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We spend a lot of time exploring the connection between nourishing foods and physical health, and in this episode, we are taking a look at the impact food has on mental health.
Jan Ellison Baszucki is a former Silicon Valley fintech marketing executive, writer, parent, and mental health advocate. When her son, Matt, was diagnosed at age 19 with bipolar disorder, Jan and her family tried every therapy and treatment available with little success.
Through Jan’s tireless research, she came across anecdotal evidence of someone with bipolar using a ketogenic diet to manage his condition. So after finding more scientific results and with the support of a practitioner, Jan’s son started following the diet. The results were life-changing.
During this episode, Jan opens up about what it’s like to live with someone with a mental illness and what it’s taken to get her son on a path to health. Listen in to this very personal story as Jan, and I discuss:
- How mental illness affects the whole family
- What it took for Jan’s son to realize he was ill
- Discovering the keto diet and how they put it into practice
- How Matt is doing today
Throughout this entire journey, Jan has acknowledged the privileged position her family is in that allowed Matt to recover from his mental health. This is why Jan founded Baszucki Group, a nonprofit devoted to transforming mental health outcomes. Their newest initiative, Metabolic Mind, focuses on providing resources and building community in metabolic psychiatry.
Resources:
Sustainable Dish Episode 92 with Dr. Georgie Ede
The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz
The UltraMind Solution by Mark Hyman
Two Meals a Day by Mark Sisson
Brain Energy by Dr. Chris Palmer
The Case for Keto by Gary Taubes
Connect with Jan:
Website: Baszucki Group | Metabolic Mind
Twitter: @janellison
Episode Credits:
Thank you to all who’ve made this show possible. Our hosts are Diana Rodgers and James Connelly. Our producer is Emily Soape. And, of course, we are grateful for our sponsors, Patreon supporters, and listeners.
If you’re ready to take your support for a nutritious, sustainable, and equitable food system to the next level, join my Global Food Justice Alliance community on Patreon. You will have access to ad-free podcasts, exclusive videos, a discussion community, and much more. Go to sustainabledish.com/join to support my work.
A big thanks to the sponsor of today’s show, LMNT. Do you often suffer from headaches, muscle cramps, fatigue, or sleeplessness? It could be from an electrolyte deficiency, and drinking plain water may not be enough to replenish lost electrolytes. LMNT is a drink mix that has everything you need and nothing you don’t – no artificial ingredients, food coloring, gluten, fillers, or sugar!
LMNT comes in lots of great flavors, and when you go to sustainabledish.com/LMNT, you’ll get a free sample pack with your purchase. Plus, they have a convenient subscription program that makes it easy for you to keep your favorite flavors fully supplied. Head over to sustainabledish.com/LMNT to give it a try.
Quotes:
“I read The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz, and everything changed in our household. And I was like, oh, shoot, I’ve been feeding my kids the wrong thing.” – Jan Ellison Buszucki
“That idea that all foods are good, there’s no bad foods, we shouldn’t shame anything or everything in moderation – that’s killing people.” – Diana Rodgers, RD
“[On the keto diet], I have stable weight for the first time in my life. I don’t worry about it at all. I’m not trying to be skinny, but I don’t worry about it.” – Jan Ellison Buszucki
Transcript:
Diana Rodgers, RD
Welcome to the Sustainable Dish Podcast. I’m Diana Rodgers, a real food registered dietitian, author, and sustainability advocate. I co-host this podcast with James Connelly, who was a producer on my film Sacred Cow. I also founded the Global Food Justice Alliance, an initiative advocating for the inclusion of animal-source foods like meat, dairy, and eggs for a more nutritious, sustainable, and equitable worldwide food system. You can check it out and join me at global food justice.org. Thanks again for listening. And now, on to our show.
(Patreon Ad) Diana Rodgers, RD
Ready to take your support for a nutritious, sustainable, and equitable food system to the next level? Join my Global Food Justice Alliance community on Patreon and have access to ad-free podcasts, exclusive videos, and a discussion community, plus so much more. Go to sustainable dish.com/join to support my work, and thank you.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Welcome back to the podcast, everyone. I’m so excited today to have with me Jan Ellison Baszucki. She is here with me to talk a little bit about her son’s struggle with mental health and the solution that they found in real food. And there’s been some exciting research on it. I’ve had Dr. Georgia Ede on the podcast before, and was going to talk to her about it. But I thought it might be even more powerful to hear from the mom, who kind of spearheaded a lot of this and is a major supporter of my work at Global Food Justice Alliance and also of just supporting diets that are sort of low carb, real food and solving all kinds of problems, including mental health. So thank you so much for being on the show.
Jan Ellison Baszucki
Thank you for having me, Diana. I’m thrilled to be here today.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah, so will you please give a little bit of your background, so people know a little bit about your story, who you are, and the struggles that your family had?
