Anyone with an impairment of brain or neurological function – whether mental illness, depression, seizures, brain cancer, headaches, neuropathy, brain infections, or any other neurological condition – should try a ketogenic diet to see if it improves the condition.
“Ketogenic” means that the diet causes the liver to manufacture ketones. Ketones are small water-soluble compounds that are metabolized like fats. Unlike fats, they do not need carnitine transport to reach mitochondria. They can be used for energy by every mitochondria-containing human cell type. This makes them one of the most disease-resistant sources of dietary energy. There are few things that can go wrong with ketone metabolism.
Ketogenic diets have several major benefits for neurological conditions:
- They relieve neuronal starvation from cognitive hypoglycemia of any cause.
- They stimulate the innate immune response against intracellular pathogens, helping to heal brain infections.
Recent work has identified a third benefit from ketogenic diets: They eliminate an excess of glutamate. In a carbon isotope study, feeding the ketone beta-hydroxybutyrate in place of glucose caused less glutamate to be formed in the brain:
The amount of (13)C incorporation and cellular content was lower for glutamate and higher for aspartate in the presence of [2,4-(13)C]beta-hydroxybutyrate as opposed to [1,6-(13)C]glucose. [1]
This is important because excessive brain glutamate is “excitotoxic” and kills neurons. Glutamate excitotoxicity causes damage in a host of conditions including
spinal cord injury, stroke, traumatic brain injury and neurodegenerative diseases of the central nervous system (CNS) such as multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Parkinson’s disease, alcoholism or alcohol withdrawal and Huntington’s disease. [2]
Other diseases in which damage from glutamate excitotoxicity is important include epilepsy, schizophrenia and various mood and anxiety disorders.
Migraines and Glutamate
My sister’s husband gets frequent migraines, so I keep an eye out for papers about migraines. A new paper in Nature Genetics finds that people with common migraine tend to have a mutation in a regulatory sequence for genes that control glutamate abundance. [3]
People with the mutation are prone to glutamate excitotoxicity:
[A] DNA variation found between the PGCP and MTDH/AEG-1 genes on chromosome 8 appears to be associated with increased susceptibility to common migraine. The variant appears to alter the activity of MTDH/AEG-1 in cells, which regulates the activity of the EAAT2 gene: the EAAT2 protein is responsible for clearing glutamate from brain synapses in the brain….
“Although we knew that the EAAT2 gene has a crucial role to play in neurological processes in human and potentially in the development of migraine, until now, no genetic link has been identified to suggest that glutamate accumulation in the brain could play a role in common migraine,” says co-senior author of the study Professor Christian Kubisch of University of Ulm, Germany (previously at the University of Cologne where he conducted his research for this study.) “This research opens the door for new studies to look in depth at the biology of the disease and how this alteration in particular may exert its effect.” [4]
If glutamate excitotoxicity causes migraines, then it’s likely that migraine sufferers would benefit from a ketogenic diet.
How Do You Eat a Ketogenic Diet?
The safest and healthiest way to eat a ketogenic diet is by:
- Restricting carbohydrate consumption to 200 calories per day from “safe starches” like rice, taro, and sweet potatoes. 70 grams of cooked white rice, 150 grams of taro, and 300 grams of sweet potato are an appropriate daily ration.
- Eating massive amounts of coconut oil. The short-chain fats in coconut oil are the most “ketogenic” of foods, i.e. the most readily turned into ketone bodies. 6 to 8 fluid ounces (12 to 14 tablespoons) per day of coconut oil is an appropriate daily ration.
Supplements with vitamin C and selenium should also be increased on a ketogenic diet.
Conclusion
Research on ketogenic diets as a therapy has focused on epilepsy for decades, with some recent interest in using these diets as a therapy for brain cancer. But really, they are likely to be helpful against nearly all brain and neurological conditions, and probably all solid tumor cancers and many infectious diseases as well.
Rather than waiting for the glacial progress of modern biomedical research, which needs decades to assemble sufficient evidence to get an application for funding for a clinical trial past skeptical reviewers, anyone with a brain or neurological condition should simply experiment with a ketogenic diet themselves to see if it helps. Odds are it will.
References
[1] Lund TM et al. Availability of neurotransmitter glutamate is diminished when beta-hydroxybutyrate replaces glucose in cultured neurons. J Neurochem. 2009 Jul;110(1):80-91. http://pmid.us/19457063.
[2] Wikipedia, “Excitotoxicity,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excitotoxicity.
[3] International Headache Genetics Consortium et al. Genome-wide association study of migraine implicates a common susceptibility variant on 8q22.1. Nat Genet. 2010 Aug 29. [Epub ahead of print] http://pmid.us/20802479.
[4] “First Genetic Link to Common Migraine Exposed,” Physorg.com, Aug. 29, 2010, http://www.physorg.com/news202139760.html.
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