The Kick Sugar Coach Podcast
The Kick Sugar Coach Podcast
Jan Ellison Baszucki: The Role of Diet in Mental Health Treatment
When Jan Ellison Baszucki's 19-year-old son Matt had a manic episode at UC Berkeley, it started five years of hell. Psychiatric hospitals. Twenty-nine different medications. Therapy after therapy. Nothing worked.
"I thought we'd lost him," Jan says. Matt wasn't the energetic, intellectual kid they knew. He was barely functioning, even when he wasn't manic or depressed.
Then they tried something radical: a ketogenic diet. Within four months, Matt was in remission from bipolar disorder.
Jan, who runs the Baszucki Group and founded Metabolic Mind, has spent the last few years diving deep into the science of metabolic psychiatry. Her message is simple but revolutionary: your brain needs the right fuel to function properly.
In this conversation, Jan gets real about what it's like to watch your child disappear into mental illness—and what it feels like to get them back. She talks about the emerging research showing ketones can stabilize mood in ways medications often can't. And she shares practical advice for families who feel stuck in the traditional treatment system.
This isn't about ditching medication or therapy. It's about understanding that sometimes the brain just isn't getting what it needs to heal. For some people, changing how they eat changes everything.
If you're dealing with mental health issues in your family, or you're curious about this growing field of metabolic psychiatry, this conversation will give you a lot to think about.
Jan Ellison Baszucki is a Silicon Valley executive turned mental health advocate whose family's story is helping pioneer new approaches to treating serious mental illness.
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Hello and welcome to an interview today with Jan Ellison Buzuki, who is the president of the Buzuki Group and founder of Metabolic Mind. She's a former Silicon Valley fintech marketing executive. She's also a writer, a parent, a mental health advocate and an aspiring citizen scientist. She, with her husband, David, founder and CEO of Roblox, co-founded the Bazooki Group, where she co-directs strategies and leads day-to-day operations. She focuses on initiatives at the intersection of metabolism and mental health, which is what we're going to focus on in our interview today. They also touch on other topics like regenerative agriculture and electoral reform. Inspired by her own personal journey of supporting her son through his bipolar recovery journey who is Matt? And Matt is on our summit and I have never had a summit where I've had a father I'm sorry, a son and a mother duo show up, so this is pretty exciting. She advocates, through Metabolic Mind, for the use of ketogenic therapies and other metabolic treatments to address serious mental illness. She's the author. As an aside, just on top of it all, she's also an author, a best-selling novelist, and she's had her essays appear in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle. She has degrees from Stanford University, San Francisco State University, and she's currently working on a memoir about her family's experience with mental illness and recovery.
FLORENCE:Welcome, Jen. Thank you. Happy to be here, Lauren, Thank goodness. So my understanding is that when Matt sort of adopted the ketogenic diet, you and your husband also did as well. Right, we did Okay?
FLORENCE:Because I'm thinking there's no way you can do all that and not be on adequate energy yeah, it's been great for both of us yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, let's talk a bit about um, where do you want to start? Do you want to start a bit with your own story of of awakening to the potential of the intersection, I guess, between metabolic health and mental health? Sure, I mean?
JAN:I know matt has shared his story but in case you know people haven't watched him first, I'll just give a little bit of background on. You know how we got here. Matt's the eldest of our four children. We also have three daughters and we had a pretty easy time of it honestly raising four kids the usual bumps, but nothing serious, you know. No, no educational issues, no real behavioral issues, kind of sailing through.