Jan Ellison Baszucki
Sure. Well, I, after a career in Silicon Valley, started having kids – four of them boys and three girls. Our son is the eldest. And then started writing fiction essays, short stories. I published a novel in 2015. And then, right, and then the paperback came out a year later. And then right around the time that I was on the tour for the paperback, my son had a manic episode. And it started with, you know, a text that he sent me saying, basically, you know, I’m having a spiritual transformation kind of. I know these texts seem strange because they’re coming straight from my body. And all of a sudden… I mean, we had known that he was not doing well, that he was under a lot of stress and that he wasn’t sleeping well. But that was the moment when it became very clear that something had gone terribly wrong with his brain. And it was not difficult to diagnose him. Typically, with bipolar disorder, it can take an average of seven years to diagnose the illness. We knew in that moment that he was having a manic episode. I essentially Googled his symptoms, and I knew that’s what was happening. So in a way, we were lucky that he was very weak, very quickly identified. What was happening, at least, you know, understood that he was in a mania that eventually led to psychotic symptoms. I remember the first time I heard the term psychotic, it really freaked me out. Psychotic just means having lost touch with reality. And that is what happened with him when he was 19. He was a freshman at UC Berkeley. And I kind of sent our family on a whole new journey. I quit writing and dove into neuropsychiatric research. Essentially, we funded bipolar science for about five years while he was going through this journey. And the first two years entailed four hospitalizations, unfortunately, always for mania. He did not tend toward the depressive side, he tended toward the manic side. And so, you know, we’d be in this cycle where we would get him somewhat stable, and then something would happen, either he would stop taking his meds, or he would lose some sleep, and then the cycle would happen all over again. And so he didn’t have insight into his illness until two years in after the fourth hospitalization down in San Diego. He got insight. He understood that he was ill. And he started on a journey of basically doing everything he possibly could do to be well. He was 21 at that time. He quit smoking cigarettes. He quit drinking, quit weed. He hadn’t really done any other drugs, thank goodness. He was exercising daily. He was meditating daily. He was doing DBT and CBT. I was doing all kinds of research. I was dragging him through many experimental emerging treatments, including at Stanford something called neurostimulation, according to state product protocol, which have just been developed. And in fact, that was very effective for a brief depression, but it didn’t stabilize his mood. And, in fact, nothing really stabilized his mood. And by then we were five years in. He’d been treated by 41 mental health care professionals. He’d been prescribed 29 medications, and he still was battling his mind just to get through the day. He had to fight his own mind. And he was valiantly in that struggle. And then I happened to meet somebody who told me his story about going – he had been bipolar. He had been addicted to several substances. And he was obese, which our son was not. But he had gone on a ketogenic diet under the supervision of a physician at Harvard. And he got better. And so I stayed up all night reading that physician’s website. It was Chris Palmer’s website, and reading all the links and reading all the science and reading the case studies. And it seemed like a good bet. And I felt like we’re really onto something now. But I didn’t tell Matt right away because I had been telling him for five years, “Oh, we’re really onto something.” Now, this is going to help you. We’re going to try this thing and dragging him through, you know, literally, a dozen treatments, including all the medications, which we’re going to try this medication, and this one is going to really help you because of such and such and such and such. This doctor said, and we had been met with dead ends. And so I didn’t want to do that to him again. But I can never keep my mouth shut. So next time I saw him, I kind of blurted it out, “Matt, I met this guy who went on a ketogenic diet, and it helped his bipolar disorder.” And I was fully expecting Matt to say, “Yeah, right, mom, well, I’m not doing that because you’re always telling me to try these things.” And he said he was totally ready. He was like, I want to do keto. He kind of knew what it was. And that was it. So then, you know, we got our ducks in order. Dr. Palmer agreed to treat him pro bono who didn’t have room in his practice, but he helped us anyway. We met. We met Denise Potter dietitian who is active in she actually was trained in epilepsy world. She’s been treating pediatric epilepsy patients for many, many years with the ketogenic diet. And we mapped out a plan, and we figured out how we’re going to get the food made. And he started it last January, so more than a year and a half now. And within four months, I would say it took a full four months, he started not having bipolar symptoms, and not even the low-level symptoms like anxiety and irritability, but certainly no depression, no mania. He sailed through that March, even two months in, without increasing his antipsychotic. And that was the first time that ever happened in March because, typically, his version of bipolar disorder tends toward mania in March. And that’s common for many people with bipolar disorder. And he’d have to go way up on his medications just to stay stable. I mean, just to keep sleeping and not get manic again. And so we knew like something’s really changing here. And his brain, we don’t fully understand why that is, we have some theories. And he’s just continued to get better. He graduated from college that June. He has a full-time job. Now his cognitive function is honestly better than ever. And he’s always been a brilliant kid, his executive function better than ever, his relationships, he just wakes up calm, good energy. I mean, there really, there is no sign of bipolar disorder in him now. So I don’t know whether you want to call that a cure or remission, but it’s the closest thing to a panacea that we have found. And I should say that he already had all the other lifestyle pieces in place. If that were the only thing he was doing, I’m sure he would not be as well as he is. But I also feel like he had been doing everything else. And he still wasn’t well. And so it seemed to be the key piece, it seemed to be the thing that changed whatever the dysfunction was in his brain and kind of reverted back to what a normal brain would do. Like if you lose a couple hours of sleep one night, it used to be that he would lose another hour the next night and another hour the next night, and he would not be sleeping, and he’ll be full of energy. Now, if he loses an hour of sleep, the next day, he’ll sleep more or he’ll take a nap like that dysfunction in the circadian rhythm has resolved, and I think that’s probably at the root of why he’s gotten better. And the ketogenic diet is doing something in that pathway. So we’re just incredibly lucky to have him back and in full health, and it was right at the same time that he got better that my husband’s company became publicly traded – Roblox on the New York Stock Exchange. And so it was like kind of all at once we were onto something. We couldn’t ignore this clue. We felt like we had to share it with the world. We had to support science that would, you know, tell us who can respond to this intervention. How can we deliver it? What are the mechanisms underlying it? And so we’ve been funding lots of studies since then to try to help other people like, you know, like our son. That’s the story.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah. And it’s such a simple fix. Will you talk a little bit more about – there’s a lot of confusion about bipolar. There’s different types of bipolar. I know that the teenage years, or like late teenage years, is a very common time for mental illness to show itself. Will you talk a little bit about, like what we know, what we don’t know – just kind of give a brief background for people who are unfamiliar with it.
