The Kick Sugar Coach Podcast
The Kick Sugar Coach Podcast
Ally Houston: The Mental Health Benefits of a Ketogenic Diet
Have you ever wondered if what you eat could be fueling your anxiety, ADHD, or depression?
Meet Ally Houston, a former physicist who transformed his life by transforming his diet. After battling ADHD, anxiety, and seasonal depression for years—despite conventional treatments—Ally discovered the ketogenic diet and experienced a breakthrough that changed everything.
Today, he’s a metabolic mental health coach and a trailblazer in using nutrition to improve mental health. In this powerful interview, Ally shares his journey and insights that could inspire your own transformation.
Episode Highlights:
- How Ally reversed ADHD, anxiety, and seasonal depression with a ketogenic diet.
- The science behind food addiction and why ultra-processed foods like sugar and dairy can wreak havoc on your mental health.
- The emerging field of metabolic psychiatry and its groundbreaking potential to treat mental health conditions through diet.
- Practical strategies for using food to improve mood, focus, and overall well-being.
- Exciting insights about Ally’s upcoming 2025 study at Oxford on ketogenic diets for ADHD and depression.
Ally’s story will leave you questioning everything you thought you knew about food and mental health. 🌟
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Welcome everybody to an interview today with Ali Houston, who is a former physicist who fixed his brain with food. After suffering from ADHD, seasonal depression, chronic anxiety and a host of other metabolic problems, he discovered the paleoketogenic diet and lifestyle. I made some lifestyle changes and made a quantum leap in his health and mental health. The effect was so profound that he decided to switch his careers. He is now a metabolic mental health coach, trained by Precure and Dr Georgia Eade, and in 2025, he will lead a study at Oxford testing ketogenic diet plus MetSci for ADHD with depression. Welcome, ali.
Ally Houston:Thank you, florence. It's really a pleasure to join you.
Florence:So tell us a bit about what your life was like while you were struggling with all of these metabolic symptoms and syndromes, like how bad did it get and how long was it really bad?
Ally Houston:Yeah, it was bad from when I was a child, really up and down, on and off. There was definitely a big seasonal component, like you said, to the depression side, but anxiety could be any time and I didn't understand why and I finally got diagnosed with ADHD in 2015. I was going back to the doctor again and again saying, look, there's something not right. I need to make sense of my inability to perform at the level I know I could sometimes and, you know, eventually got a referral to a psychologist and a psychiatrist and they went through the process of diagnosis and had to look at school report cards and that kind of thing and got a diagnosis of ADHD and I got given Ritalin, which sort of helped for a bit, and then I got used to it and built up a tolerance. I needed more to get the same effect.
Ally Houston:I started to get nasty side effects like emotional numbing and further anxiety that seemed to be caused by taking the medication. I got disillusioned because I realized that I didn't have a Ritalin deficiency. There was something else deeper going on. The system as it was wasn't really helping me out the way I needed it to and you know ADHD sometimes thought of as one of the sort of lighter mental health diseases or sets of symptoms, and it really impacts quality of life. You know, I knew that I wasn't stupid.
Ally Houston:I'd got a physics degree, even though it was really difficult to push through with the anxiety and depression and the problem with focus. But I knew that it was in there somewhere. I just couldn't access it regularly. But but the anxiety and depression sometimes got really bad in and of themselves and I had had suicidal ideations in the past when they'd got so bad that I just couldn't cope and so things weren't good. And yeah, it kind of came to a head around 2015 after I'd got my diagnosis, but when the drugs weren't really working that well because I realized I felt like I was kind of out of options through the usual channels with doctors yeah, and then what happened next?
Florence:I'm assuming you did you George at Eid, or what happened?
Ally Houston:No. So I, after I got my physics degree, I worked in industry for a few years and I was working in a laser factory. So I was kind of like a mid-level Bond villain henchman, if you like and working in that sort of high-tech world was interesting. But I kind of was drawn towards the academic side again and started a PhD program in gravitational waves using lasers, and so I started it but just couldn't get into it. My brain wasn't working the way I wanted it to and I was lucky I had a professor at the time, ken Strain, who had healed his AME chronic fatigue syndrome.
Ally Houston:Several years before Now he'd been told in his early 40s that he probably wouldn't work again. He was bedridden, he was collapsing when he was walking, he couldn't think straight just terrible. And he'd researched by himself and found that people were getting better using particular diets, particularly low-carb, ketogenic diets. So he tried that and within six months he was running 10ks again. So it was almost like a miraculous turnaround for him and he went back to work as a physics professor and in the end actually discovered, helped to discover gravitational waves, which is kind of amazing. And he kept up this really deep side knowledge of nutrition and human health and why it had worked for him. And so fast forward a few years.
