regulate your neurotransmitter balances right yeah not that I think that um I know like neurotransmitter theory is what's been the predominant theory for decades now in Psychiatry and um I think that's only one tiny part of the whole puzzle yeah well that's the thing you know I mean obviously you know most things are going to be your genetic predisposition environmental trigger you know when I mean and that and that's something that I think that we forget a lot you know we put so much on the genetics we forget about penetrants you know and like you know when I studied genetics 20 22 years ago that was a major part of that you know you have identical twins they have the same genes and 60 of them get the disease and 40 don't so what's going on well there's something there's something in the environment I always um actually funny enough I said I used to say that you know when I was painting this example to people you know that there's some things that are purely environmental like getting your arm cut off you know there's nothing in your genes they're going to predispose you to getting your arm chopped off at some stage in your life unless you're just like a you know you have a genes to be like a you know a jerk or something like that and um and uh and then there's something that that is like you know purely genetic you know and I would use the Huntington's as that you know and because that's that's what I thought that's what I was taught this is just purely genetic you get this you have this Gene you will get this disease and then I was at and I was like everything else is in the middle and I was just at um uh lecture series uh medical conference low carb down under where I was speaking at last weekend and there was someone presenting on this they actually had a case study case study of a guy with Huntington's had Huntington's went like keto did not have Hyundai dance like reverse like nuts like it blew my mind yeah so I was like Jesus even that and and that was something that um Dr uh kiltz actually said mentioned Huntington's he's like I don't think so I don't think that's projected like I think I think it's all to do with diet and uh and and at least uh preliminarily on this on that case he was right on that which I thought was pretty amazing oh this is the stuff that really excites me when I hear cases like that that's that is amazing I mean I think I see it in kind of every like most days at work I think um we get into a very biased way of thinking about things so you know a patient will come along and you know they have a problem with alcohol or they're possibly presenting for the first time with bipolar disorder and um and then as soon as somebody hears that there's someone else in the family and that also has that illness it's an automatic oh this is why it's because of their genes and and there isn't really any thought paid to to other reasons why somebody might be presenting there or what what other contributing factors might there be so so yeah I think I mentioned that in my book actually about just just trying to give people hope that um for many years I've worked and consulted with patients and always felt like genetics were a major determinant and people's success and people's chances of illness but actually epigenetics is so important and the interaction between your genes and the environment and like food is just a huge aspect of that it's not obviously the only thing but it's a major it's an absolute major component yeah well it's something yeah you're putting it in every day you know and uh yeah day in and day out for years and years yeah absolutely yeah yeah and then you know what people forget too is that yes genetics run in families but so do habits and uh traits you know so yeah you know you have you have people's eating habits and you know a child isn't going to feed themselves they're not going to go through you know go shopping on their own uh they what their parents give them maybe you know maybe they fight it but that's that's what their options are and so they generally learn their habits if they're eating habits from their parents for better or worse and then that you know continues on and passes on so yeah and and um yeah I quite often think about that in relation to my son and um he's way more meat now than he ever used to and he doesn't tend to get sick nowadays either um but he's not current he's not fully carnivore by any means but you know had I known what I'd known years ago when he was born I probably would have done things very differently but then I think about just when he goes to children's parties and the sort of food that everyone served there and then it is inevitably Pizza on chips and kind of junk food and um thankfully it's so obvious he has a problem with gluten I can see he has to be gluten-free you know at least minimize some of that toxicity but then they come home with a bag full of sweets and um I mean these days just from a cultural point of view it's very difficult very different to to kind of go against the grain and and um and to make children I know some people do but I think it's difficult once they've started down the Journey of kind of sugar addiction to actually extract them fully from that um so yeah well I think it yeah it definitely is and especially because of how addictive it is and and no one no one considers it like fully addictive oh yeah no no totally no no no it actually is like an actual drug and um and people don't don't recognize that they don't recognize just how bad it is they think it's just something sweet no it's an empty calorie oh it's not that great for them but is it