Jan Ellison Baszucki
Sure. So Bipolar disorder is one of the most serious mental illnesses, right up there with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder. It affects somewhere between 2 and 4% of the population. It does typically have onset in the late teenage years. Sometimes it can be earlier, we think that might be a different phenotype, but typically would hit around seven between 17 and 21. There are technically two, possibly three types of bipolar disorder: bipolar one, bipolar two, and bipolar not otherwise specified. Bipolar one essentially just means you’ve had a manic episode, at least once in your life. You’ve become manic, and mania is it’s a symptom of the disorder. But it can be brought on by other things as well, like a drug trip could induce mania and illness could. I, in the beginning, I was like, well, he’s not depressed, he’s not getting depressed. Why are we – it used to be called manic depression. Why is he getting a diagnosis of something that includes depression when really, he’s just had a manic episode, but there is no unipolar mania diagnosis? And that is because most people who will have manic episodes, almost everyone who will have a manic episode that will be followed by depression. So that’s bipolar one. Bipolar two is characterized by depression and periods of hypomania. And hypomania is defined as high energy, loss of sleep, changes in behavior that don’t lead to catastrophic life decisions. And so it’s a lesser form of mania. And people can be hypomanic, if it doesn’t lead to depression, that actually isn’t even a diagnosis. Some people could just be hypomanic their whole lives. They don’t need a lot of sleep, they’re very energetic. They’re very creative. But if it’s followed, but debilitating depression, then you typically would get a diagnosis of bipolar two. And then there are other versions that are more lesser versions of kind of just very high energy, mild or cycling into depression, and hypomania, that would be not quite classified as bipolar two. There’s very little known about the mechanisms. We don’t really understand what triggers mania, or we understand what triggers it, but we don’t understand the neuroscience behind it. So that’s one of the things that we’re trying to work on. Tragically, bipolar has been underfunded relative to other psychiatric illnesses for forever. Not sure really why that is. Usually, if someone’s studying depression or schizophrenia, they might lump bipolar in there. But in terms of pure bipolar research studies, especially looking at mania, they’re very few. So actually, just yesterday, we announced a major bipolar research funding initiative with two other families. It’ll be 150 million over five years to try to crack this.
Diana Rodgers, RD
And will you describe a little bit for people that are unfamiliar with what even mania is it? You know, they may have known someone that was manic, and they didn’t understand what was going on. Will you describe it?
Jan Ellison Baszucki
Sure. It’s yeah, unless you’ve really – probably unless you’ve seen mania up close, it would be very hard to understand that. I can just describe kind of what happened for our son because maybe that’s a better way than abstracting it. He had been under a lot of stress at school. He took on a huge academic load, he was doing electrical engineering computer science at Berkeley. He had joined a fraternity. He got sick over the holidays. This was after his freshman fall quarter. He got mono and strep. He went back to school, he had been smoking a lot of marijuana, which was not good for his brain. He didn’t even really like it. I think he was just surrounded by it and had kind of gotten into it. And he came home for a weekend and had this huge, extremely difficult… my husband’s a computer scientist. And he said, I don’t understand why they are assigning this to freshmen at UC Berkeley, like it’s crazy the stuff that they’re asking these kids to do – really challenging for him. He lost a bunch of sleep. He went back to school, we had agreed that he was going to drop a class, and then I stopped hearing from him for a couple of days. And I was like, oh, texting, texting. He had actually lost his phone. He told me later that he just started to experience this profound spiritual transformation he would call it. He sat on a street corner for two nights, not sleeping at all, just meditating and experiencing the universe as he would have called it. He’d been reading Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. That was the root of his delusions. And he started to believe that his role was on the planet was to enact this kind of ego death and to spread the word, and so This is very typical with mania, that there would be some kind of spiritual or religious undertone. And it’s so common that it’s almost a feature of the symptom of mania. So the symptoms can be people essentially stop sleeping. And there’s no other condition in which this would happen. And when I tell people that they think, “Well, it couldn’t be that he didn’t sleep at all.” No, he didn’t sleep at all, for almost two weeks. And he had high energy. And so the longer this went on, the more and more he lost touch with reality. And he was deep into this delusion, it turns out, he had already dropped his classes and hadn’t told us. And so we had to bring him home, and he withdrew from the quarter. So I didn’t sleep at all, he essentially paced the kitchen all night long. We divided up the days and nights, and we were watching him, you know, 24/7. We were afraid if he left the house, you know, anything could happen. At that point, he had completely lost touch with reality. Things like the delusions can take many forms and mania – many, many people will think they could talk to animals, for example, or they could fly. They could jump off a building and think they could fly. Luckily, he didn’t have that delusion. Hypersexuality can come along with it. So you hear a lot about promiscuity that was not a feature of his first mania. But it could have been and rapid speech, just talking really, really, really fast. Although mania can get so extreme that he and one of his manias was so extreme that he lost the ability to speak really at all. He could still write. He was actually writing this philosophical treatise, in his second mania that integrated kind of philosophical and physics ideas, but he couldn’t talk anymore. And he couldn’t really make eye contact. So it can be incredibly debilitating. At that point, it kind of looked like schizophrenia. It looked like a thought disorder. They sort of divide up a mood disorder being bipolar disorder and thought disorder being schizophrenia. I personally think those lines are very messy. And during the second mania, when we were told, “Oh, that looks like schizophrenia.” I really didn’t believe it. Because it was in such an acute mania. He hadn’t slept for weeks, and anything, anything was possible. And as soon as he came out of the mania, all those symptoms resolved. And I say that like in case there any listeners out there who are getting a schizophrenia diagnosis, when someone is in the height of mania, I think that’s not well understood. And you really need to see what happens when the mania resolves. Let me think if I have missed out on any manic symptoms. I think that pretty much describes it.