JAN:And then when Matt was 19, he was a freshman at UC Berkeley and he had a full blown manic episode in the spring and we'd kind of seen it coming. You know people want to know what triggered it and I think it's never one thing. It was many things together. It was probably a very competitive, sensitive temperament, very ambitious, very intellectual. Probably his brain needed really good fuel and maybe he wasn't getting it in college, wasn't sleeping well, he was using alcohol, marijuana, he was smoking cigarettes, and then he got mono and then he got strep and he went back to college and within a couple of months he was landed in a psychiatric hospital and he was there that first time, at Stanford, for 10 days. He got out and then there were two years really of struggle in and out of psych wards, in and out of residential treatment centers. I mean, we really tried everything to try to just get him stable enough to stay on his meds, and that took two years. And then, after two years, after he kind of been wandering around the streets of California for a couple of weeks, we found him. We got him hospitalized again and after that he said, okay, I never want to be manic again, what do I need to do? He understood that he was sick and he wanted to take it on, and then he started putting everything in place, got sober, he quit smoking cigarettes, he started meditating, he was med compliant on five different medications for three full years and he he actually was prescribed 29 different medications during the five years that he was ill. Oh, my goodness, yeah. And so it was incredibly frustrating for him. He was seeing a psychiatrist weekly and he's doing everything that he's being told to do and he's not well. He was what you might call euthymic. He wasn't in a full-blown manic episode and he wasn't in a full-blown depressive episode, but he was not himself. And you know, when I talk to families, I think it's really important to remember that you know your loved one better than the psychiatrists who are treating them do, and it's really important to not give up until you get your loved one back full. You know fully, not not some version of your loved one that is impaired, and at that stage he was really impaired.
JAN:And then I happened to meet someone who had gone on a ketogenic diet. He told us about Dr Chris Palmer's work and I stayed up probably that night reading the whole website. There was not a lot of material. Then there were two case studies and there was some articles that Dr Palmer and Dr Georgia Eda had written, but we reached out to Dr Palmer and he agreed to consult with us, and then Matt started the diet in January of 2021, along with my husband and me, and we also had help from Denise Potter, who's a dietician out of the epilepsy world.
JAN:So we were very, very fortunate to have resources at our disposal. Still, it was complicated, it was scary. I had a lot of questions and I couldn't find, you know, there weren't any families to talk to, there weren't other parents to talk to, because there was no community, and so we just sort of relied on expert advice and started, and I would say that within four months, matt was pretty much in remission from bipolar cycling. He still had, you know, he still had things to work out lower level symptoms, but for the most part he was himself.
FLORENCE:Again, I will say after four months on a ketogenic diet, yeah, and what was it like before the turning point? Like, did, did he struggle with the keto flu? Was he like, yeah, what was that sort of transition window Like?
JAN:yeah, so he. So he started I think he like January 4th and I remember all through Christmas planning. You know what are we going to eat and where are we going to get the food and what are the ratios and do we need to weigh everything, all of those things we were putting in place? When's he going to measure his ketones? You know, got keto mojo. He definitely got keto flu. He also got COVID right at the beginning and that did not help. So he started to feel better. Then he got COVID and then his ketones went really high. He got sick again and his ketones went to like seven and he had some gastrointestinal distress from that, easily solved by swallowing a tablespoon of apple juice, it turns out. That's how simple it is to resolve. You know, keto flu and other various other challenges in the beginning.
JAN:But it was probably by March that we started to see very clear signs of a dramatic shift. And I think the most dramatic thing for Matt was if he, in the years that he was ill for five years, if he lost a half an hour of sleep one night and it was usually in the January to April timeframe, which is when people who have bipolar disorder tend to get manic. And so if he lost it, so if he woke up at six one morning, the next morning wake up at five, 30, the next morning it'd be five and the next morning, you know, it'd be two in the morning and he would stop sleeping. Um, that changed in ketosis. When he's in nutritional ketosis, if he has a bad night's sleep one night, the next night he will make it up with a nine hour sleep, just like a regular, a non-bipolar brain.
JAN:And I think that's been the most dramatic, obvious shift and it's something I'm super interested in from a scientific perspective, because why would being in nutritional ketosis change a broken circadian rhythm like that? It's such a profound physiological shift. And so he didn't get manic and he didn't have to go up on his medications, as he had the last five years, you know, and so he stayed on like a low dose of antipsychotic and then he's just started getting better and better and better. And I think one of the one of the most important things we hear from people is that there's a dramatic improvement in the beginning and then it just continues, like the cognitive function improves, the just overall health and vigor improve the longer someone is in ketogenic therapy, and we definitely what we've seen with Matt and definitely what we hear from other people in the community.
FLORENCE:And what about for you and your husband? What did you notice for yourselves?