Ally Houston:And and I appear I'm underperforming he's saying these strange things about food. Like you know, no one should eat margarine, and wheat isn't really food. And Five a Day was invented by a marketing board. And I was thinking, you know, if this wasn't coming out of the mouth of an eminent physicist, I would seriously question the statements. And even though it did come out of the mouth of an eminent physicist, I did question the statements and he always had good answers.
Ally Houston:And when I found out about his profound change with diet, I thought, well, I mean, at least I could try it for controlling weight, you know. And I tried it. And I didn't expect that within weeks my anxiety would almost disappear and my ADHD symptoms would quieten down to almost nothing, and that over that summer I was just in such a great mood and, uh, it didn't seem to go away. And then I was worried because winter was approaching, and so around september, october, actually around about this time when the weather starts to change, you get that sort of back to school, crisp air. I thought, uh well, here comes the slow freight train, and it just didn't arrive at the station, you know and that, and that was 2016 and I've not had seasonal depression since.
Ally Houston:So it was amazing really, and, like you say, georgia eid was probably one of the only voices in 2016 who was writing about this, to try to make sense of it at all. There was a couple of small groups like Zero Carb, zen, which was purely carnivore and talking about the Zen feeling that you can get from going on that type of diet, and they were exploring how clinically it seemed to work. They were exploring how clinically it seemed to work. Georgia was obviously writing back then on her blog about potential mechanisms of food being good for mental health, but there wasn't an ecosystem for it, and so I just knew that I had to try to help other people to do what I had done, because if it worked for me, then it could work for other people, and I really wanted to understand why it worked so that I could make that intervention more effective if possible. So I also know not everyone's like me I like to really nerd out about things and read very deeply and think about all of that side. Some people just want to get a meal plan and do it, so, um, I kind of dived into the nutrition science and, um, the mental health side of things and, uh, the metabolic side of things. You know, people reversing the diabetes made friends with dr david unwin and his wife, jen, who's so, uh, key in the investigation of sugar addiction, and started to sell food that I thought people would find helpful, and I brought out a cookbook and then I was doing a lot of coaching to people, asking how I did what I did and how they could do it, and really enjoyed that process of helping people one-to-one and in groups.
Ally Houston:And in 2022, the Buzuki group arrived. And, for anyone who doesn't know, david and Jan Buzuki are a couple in America and they've got four kids. One of them, matt, had very serious bipolar disorder, crushing suicidal depression, cycled with running away from home when he was manic, thinking he had powers and giving his belongings away. He wouldn't know where he was and it was just dreadful. They're very well resourced because David Buzuki is a co-founder of Roblox, which is a global gaming platform, and so they tried everything all sorts of different therapies and psychiatrists and nothing had worked. And that was until they met Chris Palmer and he suggested ketogenic metabolic therapy and he suggested ketogenic metabolic therapy, and that was more than three and a half years ago and Matt's not had any symptoms of bipolar disorder.
Ally Houston:So after about a year, when they realized, wow, we've actually got our son back, I think the feeling occurred to Jan that there was still so many other mothers out there, so many other parents and siblings and friends whose loved ones were going through this still and didn't know anything about what she did and what Matt had, and so they started to put money into the space becoming known as metabolic psychiatry, in order to do the research that backs up the anecdotes that were like mine, like matt's, and so when I saw that was happening, I thought, right, it's not just george eade, who's extremely credible and lovely and uh and articulate, it's not just a couple of lone voices, it's, it's a movement, and it's the movement I've been waiting for. So I niched particularly with my coaching down into metabolic mental health in 2022 and founded met sai, which I wanted to be a scalable coaching platform for people to use metabolic strategies to improve their mental health.
Florence:Incredible.
Ally Houston:So Matt's on our summit this year.
Florence:Oh great, yeah, he shared his story. It's amazing, and I think the Bazooki Foundation is going to help us promote the summit and they're involved that way. So let's go back to the early days. You find out about this physicist professor, starts to plant the seed that food and mental health are connected right, that there's foods that can actually be helpful, foods that aren't helpful, and it starts to awaken you to the power of nutrition. You learn about the, the paleo ketogenic diet, and you try it now. Were you coming out of a background of sugar addiction? Like, were you been like not binge eating, but were you eating sugar and junk food all the time? Like, was that your background?