Diana Rodgers, RD
And will you talk a little bit about I mean, I’m a mother, I have an 18-year-old and a 16-year-old and you know, when they’re sick, you feel like you can do something, right? You can, you know, get them some cold medicine or some tissues, and you know, bring them their favorite foods, and your feels good to do that. I cannot imagine what it could have felt like to not be able to help and to watch this and for also your children. Will you just talk a little bit about the impact it had on you and your the rest of your family?
Jan Ellison Baszucki
Yeah, so we have three daughters as well. Matt is 26 now, and our daughters are 23, 21, and 18. So we’re officially empty nesters. A third just went off today, and I’m like, wow. I’m actually alone in the house after 26 years, I guess. And they were very stoic. I mean, I have to hand it to my daughters. At that time, you know, he was 19. So they were 17 and 15 and 13. And they really, I think, understood intuitively that they had to put their own needs aside. And so I was constantly asking them, you know, “Are you okay? How’s this impacting you?” And they’ve, “Oh, we’re fine, Mom, we’re fine. We’re good, we’re fine.” And that was the story that I heard really until he got well. And then, once he was better, they started to, I think, feel like they could share how difficult it had been. And it had, of course, been very, very difficult, especially, I think, our eldest daughter, you know. There were times when in high school, I would say to her, “Can you get the girls and take them to school with an hour early because we need to get you out of the house.” One of the days that he was hospitalized, I remember that happened. And she was very, she’s just hyper-responsible. And I’m sure that the reason part of the reason she’s hyper-responsible is that she had to grow kind of fast. So it was incredibly difficult. I mean, I think in mental illness, we don’t have the same culture, I guess, of community around mental illness. And so if it had been a cancer diagnosis, not that we would have wished a cancer diagnosis on him or anyone else, but we would have had people knocking on the door bringing casseroles, and we didn’t have that. Although we did – my neighbor here was in the know and incredibly supportive. And there were, you know, there were friends who were offering to do anything they could. But it was a small group. We weren’t obviously not sharing it broadly, especially in the beginning. And we had to respect that we wanted to keep this close to family and close friends until Matt decided how he wanted to share it publicly or not. And so, in the beginning, we really didn’t tell anyone except close friends and family. And it was a feeling, it was both a feeling of helplessness and a feeling of desperate need to act. And both of those were operating at the same time. Of course, it is different when your child has a physical illness and is accepting your help. He was not in a position to want to accept our help because he didn’t think he was ill. He thought he was having a spiritual transformation. And it was very difficult to know how we were supposed to respond to that. Were we supposed to play into his delusion, or were we supposed to not play into his delusion? And there wasn’t a lot of advice about how to do that. I mean, I read every book that I could find, eventually, we ended up being sort of agnostic about it, not playing into it, not challenging it, just sort of letting him letting it burn out in a way. The most difficult and upsetting aspect of this was around him taking his medications. He was first hospitalization, he was put on an anti-psychotic called Zyprexa, it’s also known as olanzapine. Always weird to me that all these drugs have at least two names, and memorize, you know, the double names for all of them. It’s a very effective sedative, essentially a dopamine blocker. And it knocked him out. He was on the highest point 25 milligrams, which is a very high dose, but he’s big – 6’4″, not overweight or anything but just tall. And he took it in the hospital and he came out. And then there was always the struggle about medication compliance. And when the delusion was strong, he thought that the medications were interfering with his spiritual enlightenment. And actually, one of the delusions early on with his first psychiatrists was that if he refused the medications, he would have passed the test of enlightenment. And my son is very committed to his intellectual ideas. And I think if you have someone who’s like that, anyway, you know, very committed to following through and very committed to their own intellect, very confident in their ideas, which he had always been, in mania, that can really be difficult. So he believed he needed to pass this test of enlightenment, and he was not going to take those medications if it meant he was going to fail. So we had this very tricky situation in which his underlying temperament, which had always been an advantage for him, in this case, got him into trouble. So there were times when I had to ask him to show me, you know, under his tongue, take the medications in front of me and then show under his tongue, whether he take him or not, I mean, that was the most excruciating as a parent who has always trusted her children. I mean, I tend to be a little bit hands-off, because my kids were great. And I didn’t really need to need to go look in their room and read their journals or any of that stuff. They were always doing great. It was incredibly difficult and counterintuitive, and traumatic for all of us. That kind of went on, off, and on for two years. And once he finally got insight, thank God we didn’t have that particular struggle. Again, we had the struggle that the medications were causing all kinds of, I don’t call them, side effects. I think the term side effect is a misnomer. These are effects of drugs, some are wanted, and most are not. I’m very grateful for that. Especially the antipsychotic medication, because I think it probably saved his life. But over time, the side effects – the many effects or incredibly difficult to me. I think he gained 25 pounds in the first six weeks out of the hospital in the first mania on Zyprexa. So when a medication is inducing metabolic dysfunction, and probably the illness was triggered by a metabolic brain dysfunction. You know, we’re now starting to understand that’s really adding insult to injury. So, clearly, we need better interventions. But I am still grateful that those medications existed and at least put him to sleep long enough that he recovered his sanity, but he never recovered fully. I don’t think he was ever euthymic, you find, because the term in bipolar parlance for not manic and not depressed. It doesn’t necessarily mean well, but it means not in an extreme mood state. I’m not sure he ever was euthymic. He was either mildly manic or mildly depressed or really, really manic and mildly depressed. He didn’t have super deep debilitating depression, seemed really suicidal. So we were lucky in that in that regard, but mainly it can be life-threatening, as well, for the reasons that I discussed earlier.