JAN:Oh well, I lost 20 pounds and I didn't gain it back. That was big for me. I would say for my husband you know he's CEO of Roblox, very intense entrepreneur, silicon Valley type, and it has just leveled him out Like he. I remember on the weekends he used to crash and like take long naps and be kind of fried and he's just like steady energy, go, go, go all week, all weekend. I think it's definitely resolved any kind of blood sugar fluctuations that were causing changes in energy.
JAN:I should say we had already been on paleo diets and low-carb diets. It was not brand new to us. We'd already incorporated that kind of into our lifestyle. What changed was a real focus on being in nutritional ketosis, especially for Matt, and tracking the ketones and adjusting the macros anytime they got a little off. I think for him it's really important to be and at least it was for the first year or so to be in pretty deep ketosis. That's what stabilized the mood symptoms and when people want to know well, how high do my ketones need to be? It's very individualized. If you're treating something like type 2ia or schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder, major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder and maybe anxiety disorders, it seems that the ketones. Higher the ketones, the fewer the symptoms. We need more data, but that's the early signal that we're getting.
FLORENCE:I was hearing. So just to make that number sort of concrete, I was hearing between 1.5 and 3.5. Is that right? Is that high enough? Is that what you're getting in your data?
JAN:Yeah, actually in the Edinburgh data anything over two was correlating with major symptom reduction.
FLORENCE:So I'm curious to know how long did it take for Matt understanding that he's a young male in his 20s. But how long did it take for Matt to start to see some of those higher elevated ketone numbers so that he could start to feel the good effects of?
JAN:it. I'm thinking back, I think he was. He got into ketosis really quickly and within the first several days he was in ketones one and a half and beyond. Um, he, he's. He's an athlete, so I think that probably helps. Um, it's quite muscular, he lifts weights, and so that I'm sure that that helped him get into ketosis more quickly is.
FLORENCE:I have not had many clients, but I tend to work with women older, menopausal, pre-menopause like like totally definitely harder for this right.
JAN:Like sometimes it can take like three weeks for us to start to see ketones right and I mean I still have a really hard time producing ketones over like 0.6 um. I don't even try, okay, but I think for people who are younger, more metabolically healthy, um, they can get into ketosis really quickly and okay, and but we we have to play around with um the ratios, so, especially with the interaction with medications. I just learned something about protein binding. Actually he's on three medications still that have high protein binding and he was pushing his protein up higher because he's a bodybuilder and that can interfere with producing ketones and also can interfere with um just feeling, you know, okay, because it's changing the medication levels. So a lot of different factors that I think you know. We, we just learned that you need to troubleshoot it. It's different for everyone. Things change over time. Just need to kind of keep trying things, keep adjusting the ratios, adjust the exercise and, over time, figure out what's going to work.
JAN:And one of our collaborators who has a channel that used to be called Living Well with Schizophrenia. She's been on metabolic therapies for eight months. She changed her channel name to Living Well After Schizophrenia because she's in complete remission in just eight months. I actually think she went into remission much sooner than that and she tries to keep her ketones like over three, and she's been sharing this journey, uh, on her youtube channel, and so you know we can see that sometimes various things will happen and her ketones will drop and then she'll have to adjust the ratios to get them back up so tell us, talk to us, a little bit more about nutritional ketosis, because most people, when they think they hear the word keto, they think, oh, burgers and cheese and guacamole and bacon all in one meal, right, like they just think about the food, the fatty, meaty foods.
FLORENCE:But that's totally not what keto, nutritional ketosis, is. Do you want to tell us a bit more about that?
JAN:Sure, um, the way we think about it. You know everyone's pretty much heard of the keto diet for weight loss and I think people, that's what people think of. You know it's not a healthy diet because all I'm eating is saturated fat and tons of meat and cheese and bacon, butter and bacon, and that is certainly one way to get into nutritional ketosis. But the distinction that we try to make is there's like the keto diet, which people have kind of heard about, and then there's the state of nutritional ketosis, and the state of nutritional ketosis simply means that your body is burning fat for energy and producing ketones that the brain can use for energy. And so whatever nutritional strategy combined with, you know, maybe intermittent fasting, where you're not eating all the time, or extreme exercise that puts your body into a state of nutritional ketosis, where you know, maybe intermittent fasting, where you're not eating all the time, or extreme exercise that puts your body into a state of nutritional ketosis, where you know you can prick your finger twice a day and find out if you have, if you are producing ketones, that is a ketogenic nutritional strategy.