that bad for them yes it is horrible for them and I think if people recognize just how bad this stuff was for their kids they would never let them have it or at least you know I don't think they would they would they would responsibly let their their kids have it you know there's like you say you know you come to this late and there it can be quite difficult but um it's um I think that we should we should at least try to change the atmosphere around sugar and not just be like oh it's not that big of a deal we should we should treat it like what it is it is a big deal and um you know and uh yeah I guess the main thing is is just trying to raise your kids in a way that they they'll say no on their own just like with drugs alcohol and cigarettes as well well yeah definitely so he's quite funny now he's 10 and he he comes out with comments like and one day he just said to me oh from now on mum I just want to have meat I just want my breakfast my lunch my dinner to be meat you just turn around once and said that to me and I said oh really and then he's like oh apart from maybe a dessert and um he makes me laugh and I I think yeah he's open-minded and he listens and he understands he's intelligent enough he understands when I try to explain to him you know the reasons why me would be healthy and and sugar is not and so I think he is able to make choices but I think it's more difficult with um older people who've just become used to to living in this way and so so yeah some people close to me an example is well I'm 70 whatever years old and it hasn't done me any harm so far and I think it's because the the length of time between the the talks or the the adverse effect from the food actually having a very obvious negative Health consequence um that's why people get away because they don't you know they're not going to drop down dead as soon as they eat a piece of sugar but what they don't realize is just the damage that they're doing their bodies over time and I think part of the challenge of getting the message across is that people end up living in this state like we spoke about in the beginning which is a far from optimal state but it doesn't necessarily really feel acutely diseased or painful enough to the person to think that they need to do something to change it just becomes a normal they just normalize that experience I suppose is what happens yeah and because it's not that big of a deal and and you know it's like if we were considering you know cocaine or something like that not that big of a deal and you know we you could consider that that way and and certainly in in you know centuries past uh not that people necessarily thought it was not a big deal but they didn't they didn't consider it as detrimental as it as it is now and then you know you have maybe people that were just like oh this is actually really really bad you know and then so uh and you have to sort of look at that in that way but um you are going against the tide and it can be very difficult for people especially when you're you're in the middle of that situation you're not really sure of yourself and everyone's having it and you sort of feel a social pressure to have the sugar and you and people look at you weird because they don't think it's that big of a deal but they do it for for other other drugs as well like alcohol and things like that and you're out drinking they're oh why don't you have a drink oh why don't you have a drink with us oh it's much more fun when you and they give you these guilt trips they're like these dare commercials when I was a kid doing these exact things like oh would you chicken and all that sort of stuff and it's like it's the same thing we do this with food as well yeah I mean and alcohol is a huge one so like it looks it's more taboo not to drink anything or to say that you're not drinking anything than to actually have something yeah and there's so much the science or pressure particularly in Scotland and I know you spent some time in England and rugby scene and you know what that's all about but yeah I think dare I say it's probably even worse up here in Scotland um yeah yeah yeah well you know one person thinkers yeah I I definitely drank a lot when I was in Scotland when I was like 22. yeah yeah you know yeah uh yeah but yeah you're right people do the same exact thing with food and you know one piece couldn't hurt or yeah or live a little you know those sorts of comments um and actually I don't like I had I've had such a sweet tooth my whole life and I could take her leave you know starchy carbs or like potatoes and pasta and all that kind of stuff that that wasn't the stuff that bothered me but actually the longer I've been away from it all I don't have any desire to have that stuff um I don't miss it I don't crave it and it's such a different way to to exist and to be around all that stuff and I can have all that stuff around me and it's just not an issue it's not an issue yeah at all and I spent years thinking I spent years thinking I had I was an emotional eater I had some sort of emotional type eating problem um but actually it was just yeah all pure sugar addiction yeah yeah yeah I always love that term you know live a little live a little I think it's it's more apt Than People realize it's just like it will make you live a little like I'd rather live a lot yeah so I'll not eat that and I'll live five decades longer than you thank you very much I'll appreciate it I'll I'll enjoy those five decades more than that yeah you know I think there was some or something I think there was a shop where we were I can't remember if it was um when we