For over 40 years I have been preaching the wisdom of eating healthy whole foods and avoiding highly processed manufactured “fake” food. For decades many professionals, researchers, the government and the general public were caught up in the low fat debacle but today most experts on either end of the Paleo/ketogenic versus vegan scale are converging on this same idea. In my experience this is the best way to avoid food-induced brain dysfunction or CARB syndrome and common metabolic disorders. For years I felt like I was wandering in the wilderness, similar to the experience of Jesus. For those of you who are Christians:

Matthew 4:1-11: “Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.”

Thank goodness that he didn’t go along with this plan because if you want to be healthy, bread is one of the first things to avoid. Over the past few years the interest in the connection between food and brain disorders has grown exponentially. They now call this new field “Nutritional Psychiatry” where they first try to use dietary changes to treat common brain disorders before loading up patients on drugs that often don’t work very well or make them worse, especially if they are eating a diet of highly processed food. They even have their own professional organization made up of well-trained academic type folks. I am sometimes tempted to tell the medical profession and scientists who have been pedaling toxic low fat diets for decades “I told you so!” As far as I’m concerned making mistakes is OK as long as you learn from them, but the best and least painful way to gain wisdom is to find wise people and listen to them. I work very hard to try to be this type of person.

The Diet-Brain Connection
Nutritional Psychiatry has stormed on the scene in a very short period of time and now is even considered to be ‘mainstream”. In my experience many primary care physicians and Psychiatrists have yet to jump on this bandwagon because of their lack of formal nutritional education and their busy work schedules that leave little time for keeping up with every possible important topic. It often takes a magic “connect-the-dots” experience before many clinicians even consider the possibility that food is adversely affecting the brains of a large segment of our population. Because most academics and physicians are unaware of the concept and because CARB syndrome is a relatively new concept, they fail to connect the dots in the same way that I have done over the course of many decades. Because the symptoms of this disorder come on so slowly, often over a period of years or decades, it can be difficult to associate these changes with what you were eating years ago with how you feel today. Hopefully as the concept becomes better known, clinicians will make their own observations to “connect the dots”. In other words to me it is clear that we are no longer in a flat world but some ships still seem to want to hug the shore. Hopefully this will change over the next few years and I will keep working to facilitate this important change.

Bad Diet Trumps Good Treatment
We also need to get our hospitals on board with these new approaches. Most hospitals still serve food based on nutritional principles that are literally decades out of date. I sometimes tell my patients to have their relatives bring them home cooked food if it is similar to a standard Mediterranean diet. I call this the “the duct tape” approach to nutrition, the best approach when not everyone is up to speed on the latest nutritional science. I know this diet very well as I am writing this at my home in Greece. Soon we will be returning to Boston and I will get to work trying to convince my professional colleagues to focus more on healthy eating when it comes to managing just about any medical problem, especially when it comes to common brain disorders.

Become a “Fat Head”
Over the years I have discovered that most patients with brain or mental issues do better with a combined approach. In my opinion a ketogenic diet (with healthy fats) is the most brain friendly way to eat. A Paleo style diet is also worth considering and the diets have a lot in common. I also recommend taking a mixed precursor supplement like CARB-22. This can help restore normal levels of monoamine neurotransmitters and low levels of these important chemicals are what drives the 22 symptoms of CARB syndrome. I also recommend that you eat tons of small fish that are high in omega 3 fatty acids but low in mercury. Check you AA/omega 3 level and get it between 1 and 3 to suppress inflammation. Both Dr. Mercola who has the number one natural medical web site in the world and Barry Sears of Zone diet fame are now recommending this test. If you do eat an occasional food with processed carbohydrates I recommend first taking Cinsulin, a concentrated form of cinnamon. It is available at Costco. Also do what the Greeks do. If they do eat a few French fries they will smoother them with vinegar or lemon juice because acids slow the absorption of carbohydrates. Recent studies in animals have shown that certain antioxidants can help prevent aging in the brain. Blueberry extract seems to be one of the most effective substances to slow brain aging.

Medications are No Panacea
If you have a true traditional classical mental illness like major depression, ADHD, bipolar l, schizophrenia, panic disorder and others you will obviously need to be under the care of a Psychiatrist. In my experience many folks who have been diagnosed with some of these disorders likely have just CARB syndrome or they have both a classic mental disorder and CARB syndrome, which is like pouring gas on a fire. If so I would concentrate on the treatments listed above and if you do need to take medications to “jump start” brain function I recommend very low doses of drugs like Adderall, Ritalin, Wellbutrin or Provigil combined with a low dose SSRI. When your brain function improves over time making compliance easier, I recommend trying to gradually stop the medications but continue with the other treatments, especially when it comes to your diet.

When looking for a physician or Psychiatrist to provide treatment you might suggest that they look over my web site. If they seem interested in the CARB syndrome concept then they might be more flexible in their treatment approach, especially when it comes to nutrition. If they are interested in learning more, I would be more than happy to discuss these issues with them directly.

The Brave New World of Connecting Diet and Brain Function
One motivating factor behind Nutritional Psychiatry is the emerging evidence that many psychiatric drugs are problematic and perhaps even addicting. Over the years I have found that combining low dose medications with precursor supplements like CARB 22 ameliorates any type of withdrawal and improves the efficacy of the medication. Yes indeed, we are now entering a brave new world of neuroscience where medications and drug companies are no longer king. Thank goodness for that!