Ally Houston:Yeah, very much so, and I would binge, absolutely would binge. I would eat an extraordinary amount of sugar sometimes, and starch, cheese, processed foods certainly, and sometimes I would eat until I felt sick. Yes and um, I I had been very active in my teens and early 20s and then in my late 20s, especially when I felt like I was, you know, maybe working at a desk more, I struggled to control my weight for the first time and I found that quite disturbing because I didn't like the way I looked, I didn't like the way I felt, but I felt out of control and I couldn't eat the foods that I felt like I wanted to eat, including the sugary, processed ones that I thought, oh well, everyone gets to eat them, don't they? And I couldn't seem to control myself around them, and sometimes my weight would go up and down by as much as, maybe four stone. So what's that about? 55 pounds? You know, I think was my biggest kind of differential. Certainly, when I discovered keto, I had gone from 14 and a half stone to 10 and a half stone in the months leading up to that, and you know so, even by my early 30s, I was really feeling out of control with food, out of control with my weight and out of control with my health. I just hadn't realized that.
Ally Houston:You know, sugar could be seen as an addiction. I think there's a sense with alcohol, now that it's clearly such an addictive thing for many people. We're much more sensitive around Alcoholics Anonymous, the 12-step program recovery, recognizing it and naming it and realizing that you know your addiction is doing pushups in the parking lot, all of that. But if you look at a Simpsons episode from 1994, then they're kind of ripping into people like Barney. There's a sensitive aspect to it. But drunks are kind of a joke and I hope that in 30 years from now I hope that in of a joke and I hope that in 30 years from now, I hope that in three years from now, I hope that in three months from now people will realize that sugar can be like that for people, that it gets into people's lives in a way that ruins it. You know it ruins their lives and I think the element of my health around sugar addiction wasn't as strong as some people, but my use of it was out of control for sure, incredible.
Florence:So did you have relapses. So did you learn about the paleo keto diet and you're like, oh my gosh, I'm just going to try it. I can always go back, so you try it. It sounds like within weeks and months, you started to feel better and then you're like, wow, fall has come, the depression hasn't come. Did you just keep going forward, or did you ever try and bring carbs back in? Did you relapse? Did you slip? Did you ever have occasional binges as you sort of phased it out, or what did that unhooking from ultra processed foods look like for you?
Ally Houston:yeah, it's a great question because I think it it teases out the fact that it's not usually just one food and it's not usually just one thing. It's not usually just sugar either. Right after March 2016, I just stopped eating sugar, so I don't think I ever tried to reintroduce sugar in processed food. I did try to carb cycle a little um, and by that I mean having like a tablespoon of honey before um going to the gym but that did really bad things to my gut and like took me months to recover from that. I was quite surprised, actually what happened.
Florence:What did it do?
Ally Houston:So I got terrible bloating and kind of GI distress and I felt like it just threw my flora way out of whack and I hadn't anticipated that at all. I hadn't anticipated that at all. I think that it makes sense in retrospect, if my gut microbiome was not good, that I could throw petrol on it and anything can happen. But it can go in any direction and especially if you've got sort of small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, I think throwing simple carbs on it is not a good idea. And I think you know people probably don't appreciate all the time how long your small intestine is and how kind of in the system pathogenic microbes can be, whether that's bacteria or fungus. That we collect these things over our lifetime of processed foods and to buy rounds and rounds of antibiotics when we're younger, bottle feeding, all sorts of things that in the modern environment can fuel these, uh, the growth of these things, and that I was probably doing a really great job of starving them by being ketogenic. But then when I tried to carb cycle it was just a disaster because they just they were just lying dormant and it hadn't. I didn't realize at the time that you really need to hammer home the advantage, so it's not just starving them with a ketogenic diet, but it's killing them directly in these principles of functional medicine. So I learned that the hard way and have done various supplementation since to try to address that, even though I feel like for some people perhaps myself included you might struggle to ever properly get rid of what should be in your small intestine. Unfortunately there's just so hard to get at.
Ally Houston:But, um, yeah, dairy was probably my main one I struggled with in terms of coming back on and off and feeling like there was an addictive component to it. You know, it's a bit like, uh, the the Mark Twain quote quit. Oh, sorry, you lost me for a second there. Um, yeah, it's a bit like that Mark Twain quote. Quitting smoking is easy. I've done it hundreds of times. It's the same with me and dairy. I would always feel like it was calling to me, especially when I was stressed.