were away recently or if it was locally but there was a shop we were driving past and it it's called Heavenly desserts and and just my first thought was well you know they're gonna get you to heaven faster that's all I think now about those things that's not what most people would be thinking looking at that no yeah it is funny you do look at you look at things more and and you start seeing like well that's poison I never eat that but it's like especially going around the hospital my God it's so frustrating every day it's just just carbs and sugar carbs and sugar it's like this is a hospital and and you're feeding people sugary nonsense and it's one thing to not consider carbohydrates damaging but but to give people shovel in sugar and I mean shovel in um they did a they sent out this list of all the different foods and categories like green category yellow category red like green as much as you want whenever you want it's just it's only good at all times yellow is it right yeah 100 the um one of the one of the top Foods it was like I had a 100 rating was watermelon of all things right so that was like is much watermelon as you want it's just a superfood now and um and and Kellogg's Frosted Flakes that was in the green eat as much as you want whenever you want not even the Corn Flakes but the Frosted Flakes oh that that takes me back to being a teenager because I think that's what I had for breakfast every morning horrendous and you can just see the influence of money there can't you in big corporations and the influence that they've had in developing those guidelines which yeah they're all a bunch of nonsense essentially yeah um yeah and a lot of people go by the guidelines I I um I was talking to someone uh the other day at the conference and and they were they were saying they got they got into an argument with or you know a bit of a disagreement with uh you know their head of Department uh about you know something and and they were saying well you can't treat people like that or whatever like you know something low carb and and I said but this is this is evidence-based this is evidence pictures look at the studies look at this look at that you know it's all there it's this is this is very very substantial evidence and that's what's driving my practice and and the person was just being you know refusing to even look at it said well why don't you just look at the studies why don't you just look at the evidence and see what you think and and this is like a head of a department at a major hospital and they said I don't care what the evidence says I only care what the guidelines say oh yeah yeah yeah just talk about the complete opposite of being open-minded and critical thinking and just yeah awful yeah awful but I mean that goes on just all the time in every single way really it doesn't it's um yeah it's a huge frustration um yeah I just have to hope that you know something really nice recently I had a consultation with a patient and um like somebody with bipolar disorder who's had pretty severe episodes of illness um for and and with zygous like many years ago so he's been living with the illness for 20 plus years at this point in time and and he came to our service on five or six different psychotropic medications including lithium and was saying to me that he's been depressed for throughout this whole year um so so it was in Hostel yet last year and just has never like recovered to an extent but never fully recovered and um and I just I just took one look at his list of medications and thought okay fine so from a a traditional psychiatric point of view there are two different medicines that we could increase at those points um to even worse and overall your whole cocktail medications that you have already um including some of the worst ones in terms of giving people insulin resistance never mind um anything else and I thought oh at the end I just I need to I need to mention the ketogenic diet to this person because I don't think they've heard of it at all they don't know anything at all and they said to me they tried other lifestyle interventions you know I exercise and all sorts of different things and I thought this is somebody who's actually interested in trying to get to the root cause of their illness and try to make their life better um and anyway I gave him we sat for a while and spoke about everything and I left all the information with him and it was just really nice because he seemed really appreciative and said oh thanks very much for mentioning this I'm gonna look into it and um and he's somebody I don't doubt that he will look into things because he seems like a very well educated sort of person and somebody actually interested and and looking after their health and trying to improve their situation and so it's kind of moments like that that really excite me um in amongst the the I suppose monotony at this point of still being in mainstream sort of practice and with all the prescribing that goes on within that yeah yeah I know I think I've heard you before speaking about how your goal is to put lots of doctors out of business and how you would you would love for that to happen and I I feel equally the same because it would be amazing if people actually could make changes to their lifestyle excuse me and diet and um end up not having to darken the doors of psychiatrists again or be admitted to hospital and it's not the most Pleasant place to be by any means no I think I think it would be amazing and I think I think it would I think it'd be much more satisfying for doctors as well because you you get back to actually helping people