hi everybody my name is dr. Annette Bosworth and I'm back today to talk a lot more about
ketones today I'm going to tell a story about how I got curious about the ketogenic diet this
happened actually in 2015 and it has kind of a winding tale but I think it's worth telling
I have patients show up and ask why do I have such a tough time finding a doctor who wants
to talk about ketones or wants to be open to the ketogenic diet and I will admit I was just
as resistant it took a huge time-suck on why I missed the boat on ketogenic diets and the use
I could have been using as an internal medicine doctor for the last 15 years and then to get up
to speed efficient enough to go back out in the world of expert advice and be able to talk with
a level of confidence I get a patient who comes to me and asks me questions about a ketogenic
diet and she used the word ketosis and instantly my mind heard ketoacidosis and this happens to a
lot of physicians in medical school we're like scarred with the word ketoacidosis if that word
comes along we know the patient is in serious danger there is a very specific set of rules that
we're supposed to follow to get the patient back on track and time is valuable so it's almost like
a traumatic word to hear the word ketoacidosis as an internist so when the patient said ketosis BAM
my mind heard ketoacidosis and I'm not the only one we get tested on this way too many times as
a medical student and not nearly enough time spent on nutritional ketosis and the benefits so let's
go back to this patient and she was nervous to talk to me about this she mentioned it in a hushed
voice that she was at MD Anderson visiting her mother when they put her into ketosis before they
would do radiation for her brain tumor and I just stared at her like I can hardly process the words
you're saying to me she then goes on to explain that her mom has had a tumor called glioblastoma
a very dangerous brain tumor but her mom is lucky enough to live very close to MD Anderson which is
world-renowned on how it takes care of cancer let me just make an analogy if you're the Queen
of England and you get one of the bad boys for cancer I'm talking the cancers that within six
months people die I don't care if you're the queen of England within six months you die you might
have mayo clinic on your speed dial but they're still gonna call MD Anderson MD Anderson is the
mecca for cancer treatment they are known for this and they do lead the way on finding a way
to rid the world of cancer so if they're putting a patient into ketosis I couldn't just say oh that's
a bunch of hogwash I needed to pause and then I send a message off to my researcher saying can
you look up why MD Anderson and ketosis might have anything to do with one another of course that's
when I got a quick flash briefing on ketosis is a nutritional state where your body feeds off of
fat and that led to a better understanding that when cancer patients are being treated the cancer
cell doesn't know how to use a ketone a cancer cell can't adapt to a place that has no glucose
and lives only on ketones it must be fueled with glucose it wasn't long after I started looking
into ketones that my researcher filled my inbox with a recent study that had been done by the
Department of Defense and I thought what in the world would the Department of Defense be looking
at ketones for so that curiosity led me down another paper trail of Navy SEALs being studied
about their performance while in ketosis it turns out this is really important to a Navy SEAL and
initially I thought the fuel and the their body's being fueled must have an enhanced performance and
although that's true that's not why they started looking at that it turns out that if you're a Navy
SEAL they do bragging rights for a few things one is how long can you hold your breath and
that sounds strange but they'll go home swimming pool and go underwater and say how long can you
hold your breath and it's kind of like a you know alpha male thing or something but more importantly
they use a special kind of rebreather when their scuba diving their scuba diving equipment doesn't
leave a trail of bubbles and that's pretty important because they're all about stealth
and being sneaky and not being able to have the enemy see where you're at so if you're underwater
leaving a trail of bubbles would be like deadly and so they're using this non rebreather only
to find out that the longer they were on the non rebreather the more chemistry shift happened in
their brain that induced a seizure so seizures are something that I've looked at a lot at I
have patients who've suffered many seizures and they have a brain damage they have had trauma to
their brain because of those seizures and the more seizures they have the more damage we see we don't
want patients having seizures and we go to extreme lengths to make sure that that stops immediately
so there's probably only one thing worse than having a seizure and that's having a seizure
30 feet under the water because now you're gonna drowned seizures are deadly in and of themselves
but even more when you're underwater so the Navy SEAL team the Department of Defense work together
to say how can we prevent these seizures and they did the same thing that we as physicians did they
added anti-seizure medications this didn't work out so well Navy SEALs are very competitive and
their life depends on their reaction time so our seizure drugs work intentionally to slow
down a message as it marches through the brain when seizures are studied electronically or on