Ally Houston:I wondered oh, maybe there's certain things in yogurt and cheese that I'm craving. That is to do with the nutrition, but really the patterns of behavior around it would say otherwise and the way I felt after it, which was pretty lousy and I think that's actually a really common thread in people using ketogenic diets for mental health is that they very often wander into a facebook group for keto because they've heard that keto can be good for mental health. And it'll say have as much cream as you like, have as much cheese as you like, have as much yogurt as you like. And so they get the message and you know, if you tolerate dairy, then it's amazing because you can have these things. But if you're like probably, I would say, most of my clients and a lot of the people I've spoken to in the professional network that I have in this area that dairy just doesn't work, if you're, if you're trying to do, uh, keto for me, for mental health, and there's a few reasons why that might be, but it was certainly true for me. And so I just leave it now, and not only because it causes mental symptoms in me, but because it has that addictive component where I just can't stop thinking about it. I'll have cream with everything. I'll end up having a pint of cream a day and two liters of yogurt, given half the chance, as much cheese as I can stuff in, I put on weight again.
Ally Houston:My skin issues come back. So I think some people talk about oh, you have to go raw, you have to get the a2 type of casein and I think sometimes that can dampen down the immune response. But I believe it to be wishful thinking in most people that if they've had a problem, big problem, with dairy the past, that they can find the right dairy for them. Unfortunately, and that took me years to come to terms with. And that's probably the main one.
Ally Houston:I think the third, which isn't so much about addiction as about getting the foods right, was making sure I was eating enough fat, and that helps both in terms of like feeling full but also mentally feeling at my best, and a lot of people find that that's a huge lever to pull. Is getting enough of the right type of fat and compared to the protein in order to feel at their best? Yeah, but sugar, flour, veg oil and dairy these things are just I steer as far clear from as I can because, um, they've all got their own individual problems and, um, the, the, the, the fuel addiction in me, wow, so, so amazing.
Florence:One thing that's incredible about your story and there's people, many, many, many people listening to this interview that will be envious of the fact that you could go oh okay, oh, I have better information, I'm going to try it and, hey, I'm feeling better, I'm going to keep on it that there wasn't this underlying resistance to you finding recovery in the remarkable ways that you have. And for many of us, we have this resistance to following through. We're like, hey, we feel so much better. I've lost 80 pounds, Like everything's great, I never want to go back and then boom, we do, and we do it over and over and over.
Florence:Right, we blame the addiction, and certainly certainly it's a piece of it. Blame the addiction, and certainly certainly it's a piece of it. But a bigger piece of it is that we've got unconscious programming that's resisting our recovery and so we have to work through that. We have to work and that sounds like that wasn't a piece. You had to work through that when you start to feel better. You've never gone back to sugar, which is remarkable. When you talked about experimenting with bringing honey in, it sounds like it flared up SIBO or SIFO for you, or both. Did it also docibly impact your mental health, like did you notice depression or anxiety just touches of that coming back?
Ally Houston:Yeah, definitely, you know, I think if there's been hints of sugar in things I've eaten, then even within hours I can feel a flare of anxiety and certainly the next day. And you know, I also get gut issues straight away too. And I think in some ways it's a blessing. In a weird way it's a blessing that I get immediate symptoms, because when it comes to a kind of creeping psychological rug pull, it's much more insidious. And it's the same with people who are doing this kind of thing for type 2 diabetes, because for me I get mental symptoms straight away and talking within hours and certainly the next day, and gut symptoms sometimes straight away too, including quite bad pain, and it's just not worth it for me.
Ally Houston:But then other people, they sleepwalk into it and three months later they sort of wake up, as it were, and they realize they're back where they were in the doctor's office pre-diabetic or diabetic again. Maybe they put on the 50 pounds again, um, or they are hiding food from people and eating it in the dark by themselves, and it really can be months and months. I've had clients who stopped for Christmas and given themselves the freedom, as it were, to enjoy themselves, quote, unquote and then you see them again in April and they think I can't believe that I disappeared for months into that hole. And so I don't impose my attitude of gratitude to others who feel immediately negative effects when they eat like that, but I feel like it's a blessing, because that's the thing that makes me stay off right, right, if there's a gap and a delay, right it's, it's, it's easier to go.
Florence:Oh, it's no big deal, I got away with it, I'm fine, you know. But there's this slow creep of the, of the demise of our mental and physical health again, until we hit another bottom and we're like, okay, no, how, how did I get here? There is stories of people who actually had lost hundreds of pounds, had had multiple years of abstinence, whole foods only, miraculous transformation of body and mind, and had the one bite, the one bite that took them slowly back and they thought they got away with it and a few days later they had a little more, and that you know. But it just slowly crept back in and took him down.
Florence:And one woman I met, a woman who had it had been two years and she couldn't get. She couldn't get it, she couldn't get a week under her belt, she just couldn't. Two years she gained all of her weight back. When I all of her weight back. When I met her, she was in a wheelchair.