JAN:And so any way of eating that can put you into that nutritional state or that metabolic state is ketogenic, and so we have people doing vegan keto, we have people doing Mediterranean keto, we have people doing carnivore, we have people doing, you know, modified Atkins, which is probably kind of what we do. We have people with ratios that are, you know, like the traditional ketogenic diet, four to one, that really need to get their ketones up, people doing 1.5 to one, which is like 55% fat or 60% fat, which is not a very extreme ketogenic diet at all, but for some people they can produce ketones just fine that way. And so I think it's really important to understand that ketogenic therapy, in the way that we're defining it at Metabolic Mind, can accommodate all kinds of nutritional strategies and preferences, and that is really important for people to understand, because someone who's vegan, who's really committed to that lifestyle, may think it's out of reach for them, and it isn't necessarily.
FLORENCE:I so agree, and I'm so glad you've said that right. There's so much bio-individuality and it does change, as you said, and things can change. We have to stay in tune with our bodies. I love that. And what other metabolic therapies are you exploring as a sort of cutting edge with respect to how we think about and how we treat mental illness?
JAN:Sure, I mean, this is a really important question and we get a lot of questions about well, is that all I have to do is just be in nutritional ketosis and then I can live the rest of my life? However, I want Not necessarily right. If you're drinking and using, you know, not active and not again inside all day or on a computer all day long, playing video games all day long, that's not going to lead to robust health. I like to take it back to Matt's experience, because he spent five years well, three years really after he really decided he wanted to get well, putting a lot of measures in place. As I had mentioned, he was med compliant, he was exercising pretty much every day. He was doing light therapy, so he'd get up in the morning and get sunlight and then he'd wear blue light blocking glasses at night.
JAN:A lot of therapies, a lot of practices that turn out to impact metabolism in a positive way, but he didn't get better until he went on the diet.
JAN:So if I were to switch it all up and we had to do it all over again, that would have been the very first thing, because I think it would have made everything else easier. And so you know, it's really important to understand what other things contribute to robust metabolic health, and we're actually just about to launch a program called Think Smart, which is therapeutic integration of nutritional ketosis plus SMART, sleep, move, avoid, rebuild and track, and that is our way of framing what are the other things I need to be doing, what are the other things other people are doing in addition to nutritional ketosis that are leading to wellness, and what order you do it in is going. There's going to be a lot of individuality there, but those are the five. We've kind of codified it. Everything else, anything else you could do in your life that can improve your metabolic and mental health, and so we'll be launching that program. Um, so, website and uh, it's. It's really a tool, community based tool for the community.
FLORENCE:Oh amazing, it sounds really great. I love the acronym because it people can remember it and, yes, really great.
JAN:Everyone who knows me knows I really love acronyms, so oh okay, that's your thing.
FLORENCE:Okay, I really really love that acronym too. Awesome. So what sort of so? When did you actually found the Bazooki Foundation? Has it been two, three years now?
JAN:It's been two or three years we had been doing even before we formally launched Pazuki Group we had been doing science grants in the bipolar space. So we spent several years, ever since Matt got sick, really giving grants to science investigators that we thought anything that seemed like it might be promising or cutting edge or interesting we would do a grant. We probably gave out 60 bipolar grants in the first few years and then, once Matt got better, we pivoted Bazooki Group to really focusing on this intersection of metabolism and mental health and then we founded Metabolic Mind two years ago to do the work of education and sharing stories and sharing the science as well.
FLORENCE:Right, so you've got two years of data now that's been coming in, and much, much more to come Beyond Matt. What else have you seen in terms of stories of transformation?
JAN:Oh, my gosh. I mean every week it seems like we get somebody sending us an email or posting something on excerpt LinkedIn sharing their stories. And we now have the data from these early pilot trials the Stanford trial, which was published a few months ago, the Edinburgh trial, which the papers soon to be published. They wrapped up about a year ago. We have, and what we're hearing is miraculous stories of recovery.