and getting them better and there's always going to be acute emergencies there's always going to be injuries there's all going to be you know acute you know psychosis that you know someone needs real help and and but this is just this chronic inflammatory state where everyone's just everyone's just toxic you know that that's not normal and that's you don't need a doctor for that you need a you need a you need a farmer and you know you need to to sort of get on get on good foods and then and then your body will just just work properly and there have been doctors for thousands upon thousands upon thousands of years and there were like medicine men and wise you know you know Wise Women things like that long before that and so there's always going to be a role for that and um I think that that if we if we get back to how it was where we were really focusing on the things that people actually couldn't solve themselves I think I think the world's going to be a better place and I think I think doctors are going to be much more engaged as well and I think patients are going to be more engaged in their own life and then you have a lot of people with a lot of education and a lot of know-how actually putting their their effort and their intelligence into very very useful directions as opposed to just spinning our Wheels putting bandages on toxicities you know and cheating and you know like cheating or you know trying to put a plaster over a condition and just treat symptoms as opposed to underlying disorder and they prescribe a medication and then the person ends up with side effects from the medication so then then the answer is prescribe another medication to enter out the side effects from the first one and and so it continues and and I don't know about you but I see patients quite frequently who end up on just so many so many medications and particularly if they see different doctors or kind of less experienced doctors sometimes people just feel like they need to do something but it's like there's a real lack of critical thinking around what what other possibilities might there be here other than just reaching for a Prescription Pad um and yeah it really frustrates me the the kind of state of medicine these days um particularly I suppose I'm particularly thinking about GP practices but also I mean it's this sort of um the sort of practice and prescribing is Right throughout all Specialties I think so it would be unfair to say it's just GPS it's definitely psychiatrists um myself included but uh yeah it's just across the vast majority of fields I think and just the wrong approach and I I quite often think why do people go into medicine surely most people go into medicine because they ultimately want to help people and where does that get lost along the way and but if that's probably a whole other conversation about influence of medical education and and pharmaceutical Industries there and [Music] but I think that that's also why a lot of doctors burn out you know because it isn't it isn't as satisfying as as uh that is is it it was supposed to be you know it's not as altruistic they're not actually like really helping people it's just this grind you just have these people that just have this all these same problems all these things and and the system's overloaded and you really can't help them and they have about to wait years to see you you have to wait years to get any sort of practical uh Solutions certainly in surgery you know here in um in Australia it's it's a four and a half year wait is what we have right now for people in uh you know category three so the you know lower you're not going to die you're not going to lose permanent function you're just in horrible pain and you haven't been able to work for five years you know well you can handle it okay fine but you know they're not gonna die but they can't really live very well either and they do need help and it's very difficult you know because it's um and then you sort of have the same sort of thing for them excuse me and um I think I think people just do get a little bit burnt out from that and because it's it's not it's not what what they got into it for in the first place and I think a lot of people like yourself like myself like you know Dr uh you know praying again if and like you've sort of seen this and went like you know this isn't this isn't right this isn't making me happy and then we found these alternates I love surgery like I love doing that I love being able to do that for people and I love learning about it I think it's just fascinating but I want to be able to do it when it's necessary not just because you know people are just killing themselves from the inside and um and you know and then being able to treat people like in functional medicine practice and just watching them get better and watching them come off their medications and drop their blood pressure and drop their weight and get rid of all these issues that they've had for for years and years and years is so satisfying it is so fulfilling yeah I like um I'm just thinking of Sean Baker's account there if when he was doing surgery and then all the lifestyle advice he gave people and ended up he was taking people were coming off surgery lists because they they'd got on top of their inflammation and no longer needed the knee surgery or whatever it may have been and uh and then of course he ended up getting into trouble with the hospital not being very happy because they're not going to make the money that they wanted to make yeah so I mean that's such a warped backward system uh when you really take a step back and think about