Florence:I was doing a public lecture at our local library on sugar and sugar addiction. This was 20 years ago. I was an early, early, early adopter of this and, um, she raised her hand in the audience and told the story of how she had total recovery and she took the one bite and it's been. It had been two years and she was back in a wheelchair and she'd gained I can't remember 150, 150 pounds or something, really, and people think, come on, no, seriously, like for some people it's like that petrol, it just sucks us right back in and it can be a real battle to get free again. So once you've got it, once you've got it, hang on to it, because it's never worth it. And you know that, once you know, you know, once you're awakened and you know that these foods don't agree with you physically and mentally, then you know you're going to come back to this path that you're on. So just hang on to it, because who wants, who wants to wait for a second bottom or another bottom, the 10th bottom, the 100th bottom?
Ally Houston:yeah, I know, and it's. It's pathological in our society. You know, since I was a child, there's been adverts on the TV for chocolate where women are getting it from the fridge at night alone, in the dark, and of course it's a supermodel and it's softly, classically lit so that she looks like she's having a great time. But it's just imprinting on people that you should hide it, you should eat it alone, and it's just imprinting on people that you should hide it, you should eat it alone, and it's a very dark thing. I I think people still scoff at this idea that it can ruin lives, but it's very dark it really is.
Florence:It really is. It's a, it's a blight around the planet and it's like it's spreading like a cancer and you know, impacting cultures. That, yeah heartbreaking Like I even I have a VA in the Philippines and the level of obesity and sugar consumption and drunk food and I'm just like, oh no, don't, don't eat it, don't do that. Like, yeah, no, when you were eating dairy and you said that you could tell that it was hooking you into more and more and more, that you could tell that there was some sort of addictive pull for you, did you also notice any mental health implications? What was it doing mental health wise to you?
Ally Houston:the kind of addiction psychology piece where it was like thinking about it, preoccupied with it, kind of waking up in the morning and planning your day around that it was also just straight mental health symptoms.
Ally Houston:So I'm extremely sensitive now to things that give me an issue and I kind of wish that I could fix myself to the extent that I didn't feel that strongly when I ate things. But I'm not sure whether it's a sign that I've moved away from the maddened crowd and now I'm just more sensitive because I've got a cleaner baseline, or whether it's because there's still some kind of dysfunction in the system and that's why I can't tolerate these things. Because there have been societies like the Swiss, the West and Price saw where they were eating a lot of fermented bread with far lower gluten but lots of dairy, and they were very healthy. And so I do wonder, but regardless of that, I still feel strong mental health symptoms if I have dairy. So even if I have some people talk about, oh, can you not have ghee or butter? Well, actually no, even ghee, which has almost all of the protein taken out of it, the lactose as well, I get this sense of dread.
Florence:Wow, really.
Ally Houston:It's catastrophizing. Sometimes I'll just take the hit at dinner because I'll sleep through it, as it were, and it won't be that strong in the morning. If I haveise at brunch, then later that day I can feel um, kind of like a catastrophe is coming and I'll I'll try to sort of find something that will fit that in my life. But really I know, oh yeah, it's just the. It took me a while to work out that that could be ghee or butter.
Ally Houston:But there's some amazing research on one of my favorite, kali Reichelt, a late Norwegian doctor who worked with kids with autism, spectrum disorder and various other mental disorders.
Ally Houston:Using gluten-free and casein-free diets, kids can make amazing progress, being very strict, and then go off the rails and the parents would get forensic about what happened and maybe the granny had given the kid a biscuit because they felt like it was cruel and unusual to deprive the kid. But that might set them back for weeks or months, because the peptides that are produced in the gut and that are interacting negatively with the neurological system can stay in the system for weeks or months. So I certainly feel acute effects over the next 24 hours after eating dairy, but they're very strong even with things like ghee, where there shouldn't really be much in the way of the protein there and gut effects and slowing down of mental capacity, not feeling as mentally clear, also the mood dipping, so it's not just this sort of feeling of dread but also this kind of lack of motivation. So I mean it has a profound effect on my personality and outlook and mood and cognition.
Florence:Oh, that's so incredible. It's so amazing and it's hard to imagine that the foods we eat can literally bring on negative thoughts. We know it anecdotally, we've all had kind of experiences of that. We know scientifically that ultra processed foods, sugar in particular, is highly scientifically absolutely linked to depression. But less of an understanding around the anxiety piece, or less science around that. But to think that you're so at the cutting edge of understanding, right at the very minutia level, something like dairy in any form, including grass-fed ghee, can bring on a feeling of dread, like we just think that's impossible to be that sensitive to food. But it's so not.