JAN:Not everybody recovers in the same way, not everybody recovers, but I would say that what we're hearing out of these studies is that everyone sees some improvement, either just metabolic, health-wise their A1C gets better, their insulin sensitivity gets better, their cholesterol gets better, their blood sugar stabilizes, their mood, you know, improves a little bit, their cognitive function gets better, their anxiety is reduced. And then, for some percentage of people, we just see miraculous recoveries. Where people have been struggling with mental illness, severe mental illness, their entire lives, you know hearing voices, delusions, anorexia, severe anorexia, debilitating, you know, decades long anorexia, resolving in a matter of months once the brain is fed in the way that brains are intended to be fed, the brain is fed in the way that brains are intended to be fed Incredible.
FLORENCE:And I have my own story of this, but a little bit different than Matt. So I have a daughter who, very early on though when I look back as a mom and even that not even looking back even then I knew that she was very carb sensitive. So if I picked her up from a play day at school a school like a friend's house or something and my kid would wiggle, the tips of her ears would be red and she'd wiggle and she'd be a little bit giddy and right Like, and I'd be like, oh, what did you get into honey? Right Like. I clued in really quick, sensitive kid, and so I did my very best. I was already awakened to my own sensitivity to refine carbohydrates, which later I've expanded to even beautiful, healthy, whole food carbohydrates that many people eat, and I'm glad that you can. But I have a migraine brain and I have some mental illness in my um, both sides of my family, and we're just carb sensitive and I didn't. I didn't know the extent to which it impacted mental health, but I knew it impacted my migraines. So I was raising Skye with that awareness that these, especially the refined carbohydrates, they're a problem and so I protected her as best I could. But as she got older it became less and less possible. It was everywhere. It was everywhere Teachers passing it out as rewards in the classroom. So I did my best to protect her.
FLORENCE:But as she got older, her sensitivity and her reactions to them become more, became more pronounced, and when she's on carbs she's exquisitely sensitive to sleep deprivation, like the half hour you were talking about. It caught my attention because she would have meltdowns and she'd struggle and her capacity, her stress resilience was so little right. So this was I saw this in my kid really young, and by the time she hit her teens she was really into the junk food, ate like a typical teenager, had some of her own money, grabbed food at the cafeteria in high school and went right off the deep end with moods and just yeah, I lost her. And there you know I don't think Sky would mind me saying, because I think she's quite open about this, but I thought there was.
FLORENCE:I thought there was a time there where I might lose her and lose her to suicide more than anything that she was just so, so anxious and so depressed and so tired of trying everything. She was trying diet, meditation. She was like took up a run, she was trying everything Right. She was like pick took up a ride, she was trying everything Right. And so I would say to her eventually so I kept saying Sky, why don't you try keto honey, why don't you try keto? And she did. And she's a year and a half in and she's a completely transformed kid and unbelievable the miracle that we received she received and I get to receive as a mom too but, like you said, it was necessary but not sufficient.
FLORENCE:The food piece is necessary, it's the non-negotiable but not always sufficient right. So these other pieces are sleep and movement and working with thoughts and working with the nervous system. Um, yeah, but it's the foundation. You can do everything else right, but if your food's wrong for you, it's like they're just not going to compensate.
JAN:And if you think about all the time that Matt spent in therapy CBT, dbt, I mean family therapy I don't know how many different forms of therapy we were in he was in, but it was many and if you think about trying to do the difficult work of psychotherapy or learning new skills, if your brain isn't working because it's not fed right, that's going to be an extremely difficult task.
JAN:Or you know I get really frustrated when people say things like to a person who has severe depression well, just get out and move, you know, just get out and get some walk around the block. You know, pick yourself up by your bootstraps. If your brain does not have enough energy to function, you cannot literally cannot get up off the couch and go outside. And we need to understand that and we need to be sensitive and understanding for people's dilemma, which is their brains don't have enough energy to function. And once you get that going, then of course, like, feed the body, feed the brain, and then the person can take on things like therapy and light therapy and exercise and um, and it's tricky because nutrition is probably one of the hardest parts, but I do think it is necessary, as you said, not always sufficient, but necessary, and then it can lead to all kinds of other wonderful changes.