it yeah when uh and Gary fatkey um similar situation here in Australia uh Australian orthopedic surgeon and and he was he was doing the same thing he was he was actually trying to be a real doctor and actually really help people as opposed to just you know mint cash and by you know chopping people up unnecessarily and so you're saying hey you know you change your diet and you may not need surgery and and you can get better and you can lose weight and you won't have these problems and it was working and and you know people were getting better and they were very appreciative and then you know a dietitian at his Hospital caught wind of it and was like well he's a doctor he can't he can't give diet advice he's not a dietitian well you know we're doctors and and the entire purpose of being a doctor is to help people uh get better and and to help people optimize their health and before there was ever the first dietitian there were doctors who dealt with what people were eating I mean this goes I think it's attributed apocrates but I don't think I don't know if he ever actually said it but you know let let uh food be thy medicine and Medicine thy food right this is basic tenants and there was even older than that there was a ancient Egyptian uh proverb that said um one quarter of what you eat is for you three the other three quarters is for your doctor yeah one quarter of your food feeds you and three quarters of your food feeds you of what you eat feeds your doctor basically you know because you're going to stay sick and you're going to keep seeing the doctor and you're going to be paying his bills and but you don't have to you know and so I think that's a major thing and you know Dr fecky he he got a very hard time he was in court for years uh being challenged on this because they said yeah you can't be going around giving people you know advice on their health what what do you think you are and of course he won but it cost him a lot of money and a lot of heartache and just years off his life and with that from his medical regulator whatever the I don't know what's called in Australia but um yeah so is it the medical governing body they they took exception to this they they took this nutritionist complaint very seriously and they thought that this was something that that uh was you know was not in his wheelhouse and wasn't something that he should be commenting on and you know so they they took him to court and uh and he won which was good but it caused it was very very expensive you know as as most Court battles are and took years and years and years which is very stressful and very you know harmful to his his mental health and um and so that was quite difficult for him but but he wanted to know somebody else yeah no somebody else who's been through something similar um yeah I don't have a lot of faith in these regulatory bodies at all because I think um they a lot of it's very subjective so they allocate um a specialist you know from their their service just to oversee a complaint or whatever it may be and then they just compare against kind of standard practices or someone in my specialty it's like someone's opinion so someone can end up looking through a bunch of case notes and just giving a kind of diagnostic opinion on a patient who they've never actually met and just draw conclusions from that um so yeah I yeah I'm just wary I'm wary of all of those organizations and their ability to actually be objective and not um influenced by other other you know aspects of money or you know whatever whatever their influences may be um yeah it's very sad I think but I suppose another thing is no such thing as negative publicity so in a way what happened with Tim Knox um you know it was really nice to read his book and very satisfying you know that he got through that whole battle that legal battle but yeah he's not the only one who's had it [Music] um which was disappointing but maybe not surprising yeah and of course you do need some sort of regulation in these things you have to make sure things are safe but yeah I mean these these sorts of things can can get a life of their own and get a bit out of control and you know in in the guys and you know trying to do the right thing but then you kind of sort of lose sight of what that is and and what you say and what you think turns into the right thing whereas it might not necessarily be the case it may just be your you know your opinion and then their opinion becomes law uh with these regulated regulatory bodies um and certainly that seems to be the case in in um Gary fecky's case because even after he won he went to the Supreme Court went all the way up to the top and then he won and even after that they still tried to prosecute him again say no you can't do that he said um guys we've been here we've done this you know here's the ruling and they said no we're telling you you can't do this and so we had to take him to court again and I had to go through it all again so it was a bit um yeah it's it's a bit difficult to know where the balance is on that but I think it's definitely I think I think wherever you wherever someone agrees on where the line is I think I think I think most people would agree we're past it in a lot of these cases yeah yeah all right well you mentioned your research what what what is uh what is that research project and what do you guys uh how's that going oh um yeah so it's going good it's a pilot study at the moment um it's a kind of multi-site so Stanford is one of the other sites and there is a university in Australia but I forget the name of it exactly that's also doing it and it's a