Ally Houston:Absolutely, and it does make me wonder if there is some evolutionary reason why that would be the case. I mean, we have, as humans, gamed the mammalian system of eating milk after we've weaned. You know, you can't imagine how that would look, uh, in a hunter-gatherer society. Um, adult adults eat the drinking milk, human milk it. Just it wouldn't work. So you know, you can see how there may be something wrong with that and you can also maybe it's a just so story, but you can. You can think it was plausible that mother's milk should make us feel in a different way somehow, that it could be evolutionarily useful to make you feel more attached to your mother, or that you wanted more of that milk or something. So it seems plausible to me that milk proteins should have that kind of effect. I mean, they talk about babies being milk drunk after they've had a feed, and that's kind of how I feel after I've had dairy a bit zonked out, feel after I've had dairy a bit zonked out.
Ally Houston:There's some fascinating stuff on the effect of milk proteins in the guts and the opioid effects that they have Casomorphin, an opioid like substance that goes into the body and affects digestion and mood.
Ally Houston:This is really why I wanted to get into the academic side of it is to try to nail down what it is that affects people's mood about diet and really try to academically formally test what I did to help myself formally test what I did to help myself. So that's why I'm doing a study next year on using ketogenic diet for ADHD with depression, and the Bazooki Group very kindly funded that study and we've been raising money with crowdfund as well to make the studies as good as it possibly can be. So it's amazing that the number of clinicians now and you can find a lot of them on Georgia Eads clinician directory around the world who are noticing that their clients and patients are getting remarkable results using ketogenic diets and metabolic therapies more widely, particularly around sugar abstinence for their mental health, and there's still a big question mark about the exact mechanisms. So I'm excited to be part of the group that's trying to work that out.
Florence:Oh my gosh, it's so exciting. If I was 20 years younger, I swear I would say I'm doing my PhD too. I'm coming to join you. It's fascinating. I have so many questions. There's so many different little experiments. I'm sure I'd love to run.
Ally Houston:Yeah, amazing.
Florence:So that study the ADHD with depression. Are you accepting clients or is that going to be more local to Oxford or how can people be a part of that or support that?
Ally Houston:So we thought for a long time about exactly how to recruit, and I think, in order for it to be as clean a test as possible, we're going to do it blind, in a sense. So what I mean by that is we'll recruit people who are on adhd clinic waiting lists trying to get a diagnosis, and we're doing that because we don't want people who are already on adhd drugs. We'd rather that they came to a diet and were not on drugs yet, so that they didn't taper off by themselves and not tell us, and then that might hide the effects of the diet. And so we're just going to advertise as like a diet and lifestyle intervention and then, if they pass the inclusion criteria and don't have any of the exclusion criteria, we'll randomize them. So that means that they'll either be assigned a ketogenic diet or they'll be assigned a control diet where, um, they'll be told to kind of eat healthily in a vague, almost meaningless way, like most people are already Everything in moderation kind of thing. And so that will be the test. It will be if you get coached every week on using a ketogenic diet, versus getting coached every week by someone who's perfectly nice and giving you the time of day and all that, which isn't nothing. People really respond well to that, obviously. Then I think that'll be quite a controlled test of it and, crucially, that you've been randomized to those groups so that it's not like a keto true believer who's going in to really help with the results. So that's the Oxford study, and we'll be doing that next year in recruiting from clinics in the UK.
Ally Houston:But what we're doing right now with MetSci is a kind of commercial version of the Oxford study, where we're getting super interested in how wearable technology can help with all of this, and so right now we're just recruiting the first wave of people who are taking part in this pilot, and what they're doing is they're going to wear a continuous glucose monitor for 12 weeks. They're going to wear an Oura ring or similar, like an Apple watch or something that measures heart rate variability, and we'll coach them for 12 weeks on how to use ketogenic diet and metabolic psychiatry principles for their mental health Things like brain fog and irritability, mood up and downs, forgetfulness, that kind of thing Kind of at the lighter end of the mental health symptom spectrum and see how they get on. And we'll measure their mood and cognition and energy every day and get all that data from them and hopefully it'll take the coaching which we know works so well and close that loop so that we can recognize when, if there's a signal on the continuous glucose monitor on the or on the ure ring that correlates with their mood or their cognition or their energy dipping or going up, that we can work out on a user and population level what works and let them know in advance. Oh, there's a little red flag.