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Diana Rodgers, RD
Yes. You know, I just wonder before I ask a little bit more about food interventions and mental health because it’s just I know how prevalent especially sugar is with people who are suffering from mental illness. But I’m just curious, what was the turning point for him when he… how did he realize that he was actually these weren’t… this wasn’t a spiritual awakening?
Jan Ellison Baszucki
Well, he… his last mania he had, this was, we were about two years in, not quite two years in, and he had been living at his grandparent’s house. We had at some point, we made a rule, you can live at home, but only if you’re med-compliant and sober, and he wasn’t. And so his grandparents offered to let him live with them. And he had been doing that for about three months. And then he got some kind of argument there and set out on foot, from Carmel, walked to Salinas all night, left at midnight, and he had called us, and my husband had been for probably the first time ever, not as patient, as he typically was. I mean, my husband, during this process, was the one person who could always keep the thread always kept the relationship with Matt, and I was kind of the bad guy who’s the good guy that was sort of agreed between us, I was the one doing all the research, pushing him to try things, taking him everywhere, reading everything I could read, but my husband was the one who kept that relationship. And in that one moment when he was setting out on foot from Carmel, and my husband was frustrated and shared that with Matt, and that was it. Then he cut us off, stop talking to us, took us off, blocked us from all the social media accounts, but our daughters were still connected to him. And so that’s how we tracked him during the two weeks that he was on the road, but essentially, without a home. And so during that time, we were tracking his whereabouts by following his social media activity. And he had this delusion at that point of becoming a musician, or rap musician. And so he was making music and posting it online. And he was making videos and posting them online. And he was fully manic. I mean, he took a video of himself flushing his lithium down the toilet on a Greyhound bus, shared it with the world, shared it on his personal Facebook account. Everyone we knew was privy to that, obviously very difficult at the time. And I was especially worried that, you know, this is his life. This is his reputation. This is essentially everybody he knows in his life, including all his friends at Berkeley, and they are new friends. These are not friends who, you know, known him his whole life. One of the wonderful things that happened is that his elementary school friends really rallied around and did everything they could and they were along with my daughters. They were feeding us information to help us keep track of him and make sure he was safe. But we didn’t want to slip in too early. And then there were times when we didn’t know where he was. He kind of went silent for a couple of days there. And that’s when I remember being rolled up on the floor in a ball thinking – literally, I thought it was dead because he had been posting, posting, posting and then silence for two solid days. Turns out his he’d lost the charger for his phone. And so he had stopped posting. So as difficult as this was that this whole descent into mania and psychosis was shared on the internet. When he came to, we got him hospitalized. We identified where he was. My husband flew down, met him at a Starbucks, collected him. He, like in two weeks, he lost 20 pounds. His blood pressure was sky-high. He had given away all his belongings. He still had his computer and his phone in a shopping bag, giving away his backpack and his leather jacket. He was barefoot. But he had his computer and his phone. And my husband got him in a rental car and drove them to San Diego, who happened to have an uncle who lives down there who is was a school psychologist. He kind of helped us get Matt to check himself into the hospital that time. After about 10 days once the anti-psychotic started to take hold. He saw the videos. He saw the evidence of his mania, and that was the first time he’d ever seen it. We describe it to him, but he didn’t really believe it. And once he saw it that was just – he said to me, “I never want to be manic again. What do I have to do? I will do whatever it takes, what do I have to do?” And that was the beginning of getting enough stability to start to put these lifestyle pieces in place. And he was med-compliant from then on. So three solid years of med compliance before we went on the diet.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Wow, I always hesitate to ask deep questions and really things that I worry might make someone else uncomfortable. But that was just so powerful to hear. So thank you so much for sharing that.
Jan Ellison Baszucki
The only reason I can share it is because he has shared it. So he lives on that. And he’s very, very open in hopes that his story will help other people. So I wouldn’t have shared it if he didn’t have given us full permission to do that.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Right. So let’s talk about what type diet was he on before? Was it just like standard American diet? Was he really, really into sugar? I do know people who suffer from mental illness that eat so much sugar and are completely unwilling to give it up. And it’s, I think, you know, a major contributor to making their symptoms worse. Will you talk a little bit about his diet before and then what it looked like when he went keto?
Jan Ellison Baszucki
Sure. So we had been on not, I wouldn’t say a standard American diet. I mean, I was pretty health-conscious, but I was following the guidance that everyone else was following. It was you know, whole grains and nonfat milk and, you know, meat, fish, vegetables, but also oatmeal, and definitely not in any way ketogenic. And then, whenever it came out, I read The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz, and everything changed in our household. And I was like, oh, shoot, I’ve been feeding my kids the wrong thing. And myself and my husband. And so, you know, I basically went on a crusade, switched it up in our household. That met with considerable resistance from my four children, as you can imagine, but ironically, Matt was the one always willing to try something new nutrition-wise. He was very into sports and fitness and mind-body connection. And actually, he was the one, when he was 19, he gave me before he got sick, he gave me a copy of Mark Hyman’s The UltraMind Solution, which he had read and incorporated some of that into his lifestyle. So I would say he was the one willing to try things nutritionally and who really understood the mind-body connection. Unfortunately, he got really into weightlifting when he was a senior in high school, and he wanted to get big, and he was reading some advice on – reading some advice, not just on the internet, but books written by bodybuilders suggesting that he needed to bulk up in order to convert that into muscle. And he was literally sometimes eating a pint of ice cream, not because he wasn’t disciplined, because my son is incredibly disciplined, but because he was disciplined. He had, in his mind this program, and my poor husband, who was by then already probably fully keto could not I mean, he couldn’t stand it. I was like, What are we going to do? We can’t make him. We can’t make him eat what we want him to eat. And he’s on this crusade to bulk up, and he did bulk up. He got really big. But of course, now we understand that was challenged his metabolic health right as he was going off to college. And then interestingly, he went, he actually went on a low-carb diet when he was going off to college. But it was like the college version, we think of a low-carb diet, which is like cheese and meat all week, and then beer and pizza on the weekends. So he was probably going in and out of ketosis, which we now understand would be the same as taking your meds for five days, and then going off them for two days, which for bipolar disorder is basically a recipe for disaster. But after he got started to get better, I was afraid to try keto, honestly, because I thought maybe there was some connection. We later learned from Dr. Palmer before we started the diet that, indeed, for people with bipolar, you have to be very careful in the initial transition into ketosis because it can increase brain energy. And I’m not sure whether it’s an increase in brain energy causes insomnia, insomnia triggers, hypomania, hypomania, triggers mania, or whether it’s that something that the ketogenic diet initially could actually trigger hypomania, and then you need to address the sleep, which is what we did when he finally went on the diet.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Just anecdotally, I’ve noticed with myself and a lot of my patients that if I under-eat calories, or the few times that I’ve gone very strict keto, it definitely has interrupted my sleep.
