The Tailored Brain by Emily Willingham

Author:Emily Willingham [Willingham, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2021-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

DE-STRESSING DIETS?

People have promised that low-carbohydrate/high-fat or high-protein dietsxviii will do just about everything, but very rarely do such diets keep the promise. They don’t “work”xix for lots of reasons. When used for weight loss, the diets often simply end up yielding the same reductions in caloric intake as a lot of other diets because, as people who’ve tried them can attest, there’s only so much fat and protein you want to choke down without carbs. Eating that way gets old fast, and any early weight loss that dieters sustain often reverses as adherence to the highly restrictive form of food intake wanes.

But. The one consistent benefit of such a diet, specifically the so-called keto (or ketogenic) diet, has been to reduce seizures in some people with epilepsy.xx And there are hints that a low-carb, high-fat diet could take the edge off anxiety. Hints.

What purportedly happens in the brain is related to levels of glutamate—the neuron-exciting neurotransmitter—which is depleted in the keto diet.40 Glutamate plays a vital role in anxiety. The yin to the yang of glutamate, if you recall, is GABA,xxi the neuron-inhibiting neurotransmitter. People who have diagnosed anxiety and panic disorders have fewer places for GABA to bind to their neurons in some parts of their brains That means fewer places where GABA can counteract excitation.

Certain drugs used to treat anxiety and depression are in a class called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs (you probably recognize the most famous of these: fluoxetine, or Prozac). As their name suggests, they keep cells from soaking up the neurotransmitter serotonin once it’s released into the space between neurons. The result is that the serotonin persists, so its message persists, and its message is allegedly to “smooth your mood.”xxii In addition to this effect, SSRIs boost GABA levels in the brain,41 suggesting that GABA might have a role in taking the edge off a negative mood. Those Xanaxes and Valiums that people talk about all the time are part of a drug class, the benzodiazepines, that operate on the GABA-signaling system.42

What’s all this got to do with eating low carb/high fat? A ketogenic diet boosts GABA and dampens GLUT, which suggests that it exerts some reducing effect on anxiety and perhaps a leveling of mood.43

Some authors have argued that the keto diet “remodels” the microbial populations living in the gut, affecting what gets to your brain and what your brain uses as fuel.44 The microscopic organisms in your digestive tract break down what you send them into new products, or metabolites, some of which go to the liver for processing. The products from the liver determine the profile of molecules that reach your brain, where they are used for building, communicating, and fueling the brain’s functions. Astrocytes, which are the purveyors of energy molecules to neurons, play a role in how metabolites from the keto diet are used.45

But no one knows for sure that it all goes down this way between the gut microbiota and the brain—it’s early days yet in tracing these pathways.

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