Ally Houston:We think that in an hour or a day or a week you might feel bad. So why don't you do X, y and Z, because that's what's made you feel good. So I think that's the way that people can really get involved is go to netscicom and get involved with Pilot. So we've just recruited the first cohort and keep an eye out over the next kind of month to six weeks, because we're going to be making announcements about who's joining the team, which is very exciting, and how you can get involved in the next wave of the pilot oh my gosh, that sounds amazing and, quite frankly, that sounds exactly like my coaching programs yeah, like I.
Florence:That's really cool. We do cgm, we do our rings, we check our rate variability, we do low carb, more paleo keto, but not necessarily keto. Actually, more paleo low carb. Uh, some people do keto, but it isn't. Yeah, I'm very, very amazing.
Florence:So actually I should probably connect with you about there's any data I can share. Certainly, people can see on their CGMs that the dips are typically when they experience anxiety. They can experience anxiety and high hyperglycemic, you know spikes in blood sugars, but also those dips is when they will feel anxious and negative and fearful and catastrophic right. So that's going to be real interesting to have dart. I just have anecdotal, you know data around that, but that, oh this is going to be so exciting for this research to come out to the world. So there's so much more hope because so many people are struggling, we're stressed, future generations coming up, there's high, high numbers of depression and anxiety and autism and we can get. We can get this sorted. We just need to get people unhooked from the ultra processed foods and then onto the whole foods and then figure out what what ratios were for them. You talked about met metabolic psychiatry principles. Tell me about those principles. What are they?
Ally Houston:yeah. So I quite like the metabolic psychiatry tag because, as evidence emerges, it can be absorbed in and it's not just about nutrition. So of course nutritional psychiatry is a kind of name for similar disciplines in and of themselves and there's different takes on it. You know, some people are all about healthy whole grains and some people are about the Mediterranean diet even though there's not just one Mediterranean diet and other people focus on ketogenic diets or carnivore diets or paleo diets. I think metabolic psychiatry broadens that out to say it's about how you make energy in the body and about having enough nutrients. So if you can include things like sleep hygiene, light hygiene very important using things like heat and cold and anything that positively affects that heart rate variability, so anything that trains your body to switch easily between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system and that can get deranged for all sorts of reasons, very often starting in the gut and with microbiome stuff going along all over the body. So I bet if you asked anyone in in the metabolic psychiatry space what they mean by metabolic psychiatry, you would get a different answer. And that's my answer. And I believe that as the ability to test biomes gets better and better and affect them gets better and better. Uh, we'll get better and better at helping the people who aren't necessarily getting better straight away with an off-the-shelf keto diet, and that is quite a lot of people you know. I think you get people like amber o'hearn, who's brilliant and a great writer and very smart and got better from her bipolar disorder using a carnivore diet, and she's constantly trying to convince people that not everyone gets better when they go on a carnivore diet. You don't just tell people to carnivore harder. That's not necessarily what's going on. That's not necessarily what's going on.
Ally Houston:So I think these principles of functional medicine will increasingly merge with metabolic psychiatry, because I think so much of the great stuff is in that discipline of functional medicine, with gut health, and not just gut, but biome. Biomes can be in the brain, they can be in the joints, they can be anywhere in the systemic blood system and people don't necessarily realize that. I don't know if you're aware of a group called Remission Biome Absolutely brilliant. They're doing great work with ME chronic fatigue syndrome and they found that people were getting better when they were going on a course of antibiotics. That people were getting better when they were going on a course of antibiotics and sometimes they were going from bedridden to skipping down the street, even if it was just for a day or two, and then maybe their symptoms were coming back, maybe not as strong, but they're trying to systematize that into a way that properly understands how they can help people who have this dysregulated neurology.
Ally Houston:Through biome dysfunction throughout the body, there's all sorts of ways into poor mental health.
Ally Houston:I don't think we should neglect in the biopsychosocial model, the psycho and social side.
Ally Houston:Actually, one of the major issues that my clients face is when they get better, which is amazing and they're extremely grateful, and there's like you know, they struggle for metaphors to describe it. Sometimes they're like, oh, it's like a state of grace or the clouds have parted and the sun shining through, but afterwards there can be a wave of very complicated negative emotions like grief and sorrow at time lost and what their lives might have been like and that is crucial to understand and to help them with. And they may have gone through traumatic things that they're only now able to properly deal with because they now only have the strength and the resilience, and that all comes out like a big flood. Um, so I think metabolic psychiatry to me means all of that. But I think what's great about keto is that it's a short word you can understand what it means in about two minutes and it actually acts on multiple different pathways and really helps people with the addiction part of it, which is like it really is the thin end of the wedge.