JAN:You know we've seen in alcohol use disorder. For example, there's a wonderful study that showed that people who are withdrawing from alcohol, who are in ketosis, need less benzodiazepine medication in order to get through the withdrawal symptoms, and that's probably related to GABA increasing in the brain on a ketogenic diet. So imagine if someone is trying to kick their addiction and their blood sugar is going all over the place. That's extremely challenging, but if you could stabilize the blood sugar, feed the brain and then try something. That is that difficult, everything gets easier.
FLORENCE:Totally, including exercise for people who are so exhausted. So my background is trauma and I understand that. Trauma is a physiological state of collapse. It is a state of overwhelm. It is. They call it the dorsal freeze, right? Well, what is the dorsal freeze? It is. It is basically, first foremost and fundamentally, an energy crisis. Your body does not believe it has enough energy to meet that threat, so it collapses and it's a very it's a it's a dark place. People feel hopeless and helpless and depressed, despairing. It's a very dark place. The dorsal trauma response right, the dorsal freeze response.
FLORENCE:And what was very interesting for me because I wear an aura ring and I track my HR I track my HRV and when I was doing when I and I I have been on all kinds of different diets and I've done so much geeking out on my own body. But I was stunned. I did a carnivore challenge and it isn't one I want to continue long-term, but I'm glad I did it and I recorded every day. I turned on zoom and I shared what was happening. But what was very interesting is my heart rate variability, which is normally pretty high, between 30 to 36, not bad shot up to 45 or 46, massive change, and I was getting two hours of deep set just from taking out the plant foods.
JAN:It was a hundred percent carnivore at the time but you'd already been keto, so it wasn't a huge shift.
FLORENCE:No, I wasn't keto. I wouldn't say I'm probably low, low carb, more paleo, but I eat tons of veggies and I love them and I thrive on them for the most part, I think, but I wanted to try the carnivore challenge. I'm going to try this. See what happens. So I didn't know what to expect, but it took me a while to get into higher ketones. I can't get, I couldn't get above 0.6 I don't know.
JAN:I've heard some people who said that they have a harder time producing high ketones at um on carnivore.
JAN:I don't know if that's because of the protein is at a higher ratio, maybe yeah it makes sense that definitely has a higher time producing ketones when his protein is higher yeah, well, that the gluco, uh, the gluconeogenesis, there's got to be a piece that's still for us to understand fully, um, totally but that is really interesting about hrv that matt tracks his hrv too and like, if he's coming off of a medication and he has withdrawal, symptoms of withdrawal, he can see that reflected in his hrv.
JAN:I actually was. I was a couple years ago I was working with a hrv expert because we're trying to figure out symptoms of withdrawal. He can see that reflected in his HRV. I actually was. I was a couple of years ago I was working with an HRV expert because we're trying to figure out. It's such a wonderful objective measure of overall stress, allostatic load and if we could somehow, you know, work that into our ketogenic diet trials, which we could easily do with an aura ring. But I think the HRV that the aura ring captures, my understanding, is not super sensitive and accurate, but maybe it's just good enough to get that trend. It's actually something we should be including in the studies that we're funding, because it is that it is one of the very few objective measures of overall stress and stress resiliency.
FLORENCE:Yeah, yes, I absolutely love it and I would suggest if you could get people to choose a Garmin ring a Garmin. I'm sorry, watch, it'd be better. It is a bit.
JAN:Garmin is a better HRV.
FLORENCE:Okay, I think it's the gold standard right now in terms of tracking HRV. And what was also interesting was that my so my stress resilience was was getting higher, but my perception of stress was very different. I thought I was more stressed, really. Yes, oh, that's interesting. I felt like just a bit more, a bit more edgy, but I mean it was early days of getting into ketosis for me. I wasn't like mad on day two, feeling better and high ketones it was a slot, but I I felt a bit more edgy, slightly more cranky, um, just a bit more stress. It was not what my HR HRV was telling me.
FLORENCE:And so on the aura ring, you have the high stress, high resiliency, anyways, they can track that. Those were all increasing. My stress resiliency was increasing with my HRV. So it was very, very interesting. And another thing that was very interesting and there's a guy out of Finland who's kind of like the world expert on this right now I can see that refined carbohydrates, which I don't get into very often but will spike my adrenaline and my cortisol, it's trackable, yeah, and very, very interesting. But when I'm on adrenaline and cortisol, my perception is that I am more resourced. Interesting, right, it's just so, which is why these trackers are so helpful.
