Can The Low-carb/high-fat Keto Diet Help Treat Mental Illness?
Can The Low-carb/high-fat Keto Diet Help Treat Mental Illness?
Bipolar disorder is characterised by mood swings, including mania and depression. Medication is a mainstay treatment but there is evidence that a radical shift in diet can help manage the condition
Can The Low-carb/high-fat Keto Diet Help Treat Mental Illness?
Can The Low-carb/high-fat Keto Diet Help Treat Mental Illness?
Matt Baszucki is a musician and tech professional living in San Francisco. At just 26, he could be expected to be leading a certain kind of life as befits his age and profession.
Can The Low-carb/high-fat Keto Diet Help Treat Mental Illness?
Instead, every morning Matt gets up at the same time and goes outside for the morning light to reset his body clock. He spends two hours a day exercising — running in the morning, lifting weights in the afternoon.
Can The Low-carb/high-fat Keto Diet Help Treat Mental Illness?
He makes sure he gets enough sleep and doesn’t drink or smoke. He also emphatically steers clear of drugs.
Can The Low-carb/high-fat Keto Diet Help Treat Mental Illness?
But it’s his diet that really sets Matt apart from his peers. He often eats only two meals a day — the first at 1pm or 2pm, the other at 6pm or 7pm — then fasts until lunchtime the next day.
And then there’s what he does, and doesn’t, eat: no bread, pasta, rice or refined carbs, sweets or cola. His meals are instead based on protein and fat — “a lot of super-heavy fat foods”, including nut butters and avocados, plus meat, eggs, fish, chicken and “a lot of vegetables”.
None of his friends lives like this. “This damned diet has turned me into a monk,” Matt says wryly. “It’s lonely.” But it’s also been the making of him, as he explains: “It gave me my life back.”
That he is where he is now is an extraordinary story.
At 19, Matt was hospitalised with severe bipolar disorder, a condition characterised by mood swings, including mania and depression, after he suffered a psychotic breakdown, experiencing delusions.
The next five years were a chaotic blur of recovery, psychotic episodes and mania. At one point Matt was “running around barefoot and homeless” travelling across California (once sleeping behind a skip); at other times, he’d be “doing crazy, embarrassing things in front of my friends in public”; or…