Florence:Even if people don't want to admit it more often than not, there's this huge addiction component going on and the thing that, yeah, and I love that you're saying that it's not it's not just about nutrition, right that that but I think it's foundational for many people. It's foundational in that you, if you don't have the food right and you're doing meditating, and you're out, going for your walk in nature and get your light in your eyes, and you're sleeping eight hours a day and you're hydrated and you're you're praying and you're socializing and you're like you've got everything else going for and you don't have your diet right, it's like limited capacity it's. There's no substitute for making sure that your diet's right for your body and that it consists of mostly whole foods and really depending on the macros and the ratios and the foods that work for your body. But, um, yeah, there's just no way around the fact that we don't get to eat ding dongs and meditate all day and think we're going to be mentally well, because for those of us that are sensitive, it's just not going to work.
Florence:But this does work and can work and there is hope and, yeah, okay, so we have to break up with junk food, but maybe that's you know, to quote Ali maybe that's a blessing, maybe it's not. That, oh bummer, I can't eat it. Maybe it's not that, oh bummer, I can't eat it. Maybe it's like oh man, I'm so grateful, I'm one of those people that don't even get to eat a bite.
Ally Houston:I'm spared yeah, yeah, it's a. It's a funny place to be in in the world that we live in. Um, and you know, one of the major things that I have to help clients get over I dare say say you're the same is the social aspect of saying no to things and the sense of slight sense of deprivation that lingers even after a long time. But you're just sort of twiddling your thumbs while other people are entertaining their mouths.
Florence:Right, they're having a party with food. Yeah, a mouth party, amazing. Is there any final words you'd like to share today on the topic of metabolic psychiatry and ultra-processed foods and that whole mess?
Ally Houston:Just that if anyone's come on to this summit because they're curious and they're really not sure and they're on the fence and they think maybe it's not for me, maybe this is a load of rubbish and everyone eats sugar, it's fine, I would say that you're really not alone, that so many people, myself included, have changed their lives by changing their nutrition and lifestyle, and that you should have hope. If you don't have hope because that is the most amazing thing that when you're ready to change and you're probably listening to this or watching this because you feel, okay, maybe I'm ready this time that I see people every day who stick with it and make it work and you can do it too amazing.
Florence:I love that. And I forgot to ask one really important question. You were binging before when you were eating processed junk foods. You go paleo keto, you get low carb, you pull out all the processed junk food. Did you ever binge again, or did that resolve itself when you took the processed foods out?
Ally Houston:yeah. So beside dairy, I would say I can if it's lean, particularly lean processed meat. So, um, thinking about really salty, vinegary, spicy stuff like biltong or I've made drovorce and, yeah, I do eventually get full, but I do feel like it's slightly disordered. So for me it's about, um, whole foods that don't have massive amounts of uh, of salt, and in a preserved way. So there is, there is gray area around all of that. Um, and I've never felt like I've been a kind of volume eater. You know some people who binge anything just until they're they're beyond full. That's not me, and I found that if I find and this is true for almost all my clients is that if they find the foods that they love, that love them back and then they just eat when they're hungry until they're full. That works and that's been the same for me too, and now I just eat when I'm hungry until I'm full and I feel really nourished eat when.
Florence:I'm hungry until I'm full and I feel really nourished. I wonder okay, thanks for sharing that, because there is definitely debate and research happening about the overlap between binge eating disorder and ultra processed food addiction. And I was just thinking ah, ali might be one of those examples of someone who was binge eating, eating past full, eating till you felt sick, right, but you get onto whole foods and that more or less resolved itself. There's still some foods that can trigger you the dairy, and this sounds like a sausage or something I'm not sure I don't recognize the North American. I don't think that's a North American sausage, but anyways, I understand what you're saying.
Florence:It can be processed in a way that gets a little bit hooky for you. But generally speaking, that the binge eating disorder, the eating till you're sick, you know you only did that with all your processed foods and that you for the most part don't do that with whole foods, which again suggests that some binge eating is really driven. It's driven by the foods. It's not the biopsychosocial. There's a bio piece that's bigger than the psychosocial in that case.
Ally Houston:I absolutely agree. I absolutely agree. I was at Jen Unman's addiction consensus meeting in London in May and I thought it was a brilliant day. The speakers like Anna Lemke and Chris Van Tulleken and others were terrific and I think you know the stuff, like anna lemke's work in dopamine nation and, um, the science that goes back a long time is unequivocal. You know, we get addicted to foods and it's certain types of foods which are worse than others and you can be free of it amazing.
Florence:Thank you, ali. Thank you for staying up late. It's really late for him over there in the UK. I appreciate your time and your story and your work.
Ally Houston:It's been amazing oh good, it's my pleasure. Thanks, florence.