JAN:And that's why this Think Smart program the last letter of smart is tracking and, um, what we? Our intention with this program is to hear from the community, not to prescribe what we think people should do because we don't know. Um, that's not. We're not in the business of telling people how high their ketones should be or, you know, when they should be exercising, but we want to hear from other people what worked for you. And so, in terms of tracking, this is one of the questions we're asking what do you track? What did you start out tracking over time? What things were most critical for you, so that we can just kind of start to assemble a database over time or a data resource over time. What are all the things that work? So, if we were to ask you to fill out a profile on your ThinkSmart strategies, you could tell us about that. The Garmin is the best way to track HRT and it would be super HRV and it would be super, super helpful.
FLORENCE:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's transition to talk a bit about the Bazooki Foundation, what it's doing, how people can get involved how they can support your work.
JAN:So at Bazooki Group we've focused on the intersection of metabolism and mental health We've been talking about today. We also invest in regenerative agriculture programs and democracy mostly electoral reform, nonpartisan electoral reforms and then Metabolic Mind is really the place where people can find us when they want to learn about our work in metabolic and mental health, and metabolicmindorg is where you can find us. We've got a YouTube channel with about 150 videos. Brett Scherer is the host of our YouTube channel. We've got blogs, we've got science, we've got personal stories and then we'll be launching the Think Smart program soon, which you can also find through Metabolic Mind.
FLORENCE:And how can people support your work? Or if you're a young adult going in to do your master's or PhD and would love to do some science around this area, how can they work with you and how can people support you? Do you take donations to your foundation to continue this research? We don't take donations.
JAN:There is an organization that is soon to launch called Metabolic Collective, which hopefully will be taking both volunteers and financial support from the community. But we don't, we're self-funded, for the time being at least, and for people who are interested in the science, you can reach out to us at info at metabolicmindorg. We are connected, we are deeply connected to the scientific community and the clinician community and that is one of the important roles we play as kind of as connector, in making introductions and seeding this interest in this work. And I should say one more thing is that we just announced that there are now two free continuing medical education courses for metabolic psychiatry, one from Dr Georgia Ede and one from Dr Chris Palmer, and you can find that through our website and anyone can take them, but especially designed for clinicians who are looking for approved CME credits. And then they said that first of its kind. So Brett Scherer spearheaded that project and really excited that those have launched.
FLORENCE:Absolutely so I actually I kind of get the sense that you, you, you maybe thought I was getting you to wrap up. I didn't mean for that to happen. We could, but let me, I was going to ask you is there anything we didn't touch on that you wanted to touch on? Um?
JAN:well, yes, I mean I would say that for the families that reach out to me personally that I speak with um, I think the most important thing families need to know is that the person I love is quite possibly still there. It felt to me when Matt was so sick and so impaired, and so not himself, that we'd lost him. I couldn't imagine how his brain, which had taken him all the way to the heights of mania and delusions and psychosis and the depths of dark depressions, how was he going to get back to the brain that he had before, the person he had been, that was, you know, energetic and intellectual and optimistic and positive and loving and steady and calm. Um, while being always fairly intense, I should say Um, and it happened and it felt like a miracle at the time and it was, in a way, a miracle, but it was a miracle of evolutionary biology, not necessarily a spiritual event, although it felt that way.
JAN:And so my advice to people one of the things everyone wants to know is how do you get your loved one on this program? How do you get them interested? And that's a very hard question to answer. I would say just don't give up hope, keep trying. It might take a while. It took us five years really to get Matt on a therapeutic nutritional intervention that he stuck to for the long term, and so it could feel like a long struggle ahead. But if you can keep at it and not give up hope and keep that possibility out there and keep laying, you know, breadcrumbs here and there, recovery is possible. These diseases that we are told are chronic, lifelong you know, forever. This is going to be your life forever. It's inherited in your genes. Well, the same genes that Matt had when he was very, very ill are supporting him now in robust mental health.