kind of small clinical study um still recruiting patients at the moment but putting people with bipolar disorder onto ketogenic diet um and over about six weeks and then analyzing the results I think the the studies in the different centers are are each designing their own study and maybe measuring different parameters and doing different investigations um but but from an Edinburgh point of view that's going well so far so it'll be interesting to to see what comes of that um yeah I really like the the French study that was out not that long ago um I think Georgia Eid had some involvement with it it wasn't the main researcher but I quite often mentioned that to patients as well when I'm seeing them just the outcomes that people can get when they they adopt and that's just a ketogenic diet so so that's one step um but I'm I'm in touch with so many different people in the carnivore Community who have transformed their mental health by following a carnivore diet but I think there's just so much more potential in the future for for benefit in terms of all sorts of different mental health conditions um so it was really interesting there's somebody on Instagram who is the first person with borderline personality disorder who um is saying that carnivore is completely revolutionized their mental health well and um so that's somebody I follow and I don't know of anybody else but but um I've been doing some q a sessions with Bella's steak and butter gang recently and a few people have asked me about personality disorder and carnivores so um obviously some of it's speculative just now but I I was very taken by this one person's account somebody who struggled with their mental health since and a childhood teenage years kind of saying the old if they're they're kind of interpersonal difficulties and anxiety issues and just everything has it's like they're a new person after going to carnivore and they just can't believe kind of what's happened and how did they not know about this before so I just think there's so much more to come in the future yeah yeah whether we'll get the studies like on it I don't know but but if there are enough people giving their own experience and I think that should be that should be enough I hope so yeah yeah I think real life experience you just you can't argue with that and I I constantly say to patients so I'm kind of blue in the face that statistics don't necessarily apply to an individual and you know we can quote all these statistics from various studies or trials but actually your n of one is what really matters and it's about your own experience and um you know trying things out and seeing if they work yeah what's the thing you know it's like you I tell people when I'm they're consenting them for a surgery or procedure you know if it's you know five percent of this and two percent of that and less than one percent of this other thing but if it happens to you it's a hundred percent you know it's absolutely that's what really matters and it doesn't matter that like oh well you know 99.9 of people you know don't have this horrible side effect but you got it so who cares and um then you see people uh talking about like well this person have these these uh you know amazing results and and you know got off their medication stop having psychiatric issues or personality issues and they say yeah whatever that's anecdotal it's like okay well I guess it didn't happen then you know I guess they just yeah I guess that that just doesn't exist you know their their own own reality is just yeah you know that's not that's not real you know and yeah sorry no no I'm just going to say how can that possibly be irrelevant to other people like you've got an actual living person with who's not in a controlled environment he's dealing with all the stresses day to day that like lots of other people might have to deal with but coming from their own kind of genetic background and environmental influences and yet man they've maybe suffered from a major illness for years and years and then they make lifestyle changes and and put their difficulties into remission like how can that be ignored and that's the best test that there is really yeah real life test not not something artificial in a lab or in a very highly controlled environment yeah yeah it's frustrating it is yeah and and and again like and why do we do case studies in case reports in medicine if if the end of one doesn't matter at all right that gives you an idea of a new Direction that's what that is you say look at this this is different this is interesting we don't see this very often look at this and you just and you you describe you know new diseases and things like that I mean that's how that's how we got the names for most of these diseases people were like oh hey look at this I saw this today they wrote it up you know yeah and named after themselves yeah that's it yeah um yeah yeah so that'd be great mate I was thinking in medical school I was like everything's been named you know all these things have been named you know and I was just like am I how am I going to get my name on something somebody's been anything's been done but I guess you know everyone's thought that as they're going through it because that's just what they know and then you have to sort of learn enough so that you can know where to push the boundaries so maybe I can maybe I can get something someday you know what are these things yeah yeah they do they do um they do talk about it doctors being inherently narcissistic to me yeah it was just like one of my favorite topics but it's something that that comes to mind yeah they