a microscopic level they send messages to another without regulation they just kind of the message
becomes like an electrical storm if you would in the brain using some of our seizure medications
will slow down those messages and that's how we prevent seizures but what happened with the Navy
SEALs is well we made them stupid and I know that's not the word to use but we just slowed
down their thinking we slowed down the reaction time and yeah they wouldn't take that medication
they're Navy SEALs because they care about that so this was unacceptable they couldn't have their
cognition that slow so the next thing that the team looked into is they found a diet that had
been around for many years and in fact it was the only lesson about ketosis that I got when I
was in medical school was I remember hearing about this diet where they would admit the whole family
into the hospital and they would have to teach the family how to get this kid into ketosis and
these are called the ketosis kids because they had childhood seizures and these were the kids that
didn't respond to our medications so here you have the unfortunate event of having childhood seizures
you get put on the medications that are supposed to take them away and then they don't work now we
have your whole family admitted to the hospital in the 1950s and 60s to make sure we could induce
ketosis and that the kid would stay there and that the family understood the rules so now you
March these kids out into their life and they were really compliant these ketosis kids had you know
seizures whenever they stopped following the diet so they got into ketosis they stayed in ketosis
and it only took a couple of you know mistakes in life to fall off of the way again if you would for
ketones before they said not can't do that I end up with a seizure so let's recap I first started
out with MD Anderson and how their protocol was to put patients on a ketogenic diet this led to
the Department of Defense and Navy SEALs using a ketosis diet to prevent seizures and then the
third layer of my curiosity was from autopsies and it came from these ketosis kids who got put into
that ketogenic state as a child because of their childhood seizures and now they were dying they're
in their 80s and they're dying and that's not from seizures they're dying from other things but what
we were privileged with is a look at their brain autopsies let me remind you that seizures don't
do nice things to brains if you want to see the worst brains possible take a look at the autopsies
from folks who've had seizures especially if they started as a kid maybe they had dozens or
even hundreds of seizures a day the pattern that the brain looks like in a seizure patient looks
very similar to the same pattern I see in drug abusers both brains have had chronic swelling
from that one from a chemical and one from the short circuiting that happens in a seizure but
they are very riddled with lots of areas of damage lots of places where we can see plaques that have
built up over time again linking both of these to chronic inflammation but what happened with these
ketosis kids is you'd followed their brains all the way to the end of their life and we got the
privilege of looking at their brains at autopsy and I had brain Envy and that's not supposed to
happen with a seizure patient their brains were pristine not only did they not have the chronic
damage but the size of their brains was preserved so now we had several layers of evidence that had
made me curious enough to say timeout I need to pause my clinic yeah doctors don't do that that
costs a lot of money for a doctor to sit still and just study something is probably why many
physicians are saying if I can't get my education in a continuing medical education class or if I
can't get at spoon-fed to me where I get you know points for my education my continuing education
it's not gonna happen so here I was reading through this trickle of information deciding that
it was serious enough that I didn't understand this I would close my clinic until I figured it
out not only was this information very curious to me it was coming from pretty amazing sources
we had MD Anderson we had Department of Defense not known for taking like big pharma money to
study something pretty pretty trustworthy when it comes to research so let me summarize this
up this video was to show you why you might be struggling to find a physician that's taken time
to learn about this I would contend you're gonna have more and more physicians better educated on
this as we get more research on this and it becomes part of the continuing education but
when I got curious about this there were three amazing resources that taught me I should slow
down and pay attention one was the message of what was coming from MD Anderson number two
was the Department of Defense and what they were studying with some of the most amazing athletes
in our military and finally it was autopsy studies like there's hardly anything better
for an internist to learn from then watching what happens throughout a lifetime of an intervention
and then being able to study it on a cellular level after they've died three very reputable
ways to learn information and it caused such a curiosity in me that I paused my clinic until I
figured this out so thanks for tuning in I hope you enjoyed why I got so curious about this and
watch switched my practice into a full ketogenic practice until next time tune in for more ketosis
lessons on the next go-around if you want to know more about the ketogenic diet check out
my book anyway you can either inaudible version in paperback or in Kindle until next time you