FLORENCE:So we have more control over our health than we think we do yes, and I might add that, um, oh, I would add it, but it just went through my head just a minute. Um, matt, oh, I know, one of the things that complicates, even when people are like have this burst of desperation, I'm at my lowest, I'm open to anything, I'll try the keto diet. I'll, or I'll try a nutritional state of ketosis and see if that can help. I often find and much more so with women than any of my male clients or anyone I've ever heard men seem to relapse less on sugar. I don't know why. They just seem to relapse less on the refined carbohydrates.
FLORENCE:And, yeah, very interesting, and you know what? There's just a few studies, but I've seen them. Um, yeah, very interesting, and you know what? There's just a few studies, but I've seen them. I know they exist. It's the same in the, the, the rodents in the, in this, in the labs, that the female rodents are more likely to become addicted to sugar and that they have more extinction bursts and they they're harder to wean off, like they are more for some reason. So one of the things I can get in the way is we can give this burst of motivation to try it and then we have the proverbial. Just the one bite of the cookie and we're hooked all over again. And then we're struggling and it's like we can't get long enough off the processed junk, ultra processed foods, the sugar, to feel good enough to be motivated to carry on. And that can be a real problem, especially the older you get.
JAN:Yes, and I think this is especially important with very serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, because it can take a while. If you had some mild you know anxiety or a little bit of depression here and there, you know, maybe in a few weeks you could start to feel better. And I have heard both Georgia Ede and Chris Palmer say that for serious mental illness you want to give it a solid three to four months at a minimum and see how it goes. And I would say, push that probably even to six months. Like give it a solid six months where you are 100% committed. And I've heard Matt say this before like you got to go all in.
JAN:And in fact Lauren Kennedy, who I mentioned, has the Living Well After Schizophrenia channel. She had gone on a ketogenic diet during COVID. She hadn't, she hadn't known exactly how to do it and it didn't work and she gave up. And then she found out about our work and we talked to her and she decided she was going to try it again and this time she was very, very systematic and very, very committed and she dove in and got into the nitty gritty and, lo and behold, you know, eight months later, her lifelong schizoaffective disorder is gone. It is effectively gone as long as she stays in. Nutritional ketosis is gone.
FLORENCE:It is effectively gone as long as she stays in nutritional ketosis, right, right, as long as she's on the medicine, the nutritional, um therapeutic. So what's interesting is that people think sometimes the difference between 99% and a hundred percent is everything Like you're just like oh, I just said one by it. It was like I had been good for a month, right, it's weird and I'm sorry to say it, but for some people that 99%, a hundred percent is night and day, isn't it?
JAN:Yeah, that's right. Jen Unwin talks about this. Um, she has an amazing channel, uh, and her husband is is curing people of diabetes, reversing type two diabetes, in his practice. He's a physician and she is really, I think, leading the charge in educating people about food addiction and she shares her story in, actually, a documentary film that we have underway called the Cholesterol Code, and she shares her story.
JAN:If she has a bite of two bites of refined carbohydrates, she is addicted and she will continue to consume them, and so she needs to think of it just like any other addiction. You know, we don't we don't encourage people who have alcohol use disorder to alcohol cycle or, you know, have some have some alcohol once a week, it's okay. You know, some people could do carb cycling and we definitely have people in the community who are you, you know in ketosis five days out of the week and that aren't on the weekends and that works, but they've carefully tested that over time and, um, not everyone can do that and I think that is a question of understanding your own responses to the food that you're eating.
FLORENCE:Totally, which is where the tracking comes in, because it's so easy to to to lie to ourselves or to be to misinterpret our cues. I would have said I am less stressed on the sugar. Thank you very much. More energy and I feel bad.
JAN:No.
FLORENCE:Yeah, lie, it's, I'm, I'm, I'm not correct. So yeah, no BLTs for six months. No bites, no licks, no taste. Just stay the course and give it the BLT, but don't have the bread Totally. Is there any final words you'd like to share today?
JAN:Well, just thank you for having me and thank you for having Matt, and thank you for your own journey and the work that you're doing in this community.
FLORENCE:Thanks so much. I will put in a shameless plug. Jan is on our summit this year and she talks all about this addiction piece, so I catch her. Catch her interview as well. Thanks everybody for tuning in today. Thank you.