say right that's a joke is um it was the difference between God and a neurosurgeon God doesn't think he's a neurosurgeon yeah yeah I have heard that one yeah and um when I was going through through medical school I'm just speaking about you know naming things apparently it was a doctor in Dublin who started doing uh he was doing a lot of autopsies and dissections and Canaveral dissections and there's a guy who came in from the country and he had you know come in and died sometime in Dublin and they got him and he opened him up and they found this like in the 1800s you know a bunch of coal smoke everywhere and opened his lungs up and he found this very abnormal pathology in his lungs which was they were completely miscolored and misshapen they were very pink and and very you know you know big and buoyant where normally they're supposed to be like black and crackled and and so he he wrote this up as this is like this new pathology may have maybe have died of pink lung disease and uh you know you know just not for having all this this cold smoke in your lungs and my my anatomy Professor just said so you know so be careful because you never want to be known as the pink lung guy you know yeah you guys discovered pink long and yeah that's just a crazy calm moment yeah oh yeah that's so funny though but um yeah um just just for people who don't know just just uh quickly I know uh you need to leave but you mentioned the Georgia Eid study that'd be great to get your take on that you know as an actual uh psychiatrist yeah so I I mean I thought it was a really exciting site encouraging studies some inpatients forget the exact numbers but um I forget the proportions sorry I think it was 32 if I remember yeah I was thinking it was around 30 but um I don't tend to have a brain that retains these sort of facts um but a whole a mix of diagnoses so depressions schizoaffective I think some schizophrenia and bipolar and in there and um you know he like all of them improved um a vast proportion managed to reduce medications some managed to come off medications um and so it's just just really highly encouraging and that was about a ketogenic diet um and I think they did include in the study the what the diet was made up of um but there are even aspects to the the it could be improved upon so I'm even thinking about the ketogenic study that I'm involved in I came into it quite late and um there was a there was a food list just because I hadn't been aware they were doing it but I found out from another colleague about it and then instantly thought oh I need to get involved and when I looked up the patient information uh details and some of the stuff on the food list was a bit dubious so like mayonnaise for example and I thought oh no but why are they having all the inflammatory vegetable oils in this study because this is gonna this is gonna affect the outcome but anyway my point being that I I think people are going to improve anyway but I think with a lot of these studies there are further improvements that could be made and and as I say um who knows what a carnivore study if there was everyone done in mental health would actually show um and I think there would be great potential for that just considering carnivore to be a subset of the ketogenic diet and I think food intolerances are huge issues for people so I know it's kind of another topic maybe don't have a lot of time to discuss today but um I do know from Georgia's training that she was very clear she's worked with patients for years now using ketogenic diets and I remember her giving an example of a patient she'd seen who managed to narrow down their anxiety attacks so their panic attacks to one specific food and I think they've been troubleshooting things for a while and and playing around with different Ketone levels and it was actually keeping a food diary and um like where both of them managed to pinpoint there was one specific food and when they excluded that food from her her diet the kind of panic attacks just never came back all right yeah yeah I think there's so much that could be explored and isn't even being done now in terms of research so yeah yeah well that's a great thing about the carnivore diet is it is a true Elimination Diet and and you maybe someone will have a bigger reaction to one thing than the other but yeah this gets rid of everything and so you know getting getting rid of the carbs and the sugar are massive but you know there are other things as well and this gets rid of all of them and that you know maybe you you sample some things back and I go wham give you a big big uh reaction you go okay stay away from that one but maybe you can incorporate other things in as well if you want to I mean I don't personally but um but you know if you if you were uh of that mind you you could sample things back in and and to and to to try to avoid like the major reaction and then and then go from there but um yeah I have to have to thank you actually for the coffee thing so um oh yeah so just some of the podcasts you put out there when you've discussed coffee so I I am I know that coffee puts up my triglycerides because I did some blood blog tests on myself and um so I knew quite a while back I need to just stop the coffee I I used to have like two or three espressos every morning before this is pretty carnivore before I'd even go out to work I was like I was that person and um I remember giving out coffee during pregnancy I never had any withdrawal symptoms it was absolutely fine just to avoid it you're at school but um anyway because of my checklist rights I thought okay I really need to stop this