Jan Ellison Baszucki
Yeah, you can get that energy, and you could get some insomnia which if you’re not, if your brain is not tending toward bipolar, sleep circadian cycle is probably okay because, you know, you have some insomnia. But…
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah, it’s a little disruptive, but not yeah. Not enough to, right?
Jan Ellison Baszucki
Not that cause mania, but someone who has bipolar disorder, you have to be careful, I would not… and that’s why we don’t ever, I would never suggest to anyone to try this at home without medical supervision because you really do need to be careful in those first two to four weeks. But so his diet had been variable, I would say. And then, once he got sick, there were times he didn’t eat at all at the height of mania, he hardly ate at all. He was completely uninterested in food. Then he got on the medications, and Zyprexa, in particular, I mean, I think the weight gain statistics with Zyprexa are the worst of any antipsychotic. You just make people starving all the time. And the carb cravings were extreme. And so he was just eating constantly and gaining weight and could not I mean, his hunger was just insatiable. And I was trying at that point to – we were doing a Paleo Diet generally in the household at that point. So I was, you know, trying to feed him eggs and avocados and for breakfast, and you know, there was not a lot of sugar in the house. But it was just impossible for him. The carb cravings were so intense. And then over the period of the five years when he was really ill, his diet was really all over the place. When he was living on his own right before he started the ketogenic diet, he was living with five other students or young adults say, and that was just a carb fest. He was eating, I would say a typical college student or young adult diet at that point, and he knew it. He knew this is the last piece. He wanted to take it on. He just had put every he had, put everything else in place first. And then, by the time I suggested it, he was just ready. Yeah, I don’t want anyone to think that the first time I suggested it, it was accepted. It was like years and years of harping on nutrition. And then, finally, it just so happened that I heard about this ketogenic diet success, and I suggested to him, and he actually said, you told me I couldn’t go on a keto diet, which is true. I had told him he couldn’t go on a keto diet because I was afraid that there was some connection with mania. I couldn’t find anything in the literature. And I remember the first time we got on a Zoom with Chris Palmer, he said, Yeah, I’ve been meaning to write up this case study about how you know the initial transition to ketosis needs to be carefully managed and can trigger hypomania. I said I wish you had written a case study because then I would have known, but anyway, he was ready by then. And he had that incredible discipline. And, you know, we wouldn’t be where we are if he hadn’t.
Diana Rodgers, RD
So, what version of keto? How many grams of carbs a day, how were the meals planned out? What did the day look like for him?
Jan Ellison Baszucki
We used the Keto Calculator, which is a calculator that the Charlie Foundation hosts on their website. It was actually developed by Beth Zupec, Kania-Zupec, Zupec-Kania. I always get her name mixed up. But she’s a colleague of Denise Potter’s. She is active with the Charlie Foundation. And so it was very systematic. I think we started with I forget what the ratio was initially, maybe two to one fat to carbs plus protein. And then we ultimately ended up with 1.75 to one, which is essentially like a modified Atkins diet about 60 or 60% fat. So not super extreme, certainly not the extreme type of ketogenic diet that, for instance, someone with pediatric epilepsy might first encounter in a hospital setting, but very low carb. I think he was shooting for under 50, initially, and probably stayed around that between 20 and 50 grams of carbs per day, moderate protein, and we controlled the protein based on his body weight, and then the rest fat. Denise was very clear about wanting each meal to follow the ratio. And so that’s the way we did it. Every meal was calculated in the 1.75 to 1 ratio. I had helped with the cooking. I don’t want anyone to think that you know, they’re not successful because they can’t manage to take on this creating three meals and two snacks a day with a 1.75 to one ratio. I did not do that myself. I was in the very, very fortunate position to be able to hire someone to do that since my husband’s company had just gone public. We were very blessed. And one of the challenges that our foundation is trying to address is how do we make this available, scalable, doable for anyone, and I was very conscious all along. I’m thinking if this is so hard for me, and I don’t even have to do the cooking, how is someone going to do that? But once we got it organized, and all he had to do was eat the food. He ate the food, and he never cheated. I mean, he told me once he dipped a piece of cheese in honey, that was his cheat. He was absolutely committed, completely religious about it and only ate what was provided. We started testing, and it was, you know, whole foods, very carefully constructed diet, but it did include some sweet treats, you know, keto brownies and things like that made with almond flour. And, you know, the three sweeteners that Denise had told us we were able to use, very strict protocol in terms of managing his electrolytes and the supplements. He once, he got COVID right off the bat when he was just gotten into ketosis to get COVID. He got really sick, his ketones plummeted, and his symptoms came back. But luckily, we, you know, had Denise and Chris on board saying you got to ride it out, you know, it, this can happen when someone gets a virus or an illness that did knock you out of ketosis. And so he just road that out. And then his ketones went really high, they went to 7.5. And that made him sick. He was throwing up to all kinds of gastrointestinal distress. And thank goodness, you know, again, we had the