it's probably not doing me any good um and then I kind of slipped back into it every so often and and at some points I'm not somebody who's suffered from anxiety before but for me after a caffeinated coffee there were a few times I just thought oh I feel like I'm feeling anxious and so I suppose I just want to point that I particularly for people with mental health problems just the impact coffee can have and then the other really odd thing that happened it was my son's school sports day um this was in the last year I forget exactly when and there was a coffee cart at the other day and I've got such a like positive association with coffee just being like a special sort of thing and my husband said should we get a coffee and I just thought oh yeah to heck with it I'm just gonna have one and it must have been like really poor quality coffee in that evening I had like sudden onset awful pain in my left wrist that I've never had before in my life oh wow um ever and it was it was pretty bad so it was still sore the next day but less so but just really unpleasant and not somebody has joint pain at all ordinarily and I thought it can only be the coffee because there was nothing else that was different then and so I didn't have coffee for a while and then I think I had another one and it was okay and then the second time I had from a cafe that we've been to over the years and I kind of trust what they what they do and what they serve so not from a dodgy coffee cart at the school sports day um and I had a coffee one coffee that day that evening same pain same wrist and I just thought okay that's absolutely confirmed for me now it's gone yeah so um and I just it just made me think of you a story about I think was it a work colleague who'd you'd done a hard session with in the gym and then they were saying that the next day they didn't have any delayed onset muscle soreness and then somebody a rep or something somebody brought rain coffee and then they'd partaking in the coffee and then suddenly they had aches and pains later that day so that's a story that kind of stuck in my mind yeah yeah I had a i i that was when I I tested it uh because I wasn't I wasn't getting sore I was like what what is going on like how why am I not getting Spore am I why am I not working out hard enough I'm not pushing myself or what because that's what I ended up doing like 32 sets of heavy legs and um and just it could have kept going but like I just I was been there for four hours and I had things to do I was like okay well I'm done with that and and the next day I wasn't sore but I was like really worried about that I was like oh my God I'm not gonna be able to walk for a month and the next day I was fine I was going up the stairs two at a time and I could sort of feel like okay yeah you know my legs Something's Happened but I could do it again and I had no problem I went hiking up a mountain the next that day went to and I was like right I'm ready to go to rugby like I'm ready to get back playing and this has been not working out for a very long time much rugby practice dead Sprint the whole time kept up with the the team everyone had been training the whole time I was in Bangladesh volunteering in the refugee camps and so they were in very good shape I was not in good shape and I was keeping up with everything all the drills all the Sprints and the next day it still wasn't sore the day after that I still wasn't sore and then I met up with a friend of mine for coffee I hadn't had coffee in a number of weeks so I said okay well let's see what this does you know can I have coffee is coffee going to be okay one cup of black coffee from you know a nice place yeah and within 20 minutes my hamstrings were getting tight and stiff my back started getting stiff and aching like okay okay what's happening what's happening I can feel it in real time and and I was sore for two days after that you know not not nearly to the extent that I justly deserved after doing something is stupid as I did but yeah still very still quite sore and and you know way more than I wanted it to be so that for me was just like right well I know that this is causing inflammation in my body I know this is doing things that I don't want and so that's that was just it for me yeah yeah well yes very dramatic and memorable isn't it it's not something that you're gonna forget anytime soon it's the same for me just with my even even though a single joint sort of pain I just thought what on Earth is going on yeah yeah yeah that's it it's as simple as that you know you don't don't take the poison you don't get poisoned it's yeah it's amazing how that works you know yeah yeah you don't need to go to medical school to figure that one out yeah yeah not true well great all right well well Dr Brown it was it was absolutely lovely talking to you thank you so much for taking the time today um you have a book out and um and social media presence and where can people find you and how do they find your book okay um so on social media I'm just on Instagram and I'm carnivore shrink on Instagram and um my book is called metabolic Madness and that's on Amazon so um so it's a kind of it's quite a brief read I wanted it to be that way and I just wanted to make all the reasons why people need to look at their diet for their mental health accessible and kind of but it does cover a lot of the research as well in an accessible sort of way so yeah good that's me lovely so thanks thanks so much I've really enjoyed that conversation thanks for having me oh you're very welcome it was a pleasure great all right we'll have to do it again [Music]