advice of professionals who were guiding him through that. And he was basically taking a tablespoon of apple juice to resolve that the symptoms from his ketone was going too high, then, yeah, and then in the very beginning of he had like two days of insomnia, which he treated with a little tiny bit extra antipsychotic for two days. And so that resolved really quickly we were prepared for much worse. He was very strict about ketone measurements for the first, I would say, nine months. So he’s taking finger pricks twice a day with Keto Mojo and tracking those. And he was going between, I would say, one and 2.5, generally speaking, depending on the time of day and the diet. His view now is that being very, very strict about it for about nine months and really trying to drive the ketones to a reasonably high level helped his brain heal. He has… he does not take ketone measurements anymore. I think he probably did, maybe for the first nine months, maybe a year. And he feels like he can kind of feel now whether he’s in ketosis or not in ketosis, and he does not try to get very high ketones. Even at one point, it was kind of stressing him out to try to keep the ketones high. And he met with Dr. Shebani Sethi at Stanford who’s been running a trial ketogenic diet for bipolar and schizophrenia. And she said, Just shoot for, like, 0.6, 0.7. And that kind of took some of the stress off. So I think that’s probably where he ended up. But he would tell you that keeping the ketones high, being very, very strict in the beginning, and monitoring carefully, he thinks that helped his brain heal in the initial phases. And now he doesn’t have to be so strict. He doesn’t eat anything. He doesn’t eat bread, or rice, or potatoes and has not even once in almost two years. But he’ll go out and order at a restaurant. And maybe he’ll only order the protein and the fat, but he thinks there could be some carbs creeping in there, you know, you get a salad dressing here, here, or there that you’re not sure about. He’s able to be quite stable now while being a little more flexible on his diet.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Wow, that’s amazing. When we were first filming with for Sacred Cow, we actually did a lot of filming with the patients of Dr. Sarah Hallberg and the pressures of trying to follow a keto diet when you don’t have a lot of money, and you’re shopping at Walmart were so intense that this… that’s actually why we stopped following those stories because there was so much other pressure going on for them. It wasn’t like they couldn’t comply, in theory. They just, you know, we had one boy who qualified for free school lunch, he lived in a trailer, he didn’t have a mom, and he couldn’t eat the free school lunch because it was, you know, 100 to 150 grams of carbs, you know, French toast breakfast for lunch kind of thing. And so we would follow him. We followed him to Walmart, and you know, just buying whatever cheese and sausage he could get. And it was just a huge struggle for him and for the other patients living in Lafayette, Indiana, which is not a wealthy place. And workplace. There was a there was another woman who she worked in telecommunications, you know, like call center, and all the rewards were pizza and ice cream, cakes and all these things. And it was just so hard for her socially, and she lived by herself and to just, you know, I think, also, if it’s just a weight loss, it’s different if you have a really strong motivator, and I’ve noticed this even in my like, as a dietitian, my favorite patients are celiacs and Crohn’s disease, you know, because they will not cheat. And they have such a strong why, or somebody who just had a massive heart attack and really wants to see their grandchildren, right. But when it’s straight weight loss, the compliance level when it’s so addicting to eat these comfort foods, and you see it everywhere. It’s just so hard.
Jan Ellison Baszucki
No, that’s really heartbreaking. I mean, Dave and I were walking, my husband’s name is Dave, we’re walking up the street, our Saturday morning go for coffee, imagining a world in which government subsidies were whole foods, and that there was an understanding for Medicaid and Medicare, that it’s a lot less expensive to deliver meals to people that are therapeutic meals than to treat diabetes and heart failure and obesity and children is so heartbreaking. And I think we really need to get away from this idea, of course, didn’t make this up – taking the lead from the brilliant nutrition researchers who are helping people to understand that this is not a willpower question. We cannot blame people for obesity or Type 2 diabetes. And we have created a situation in which the advice we are being given by our government in the dietary regulatory recommendations is creating these illnesses and this cycle of insulin resistance because people are following the advice of 50% carbohydrate diets. That’s not anybody’s fault. And we need to get away from this idea of if you could just exercise more and eat less and why can’t you and must be a willpower question, well, let’s just let’s put the nail in the coffin on that one and figure out a way to provide food in those settings that is proper human nutrition, and not poisoned.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah, and there’s such a movement right now. I was just talking yesterday, actually, with my podcast guests, Peter Balor said about the Health at Every Size movement and the no food shaming movement and the pressure I get from other dietitians on you know, being too restrictive. It’s really intense. And that idea that all foods are good, there’s no bad foods, we shouldn’t shame anything, or everything in moderation. That’s killing people. And I get, you know, for the small percentage of people that have had overly restrictive anorexia, that might be useful. But for the majority of we’ve, 70% of Americans are overweight or obese on their way to Type 2 diabetes. And we have to get real about what our modern food system is doing to people and educate people on what are the right foods to be eating.
Jan Ellison Baszucki
And not just the right foods but right in the right ratios. I mean, I just can speak only from my personal experience of having followed a low-fat diet, many low-fat diets. You know, since the time I was, I don’t know, I was a competitive gymnast. I quit gymnastics, again, 20 pounds my freshman year in high school, and for, I don’t know, 30 years, I was going up and down 20 pounds on these low-fat diets. And it took up such an incredible amount of my energy and effort and angst, you know, was centered around this, and I wasn’t, you know, fat, except when I was pregnant four times and gained 50 pounds with each pregnancy, but I definitely struggled, and I struggled on a paleo diet, and I struggled on an autoimmune paleo diet. An autoimmune paleo diet, actually, it was effective in terms of brain fog and energy level and weight loss but it was super hard to follow very, very restrictive in terms of what you could eat to me. Once I finally got on keto hardcore when I needed to support my son, that’s the only reason we did it. Very hardcore, very strict. All of a sudden, not all of a sudden, a year later, I have stable weight for the first time in my life, I don’t worry about it at all. I’m not trying to be skinny, but I don’t worry about it, and I don’t go up and down, and I just eat the foods that are you know, it’s not that hard to restrict carbohydrates when you’re full from the rest of the food you’re eating, and I don’t even think it’s… I mean some profound shift in appetite because I used to be a clean-your-plate person, and I cannot do it anymore. You know, if I put too much food on my plate, there’s something internally that has shifted that says stop, and I can’t push through even if I wanted to. And I might look at the dessert, the keto desserts even in my fridge, but I can’t eat them. I am full period. And that never happened to me in 30 years of dieting. And so I feel like we owe it to people to tell them the truth about this and to encourage people to just try it, but don’t try it for a week, try for three or four months at least. And start to understand that this metabolic shift in your body and brain is so profound. It’s, I mean, to me, it feels like it is the secret to health. And I know we set… we all sound like snake oil salesmen with our low carbohydrate message. But from what I’ve just seen, personally, from what I see in my husband, and my son, and this whole community, and everyone I know who tries it now – my mom, my dad, my uncle, my brother, my sister, my sister in law, the whole family, we’re all keto maniacs, to varying levels of being strict about it, but it’s definitely the guiding principle for our health. And everyone’s, you know, my uncle’s blood pressure has dropped, he’s lost 30 pounds, my dad’s cancer is in remission, it was in remission already has stayed in remission. We have to get away from that idea that we are supporting people’s health or wellness by telling, by saying it, you know, at any weight. It is important for health to find a way of eating, that sustains a proper metabolic condition in the body. And, you know, obesity is – I see it as a symptom, a symptom of a metabolic dysregulation. And so let’s focus on the metabolic dysregulation and not the weight loss. Let’s focus on metabolic health in the body and the brain because guess what, they’re connected.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Before we go, could you just for the folks who are listening that might not be as familiar with what a day in keto looks like? Would you share like what? What are you eating? What’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner? What does it look like for you?
Jan Ellison Baszucki
Sure, interestingly, I only two meals a day, but I eat cream in my coffee, so I’m not dairy sensitive. I did the elimination diet, put dairy back, and nothing bad happened. So I do drink creamer in my coffee, but I do intermittent fasting. So I eat… stop eating at 7pm and I don’t have a meal probably until noon the next day, um, but I do have this calories, the cream in my coffee. I do that I do only the fat and no protein, and no carbs during the intermittent fast to keep the insulin levels steady. That seems to be working. I read a book – Mark Sisson’s Two Meals a Day, which was really transformative for me. It kind of liberated me from this idea that I had to be eating three meals a day, and I had to be eating regularly, and that I shouldn’t be fasting. And so sometimes I do like a 24-hour fast now and then. But a typical day is coffee with cream, meal at noon, which would be a meat or fish and vegetables. That’s pretty much it in olive oil or butter. And then dinner is the same and that’s pretty much it. And then we have some keto treats like will cheesecakes with strawberries, or keto chocolates, or keto brownies, sometimes a keto cookie, but I find that those don’t get eaten so much. I think by the time we’ve had the meal, there’s less appetite for the sweet treats, but we do have some of those around. And that’s it. That’s pretty much it – stop eating strictly at seven. And almost never, and I do have a glass of wine sometimes. Or even a couple of glasses of wine. I had to stop drinking beer. I’ve been a beer drinker my whole life, but that beer is out.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Well, that sounds – meat and vegetables, I mean, that’s a pretty good way to go. And I think a lot of people have probably eaten keto, even if they didn’t know it. So well. Thank you so much. Can you share some of the resources for people that want to learn a little bit more? Where they can learn about you and also about, you know, some of your favorite books. You mentioned The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz and then Two Meals a Day is that it by Mark Sisson and I haven’t read that one. Then Chris Palmer at Harvard, right up the street from where I am.
Jan Ellison Baszucki
Yeah. Chris Palmer has a book coming out in November called Brain Energy. It’s a science book. I would recommend that everybody get a copy of that book and share it with everyone you know, and then The Case for Keto by Gary Taubes has been a go-to for us. It’s the one we give to everybody who joins our family foundation is kind of the keto primer. You can find me on Twitter at Jan Ellison. And then our family foundation is what all of our philanthropic efforts operate under Baszucki group.com. And that website will take you to links related to our brain research. We’re trying to launch the fields of metabolic psychiatry and metabolic neuroscience, and you can learn a lot about that on that website. And then a separate initiative is that we’re launching an initiative called Metabolic Mind, which is going to be about metabolic psychiatry resources for patients and clinicians. But that’s just in very early stages. So there’s not too much there. But you can join the mailing list at metabolic mind.org.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Wonderful. It was great to learn so many new things about your story. And I’m so excited about all the work that you’re doing in this space. Thank you so much on behalf of so many people that need this
Jan Ellison Baszucki
You too, and right back at you, Diana. We’re so thrilled with the work that you’re doing.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Thank you.
Jan Ellison Baszucki
So important. Thank you.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Thank you. All right. Well, have a wonderful day. Thank you so much for your time.
Jan Ellison Baszucki
You too. Take care.
Diana Rodgers, RD
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